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"Justice is what love looks like in public." Thank you #BlackSeed for leading the way with love. Today as part of the #96hours of #ReclaimMLK for #BlackLivesMatter, members of #BlackSeed blockaded the San Francisco #BayBridge to call for an end to the war on black people. Activists named that they were acting in the same spirit of resistance that led their ancestors across the Edward Pettus Bridge, facing bullets and batons, from Selma to Montgomery 51 years ago. For more info, see APTP's press release here: http://www.antipoliceterrorproject.org/new-blog/2016/1/18/black-queer-liberation-collective-blackseed-shuts-down-bay-bridge. #96hours #ReclaimMLK #BlackLivesMatter #BlackHealthMatters
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Jan 19, 2016 07:59
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Litany Unheard posted:Your planned response to your wife going into labor should not be to drive across the Bay Bridge. Way to miss the god drat point. Replace "wife going into labor" with any other one of thousands of possible emergencies requiring travel across the bridge.
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Jan 19, 2016 08:09
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The law is clear that the right to petition one’s government for the redress of grievances shouldn't be exercised by marching, especially along public highways. If there was one thing that MLK Jr stood for and which we should respect on MLK Jr day, it is the fundamental right of white Americans to not be inconvenienced through civil disobedience.
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Jan 19, 2016 08:11
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Xaris posted:Another example of backfiring was the last BART strike which really pissed off a lot and anti-union sentiment went way on the rise (of course part of that was media) , but ultimately it did more to hurt unions more than anything else--even from diehard democrats. Didn't management end up caving and agreeing to the union's demands?
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Jan 19, 2016 08:23
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enraged_camel posted:Way to miss the god drat point. Replace "wife going into labor" with any other one of thousands of possible emergencies requiring travel across the bridge. I too agree the protesters shouldn't have blocked traffic or attempted to cross Edmund Pettus bridge.
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Jan 19, 2016 08:45
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It's pretty funny that you guys keep bringing race into this, as if doing so automatically makes you right. Would you feel the same way if it was an anti-vaccine crowd blocking the bridge? In my mind it doesn't matter what your race or color or religion or sexual orientation is. My philosophy is simple: protest all you want, but do it without being a dick to other people.
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Jan 19, 2016 08:57
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MLK posted:"First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action;" who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a "more convenient season."
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Jan 19, 2016 08:58
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enraged_camel posted:My philosophy is simple: protest all you want, but do it without being a dick to other people.
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Jan 19, 2016 09:22
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I still haven't seen an honest response to my original question. I genuinely want to know whether "heightening the contradictions" like this actually works (if it even counts as that). Are there any sociological studies on the matter? It seems like the sort of thing people would have researched in the past 40 years since "heightening the contradictions" became a thing. The context for MLK's "white moderates are the enemy" bit is different from the moderates here, I think. There is a substantive difference in so far as I think that the methods of direct action employed today are somewhat different than the methods of direct action employed during MLK's day. If you look at the classic examples of direct action, we tend to see the direct action specifically targeting the issue in question. The Birmingham Campaign, ELF/ALF, the Day X protests in 2003, all directly took action that specifically targeted the issues they wanted addressed: the Birmingham Campaign saw boycotts and sit-ins of segregated businesses to protest segregation. ALF/ELF specifically target animal rights abuses and environmentally destructive operations. The Day X protests blocked entrances to federal buildings and tried to shut down city financial centers (presumably responsible for calling for the Iraq war). The classic tactic of "heightening the contradictions" specifically aimed to raise tensions in an existing conflict rather than creating a secondary conflict and calling it the same as the first. But here we have a case where a novel crisis is created that is not related in any way to the original issue in any manner other than that a handful of activists responsible say it is. If tomorrow a handful of hacktivists shut down the electrical grid for an hour or two in the name of Black Lives Matter, would it be okay because... "Hey, hospitals have generators and look, at least you don't have to worry about being gunned down by the cops..."
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Jan 19, 2016 09:45
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Please read Emmeline Pankhurst's Freedom or Death speech if you want to understand the strategic and tactical principles being "inconvenient" direct action.
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Jan 19, 2016 10:21
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Here, I'll quote and bold the section that's the most germane to this discussion: "That is what we women have been doing, and in the course of our desperate struggle we have had to make a great many people very uncomfortable. Now, one woman was arrested on an occasion when a great many windows were broken in London, as a protest against a piece of trickery on the part of the government, which will be incredible in fifty years, when the history of the movement is read. Women broke some windows as a protest: they broke a good many shopkeepers' windows: they broke the windows of shopkeepers where they spent most of their money when they bought their hats and their clothing. They also broke the windows of many of the clubs, the smart clubs in Piccadilly. One of the clubs was the Guard Club. Well, the ordinary army man is not much in politics, but he very often, because of his aristocratic and social connections, has considerable influence if he would use it. One woman broke the windows of the Guard Club, and when she broke those windows she stood there quietly until the Guard hall porter came out and seized her and held her until the policemen came to take her to prison. A number of the guards came out to see the kind of woman it was who had broken their windows, and they saw there a quiet little woman. She happened to be an actress, a woman who had come into our militant movement because she knew of the difficulties and dangers and temptations of the actress's life, of how badly paid she is, what her private sorrows are and her difficulties, and so she had come into the militant movement to get votes for actresses as quickly as possible, so that through the vote they could secure better conditions. Some of the guards - I think men who had never known what it was to earn a living, who knew nothing of the difficulties of a man's life, let alone the difficulties of a woman's life - came out, and they said: "Why did you break our windows? We have done nothing." She said: "It is because you have done nothing I have broken your windows." And perhaps out of that woman's breaking of windows has come this new movement of men of my country, where we find distinguished men who fought through the Boer war are drilling now like Sir Edward Carson in Belfast, drilling men in order to form a bodyguard to protect the militant women. Probably that broken window of the Guard Club did a good deal to rouse men to the defense of women and to the injustice of their situation. Well, then the shopkeepers who could not understand why we should break the shopkeepers' windows. Why should we alienate the sympathy of the shopkeepers? Well, there is the other side of the question, gentlemen - why should the shopkeepers alienate the sympathy of their customers by refusing to help them to get political power, some power to make the condition of the woman who helps to earn the shopkeepers money by serving in his shop, easier than it is at the present time? Those women broke shopkeepers' windows, and what was the situation? Just at the beginning of the winter season when all the new winter hats and coats were being shown, the shopkeepers had to barricade all their windows with wood and nobody could see the new winter fashions. Well, there again is an impossible situation. The shopkeeper cannot afford to quarrel with his customers, and we have today far more practical sympathy amongst the shopkeepers of London than we ever had when we were quiet, gentle, ladylike suffragists asking nicely for a vote. Well then, there were the men of pleasure, or the businessmen who were so busy earning money during the week that all they could think of when the week came to an end was recreation, and the great recreation in England today is playing golf. Everywhere on Saturday you see men streaming away into the country for the weekend to play golf. They so monopolize the golf links that they have made a rule that although the ladies may play golf all the week, the golf links are entirely reserved for men on Saturday and Sunday: and you have this spectacle of the exodus of men from London into the country to fill up the week-end with playing golf. They are not, ladies, putting their heads together thinking how best they can govern the country for you, what good laws they can make for you and for the world: they are there, all of them, getting their health, and I do not blame them for it, at the week-end. Well, we attacked the golf links; we wanted to make them think, and if you had been in London and taken a Sunday paper you would have read, especially if you played golf, with consternation, that all the beautiful greens that had taken years to make, had been cut up or destroyed with an acid or made almost impossible to play upon on the Friday night, and in many cases there were going to be important matches on the Saturday afternoon and Sunday. Just to give you an illustration of the effectiveness of these methods in waking the Britisher up, in conveying to him that women want the vote and are going to get it even if we do not adopt quite the men's methods in order to do so. I was staying at a little house in the country on a golf links, a house that had been loaned to me to use whenever I could get away from my work, and several times in the course of that Sunday morning I got telephone calls from gentlemen who were prominent members of golf clubs in that vicinity. It so happened that the golf links where I was spending the weekend, had not been touched. Those links had been respected because some of the prominent women suffragettes happened to be members of the club, and those women who destroyed the greens - I don't know who they were, but it was no doubt done by women - spared the links where these women, whom they admired and respected, played. Well, then that morning I was rung up over and over again by excited gentlemen who begged that those golf links should be spared, saying: "I don't know whether your followers know that we are all suffragists, on our committee, we are entirely in favor of woman suffrage." And I said: "Well, don't you think you had better tell Mr. Asquith so, because if you are suffragists and do nothing, naturally you will only add to the indignation of the women. If you really want your golf links spared you had better intimate to Mr. Asquith that you think it is high time he put his principles into practice and gave the women the vote." There was another gentleman who rang up and said: "The members of our committee, who are all suffragists, are seriously considering turning all the women members out of the club if this sort of thing goes on." "Well," I said, "don't you think your greater safety is to keep the women in the club as a sort of insurance policy against anything happening to your links?" But this experience will show you that if you really want to get anything done, it is not so much a matter of whether you alienate sympathy; sympathy is a very unsatisfactory thing if it is not practical sympathy. It does not matter to the practical suffragist whether she alienates sympathy that was never of any use to her. What she wants is to get something practical done, and whether it is done out of sympathy or whether it is done out of fear, or whether it is done because you want to be comfortable again and not be worried in this way, doesn't particularly matter so long as you get it. We had enough of sympathy for fifty years; it never brought us anything, and we would rather have an angry man going to the government and saying, my business is interfered with and I won't submit to its being interfered with any longer because you won't give women the vote, than to have a gentleman come onto our platforms year in and year out and talk about his ardent sympathy with woman suffrage.
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Jan 19, 2016 10:29
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I too enjoy having the exact same argument in this thread every time a group of protesters decides to block traffic.
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Jan 19, 2016 10:47
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Trabisnikof posted:I too agree the protesters shouldn't have blocked traffic or attempted to cross Edmund Pettus bridge. The people crossing the Edmund Pettus bridge also gave several days of notice in advance that they were going to do so. It wasn't an act of spontaneous flash-protest. Hell, when Dr King lead the second march over the bridge, they waited for a court order granting them the right to do so.
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Jan 19, 2016 15:49
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enraged_camel posted:Way to miss the god drat point. Replace "wife going into labor" with any other one of thousands of possible emergencies requiring travel across the bridge. You hear that whooshing sound? That was you missing a joke. Chill out. Now, thankfully both SF and Oakland have emergency services on their respective sides of the bridge. And I am not aware of a protest blocking traffic killing someone. It's just not something that happens. And it's not as if "traffic jam on the Bay Bridge" is some unexpected scenario for the fire department, police, et al. enraged_camel posted:It's pretty funny that you guys keep bringing race into this, as if doing so automatically makes you right. If you only protest in ways that don't get notice, then how does your movement ever get noticed? Protest must cause disruption if you want to elicit a response. And I disagree with anti-vaxxers, but I would totally understand why they would block a bridge to bring attention to their cause. My belief that they're foolish is detached from their methods. Sydin posted:I too enjoy having the exact same argument in this thread every time a group of protesters decides to block traffic. We could talk about the rain instead. It's raining and I am glad.
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Jan 19, 2016 15:58
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Litany Unheard posted:If you only protest in ways that don't get notice, then how does your movement ever get noticed? Protest must cause disruption if you want to elicit a response. The goal of a protest is to garner people's sympathy and provide a venue through which they can not only become aware of, but also empathize with your grievances. After all, the primary method of bringing about change in our society is through voting, and the more voters who are sympathetic to your cause, the higher your chances of getting your laws passed and policies implemented. However, when you protest and block traffic, all you're doing is yelling, "hey people, stop going about your lives and listen to our problems!!" It's basically a mass-scale denial of service attack; an attempt to rudely hijack people's time and attention, versus kindly request it. It simply annoys people and is fundamentally counter-productive.
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Jan 19, 2016 16:11
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So for those of you declaring that protests that inconvience anyone is bad, what is your alternative protest strategy that is more effective? (Also for all the wailing about how they protests hurt normal Joe you seem to forget what Monday was)
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Jan 19, 2016 16:30
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effective protesting is rude man, if rude protesting elicits only annoyance there's something wrong with the society not the protestors
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Jan 19, 2016 16:30
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Pankhurst and her allies strongly targeted the MPs and Prime Minister Asquith, and to a lesser extent, the upper class as a whole that had effective control of the political system. They didn't go into King's Cross station unannounced and try to burn it down or try to stop factory workers from going about their business. Protest is more than just a "gently caress everyone until you listen to me" action. It's more than just wanting to inconvenience people. It's about inconveniencing people in a way that sends a message and, as you point out, should lead to people going and complaining saying "my business is interfered with and I won't submit to its being interfered with any longer because..." I am not certain that the man stuck in traffic in the MacArthur Maze because of these actions is going to even know what is going on when the only signs of protest are miles down on the Bay Bridge. EDIT: In other words, it's not direct action itself that is a problem to me. It's not even blocking traffic that is a problem, per se. It's the apparent indiscriminacy that strikes me as problematic. These kinds of actions strike me as more overly broad in their targeting than MLK or Pankhurst ever were. I mean I suppose the protesters would argue that "all voters" are the target audience but I'm not sure that that's a wise distinction to make when that class inherently subsumes everyone who supports you. Is targeting "white voters" too hard? Am I missing something in that there's some stereotype that everyone crossing the bridge are San Franciscans and Oaklanders who can vote out their mayors and that other people in the East Bay or on the Peninsula never use the Bay Bridge? Trabisnikof posted:(Also for all the wailing about how they protests hurt normal Joe you seem to forget what Monday was) Yeah, uh, not everyone gets MLK Day off, you know. ComradeCosmobot fucked around with this message at 17:24 on Jan 19, 2016 |
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Jan 19, 2016 16:59
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Trabisnikof posted:So for those of you declaring that protests that inconvience anyone is bad, what is your alternative protest strategy that is more effective? I can only speak for myself, and I further recognize that not everyone is like this. But the only times I've actually changed my mind about an issue have been when the other side appealed to my intellect by making well thought-out arguments that successfully refuted my own. This is the reason I joined SA back in 2007: to participate in D&D threads and have my opinions challenged. There are also other methods that work on other people, such as appeals to emotion: sadness, outrage, etc. But they only work if used as a means to garner sympathy: feeling sad about what the protesters are going through, or outrage towards the protesters' "enemy". A protest that blocks a bridge elicits stronger emotions in ordinary people that override these: a cause that you may otherwise feel sympathetic towards is loving you over by disrupting your daily life. And no one is going to say, "man, I am so going to get fired for being late to work, but you know what, I totally understand why black lives matter!"
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Jan 19, 2016 16:59
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KQED's Forum is talking about this now if anyone is interested. I'll post the link when it's up in a few hours.
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Jan 19, 2016 18:10
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Shbobdb posted:Since police brutality is loving up your commute, you can no longer shrug and say it doesn't concern you. Police brutality isn't interfering with the Bay Bridge commute. Protesters who think it's a good cause (it is) are deciding to interfere with everyone's commute to bring attention to it. This sentiment frustrated me when I was a college student, and the blocking of Highway 17 in particular comes to mind (a couple years ago I believe). Some (not all) of the protesters or sympathizers claimed that they were forced to block traffic because of such and such issue, like tuition and fees. They didn't seem to want to accept responsibility that they in fact, had decided it was the best course of action to take, in their minds. It was someone else's fault, of course.
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Jan 19, 2016 18:15
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SoCalGas officials just said they're optimistic that they'll have the Porter Ranch leak capped by end of February 
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Jan 19, 2016 18:49
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Bizarro Watt posted:This sentiment frustrated me when I was a college student, and the blocking of Highway 17 in particular comes to mind (a couple years ago I believe). Some (not all) of the protesters or sympathizers claimed that they were forced to block traffic because of such and such issue, like tuition and fees. They didn't seem to want to accept responsibility that they in fact, had decided it was the best course of action to take, in their minds. It was someone else's fault, of course. The UCs backed down on the tuition raise though, after it seemed like a done deal. They'll never say it was because of the protesters, but the protesters got what they wanted (at great personal cost). Direct action is incredibly effective, and if the cost of keeping UC tuition down is a day of awful traffic on the 17, that is a small price to pay.
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Jan 19, 2016 19:24
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Not really, police brutality results in bridges being blocked. It's a pretty direct relationship and disrupting traffic has become a signature move for BLM.
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Jan 20, 2016 03:21
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Shbobdb posted:Not really, police brutality results in bridges being blocked. It's a pretty direct relationship and disrupting traffic has become a signature move for BLM. I don't think you understand direct relationships.
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Jan 20, 2016 03:42
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enraged_camel posted:an attempt to rudely hijack people's time and attention, versus kindly request it Of course you could move to a more Rational state? http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/01/minnesota-cop-run-over-black-lives-matter-protesters quote:Cop Tells Drivers to Run Over Black Lives Matter Protesters
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Jan 20, 2016 03:58
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Well excuuuuse me for having a contextualized concept of causality when it comes to overdetermined events. Abductive reasoning is considered a bad idea for a reason, yo.
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Jan 20, 2016 04:12
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enraged_camel posted:I can only speak for myself, and I further recognize that not everyone is like this. But the only times I've actually changed my mind about an issue have been when the other side appealed to my intellect by making well thought-out arguments that successfully refuted my own. This is the reason I joined SA back in 2007: to participate in D&D threads and have my opinions challenged. And yet here we are, 30-odd posts later, talking about BLM -- their tactics, their goals, etc. Even if you, personally, do not have your mind changed by the protest, you're engaging on the subject and so is everyone else reading this thread. Blocking traffic is effective, cool, and good.
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Jan 20, 2016 04:25
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Kobayashi posted:Blocking traffic is effective, cool, and good. Blocking traffic is cool and good and effective at stoping traffic. Dunno what it's effective at besides that.
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Jan 20, 2016 04:28
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VikingofRock posted:Didn't management end up caving and agreeing to the union's demands? Yeah, but there was also the little matter of the manager-driven train running over and killing some scab yard workers. Turns out that the strikers weren't full of poo poo when they said the main issue was safety, not pay, and the NTSB can bring a unique kind of pressure.
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Jan 20, 2016 04:58
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ComradeCosmobot posted:Chuck Reed pulled his propositions from the 2016 ballot. Measures to end public pensions or at least cap benefits will return in 2018 for the more favorable electoral environment. Yeah, go ahead, just let the Supreme Court do your dirty work for you, I guess.
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Jan 20, 2016 05:08
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FRINGE posted:Yeah. Thats pretty much how they tend to work. No one stops their own entertainment for some relatively alien cause unless it stops their entertainment (so to speak). I would hardly call driving to work "entertainment" (a lot of people still worked on Monday, you realize?). But maybe you have some bizarre tastes. To each his own I guess.
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Jan 20, 2016 05:11
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Kobayashi posted:And yet here we are, 30-odd posts later, talking about BLM -- their tactics, their goals, etc. Even if you, personally, do not have your mind changed by the protest, you're engaging on the subject and so is everyone else reading this thread. Blocking traffic is effective, cool, and good. Yes, but I feel less sympathetic towards them, not more. This particular conversation has not changed that, especially since no one has succeeded in putting forth a rational, intelligent argument regarding why blocking traffic is a more effective tactic than other forms of protest that don't cause inconvenience and economic harm. Unless you subscribe to the hosed up mindset of "any publicity is good publicity."
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Jan 20, 2016 05:12
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Kobayashi posted:And yet here we are, 30-odd posts later, talking about BLM -- their tactics, their goals, etc. Even if you, personally, do not have your mind changed by the protest, you're engaging on the subject and so is everyone else reading this thread. Blocking traffic is effective, cool, and good. If the purpose of the protest is just advertising, then it is a pretty terrible ad campaign. Wouldn't you want people to associate your cause with something pleasant or something motivating like a deep-seated fear? Associating your cause with something annoying and unpleasant like traffic doesn't seem very prudent to me. Bad traffic doesn't even catch your attention for being shocking or offensive since it is so common in the Bay Area.
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Jan 20, 2016 05:14
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enraged_camel posted:Yes, but I feel less sympathetic towards them, not more. This particular conversation has not changed that, especially since no one has succeeded in putting forth a rational, intelligent argument regarding why blocking traffic is a more effective tactic than other forms of protest that don't cause inconvenience and economic harm. So what? Was your sympathy, inasmuch as it ever existed, doing anything?
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Jan 20, 2016 05:18
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Those suffragettes didn't huck bricks through every window they could find. They targeted their brick-hurling towards specific demographics. They went after golf courses to target a specific demographic. Martin Luther King, Jr. (and the civil rights movement's other leaders, generally) targeted specific demographics, too: they were fighting institutionalized racism by publicly engaging (usually peacefully) with the racist authorities and institutions. What demographic is targeted when you block all Westbound traffic on the Bay Bridge, on a bank holiday, when BART is running Saturday service? I'd argue you're targeting the sorts of people who have to work that day regardless. E.g., absolutely no government workers, probably not a lot of high-tech workers, the employees who work in finance, biotech, software; but a lot of service industry workers. A lot of people who commute not from the wealthiest Bay Area communities on the Peninsula, but rather, people commuting from the much less wealthy communities in the East Bay. None of the most-wealthy people who actually live in the City. Nuance matters. Who is BLM trying to inconvenience? The Suffragettes wanted to sway their most passive supporters to act. The civil rights marchers wanted to garner national attention, show themselves to be peaceful by contrast to the violence employed by (particularly but not exclusively) Southern government and commercial institutions, and inconvenience their passive supporters who were eligible to vote in those (mostly but not always) Southern communities. When BLM interrupts Bernie Sanders, they're inconveniencing a politician who may be their most likely ally among the presidential candidates. When they block the Westbound Bay Bridge, they may be inconveniencing the Bay Area demographic segment most likely to already be their supporters. I'd be a lot more sympathetic if they blocked northbound 101 in Palo Alto at 8 AM on a regular weekday morning. It might also have less of a direct impact on the hourly wages of people who don't get paid if they're not at work (e.g., working class stiffs) if they blocked the evening commute instead of the morning commute. Maybe they picked Westbound Bay Bridge specifically because there's a pedestrian walkway that permits access more easily than a lot of other choices, and practical considerations have to be, uh, considered. I dunno. I'm still a bit ambivalent about it, but hell, "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good." If BLM is still figuring out how to be maximally effective, at least they're regularly getting national attention, which is more than I can say for a lot of other important liberal causes these days.
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Jan 20, 2016 05:21
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Shbobdb posted:So what? If you aren't protesting to try to persuade people, then what is the point? Is the point to satiate your martyr complex?
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Jan 20, 2016 05:26
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Non violent protests are designed to create martyrs. That's how they work.
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Jan 20, 2016 05:28
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To be fair, BLM interrupting those Sanders events did pretty directly lead to him changing from offering sort of bland liberal talking points about race relations to appointing black activists to his staff and seriously incorporating the principles of the BLM movement into his platform.
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Jan 20, 2016 05:29
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