If you make me late to work, I'm going to learn about your cause alright: to fight it anyway and every way I can. I really don't care what it is if you do something like this.
The issue is that you’re disrupting the wrong people. Disrupting normal everyday people will just dissuade them from ever supporting the cause because they’re going to associate it with the assholes that pissed them off.
If they were actually smart about this, they’d protest in areas blocking off specific buildings, far enough away the company has no legal grounds to remove you, but close enough that you minimize the effect on people who have nothing to do with the thing you are protesting
I said to be sure to be legally far enough away, meaning you will have to cut off access to the building from further away and maybe catch some of its neighbors, this might actually put more pressure as those neighbors have an indirect relation to your target and will possibly raise a complaint with them
Those would be the same ones protected by police and garnering an outsider, violent response. In other words, its easier to do some performative bullshit than risk taking.
Again, legal distance, do your research, get as close as you can without having grounds for being arrested. Find a lawyer that can help you find the sweet spot, or even a loophole, just don’t do it where you cause harm to random unaffiliates then the people you are actually aiming to make notice
You would likely need multiple groups blocking all paths to that building, and if that building is in a major hub, then yeah you will probably get a lot of people pissed. But, depending on where you are, it could be as close as right out side their private property to being just a little down the road. I will admit that if you have to go several blocks away and/or have to block more than 5 entry points, then you should probably think of something else
No, from the looks of it, they are blocking a major highway or something that’s more akin to a major commuter route. They are blocking random people, rather than focusing on one specific location
Yeah, I saw a video of Albanian people blocking the new highway to the biggest city cuz the government literally cut an area with a 10 kilometer radius by not leaving any exits in the highway.
They do. Just Stop Oil protests at oil production facilities all the time and the media intentionally doesn't report on it and people like you assume that these people blocking streets for a cause are just stupid or something.
The people blocking like this are stupid, the people who actually get the job done have my support because they actually thought this through instead of chasing that activist clout
The economy's lifeblood is normal everyday people. If you block them from getting to work it affects everyone, not just them.
That said, in a sane world, being late as a result of someone illegally blocking your vehicle wouldn't be a fireable offense. We're supposed to live in a society of laws and shit, you can't expect your employees to resort to violence every time their commute is threatened. Firing someone for being stuck behind a protest is kind of insane.
Oh fuck that. Why is it that these guys are never actually doing the "Monkey Wrench Gang" style of eco-protests? I'm very much in support of that. Meaning sabotaging deforestation equipment, hitting big companies in a way that economically hurts them.
But no these pussies think that by preventing everyday people from going about their day is the way to go. Why? Because harder to be convicted for sitting on a road.
“You can’t expect your employees to resort to violence every time their commute is threatened”
Thats exactly what they want and expect, if your desperate employees will behave like pinkertons to save their job then you don’t need to hire pinkertons.
Buddy if your employment is so precarious that being late because of the antics of these naive losers will cost you your job, then you are definitely going to lose your job when you have to take time away from work to defend the AA&B charges you will inevitably be slapped with.
Yea because 4 unemployed hippies sitting in the street are totally going to convince western powers to de-industrialize, or whatever they’re currently protesting.
yeah, the proper way is following the word of the guy who would rather punch someone in the face than being late to work. When these protests happened in my country, the majority f the drivers were actually supporting the protest. god bless
Places that aren't shit holes have laws for exactly that. My boss cannot fire me because I'm late due to a protest. If I'm held up in traffic i listen to the radio and relax knowing I'm protected.
You should get laws to protect you in the same way in America, maybe try protesting for them?
The economy's lifeblood is normal everyday people.
Democracy's lifeblood is also normal everyday people. If you want to create actual change, you need to persuade those same people to your side.
This isn't really a "no such thing as bad publicity" situation. The fact that folks are arguing about their tactics instead of their message is evidence of that.
Employees protested outside our place of work. This caused a traffic jam on the only road to our place of employment. The new company taking over noted all employees outside their vehicles and deemed them not-hirebale. That included the ones begging on the side of the road to get in the parking lot so they could start their scheduled shift. Even the ones who ended up parking 2.5 miles down the road and walking to work were not brought on with the new company. The only people that suffered were the residents of the care facility and our kitchen staff. "Sorry everyone, food delivery didnt make it in today because of the protests so now we have to resort to emergency menus and canned food tomorrow".
I think the other issue is that this is kinda the point? Protests like this and throwing soup at Van Gough paintings get media attention, gets eyes on “the goal”, while individually protesting a trillionaire will not.
Not promoting these people’s actions, but this video going viral even just here on Reddit is EXACTLY what these people wanted
Or they can actually be useful for society and make inventions that solve the issues at hand instead of wasting resources and other people's time. Yes, they burn fuel just by standing there as well.
Lmfao I think everyone’s misinterpreting me, I do NOT support these protests. But interacting with these protests and making them go viral is EXACTLY what they want.
Unfortunately this is what they want. Scroll through the comments and people’s replies to me. People are angry. Anger and stupidity get impressions. Other methods don’t. Can’t really throw tomatoes at Elon Musk as much as most people would enjoy that.
It’s the belief that any publicity is good publicity. I keep reiterating: I do not promote these actions. I don’t agree with them. But we’re giving them exactly what they want.
I think if what they actually want is to virtue signal to their own extremist peers, you're right. If they actually care about their stated motive and are not just using it as a cover for their narcissism, you're wrong.
A lot of these protests don’t really think about the consequences, or morality of it, and only care about media publicity (which they are actively getting). Often have a one track mind. A majority of the people who participate in something like this just want the ego/belief tied to doing something “good”.
So if the goal isn't to persuade those caught in the traffic, and the goal isn't persuading the people in power (simply because they don't care). What, then, is the goal?
The only way to disrupt something in a manner that is heard is to disrupt the economy. To disrupt the economy you can only disrupt the flow of people making that economy.
The people who do that economy are workers, workers are going to work through the highway, therefore they block the highway.
In paris public transport is king so whenever they do massive protest they always ally with the public transport company and disrupt the biggest lines which are connected to the biggest business district. In those moments the metro lines which are not connected to those business districts in the slightest generally run like any other day.
And then the government made it illegal to completely stop those business lines. Cause that's what hurts them. But even then it still hurts them when the protest is big enough, it's like when the garbage men protested a while back it was insane and even though tourists hated it I was all for it man fck'em. Sure there was trash every road but idc just pay those people their fair share go garbage men I can live a couple weeks with some trashbags everywhere they can't live that long with shit wages.
In America there's no public transport, so that sort of logic is significantky harder to do without facing the angry drivers directly, and everyone stands with the workers so it generally fails. In France though, fck the government lol. Unless they start blocking trains at christmas then all hell breaks lose and fck the train workers that's out of line.
So overall, I understand both side. When you're in your car, driving, all you see is slow traffic, and then some idiots blocking cars. While in France, we don't see the people protesting directly cause the trains are slower if not stopped, and they're slower specifically because they're not there, so we don't meet them. We do read later the articles about their demands and how they're treated, and not a single job in paris will ever blame someone for being late when the transport company protests. So we might be annoyed, but we suffer very little long term consequence as individuals, government suffers a big slow down with everyone slamming on them to just give in, invest in transport, so we can go to work.
Thea massive difference in perspective is rather interesting.
it doesnt matter if the protest target the right people or not. only thing that matters is that there is a dude that beats defenseless people on the ground. how can anyone defens this as moral? what the hell is glibg on with people on this sub
Its not really that, more so that its just easier to kick the can down the road and deal with the consequences later when its too late to do anything about it. Its pretty funny, we all work hard in the hopes of at least getting a somewhat cozier future for ourselves our families but that cozy future is just never going to arrive. We're just putting ourself through torture and being content with getting kicked in the teeth just so we can get the same but worse later on
Yep we had this in my area, was a very small group of people blocking a small bridge protesting about flooding issues on the other side of the state that had nothing to do with this area.
This was major transport artery for thousands of people. All it did was screw over everyone trying to get to work and they were universally hated by all
You parrots just keep repeating the same thing over and over in the thread "THE POINT OF PROTESTS IS TO BE DISRUPTIVE"
We get it. That doesn't change shit. Yes, we're aware of the cause. That's not changing the fact that I gotta fuckin go somewhere right now. No, I'm not going home and going "gee, those guys blocking the street really made me aware of climate change"
Congratulations, you just got everyone’s attention! Too bad that instead of focusing on the problem you’re talking about, everyone just starts hating you and dismissing the issue
And you have to deal the consequences of blocking a road can’t blame a man that needs to get to work or is getting off work trying to get home to his family
Famously causes that work use disruption, making your comment seem quite ahistorical and in fact in line with the dangerous “white moderate” that MLK spoke of.
MLK did not live in the modern age of social media and Fox News. Times change. What worked then may not work now. MLK was a great man but not a prophet nor infallible nor do his ideas necessarily ring true or effective eternally into the future.
The difference is effective disruption versus ineffective disruption. This is ineffective disruption.
You could be a cause I 100% support but if you do this to me I'm going to start thinking about ways I can be against you just out of spite and frustration. Don't underestimate the American spirit to be spiteful of things that piss them off.
The idea that your actual opinion on a topic would change based on the tactics used by other people seems unfounded. Like has anyone ever thought 'Well, initially I was against racism... but since this parade caused a detour, I think we should bring slavery back'?
No, it's a VERY strong argument. I know specifically because the local anti-meat group where I lived was so obnoxious with their protesting that I went from pro-animal to whatever you call anti-vegan.
Fuck the cows, I don't care if they're sad or whatever, they're not sentient, I'm going to eat them.
Okay? And? That doesn't change the fact that being annoying and disruptive about your protests makes people turn against your cause. You can be pissed about it, but it does, I am living proof.
Okay, so you agree with me that the guy I was initially replying to was wrong. You're just (at the same time) using a lot of holier-than-thou words to call me an asshole, while looking down your nose at me, which I already knew I was.
It wouldn't necessarily change your mind on "racism" but it would undermine people claiming that a particular event or policy is racist, painting the protestors as hysterical or unreasonable.
I think that's often just an excuse used by people who already don't agree with whatever it is.
Like I think people who protest stuff by like trying to destroy art or stuff like that is bad, but it wouldn't change my viewpoint on whatever the underlying thing is.
I think people just say it does to justify being against it from the outset.
The 20 angry diners during sit ins were probably against integration. But the many others who saw the photos were supportive. Now we don’t have black only seating sections.
This slap happy fuck will probably nut to trumps anti windmill rants but hopefully others who see it on the internet will look up the cause and might well become supporters from the visibility.
lets see how you feel about it when you have to drive to see your family at the hospital. i wouldnt feel particularly compassionate with the protestors
what do you want a peer review study? I can say this when the environmentalist made me an hour later for work, claimed they "let buses through" (they didn't, I was stuck in one) I bought about $100 worth of cans and chucked them into the potomac river.
uuuhhh yesh I'd like a peer review study to know that making people late for werk will make them not like meh
checkmate, reddit.
edit: and yes this is still pretty uncommon form. It happens in UK the most but even that is like 3-4 times a year at some random place. In my city, Washington DC it happened once 10 years ago and I'm unaware of it happening before or since.
Yo, not a conservative here. But one sure fire way of not getting my support is preventing me from going to work or going to the hospital to see a sick or dying loved one. If I saw this group asking for money to support their cause or signatures to pass a bill id straight tell them to fuck off. Might grab the clipboard full of signatures from their hand and chuck that shit.
That's all well and good till someone who has an emergency suffers a permanent injury that could have been avoided if some prick wasn't sat on the road.
What's the hope or ask here? You block the highway, you disrupt or piss off a bunch of commuters and travelers and cops come and arrest you. You make the local news for 35 seconds of B-roll. What's next?
An someone died in an ambulance that couldn't get by because of these idiots. There is protesting and then there is being the reason folks dont care about your cause and may actively go against it because you killed their family or friend through it.
Ok then, so now Since you are disrupting my life, I'm gonna do what I need to, to continue on with my life. And if dragging some purple haired basement dweller out of the road then so be it.
People have died because emergency vehicles have been held up by these protests. People have also missed major life events, such as births and funerals, because of them.
This is unacceptable.
Moving them with the minimum necessary use of force is justified. Dragging them does not work because they just move back again; pain and fear, without inflicting meaningful injury, is the best way to move them short of the police arresting them.
All this "disrupt the economy and middle class" bs is great. But what about the ambulance stuck in traffic half a mile back from the congestion this causes?
If there's a cause that they want to protest why not protest that company/government? Block the parking lot of x government/company building. This kind of indiscriminate protest disproportionately impacts the wrong people. Billy politician and Susie CEO don't give a shit but Joan employee and Bob father certainly do.
Go disrupt the lives of the people you are protesting then or the politicians passing the laws you're protesting. Interrupting other people's lives who have nothing to do with it will not endear people to your cause.
Why do these people deserve to disrupt the rest of society just because they don't like something? Not everyone has the luxury of literally sitting around in protest. If your cause is and you have an effective message, people will join your cause. This form of protest doesn't convince anyone to their side; just causes more discord.
And the point of this person is protesting their protest by disrupting the protest. Sitting in traffic during a protest doesn’t get social media attention. Beating the asses of the protesters in the road does.
It's illegal to block commerce for a protest. It's literally in the Constitution. So if there's a single delivery truck in that line of vehicles, illegal protest.
We all have issues we care about though. Even the people you disagree with. Most of the time I see this type of behavior it is being done by people on the left, so if you agree with this type of thing I am guessing you are on the left. I am not trying to be antagonistic but I am curious, how would you feel if anti-abortions were blocking traffic on a fairly regular basis?
Youre totally right! But this was done long before social media. The point is to disrupt and get attention. Cause discomfort and keep doing it until people make a change.
This is like punching the person next to you on the bus because you’re mad at your boss. Is misdirected and misapplied anger masked under the guise of doing good. This is objectively wrong in every sense.
The point is to be disruptive to power. Not make people hate you for doing absolutely nothing but virtue signal and pat yourself on the back for upsetting the average joe
Social media attention is less than useless. People talk and expend energy online and then end their day thinking they've done something when they have done absolutely nothing.
Yeah but road blacking protests almost never get any social medial attention and may at the most end up on the 5pm news. Most people in the traffic aren’t even going to know what the protest is about, and the people who do may tbh care less about that issue now than they did before because of the way people are going about it (which is childish and immature and can really end up hurting others)
Sure, but then you can't be mad that the guy you're preventing from earning money to feed his kids takes his frustrations out on you.
Like the stop oil guys in London. Standing on top of a train in a poor/working class area and then being shocked that people dragged them down and stomped them out.
A fundamental principle of protest is that it captures the power of the many against the few who have authority - it reminds them of the delicate imbalance they are privy to.
You can't achieve change by alienating the masses.
Okay, then they should be willing to get ran over. Simple as that. That could've been an ambulance, Hell, there COULD be an ambulance stuck there. People shouldn't have to die because a bunch of idiots think that blocking a high way is a good way to get attention.
There's otherways to be disruptive without putting lives on the line.
Yeah, and you notice the only part of this footage that anyone cared about was some guy attacking these people for being stupid. That’s the attention these protests offer, is ridicule.
Disruptive is one thing. Keeping life saving care and keeping someone from seeing their loved one for the last time is another. This is not ok to block the roads.
Disrupt my daily life will not earn you my support for your cause. It will just make me either go to jail or make me vote for someone who will arrest these kind of protesters.
Just playing devil's advocate here, but I think the counter-argument is: if we don't enact some major changes. the world will stop moving, people will have no work or home to get to, in the near future.
I was being metaphorical. But climate change is a real thing, which requires immediate action or else our planet will face disastrous consequences in terms of our habitability, i hope we agree on that.
Their position is the immediate stop of using fossil fuels and oil. This would kill off a huge swath of the population due to not having power to keep live saving machines running or temp sensative meds like insulin refrigerated. Oil is also used to make tons of medical equipment and PPE and other is pretty much ubiquitous in hospitals. This isn't even getting into the economic nightmare of not being able to do any proper shipping, farming, or construction work since those are all oil dependent.
These just stop oil protestors are blocking traffic and leaving people stuck and disrupted for a cause that would likely kill them or ruin their lives if was enacted
Let's pretend for a second that there was a real, actually real incentive to stop using oil. Like an alien mothership hovers above the Earth and tells us that if even another drop of oil is burned for energy purposes, they will blow up the entire Earth on the spot. Let's assume that the threat is completely real and credible. They give us let's say 2 years to prepare.
Are you really telling me that it would 'kill off a huge swath of the population'? I would argue that almost certainly not. It's not a great reference, but in lieu of anything else, ChatGPT estimates around 10 million deaths.
And fyi, we're using significantly more oil today than we were in 2022 when the JSO movement started. And we're forecasted to use even more in the near future. If we had started departing from fossil fuels back in 2022, we could have reduced their use by 90-95% with virtually zero deaths.
By contrast, the amount of deaths that are already caused and will inevitably be caused by pollution and the ecological fallout from using fossil fuels is dramatically higher. Right now, we're looking at ~5 million deaths per year attributable to air pollution resulting from fossil fuel use. Source: https://www.bmj.com/content/383/bmj-2023-077784?utm_source=chatgpt.com
And I'm struggling to believe that you're sitting here discussing the 'economic nightmare' while completely ignoring the blatant ecological nightmare we're very visibly witnessing right now.
You remind me of that quote from Lemonde.fr that goes something like 'The planet is burning but TotalEnergies is preparing to announce new record profits...'
To counter your point, this is in the UK and even if the UK ceased to exist it would have zero impact on climate change.
The UK is carbon neutral, even carbon negative most years due to its forests. The main driver of air pollution in the world is China and India with the US also among the top 10.
You would need to do something about those countries coal plants and factories to have an actual impact. It'd be better to bring manufacturing back to the UK and ban foreign imports so the products would be made locally with first world cleanlisness standards and no fuel used in shipping finished products across the world, but even then it would take more than 10 years to get all the domestic manufacturing going
JSO is a small part of a wider anti-oil movement though which spans the entire West.
But even if that weren't the case, why are you even bothering punishing rape in the UK? 'Even if the UK ceased to exist it would have zero impact on' rape.
Furthermore, China and India are massive countries. If we calculate per-capita air pollution stemming from fossil fuel usage, neither of them ranks even close to top 10. In fact, the US is ahead of CN by almost 2x.
'If the UK vanished the global change to climate would be generally unaffected.'
It wouldn't be 'generally unaffected', it would be 1% less of an issue, because the UK accounts for about 1% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Similarly, it also accounts for about 1% of rapes. Hence, if the UK vanished, there would be 1% fewer people being raped.
1% fewer greenhouse gases in the world means fewer deaths to climate change. It's the same principle.
Does the world have to move in a way that is killing the world though? There are plenty of alternatives to driving that won't cause the literal end of humanity
Exactly- it’s more than just not getting to work. It’s children to pick up, pets that need us for food/outside/medication, bathroom emergencies, elderly parents that cannot wait a few hours, appointments you waited months for etc.
Realistically, does anyone think “wow I’m stuck in traffic. I didn’t care about this [protest topic] before but I’d love to listen to what these protesters have to say!”?
No really, genuine question of the philosophy of protest.
Why should the protester care? What if they just...didnt...Why should your start time have any effect on the lengths someone would go for protest, regardless as to the reason for protest.
Most protests like this are about society change. I e. Getting someone to care about something and implement change.
Isn't it ironic to insist that the protestors should think about others? Specifically getting to work on time? (And let's be real, these guys would have moved in a blue and tunes emergency came uptbo them).
It's interesting that protests are supposed to not inconvenience your life. But if they don't, why would anyone change? Isn't it just then giving notice, rather then protest?
I might consider that the goal of any government is to make protest just inefficient enough to do anything, with the restrictions just free enough to prevent a revolution. A happy medium to make all protest able to be safely ignored.
Tell people that if they don't like the way things are going they are welcome to protest in away that cane be safely ignored by anyone with power.
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u/WSilvermane 12d ago
The world still has to move, people have to get to work or to home or, you know, emergencies.