> Of course if you watch TV or read mainstream newspaper they won't give you an idea; you would have to go to the protest yourself to escape the propaganda.
So you can fall victim to the protester's propaganda instead of the mainstream news propaganda?
That's a common argument for many things, and I don't consider it valid.
It is like saying that you can't understand a cult unless you become part of that cult. Some people took on the advise and become brainwashed like everyone else, it is hard to keep a neutral point of view under the peer pressure such meetings usually entail. "seeing for yourself" to get an unbiased opinion is easier said than done.
You mentioned fascists. Did you go see fascists? I did, and they are probably much friendlier than you imagine, and they have convincing arguments. It requires some amount of detachment to see the flaws in their ideas.
Now back to the yellow vests. I've seen protests, my father was part of the movement, I met many people with different ideas. And from my experience, that's a mess. My father joined the movement because of a dislike in the banking system and Macron's administration, and found like-minded individuals. He left a few weeks later when another groups pushed ideas about unions he didn't share at all. I know one self-employed nurse who was booed at a protest when other people from the same movement claim they support self-employment and better medical support... go figure. The things is: individual groups know why they are upset, but the movement itself is all over the place. There are some common themes like taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor but as the movement progresses, it becomes broader and broader, covering immigration (more immigration control, but treat refugees better...), organic food, etc...
> So you can fall victim to the protester's propaganda instead of the mainstream news propaganda?
Placing personal experiences and sufferings in the same basket as state/capital-sponsored propaganda and smear campaigns tells a lot about your worldview.
> It requires some amount of detachment to see the flaws in their ideas.
Or enough privilege to not feel directly threatened by their genocidal agenda.
> The things is: individual groups know why they are upset, but the movement itself is all over the place.
Agreed. Though i'm not sure it's a bad thing. That's the essence of a popular movement, compared to a top-down mobilization with a clear agenda imposed by a restricted group of people.
> more immigration control
WTF? I've never met people in yellow vests protests arguing for more immigration control.
If anything, there is convergence with anti-racist initiatives such as sans-papiers collectives, the gilets noirs, the Justice & Truth for Adama collective..
Sure, there's fringe groups of royalist/fascist movements trying to infiltrate the gilets jaunes with such agenda, but claiming the movement as a whole is even considering this is highly misguided.
> It absolutely is not a baby step. In fact it is a really big deal to jump from your own experience to assuming the intent of other people. That is actually a really fast way to anger people in my experience, because it requires that you pretend that you understand what is going on in another person's head.
That is not correct. If you are blocking a freeway causing hours of traffic delays then I am not making assumptions about what's in somebody else's head. I don't care what their intentions are. They have made me disgruntled and digusted with their protest message completely alienating me from their cause. From that moment forward I would vote against and fund in opposition to everything they advocate.
As the audience all that matters is what's in my head, which I don't have to guess at. The inability for people to accept that reality tells me the things they are protesting about aren't important to them.
> You do understand how what you perceive and what they intend are different things, right?
If the protestors are utterly incapable of bridging that gap it doesn't matter what their intentions are as they are failing to win hearts and minds. That leap you speak to is only a minor baby step. If they really wanted to convince me of the value of their message they could start by not intentionally pissing me off.
This isn't rocket science. This complete lack of common sense on behalf of the protestors typically indicates youth. Everybody else has since either developed a few drops of empathy or moved on to anything more self-indulgent.
> In essence, those actually supporting the protests have created an environment whereby they'll never be able to judge the true sentiment around their movement, as dissent or even public agnosticism toward it has been all but quashed. Something that, in my eyes at least, has dangerous potential.
I support the protests. What can I change in my behavior to stop creating this dangerous environment?
> There's so little coverage of the insane violence.
The tinfoil hat in me believes that media is not really interested in foreign violent demonstrations and reports as biased as possible about domestic protests turning violent (e.g. BLM), so that the domestic population doesn't even get the idea that violent protest can actually achieve something. Just look at French labor/social protests... immensely violent, and pretty effective when compared to Germany where the social net was pretty torn up during the last decades.
> Of course I'm aware of the protests that make the main stream media, but it seems silly to just assume that those small numbers of protests are broadly representative.
You have to assume that a protest is representative of something larger.
It's not like there's the normal population and then there's a few hundred people crazy enough to protest for reason X. Much more likely, they have a network of support, people who aren't as convinced as them, but who do agree with them to a large degree and those people have their own network with whom they sort of agree and so on and so forth.
The same applies for any group, no matter how extreme really.
EDIT: Also, I live in Montréal, Canada. I can assure you our universities are infested with "leftist thought", even the engineering ones (and having visited the humanities ones, the infestation can be shockingly intense). There is one wall in UQAM (like, in the school, facing some gathering space) where someone wrote "let's throw the blood from our diva cups in their faces". There absolutely is something going on.
> We’ve got this warped idea that a proper protest is when some people gather in some designated area that the authorities allow them to, and they don’t inconvenience anyone. That’s absurd when you consider what a protest is about.
OK, fine, but you also don't get to decide how other people interpret your actions. You can fuss and bother about how trivial it is to you that someone's commute got delayed by 10 minutes, but if you're pissing off the person you're trying to get your message to, you're still shooting yourself in the foot.
Persuasion is contextual; you don't get to dictate someone else's feelings and you don't get to force them to see things your way.
> "This is the only thing that makes sense. The people, governments, and institutions being protested only know one language: violence."
Not true. They also understand money. I'd say money is the best thing to focus on if you want a truly effective protest. Violence is too easy to condemn by those not taking part. That's why I'd say we'd be better off arranging protests as boycotts rather than marching in the street.
That said, there is a sense of community with collective gatherings like street protests. I'd say fostering connections between people is probably the main strength of protesting in the streets.
> his one, in particular, that “antifa is a violent mob that is super hypocritical”
For having met many of them during the Gilets Jaunes demonstration in Paris, it’s not only true but an understatement. In addition everyone of them I talked to was of an abysmal intelligence and seemed to come only to destroy. I completely understand police brutality has I have been gassed, beaten and shot with rubber bullets while totally cooperative and non violent. However the behaviour of antifas is unacceptable.
I highly suspect that the government used them to destroy any sympathy towards the protests. It might be also the case in the US.
I don't remember such an event. In some cases, other people (not demonstrators) who were trying to cross a blockade their cars.
> "Just the claim that French protests aren't notably violent."
Sorry I didn't understand that, you are indeed right.
There is often a level of violence (see farmers or docker unions) but the Gilets Jaunes were mostly ordinary people, not the smartest, not in their best health, and they were not aggressive in most cases. They were us, feeling things were falling apart and not knowing what to do.
> initially a reasonable oppositiin movement, it became full of antivax and destroyers if common property
What's your source?
About direct action and sabotage, of course some of the movement engages in such tactics, as most protest/revolutionary movements have over the years, because that's the only way to get the message across when nobody in power wants to listen to your reasonable requests. That's the only way i know of the make the nationwide media talk of social issues and popular protests... If you have other ideas, i'm sure plenty of people are interested.
Specifically about direct action, as the name implies, the action itself is the objective. Burning trashcans and blocking streets sends a message, but attacking the institutions (eg. banks) directly responsible for our suffering, whether we agree with it or not, is a relevant political strategy that has been part of revolutionary and anti-colonial struggles since as long as history has been written, and arguably longer. Do you think the resistance movement from the 40s blowing up trains and assassinations of nazi officers was illegitimate? Or do you think the situation is possible, and the endless destruction of our planet along with deteriorating social conditions for the global populations does not warrant being angry and attacking those directly profiting from this situation?
About anti-vaxxers in the gilets jaunes movement, from what i could see it was pretty divided. Moreover, i would argue the government's lies and coverups all along the pandemic has greatly helped anti-vaxxing conspiracy theories. People don't trust the government, because the government doesn't have our interests at heart. Moreover, there is a growing distrust of the scientific community, which i personally credit to key institutions from academia and media giving scientific credit to many discredited ideas: downplaying the seriousness of climate change, advertising for urbanization as "progress" despite medical evidence pointing to inherent problems in the modern way of life, or pushing for the "green revolution" since the 50s despite solid scientific evidence that mechanized monoculture is damaging the environment and not sustainable yield-wise (we are already witnessing in Europe the first signs of desertification such as land dry, due to such techniques).
Of course, most vaccines are good. But to be honest, most people i met who you would probably label "anti-vaxxers" are not anti-vaccines, but rather skeptical of the results and side-effects, which is a good critical posture. Many people who were skeptical at first are now getting vaccinated and that's a good thing. Of course, the government trying to actually force people to get vaccinated is not helping the situation. Instead, making the vaccine widely available for free, even for those who don't have social security, would help it reach more people, and would probably help convince those who are still skeptical.
After all, the government never has our best interests at heart. In this specific case of Covid vaccines, its actions are not against our best interests (no hidden chip or autism serum in there), but for the financial interests of the pharmaceutical industry it's subsidizing through this scheme. Once again, if the government forced nobody but made the vaccine widely-available, requisitioning the pharmaceutical industry to produce it at cost, more people would be inclined to get vaccinated.
> up until the moment they get power and realze that their claims do not hold water.
So this is a divisive issue in the gilets jaunes movement since of course not everybody is an anarchist. However, a lot of people in the movement want to destroy power, not seize it. There is a strong anti-party sentiment across the gilets jaunes movement: elections are rightfully seen as the opposite of democracy (giving power away from the people), and many components of the movements advocate explicitly for decentralization of power through local assemblies, even holding "Commune of the Communes" (or assembly of assemblies) conferences to federate those smaller initiatives without centralized power.
As a conclusion, i'm not saying i feel sympathy for the entirety of the movement as we have our disagreements. For example, i don't have any sympathy for royalists and neo-fascists infiltrating the movement, and i'm glad they were kicked out of demos by the protesters themselves in some cities. However, your talking points appear to be regurgitated from government propaganda. Are you actually talking with people who identify with the gilets jaunes movement?
> protests are just delegitimized by inserting violent people in them and not arresting them
It's an attempted tactic, though in the US I think by the political opposition (radical neo-reactionaries) and not the government. It has uneven success.
> countless pictures of pallets of bricks being delivered to demonstration sites in the night before the protest opposed to the leading party
Do we know those pictures were legitimate? Countless pictures on the Internet doesn't mean much.
> Many legitimate protests from people who actually are minorities in their nations, were put in bad light and you never heard of them.
> Democracy is when foreign far right groups participate in and fund a domestic protest where people demand the resignation of elected officials, got it.
Well, yeah. Whether the protesters are misinformed or not is irrelevant, they are seeking to highlight their grievances.
You can't very well claim that people should only be able to highlight grievances that they personally, individually and without any external influence ... came up with themselves.
A grievance is still a grievance even if it was brought to the protestor's attention by a foreign power, by a local politician, by their neighbour or by the invisible green elves who live at the bottom of the protestor's garden.
1. You don't get to gatekeep that a grievance is valid only if it comes from the right[1].
2. You don't get to gatekeep that any and all grievances from the left[1] are automatically invalid.
3. You don't get to gatekeep that some things are legitimate grievances and others are not. If 1000 verified working-class people with jobs are literally peacefully protesting, maybe you shouldn't be feeling threatened?
[1] Switch the words 'left' and 'right' in this comment; the point is the same.
> And while I sympathize what many of these causes, the lack of a proper, unified list of demands makes the whole thing completely worthless in the best case, and quite dangerous in the worst.
"Represent us, not yourselves" is the message delivered by these sorts of protests. It's more effective than an itemized list.
> And then my own friends and coworkers who supported the whole thing trying to explain what they thought it was about (each one with a different explanation).
This makes perfect sense amongst people who aren't being represented at all well by their government - the government isn't just doing one thing badly, so of course there isn't agreement over what they're doing wrong. It says something kind of ugly about you that you think it's "funny."
>all that does is piss off every man and woman trying to live their life and work and get groceries.
That's the same thing it does everywhere else. The reason you have street protests is to disrupt what people are doing and have them focus on what you are saying.
The reason street protests "don't work" in the US is because of a combination of the precariousness and conservatism of the middle class. It's too big a risk for middle-class people to participate in a protest, and the majority of them are racist law-and-order voters who have voted to eliminate most of the rights of the accused and to militarize their police forces out of their fear of black and hispanic people. Now that we're afraid of the Middle East, we've eliminated most of the rights of the unaccused.
Europeans have a different history, and the development of civil rights there wasn't entirely born out of race-based fear, so their situation is different.
Here, only poor people and students protest, and they are completely ignored by a monolithic media except to be taunted, confronted by police at a ratio of 10 cops to a protester, and carted off to jail if their permits aren't current or if they step off the sidewalk.
> Of course the US is so far beyond any reasonable protest culture that you might as well not protest at all.
Really? It seems like it's all some people do anymore. You can even become a professional activist and monetize your own victimhood. In the past year we've had people literally rioting and burning down buildings while the intelligentsia provided apoligies for them. "This is self-expression of a voiceless people, that burning car is a statement...."
Are you upset that you're not allowed to stop traffic during rush hour and chant slogans at people? Name one thing you can't do in the US that's part of a "reasonable protest culture"
So you can fall victim to the protester's propaganda instead of the mainstream news propaganda?
That's a common argument for many things, and I don't consider it valid.
It is like saying that you can't understand a cult unless you become part of that cult. Some people took on the advise and become brainwashed like everyone else, it is hard to keep a neutral point of view under the peer pressure such meetings usually entail. "seeing for yourself" to get an unbiased opinion is easier said than done.
You mentioned fascists. Did you go see fascists? I did, and they are probably much friendlier than you imagine, and they have convincing arguments. It requires some amount of detachment to see the flaws in their ideas.
Now back to the yellow vests. I've seen protests, my father was part of the movement, I met many people with different ideas. And from my experience, that's a mess. My father joined the movement because of a dislike in the banking system and Macron's administration, and found like-minded individuals. He left a few weeks later when another groups pushed ideas about unions he didn't share at all. I know one self-employed nurse who was booed at a protest when other people from the same movement claim they support self-employment and better medical support... go figure. The things is: individual groups know why they are upset, but the movement itself is all over the place. There are some common themes like taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor but as the movement progresses, it becomes broader and broader, covering immigration (more immigration control, but treat refugees better...), organic food, etc...
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