Please, someone tell me how the fuck these protests get organized? I've been scouring IG for upcoming demonstrations in LA and nobody's registering their actions on Shut It Down For Palestine. For months I've tried to get involved and it feels impossible for any full time worker to help take action for Palestine. Best case scenario is I find out about an event a few hours beforehand when I'm already in the office and it's too late for me to be there.
this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
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Xitter probably. Easy to retweet and get the word out, big community, lots of political guys
I don't disagree that the conflict has to stop, but I don't see how anyone can force a ceasefire between two separate independent countries. What action do they think the US can take to force this situation? No matter what you offer or withhold it's still ultimately up to the individual parties involved.
The US just vetoed a ceasefire agreement in the UN security council.
True, though the US is one of the biggest suppliers, if not the biggest, for Israel's military.
America only cares about money. This shit costs them HUGE money.
This is exactly how you stop the war by shutting down infrastructure.
Ok, but this war is between Israel and Hamas, what can America do about it other than what they've always done and bomb the shit out of both sides?
It's like protesting in Toronto because they don't like a new policy in Tokyo.
accomplishing absolutely fuckall
The fact that it made news enough to be posted on social media is quite an accomplishment.
Not a very high standard. If it was in middle of Tel Aviv maybe had a bigger impact.
Regardless of your feelings on the conflict, blocking freeways is beneficial even if done for no reason at all. Urban highways were a mistake and never should have been built. Every minute they continue normal operation is a minute they continue destroying our neighborhoods, poisoning the innocent and vulnerable who live nearby, and destroying the future for our descendants.
So I commend these activists and hope we see more of this.
No matter the outcome of this, nobody is learning that lesson from this demonstration.
If you want to take a (more obvious) environmental bent, this is a terrible idea for them to do because all they're doing is causing vehicles to have to run substantially longer.
This assumes the same number of people will use them, just more slowly. But this is quite obviously false if you think it through. If the highway is so backed up you can’t get onto it then you won’t use it, will you? I would be fairly confident that this more than offsets the idling engines. Covid was a big eye opener in realizing how much traffic actually protects us from the real dangers of unfettered high speed traffic.
This individual protest may only have a small effect but it seems we’re seeing more of these as time goes on, and the more often they happen, the bigger the impact.
That might be what you wish they are learning, but I assure you that's not the case. There may be more of those Highway blocking protests that you're thinking about, but you're simply hearing about them spread across many, many locations. They are not occurring frequently enough in one location to warrant a change to the way people commute. I have never even heard of anybody linking those two points together before.
If they're blocking a highway, it's not like you can just see the protest up ahead and turn off instead instead of choosing to be stuck. Often they are held in the middle of long stretches where they will trap as man cars as they are able on both sides.
And the lesson most people learned from COVID was that there was absolutely no reason why we couldn't work from home. Although I could potentially see a link between working from home and, when the time comes to replace the infrastructure, replacing it with something more environmentally sane... but they'd have to convince big business owners to not force people to come into work for no reason, and good luck with that.
It seems like there's a lot of wishful thinking to get from "those protesters are blocking this street" to "man, we should completely redo the entire infrastructure of North America because of these protests."
I always feel conflicted when I see things like this. On one side good for them, they found a way to get their message across to a nation news. But on the other hand they are intentionally disrupting infrastructure people rely on everyday. I don't think it's a bad thing that people want global change, but I do think it is a bad thing that people feel powerless to influence this change so they have to resort to more disruptive methods like this. More representation in the federal government could help prevent this.
A non-disruptive protest just gets ignored. You need to impact people’s daily lives to make them think why the problem arose in the first place.
But, you need to impact the lives of the people who have the means to make that change. A traffic jam isn't going to do that.
I mean, is a major highway in the second largest city of the primary colonial sponsor a bad place? I guess if we had free teleportation they might find marginally better success in DC or Tel Aviv, but if you’re located in LA I can see why you’d choose to protest there and not somewhere else.
If it happened in a vacuum, probably not. But traffic jams don’t happen in a vacuum. They ripple out and cause effects that hit millions of other people. Such as this news article, this lemmy post, and all of the people here discussing it.
Traffic jam equals lots of news coverage lots of pissed off voters, lots of attention lots of eyes, that is how you get to people who can make a change.
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And a disruptive protest just makes people hate you and your cause.
I'm not really asking you to look it up or anything, but this gets parroted around a lot, and I wonder if there's actually any data to really support it or if it's just a statement that kinda sounds nice.
I mean maybe not data but it's telling that almost every successful movement goes beyond the "quietly protest on the side of the road" step.
What does a non-disruptive protest even look like? The entire purpose of protest is to be disruptive, and every protest is disruptive in some way.
Adding a flag to your profile pic.
I wouldn’t consider that a form of protest personally. Just a way of expressing support.
This post itself provides a new data point as a piece of evidence to support that claim. There is a news article written about it, and we are talking about it.
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Great initiative.
The peaceful protests are over.
Next phase is nonviolent disruption. Block infrastructure.
Do they understand that the conflict is between two separate countries and neither of them is the USA?
You forgot about the nearly $4 billion USD worth of military aid every year.
They're US allies. They've been receiving that aid long before the hamas broke the ceasefire by attacking an EDM festival and killing a thousand civilians. The conflict over there is a terrible situation, but fucking up people's commutes 7500 miles away from the conflict zone accomplishes nothing except for ruining those people's days, and possibly causing them massive hardship.
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