I think teaching people how protests work is pretty important praxis and is not talked about nearly enough.

Moderates and liberals tend to think of protest and demonstration as the same thing and anything that is not a demonstration is generally though of as bad or counterproductive.

Most of the populace simply doesn’t understand that blocking roads or getting arrested have strategic value. They consider the goal of every protest to be to raise awareness and support and to convince people like them ™️ that any given cause is worth supporting and that their support is all it really takes to a make change happen. It’s a very self-centered view of how political movement work and it seems unfortunately quite obiquitous.

They see a road block and think “that just makes you look bad” and the thought process ends there because now your movement isn’t worth supporting in their eyes. If you try to explain that blocking off roads is often done to cut off supply lines to financial districts or big corporations and put economic pressure on them or the politicians they donate to, they refuse to engage with the idea entirely or claim that it doesn’t actually work and the only way to protest successfully is to win over people like them even though they’ve probably never been to a demonstration, let alone a direct action event and if they did they’d probably do more harm than good given how ignorant they are on the subject.

We really need to educate people about protesting tactics, how they work, what they actually seek to achieve, and how different methods put pressure on different areas to get different effects and I think you probably can’t teach this to older generations but younger generations are capable of learning and we really need them to learn this.

Teaching people to think in terms of systems and take a structural approach when trying to change a system is paramount because, in the current state of things, the common belief seems to be if enough people wave signs from the sidewalk, things magically work out in the end.

  • AnyOldName3English
    7•10 months ago

    Persuading the general public to take climate change seriously and oppose the ones causing it is absolutely an important task.

    Do you really think there’s anyone out there who isn’t aware climate change is real and a big problem who could be persuaded that it is? As far as I know, it’s universally accepted, except by people who’re convinced it’s a hoax made up by communists so they can take their guns and make their children chop their genitals off, and there’s not enough of a middle group that they could be persuaded in large enough numbers to swing an election.

    It’s not like it was a couple of decades ago - people are already aware and positions are entrenched. No one’s going to look at a sign and suddenly take things seriously.

    • mozz
      7•10 months ago

      As far as I know, it’s universally accepted, except by people who’re convinced it’s a hoax made up by communists so they can take their guns and make their children chop their genitals off, and there’s not enough of a middle group that they could be persuaded in large enough numbers to swing an election.

      It is universally accepted by people who get their news from honest sources. In the US, that’s like 10% of the populace. If you take someone who’s a victim of engineered propaganda, and blame them for the problem that someone else is engineering and start insulting them and actively punishing them and stopping them getting to work, then get ready for no one to take global warming seriously until it’s even more too late than the too late that it already is.

      • AnyOldName3English
        2•10 months ago

        My point is mainly that the people who are victims of engineered propaganda aren’t going to change their minds if they see a demonstration. If it’s possible at all, it takes a lot of friends and family members who they trust more than their news sources to spend a lot of time and effort to gradually deprogram them. Demonstrations only help when there are people who’ve heard next to nothing about either side of an issue, but would care if they were given some information (not the case with climate change as for all intents and purposes, everyone knows it’s real and a serious problem, or has been convinced it’s imaginary/actually a good thing/isn’t caused by humans), or when there are enough demonstrators to make elected representatives increase their estimate of the number of voters who they need to appease (which needs to be tens or hundreds of millions of people at a single demo - it’s very much a partisan issue around the world, so politicians on the vaguely-more-climate-change-addressing side know the people at a demo won’t vote for the other guy until the demo’s so big that it makes a third party seem like a risk).

        Sorry about the hundred-and-forty-one-word sentence.