As students return to college campuses across the United States, administrators are bracing for a resurgence in activism against the war in Gaza.
As students return to college campuses across the United States, administrators are bracing for a resurgence in activism against the war in Gaza.
Protests don’t really work if they’re not disruptive.
At the same time, any legitimate authority has a vested interest in minimizing disruption.
It’s one of those things where I think neither side is inherently in the wrong, at least insofar as the question of “Protest vs. Disruption” is concerned. One must protest for what one believes is right, even if that protest must be disruptive to achieve its goals, and one must be prepared for a response from the authorities if that protest is sufficiently disruptive. You have to break rules, and you have to accept that the authorities are not necessarily wrong in trying to enforce the rules.
Short of saying “Only people I like are allowed to protest” or “Republicans can shut down the interstate highway indefinitely because they hate gay marriage”, neither of which are particularly appealing, I don’t really think that there’s another option.
That this is all done by universities in the defense of a genocidal apartheid state, though? Not very morally ambiguous. This isn’t a minor policy disagreement, or even a major one. This is support of corruption in US politics, the blatant sabotage of US interests abroad, and apartheid and genocide in Israel. Fuck these places trying to run interference for Israel.
The dynamic still holds as valid. It’s just that the universities are shitty fucking authorities for taking the side that many of them have.
I would be very interested in seeing any example of a case where minorly disruptive protest was successful at accomplishing its goal. Large scale disruption that paralyzes the flow of goods or services is one thing, like a strike for instance. But I think back to Occupy Wall St, and it was just absurd how poorly it all worked. Then on top of that, the expectations were so high that the failure set our movement for economic reform back instead of forward, by demoralizing the whole movement for years. It didn’t really recover until Bernie started running for President.
That was about as big and disruptive as you can go, too, and fresh off of a major economic fuck up that actually hurt many Americans.
It’s literally just a waste of energy, when people should be composing compelling arguments, compiling their evidence, and actually spreading it to new people via newsletters, flyers, pamphlets, conversations, speeches etc etc etc. Grassroots outreach.
Frankly I think that’s all too difficult though, and it’s easier for people to just pitch a tent somewhere and chant, even if it accomplishes nothing or even harm for your cause. It lets people feel like they’re helping, even if no strong evidence for the success of the method can be presented. Just theory.
Then on the flip side, you have BLM, which was able to actually create some change by getting some people elected through mass civic engagement. Some few places actually got some police reform, since the BLM protestors were mostly all peaceful and lawful, and you could sympathize with their cause. And there was a metric shitload of them, that always helps.
iirc, ows was infiltrated by business interests?
Let’s assume it absolutely was. Could it have gone better if we had done something differently?
At the end of the day, there was no mechanism for results. If the plan was:
Then the ??? part wound up being “no solutions through this point”. That’s the problem. There is literally no step there, it’s a dead end that prevents you from ever advancing.
I can’t say for sure, but I thought the purpose was that the public would then take up the flight and begin boycotting and suing?
An idea, for sure. It never materialized, though. People didn’t seem eager to just jump up and drop their day-to-day stuff to join a movement, even after it had recently directly fucked them all over.
That’s not really ows fault. They did their part. That the people failed to step up is on them. And I get the reasons. I have been there and I know them. I had a job, new marriage, elderly dying and teenager to care for. Three of those could have been permanently relinquished, the other not so much. I wasn’t willing to sacrifice the new marriage and the unexpected care responsibility thrust upon me. Since then, they’re both gone, teen is grown. I wasn’t willing to sacrifice anything personal for that, then. That’s my fault.
That’s the thing though, we somewhat were at fault for choosing a method that was unlikely to work within the realities of people’s real lives. We didn’t know it at the time, and it was certainly something worth trying, but now that we have that experience we should learn from it and adapt our tactics accordingly instead of repeating the mistakes of the past.
Disruption alone simply doesn’t do enough. It’s predicated on this idea that people need to be “woken up” without acknowledging that they’re choosing to live the way they do for their own reasons.
So what we need to do instead, imo at least, is pivot to more groundwork, grassroots outreach. Building the base up with communication, which I think will have a much likelier chance of long-term success than seemingly bolder, short-term actions that risk not only being ineffective, but even potentially counterproductive.
The right to a free exchange of ideas includes the right to disagree with protestors without being harmed.
You say this but if I saw someone punch a Nazi, I would cheer and forget who it was if asked by the police.
I believe that you would, but it would make you an enemy of free speech. Either a society allows the expression of ideas widely perceived as harmful, or it only permits people to express those ideas which the powers that be approve of. Throughout history, the powers that be always claimed that they were suppressing just the harmful ideas, and they were almost always lying. I don’t trust them with that authority.
That’s a false dilemma. There’s a middle ground between allowing only approved speech and allowing any speech whatsoever. And we already make that distinction. Fascists don’t believe in free speech and threaten the rights of others through threats of violence, which isn’t protected speech. Likewise fraud, libel, slander, blackmail, false advertising, and CSAM aren’t protected and are considered harmful.
There’s a difference between expressing an idea and making a speech act. Harmful speech acts, including “true threats” in the legal sense (e.g. credible threats of imminent harm, as opposed to expressions of support for policies that would be harmful) and all the other things that you mention* may be regulated without impinging on the free exchange of ideas (although one must watch out for attempts to suppress ideas by claiming that they’re speech acts).
I’m not talking about a mob of fascists threatening to attack someone there and then (illegal) or actually attacking (illegal, and cause for justified violence in self-defense). I’m talking about a peaceful march of fascists carrying signs expressing support for national socialism. They get to march.
*I do find it odd that simply possessing images of children being raped is illegal whereas possessing images of, for example, children being murdered is not (even if those images of murder also used for the purpose of sexual gratification).
😬
Promoting the systematic genocide of minorities immediately disqualifies you from meaningful conversation. You deserve a punch in the face for being a Nazi and defending Nazis.
Fuck off, Nazi
I don’t see how that has any relevance to the argument. Harming people is already illegal and isn’t being addressed here.
I am responding to this comment:
I consider disruption to be a form of harm. It’s not as serious as, for example, physical injury, but it’s still harm. The main form of disruption that the recent protests have engaged in involved trespassing and so it was illegal, but many colleges preferred to address the problem internally rather than calling the police. These new rules are part of the process of addressing the problem internally, and we’re discussing whether or not they do so without infringing on the students’ free speech rights. My point is that preventing the protesters from being disruptive is not an infringement.
(“Illegal” wouldn’t be the end of the discussion even where the police were called to remove trespassers, because a university’s policy of having the police remove some trespassers but not others could also infringe on free speech rights.)
Disruption is not a form of harm.
Disruption is impossible without causing harm. If you’re not harming me then I can just ignore you and so you have failed to be disruptive.
Edit: The word “disruption” can be used in other contexts to describe acts that aren’t harmful. For example, a new discovery might be said to disrupt the existing paradigm. My claim is about “disruption” used to describe protest-associated actions like blocking roads, making a lot of noise, or preventing students from going to class.
Being unable to ignore something is not a form of harm.
Gotta love a “free speech absolutist” who thinks that it doesn’t count as free speech if it stops you from walking to the other side of the quad without taking the long way around.
What material harm do you experience from those things?
And, if there is any material harm, is that worse than what people are experiencing in Gaza?
Loss of personal income and denial or service come to mind with like 5 seconds of thought.
Any non-salary employee who’s late to work probably doesn’t just get to make it up later. The business that employs then may lose business as a result of the shortage/delay. Their products being shipped to them could be delayed resulting in loss of sales. The ripple goes on and on but most pockets getting hit are commuting workers, more than big businesses.
As for if it’s worse than what others in Gaza are experiencing? A pointless exercise. As my parents told us growing up “there are children starving in Africa”, yet it doesn’t make me like the taste of steamed green beans any more or less. Their suffering doesn’t impact my suffering, no matter how extreme the difference.
Come now, I don’t believe for an instant that anyone is as fragile as that. Even my nephew who is a young cancer survivor and weathered people who refused to wear masks during the pandemic by wearing his own.
Except these restrictions prevent speech, not harm.
How so? I think they’re content-neutral and designed to prevent disruption (such as blocking off parts of the campus that should be publicly accessible or making a lot of noise at night) without preventing people from peacefully gathering and expressing their ideas.
This is a common idea, but its misguided. It requires that you can pressure leadership to change their behaviors by inconveniencing people and/or costing the leadership money, otherwise it has no mechanism for success. This has never really proven to be the case when they have the cheaper alternative of using the law to remove you.
What actually needs to be done is rallying support among the masses themselves for either a paralyzing general strike, or at least a show of voting force that threatens politicians with removal in the next election cycle. Neither of these goals is furthered by simple disruptive protest. A small minority cannot impose their will without first gaining a significant amount of support from the majority, so ultimately, behaviors that are sympathetic to those less politically-engaged will see better success than behaviors that are not.
Protests rally support.
They can, or they can erode it. I’ve never met a person won over by road blockade. It more like a call to rally people who already agree. If the classes you are going into debt paying for keep getting canceled or your graduation gets delayed because of protests, it’s not gonna endear you to protesters. You may agree with the message, but if you didn’t it would only further entrench you on the other end.
Wild how these protests erodes support for Palestine while also hurting Kamala because it garners support for Palestine.
Do they? Like I said, I haven’t seen anyone change their minds because of the road blocking protests. I have seen people change their minds because of reporting.
Closest I’ve seen to people change stances is literally supporters of Palestine go “fuck these kids are annoying.” But are still anti-genocide.
No, every protest does not rally support. Some do, some do not. Which is which is extremely important.