Hard-earned freedoms are wasted on societies who don't have memories of what it took to earn them. Freedom is a ratchet: slides easily and frictionlessly one way, and offers immense resistance in the other.
This is all so disheartening.
replies(8):
This is all so disheartening.
In the end the state is a force of violence. Voting works in so much as it is roughly a tally of who would win if we all pulled knives on each other. Democracy was formed at a time when guns and knives were the most effectual tools the state had to fight against the populace. Now that the government has more asymmetric tools democracy is likely a weaker gauge of how to avoid violence, because the most practical thing voting does is bypass violence by ascertaining ahead of time who would win in a fight.
As this asymmetry becomes more profound, the bargaining power of the populace erodes, and voting becomes more of a rigged game. If the populace can't check the power of the elite, the elite has no carrot to respect the human rights of others.
False
“Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change” [1].
Exhibit A: the same region, literally last month. First protesters in Bangladesh lead “to the ouster of the then-prime minister, Sheikh Hasina” [2]. Then Indonesia “pledged to revoke lawmakers’ perks and privileges, including a controversial $3,000 housing allowance, in a bid to ease public fury after nationwide protests” [3].
[1] https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/carr/publications/35-rul...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_Revolution_(Bangladesh)
[3-] https://apnews.com/article/indonesia-protests-subianto-privi...
You could have tens of millions of students and otherwise unemployed individuals walking around with placards, and nobody's going to care. But get 50,000 truckers (let alone 12 million people) to go on strike over something, and the whole country will grind to a halt.
Growing up in Nepal and witnessing some large non-violent and violent protests, I was frankly, baffled to see people standing on the sides of the streets and holding sign boards as protests
Where's the rallies? Where is the mass involvement needed for a successful protest? where are the street blocks? non-voilent doesn't mean just standing there.
The first time I actually saw something worth being called a protest was during the Black Lives Matter movement. I think it exposed the American police system for what it was, and the system's inability to control protesters peacefully
I've seen a lot of protests around NYC on various topics
Recently more with Palestine
> You could have tens of millions of students and otherwise unemployed individuals walking around with placards, and nobody's going to care.
I think you're wrong here Do it for one day nobody cares Do it for a week, people notice Do it for a month, you've got regime change
When I was young and still under the illusion protests did anything, I recall going to a protest during the 'occupy' days. Obama was coming into town and we wanted him to be able to hear us chanting or see our signs.
My memory is pretty bad at this point on the context, but roughly how I remember it going was he was going to some sort of convention center. We started walking there, and about halfway there this mysterious but incredibly confident and authoritative person with a megaphone showed up and told us we had succeeded and the protest was over. About 90% of people actually believed that and left. The 10% of us that were like "who the hell is this lady and why would anyone listen to her" kept going. Then the police surrounded us and beat the shit out of anyone they could get to. We never got anywhere close to Obama's route.
[] https://nypost.com/2024/08/07/us-news/gwen-walz-said-she-kep...
Occupy Wall Street lasted longer than a month, and I'm not sure they achieved regime change. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_Wall_Street
You could argue that it's below the 3.5% of the total population threshold mentioned in the previous comments tho.
It was an anti-vax protest [1]. Canada isn't anti vax [2]. The protests were unpopular [3][4].
The convoy didn't go anywhere because it had nowhere to go.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_convoy_protest#cite_not...
[2] https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/measles-vaccination-poll-1.75...
[3] https://edition.cnn.com/2022/02/15/politics/fact-check-canad...
[4] https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/two-thirds-of-canadia...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/22/world/americas/canada-pro...