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.
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.
True, though the US is one of the biggest suppliers, if not the biggest, for Israel's military.
The US just vetoed a ceasefire agreement in the UN security council.
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.
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."
Great initiative.
The peaceful protests are over.
Next phase is nonviolent disruption. Block infrastructure.
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.
People will find a way to get mad at any protest no matter how little it impacts others. See kneeling for anthems or just wearing shirts at events
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.
And a disruptive protest just makes people hate you and your cause.
Also conflicted: I don’t think the disruption itself is a bad thing if it’s disrupting a part of society that derives benefit from the whatever is being protested against.
That said, I’m not sure how disrupting traffic in Los Angeles is going to affect the change they want to see. You can’t get much further from Washington DC than the West Coast.
This is the dumbest way to protest. Out of the book of any publicity is good publicity: “any protest is a good protest”.
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