210
Traffic Blockade Protests Were a Nuisance. Lawmakers Want to Make Them a Felony.
(www.motherjones.com)
this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2024
210 points (95.3% liked)
News
23311 readers
3594 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
To everyone saying that this shouldn't be a protected form of protest, explain why blocking traffic is bad, but this wasn't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sit-in_movement
Probably something about either how it affects them directly so that protest is bad. Also possibly about shipping
Great example of false equivalence.
Those sit in demonstrations targeted segregated businesses and the sit in protests happened inside those segregated businesses. As a consequence, the owners of the segregated businesses lost out on revenue and their customers lost the opportunity to make use of their services during the protests, but the customers suffered no further harm, nor were passersby harmed in any way.
Now blocking traffic on the other targets everyone that is moving from one place to another, which can have such consequences as: loss of wages because the person stuck in traffic could not work their hours, people who did not make it to work in time are forced to take up their scarce vacation days, fines from the daycare because the parent was too late with pickin up the children, ... But it can also have life altering consequences, such as: a father missing the birth of his child, an ex prisoner failing his parole conditions, a surgeon not making it in time to the hospital, ...
It's really no surprise that blocking traffic is one of the most derided forms of protest, only being beat by rioting and vandalism, while sit in protests on the other hand received widescale support.
The consequences are so vastly different in the harm they cause, that I can't even begin to fathom how you can possibly believe that these 2 forms of protest are equivalent.
@RunawayFixer @BreakDecks
When Japanese railway workers strike they simply did their job, picked up the passengers, and collected no money in protest.
Yeah, those are the best kind of strikes, ones that only harm the money of the organization, without any harm to ordinary people. But it only works for strikes against a service organization that provides a service for an immediate payment, so basically only for things like public transport and toll roads. I can't think of anything else.
And they also don't work when striking against semi government organizations where the tax money will be used to make up shortfalls: sure, day passengers could ride for free, but it's their taxes that will be used to make up the shortfall anyhow.
It can really only work against very specific companies. I wish it was wider applicable, which is why I tried to think it through, but I only find more reasons as to why it would seldom work.