re: #9 Snarknado!

In my neck of the woods, they shut down the major subway route (BART) from the East Bay to San Francisco. Outside of commute hours, but still — and in respect of all of those “shut it down” protests — they’re doing the cause harm not good. Since when was it a good idea to advance your cause by hampering people and antagonizing them in the name of “education?”

(And if you tell me “Michael Brown is more than hampered,” I’ll throw up on you. Stopping someone from getting to that job interview or even the shopping trip is not going to bring him back to life, and it won’t save the next person. )

You need to go back to the early days of unions to see how disrupting commerce has an effect. There is a long history of being a pain in someone’s ass to affect social or business change. The ’60s was full of sit-ins, demonstrations, takeovers and other forms of civil disobedience that in fact did bring their causes notice and help affect social changes.

The idea that demonstrations do nothing but alienate people is nothing more than a manipulative method of reducing the effects.

Without the demonstrations, and the civil strife that may be associated with it very little of importance will happen. People as a group tend toward the norm rather than the divergent if they aren’t pushed.