Comment by baumy
16 days ago
I think you have to be careful with this as well, the word "blocking" in particular reminds me of a protest over the Israel/Gaza war that happened at my alma mater a couple years ago.
Protesters camped out at a central campus thoroughfare, and some protesters tried to stop people from walking through it. Not every protester did this and it wasn't done consistently by those who did, although some people avoided the area entirely just because they didn't want to deal with it. There were certainly other ways to travel from point A to point B on campus, just slightly longer and less convenient ones.
Were people "blocked" from walking through campus? Without disagreeing on any of the above facts, whether people agreed that someone was "blocked" largely came down to who was on each side. So you end up in this annoying semantic argument over what "blocked" means, where people are just using motivated reasoning based on who they want to be the bad actor.
Then you have another layer of disagreement - is it the responsibility of someone walking through campus to make a tiny effort to walk a few minutes out of their way and avoid instigating or escalating? Or do they have every right to walk through a public campus they're a student at, and anyone even slightly getting in their way is in the wrong? This feels closer to a principle people could have a consistent belief about, but again, people's opinions were 100% predictable based on which side of the protest they agreed with
I’m not sure what peoples feelings about have much to do with anything. A protest is not effective unless it impacts some kind of ‘violence against the state’. Usually, this is blocking roads at its lightest.
There seems to be an assumption that there's a right to an effective protest.
That said, impeding a college student who wants to walk through part of a college campus isn't "violence against the state."
I hope that you’re young or something… impeding a citizen is violence against the state, as the state gets his power from the work of it, citizens.. which is basically in the western world this describes most protests. Being granted the right to protest by your government is meaningless because if you took away the right to protest, then your people would just protest. The states options to quell unrest are: violent repression or negotiation. over the last 5000 years. We’ve determined that the best way to keep people in their place and the rulers in power is a mix of the two, hegemony look it up.