Hey protesters, I have a message for you.

Flying Pig said:
That's a bit self-righteous. Nobody's saying that they disagree with the WBC because they're loud and annoying, but their ideas are otherwise sound - but then you shouldn't expect people to walk around foaming at the mouth at every example of injustice or bigotry going. I don't like the BNP, but I don't actively hate them - though it gets a lot closer when they drive a van down the road blaring their slogans when I'm trying for some peace and quiet.
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Yeah? I'm responding to this post using and understanding the very words:

warpus said:
Yeah, but acting like dicks at people's funerals is going to probably hurt the movement a lot more than it is going to help it. I mean, that's why pretty much everyone hates a certain "church"...
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Not the first time you failed to read the relevant posts and missed the context.
 
Flying Pig said:
This is a bit of a tricky one. The danger, which I think you're falling into, is that you give marginalised people carte blanche by virtue of their marginalised status
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The story is a contrived as a smear piece created by 'journalists' who want to denigrate these people and their cause (searched it on google news, only a narrow range of right-wing outlets are reporting it). It isn't news, it is propaganda.
 
In response to Aelf:

No, I stand by what I said - people don't actively hate other people for what they think; abhorrent political views usually evoke mild disdain, like I have for the BNP. People do actively dislike people who inconvenience them directly, though - and that's not a moral failing. In other words, how a movement acts has a much greater bearing on its PR than what it believes. Hence the RSPCA has a much better reputation than the ALF.

The story is a contrived as a smear piece created by 'journalists' who want to denigrate these people and their cause (searched it on google news, only a narrow range of right-wing outlets are reporting it). It isn't news, it is propaganda.
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That's certainly true of discussions as to whether the original victims in these stories robbed shops or threatened old ladies - they're totally missing the point, and trying to influence people's opinion of the issues that matter by convincing them of things that don't. For sure, there's quite a lof ot that going on here. However, I think this is slightly different - the message of it is that these protests, being carried out as they are, are causing trouble for people who have nothing to do with the issue in question. If the people organising the protests read them and change their tactics, that would be for the better.

Incidentally, I'm not sure you can really make a clear-cut distinction between 'journalism' and 'propaganda' in the first place.
 
I agree with the last sentence. Unfortunately, there is nothing any political movement can do to avoid that kind of smear from big propaganda. The US is a big country, like any it has its idiots. Freedom to select stories is essentially indistinguishable from freedom to create stories. If big propaganda wants to 'find' these stories no sort of disciplined behaviour will stop them.
 
Absolutely, but small propaganda does exactly the same. Even those news outlets which try to be unbiased only have finite resources. I think the only solution is simply to have lots of people reporting the news with lots of different agendas, and hope that people will take several of them into account. The fact that many people get most of their information from the internet is a great help to that.
 
Flying Pig said:
In response to Aelf:

No, I stand by what I said - people don't actively hate other people for what they think; abhorrent political views usually evoke mild disdain, like I have for the BNP. People do actively dislike people who inconvenience them directly, though - and that's not a moral failing. In other words, how a movement acts has a much greater bearing on its PR than what it believes. Hence the RSPCA has a much better reputation than the ALF.
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Again, you fail to understand anything. I wrote according to what was written. Your own self-righteous indignation is irrelevant and misdirected.

Movements need to stave off disaster, that's true. It is indeed possible to screw up badly enough to lose. But it's going to be a gamble. At some point, there will be confrontation and that will create inconvenience. People like you hate anything that does not conform to your narrow-minded expectations. You would have disagreed with strikes or any form of civil disobedience, whether it was led by militant groups or by Gandhi. Only the celebrity of Gandhi would make you say otherwise now. If you had lived in those days? I wouldn't be so sure you wouldn't be one of those commenting that disdain towards him was not a moral failing.
 
is it just me, or does the OP seem to be telling all protesters to <redacted>?
 
It would be just you. I am, in this case, saying that to the 100 or so that had no business wrecking the ceremony honoring a 100 year old naval veteran. Nowhere did I suggest or even imply that it was meant for all protesters everywhere. If anyone thought that, I suspect that is simply because of their own preconceived notions of what they figure I think about things.
 
Flying Pig said:
There's an inherent difficulty with ethnic minorities getting anything done by mass of votes.
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You really think minorities are the only people who care about this issue?
 
My point was that WBP made a lot of enemies by picketing funerals and just generally being dicks. A lot of people have negative views of the organization because of their dickness. Not many people will say: "Oh yeah, I get it, where do I sign up?"

Being dicks at funerals is just not a very smart move, whatever you are trying to accomplish. In this case the funeral had NOTHING to do with what they are protesting, as far as I can see, making them not only dicks, but also confusing dicks. Or maybe confused dicks?
 
bhsup said:
It would be just you. I am, in this case, saying that to the 100 or so that had no business wrecking the ceremony honoring a 100 year old naval veteran. Nowhere did I suggest or even imply that it was meant for all protesters everywhere. If anyone thought that, I suspect that is simply because of their own preconceived notions of what they figure I think about things.
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Well I wouldn't say "preconceived," more like "conceived by years of reading your posts and coming to understand you principles." I admit to not reading anything on here about Ferguson or all the rest recently so I am blissfully ignorant of where you stand on the whole mess, and if there is nuance there which I assume there is since you are the smartest Missouran I know, then accept my humblest 2015 apologies. :blush:
 
Phrossack said:
You really think minorities are the only people who care about this issue?
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No, but their minority status is straight away a stumbling block. They first have to tell people what their problems are - because white people don't necessarily know what it's like to be black and have to deal with the police - and then convince them to change their voting patterns to fix those problems, which inevitably means, for at least some people, voting for someone that is less favourable on other policies. Neither of those difficulties apply to problems which affect majority groups.

EDIT: Fast posting going on here!
 
Flying Pig said:
and then convince them to change their voting patterns to fix those problems
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Aren't African American voting turnouts fairly low? Maybe I'm talking out of my butt here, but if they came out in force and voted in high numbers, I think they could actually make a significant enough difference.
 
Are black USians that big a minority? I thought Spexicans were outnumbering them.
 
Takhisis said:
Are black USians that big a minority? I thought Spexicans were outnumbering them.
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Already did by a big margin. But still black votes, specially in some regions, matter a lot.

Edit: And while there are more Mexicans than blacks in the US, my guess is that there are still much more black voters.
 
That's what I was thinking, I don't know how many of the immigrants and their descendants are registered voters.
 
aelf said:
Again, you fail to understand anything. I wrote according to what was written. Your own self-righteous indignation is irrelevant and misdirected.

Movements need to stave off disaster, that's true. It is indeed possible to screw up badly enough to lose. But it's going to be a gamble. At some point, there will be confrontation and that will create inconvenience. People like you hate anything that does not conform to your narrow-minded expectations. You would have disagreed with strikes or any form of civil disobedience, whether it was led by militant groups or by Gandhi. Only the celebrity of Gandhi would make you say otherwise now. If you had lived in those days? I wouldn't be so sure you wouldn't be one of those commenting that disdain towards him was not a moral failing.
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You are missing the entire point of Flyingpig's point though. Pig isn't hating on anything, merely pointing out most people don't care about issues that affect them and annoying/disrupting their daily lives can go in one of 2 ways:

1. Make them feel like what they are currently doing is hurting themselves (IE Boycotts encourage individuals to try and resolve the issue of the boycott for their own self interest)

2. Annoy a group without reaching them in some other way.

Gandhi's protests disrupted India and forced the British government to act out of its own self interest. The Birmingham bus boycotts brought tons of bad press for the city when it was trying to push for tourism and cut off a revenue stream for the city. Cesar Chavez caught the attention to sympathetic peoples through his rallies/boycotts by shocking them about the lives of others

Organizing is like playing a game of chess. People are inherently lazy/unsympathetic in most cases, the key to most succesful protests is to hit someone where it hurts while still gaining sympathy elsewhere. This [the ceremony protest] is bad press with little real benefit and only serving to annoy without doing any of the positive of the above.

Gandhi, C. Chavez, MLK, etc. all had their misplays as well, I am not sure why the anger Aelf
 
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