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Originally Posted by Cynthetiq
It's not acceptable to me on it's face, but the fact is that some people will be arrested and that's acceptable to me.
While I don't think that the protestors that were involved in the Bike Ride through Manhattan on Friday were ALL bad, as one friend who was swarmed by bikers was harassed and annoyed by it.
My boss' upstairs neighbors were arrested and detained for 36 hours.
There are two sides to it, but at least in this country one just has to wait until it's time to vote again and thus some things change bad to good and some good to bad, depending on how you saw it.
You won't find me at protests because large crowds can be stupid all together as one, and then the police single out a few and that's that, which is what happened to my boss' neighbors. Did they do anything wrong, no. But they pay a price for the few that did, as I've read and seen annoyed NY'rs via blogs and regular media.
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Also, Cynthetiq, the part where I was quoting Tom Hayden was from a piece on C-SPAN with a panel of activists and experts speaking about activism, civil disobedience, and civil rights. They all expressed dismay at tactics like the one you just listed because it alienated the general population. Hayden's comment was partly in response to their suggestion that the media and administration also uses those instances to frame protesters, in general, as rabble rousers. So when the story does get around that a group of people were arrested for hanging a banner from their balcony, people wonder just what the hell else they were up to--because in this country people don't just get arrested for something like that, right?
Well, that's his point anyway. He argues they are. But I wanted to point out that both you, a non-'activist' (in I think this sense we are using it in) and me, an 'activist' (maybe 'protestor' would get the point across better as I don't really know how active you are in politics), agree that those tactics are annoying and disruptive to the general population and likely counter-productive to their long-term goals. I'm actually contemplating writing a popular piece for the Times that details the scope of the damage to the environment when an activist damages a vehicle of a logging company, for example. Similar concept--but I think we agree on that overall picture.
I stated this before and believe that some other 'conservative' TFPers came to agree that the public discourse really serves as a way to keep the public from coming together on very importance issues and forces them to be at loggerheads with one another. It's really very skillfull and my fear is that, with all the social science, technology, and means of dispensing propoganda, that this current administration and those following it will really be able to manipulate the public sentiment on a far grander scale than times past.