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Originally Posted by pan6467
See the people I know going are much like myself , more fiscally conservative and socially liberal who understand micromanaging people's lives is not what government should do, and that spending has to be justified and programs streamlined and made more effective, throwing money at them but not changing the bureaucracy is not the answer.
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Most of the people at the rally were former Bush supporters and people that voted for McCain. If you supported either of these men for their economic policy, you're not a fiscal conservative. You're not even a fiscal liberal. But that's not the point.
Tea parties will be impotent as long as they're ideology rallies. You need a singular goal, something to be shared with your brothers and sisters on the left, like ending wiretapping. We liberals simply aren't going to get on board with neoliberalism because we've seen that it's all talk when neoliberals get into office. Lower taxes on the rich and spend tons on the military is just as much micromanaging as any social program a liberal might put in place.
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Originally Posted by pan6467
If you did it just for MSM coverage and done solely for 1 day, it was for the wrong reason and it failed. If you protest to have government hear you and you continue the protest to make people aware of what is going on then, people will hear.
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We did it to demonstrate a united voice against the war, but the fact is that media outlets underestimated the numbers of protesters by leaps and bounds. I was in San Francisco, and there had to be something like 350,000 protesters on the street. Most media outlets said there were 50,000. There were over a million people on the streets in NYC, and the newspapers and media said something like 250,000. If people knew just how big the protests were, the odds of them taking the movement seriously might have had a bigger affect. All in all there were likely 10s of millions of people around the planet and several million in the US protesting that day, trying desperately to change the course we were on.
It did nothing.
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Originally Posted by pan6467
There's no reason they can't work in higher government, just needs better organization.
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There's no reason? What about free speech zones?
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Originally Posted by pan6467
What's fighting smart? To me it's standing up for my beliefs and finding ways to change what I believe to be wrong. I just know if I believe all that I do will have no affect, then I won't do anything. It's all a question of being true to myself.
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Fighting smart means no more bullshit protests that don't stand a chance of success. Fighting smart means employing methods that have succeeded in the past and stand a reasonable chance of succeeding now.