It's a tweet thread - the last tweet
Ca Highway Patrol press officer says:
75 protestors arrested
charged with Failure to disburse
Are they doing the usual fantasizing about running them over?
Don't they realize the LA county sheriffs department isn't Israel?
I was ambivalent on the issue until this barbaric "protest" forced my hand. Now Gaza will never have my vote.
80% of Americans are only 1 stolen parking space away from committing a mass shooting spree, so it’s not too far off
How much money were the cops asking for?
disburse
dis·burse /disˈbərs/ verb
verb: disburse; 3rd person present: disburses; past tense: disbursed; past participle: disbursed; gerund or present participle: disbursing
pay out (money from a fund). "$67 million of the pledged aid had already been disbursed"Well yeah, the protestors aren't the ones paying the cops, that's for damn sure.
Have they thought about the inconvenience this will cause? What if there's an Ambulance? etc. etc. etc...
Idc what you think about roads and cars and using protest to disrupt everyday life, if someone in your organization suggests blocking a road they’re either a fed or a useful idiot of feds.
Everyone involved just got run in. Assuming no one gets it when they check you for outstandings, you’re all in the system now. Immediately grinding up against the carceral state pushes away your people who are willing to protest.
Arrest records are public. Now all these people can be harassed by cops, the israel lobby etc.
Aside from failing the yippie test, blocking the roads is ineffective here. Take an incredibly sympathetic cause like the brutalized palestinian people and demonize it by making people late for work or to pick their kids up in its name.
What does it accomplish? The average highway driver has no way to control American foreign policy. The ceasefire already had majority support. Everyone already knows what’s happening.
Blocking the roads is the most wrong form of demonstration at this point.
In general, blocking the roads like this is the wrong way to protest. It puts you in opposition to people driving (that’s everyone) and only serves to get the word out but only because people are frantically searching “who are these assholes”.
If someone knows all this and still wants to do it, they’re a fed. If they don’t know and want to do this, they’re doing what the feds want.
Before some enterprising poster says this is all respectability politics and tone policing, when you don’t care what people think and need to disrupt traffic, tear the roads up. Literally take hand tools and destroy them. When you got so many people in the march that it spills into the street, that’s great! Don’t make a little pissant line of linked arms across seven lanes, bring a stadium! Wanna show people that it’s normal to do outstanding things because of the insane violence on the tv? Make it normal, with a big crowd! When people see thirty jerks keeping them from buying groceries emblazoned with the cause they’ve been told is wrong and crazy it looks wrong and crazy.
ok it's bad because you'll get in trouble, so instead you should destroy infrastructure (you literally are doing respectability politics and tone policing btw)
It’s not bad, it’s ineffective and plays into the opposition messaging, police actions and activism and harms the future of your members.
I think there’s a real difference between saying “go bigger” and respectability politics. That’s why I got out in front of the accusation of respectability politics by saying “go bigger”.
I wasn’t able to find any examples of tone policing in my post. I have investigated myself and found me innocent of all charges.
I have investigated myself and found me innocent of all charges.
Spoken like a tone cop!
But really, good points
Discussing the effectiveness and costs of different actions is not tone policing or respectability politics. It's an inescapable part of organizing; you have to think about what you're going to do and what result you're hoping to achieve.
Getting in trouble isn't a hard barrier to action, but if you're going to get into trouble (and ask those around you to get into trouble) you should have something to show for it. If someone is trying to talk you into getting arrested in a way that will not achieve anything significant, yeah, they're either a cop or doing a cop's job.
Yeah that's my main problem with Extinction Rebellion, they just seem to want to be ineffectual and annoying then get arrested without accomplishing a damn thing
If you're going to get arrested, you might as well break something and cause some serious disruption. It's easy for cops to pull you off the road if you're just standing there.
Sure, may as well assassinate the president while you're at it, if you're gonna get arrested
How about destroying the roads at a time when those roads have the least amount of traffic. Also posing as highway road workers, with detour signs while destroying the route
Lastly, i feel like the best way to block a road is literally to just form a concrete barrier around 1 feet high. That would be costly to dismantle, and would probably effectively block traffic for a day.
Hypothetically speaking
