No more business as usual," the organization leading the protest said on social media.
Dozens of Jewish protesters and their allies were arrested on Wednesday morning after they blocked rush hour traffic on a busy Los Angeles highway to demand a ceasefire in Israel’s war on Palestinians in Gaza.
They’re US allies. They’ve been receiving that aid long before the hamas broke the ceasefire by attacking an EDM festival and killing a thousand civilians. The conflict over there is a terrible situation, but fucking up people’s commutes 7500 miles away from the conflict zone accomplishes nothing except for ruining those people’s days, and possibly causing them massive hardship.
I don’t disagree that the conflict has to stop, but I don’t see how anyone can force a ceasefire between two separate independent countries. What action do they think the US can take to force this situation? No matter what you offer or withhold it’s still ultimately up to the individual parties involved.
Ok, but this war is between Israel and Hamas, what can America do about it other than what they’ve always done and bomb the shit out of both sides?
It’s like protesting in Toronto because they don’t like a new policy in Tokyo.
Regardless of your feelings on the conflict, blocking freeways is beneficial even if done for no reason at all. Urban highways were a mistake and never should have been built. Every minute they continue normal operation is a minute they continue destroying our neighborhoods, poisoning the innocent and vulnerable who live nearby, and destroying the future for our descendants.
So I commend these activists and hope we see more of this.
No matter the outcome of this, nobody is learning that lesson from this demonstration.
If you want to take a (more obvious) environmental bent, this is a terrible idea for them to do because all they’re doing is causing vehicles to have to run substantially longer.
This assumes the same number of people will use them, just more slowly. But this is quite obviously false if you think it through. If the highway is so backed up you can’t get onto it then you won’t use it, will you? I would be fairly confident that this more than offsets the idling engines. Covid was a big eye opener in realizing how much traffic actually protects us from the real dangers of unfettered high speed traffic.
This individual protest may only have a small effect but it seems we’re seeing more of these as time goes on, and the more often they happen, the bigger the impact.
That might be what you wish they are learning, but I assure you that’s not the case. There may be more of those Highway blocking protests that you’re thinking about, but you’re simply hearing about them spread across many, many locations. They are not occurring frequently enough in one location to warrant a change to the way people commute. I have never even heard of anybody linking those two points together before.
If they’re blocking a highway, it’s not like you can just see the protest up ahead and turn off instead instead of choosing to be stuck. Often they are held in the middle of long stretches where they will trap as man cars as they are able on both sides.
And the lesson most people learned from COVID was that there was absolutely no reason why we couldn’t work from home. Although I could potentially see a link between working from home and, when the time comes to replace the infrastructure, replacing it with something more environmentally sane… but they’d have to convince big business owners to not force people to come into work for no reason, and good luck with that.
It seems like there’s a lot of wishful thinking to get from “those protesters are blocking this street” to “man, we should completely redo the entire infrastructure of North America because of these protests.”
Please, someone tell me how the fuck these protests get organized? I’ve been scouring IG for upcoming demonstrations in LA and nobody’s registering their actions on Shut It Down For Palestine. For months I’ve tried to get involved and it feels impossible for any full time worker to help take action for Palestine. Best case scenario is I find out about an event a few hours beforehand when I’m already in the office and it’s too late for me to be there.
I always feel conflicted when I see things like this. On one side good for them, they found a way to get their message across to a nation news. But on the other hand they are intentionally disrupting infrastructure people rely on everyday. I don’t think it’s a bad thing that people want global change, but I do think it is a bad thing that people feel powerless to influence this change so they have to resort to more disruptive methods like this. More representation in the federal government could help prevent this.
Also conflicted: I don’t think the disruption itself is a bad thing if it’s disrupting a part of society that derives benefit from the whatever is being protested against.
That said, I’m not sure how disrupting traffic in Los Angeles is going to affect the change they want to see. You can’t get much further from Washington DC than the West Coast.
I'm not really asking you to look it up or anything, but this gets parroted around a lot, and I wonder if there's actually any data to really support it or if it's just a statement that kinda sounds nice.
This post itself provides a new data point as a piece of evidence to support that claim. There is a news article written about it, and we are talking about it.
I mean, is a major highway in the second largest city of the primary colonial sponsor a bad place? I guess if we had free teleportation they might find marginally better success in DC or Tel Aviv, but if you’re located in LA I can see why you’d choose to protest there and not somewhere else.
If it happened in a vacuum, probably not. But traffic jams don’t happen in a vacuum. They ripple out and cause effects that hit millions of other people. Such as this news article, this lemmy post, and all of the people here discussing it.
Traffic jam equals lots of news coverage lots of pissed off voters, lots of attention lots of eyes, that is how you get to people who can make a change.
“Fuck shit up for a many people as possible” isn’t sustainable. Gandhi and Martin Luther knew that. If it weren’t for the number of downvotes people are getting for even hinting that this isn’t the right way to do things, I would think this is actually a psyop from the other side to put people off towards Palestine.
Like just stop oil is actually run by oil companies to recruit the most extreme left people that think sitting in the road is doing anything more than pissing the average person off and giving right wing media material to hate you.
But nope, people really are this stupid. On both sides. Both want to divide so strongly, because if people actually got along we would start addressing issues instead of bitching online about what you hate about the other side.
You think Gandhi and Martin Luther King didn’t disrupt things? My god of course they did they were extremely disruptive. You’ve fallen for the whitewash history, were they teach you to be good little boys who sit down out of the way and don’t bother anyone. It’s fiction. It’s not real. Martin Luther King was disrupting a ton of stuff Gandhi even more so.
Here’s a quote from Martin Luther King that says exactly what he thinks of people like you:
First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action;” who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.”
Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
I don’t have a problem with people disrupting traffic to protest, I have a problem with people doing it for a purpose that the government can’t actually achieve, with only a few people, or in places that don’t make sense for the cause.
If you want to disrupt it over some local (to at least the country) issue, and you have enough popular support to host an actual rally with hundreds or thousands of marchers blocking the road, go right ahead and disrupt traffic. If you’re marching about the environment, rally at a park then march to a government office. If you’re marching about police brutality, go sit down outside a police station.
Unfortunately, The US government is not the Israeli government. The most they could do is exert pressure on Israel, which to be fair is quite a lot of pressure given it’s the US, but I highly doubt that Israel would stop immediately even if the US asked them to. In this case, from the pictures, they also only had enough people to make a single line across the road. The location isn’t relevant to anything either.
I thought you might be referring to the 1983 attacks.
I was a little underdeveloped at that age to be aware of everything going on.
Doesn’t look like he stopped anything though, given that fighting continued despite the ceasefire for a few more years, and that Israel still attacks Lebanon on a regular basis because of Hezbollah.
He didn't stop the conflict as a whole, but he stopped the bombing of west Beirut itself.
That bombing was followed by a protest to the Israeli government by President Ronald Reagan. Within 20 minutes of a phone call between Reagan and Begin, in which the former said the bombings were going too far and needed to stop, Begin ordered the bombings stopped.
Add comment