dagblog - Comments for "Ambassadors of Conscience"

I probably would have

Aaron Carine — Fri, 24 Aug 2018 13:09:54 +0000

I probably would have considered Havel disqualified by his support for the Iraq War. The cleansing of Rohingya Muslims hasn't left Aung San Kyi looking like much of a human rights champion(although, of course, she got the award before that).

OWS helped make it possible

rmrd0000 — Mon, 20 Aug 2018 03:23:23 +0000

In reply to RMRD... OWS is NOT about

OWS helped make it possible for a Consumer Protection Agency. BlackLivesMatter helped remove 3 prosecutors who failed to bring charges against police officers who killed unarmed black men.

RMRD... OWS is NOT about

oldenGoldenDecoy — Mon, 20 Aug 2018 03:02:50 +0000

In reply to Protests are always unpopular

RMRD... OWS is NOT about polling or popularity...

Where ocean-kat said...

Occupy Wall Street and so far BLM have and are failing miserably. All these groups had protests of considerable size for a considerable length of time.

Popularity Polls or not--the vestiges of the OWS movement goes on. And one of the latest being...

6 Jul 2018 | Guardian
The growing Occupy Ice movement: 'We're here for the long haul'

In cities from Portland to New York to Louisville, Kentucky, activists set up camps with a clear goal: to abolish the agency...

And here's a short article from 5 years after the beginning.

September 16, 2016 | CNN
Occupy Wall Street: 5 years later

Nearly five years after Occupy Wall Street's eviction from a small Manhattan park, the movement that shined the spotlight on the 99% has spread its seeds across America.

The group's creed against income inequality, corporate greed and the influence of money in politics helped spawn a variety of causes -- from Black Lives Matter to the ascent of Bernie Sanders to San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick's quiet protest against institutional racism.

--- snip ---

"What a movement that has any kind of success does -- not necessarily practical results but any kind of excitement -- is acquaint or reacquaint people with some of the pleasures of being involved in a social movement," says Todd Gitlin, a Columbia University professor and author of "Occupy Nation: The Roots, the Spirit, and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street."

"The way movements work is they sort of enlarge the circle of possibility."

I've known Todd Gitlin since his days as president of Students for a Democratic Society.

Targeted involvement...

======
~OGD~

Found this nice roundup of

artappraiser — Tue, 14 Aug 2018 04:09:28 +0000

In reply to Protests are always unpopular

Found this nice roundup of relatively recent scholarship on the theme here in a 2017 piece @ TheCut.com:

5 Important Insights About Successful Protest Movements

John Legend: Voters can amend

NCD — Tue, 14 Aug 2018 03:03:03 +0000

In reply to

John Legend: Voters can amend Louisiana's Constitution to end a policy of white supremacy in the courthouse. Voting, a right, that exercised, can improve justice:

Louisiana is one of only two states — the other is Oregon — in which a person can be convicted of a felony and sent to prison without a unanimous vote of the jury. As a result, Louisiana prosecutors do not truly have the burden of proving their case “beyond a reasonable doubt.” They only need to persuade 10 of 12 jurors to send a defendant to prison, even for life.

The result? A state justice system in which felony trials are held without the full participation of African Americans.

Here’s why: During Louisiana’s all-white constitutional convention in 1898, delegates passed a series of measures specifically designed to “perpetuate the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon race in Louisiana.” Non-unanimous juries were one of those measures, and the intent was clear: If the federal Constitution required that African Americans be allowed to serve on juries, the state constitution would make sure that minority votes could be discounted.

Protests are always unpopular

ocean-kat — Tue, 14 Aug 2018 02:23:07 +0000

In reply to I’m not sure that I get your

Protests are always unpopular. That tells us nothing about whether they are well or poorly planned. I think it's obvious that King's civil rights movement and Act Up were astonishingly successful. I think it's obvious that Occupy Wall Street and so far BLM have and are failing miserably. All these groups had protests of considerable size for a considerable length of time. All these protest movements polled very badly. Why do some protests seem to get results and some protests seem to get no results?

Protests can serve to bring attention to the problem. They can also be ineffective or produce backlash that's greater than the attention they might bring to the problem. Protest is not the strategy. How one protests is the strategy. It can be successful or not.

I’m not sure that I get your

rmrd0000 — Tue, 14 Aug 2018 01:55:52 +0000

In reply to Polling doesn't necessarily

I’m not sure that I get your point. King’s protests were unpopular. Southern whites left the Democratic Party in droves after the Civil Rights Acts passed. LBJ and Northern members of Congress did the right thing. Democrats paid a political price and Republicans become the Southern party after the Dixiecrats arrived.

Polling doesn't necessarily

ocean-kat — Tue, 14 Aug 2018 01:41:29 +0000

In reply to Whites could not stand Martin

I don't get or I disagree with whatever point you're trying to make. Polling doesn't necessarily tell you whether a protest action is wise or stupid. It's very likely even greater numbers of blacks would poll against Act Up. Both blacks and whites were against gay marriage until 2012 when whites barely crossed 50%. Blacks were still against in 2012 by greater margins then whites were against civil rights for blacks when King was leading his protests. Polls rarely give a strategic analysis. It requires a thoughtful analysis of the strategy to form an opinion. Imo both King's civil rights movement and Act Up had a good strategic plan and BLM and Occupy Wall Street didn't. I've posted my analysis several times explaining why I hold that opinion.

According to the 2008 exit polls, black voters hugely favored Proposition 8, with approximately 70 percent voting in support of the ban on gay marriage. Similarly, General Social Survey data show that black Americans’ attitudes toward same-sex marriage, though becoming more positive, continue to trail behind the attitudes of white Americans (see Figure 1).

You don’t have to be a Trump

rmrd0000 — Tue, 14 Aug 2018 00:39:05 +0000

In reply to Whites could not stand Martin

You don’t have to be a Trump supporter to disagree with protests but if you are a Trump supporter it’s very likely that you dislike the protests.

Whites could not stand Martin

rmrd0000 — Tue, 14 Aug 2018 00:31:14 +0000

In reply to Protests can serve to bring

Whites could not stand Martin Luther King Jr when he was alive.

In August 1966, less than two years before King was gunned down, when a Gallup Poll asked Americans for their opinion of King, 63 percent of Americans had an unfavorable opinion of the civil rights icon. In a Harris Poll that same year, 95 percent of African-American respondents gave King a favorable rating.

In that same Harris Poll, 54 percent of whites said that they would not march or protest if they “were in the same position as Negroes,” and two months later, in October 1966, 85 percent of whites (pdf) said that civil rights demonstrations hurt Negroes more than they helped. By December, many whites had changed their minds, but 50 percent told Harris pollsters that Martin Luther King Jr. hurt “the Negro cause of civil rights.”

https://www.theroot.com/from-most-hated-to-american-hero-the-whitewashing-of-m-1824258876

The problem was not King’s protests. The problem was the mindset of white people at that particular point in time.

Trump is a racist. Omarosa says that there are tapes of Trump using the word nigger. Omarosa is not a credible source, we need to hear the tapes. Trump questions the intelligence of black people. Let us suppose that there are nigger tapes. There is no reason to believe that Trump supporters would abandon Trump after their release. The problem is not protests the problem is Trump supporters.