As much as I hate to say it, I struggle to think of what the Women's March or Occupy Wall Street tangibly accomplished.
Can someone provide studies or articles demonstrating the effectiveness of large protests in changing the populace's views?
Protests aren't about changing people's views as much as about normalizing active engagement by the silent whose views on the issue (even if they haven't deeply considered them prior to the protest drawing attention) already favor the protesters.
When people already opposed to position a protest takes dismiss it as unconvincing, they are missing the point. Protests are about mobilizing allies not converting enemies.
> I struggle to think of what the Women's March or Occupy Wall Street tangibly accomplished.
OWS directly produced the rapid development of anti-elite populist movements of both the Right and Left which subsequently displaced the dominant faction of the Republican Party and drastically weakened the dominant faction of the Democratic Party, it's a major reason that we have the President we have and that the pool of potential opponents for him in the next election looks like it does.
The meatspace Women's March and the online #MeToo protest movement were the central mobilizing elements in what has been one of the biggest ad most rapid social and political mobilizations of women and around women's issues—in government, workplaces, and society generally—in this country’s history, which had adverse repercussions for a number of very powerful people. It's a key element in the biggest increase in women on Congress from one Congress to the next ever.
Ultimately his and other protests led to legislation in the form of the civil rights act.[2]
[1] http://okra.stanford.edu/transcription/document_images/undec...
Now, in "recent" History I tend to agree with you. My personal opinion is that protests are not violent enough to cause real change.
Edit: I would appreciate feedback from downvoters. I think the few examples I provided are valid to illustrate "protests that caused real change", but if I'm wrong I'm happy to learn.
i think that, insofar as one might be inclined to point at "successful" protests, it's often really an issue of achieving a consensus amongst a plurality of those in power.
perhaps protests can work toward that (i'm not sure); but if so, they could also work against it. i sadly doubt the protests in hong kong, despite their scope and intensity, will change much at all when the powers-that-be neither care, nor (seemingly) can ever be made to care.
It's interesting that you immediately draw the conclusion that there is something "wrong" with the person or that they are "broken". Having a different opinion than you never seemed to enter the realm of possibility - unless, of course, you conclude having different opinions is being "broken".
That engineer can probably afford a 5 bedroom house on their salary if they moved to a different city like Pittsburgh or Austin. So it isn't some abstract issue, it's just a concrete question of whether they would like to stay where they are, or move to a city where they could afford a 5 bedroom house.
But protest that is crafted to cause disruption to the populace at large (blocking traffic) needs to be used very carefully.
It can create backlash against and undermine your cause.
Further, the precedent that any group with a grievance can undermine common goods like transportation infrastructure is a dangerous one-- irrespective of the validity and the severity of the grievances..
Please prove it then. I must be a little slow because it is not clear to me at all.
Just because not every protest is virtuous or successful doesn't mean that protest doesn't have value.
At the end of the day a modern protest accomplishes nothing. Let's not pretend that government officials don't know what the populace wants. They chose to ignore it for their own benefit and a protest won't change that. The only thing a protest does is give confidence to other powerful people who want to overthrow the current leaders, again for their own benefit. All the big "revolutions" have simply exchanged one abuser for another. The french revolution exchanged the monarchy for Napoleon's dictatorship. Russia went from a monarchy to a communist dictatorship and then to an authoritarian capitalist state. And in the case of east Germany it was the western capitalists who swooped in and bought out the entire country for western-dictated dumping prices, leaving the eastern populace disenfranchised and economically barely better off than before (and sometimes worse, now giving rise to a new nationalist party).
If you actually want to change anything you need to hit the powers that be where it hurts. They couldn't give a shit how many people are unhappy and protesting but what they do care about is money. The strike is the most effective and only effective tool the populace has, short of extreme violence which will just lead to another despot taking power.
I would agree if this were a unique experience, but this is a mentality held by a large section of the population. It is systemic.
Realistically, "corporate diversity" usually means "we have diverse kinds of privileged middle class people in our offices."
E.g. a female CEO is considered a necessary diversity win, but generally no one cares if the food servers and cleaners - most of whom usually happen to be female too - are treated with respect and decency.
Does Google - or any other FANG - actively and practically support anti-poverty activism and awareness to anything like the same extent they support a relatively safe form of activism like LGBT pride?
Is it not a problem that someone with one of the best jobs in the world can't afford a decent house near work? It might be related to why the contingent workers have 2.5 hour commutes.
In any case OP was just trying to point out the entitlement that gets instilled, and how it can be particularly blinding when you’re wrapped up in your own decadent lifestyle. It’s a very common trait among people in the valley, in my experience.
That doesn’t make the fact that ordinary workers have to travel multiple hours each way to afford housing any better. It is just a canary in the coal mine that even very highly paid workers struggle to afford housing in the area.
And if you don't like the housing options in the Bay Area, don't move there. It's very simple. The only reason housing is so bad in the Bay Area is because people keep moving there and complaining about it, but still putting up with it.
This person and many like them are just completely self-centered.
You'll probably fine the disruption just affected their commute home. Nothing more, nothing less.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not defending it. In my time at Google I lost count of the number of times that, say, some engineer 3 years out of college couldn't afford a 5 bedroom house in Palo Alto for them, their partner and their dog and how they were underpaid and this was unfair and a problem (and I'm not exaggerating as much as you might think) while not thinking twice about the 2.5 hour commute of the workers who prepare the free food and drive the buses to and from SF.
It's actually infuriating how much people can buy into these things as being "problems" while being completely oblivious to what's actually a problem right under their noses.