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A comment on Maddox - I hope SOPA passes. Parent comment

Re:Maddox - I hope SOPA passes by RyanMcGreal on Thursday January 19, 2012 @11:13AM (#3485061)
I was in downtown Toronto on February 15, 2003, freezing my ass off in a protest march of nearly 100,000 people who were, in turn, part of a global march of between 10 and 20 million people protesting the invasion of Iraq. It was the single biggest protest in history, and it was against a war that hadn't even started yet.

Popular protest against the Vietnam War didn't take off until the war had been grinding for several years.

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Re:Maddox - I hope SOPA passes by thebigshane on Thursday January 19, 2012 @12:14PM (#3485403)
Sorry if this is rubbing salt in a wound... but, that protest really didn't have any effect. Did it? I agree with Maddox here that both protests (while impressively sizable and passionate) were equally ineffective.
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Re:Maddox - I hope SOPA passes by RyanMcGreal on Thursday January 19, 2012 @12:46PM (#3485600)
It's an open (and probably unanswerable) question whether the invasion would have gone differently if not for all the popular global protest (though I can imagine that the US would have been less restrained if they knew the world wasn't watching).

I was responding to the OP's contention that the Boomer generation was more committed to protesting in support of social justice than people are these days.

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Re:Maddox - I hope SOPA passes by mindslight on Thursday January 19, 2012 @01:18PM (#3485777)
I remember that date, being in New York myself. Seeing the police embrace their militaristic fantasy of being under attack; seeing the futility of organized dissent when it came to changing the course of an autonomous government. That was my last protest. "Cypherpunks write code".
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Re:Maddox - I hope SOPA passes by unreal37 on Thursday January 19, 2012 @12:17PM (#3485424)
Yes I remember that massive worldwide protest against the impending invasion of Iraq. But the US was still able to get 20+ countries to go with them into war. Based on the "get off your ass and actually do something" theory of the OP, why didn't this have any effect?
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