Don't straw man what I say. I didn't imply that protest is pointless, neither did I imply that visible democratic pressure on an important issue is sometimes necessary. I simply said that protest signs are stupid. You can't argue against one protest sign with another, fundamentally, it's a little sign with a half dozen words, it doesn't contain an argument, it contains simply the statement of opinion.pintle wrote:I absolutely disagree with that swift, you imply that the entire action of protest is meaningless unless you can hold a seminar on the same topic in order to discuss the reasoning behind your driect action.SwiftSpear wrote:They don't say anything, they just advocate an opinion with no implied reasoning. Any time you take a complicated issue and sum it down to a few words you lose any power of convincing sway.
Generally mass mobilisations are organised by an entity or coalition of entities which will publish a statement for use by the press, explaining their motivation and aims.
In Britain at least, protests are aimed at generating visible democratic pressure; there is little point in mobilizing to go and stand in trafalgar square, being adamantly opposed to, say, the Palestine Wall, if you do not have some visible signifier of your intent.
Sloganeering and hiijacking of honest intentions is a problem, but a protest sign is not an inherently useless thing.
This site effectively takes common topics that appear on protest signs and spins them, completely ignoring any sembalence of argumentative validity on the points being made, effectively, if you boil down a thought process to a few dozen words, ya, it generally doesn't do a good job of defending itself from criticism. With a protest sign that's not really the point now though is it.
