"Should" protest make people "uncomfortable"?

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

...and if so, why does this only apply to protests that I, the protagonist, agree with?

[John Dule]

HONK HONK

[HisGrace]

Making people uncomfortable with your message- fine

Making people uncomfortable with arson, looting, or hate speech- not fine

[Ferguson97]

If a protest makes people feel comfortable, then it's not doing it's job. If it doesn't disrupt something about the status quo, then what are you protesting for?

I think the issue here is that people may conflate 'uncomfortable protest' with 'violent protest'.

Rosa Parks certainly made a lot of people feel uncomfortable, and all she did was sit on bus seat she wasn't supposed to.

[Antonio the Sixth]

I mean. "Which people" matters a great deal here.

[parochial boy]

It's February, it's below freezing. Of course protesting should make people uncomfortable. You wanna be comfortable protesting, you should go live in San Diego or something.

[dead0man]

If you want most people to hate you, sure.  Obviously it depends on what you mean and who you are protesting to (instead of "at"), but generally speaking, pissing off the people you are trying to educate (preach to, whatever) isn't going to work very often.

If a protest makes people feel comfortable, then it's not doing it's job. If it doesn't disrupt something about the status quo, then what are you protesting for?

I think the issue here is that people may conflate 'uncomfortable protest' with 'violent protest'.

Rosa Parks certainly made a lot of people feel uncomfortable, and all she did was sit on bus seat she wasn't supposed to.

sure, making people uncomfortable can work if your protesting something that they are doing.  If you make neutrals and outsiders uncomfortable, you ain't helping nobody.  Like blocking traffic to let us know that black lives do in fact matter.  It's an amazingly stupid tactic, yet I can guarantee some dumbass will be here shortly to explain why it's necessary and the next time it's warm out and a recreational outrage happens, other dumbasses will get run over trying to stop traffic on the freeway.

[Ferguson97]

If you want most people to hate you, sure.  Obviously it depends on what you mean and who you are protesting to (instead of "at"), but generally speaking, pissing off the people you are trying to educate (preach to, whatever) isn't going to work very often.

If a protest makes people feel comfortable, then it's not doing it's job. If it doesn't disrupt something about the status quo, then what are you protesting for?

I think the issue here is that people may conflate 'uncomfortable protest' with 'violent protest'.

Rosa Parks certainly made a lot of people feel uncomfortable, and all she did was sit on bus seat she wasn't supposed to.

sure, making people uncomfortable can work if your protesting something that they are doing.  If you make neutrals and outsiders uncomfortable, you ain't helping nobody.  Like blocking traffic to let us know that black lives do in fact matter.  It's an amazingly stupid tactic, yet I can guarantee some dumbass will be here shortly to explain why it's necessary and the next time it's warm out and a recreational outrage happens, other dumbasses will get run over trying to stop traffic on the freeway.

Do you think MLK "helped nobody"? He was extremely unpopular when he was alive, and his methods of protesting was considered extremely controversial. Nowadays he is considered the single most important figure of the Civil Rights movement.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

I mean. "Which people" matters a great deal here.

The people, one presumes, for whom infrastructure and services are blocked or delayed because of the civil disobedience. Parking trucks in the middle of a major city to impede traffic and disturb residents and politicians is probably some sort of imposition. But so is exposing drivers to a potential murder charge by having protesters link arms across a freeway. I'm not particularly interested in who is better or why--I am involved in no movements, and I don't have the patience for the detective work needed to decide who is good or evil--but I am interested in whether or not anyone has a stance on what is "allowable" in a protest situation without first having to decide if they agree with the protest's aims or not.

[dead0man]

If you want most people to hate you, sure.  Obviously it depends on what you mean and who you are protesting to (instead of "at"), but generally speaking, pissing off the people you are trying to educate (preach to, whatever) isn't going to work very often.

If a protest makes people feel comfortable, then it's not doing it's job. If it doesn't disrupt something about the status quo, then what are you protesting for?

I think the issue here is that people may conflate 'uncomfortable protest' with 'violent protest'.

Rosa Parks certainly made a lot of people feel uncomfortable, and all she did was sit on bus seat she wasn't supposed to.

sure, making people uncomfortable can work if your protesting something that they are doing.  If you make neutrals and outsiders uncomfortable, you ain't helping nobody.  Like blocking traffic to let us know that black lives do in fact matter.  It's an amazingly stupid tactic, yet I can guarantee some dumbass will be here shortly to explain why it's necessary and the next time it's warm out and a recreational outrage happens, other dumbasses will get run over trying to stop traffic on the freeway.

Do you think MLK "helped nobody"? He was extremely unpopular when he was alive, and his methods of protesting was considered extremely controversial. Nowadays he is considered the single most important figure of the Civil Rights movement.

he didn't make neutrals and outsiders uncomfortable.  He made racists and people who took their political cues from racists uncomfortable.  He didn't punish random people to get attention, which is exactly what stopping traffic is.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Protesting is supposed to make people morally uncomfortable about the system or situation being protested. That can take the form of actions that also inconvenience bystanders, but if bystanders just feel inconvenienced by the protest itself, they tend to turn against the people inconveniencing them. The refusal to understand the difference is one example among many of the contemporary left's tendency to treat unpopular strategies and framings as morally imperative to avoid having to adjust them, which itself is perhaps the biggest reason why the left keeps snatching defeat from the jaws of victory on issue after issue after issue--M4A, criminal justice, race relations, guns, and on and on and on.

[Antonio the Sixth]

I mean. "Which people" matters a great deal here.

The people, one presumes, for whom infrastructure and services are blocked or delayed because of the civil disobedience. Parking trucks in the middle of a major city to impede traffic and disturb residents and politicians is probably some sort of imposition. But so is exposing drivers to a potential murder charge by having protesters link arms across a freeway. I'm not particularly interested in who is better or why--I am involved in no movements, and I don't have the patience for the detective work needed to decide who is good or evil--but I am interested in whether or not anyone has a stance on what is "allowable" in a protest situation without first having to decide if they agree with the protest's aims or not.

I think to the extent that "making people uncomfortable" is the goal of a protest, it should obviously be about the people in charge - the people who have the power to fulfill the protest's demands and are refusing to do so. Inconveniencing everyday people might be a means toward that end, but obviously it only works in some cases and dramatically backfires in other.

As for where to draw the line, obviously it has to be drawn somewhere and obviously we should all agree that mass indiscriminate violence crosses it but yelling in the street doesn't. Aside from that, I don't have particularly strong thoughts on the matter.

[Ferguson97]

If you want most people to hate you, sure.  Obviously it depends on what you mean and who you are protesting to (instead of "at"), but generally speaking, pissing off the people you are trying to educate (preach to, whatever) isn't going to work very often.

If a protest makes people feel comfortable, then it's not doing it's job. If it doesn't disrupt something about the status quo, then what are you protesting for?

I think the issue here is that people may conflate 'uncomfortable protest' with 'violent protest'.

Rosa Parks certainly made a lot of people feel uncomfortable, and all she did was sit on bus seat she wasn't supposed to.

sure, making people uncomfortable can work if your protesting something that they are doing.  If you make neutrals and outsiders uncomfortable, you ain't helping nobody.  Like blocking traffic to let us know that black lives do in fact matter.  It's an amazingly stupid tactic, yet I can guarantee some dumbass will be here shortly to explain why it's necessary and the next time it's warm out and a recreational outrage happens, other dumbasses will get run over trying to stop traffic on the freeway.

Do you think MLK "helped nobody"? He was extremely unpopular when he was alive, and his methods of protesting was considered extremely controversial. Nowadays he is considered the single most important figure of the Civil Rights movement.

he didn't make neutrals and outsiders uncomfortable.  He made racists and people who took their political cues from racists uncomfortable.  He didn't punish random people to get attention, which is exactly what stopping traffic is.

This is completely ahistorical.

[Vosem]

Protesting is supposed to make people morally uncomfortable about the system or situation being protested. That can take the form of actions that also inconvenience bystanders, but if bystanders just feel inconvenienced by the protest itself, they tend to turn against the people inconveniencing them. The refusal to understand the difference is one example among many of the contemporary left's tendency to treat unpopular strategies and framings as morally imperative to avoid having to adjust them, which itself is perhaps the biggest reason why the left keeps snatching defeat from the jaws of victory on issue after issue after issue--M4A, criminal justice, race relations, guns, and on and on and on.

I don't know that this fits the topic of the thread, but I'll say it since it strikes me as odd -- when was the left close to a victory on guns or M4A? On guns American public opinion has been zooming in the direction of gun rights since around 1990, in a way that looks very reminiscent of the trend of public opinion towards acceptance of homosexuality and towards marijuana legalization; there is a general trend towards societal libertarianism and it seems hard to say that some unpopular protest is the reason that gun rights have not been curtailed. An America where they were curtailed would be a totally different memetic environment.

(M4A seems like a much newer issue, but it also seems like something where, in practice, a majority of the Democratic Party supports politicians who oppose it, and the backlash to Obamacare along with state-level election results suggest this is actually a very unpopular position among the American electorate. Even beyond the Democratic Party, just a tad under 50% of the electorate normally votes Republican¹ -- where most of the debate centers around the speed with which to cut public services, and the faction supporting "faster" is clearly becoming ascendant over time -- and the structure of our institutions means that the judiciary is controlled by Republican appointees and getting more so over time. I don't know when a near win on this one occurred either.)

I do agree with you on criminal justice, though -- it seems like there was widespread societal support for large reforms in the late 2010s, which hasn't even totally dissipated, but which was substantially squandered on extreme demands which created a backlash. Also, while it's not clear to me how much difference the Timbs decision has made on the ground, it seems notable that it came before the really large protest wave in 2020.

(More generally I am skeptical whether protest works at all in the contemporary United States -- I am inclined towards a position of 'no', though open to discussion on this point -- but these all seem like very weird examples.)

¹Mean contemporary GCB, whether you measure post-2008 or post-1992 -- either is defensible as the start of the contemporary political era; while 2008 was my first cycle I lean toward the latter -- comes in at around D+1.5, which is probably a more accurate "normal" result than zero.