Crosswords0 min ago
A Bit Ott Don’t You Think?
Christ what’s she going to be like with a real trauma in her life?
Answers
Are these people so deluded and arrogant that they honestly think their pathetic protests will make one jot of difference, because if they do, I've got news for them, it won't. I was due to drive my daughter back to university yesterday, but couldn't because it involved where they were protesting, so instead was on the 25 at silly o'clock this morning, and as I...
11:08 Tue 08th Nov 2022
I have posted before - but it bears repeating -
Legitimate protest is a cornerstone of the personal freedoms we enjoy, but that does not mean that all protest is automatically legitimate.
If protest is to be effective, it needs to draw attention to a situation that needs to be altered, and the attention needs to be positive, from the people who can actually make the change required.
In this case, the people who can make the change is the government, and recent history shows that they are addressing the very issues being raised by these protestors, albeit not in the immediate way that the protestors seem to believe is either desirable or achievable.
Unfortunately, direct action such as this means that the reason for the protest becomes buried under the avalanche of reasonable anger and disgust caused by affected individuals who might have been in agreement with the original reasons for the protest, but are comprehensively alienated from it by the horrific fall-out and the livelong damage to innocent people caught up in the impact of the protestors' actions.
I fully understand the concerns of the protestors, but this method of drawing attention to their view is completely counter-productive and far from being seen as concerned individuals with a genuine cause to be raised, are forever doomed to be seen as attention-seeking hysterical, time-wasting, chaos-causing idiots.
We live in a media-driven culture, and protestors should learn their lessons from this - a weeping wailing woman paraded entirely for derision and hate, is always going to be a bigger and more attractive story than the notion that oil production is a bad thing.
Legitimate protest is a cornerstone of the personal freedoms we enjoy, but that does not mean that all protest is automatically legitimate.
If protest is to be effective, it needs to draw attention to a situation that needs to be altered, and the attention needs to be positive, from the people who can actually make the change required.
In this case, the people who can make the change is the government, and recent history shows that they are addressing the very issues being raised by these protestors, albeit not in the immediate way that the protestors seem to believe is either desirable or achievable.
Unfortunately, direct action such as this means that the reason for the protest becomes buried under the avalanche of reasonable anger and disgust caused by affected individuals who might have been in agreement with the original reasons for the protest, but are comprehensively alienated from it by the horrific fall-out and the livelong damage to innocent people caught up in the impact of the protestors' actions.
I fully understand the concerns of the protestors, but this method of drawing attention to their view is completely counter-productive and far from being seen as concerned individuals with a genuine cause to be raised, are forever doomed to be seen as attention-seeking hysterical, time-wasting, chaos-causing idiots.
We live in a media-driven culture, and protestors should learn their lessons from this - a weeping wailing woman paraded entirely for derision and hate, is always going to be a bigger and more attractive story than the notion that oil production is a bad thing.
