18-Till-I-Die wrote:...But i'm not going to stand here screaming at your Wall of Ignorance all day, while taking shit with your constant red herrings, one liners and Appeals to Motive.
This was the bone of contention I wanted to carve out of the putrid corpse of your vein-throbbing rage.
Riddle me this, Batman: what am I erecting a "Wall of Ignorance" about, exactly? That Cindy Sheehan is a hero? That's an
opinion, dumbass.
Your opinion. You're entitled to it, but
my opinion is that she was a waste of time and effort and media attention.
Why? Because I don't believe that 1960's-style hippie protests are effective. Shouting, screaming, placard-waving yadda yadda makes the participants feel good, but as an effective vehicle for change they are a waste of time. If anything, the message tends to get buried under the spectacle.
Now, before you go into Volume XII of "yew R t3h 3\/1|_ neoc0n!" bear in mind, as Glocksman said, that this idea that hippie-style protests are not respected, has gone back since the Nixon era. I can't help it that today's neocons have also picked up that; I'd arrived at the conclusion all by my self a long time before they got here.
Now, no matter that I've drifted left in my politics over the years, I have
always felt that 1960's style protest marches are pointless-- explaining why I don't participate in them. News flash-- I'm sure a
lot of liberals out there don't bother to participate in those protests for the same reason. How many of those soccer mom minivan types that voted for Kerry or Gore were also out manning barricades and chanting 'one two three four, we don't like this goddam war!'. Probably
very few.
Think of the millions that voted for Gore or Kerry-- did those 'millions' also go to protest marches? No. They sat at home, quietly voted, did their thing, without ever once waving a placard or chanting a slogan. At most, some of them probably got bumper stickers and left it at that. The largest protest march so far has had, what, about 200,000 people? Are they the only ones "doing something"?
It seems to me that, in your eyes, the only way to "properly" be in opposition to GWBush, one MUST do these march & chant protests or else they're just another zombie Bushite. That would appear to be a sort of black-and-white fallacy, and seems more in line with that "you're with us or against us" attitude I mentioned earlier.
I admit I'm only
somewhat liberal compared earlier days, in fact here on SDN I am obviously more of a conservative. That's because the political spectrum here is much more to the left than where I am and where I grew up. But I am not a "neocon" by any stretch, for those people and their ideology have hurt this country and put me and a lot of my comrades in danger --and put some of my friends in the fucking ground.
But on the subject, I'll repeat my offer: If it can be proven to me, from a verified, scientific statistical analysis, that 1960's style protest marches have actually had a
key role in changing the public's attitude about support for Bush
as important or more so than war casualties, policy failure in Iraq, Katrina bungling, USAPATRIOT, extraordinary rendition, Guantanamo, the environment, church influence in government... if protest marches are on a par with these other factors in changing people's attitudes, dragging down Bush's approval rating, I'll not only concede this whole thing to you but I'll go and participate in a protest march myself and post pictures right here.
