Protests

[Ego]

Hong Kong, Chile, Spain, Ecuador, UK, Indonesia, Iraq, France, Haiti, Egypt, Malawi, Haiti, Russia, Bolivia, South Korea...

Typically these things happen in the spring, not the fall. What is going on? Do they have anything in common? Are they having any impact on their intended targets? Any thoughts if this will peter out or spread like the Arab Spring?

[Mister Imperceptible]

You can add USA to the list when the market drops and the layoffs start happening.

Holed up in my bunker with my guns and my popcorn ready.

[Jean]

I think mass shootings are kind of an individualist version of protests.

[Mister Imperceptible]

The overwhelming majority of the armed people are just trying to protect themselves from zombies.

[Jean]

I know that. That's in intersting topic, I didn't intend to derail it to gun control.
edit: I reread, I haden't even make a link between you waiting with a gun and mass shooting so just you know.
I just meant that when people feel some community, they gather and protest, and when they don't, they commint mass shootings.

[jacob]

@Ego - All of them? At least several of them (France, Chile, Ecuador, Haiti) started when the government raised taxes on fuel/transportation by a few percent. Basically, when people have to pay more at the pump whether that's to raise government revenue or to cut emissions in half within a decade to avoid frying the planet, the mass of people really don't like it. (I'd compare this to the tortilla crisis but for cars. The Arab Spring was also in part driven by a world wide rise in food prices as Russia shut off exports after harvests failed.)

Much of the rest appears to be individual counter-reactions to the emergence/rise of illiberal/corrupt democracies over the past decade. There also seems to be more protests in the US these years than there used to be.

It seems that the former are worker-driven and the latter are student-driven---painting with a broad brush here. These two forces often work in opposition to each other (educated vs "non-educated") having different goals, so at the very least, I think it will continue.

A third factor is the ever increasing number of refugees, currently standing at ~50-60 million world wide but set to increase to ~500+ million over the next 50 years as food supplies and countries start collapsing especially after the middle of this century. This would tend to drive things towards nationalism and authoritarianism which again increases tension between the two forces mentioned above.

Way I see it is more like a very slow contagion that will eventually consume the world. It's not going to fizzle or explode exponentially. It's just going to affect more and more countries. Some more than others.

[Seppia]

What stroke me of the protests I'm reasonably well informed about (HK and France) is that they're leaderless and it is ultimately unclear what their requests are.
That would make me bet they won't achieve anything beyond being destructive.

[Mister Imperceptible]

@Jean

I understand you did not make the connection but the many who are reading this with their principle of anti-charity are ready to give the worst possible interpretation to meet their political goals.

All I want to do is defend myself from corporate overlords and mindless rabble alike. It feels like it’s getting harder and harder to do.

I wish being honest and kind were enough. It isn’t.

[Ego]

That would make me bet they won't achieve anything beyond being destructive.

It seems like the tipping point for these protests is not related to any one particular problem or cause. The most benign spark causes a massive explosion and then later the media finds talking heads to make sense of the chaos.

Is the common theme the chaos itself?

https://www.thersa.org/discover/publica ... 9/09/chaos#

Two new studies suggest that divide is deeper than we think. A substantial number of people aren’t just angry at certain policies or leaders but want to simply smash the system – and enjoy the chaos. Perhaps we don’t know as much about political alienation as we think we do.

[Mister Imperceptible]

The Story of 2019: Protests in Every Corner of the Globe

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-colu ... -the-globe

[fiby41]

One multi state protest happens biannually and I think of them as pressure valves releasing excess discontent whenever it gets saturated in a corner. I'll try to list all protests I've come to know of in my country:

The earliest one I remember was of some people sitting on railway tracks in front of a train. They wanted reservation. I've been to railway station before and there was board on one of counter that mentioned which queue was for make making a reservation as opposed to just a general ticket. I put 2 and 2 together and thought, gee these people really want to go home during the holiday season comfortably and are so upset they didn't get a seat that they want to stop the train. They wanted reservation for their community in education and government jobs.

So we can divide protests into:
1 those seeking special privileges for the protesters' social group
2 in support of or against a bill or an act of the parliament
3 in support of or against a matter that is in the court
4 those for/against a power plant/dam

1 Jaat reservation protests, Maratha reservation protests,
2 Jana Lokapal Bill, Citizenship Amendment Bill/Act,
3 Ram Janmabhumi, arrest of leader of the Dera community on frivolous grounds, Aarey forest clearance for metro car shed.

Some protests are protests just for the sake of protesting , sometimes they are demonstrations of strength, at other times they turn violent and public infrastructure is damaged. In the recent ones those that got caught were send bills of the damage caused by them.

[mistatwista]

Hong Kong, Chile, Spain, Ecuador, UK, Indonesia, Iraq, France, Haiti, Egypt, Malawi, Haiti, Russia, Bolivia, South Korea...

Typically these things happen in the spring, not the fall. What is going on? Do they have anything in common? Are they having any impact on their intended targets? Any thoughts if this will peter out or spread like the Arab Spring?

Protests are always something definite and in a certain territory, for certain interests. You just took random places on the planet that almost nothing will unite and dumped in a heap. And at the same time they gave an example of the Arab spring, the country of which only the neighboring countries unites. And if you look more specifically. you will see that everywhere there was a different protest, different demand, different scope and different consequences. From raising scholarships for students in the country to overthrow the government.

[ertyu]

I'm betting the US will be on the streets this spring unless major action is taken... The american rich don't want to pay taxes, but if people are dying and many can't work, they will have a riot on their hands.

[ertyu]

not the young and poor service workers who would've been in the line of infection anyway, but are now both infected and out of a job

[George the original one]

The ones agitating right now are the minority of right-wingers demanding the freedom of assembly in their local jurisdictions and calling the enforced restrictions illegal. They back the president because Trump made the restrictions advisory rather than compulsory.

[Saltation]

Protesting could happen nationally if employment figures take a sharp negative turn. With low unemployment, wages slowly increasing and the stock market doing well many people were living high on the hog. Now that reality has hit and people who did "pick themselves up by the bootstraps" will be facing employment issues crashed retirement accounts (general economic insecurity) there is a chance that if the government does not implement a comprehensive unemployment bill to protect workers that chaos will breakout.