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There are several lessons from the trucker convoy I don't think people have learned. 1. Public support matters. If you don't have public support, it will under

by jmyeet 4y ago

There are several lessons from the trucker convoy I don't think people have learned. 1. Public support matters. If you don't have public support, it will undermine your position as you force people to side with the state. This has long term consequences. So here you had people siding with the state to get their Amazon deliveries because the given cause (ie vaccine mandates) did not enjoy public support; 2. Annoying people by clogging up residential areas and blowing your very loud horns at all hours turns people against you. Blockade freight terminals, offices, factories and freight terminals if you must blockade something; 3. The very fact that the state took action here, both at the time and now, demonstrates that collective action has power. This is good. But it has to be used responsibly. People turning against excessive union corruption in the 1970s and 1980s is what allowed the state to eviscerate unions and the labor movement and led to 40 years of no real increase in wages; and 4. Outside money played a big part in this [1]. Any movement is at risk of being coopted by outside interests for their own purposes. Another example of this is BLM. BLM the movement is very respectable, raising awareness of police violence against African-Americans. But there's also BLM the charity, which is nothing more than an opportunistic cash grab. BLM the charity bought a $6 million house [2]. It is worth noting just how stupid the vaccine cause was and is. Canadian truckers were protesting the Canadaian government having vaccine mandates. But most Canadian truckers have to travel to and from the United States. The US already had a vaccine mandate so, at best, this only affected Canadian truckers who didn't travel to and from the US. [1]: https://www.nationalobserver.com/2022/02/16/news/meet-some-wealthy-canadians-who-donated-trucker-convoy https://www.nationalobserver.com/2022/02/16/news/meet-some-w... [2]: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/04/black-lives-matter-6-million-dollar-house.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/04/black-lives-matter-6...

moistly 4y ago
Nearly 90% of Canadians received a vaccination, over 80% got the two most-important shots. Over 55% also boosted. The vast majority of Canadians are sensible people. The media over-represented the protests. The local and provincial governments were weak and the police, negligent.
- jmyeet 4y ago
  > The vast majority of Canadians are sensible people. This agrees with my point. Most of the money funding the protests was American not Canadian. > The media over-represented the protests. There was a lot of localized disruption. It fit into a wider issue of vaccination opposition. Seizure of protest funds is a story (agree with it or not). Whether it would spread to the US was a legitimate angle. So even though I disagree with the protests it was certainly newsworthy IMHO. > ... and the police, negligent. Here I will disagreee. The police and these protesters were largely the same people. This wasn't negligence. This was tacit approval leading to deliberate inaction. In the US, dying from Covid, even after having refused an available vaccine, was counted as a death in the line of duty in US statistics. This then fed into a narrative that police work was dangerous.

by jmyeet 4y ago

moistly 4y ago

Nearly 90% of Canadians received a vaccination, over 80% got the two most-important shots. Over 55% also boosted. The vast majority of Canadians are sensible people. The media over-represented the protests. The local and provincial governments were weak and the police, negligent.

jmyeet 4y ago
> The vast majority of Canadians are sensible people. This agrees with my point. Most of the money funding the protests was American not Canadian. > The media over-represented the protests. There was a lot of localized disruption. It fit into a wider issue of vaccination opposition. Seizure of protest funds is a story (agree with it or not). Whether it would spread to the US was a legitimate angle. So even though I disagree with the protests it was certainly newsworthy IMHO. > ... and the police, negligent. Here I will disagreee. The police and these protesters were largely the same people. This wasn't negligence. This was tacit approval leading to deliberate inaction. In the US, dying from Covid, even after having refused an available vaccine, was counted as a death in the line of duty in US statistics. This then fed into a narrative that police work was dangerous.