[niteshpant]

> I think when people, particularly in America, think "protest", they think of people walking around with placards and other such relatively low effort involvement.

Growing up in Nepal and witnessing some large non-violent and violent protests, I was frankly, baffled to see people standing on the sides of the streets and holding sign boards as protests

Where's the rallies? Where is the mass involvement needed for a successful protest? where are the street blocks? non-voilent doesn't mean just standing there.

The first time I actually saw something worth being called a protest was during the Black Lives Matter movement. I think it exposed the American police system for what it was, and the system's inability to control protesters peacefully

I've seen a lot of protests around NYC on various topics

Recently more with Palestine

> You could have tens of millions of students and otherwise unemployed individuals walking around with placards, and nobody's going to care.

I think you're wrong here Do it for one day nobody cares Do it for a week, people notice Do it for a month, you've got regime change

[achenet]

> Do it for one day nobody cares Do it for a week, people notice Do it for a month, you've got regime change

Occupy Wall Street lasted longer than a month, and I'm not sure they achieved regime change. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_Wall_Street

You could argue that it's below the 3.5% of the total population threshold mentioned in the previous comments tho.

[AnimalMuppet]

Far below. Occupy Wall Street was perhaps thousands of people. 3.5% of the US would be over 12 million people. 3.5% of New York City would be 350,000 people. In the street outside Wall Street. Yeah, that would have occupied Wall Street, to the point that workers would have had trouble getting in the door. Occupy Wall Street was nothing like that.

[mothballed]

The USA has an astonishly effective machine at stomping out protests for anything more than holding up a sign. BLM in Minneapolis was allowed to go on because the politician agreed with it. (Tim Walz's wife famously noted how much she enjoyed the smell of the burning tires.) []

When I was young and still under the illusion protests did anything, I recall going to a protest during the 'occupy' days. Obama was coming into town and we wanted him to be able to hear us chanting or see our signs.

My memory is pretty bad at this point on the context, but roughly how I remember it going was he was going to some sort of convention center. We started walking there, and about halfway there this mysterious but incredibly confident and authoritative person with a megaphone showed up and told us we had succeeded and the protest was over. About 90% of people actually believed that and left. The 10% of us that were like "who the hell is this lady and why would anyone listen to her" kept going. Then the police surrounded us and beat the shit out of anyone they could get to. We never got anywhere close to Obama's route.

[] https://nypost.com/2024/08/07/us-news/gwen-walz-said-she-kep...