General Road and Highway Discussion

[danbrotherston]

What about it do you find obviously invalid or misplaced?

SUVs are a problem...I know you agree. You believe that the tactic isn't effective?

Your suggestion is even less effective...in my opinion. Given our excess parking, it won't achieve anything...short or long term.

Ineffective, and probably mis-targeted, at least as to some of its victims, as I mentioned in my other reply. Randomly harming other members of society isn’t a good way of doing this (or anything else).

My suggestion is just an off-the-cuff example of something you could do which is probably illegal but which doesn’t cause direct harm to another. There are probably lots of better ideas for protests which would do a better job of spreading the message.

It's not random, it's targeted, and precisely so--the issue activists have chosen to target is SUVs and they targeted SUVs specifically.

I as I explained, I think that it's "miss-targeted" as much as you think, but I also don't think that the existence of collateral damage alone is enough, it should be considered in scope.

Edit: *less "miss-targeted"

I think the only question of "mis-targeting" I see is whether targeting users of SUVs is valid, rather than manufacturers, advertisers, fuel makers, etc. And I think it is. For me, the question is effectiveness, which is affected by many factors.

As for protesting, we've been doing that for decades...and there has been no progress. I frankly don't believe non-violent passive protest to be effective here. I understand why people would choose direct action and I support the concept in general at this point, although I'm not sure about this particular instance.

(Also, your example does have a cost, whomever's parking space that is will need to come remove the bike rack. That's going to cost money. Just look at the red paint on the statue in the park that we keep spending ungodly amounts of money to clean--which is why your example is another (mild) form of direct action.)