Hemingways_Shotgun

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • Would it have defeated it if they hadn’t performed their protest and maybe made a few other legislators rethink how unpopular of a bill it was? If they hadn’t protested, would legislative complacency just allowed the bill to pass unremarked on.

    The purpose of a protest is to draw attention to something so that other that have the power to do something about it might do something about it.

    I’m not saying the bill failed specifically because of the protest, but to think the bill was guaranteed to have failed anyway even without it is naive thinking.


  • I agree. That’s why it’s called “having the courage of one’s convictions”. The people who are protesting are willing to accept the consequences of their actions in order to shake up the system.

    But when the system makes up and applies consequences retroactively, it starts a very slippery dilemma where a person can’t protest for fear of “hypothetical” repercussions.

    You can’t have the courage of your convictions if you don’t know what the consequences of those convictions are going to be. And you can’t know what the consequences of your actions will be if they’re just made up ex post facto and applied punitively in order to stifle debate rather than following an already established protocol.