zlacker

>>oftenw+(OP)
It takes just a few rotten apples on the side of the protestors to make it go violent.

It also takes just a few rotten apples on the side of the police to make it go violent.

Protesting is largely a modern witch hunt. It lets people blow off some steam, rather ineffectively in the modern protest case, because you don't get to burn anyone alive at the end of it. Enough people long for that witch hunt finale, and that's why protests turn violent so often, it's the modern day equivalent of burning a witch.

I don't know if protestors realize that it is up to them to come up with ways of fixing systemic issues they're upset about (people in power are fine with the way things are, by definition) - burning down your local neighbourhood or yelling out in the streets can only lead to the powers that be going 'ok fine, go find some witches to burn to appease this mob'. It's never going to fix actual systemic issues, but perhaps burning witches is good enough, given our history, and going in circles indefinitely is the way of this species.

>>alexas+ol
Boston tea party

Haymarket riots

Black Friday suffragette riots

Martin Luther King Jr riots

Stonewall riots

>>malnou+lr
You’ll want to remove Boston Tea party from that list. Extremely non-violent event. They broke one pad lock, didn’t steal any tea, and bought the yard a new padlock the next day.

It wasn’t a “protest” in any comparable way to this.

>>SV_Bub+Gt
“That evening, a group of 30 to 130 men, some dressed in the Mohawk warrior disguises, boarded the three vessels and, over the course of three hours, dumped all 342 chests of tea into the water. ... The property damage amounted to the destruction of 92,000 pounds or 340 chests of tea, reported by the British East India Company worth £9,659 worth, or $1,700,000 dollars in today’s money. The owner of the two of the three ships was William Rotch, a Nantucket-born colonist and merchant.”