Token Protest

Specialization of TokenEffort?

Problem: You sympathize with a plan of action which you know to be irrational, wrong or just plain evil.

Context: Other actors have openly endorsed the plan of action and do not believe, or do not care, that it's irrational, wrong or evil. If you wanted to, you could stop those other actors from implementing their plan of action.

Forces: You're intelligent and have a conscience. You have some kind of emotional problem that makes you sympathize with the wrong plan of action.

Solution: Protest these other actors and their plan of action but only to the extent that, and in such a form as, they're willing to ignore your protest.

Real Solution: Ignore your sympathies until you can get treated for your emotional problems. Radicalize and engage in DirectAction to achieve the objective you know is right.

Examples:

you secretly hate gays and want them to die of AIDS, so you embrace educational campaigns and giving out free condoms. Instead, you could have criminalized: engaging in sex without HIV tests, engaging in multiple sex without condoms, and spreading HIV.
you secretly hate people (yourself included) and want them to die of plague (SARS being the most recent), so you embrace educational campaigns, masks and quarantine. Instead, you could stop all unnecessary travel (like going home for the holidays), large meetings (like mass), and execute any infected person who breaks quarantine (or at least start treating it like the mass murder it is). And of course, finally start segregating hospital waste from hospital food!
you're an anti-abortionist, so you mildly protest the murder of abortion doctors by fanatics. Instead, you could lobby to have the organizations that support the fanatics be listed as terrorist cells.
you enjoy the bloodbath and mass murder that is war, so you protest against Westminster & the USA and hold million-man marches. Instead, you could sit-in on Westminster and burn it down as you leave, hold a General Strike to shut down the UK economy, and coordinate an economic war against the USA to sink it into depression.

Uhh...could this page be toned down just a wee bit? Kinda afraid to touch it, me own self.

Depends. Is this page sarcastic? When I read something that says everyone who doesn't consider abandoning freedom of assembly every time a few people get sick is secretly longing for them to die, my first guess is sarcasm. In that case, it may have to be toned up, since that doesn't readily come across through text.

Let's assume SARS kills only 5% of the time. By the time it's made its way through the human population, SARS will have killed 300 million people. On one hand, this is a low-ball estimate (5% is low-balling it), but OTOH, SARS' ability to target health workers first and foremost will make it a critical problem long before it becomes endemic. So is SARS a serious problem? Yes, yes it bloody well is!

If anything you must surely be sarcastic when you dismiss a deadly and highly virulent new plague as "a few people get sick". I can't count the number of times morons have compared SARS to the flu, but the flu doesn't kill even 0.1% of healthy adults!

The question then becomes; is effective action against SARS possible? Yes it is. In fact, I don't see why a new disease like SARS can't be eradicated if sufficiently extreme action is taken sufficiently early.

Let's all remember that there would be no AIDS epidemic if serious action had been taken to contain it early on. The only country on this entire moronic planet to take serious action against AIDS was Cuba. Cuba quarantined HIV positive people and as a result almost succeeded in containing the epidemic on its soil; the only country to have ever done so.

Similarly with multiply-resistant strep. No serious action against this serious epidemic is being taken by most governments. Even after it becomes endemic, the only likely action won't be serious, it won't be DiseaseControl, but more useless hand-wringing and MoreResearch? (a specialization of TokenEffort? often used by governments).

When you see someone perform the same action over and over, with the same result every single time, one is safe in assuming that the person wants the result regardless of any protestations to the contrary. The result here is widespread death caused by plague and the action is inaction by governments, health care systems, and medical & governmental authorities.

You can defend it or whine about it, but the first instinct of government is always to legislate or regulate anything new and important. So human cloning became illegal even before it came into existence because it was perceived by society as a serious problem. But deliberately spreading a plague isn't illegal because it isn't perceived as a problem at all. The main reason for that is surely because AIDS is a problem for gays and SARS is a problem for asians. So it's pretty clear, to me at least, that society secretly wants gays and asians to die.

Ok. First of all, to the best of my knowledge, SARS has infected relatively few people and they have been mostly under quarantine. It sounds like it could be a serious threat, but it's damn hard to tell; serious potential epidemics show up all the time and nothing ever materializes from them, until it does and a few million people die horrible deaths. The media doesn't help by screaming about them all, rendering the warning system essentially useless. So, if there is actually good information to suggest that SARS is as dangerous as it is presented, then I will agree that serious action should be taken. Banning public assembly is a really serious step, and if the only reason to contemplate it is that poor idiot who attended mass while infected, it may be that fixing the quarantine system is sufficient. Don't know, would like to.

As for the first instinct of government, I am not convinced. Some things they are incredibly concerned about, like human cloning, and others which are far more serious they couldn't care less about, like cars, poverty, and plagues. Yes, I have heard the claim that AIDS is not a concern because it only affects homosexuals, and yes it is disgusting. But on the one hand, treatment of things that kill 'majority' members has often been equally incompetent (speaking of which, when you say flu above, do you mean a regular one, or one of the serious strains like the one after world war II?). And on the other, far more important hand, I don't buy that those who make partial efforts are necessarily supporting the absence of serious ones, especially in cases like the war protests where it has become clear that the serious actions are not going to occur.

In present form, I think this discussion is setting up for violent disagreement about points we don't disagree on and not much consideration of ones which are more important. DiseaseControl I essentially agree with, except I think that looking for cures is still a nice thing for the people who do get infected. I can't think of how to steer the dialog, but if you can come up with a better approach, please do.

I have never heard of any serious potential epidemic materializing just to spontaneously disappear. Can you provide examples?

No, I don't think I can. The flesh-eating streptococci come to mind, but I'm not sure whether they ended up being a genuine threat or not, and after them a German virus the name of which I don't recall. Obviously I wasn't paying enough attention, and something left me with an impression that may or may not be supported by the facts. So if you don't mind, I'd like to withdraw the opinion.

SARS is close to being out of control in China. And now that people are starting to appreciate its danger, despite the media trying to keep a lid on it, people are voluntarily foregoing unnecessary assemblies and travel.

Fixing the quarantine system isn't even close to sufficient. At the moment, Canada has neither any center for DiseaseControl, nor any national disaster relief program. Further, the reason to ban large, unnecessary, assemblies is to avoid false negatives infecting hundreds of people thereby making quarantine measures more difficult and costly.

There are SARS-infected people who were not quarantined because the clinical diagnostic criteria included "contact with a known SARS case". In a disease whose method and rate of transmission is unknown, this is downright stupid. Even if the reason for sending these people home is a cost-cutting government that has savaged its health care system, it's just one example of the fundamental limits to quarantine measures. Imposing restrictions on assembly and travel can slow a contagious disease enough to make the difference between containment and pandemic. Especially if infected people are contagious before showing any signs of the disease (a big unknown with SARS).

When I refer to flu above, I mean ordinary flu, not the Spanish Flu.

Mostly fair enough. I have heard that SARS is not that infectious, being transmitted mainly through contact rather than air, but so long as the disease is poorly understood it's far better to err on the side of caution.

On the subject of protesters. Actually it's quite easy to prove my contention. First, everyone is quick to comment on and reassure people that protests are going to be "peaceful" or other such. Most of the protesters would never have gone to them had the protests been disreputable. And what does "disreputable" mean in our world if not an actual threat to the power elites?

Second, it's quite amazing that among the tens of millions of people who participated in the protests, so very few of them proposed any genuinely effective solutions to the problem. In fact, the only effective actions attempted were taken by the Greeks and Northern Irish who tried to disrupt military bases. The Germans did propose kicking out the US military and disallowing any overflights. But no one that I know of proposed an economic embargo of the USA.

Third, everyone who went to the protests was fairly certain that they would be completely ineffective no matter how large they got. I myself held only a vague hope that they would cause the UK and Australia to capitulate.

Finally, the danger with TokenProtest is that their inevitable failure demoralizes the people who are committed to change. If token protesters aren't deliberately trying to sabotage the movement they're nominally a part of, they're nonetheless doing an effective job of it.

I don't think this comes from a desire to see the movement fail, though, so much as working within a frame where nothing better is possible. As you said, most protesters aren't interested in providing a genuine threat to the power elites, in the sense of the national governments. Those who would be are rightly frightened by the prospect of violent repression. What the protests are supposed to be is non-violent demonstrations to change what the government is doing, as is encouraged within a democratic system. When they fail, the only option that gives you is a bigger protest. The idea, I think, is even if it won't work, it can't be worse than doing nothing.

The same sort of thing, I think, explains why no reasonable solutions have been offered. The economic sanctions proposed elsewhere on this wiki are probably the first reasonable one I have heard, and they had never even occurred to me as a possibility, or to anyone else I have talked to. Simply put, they are not in the universe of discourse, something that people would seriously consider as an option. This includes most people who have heard the idea - you remember how it was dismissed out of hand with some ridiculous claims about how America was staving off European war and the like. Everyone knows sanctions come from a block of countries that includes the US. Besides, I don't think many people would be willing to put up with the consequences of those sanctions - the costs of the absence of sanctions usually being ignored as the status quo.

So, the protesters are serving mainly to demoralize their cause, but this is because they are unwilling to do what it would take to make that cause succeed. It's in that sense that they are TokenProtests: they are not committed to being ineffective, they are committed to a value system that makes them ineffective. It may be that their continuous failure is necessary to convince people that more action is necessary, although you'd think people could have figured that out already.

CategoryAntiPattern, CategoryPolitics?, CategoryPsychology