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I see sentiments like this pretty consistently, that protestors need to be able to impede others and disrupt them to make them listen. What I don't follow is how this doesn't grant full license for retaliation and escalation - is that simply ruled out as a possibility on the basis that the protestor is righteous, so there is no license to response to impedance with violence? Surely if one of these protestors was doxxed and I went to their house and simply refused to allow them to exit their door, they'd have legitimate license to use force against me, right?
I'm not being sardonic, I genuinely don't understand why refusing to allow someone to pass isn't provocation to violence.
There's a number of differences - the obstruction is targeted against random rather than specific people, the glue people don't seem to be doing the "you are not going anywhere" thing implicit in refusing too allow someone to exit their house, and of course the first speaker doctrine. The objective of free speech as I see it is strictly to expose people to more viewpoints. Actions that increase the number of known viewpoints are therefore to be supported, and actions that decrease them (such as interfering with/retaliating against viewpoint-pushers) are to be opposed.
I hope you are not trying to imply that I'm making this argument because of any sort of agreement with climate protesters. To be sure, I would be saying the same thing if this happened with a neonazi protest, although of course then there would be little controversy regarding the interpretation of this event in German society.
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If it's only protesters that are righteous, and allowed to disrupt others for attention, then that still grants license for me to temporarily become a counter-protester and disruptively protest your protest by pushing you out the way.
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If the protester was predominantly agreed to be righteous, the protest would be unnecessary; the contra-factual target(s) and/or their society(s) would already be trying to carry out the protester's desires.
What protest historically has relied upon, though, is the possibility of revealing a disagreement between the target and society on just how unrighteous the protestor is being, which may then even lead society to reconsider whether the protester is being unrighteous at all. Half the point of the protest is to get the immediate target to overreact, which then may get society to "come and see the violence inherent in the system", which then may prompt society to change the system rather than acquiesce to enabling further violence.
Society does indeed give license to respond to impedance with violence, albeit to such a limited extent that a non-libertarian might not recognize it as violence. The last climate protest video I saw ended in cheering as bystanders dragged protesters out of the street they were blocking, for example. I bet the bystanders would have burst into song if an ambulance had been among the stuck cars. But there are limits. The public response to running over protesters has been pretty heavily negative, and if you were to go about hunting protesters down at their houses after the fact then I doubt you'd achieve more than a footnote in future textbooks near the photos of Birmingham police water hoses. Serious violence even to stop a crime in progress is already a PR nightmare; retaliation is widely agreed upon to be the government's sole prerogative these days.
In general, I can agree that somebody is right about an issue without approving of their tactics in trying to convince others.
More specifically, I can agree that my wife is correct that we need to replace the carpets, and still be annoyed if she slashes my car's tires every morning before I leave for work until I agree to call the carpet store immediately.
Of course it's possible to believe that someone's cause is righteous even though their tactics are not.
But what I'm doubting in the statement you quoted is that it's possible to believe that someone's tactics are too righteous to deserve a standard punishment even though their cause is not righteous enough to support. Could you think that your wife is incorrect that you need to replace the carpets, but agree that her slashing your cars tires is a reasonable way for her to handle that disagreement and should be consequence-free?
I guess even there I'm neglecting grey areas. There are surely minor crimes (large/loud public assemblies without permits, when they're not badly obstructing traffic?) which most people would want to overlook if committed in service of a political demonstration they disagreed with but would not want to overlook if committed for a more "trivial" reason (a block party, concert, etc).
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