bitcrafter

They didn't, but lots of people here have wished that they (or someone else) would.

Agreed, but if you had the option of hiding your friends, then that would probably be better than shooting at the people trying to take them away for the simple reason then you would probably get outshot, and if not then more would likely follow. If you don't have that option, though, then by all means start shooting if that is the only way to save their lives.

Applied to this situation: it would probably be better for this group to protest peacefully for as long as they can because once they start blowing up buildings then most likely martial law or something similar will be declared and they will likely lose the ability to do anything unless they can win against the military. Additionally, they would likely end up alienating the general population, so there would be few places they could go to for support.

I mean, if you are not going to engage with the things I actually said, then there is only so much I can in response. 😃

Enjoy your "later dork" Parthian shot.

I genuinely appreciate your concern, but you do not have to worry about me. 😀

I can understand that, but keep in mind that, from my perspective, my original comment,

I think that you might not get to claim the mantle of peaceful protest when you start blowing things up yourself.

was intended to be perfectly innocuous (if a bit wry). After all, the article was about a largely peaceful protest, and introducing demolition into the mix seems like it would be going against the spirit of that.

Regarding, "only tangentially related to the topic", I think that you will note that the paragraph I wrote just now analyzing the effect of the protest on the developer conference and the likely effect it had on recruitment in the long term is more than anyone else in this post has said about what actually happened in this particular protest, rather than various fantasies of Palantir's destruction. I actually would have loved to have more interesting discussion along those lines (because my analysis is not the only valid one!), but there is not much evidence that anyone else here read more than just the title...

This article is about protests that were (arguably) largely peaceful, and I presume that was intentional on the part of the organizers. I doubt that they would be interested in dropping the mantle of peaceful protest in order to gain license to start blowing up buildings. I could be wrong about that, though. Certainly no one here seems to be interested in peaceful protest.

Who would make an argument that exploding anything is peaceful?

You, by posting a comment disagreeing with my original comment pointing out demolition crosses the line into not being peaceful.

Who’s arguing for peaceful protest here?

Apparently no one here, though I think (possibly incorrectly) that the protestors in the article were intending to be peaceful.

And why is the binary of “peaceful/not peaceful” important to you?

I would ask why it seems to be so important to everyone else, given that there was so much resistance to the idea that blowing up buildings is not "peaceful".

Are you trying to make the point that protests aren’t valid or effective unless they’re “peaceful?”

It depends on what the goal of a given protest is.

For example, this protest had the goal of interfering with a developer conference in order to disrupt the recruitment of new talent, and it would seem that they were very effective in this because there was evidence that the event was shut down. However, in the long run I am not sure how much this will help because I suspect that the event will just be rescheduled, and I suspect that the people attending the event probably felt intimidated as a result of all the people banging on the windows rather than guilty for attending the event. (Just to be clear, I am not saying that therefore this was wasted time on their part; I am just saying that celebrating might be premature.)

Regardless, if nothing else, the protest succeeded very well in being very visible and unignorable, and I think that there is a lot of value in that. Certainly I would rather that they do this kind of thing than that they be casually blowing up buildings as many here would prefer.

So property destruction is inherently peaceful as long as the property did not belong to a human being?

So, just to be clear, you are claiming that blowing up Palantir would be an inherently peaceful act?