I can understand that people don’t like riots.

What really shits me is when people are opposed to completely non-violent disruptive protests. Street marches, die-ins, gluing yourself to statues, throwing non-destructive liquids onto monuments, etc. If you put your mild inconvenience or sense of propriety ahead of a cause, that’s clearly not a cause you believe in, so stop blaming the protestors for your lack of support.

Not all protest is good protest.

Block a random highway and all you’re going to do is get people mad at your cause for making them late for work. Those people could be future allies that are getting driven away. Criticizing the form of protests is valid.

The point of protests is to make the issue were palatable to deal with than the protests.

Being completely demure and effecting nobody is a bad protest. Make the consequences measurable.

I often think that when people talk about peaceful protest, they use the broadness and ambiguity of the word “”“peaceful”“” to clamp down on any actual protest. The civil rights movement was non-violent, and if non-violence is your standard for peaceful, than it’s peaceful. Conservatives however see anything illegal happening in a protest, and even though there was lack of violence, will say “they did something illegal, therefore it isn’t peaceful”. Civil disobedience, that is illegally not following an unjust law, must be practiced for non-violent protest to be effective. Over the years conservatives have managed to make it seem as if the civil rights movement won by just passively picketing buildings.

By the way, It’s a matter of semantics sure, but sometimes, semantics can be very important, especially if you want to make a very specific point.