It would be nice if we could magically just know how sincere a person was when they say something. Of course, you’d find out that your mom really did have a favorite kid and your boss isn’t going to think about giving you a raise so there are some downsides. But with this magic power we could tell just how legit a given protest was.
Well, my superpower ring still hasn’t come in the mail so I guess we’ll just have to do this the hard way.
First off, this isn’t even a science, let alone an exact science. Best guess is the best we’re going to manage. Even so, we can be pretty confident in some of our analysis.
There will be true believersTM in almost every crowd. The question isn’t are the protestors true believers but are MOST of the protestors true believers? Just like we don’t count the one TBTM as proof that the protest is legit, we don’t count the one fake as proof that the protest isn’t legitimate. What we’re looking for is the majority – in statistical terms, the mode. Why are MOST of those people marching in protest? That is what determines the legitimacy of the protest.
A legitimate protest should have a majority of people marching because they genuinely believe in the cause. The few hangers on do not diminish the legitimacy. But if the majority are there for other reasons, the legitimacy comes into question.
Other reasons include things like ‘all my friends were marching’. Peer pressure can inflate protest numbers but not votes in the ballot box. Boredom is, weirdly enough, another reason people who don’t care about the cause will march. Wanting to feel like they are doing something important is yet another that gets them in the march but may not change their voting behavior.
Honestly, none of those are particularly significant. You can only pressure so many people into doing something they aren’t interested in. There will be a few in every crowd but rarely more than a few. They are usually easy to identify. They show little enthusiasm and leave as soon as possible. Frankly, they can be ignored as they don’t tell us anything about the real legitimacy.
Employees and students are a bit different. Employers and professors can bring about a ton of pressure. In some instances, there can be a significant number of people protesting simply to keep their jobs or get a good grade. In those cases, the protest’s legitimacy is brought into question or may be totally undermined. These, too, are fairly easy to identify because that kind of coercion will result in disgruntled people blowing the whistle.
What about the big one? Paid protestors. How easy are they to identify? Not as easy but there are some clues.
First off the problem is that a really well organized protest may have some similar traits. The first thing I look for is professional signs and banners. A few don’t tell me anything but if I see a sea of obviously professionally done signage, I start to question the protest. Same thing with national flags – are they all the same size? If so, that is much more likely to have been handed out to participants than to have been brought or bought individually.
Look at any college game near a national holiday. You’ll see thousands of American flags but they will come in dozens of different sizes. Much more likely that those folks either brought a flag from home or bought one from a vendor. Vendors don’t tend to have only one size unless they are usually selling something else. A flag vendor will have several sizes so to maximize sales.
But an organized or a paid protest will have flags all the same size. Most of their signage will be the same size, too. Why? Printers generally charge less if you buy in bulk. It’s more cost efficient to buy hundreds of flags the same size than it is a few dozen of each size.
As a very general rule, organized protests will only hand out a few dozen flags/signs and those to folks willing to seek out media to wave those things in front of. Now, paid protests do that kind of thing, too but to guarantee coverage, they tend to hand out flags by the hundreds.
Paid protests tend to have deep pocket backers. These can be corporations but are often nation states or major political organizations. They can usually afford more political bling. The exception is obvious – candidate rallies. At least in America, campaigns want a sea of red, white and blue in the crowd for the media to see and they are willing to pay for it by handing out flags like there was no tomorrow.
So are campaign rallies not legitimate? They’re legit enough but they are also highly orchestrated. It’s rare for them to be huge – unless you’re Donald Trump’s campaign – but the people in the crowd are mostly true believers. It’s not unusual for them to also be highly active in that candidate’s campaign or party so the only time to take notice is if they are really big – tens of thousands – or really small – under one hundred.
Back to paid protests. What you’re looking for is uniformity. Organic protests just don’t have that polished, professional look. Protests that look like political rallies are suspicious. If the protest is supposedly in immediate reaction to some event but it looks like everyone has a professionally done sign and the same flag, it’s almost certainly a paid protest. Most of the folks showing up are paid to be there.
The more it looks like a marching band, the less organic it is. I can tell you from experience, marching bands don’t look that good unless they work for it. If everyone is grabbing poster board and running to the protest, those folks are there because they really believe in what they are doing. If they all have the same signs and only a few are getting their mugs in the cameras, they are there for an agenda and probably not their own.
I wouldn’t call telling these things apart an art – frankly, unless you can trace the money, you simply won’t know for sure. Our lamestream media rarely bothers to follow the money unless they don’t agree with the protestors. You can track it down if the organizers are legit. If you can’t find out who paid for all the pretty signs, that’s not likely to be a legit organization or protest.
All that said, it’s worth the trouble to consider just how legitimate these things are when you see people filling the streets. These days there are so many that its easy to just dismiss them all as fake. But that’s not fair to the legit protestors that are trying to make a point and not just manipulate you.
So, the big question – which ones do I think are fake? I’ve been deeply suspicious of the anti-Ukraine protests in Europe. They all had that professional look but more importantly, they seemed suspiciously timed to benefit Russia in most cases. I’d be amazed if no anti Ukraine protests occurred but way too many looking way too good and timed perfectly with Russia’s interests? Yeah, no. Not buying it.
The pro Palestinian protests are a more mixed bag but I still find them suspicious on the whole. The ticked off college kid versions seem most common which makes the fact that they all carry the exact same Palestinian flag highly suspect. These kids can’t all have rich parents. The London protest was odd in its size but didn’t really look all that organic. I think that one may have been organized and grew organically but not with the ‘make a sign and yell loudly’ crowd. I tend to be dubious of it but only in part. For the majority of these things, they are obviously organized and appear to prey on the young and the clueless.
Someone paid for all those Palestinian flags and Arafat hound’s tooth. College students are unlikely to know about the hound’s tooth. Someone is pushing some buttons, that much I’m sure of.
So, if protests are paid, that means that they aren’t important, right? Er, yes and no. It means that that particular protest isn’t legitimate. But unless it is tiny – these do happen – not all of those people are paid to be there and there are true believers in the mix. Massive protests are used to clothe movements in legitimacy. Basically, it’s ‘lookie at all the people who support our cause!’. Paid and orchestrated protests look like they have greater support than they really do. They are done to manipulate the electorate – the citizens whose opinions actually affect public policy.
They are giant PR stunts. Ever buy something that looked great in the glossy, slick ads but turned out to be a waste of time and money? Same idea only in politics instead of cheap Chinese goods. Worth about as much.
What can you do? First don’t get caught up in the hype. Don’t believe for a second that you can’t get snookered because you’re on the ‘right’ side. Humans don’t come in size perfect and that includes you. Don’t let others do your thinking no matter how sure you are that they were right the last time.
EACH CASE TO ITS OWN MERIT!!!!!
That’s fancy for decide each thing based on the evidence presented in that argument, not on lumping cases together in convenient dumpsters. That’s how you get dumpster fires.
Is war bad? Danged spiffy it is. But the Arab/Israeli peace process has killed, maimed, and harmed more people than all six of the danged wars! Until humanity is perfected sometime after the Second Coming, we’re stuck with being imperfect beings in an imperfect world who have to just muddle along doing the best we can to make that imperfect world a little bit better than it was when we got here.
I HATE the trolley problem. Oh, I understand that it’s just a philosophic construct – kinda like a mental experiment – to examine ethics and morality in smaller, more approachable bits. The thing is annoying because people assume it proves something it doesn’t – morality is arbitrary – and it has a solution.
Yes, really. Half switch and derail the stupid trolley. It has to be moving fairly slow to be able to switch so derailing probably won’t kill anyone.
We use ‘military operations’ pretty much the same way. We try to avoid the full out war while doing enough damage to make the belligerents knock it off. Of course it doesn’t always work. Imperfect people, remember? But the US is pretty good at it. Despite what the ‘US government always bad’ crowd says, the death tolls in both the second Iraq and the only Afghan wars were miniscule compared to Viet Nam or Korea.
Nothing compares to the insanity that was World War Two which is why we wanna avoid doing that again, thank you very much.
Nor were those wars pointless. It irks me no end to hear veterans of those conflicts talking like they didn’t accomplish anything. Not irritated with them but with us – we massively messed up if they weren’t told what they accomplished. You’re probably scratching you head wondering the same thing.
That is a massive political failure. But only in the PR realm.
Anyway, what good did they do? Stability. I know, it doesn’t fit on an Excel sheet and accountants hate it but the evidence for the unquantifiable reality is very strong. The Middle East as a whole is far and away more stable than it was even twenty years ago.
Part of that is a generation that grew up questioning why they should fight their grandparents wars. Part of it is cultures change over time, like it or not. But the biggest part was that the Middle Eastern nations got a very nasty wake up call, first when the US came down hard on the terrorist exporting Afghanistan and second when we didn’t just pack up and go home when the going got tough.
Those nation states quickly realized that business as usual would get them destroyed. There never was that much unity in the Middle East and the cracks were on display. Mess with the US and you were likely on your own. That was an easy choice – time to find other things to do!
A few paragraphs make things sound simpler than they really are. People only come in size messy and they only create messy Bodies Politic as a result. But the point stands – going in when and how we did has generated a massive dividend for both the Western World and the Middle East. Stability gives a nation state so many more options that benefit its citizens than strife ever will.
It’s just unfortunate that sometimes we have to do the strife part to get to the stability part.
Worse there is no instruction manual. The Bible is a great guide but it’s not a text book .Stupid trolley problem without knowing you have options. You are expected to figure it out when you DON’T have the advantage of hindsight.
Just like the rest of humanity throughout history. Technology doesn’t solve the problem of being human. That one is left to us.
There’s no one right answer that will always be right. No matter how big or legitimate the protests, those people are just people and they have no guarantee of being right, either.
Don’t let them think for you. Don’t assume large numbers mean legitimacy and righteousness.
Those large numbers may just mean deep pockets.
The other, really important thing you can do is talk to real people. Not pixels that may or may not be the real thoughts of a living human being, but the old fashioned, face to face, sit down and TALK.
It takes more than one good point to convince anyone. Worry less about winning the argument than about getting someone else to hear what you have to say. In exchange, listen to what they have to say. Heck, they might have a better idea this time than you do. Or they may come around to your way of thinking. Those things take time but the important part is the free exchange of ideas, good, bad and really silly.
Talk to people!
But, but…
Stop right there. If every conversation ends in a fight, you are the problem. Common denominator is you, right? But so what? It just means you don’t have good conversation skills. Those are easy to learn.
Yes, really. I had fewer than five friends from first to eighth grades and only two of those lasted three months. No clue how the heck to talk to people and I had to start from scratch in ninth grade. I highly do NOT recommend trying this at home. But if that scared, geeky kid could learn to talk to people and make real, lasting friendships, then you can learn how to talk to your uncle at Thanksgiving without starting World War Three.
Just takes practice. Plenty of folks on videos that will be happy to give you pointers if you get stuck.
Don’t let protests think for you and definitely don’t let them speak for you. You have a God given brain and a voice all your own.
Use them.
