Whoever keeps throwing in the shit about law enforcement in these stories, which I think was actually a security officer for the embassy, drawing a gun, is doing a pretty good job of distracting from the main issue of what this guy lit himself on fire and died for. Doing a much better job than all the whinging about how he was mentally ill, and how this won’t change anything, and how there’s no clear cause, that mainstream news outlets are doing when they cover this type of stuff, if they cover it at all.

I would also like to kind of point out here, that “this won’t change anything, this guy was mentally ill, he killed himself for nothing”, is really only true if you decide it to be true. We get to decide whether or not this motivates us to do something or not. We get to decide whether or not we let this affect us. Whether or not we do something, to make sure this doesn’t happen again, you know? And that’s mostly, in my mind, the purpose of this kind of protest.

Maybe it makes the institutions think about what they’re doing, probably not, since, if they were gonna think that, they should’ve probably thought that about the 20,000 or so palestinians that have been killed. This protest is mostly engineered to get you mad, and sad, and to make you, the viewer, think about why this is happening, and think about what you can do to stop it. Not just deflecting immediately to whether or not it was effective, because by doing so, you let it not be as effective.

Brings to mind the discourse against, really any form of protest that I’ve seen. You could take the george floyd protests, for example. So, sure, the government throws in agent provocateurs, in order to turn what would otherwise be peaceful protests, which would shut down any traffic into and out of the city, and would choke off any economic activity (puts pressure on businesses, utilities, puts pressure on local government, which needs to please these people who don’t really care about the protest but want things to go back to normal).

But by doing so, right, by causing those passive forms of damage, but also by causing active forms of damage, say, burning a big box store down, right, the public showcases that, if a certain legal decision to, say, let derek chauvin off, occurs, then there will be potentially more protests and more destruction, which provides great incentive against that decision occurring.

Now, in this case, there’s not as clear of a process, because there’s not as clear of repercussions if they decide to do nothing. About the only thing that might happen is that this might happen again, which, might, by some process of media coverage, put enough pressure on politicians to cause this to stop, if it becomes a political issue. The same thing is happening with mass shootings, which aren’t a greatly impacting issue, by the numbers, right, they’re much less than that of road deaths, heart disease, other forms of gun violence.

But they are so horrifying to the american public and to really anyone of moral conscience, that they should serve as a clear marker that something is wrong, and something needs to change. Serial killers create a similar effect. It’s almost like a kind of terrorism, using that word without judgement, here. That’s the power of these protests. We’ve already seen it spread across a bunch of news media, even though it’s being reported about as poorly as you’d expect.

I’m not particularly sure that repeat incidents would do any good, and I think I’d generally be opposed to that, as should anyone, but, an instance of self-immolation is what caused the arab spring. This sort of thing isn’t ineffective, I think it does a disservice to aaron bushnell to say otherwise.

If you want to stop this sort of thing from occurring in the first place, you should really try to understand why it was happening, instead of brushing it aside.