Context: in the UK, climate activists got 4-5 years in jail for planning a non-violent protest. The law that made this possible was literally written by the oil lobby: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-investigations/rishi-sunak-right-wing-think-tank-anti-protest-laws-policy-exchange/?ref=publicsquare.uk
but when your “peaceful protest” is causing deaths by causing car crashes and delaying ambulances I think you both deserve some sort of repercussions and to lose the right to call it a peaceful protest
How many people were killed by ambulances being delayed and car crashes due to protests exactly? Genuinely curious.
I just looked up the car crashes and it was 3 people to hospital as a direct result of the traffic, I got casualties mixed up with deaths. I’ll edit my comment to say.
There’s no exact figure on ambulances delayed, but given all the traffic it caused, but for heart attacks (all I could find good data on) the chances of surviving are halved in a 4 minute period (https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/JAHA.120.017048), so factoring in all serious injuries there’s a decent chance that at least one outcome was severely affected if not changed to death as a result of an ambulance being delayed.
Right so causalities in car crashes, and no actual deaths, and you don’t have any evidence of deaths caused by these protests, only hypotheticals.
I think you have been swept up in the outrage machine drummed up by the newspapers around JSO, which oil companies and the government are using to crack down on dissent and protests by making it easier to arrest people for protests and silence people on behalf of oil companies. You know, the same people who want you to think that Climate Change is a “ever in the future” problem.
I made a mistake from remembering something I read a long time ago and corrected my comment accordingly. I also made it clear that I thought the sentence for the protesters was way too harsh, I just took issue at the words “peaceful protest” when people were injured as a fairly direct result of their actions.
I definitely support JSO over the oil companies and whoever they pay off in government, but I don’t think claiming a protest is “peaceful” should be a “get out of jail free card”. Call it a justified protest or whatever, but the vast majority of what protesters call “peaceful protest” is actually not peaceful at all, as the actual peaceful protesters aren’t having to defend their agressive or unpeaceful actions.
