The Loudest, Most Effective Protest of All???

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...doesn't involve a loudspeaker or one word on your part. The most effective protest; Do Not Hand Over Your Money.

If you sincerely want your protest to be successful, that is the way to do it and it is so simple to do. It doesn't require you even leave your house and no one need know you are protesting in the first place but you will see the results.

Defund.

Yes, a boycott.

A boycott is a classic and honorable form of protest. If the Muslim group that was angry about the Charlie Hebdo cartoons had organized a boycott of the magazine rather than murdering them, that would have been fine.

Boycotts are another way of looking at it but they usually involve some group announcing an organized boycott which is more publicized while simply not buying involves no on know but you. You can feel satisfied you didn't buy into it.

Announcing a boycott helps and hurts the idea of a boycott because: 1) businesses can deny that they were affected while shifting funds around to cover any losses, 2) others who support the businesses will "buycott" them to make up the lost income, and 3) the announcements tend to have much more bark than bite even among their supporters.

Still, I have had many such silent boycotts going on in my life since I was in college for various reasons. I don't care that my voting dollars don't add up to much. I realize that corporations aren't brought to their knees because they lost 51 percent of their net worth (a fallacy), but because they have lost their net incomes. To most corporations, net income is about 35 percent of their total budgets; and salaries begin to be affected (layoffs) by shortfalls of just a few percentage points of their total budgets.

In other words, if you want to get a corporation's attention, deny it about 5 percent of its budget. That is a whole lot more likely to happen. Case in point: GMO food manufacturers have learned that about 67 percent of Americans will actively avoid their products and shop elsewhere. With that many supporters, the effective boycott of GMOs is a done deal. At the other end of the corporate spectrum, the New Mexico photographer who declined to photograph a same-sex wedding ended up closing her business because she simply couldn't attract clients who, though not LGBT themselves, didn't want to associate with her.

So, boycotts, even unannounced ones, tend to succeed in some cases.

In some cases people get overly moral about boycotts and if something truly offends their sensibilities they will not buycott, like what happened during the civil rights movement when blacks were being denied rights and were being lynched and whatnot.

Nowadays announced boycotts are tougher than they once were and less effective but it's easy enough to not buy and keep quiet. Don't go along with something just because everyone is saying you should if you really disagree for whatever reason. People need conviction and to know what they really like and dislike to be able to take an intellectual stance. These days people can be conned and talked into whatever's not such a great idea very easily. Critical thinking skills seems to be in a decline among the populous.

So ... by boycotting panhandlers, they will eventually go away ... ?

No, but they will switch what they do to get money. In capitalist society, nothing just goes away, things just change method.

Terrorists want to murder because boycotting isn't terrifying but murdering is. They will not learn. They are not reasonable. Two-year-old are more reasonable.

Gunshots and bomb blasts are the loudest, just FYI and all.

A boycot by conservative Muslims would not have worked in this case since they are not the target audience for the paper anyway. Announcing a boycot would only backfire and give the Mohammed cartoons more attention.

Seems impossible but you can actually be loud without even being loud and even louder than any blast.

The public boycotts are a bit of a joke. The silent boycotts work better. Be subtle. Say, hey, is this really what you want to buy? Insults? Point out the hypocrisy and how people seem to despise insults when they are directed at themselves so why buy into it?

Let people decide what kind of world they want, one where it's fine to be as insulting as you want to anyone, to harass them, to have zero respect for them because eventually, that is what will happen to you. If they can be insulted, you can be insulted in this culture, and when you are on a daily basis, you will start to file grievances and complain because no one likes it when it's directed at themselves.