Of course Ferguson came out against the airport-blocking protests. Where else are progressives going to go? Mullet? Bird? Riiiight. Sure, progressives can just not vote at all, but how many people will decide not to vote for governor over that particular question? Almost none. And coming out in favor and/or taking no position would have been fodder for millions of dollars in anti-Ferguson ads.

I'm surprised the piece about Fremont Brewing didn't mention Sara Nelson. And I guess they'll have to take the "family owned" stuff off the marketing materials.

Super smart fucking idea: asking a democratic-appointed Supreme Court Justice to retire in an election year, about 6 months before the election, with the Senate barely in democratic control because of 3 independents. What could possibly go wrong? She's 70, no spring chicken but certainly not on death's door. And, more importantly, it's HER FUCKING DECISION. Jeebus.

Dozens of Pro-Palestine Protesters Arrested for Blocking Sea-Tac Airport - and I’m sure they’re very proud that their ‘look-at-my-virtue-signaling’ stunt caused hundreds, if not thousands of travelers to miss their flights, unnecessarily delaying their return to family and work, costing them money and potentially their jobs.

Everyone - raise your hand if these idiots won you over to their cause.

The pro Hamas crowd stages a protest that will accomplish nothing other than making people miss their flights.
That’ll show Netanyahu.

Driving to the airport is stupid.

Sotomayor is only 69, she’s 15 years younger than Ginsburg was during than 2016 election year, these cries for her to resign so she can be replaced by Joe Manchin and Sinema are truly baffling.

@5, SeaTac is a major regional transit hub, most of its users don’t live on the one solitary light rail line that can take someone there without driving.

That video is well after Gwen Stefani's early 90s ska era. Try this one? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcP2QZI-ECs

“Ferguson wants to come off like a fascist to appeal to so-called independent voters who are open to voting blue this year because Trump man bad, and Reichert wants to come off like a thoughtful gentleman cop to appeal to people whose only politics are civility politics.”

Obviously, when the main results of your protest actions just so happen to sound exactly like people telling you that your protest actions are alienating them from your cause, your only path forward is to double down on your attack rhetoric, and then whine about “civility politics.”

Blocking access to airports is essentially an act of terrorism, far from a "peaceful protest".

(And we told by the MSM that white supremacy was. When was the last time the Proud Boys block access to airports?)

Thank you @3 for saying what needed t be said. We have a man running for president who says he is going to be a dictator on day one, Americans dying from gun violence, corporations bleeding the American people dry and this is what they are fighting for to inconvenience their fellow citizens. All of this so they can post their "heroics" on social media and get kudos though their efforts will result in nothing other than the aforementioned inconvenience. Seattle seems to be at the forefront of this stupidity, as evidenced by a man who is destroying a park but being bailed out by an anonamyous source not once but twice. Stupid is as stupid does.

Protesting isn't supposed to be nice. Tell 'em, Malvina.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvC4xq32AX8

The pro – Palestinian protesters keep getting stupider and stupider. The result of all this is going to be a lot of people who never even thought about Palestine now know that the Palestinians made them miss their plane. Really fucking smart and guaranteed to build support. Also, regardless of how you feel about Boeing, Alaska Airlines has less than nothing to do with what’s going on in the Middle East. And the people engaged in commerce at the airport certainly have nothing to do with it. It’s really becoming almost impossible to comprehend how fucking stupid these people are.

@9- The Proud Boys may not have blocked access to airports, but they certainly tried to block access to an orderly transition of power. Which do you think is worse?

@6: Yeah, no shit. That's why we built those giant parking lots along light rail.

11: There is wide difference between “not nice” and ”effective”.

@3, 4, 10, 12:

Please see #11. I suppose y'all would have complained about the Selma march of 1965 and how inconveniencing all those poor, innocent, law-abiding drivers unable to get across the Edmond Pettus Bridge did absolutely nothing to garner support for the protesters' cause.

Correction: The Edmund Pettus Bridge.

The protestors masking with respirators and N95s is because...? Covid?

Hide identities from the press? Hide identities from right wing bloggers?

Hide identities from the cops? They'll figure out who you are after you're arrested.

The First Amendment doesn't protect illegal actions taken while exercising the right to speech. Like for instance it's protected speech to say "I don't care what every single investigation into these allegations has shown, this election was stolen!" but it's not protected to storm the halls of Congress and say it with your feet up on Nancy Pelosi's desk because that last part is a crime. Not because of the words, but because of the location and circumstances of their utterance!

Just apply the same logic to speech you agree with, and you're starting to get it.

Oh, tear gas. Goggles, too.

I don't think the cops bothered with tear gas tho...

@2 The Chicken , @6 98102CH , @12 and @13 dvs99 +4 for the WIN!!!!

@9: Eat your paste before it hardens, raindrop dear.

I'd SO love for the Orange Turd to drop dead from a stroke within the last few months before this nightmare election. For me it would be entertaining to see how long before all the rabid MAGA dipshits realize their Gropenfuhrer isn't just nodding off but in dire need of a coffin to be publicly shat, pissed, and spat on. Then it can be caught on video worldwide. The cheering throughout what's left of our KKKorporate RepubliKKKan and RWNJ devastated planet would be loudly echoing around the globe.
Additionally, Vladimir Putin's dropping dead soon would also be a big help. We'd still have China's President Xi Jinping, North Korean Dictator Kim Jong Un, and Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to deal with, but Ukraine and the West Coast would certainly be a good deal safer. May all these neofascists get cornholed in hell.

And WTF is up with gun control laws that voters passed here in Washington State getting repealed because automatic weapons "didn't exist in 1791" ?!?!?!? Fuck all MAGA turds and RWNJs hellbent on returning to Colonial Slave Trade and Civil War Era lawlessness!

@15 You're talking about it. It's effective.

@13 / @16: What is this, false equivalence poker day?

@11 Depends what the desired effect is. It's not going to convince politicians (absent a shift in public opinion) or people stuck in traffic. It might build solidarity among the protesters. It might increase visibility of the movement. But unless the police come down so hard that it builds public sympathy, it's unlikely to shift public opinion.

@16 I'm guessing that the main effect of the protest on the Pettus bridge was to show people outside the South what Southern police brutality looked like. That swung popular support outside the South toward the protesters, which pushed the politicians.

Pro tip: inconveniencing random strangers is not an effective way to garner support or build a coalition. It just makes you, and the movement you support, look like extremist weridos.

If you really want to do something meaningful for the residents of Gaza, and sitting in a public roadway is your preferred approach, there is no shortage of military facilities in Washington that are utilized for the shipment of arms to Israel and elsewhere. Go blockade JBLM main gate, you'll definitely get some attention.

@12: Blockading an ambulance on I-5, vandalizing artwork, threatening reporters, and now trying to make randos miss their flights — their curve just isn’t looking up, is it?

@16: When your first response consists entirely of a speculative argument — one which is really just an excuse to call persons with whom you disagree closet racists — right there, you might want to consider the validity of the point you’re trying to make. (Also, see @24 for what you got wrong.)

@11, @22: There is such a thing as bad publicity, dear. Read the comments here to learn the effects of it.

@14 Most light rail parking lots only allow parking for 24 hours, and of course that's assuming you can actually find a spot. Were you under the impression most people taking flights out of SeaTac are on day trips, or were you simply arguing from a position of ignorance?

Why not form an international brigade of combatants to go and defend the people of Gaza; kind of like the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. If you do you had better keep an eye over your shoulder. During the Spanish Civil War the socialists were too busy shooting each other; had it not been for that they just might have won.

@28, FTW!

@16
Nothing this group of whiney ass Hamas lovers did will have the slightest bit of influence over Netanyahu and how Israel conducts this war.
All they did was creat a traffic jam and piss people off. (Just think of all the carbon emissions from all those cars stuck along the highway)
They also had police protecting them and don’t deserve to be mentioned along side the civil rights protesters of the 1950s & 60s.

The protesters are selfish, childish and irresponsible. They don't care if their stupid virtue signalling protest kept someone from catching their flight they paid thousands of dollars for to visit loved ones, or snarled up people in traffic while trying to get to an urgent appointment, or heaven forbid rushing to the hospital. This ridiculous theater should be prosecuted fully. It is a form of terrorism against your fellow citizens who have done nothing to deserve such treatment.

The author of the piece calling for Sotomayor's retirement spends about half his word count trying to convince himself. It shouldn't be persuasive to anyone else. The real Scotus-related danger of a Trump presidency isn't that one of the centrists will die in office but that Alito and Thomas (both well into their 70s) will retire and be replaced by fascist 40-somethings, which would end any reasonable chance of moderating the court for a generation. This scenario merits consideration by anyone who's tempted not to vote Democratic in November. (And yes, it also merits Biden's consideration if he can't get his poll numbers above Trump's by August.)

@27: Most people clogging up the airport expressway are dropping off or picking up people. Here's an idea: drop them off or pick them up at Angle Lake or Tukwila station and let light rail do the rest.

@26 Of all of those outcomes you listed, inconveniencing randos who have other transportation means available to avoid inconvenience (see @33) seems like the least bad option. I'm not saying it's effective or useful, just not anywhere near as bad as delaying ambulances. And definitely, far, far away from terrorism despite @9's vapors.

22: If my one-line vapid online comment on a Seattle-based blog about this protest meets your definition of “effective”, then yes, I guess you’re right.

Was at the airport yesterday trying to get home. Protesters were at the light rail station too. Hilairously (and predictably) it was racist young white people chanting about freeing Palestine, Puerto Rico and Hawaii. But failing to explain why the hell they were still present in North America and not back in Europe. I suppose if you follow their logic, they will return to Europe to expel all the brown people from there?

I wish young people would start thinking for themselves and stop following the boomer handbook for political protest. The only reason these tactics worked then was because everyone had something on the line. The vast majority of Americans can’t fine Gaza on a map and really don’t care either way.

I'm glad the majority of comments on the board today are critical of these shutdowns and I'm equally glad to read they were arrested and their cars were towed. I hope they too are charged like their buddies who shut down I-5 a couple months ago. You may have a right to protest but that doesn't mean there aren't consequences, as #37 has reminded us many times the protestors from previous generations expected to be arrested.

@16 great job winning ignorant comment of the day. Tell me, how many of the civil rights icons that those people were protesting for raped women and killed children as part of the "resistance"? There is no equivalence here. Supporting Hamas, Hezbellah and Iran is evil and equating them to the civil rights movement just shows how incredibly out of touch you are with reality.

@33: Yeah, add 90 min of anxiety in your (or someone's) day to catch a flight. You'd have to time it so you'd wouldn't spend 20 min waiting the next train. Then there's the long, long walk from Light Rail in SeaTac to the ticket counters.

Don't fly much, obviously.

One of the most disturbing aspects of this "movement" is the gaping delta between professed humanitarian concerns, and the ennui from this crowd (and their cue card holders including the Stranger) regarding Ukraine.

30k dead in Gaza and counting. Yes, it is indeed horrible. It is also a rounding error in the cauldron of Donbass. 30k died recently in one battle alone (Avdivka). Hundreds of thousands are dead, and hundreds of thousands more will likely be killed before it is over. The humanitarian sentiment, when sincerely held, is usually accompanied by utilitarian ethics. It's absence here is revealing.

For Gen Zs especially, the only "colonization" that you might be a change agent to thwart will be Putins grand project to erase a nation of 43 million. And a nation, BTW, that wants to join the European community, is working for a socially inclusive society, and values human rights and democracy. You should be hopping mad MAGAT Republicans have blocked aid for 6 months. You should be demanding Raytheon, Boeing and Lockhead send their weapon systems to Kyiv that shoot down missiles honing in on schools and hospitals, not calling for their boycott.

Naa. Better to pick, among a whole coterie of stateless peoples, one that is led by a theocratic mafia bent on global jihad, that throws lgbtq+ persons off buildings, and who stand opposed to every precept of a 206er. Truth bomb - colonization might be bad, but there are worse things than colonization out there. The imagined future of Hamas is certainly one of them.

Perhaps your grandparents could have donned the checkered kaffiyeh, flush with a Stokely Carmichael speech and feel ideologically inclined to the secular, leftist movement of the PLO. But today, Arafat is dead, and the kaffiyehs in Gaza, if you've happened to notice, are emblazoned green, a Shahada and loyalty oath to some martyrs battalion. And this excites you more than Ukraine because...

@33 Ah, got it. I thought when you said "that's why we built those giant parking lots along the light rail," you intended to make a point about parking at light rail stations. I didn't anticipate you'd then move the goalposts, and start arguing about the utility of dropping off or picking up passengers at a light rail station.

@41 Don't drivers dropping off and picking up people actually park? Or do they usually hop in and out of a moving car? Anyhow, think differently, dude. Driving to the airport is stupid. There are other options.

If Doug thinks driving to the airport is stupid, one is still at liberty to do so.

@39 On the other hand, you'd avoid the utter disaster that is the airport drive (either level) during about 85% of the time when anyone actually uses it.

@39: Even when the drive is slow going, you'd make better time than light rail. More comfortable and less stressful as well, for you and your guest. Isn't that also important?

These protests are not innocuous. They help get Republicans elected.

Tom Cotton calls for murdering and torturing protestors. This is AmeriKKKa. He is a fucking senator in the United States Congress. This country is a shit hole of hate and it getting bombed into the stone age (the way Israel has bombed Gaza into the stone age) is literally the best thing that could ever happen to it. The United States needs to be thoroughly and completely destroyed. If anyone survives maybe they will SHUT THE FUCK UP.

I haven’t flown anywhere in ages, but I often drop people off or pick them up at the airport, because not everyone lives near LINK, and taking a bus to the airport is sad.

When I drop people off, I just let them off at departures, but when I pick them up I come early and park so I can walk around and people watch, then help my pick up with their bags (I don’t pick up people who just have carry-ons. That’s corny.)

@47: Good to see xina has moved on, from eliminationist rhetoric directed at Israel, to eliminationist rhetoric directed at the United States. (The difference, of course, is that Israel hasn’t provided xina with every last thing our current society can be reasonably expected to provide a citizen.)

Thank you, xina, for showing the Stranger where it all ends. Your rhetoric merely takes what the Stranger has been doing re Gaza to the logical conclusion. No nuance, no understanding, no examination of a 75-year, multi-sided conflict in a part of the world where conflict has been the norm for most of recorded history. There is only Oppressor and Victim, Imperialist and Indigenous, Colonizer and Colonized. But if Israel has no right to exist for those reasons, then neither does the United States. Again, thank you, xina, for making this clear.

And grownups don’t call this genocide. If Israel were carrying out genocide the Palestinians would all be dead by now.

@51: Eh, don’t be so sure of that. Israel’s army might not be as all-powerful as some people believe. They’ve been fighting six months now, and they still can’t clear a battlefield the size of Las Vegas. And that’s against an enemy with no air force, no navy, and no resupply. Frankly, Israel is flopping.

@47: Oh dear. Tom should be more savvy and circumspect - but so refreshing when a politician says the quiet part out loud.

@51: Just killing everyone would be faster and easier than selectively engaging terrorists who are commingled with civilians. Conventional fighting against other state militaries is something the IDF has proven to be very, very good at, starting on day one in 1948, and continuing at least through Rocket Attack Iran last weekend. But counter-terrorism in urban environments, especially where the terrorists have extensively prepared those environments, is another matter entirely.

Rich, I can't believe you're for pushing SCOTUS Justice Sonja Sotomayor to retire! This is nothing but another typical MAGAt plot to ensure 100% neofascism 24/7. If we're going to oust anyone I strongly suggest the following:
1. Clarence Thomas and its Ginny-bitch
2. Brett Kavanaugh
3. Samuel Alito, Jr.
4. Neil Gorsuch
5. Amy Coney Barrett
6. John Roberts
and while we're at it:
7. Mitch McConnell (let's NOT wait until his current U.S. Senate term is up!)
8. Orange Turd's #1 Howler Monkey, Marjorie Taylor Greene
9. Matt Gaetz
10. current MAGA fool Speaker of the House of Misrepresentatives, Mike Johnson
11. current 'shroom chompin' Trump ho, Aileen Cannon

Better yet, let's ban ALL RepubliKKKans.
Agreed with Catalina Vel-DuRay; they're horrible excuses for people.

@54: Poetic justice would also have the Orange Turd hauled out in an elephant sized garbage bag and hurtled one-way into outer space.

@53 re is it genocide
or merely Mass Murder

my favorite reader’s
comment on
the nyt’s:

The Israeli
Censorship Regime
Is Growing. That Needs to Stop.

the comment:

Israel
and its
proponents
have been caught
by surprise at the global
condemnation to its campaign of retribution.

The savagery of
Hamas on October 7 was
bestial, ruthless and appalling.

But it was also very successful. Hamas
knows it cannot destroy Israel on its own,
but it can goad Israel into doing it for them.

Israel under the reactionary regime of Netanyahu
has attacked an unarmed civilian population
with absolutely no consideration of mass
casualties, Geneva Convention rules,
guilt or even humanity.

[speaking of dehumanizing]

Netanyahu in particular is fighting
for his political life and personal freedom,
and no number of piles of dead Palestinian children
or acres of stolen Palestinian property in the West Bank
will instill an iota of compassion or even common sense in him.

Israel's genocidal fury
is unjustifiable, dispro-
portionate and horrifying.

It is also serving to separate Israel
from the protection of the West
which it has taken for granted.

This
is precisely
what Hamas was
striving to achieve, and will
leave Israel alone and vulnerable.

The response has been
to try to shut down
all criticism.

Israel will not permit journalists in Gaza be
-cause they do not want facts recorded
nor Palestinians presented favorably.

The various pro-Israel groups in the West,
particularly in the US, target free speech
that demands Israeli accountability.

Shutting down speech will destroy Israel, not protect it.

--Shar; Atlanta

more:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/17/opinion/gaza-journalists-censorship-israel.html#commentsContainer
[formatting mine]

‘Israel's genocidal fury
is unjustifiable, disprop-
ortionate and horrifying.

It is also serving to separate Israel
from the protection of the West
which it has taken for granted.

This
is precisely
what Hamas was
striving to achieve, and will
leave Israel alone and vulnerable.’

Leaving Jews
PLANET-Wide
Vulnerable. Dump Bibi
Before it’s Too Fucking Late

Oh and END
The GENOCIDE