and, to be clear: what's more effective than voting is marching over factories and seizing control of them, and then converting them into publicly owned bodies.

you'll never accomplish that by voting.

rather, you need critical mass - and you can't contribute to it from inside of a jail cell.

demonstrating and marching and waving signs is fun and useful if it helps you meet friends when you're young, but it's pointless in actually doing anything real. that's the lie they tell you: that protesting matters. it doesn't.

"but, what about the civil rights movement".

they had guns, kids. they don't tell you that, but you can look it up. this was not peaceful civil disobedience, it was a display of force.

"what about gandhi?"

gandhi was demonstrating the size of his army to the british governors. what he did was very smart, don't misunderstand me, but it was based on a game theoretic argument that you've probably never heard of. what he said was this: we can fight if you want, but you don't think you can win, do you? the british saw the size of gandhi's army and calculated that they couldn't win and gave up, instead. it only worked because the british were rational. but, this wasn't peaceful disobedience, either - it was a direct threat of violence.

strikes work because they stop production, so you have to make sure that you're actually stopping production if you want them to work. likewise, parades only work when there's a threat of force attached to them, so you have to make sure you're actually being scary, or you're just wasting your time.

you're kids; what you can do is minimal, and hanging out and networking face-to-face isn't the worse way to spend your time at that age, either. but, if you kids get yourself arrested, you're going to have the cops on your ass for the rest of your life. it's a bad idea, and it doesn't help the movement in the long run if your phone is hacked by the cia and recording everything that's happening.

the liberals are supposed to do better than this