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This is certainly just an opinion, but I think for a protest to be effective, it needs a fairly concrete set of goals, with well defined expected outcomes. Without that, the people you are protesting against have absolutely no incentive to change.

And to be clear, I think that the student protests going on do have well defined goals.

You have to realize this all just reads like someone who wants to "just ask questions" and meander about vague misgivings to downplay and discredit the protest right? You lead with focusing on messaging like you're at an ad agency critiquing a professional campaign, divert to a well-worn excuse that protest movements don't have clear goals, say that they do have clear goals, and then imply most of the protesters spending hours out there protesting somehow don't know them.

Like maybe you are just earnestly working through these thoughts and feelings, but this is basically the exact same things people who are JAQing off because protest makes them uncomfortable would say.

To give you context in case you've never experienced it, my first protest was against the Iraq war. It was seemingly well organized by a some major groups with institutional knowledge about setting up protests. People were bussing in to DC and the marching route was pre-planned and organized with cops along with way just to be sure that people stuck to the roads that were blocked off and there wasn't any confrontation with counter-protesters. And still, with all that structure, there were groups there protesting for marijuana legalization and communism and in-group sign wavers talking about Bush v. Gore. Trying to nitpick about "Palestine" or "Palestinians" or whether some people who are demanding divestment also calling for other more optimistic results is just misunderstanding how protests work.

This is a student protest. There isn't a protest boss who can go around and approve the wording on signs. Individuals can rally and self-organize to kick out someone saying something egregious like "death to the Jews", but this idea of "policing the messaging to keep it clear" is just not something you're ever going to get from a protest that isn't a single pre-existing activist organization with a hierarchy and top-down decision making.

There are no perfect protests, and people asking why they aren't perfect are often trying to discredit them rather than out of sincere support for the protest goals. That might not be because they don't approve of the goals themselves, just that they're a secondary concern to a desire for order or political concerns or just plain not liking protest as a means of change.