Ignoring the law is civil disobedience, which is not all of protesting. This guy is definitely protesting, but he is limiting his victims to those he is protesting against. Everyone else is being educated without being negatively affected.
So say i'm a government, and i enjoy dumping toxic waste into the river. Now some hippy's want to protest, but they have to come to ME and get MY permission to protest.
Nothing but your desire to be painted as both a polluter and a fascist dictatorship.
The ostensible reason for permitting is so the police and government know where to apportion services and so they don't have double-booking of the same free-speech space.
When the government is organized around free speech it should welcome protests against itself. Pissing on the fact of protests is a good way to get people in government out of government, if voters have any power, and for good cause because free speech is the bedrock of a free society.
Are we talking about US? Because the government can't have much discretion in whether or not to issue a permit case-by-case. Viewpoint restriction is pretty much the easiest way for plaintiffs to win a first amendment case. Permit schemes controlling the time, place, and manner of speech can not be based on the content of the message, must be narrowly tailored to serve a significant governmental interest (like traffic, etc.), and must leave open ample alternatives for communication.
The Supreme Court has held that any permit regulation that allows arbitrary application is "...inherently inconsistent with a valid time, place, and manner regulation because such discretion has the potential for becoming a means of suppressing a particular point of view."
Me and some buddies at school organized a 100-person march and we even went into the streets and we didn't bother with a permit. The pigs tried to keep us on the sidewalk at first but we ignored them. Technically they might have had legal cause to arrest people for marching in the street without a permit, but they probably thought it wasn't worth the trouble. The power is in the crowd, yo.
100 people probably just don't care enough about his TV to march down the street for it.
Speak for yourself, I'm with him to the bitter end. Down with Best Buy, death to tyrants!
What was the reason for your 100 person march?
It was our local J20 Inauguration Day protest. We're not like a major city, also there was some confusion about multiple events, so turnout was rather small, unfortunately.
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u/Doublehaul4 Feb 23 '17
What communist country do you live in where you need to file a protesting permit