I’m going to an event soon and the last time I was there there were some of those awful street preachers with megaphones shouting bigotry. They’re a nuisance and nobody wants them there, but it’s a public festival and evidentially they’re allowed to be there.

I tried looking online (reddit-logo)and most of the advice was stupid lib shit, ranging from, “Call the cops and tell them they’re violating statute blah blah blah” or, “Just ignore them, you can’t change their minds and engaging just feeds their persecution complex.” Obviously the cops do nothing, I don’t care about changing their minds or what they think I just want to shut them up. But I also don’t want to get arrested and if possible, it’d be nice to avoid disturbing the other people further.

Most likely, I’m just gonna have to endure it, but I thought I’d raise the question for brainstorming bc it feels like a common enough situation that other people will encounter it too. Best I can think is screaming something back at them emilie-shrug

UPDATE: I ended up just wearing a bunch of pride stuff and then they weren’t even there lol

  • EmmaGoldman [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.netM
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    8 months ago

    Many people have a desire to punch them in the face and run away. They virtually always covertly record video for just that reason with the intent to sue. Usually from multiple locations.

    Legally I cannot tell you “good luck.”

      • ReadFanon [any, any]@hexbear.net
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        8 months ago

        This makes me think of something. I would want to try this out before I’d recommend it as a tactic but if you could induce feedback into their megaphone then it would be a way of interfering without the need to risk any trouble.

        Idk maybe someone who has a knack for sound engineering would be able to weigh in on the best ways to do this.

        I guess one limiting factor would be how close you would need to get to their mic but sometimes as a protest action tactic, doing something that really fucks with someone else’s ability to achieve their goals where they know what you’re doing, they know you’re allowed to do it, and there’s nothing they can do to stop you can bring an additional layer of psychological warfare to your game.

  • FunkyStuff [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    8 months ago

    I don’t know what you can do if not just ignore them. Bring a decently loud speaker and play copyrighted music if they’re recording so they can’t publish the recording? If you wanna take one for the team and aren’t visibly queer you can talk with them and feign interest that you’re a potential convert just to occupy their time.

    • ReadFanon [any, any]@hexbear.net
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      8 months ago

      Disney is notorious for being ruthless with take-downs. If someone is looking for a good option and they don’t know where to start, that’s where I’d point them.

    • krolden@lemmy.ml
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      8 months ago

      I remember the cops doing that during the Floyd protests. They’d play Taylor swift or Beatles in hopes anyone streaming would get taken down by YouTube or whomever.

  • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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    8 months ago

    I mean, aside from just breaking their shins with a bat there isn’t much. Iafaik they all think they know the law and wear cameras so they can sue or arrest anyone who tries to stop them.

    They’re fanatics who are fully convinced they’re in a divinely mandated war against everyone else and tend to have nasty personalities on top of that. Shaming them or embarassing them can work something but it’s not reliable.

    If you’ve got someone who has absolute calm they could try to debate bro them to distract them.

  • Doubledee [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    8 months ago

    If they’re interested in converting people you might be able to take one for the team by appearing interested and distracting them with, basically, bait.

      • krolden@lemmy.ml
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        8 months ago

        Ive found most people standing on a street corner with a megaphone to have the same mentality. They just want to annoy as many people as possible which somehow validates their own opinions.

        Obviously I’m talking about the religious and really nutty ones, mostly.

  • BioWarfarePosadist [she/her, they/them]@hexbear.net
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    8 months ago
    1. Get some Fart spray or like liquid fart, or skunk smell.
    2. Figure out a way to spill it on one or more of them while making it seem like an accident.
    3. Smell is really bad and lingers on them all day making what they say seem even more irrelevant (normie Libs don’t like smelly people yelling outside, reminds them of the homeless too much)
    4. Someone will inform security about the smelly, yelling, and possibly homeless guy. Security will waste time on preacher creating less scrutiny on festival goers. Chance preacher gets thrown out for being smelly and yelling.

    Alternatively get the fart spray and just keep spraying it upwind of the preacher without any aersol directly hitting them. Making the area stinky and making it so people are less inclined to approach them. This will help starve them of the attention they want.

    • ReadFanon [any, any]@hexbear.net
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      8 months ago

      So this is hypothetical and I’ve never tried it out, plus it depends on the drug laws in your region, but if you know what terpenes drug dogs are trained by then you can get your hands on something completely legal that also shares that same terpene and use that to screw with people.

      For example, drug dogs trained to detect cannabis are trained to smell caryophyllene oxide, and black pepper (especially black pepper essential oil) is high in this compound.

      If you were at a festival and there were drug detector dogs at the gate, you could discreetly disperse this (especially away from the gate but close enough to it) and it would interfere with the ability of dogs to detect it.

      You could also get that odour onto someone else to get the police to harass them, if they had dogs or you knew they were going to bring them.

      This isn’t something that I’ve ever tried and you want to be real fucking careful because the pigs would put you up on charges of obstruction of justice or some bullshit if they think there’s even a slight chance of those charges sticking but last time I consulted my naturopath, essential oils are not a crime.

  • ReadFanon [any, any]@hexbear.net
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    8 months ago

    So this is a psychological phenomenon that doesn’t get used nearly as often as it could be, although it’s very much in the realms of Saul Alinsky-tier disruption rather than anything that has real teeth. Still useful though.

    I can’t remember the name of the tactic or the phenomenon itself but when a person is speaking, if they hear their words spoken back to them directly after they have said each one, it disrupts their ability to maintain their train of thought and their verbal fluency.

    I guess that sounds a bit abstract, right? But we’ve probably all been there when there’s been feedback or an echo on a call or in a zoom meeting (where someone’s speakers are feeding back into their mic so that when you talk there’s a half second delay and you hear your own words just after you said them) and it just fucks with your brain.

    You can harness that effect yourself and weaponise it against public speakers to disrupt and frustrate them. It’s also particularly effective because they are likely going to experience a lot of frustration inwards rather than just experiencing people around them booing; if you can’t even get your words out to finish your sentence then it’s really kinda disabling and by making someone feel broken it really wreaks havoc on the individual on a psychological level. It’s pretty unlikely to cause someone to have a mental breakdown but you can expect someone to give up and stomp away because they’re so infuriated with themselves.

    It may require a little bit of practice but if there’s someone else who is keen to get in on the action then you can play around with using it on each other to get a sense of how to do it effectively.

    The other thing is ensuring that you have enough volume to be heard sufficiently that the desired effect of disruption actually works. Doesn’t mean that you necessarily need a megaphone yourself if you can project your voice or you have a makeshift acoustic megaphone made out of a stiff plastic sheet or some heavier cardstock or something similar.

    Edit:
    This is known as Delayed Auditory Feedback. Surprisingly, there’s almost nothing out there on using this as a non-violent protest or disruption tactic so I feel like it was either something that was developed but never really given a label in protest movements or it goes by a completely different name in common parlance.

    There’s a knack to getting your timing right in doing this and it varies depending on the individual speaker but you can induce a lot of verbal disfluency that means a person might be reduced to speaking at a rate of like a word or two per second, meaning that they aren’t going to get through much material and it causes a lot of stress in the speaker.

    A more advanced tactic is, if you get someone on the hook with this and you’re really fucking with them to the point that they are struggling to get their words out because they’re focusing so much on your words, you can throw a curveball at them and say a word before they get to their next word to potentially derail their speech or even to get them to say the wrong thing.

    As an example:

    The Bible
    The Bibe

    Says
    Says

    Homosexuality
    Homosexuality

    Is
    Is… wonderful

    If that makes any sense. By shifting from just repeating back what say to interfering with what they are about to say, it can really throw someone off balance. But they will need to get kinda sucked into your words for this to work. Confident speakers who are rapid tend to be more immune to this but ymmv.

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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      8 months ago

      You can instruments at home, too. Put dry beans in plastic bottles to make rattles! get a heat gun and some pvc pipe and make different kinds of horns. Bang pots and pans. Lots of stuff.

      • Amerikan Pharaoh@lemmygrad.ml
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        8 months ago

        Pretty sure I’ve seen a couple viral drummer vids that was just some twink rigging up a bunch of different-sized buckets and pvc pipes and just thundering away

        • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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          8 months ago

          Sweet! I love that shit. Some of my buddies used to load a bunch of garbage in to the truck of their beater then go have jam sessions in the city park, just absolutely rocking out on jugs and tubs and pots and whatever they could scrounge.

  • ReadFanon [any, any]@hexbear.net
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    8 months ago

    Another idea, although this requires a fair amount of confidence:

    If you know any theatre kids especially, get one of them to play as a mime in front of the speaker.

    If you use physical comedy to turn their speaking into a parody and a comedy routine then it’s going to really mess with what they’re doing - it should attract a reasonable amount of attention but all of it will be focused on what that silly person over there is going to act out using exaggerated gestures and comical body language, so people will find it humorous and delightful rather than paying attention to all the scorn in whatever the speaker is yapping about.

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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      8 months ago

      Yeah, this is probably the best answer. Clowning, like literally getting a clown to perform using them as a prop, makes them look silly and absurd.

  • CthulhusIntern [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    8 months ago

    If I weren’t so shy, I thought of a bit of telling them “God’s not real, I know God isn’t real because God told me he’s not real.” And if they question that whatsoever, say “What are you doing? Questioning God? He came to me and told me he’s not real. So God isn’t real.”