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Originally written by Fear Uncertainty and Custer:

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Listen to the quiet, subdued voice of logic here: average Swiss person has little interest one way or another in the ecology, and all he or she knows about it that day is that some jerk demonstrating against ecological damage by automobiles made them late to an appointment and they had to reschedule... suppose the election is the next day. Who is going to win that, you or the opponent?
You don't know the Swiss. They have high interest in ecological matters and they care about traffic. Bicycles have become a very popular setting, we have bicycle routes in all the cities and if yo have to deliver something fast, you take a bike courier. Companies encourage their employers to come with the bike by giving them free bicycles, and so on.
Our municipal authorities made recently a poll about life quality in the city. 70% of the poeople say: traffic is the biggest problem. The town-council discusses now, whether they could establish a maut-system like London.
We really do not need so much car traffic in the city, everybody knows it. Driving car in the city it's the slowest and most stupid way to move: You never find a parking place, you drive detours in consequence of one-way streets, and you often stuck in jams (building sites, accidents, daily rush hours, festivals and other demonstrations ^_^)

Aggressive indirect action never won anything in a civilized society. If you want to affect change, do the Christlike thing and melt quietly into the crowd. Become an avatar of justice, above reproach -- earn respect rather than demanding it.
You misunderstood. The demonstration on wednesday was neither an agressive action nor illicit. It was a happy, peaceful manifestation of our concern, granted, organized and escorted by the police. Milla mentioned it: hooligans are much more inconvenient than political demonstrations.
And of course street action goes always together with other political work, the melting inside, as you call it. Yes, we have our representatives in the local council.

..... The group of people demonstrating in the street would have accomplished more handing out fliers or storming Bern with Kalashnikovs. ......
Again: It's not necessary, because we have our representatives in Bern too.

...... Perhaps the fact we have been democratic for far longer than Europe -- and we are far more respectful of democracy and the instutition thereof -- makes us more politically pragmatist, I dunno.
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Originally written by FatBatMonkey:

I'd like to see a foreign policy where we didn't hand out twenty six billion to the EU every year, who squander it worse than our own government departments.

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There are so many common sense things. Things that you don't even need a brain to figure out.

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