It's unfortunate when people are blocked from going about their daily activities, but when you are attempting to raise awareness, I think it's a reasonable approach.
Now, while there is no protest without any use of force (whether force of gravity by peacefully taking over an area, requiring force to be removed, or "force of language"), we generally categorise protest as peaceful if force is only used in defiance (you have to use the force to remove me).
Peaceful protest does not equate to inconvenient to everybody (actually, they are usually designed to be inconvenient to get their message across). Civilians are not "innocent" in the sense that they have elected the government a protest is aimed at. How much sympathy protesters will get is a topic of discussion for themselves, and I am sure they carefully weigh that before staging a protest.
If you can't distance your inconvenience from whether the protest has merits, you probably don't intrinsically trust the democratic process ("I know better what they need").
>but when you are attempting to raise awareness, I think it's a reasonable approach.
Seems like "raising awareness" is a convenient blanket excuse for people to do whatever the fuck they want, and blame everyone else if the actions breed resentment that's counterproductive to the original goal.
I've also already mentioned it should be a calculated risk on protesters' side: aim to win more people than you lose those who can't empathise with protesters.
I am not saying that all protests succeed, or that I agree with all of their goals, but I stand by their right to inconvenience me in order to get heard (and yes, there were cases were my personal circumstances would have made me furious at that moment, but that would not affect my general opinion of the approach).
Corporations do "whatever the fuck they want" as well, at the expense of our environment and to make themselves a few percent richer. It's a successful tactic and I support the use of it against them.
Now, while there is no protest without any use of force (whether force of gravity by peacefully taking over an area, requiring force to be removed, or "force of language"), we generally categorise protest as peaceful if force is only used in defiance (you have to use the force to remove me).
Peaceful protest does not equate to inconvenient to everybody (actually, they are usually designed to be inconvenient to get their message across). Civilians are not "innocent" in the sense that they have elected the government a protest is aimed at. How much sympathy protesters will get is a topic of discussion for themselves, and I am sure they carefully weigh that before staging a protest.
If you can't distance your inconvenience from whether the protest has merits, you probably don't intrinsically trust the democratic process ("I know better what they need").