"Sometimes the altar must be laid in one place so the fire can descend in another"

(Probably C.S. Lewis, lost in memory)

I've been reading the posts on the recent DC demonstration, and want to talk about a few things, based on a fair portion of a life on the left and attendance at many similar occasions.

Often we say that a tactic -- in this case mass demonstrations -- is good or bad, dated or not based on an assumption that there is a  knowable causal relationship between the things we do and the things we observe later.

In micro that's true ... a thrown rock breaks the window, and sometimes leads to arrests.  But when the players expand to the tens of thousands, and the timeframe to years and decades, arguing whether the demonstrations, even in aggregate, caused a particular result or will cause a desired result in the future (or the contrary) seems to me an exercise in

"it happened afterwards, therefore it happened because of"

-- a well known logical trap for the unwary.