Don't get me wrong, I think pepper-spray is absolutely appropriate in certain situations. It should, ideally, be used to allow cops to end certain violent situations without having to resort to more lethal options.
What seems to have happened with pepper-spray and tazers is that cops take "less lethal" to mean "should be used in any situation where someone pisses us off."
If you've got a violent drunk who is refusing to submit to an arrest, pepper-spray the moron. If you have a bunch of peaceful protestors you need to arrest, just pick them up, cuff them and put them in the paddie wagon.
Aetian Jupiter - 41 Gunslinger - The Old Republic
Rigorous Scholarship
This means that the crowd forming around them were the problem, not the people sitting on the ground. Not that I agree with that in the first place. We can disagree, but you still need to be held to the basic rules of logic.
If the police engaged those sitting on the ground, and this was to make them more vulnerable, it was because they were surrounded by other people standing, yes? If there was not a group of people standing around the protestors, would the police have been made more vulnerable when arresting the people sitting?
I would like citation of the law and published studies, not your personal background.
It was not to make them more vulnerable. It was to make them comply and move. Hence compliance techniques.
No, you've shown abundantly clearly that you have no idea what the law is. Shouting "Fuck the police, you can't leave!" does not qualify as violence.
I've said numerous times it is not violent. It carries with it the threat of violence. There's a distinct difference and your inability to comprehend that while insulting me is upsetting.
Officer perception and subject actions are keys in the use of force matrix. If an officer is to only go by what you are doing and not by what he perceives as a threat, you using a knife to whittle wood would be no threat. He would approach you the same as anyone unarmed. Then you would have more than ample opportunity to stab him.
In this case, the crowd itself is the weapon. The officers perceive them to be quite possibly dangerous. They have been told they cannot leave, and they know the crowd has anti-police sentiments. If you are a police officer and you do not view that as a threat of violence, then I don't want to ever work with you.
Something is either violent, or it isn't. The use of pepper-spray is either violent, or it isn't. If it's non-violent, then I guess it's perfectly legal for me to spray a cop with it. It's non-violent, after all. Spraying a cop with pepper-spray should be treated no differently than blowing bubbles at him, following your logic.
Agree to disagree then, because neither of us is going to budge in this situation. I have my training and you have your interpretations.
2.Keep (someone) from proceeding; hold back.
The cops in that scenario were not detained by the protestors sitting on the ground.
If you cannot see how the police were detained through the threat of violence I'm going to say we're going to have to agree to disagree.
The actions of the crowd occurred after the pepper-spraying incident. The people who actually got pepper-sprayed were not the ones restraining the police. You keep missing this essential point.
You keep missing the point. The training itself is the problem.
I understand that, but the police are concerned with leaving, and the people sitting are not moving. If they move to engage the sitters, they are vulnerable to the most dangerous elements. They could pepper spray the entire crowd, but they don't need to. they only need the sitters to move. It's proportionality. Use only the amount of force necessary.
I'm not disputing the training. I have said numerous times if you disagree with that, it's your opinion. I'm saying the protesters did not have their rights violated. If the police need their training changed, so be it.
I believe in this situation they shouldn't have used pepper spray on the sitters, but that's my opinion. I will argue their right to do it all day.
I'm done with this topic. I'm clearly not going to convince any of you, for whatever reasons.
Agree to disagree then, because neither of us is going to budge in this situation. I have my training and you have your interpretations.
Your training can't change the meaning of words. Pepper-spray is either violent or it isn't. Which is it?
If you cannot see how the police were detained through the threat of violence I'm going to say we're going to have to agree to disagree.
The police were not detained by the people sitting peacefully on the ground. There is simply no rational way to argue otherwise. Have you even seen the video?
I understand that, but the police are concerned with leaving, and the people sitting are not moving. If they move to engage the sitters, they are vulnerable to the most dangerous elements. They could pepper spray the entire crowd, but they don't need to. they only need the sitters to move. It's proportionality. Use only the amount of force necessary.
Your understanding of proportionality is as skewed as your moral compass. How is using a painful, potentially deadly chemical a proportional response to somone sitting on the ground?
I believe in this situation they shouldn't have used pepper spray on the sitters, but that's my opinion. I will argue their right to do it all day.
I'm sure you will.
Aetian Jupiter - 41 Gunslinger - The Old Republic
Rigorous Scholarship
No, you've shown abundantly clearly that you have no idea what the law is. Shouting "Fuck the police, you can't leave!" does not qualify as violence.
I've said numerous times it is not violent. It carries with it the threat of violence. There's a distinct difference and your inability to comprehend that while insulting me is upsetting.
Officer perception and subject actions are keys in the use of force matrix. If an officer is to only go by what you are doing and not by what he perceives as a threat, you using a knife to whittle wood would be no threat. He would approach you the same as anyone unarmed. Then you would have more than ample opportunity to stab him.
If the police engaged those sitting on the ground, and this was to make them more vulnerable, it was because they were surrounded by other people standing, yes? If there was not a group of people standing around the protestors, would the police have been made more vulnerable when arresting the people sitting?
It was not to make them more vulnerable. It was to make them comply and move. Hence compliance techniques.
You were the one who said that engaging those sitting on the ground made the police more vulnerable, because they were surrounded by people standing, and that this is why they are justified in using the pepper spray. Do you agree or disagree with what I just said?
One word answer, lets see if we can take this slowly.
There seems to be a certain element of the side arguing against Toxin that is following something along this line of logic: "If I were to Pepper spray a cop, or my neighbor, I would be arrested for assault. Therefore, using Pepper spray is an inherently violent act. Therefore, the cops using pepper spray against these non-violent protesters was totally unjustified." While I agree wholeheartedly with the general purpose of OWS, I think this thinking is flawed. First, there are lots of things that cops do, and should be able to do, as a part of doing their jobs that I, as a citizen, should not be allowed to do. If I were to go around handcuffing people and dragging them to my office downtown, I would get arrested. But I don't think anyone would argue that Cops would not have been justified in doing that at UC Davis. Second, while none of the protesters were committing overt acts of violence, the Cops at Davis felt that the situation had already escalated to the point where the officers were in danger, pepper spray or not. They then acted according to their training and used the tools available to them. The counter to that of course, is that their training is wrong and so we should change that before the next incident. That's fine, but how should they have acted in that situation? Remember, we moved to using Pepper Spray instead of Fire Hoses and Billy Clubs, because people thought that was cruel and inhumane. I am also going to assume that we agree that not arresting the people violating the law was not an option, since that would pretty much give every large group of people carte blanche to do whatever they feel like. Do you honestly believe that if the Cops had tried to slap cuffs on the sitters and drag them off to jail, that the large group of people would have allowed them?
There seems to be a certain element of the side arguing against Toxin that is following something along this line of logic: "If I were to Pepper spray a cop, or my neighbor, I would be arrested for assault. Therefore, using Pepper spray is an inherently violent act. Therefore, the cops using pepper spray against these non-violent protesters was totally unjustified." While I agree wholeheartedly with the general purpose of OWS, I think this thinking is flawed. First, there are lots of things that cops do, and should be able to do, as a part of doing their jobs that I, as a citizen, should not be allowed to do. If I were to go around handcuffing people and dragging them to my office downtown, I would get arrested. But I don't think anyone would argue that Cops would not have been justified in doing that at UC Davis. Second, while none of the protesters were committing overt acts of violence, the Cops at Davis felt that the situation had already escalated to the point where the officers were in danger, pepper spray or not. They then acted according to their training and used the tools available to them. The counter to that of course, is that their training is wrong and so we should change that before the next incident. That's fine, but how should they have acted in that situation? Remember, we moved to using Pepper Spray instead of Fire Hoses and Billy Clubs, because people thought that was cruel and inhumane. I am also going to assume that we agree that not arresting the people violating the law was not an option, since that would pretty much give every large group of people carte blanche to do whatever they feel like. Do you honestly believe that if the Cops had tried to slap cuffs on the sitters and drag them off to jail, that the large group of people would have allowed them?
Yes, but I also think that the cops shouldn't be able to skip steps because, "Well, those people might do something." I also don't understand how attacking the people sitting on the ground does anything to convince the people standing to allow the cops to leave.
The thing is, they didn't even make a decent attempt at trying to arrest the students before resorting to pepper spray. The actions were this:
Hey kids, move
Okay, you're under arrest
What? You've linked arms? Pepper spray.
There seems to be a certain element of the side arguing against Toxin that is following something along this line of logic: "If I were to Pepper spray a cop, or my neighbor, I would be arrested for assault. Therefore, using Pepper spray is an inherently violent act. Therefore, the cops using pepper spray against these non-violent protesters was totally unjustified." While I agree wholeheartedly with the general purpose of OWS, I think this thinking is flawed. First, there are lots of things that cops do, and should be able to do, as a part of doing their jobs that I, as a citizen, should not be allowed to do. If I were to go around handcuffing people and dragging them to my office downtown, I would get arrested. But I don't think anyone would argue that Cops would not have been justified in doing that at UC Davis. Second, while none of the protesters were committing overt acts of violence, the Cops at Davis felt that the situation had already escalated to the point where the officers were in danger, pepper spray or not. They then acted according to their training and used the tools available to them. The counter to that of course, is that their training is wrong and so we should change that before the next incident. That's fine, but how should they have acted in that situation? Remember, we moved to using Pepper Spray instead of Fire Hoses and Billy Clubs, because people thought that was cruel and inhumane. I am also going to assume that we agree that not arresting the people violating the law was not an option, since that would pretty much give every large group of people carte blanche to do whatever they feel like. Do you honestly believe that if the Cops had tried to slap cuffs on the sitters and drag them off to jail, that the large group of people would have allowed them?
The real question hidden inside that post is "When, if ever, is it okay to deploy violent force against nonviolent offenders to secure compliance and exactly what level of violent force is acceptable?"
I think the answer most would offer is "Only just as much as is needed to arrest a regularly compliant person and if they cannot disperse them from there then the police should leave." Of course then as you said that leaves the door open to how the police can respond to nonviolent offenses. Our society kind of gears them rather exclusively towards the handling of violent and often violently deranged persons and I think that from the get go makes any sort of modern police force likely very poor at handling people who are peacefully protesting legitimate problems.
Of course the question of the appropriateness of violence against nonviolent offenders then requires a further discussion about why they were protesting and why they felt the need to break the law to protest. Which, if people have no other recourse for airing their grievance, and it is legitimate then it's hard to authorize the violence of the police against the offenders. The real problem is that our society doesn't have a guaranteed mechanism to ensure all legitimate grievances are aired at all, let alone get listened to or addressed but it presents the IMAGE to people that it does. This sort of double-standard is what typically results in the police getting called in and most people, typically, going along with whatever's necessary to clear whomever out. But what got lost in that entire grotesque display of force was the ever-present question of "Is there really a better way to guarantee results in this world without the violence and lawbreaking?"
Which is a question most people who side with the police do not even wish to admit exists let alone begin to answer. They just act as if the status quo is good to go, and refuse to acknowledge problems exist. Take how Modern Man has now refused to respond to me twice about a hypothetical regarding the world burning. Refusal to deal with that situation is admission he has nothing considered a "right answer" in that it "would win the discussion" so instead the common tactic of ignoring inconvenient facts is played so he'll never have to admit to any one of my hypotheticals being true which would then implicate his position and require him to actually mount a defense of how the status quo is in any way fair or just. Someone smart like that sees the indefensibility of a position and immediately hides hoping no one will notice that they just dropped out of the discussion right before they were forced to address the most important questions regarding legitimacy.
The one other thing that's missed though? You can in a sense excuse the actions of the individual offers to an extent. But doing so requires you to implicate the greater system which created the situation where violence had to even be deployed to begin with. The officers by and large are doing a job just like everyone else. The fact that this job in some cases literally requires you to be a barbaric dick to innocent people though says something about the culture that creates and sustains that workplace that must be dealt with.
If the best you can come up with against someone who's patently ignorant is to yell back at him, "Yeah? Well there's BOOKS, and they say you're WRONG!"
Then honestly you're not coming out of this looking great either.
Do you honestly believe that if the Cops had tried to slap cuffs on the sitters and drag them off to jail, that the large group of people would have allowed them?
THEY DID. You clearly saw people being arrested and walked off after the pepper-spraying incident. Are you suggesting that because the people SITTING got pepper sprayed, the people STANDING were cowed into letting them do that? The notion that somehow the situation got better after the pepper-spraying, that all those people who weren't pepper-sprayed became more obedient is ludicrous. The crowd could still, easily have gone into rabid attack mode, and arguably was more likely to after the pepper-spraying than before. The situation got markedly worse after the pepper spraying than it was before; its nomenclature as a "compliance tool" is highly ironic in the context of this usage.
"If I were to Pepper spray a cop, or my neighbor, I would be arrested for assault. Therefore, using Pepper spray is an inherently violent act. Therefore, the cops using pepper spray against these non-violent protesters was totally unjustified."
I think you just got trapped into his crazy-ass world, where he's making 17 different, insane statements, and then cutting and pasting people's varied responses to them to show how they conflict. Using pepper spray is a violent act. That doesn't mean that its use is always unjustified, but he was arguing that it never requires justification, because it's not violent. Don't confuse the negative for the contrapositive.
Yea, I'm pretty sure Toxin is the only one saying that pepper spray is non-violent. Everyone else, including the police who use it, consider it a non-lethal weapon.
I can't find the article, but UC Davis PD is supposed to follow the procedures of the county sheriff's department, which prohibits the use of mace as a compliance tool. I have linked an article in which the UC Davis Chancellor said that she had specifically ordered the UC Davis police to avoid a confrontation at all costs, even if that meant letting the protesters stay.
The Occupy Wall Street movement has reason to protest. Special interest-driven deregulation policy was at the heart of the recent economic collapse. It has been the “99%” that has paid the price for this policy failure with lost employment, devalued housing prices, retirement accounts being cut in half, and increased levels of poverty while the wealthiest in America continued to do well. A valid question is why our elected representatives are not working together to put a stop to failed policy that has been so damaging to the majority of Americans. This article will examine the disproportionate number of the wealthy who hold elected office in Washington and the conflict of interest they face in setting policy versus their own financial interests as well as the special interests that finance their campaigns. And it will explore an incentive that politicians have to stay in office where they can act on non-public information to their own financial benefit. It examines the issue of whether our Congress has become ‘Our Unrepresentative Representation’.
This article is making the rounds, and does a great job of tying a lot of the reasons for the income gap disparity, and is generally good reading for people who think that the 99%, OWS movement doesn't have a cause or reason. If you aren't mad after seeing the whole picture painted out for you, then you are either one of the lucky few, or too blind to give a shit about anything.
SW-4158-3990-6116
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
0
Options
TL DRNot at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered Userregular
The one other thing that's missed though? You can in a sense excuse the actions of the individual offers to an extent. But doing so requires you to implicate the greater system which created the situation where violence had to even be deployed to begin with. The officers by and large are doing a job just like everyone else. The fact that this job in some cases literally requires you to be a barbaric dick to innocent people though says something about the culture that creates and sustains that workplace that must be dealt with.
I agree with this 100%
Everyday I wake up is the worst day of my life.
0
Options
TL DRNot at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered Userregular
Just re-watched that video.
'I don't care if it's the Keebler fucking Elves that present a solution...'
I just want to say I'm terribly excited at the first major use of the first amendment for protest in near half a century. It makes me feel happy/giddy. I'd really like to see what they're fighting against get put into motion.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
Not to drag the pepper spraying debate on further, but I just finished reading it, so my first change to comment.
I would think right before the pepper spraying the police should have disengaged, stepped away from the situation, request backup and/or consult their superiors as to what they should do next and then approach the situation again. Just because you leave the protesters for a few minutes by disengaging doesn't mean you can't get better organized and then attempt it from another angle. No one was stopping them from leaving w/o making arrest right that second. In fact the cops leaving empty handed is what the protesters wanted. Then regroup and come at it again, slowly and knowing better this time what the atomsphere is like.
Not to drag the pepper spraying debate on further, but I just finished reading it, so my first change to comment.
I would think right before the pepper spraying the police should have disengaged, stepped away from the situation, request backup and/or consult their superiors as to what they should do next and then approach the situation again. Just because you leave the protesters for a few minutes by disengaging doesn't mean you can't get better organized and then attempt it from another angle. No one was stopping them from leaving w/o making arrest right that second. In fact the cops leaving empty handed is what the protesters wanted. Then regroup and come at it again, slowly and knowing better this time what the atomsphere is like.
Did everyone forget that the police had already made arrests? The whole point was that the protesters were perfectly willing to let them leave as long as they let the people they had arrested go. Obviously the police doesn't want to do that.
Who are the candidates behind which OWS is organizing for the upcoming election cycle? The Presidential race is obvious, since even someone disappointed in Obama hopefully isn't silly enough to vote for any of the Republican candidates purely out of spite, but what Senatorial and Congressional races are being targeted? I feel like living in the thoroughly blue California stops me from doing more locally, especially in my district (Home of the Fightin' Pelosies), but is there something people can be doing to help in more closely contested races in other states?
Who are the candidates behind which OWS is organizing for the upcoming election cycle? The Presidential race is obvious, since even someone disappointed in Obama hopefully isn't silly enough to vote for any of the Republican candidates purely out of spite, but what Senatorial and Congressional races are being targeted? I feel like living in the thoroughly blue California stops me from doing more locally, especially in my district (Home of the Fightin' Pelosies), but is there something people can be doing to help in more closely contested races in other states?
OWS can't really endorse candidates, that would limit the all-inclusive and universally accessible nature of the movement. OWS talks more about what it wants candidates to do rather than throwing support behind any specific one. If a candidate happens to be doing things OWS talks about then naturally they'll get more support from the members of OWS by virtue of producing results. That's why clear demands were never made, because at this point the only universally clear demand is a demand for results from politicians and how they go about achieving that is up to them.
So really any candidate preaching broken and bankrupt ideologies is right out, and that kind of limits the playing field... ;p
If the best you can come up with against someone who's patently ignorant is to yell back at him, "Yeah? Well there's BOOKS, and they say you're WRONG!"
Then honestly you're not coming out of this looking great either.
Ok, so this is what I don't get and why a lot of people get the impression, right or wrong, that the movement lacks a clear message. I understand the frustration with the current system and the desire to try to re-define the rules of the game by playing the "right" way. However, I think that while this is a noble sentiment, that is not currently how it works in the US and it is ultimately something that will allow OWS to be more easily ignored by politicians. If OWS isn't a driving force behind who does and does not get into office, then why should anyone care? (Speaking from the PoV of the people that write the laws that need changing, not from that of joe schmo citizen, obviously there are lots of reasons for those people to care)
Ok, so this is what I don't get and why a lot of people get the impression, right or wrong, that the movement lacks a clear message. I understand the frustration with the current system and the desire to try to re-define the rules of the game by playing the "right" way. However, I think that while this is a noble sentiment, that is not currently how it works in the US and it is ultimately something that will allow OWS to be more easily ignored by politicians. If OWS isn't a driving force behind who does and does not get into office, then why should anyone care? (Speaking from the PoV of the people that write the laws that need changing, not from that of joe schmo citizen, obviously there are lots of reasons for those people to care)
Throw them ALL out. However it's not practical in our democracy to form new political parties around specific ideologies and try to vote the people you actually want in.
Both major parties are corrupt and beholden to big business interests, the democrats might have less message control and better policies so that those interests do not win all the time. They still have a huge influence, see corn, oil, banking.
One point of these kinds of protests is that whoever gets elected must think about the interests of everyone, including the poor. One should not ignore them just because you managed to get 51% of the vote.
He's a shy overambitious dog-catcher on the wrong side of the law. She's an orphaned psychic mercenary with the power to bend men's minds. They fight crime!
They both may be corrupt, but only one side is batshit insane enought to get this country to self-destruct. Do I need go through my false equivalency rant again?
Our entire country - our entire species - is corrupted to some degree. There is no group or ideology out there that can act strictly for the common good, and there is no one definition of common good, even ignoring religious and entitlement traditions. There is no purity. But you can still go for the better option.
They both may be corrupt, but only one side is batshit insane enought to get this country to self-destruct. Do I need go through my false equivalency rant again?
No, I was saying it would be better if there was another way to vote, but since there isn't you go with the one that isn't full of insane robots out to destroy the US.
Then you protest to say, "hey listen to us!"
He's a shy overambitious dog-catcher on the wrong side of the law. She's an orphaned psychic mercenary with the power to bend men's minds. They fight crime!
Our entire country - our entire species - is corrupted to some degree. There is no group or ideology out there that can act strictly for the common good, and there is no one definition of common good, even ignoring religious and entitlement traditions. There is no purity. But you can still go for the better option.
There's no such thing as a perfect person yes. That does not mean we should not strive to achieve perfection as much as we reasonably can. There comes a time when our system of governance becomes so corrupted and so gummed up in the workings that it is simply not feasible to reform it through the mere act of voting. If you never clean your house then eventually the dirt and grime becomes damage and eventually you'll find yourself unable to clean it out at all. Once that happens? Sadly, time to get a new house.
No, I was saying it would be better if there was another way to vote, but since there isn't you go with the one that isn't full of insane robots out to destroy the US.
Then you protest to say, "hey listen to us!"
And then if they still don't listen you reconsider your ability to survive the insane robots and whether it might not be better rebuilding it all from the ashes afterwards. ;p
If the best you can come up with against someone who's patently ignorant is to yell back at him, "Yeah? Well there's BOOKS, and they say you're WRONG!"
Then honestly you're not coming out of this looking great either.
If you never clean your house then eventually the dirt and grime becomes damage and eventually you'll find yourself unable to clean it out at all. Once that happens? Sadly, time to get a new house.
In this market? You're clearly not part of the 99%.
There comes a time when our system of governance becomes so corrupted and so gummed up in the workings that it is simply not feasible to reform it through the mere act of voting. If you never clean your house then eventually the dirt and grime becomes damage and eventually you'll find yourself unable to clean it out at all. Once that happens? Sadly, time to get a new house.
Agreed, but for all the hand wringing and end-of-times rhetoric we hear these days, I don't think we're really all that close to that point. There are things that need to be done, for sure, but there is also a way to accomplish those goals within the current system. It is slow, and painful, no doubt, but it can be done. However, that certainly doesn't happen with a Republican controlled House and Senate, so why not work towards removing that roadblock? And if the Democrats that get elected know that OWS is the reason, shouldn't that make it easier to get them to enact the reforms we are seeking?
I am so goddamn tired of the "Every single person in Congress is corrupt" claim. It's complete bullshit, as you'd know if you actually studied politics for a few months. The vast majority of members never get their names in the news. They just quietly do their jobs. Also, Exriel, there are plenty of Republicans in the House from California, as well as in the state legislature, and given how the districts aren't being drawn to keep everyone in office this time there's going to be plenty of turmoil - and opportunity.
Our system is not yet so broken that it can only be cleansed in fire, and in all likelihood, any cleansing by fire will just leave us buried in the ashes. Things aren't yet as bad as they were in the 1800's (as sad as that makes Newt), and if we can get asses in voting booths, we can make sure it never gets that bad again.
Posts
What seems to have happened with pepper-spray and tazers is that cops take "less lethal" to mean "should be used in any situation where someone pisses us off."
If you've got a violent drunk who is refusing to submit to an arrest, pepper-spray the moron. If you have a bunch of peaceful protestors you need to arrest, just pick them up, cuff them and put them in the paddie wagon.
Rigorous Scholarship
It was not to make them more vulnerable. It was to make them comply and move. Hence compliance techniques.
http://gunfighter1.typepad.com/.a/6a00e54f05d43088340120a70e5184970b-500wi
http://www.fletc.gov/training/programs/legal-division/podcasts/hot-issues-podcasts/hot-issues-transcripts/use-of-force-continuum-podcast-transcript.html
Look up Graham vs connor
I've said numerous times it is not violent. It carries with it the threat of violence. There's a distinct difference and your inability to comprehend that while insulting me is upsetting.
Officer perception and subject actions are keys in the use of force matrix. If an officer is to only go by what you are doing and not by what he perceives as a threat, you using a knife to whittle wood would be no threat. He would approach you the same as anyone unarmed. Then you would have more than ample opportunity to stab him.
In this case, the crowd itself is the weapon. The officers perceive them to be quite possibly dangerous. They have been told they cannot leave, and they know the crowd has anti-police sentiments. If you are a police officer and you do not view that as a threat of violence, then I don't want to ever work with you.
Agree to disagree then, because neither of us is going to budge in this situation. I have my training and you have your interpretations.
If you cannot see how the police were detained through the threat of violence I'm going to say we're going to have to agree to disagree.
I understand that, but the police are concerned with leaving, and the people sitting are not moving. If they move to engage the sitters, they are vulnerable to the most dangerous elements. They could pepper spray the entire crowd, but they don't need to. they only need the sitters to move. It's proportionality. Use only the amount of force necessary.
I'm not disputing the training. I have said numerous times if you disagree with that, it's your opinion. I'm saying the protesters did not have their rights violated. If the police need their training changed, so be it.
I believe in this situation they shouldn't have used pepper spray on the sitters, but that's my opinion. I will argue their right to do it all day.
I'm done with this topic. I'm clearly not going to convince any of you, for whatever reasons.
Your understanding of proportionality is as skewed as your moral compass. How is using a painful, potentially deadly chemical a proportional response to somone sitting on the ground?
I'm sure you will.
Rigorous Scholarship
One word answer, lets see if we can take this slowly.
Yes, but I also think that the cops shouldn't be able to skip steps because, "Well, those people might do something." I also don't understand how attacking the people sitting on the ground does anything to convince the people standing to allow the cops to leave.
The thing is, they didn't even make a decent attempt at trying to arrest the students before resorting to pepper spray. The actions were this:
Hey kids, move
Okay, you're under arrest
What? You've linked arms? Pepper spray.
The real question hidden inside that post is "When, if ever, is it okay to deploy violent force against nonviolent offenders to secure compliance and exactly what level of violent force is acceptable?"
I think the answer most would offer is "Only just as much as is needed to arrest a regularly compliant person and if they cannot disperse them from there then the police should leave." Of course then as you said that leaves the door open to how the police can respond to nonviolent offenses. Our society kind of gears them rather exclusively towards the handling of violent and often violently deranged persons and I think that from the get go makes any sort of modern police force likely very poor at handling people who are peacefully protesting legitimate problems.
Of course the question of the appropriateness of violence against nonviolent offenders then requires a further discussion about why they were protesting and why they felt the need to break the law to protest. Which, if people have no other recourse for airing their grievance, and it is legitimate then it's hard to authorize the violence of the police against the offenders. The real problem is that our society doesn't have a guaranteed mechanism to ensure all legitimate grievances are aired at all, let alone get listened to or addressed but it presents the IMAGE to people that it does. This sort of double-standard is what typically results in the police getting called in and most people, typically, going along with whatever's necessary to clear whomever out. But what got lost in that entire grotesque display of force was the ever-present question of "Is there really a better way to guarantee results in this world without the violence and lawbreaking?"
Which is a question most people who side with the police do not even wish to admit exists let alone begin to answer. They just act as if the status quo is good to go, and refuse to acknowledge problems exist. Take how Modern Man has now refused to respond to me twice about a hypothetical regarding the world burning. Refusal to deal with that situation is admission he has nothing considered a "right answer" in that it "would win the discussion" so instead the common tactic of ignoring inconvenient facts is played so he'll never have to admit to any one of my hypotheticals being true which would then implicate his position and require him to actually mount a defense of how the status quo is in any way fair or just. Someone smart like that sees the indefensibility of a position and immediately hides hoping no one will notice that they just dropped out of the discussion right before they were forced to address the most important questions regarding legitimacy.
The one other thing that's missed though? You can in a sense excuse the actions of the individual offers to an extent. But doing so requires you to implicate the greater system which created the situation where violence had to even be deployed to begin with. The officers by and large are doing a job just like everyone else. The fact that this job in some cases literally requires you to be a barbaric dick to innocent people though says something about the culture that creates and sustains that workplace that must be dealt with.
THEY DID. You clearly saw people being arrested and walked off after the pepper-spraying incident. Are you suggesting that because the people SITTING got pepper sprayed, the people STANDING were cowed into letting them do that? The notion that somehow the situation got better after the pepper-spraying, that all those people who weren't pepper-sprayed became more obedient is ludicrous. The crowd could still, easily have gone into rabid attack mode, and arguably was more likely to after the pepper-spraying than before. The situation got markedly worse after the pepper spraying than it was before; its nomenclature as a "compliance tool" is highly ironic in the context of this usage.
I think you just got trapped into his crazy-ass world, where he's making 17 different, insane statements, and then cutting and pasting people's varied responses to them to show how they conflict. Using pepper spray is a violent act. That doesn't mean that its use is always unjustified, but he was arguing that it never requires justification, because it's not violent. Don't confuse the negative for the contrapositive.
http://www.artonissues.com/2011/12/our-unrepresentative-representation/
This article is making the rounds, and does a great job of tying a lot of the reasons for the income gap disparity, and is generally good reading for people who think that the 99%, OWS movement doesn't have a cause or reason. If you aren't mad after seeing the whole picture painted out for you, then you are either one of the lucky few, or too blind to give a shit about anything.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
Awesome video from New Left Media. These are the guys who did the awesome interviews during the Glenn Beck rally and the early days of the Tea Party.
I agree with this 100%
'I don't care if it's the Keebler fucking Elves that present a solution...'
I would think right before the pepper spraying the police should have disengaged, stepped away from the situation, request backup and/or consult their superiors as to what they should do next and then approach the situation again. Just because you leave the protesters for a few minutes by disengaging doesn't mean you can't get better organized and then attempt it from another angle. No one was stopping them from leaving w/o making arrest right that second. In fact the cops leaving empty handed is what the protesters wanted. Then regroup and come at it again, slowly and knowing better this time what the atomsphere is like.
Did everyone forget that the police had already made arrests? The whole point was that the protesters were perfectly willing to let them leave as long as they let the people they had arrested go. Obviously the police doesn't want to do that.
Fixed.
OWS can't really endorse candidates, that would limit the all-inclusive and universally accessible nature of the movement. OWS talks more about what it wants candidates to do rather than throwing support behind any specific one. If a candidate happens to be doing things OWS talks about then naturally they'll get more support from the members of OWS by virtue of producing results. That's why clear demands were never made, because at this point the only universally clear demand is a demand for results from politicians and how they go about achieving that is up to them.
So really any candidate preaching broken and bankrupt ideologies is right out, and that kind of limits the playing field... ;p
Throw them ALL out. However it's not practical in our democracy to form new political parties around specific ideologies and try to vote the people you actually want in.
Both major parties are corrupt and beholden to big business interests, the democrats might have less message control and better policies so that those interests do not win all the time. They still have a huge influence, see corn, oil, banking.
One point of these kinds of protests is that whoever gets elected must think about the interests of everyone, including the poor. One should not ignore them just because you managed to get 51% of the vote.
No, I was saying it would be better if there was another way to vote, but since there isn't you go with the one that isn't full of insane robots out to destroy the US.
Then you protest to say, "hey listen to us!"
There's no such thing as a perfect person yes. That does not mean we should not strive to achieve perfection as much as we reasonably can. There comes a time when our system of governance becomes so corrupted and so gummed up in the workings that it is simply not feasible to reform it through the mere act of voting. If you never clean your house then eventually the dirt and grime becomes damage and eventually you'll find yourself unable to clean it out at all. Once that happens? Sadly, time to get a new house.
edit:
And then if they still don't listen you reconsider your ability to survive the insane robots and whether it might not be better rebuilding it all from the ashes afterwards. ;p
In this market? You're clearly not part of the 99%.
Let them eat cake, indeed.
Agreed, but for all the hand wringing and end-of-times rhetoric we hear these days, I don't think we're really all that close to that point. There are things that need to be done, for sure, but there is also a way to accomplish those goals within the current system. It is slow, and painful, no doubt, but it can be done. However, that certainly doesn't happen with a Republican controlled House and Senate, so why not work towards removing that roadblock? And if the Democrats that get elected know that OWS is the reason, shouldn't that make it easier to get them to enact the reforms we are seeking?