Slashdot Mirror
Tech Wars In Meat Space
Starfish writes: "Police and protesters are asking if new technologies used by both sides will turn street protests into bloodless, but also meaningless rituals. Real protest robots, phaser-like weapons, and other cool gadgets are discussed in this Village Voice article. Good heads up about the Ruckus Society's tech action camp in October."
"It is the exploitation of perceived civil liberties which extends into violence...
My civil rights are merely perceived?!
Colonel, I see you're working at a college. Do us all a favor and go audit the freshman civics courses again. You are an embarrassment to the cause you have sworn to defend.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
You tend to end up against large violent crowds when you brutally occupy someone else's land.
You all whine piss and moan about police/govt abuse, and then line up and fall all over yourselves trying to give your basic rights like gun ownership back to the government.
Like the government is in some way the natural holder of your rights.
People like you with your insane notions of democracy, the rights of man, etc sicken me.
Read your damn history!
Fight to KEEP your natural rights!
Read the Constitution.
Understand that the crap you were fed in school is just that...crap.
The US is a republic, not a democracy. (well it is supposed to be but you are messing that up as fast as you can also (democracies suck worse then this as soon as the huddled masses realize that they don't HAVE to work and vote themselves 364 holidays a year and liberal social programs to support them(then you have europe, but that's another story)))
The government does not assign you rights like social security cards.
Your rights are natural, the constitution only defends them from the govt.
The government is all for taking rights away from you and if you do not secure some means of keeping your rights secure you will soon find that the press is not a big enough shield in this era of mega-mergers. (How many Media companies really need influenced to keep a story of 100 protesters getting their heads cracked under cover? How long did they manage not to mention the Levy/Condit bit? What do you think they'd do if they were offered free radio spectrum in exchange for silence?)
They often do receive such training. How many protesters do?
Yes, it is a shame that often no one - most notably most of the protesters - seems to care about the issues. Every protest I attend, it seems like the majority are there for the adrenaline rush, or publicity, or the social scene - anything but the issues.
Less snidely, the police are expected to be dispassionate regarding the issues under protest. They are not there for the issues; they are there to preserve public safety and the law. You might not like that, you might not like the laws, but there it is.
That's not what they're doing. They're not protecting points of view; they're protecting people, and laws, and sometimes property, against inappropriate expressions of a POV. As mentioned before, they are dispassionate wrt the issues, and concerned only with preventing criminal acts - including politically motivated criminal acts.
Proximately, the civil authorities. Ultimately ourselves, through our duly elected representatives. If you don't like it, elect someone else. This is a (representative) democracy, not rule of whoever shouts loudest.
Those same police. I almost wish that some corporation would be stupid enough to hire their own goons, so you could see those very same police protecting the protesters - which they most assuredly would do. What a conundrum that would create for the self-righteous cop haters.
They do, and that's why the protesters prefer to misbehave in public places. They're too cowardly to risk getting their asses kicked on private property with little or no legal recourse, so instead they subject the public to all the BS they claim is directed at the corporations.
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Would I rather be shot by a beanbag or a bullet? Not a tough choice, that one. But the rules of engagement change with non-lethal weapons and the threshold for their use is lowered by virtue of the fact that they generally don't kill -- not intentionally, anyway. It becomes much easier to pull that trigger.
I could write a dissertation here, score a five, get some cool responses and maybe some E-Mail, but I don't have the time or resources. There's a lot of information about this; check out some of it. Google, teoma, even Yahoo.
Let me note that the military's use of non-lethal weapons has historically been to disarm/disable an enemy so that lethal force could then be used, from the days of catapulting rotting carcasses into the keep to the gas attacks of WWI.
woof
Have you ever even bothered finding out why globalisation is really a bad thing if it done on corporate terms or are you just content spouting the media/corporate prepared propaganda?
Did you watch Berlusconi's final speech in Genoa? That gives you a pretty good idea of what the unrestricted globalisation will mean: "Free trade is democracy and democracy is free trade". What a load of bollocks. Free trade and capitalism are not equivalent to democracy. In such a free trade world the people with the most money will also have the most votes.
This quote emobides what is wrong with law enforcement in America (especially) and (I'd assume) across the world!
Basically, this quote says "Everyone participating in the protest is wrong and just an agitator - a malcontent - someone who we should lock up anyway."
That thought, combined with these new weapons - I'm scared.
"One more day before the storm
At the baracade of freedom
when our ranks begin to form...
will you take your place with me?"
--- "One Day More" from Les Miserables
quis custodiet ipsos custodes - Juvenal
Protesters won't.
Why? Because the cops can afford it, and the protesters usually can't.
And if real people have to hit the streets on either side, then the other side has an advantage.
End result: protests will become even less effective and more meaningless than they are now, because the police will have a lot less incentive to keep the violence down. They'll be able to use violence at will.
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