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In MN, Massive Police Raids On Suspected Protestors
X0563511 alerts us to events in Minneapolis and St. Paul in advance of the Republican convention (which has been put on hold because of Hurricane Gustav). Local police backed by the FBI raided a number of homes and public buildings and confiscated computers and other material. From Salon.com: "Last night, members of the St. Paul police department and the Ramsey County sheriff's department handcuffed, photographed and detained dozens of people meeting at a public venue to plan a demonstration, charging them with no crime other than 'fire code violations,' and early this morning, the Sheriff's department sent teams of officers into at least four Minneapolis area homes where suspected protesters were staying. Jane Hamsher and I were at two of those homes this morning — one which had just been raided and one which was in the process of being raided." Here is local reporting from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune: "Aided by informants planted in protest groups, authorities raided at least six buildings across St. Paul and Minneapolis to stop an 'anarchist' plan to disrupt this week's Republican National Convention. From Friday night through Saturday afternoon, officers surrounded houses, broke down doors, handcuffed scores of people and confiscated suspected tools of civil disobedience ... A St. Paul City Council member described it as excessive, while activists, many of whom were detained and then released without charges, called it intimidation designed to quash free speech."
FUCK THE POLICE!
... this is how you START them. This coming from someone from Seattle who lived on Capitol Hill during the WTO riots and had police overreact and create a situation when none existed.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
In Soviet Russia, you didn't have the right to peaceful assembly or to travel without showing your papers.
I wish there was a joke I could make here.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Were they planning on doing something illegal? I doubt it.
In the house that had just been raided, those inside described how a team of roughly 25 officers had barged into their homes with masks and black swat gear, holding large semi-automatic rifles, and ordered them to lie on the floor, where they were handcuffed and ordered not to move. The officers refused to state why they were there and, until the very end, refused to show whether they had a search warrant. They were forced to remain on the floor for 45 minutes while the officers took away the laptops, computers, individual journals, and political materials kept in the house. One of the individuals renting the house, an 18-year-old woman, was extremely shaken as she and others described how the officers were deliberately making intimidating statements such as "Do you have Terminator ready?" as they lay on the floor in handcuffs.
I don't call this freedom.
Isn't that what they blamed stuff on pre-WW I? What kill the kaiser think? God help us if Ferdinand is shot!
meh
seeing as all the same senior politicians in the WH today are the very same ones that where there in Nixons goverment, they just slinked into the background in the 60's hoping you would forget their names and misdeeds
and it worked ! except they are back with more vigor
torture, wiretaps, harrasing political groups, removing civil liberties, wiretapping
the list is endless and so it seems the Americans patience as they dont want to do a damm thing about it
a single clip could sort out a lot of troubles in this world
Personally I'm surprised that, upon finding "buckets of urine" that the police decided to take it with them.
Why do you doubt it? Because the one-sided article doesn't give enough details about the protestors' activities?
Since the police had a warrant, some judge thought they had enough reasonable suspicion to go in and make these raids.
Stuff like this really makes me sad. Just 20 or 30 years ago, demonstrations could get out of hand, but I think that is part of free speech. Now, any speech off script by either party is squashed as if it was soviet russia. Maybe mrs mccain should rethink the trip to georgia she just took. Maybe instead of taking democracy around the world, we could start by re-invigorating freedom here at home. I'm afraid to predict the next 20 or 30 years. I'm sure it will include many cameras, microphones, drone planes and fear.
That's why we need a pre-crimes unit composed of psychics to nip stuff before it even buds!
We are rapidly turning into the latest Banana Republic.
Could the fact that we didn't see such an article about last weeks DNC be because there wasn't anybody bothering to protest? HBO's Real Time had footage from the "Free Speech Zone" in Denver which had more kids on bikes than protesters.
The officers refused to state why they were there and, until the very end, refused to show whether they had a search warrant.
Now, I have only the same information you do, probably less. But the quote above seems to indicate that they actually did have a search warrant.
And the sheriff's office, and the FBI, and DHS, and ICE, and the mainstream media, and us...
Yep, us too. Every US citizen bears some responsibility. We should demand media coverage of these obvious civil rights violations, these people aren't violent anarchists, they are citizens protesting the government. We should demand a police force that upholds the law instead of subverting it. We should elect the leaders who will do the most to protect our civil rights.
We've been tolerating this kind of behavior since 9/11 out of fear. It's time to admit to ourselves that we overreacted to the events of 9/11 and allowed our government to trash our civil rights in the name of protecting us.
We let fascists take our country from us in the name of making a 'war on terror.'
Vote. Email or write your local, state and federal representatives. Email local and national news. Protest.
Thank you Dave Raggett
From: http://www.nornc.org/
This isn't a peaceful assembly if you ask me:
"How we get there (the strategy):
1. Start Strong - Throw all of our energy into the first day. We'll kick this off right and stretch the militarized police state out so far that it can no longer contain and suppress our voices and desires.
2. Transportation Troubles - This includes blockades downtown (at key intersections), on bridges (10 bridges over the Mississippi River in the metro area), and other sporadic and strategic targets (busses, hotel and airport shuttles etc)."
This is the group that the Star article describes as having been arrested.
Unfortunately, it will not be a PC thing to do considering the most folks believe that if yo do nothing wrong then you have nothing to worry about and the police are always right and never lie. I once actually tried to convince someone of this (stupid me) but he insisted that the cops are always right and always have a justifialble reason. I guess he saw too many cop TV shows where the cops are saints and the "bad guys" are always guilty.
If the lawyers get those folks acquitted, I'm sure the consensus will be that the sneaky, snarky, lying, greedy, lawyers got those dirtbags off because of a "technicality" and the poor innocent police who didn't have warrants or just cause are the victims.
Was there any actual evidence of conspiracy? Or will this end up being one of those deals where the police confiscate all the protesters signs and bullhorns and then apologize and return them? Next week, after the GOP convention has finished.
Have gnu, will travel.
Bottles are broken every single day.
I see a different broken window at local businesses at least once a month.
Those events do not cause riots.
They are "minor". They are resolved by arresting / fining the idiot(s) who did it.
I am also in Seattle.
The police have a higher standard to hold to because they're the professionals. If they can't follow the law then they have no business enforcing it.
We'll be getting a lot more of this if we elect McCain into office. Nominally we all have the right to free speech, but in practice the government can easily suppress unauthorized speech on technicalities such as "fire codes". If it weren't for the Internet, free speech in the United States would be mostly limited to private spaces between trusted friends -- public criticism being so easily stifled.
I think the only way to get a message across is for people to speak out even in the face of strong government opposition. If they won't let you speak, go ahead and speak. People carrying signs and screaming "blah blah blee blee blah blah bloh... hey hey... ho ho" are bound to be ignored. People who get beat on by police, on the other hand, might actually get some attention from the media.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
because your right to peaceful protest is more or less gone at this point. that's why. thank you for playing.
"If for any reason you're not satisfied with our service, I hate you."
This happened in NY City in 2004 during the Republican Convention although the police waited until the convention had started. My brother was one of the thousands swept up in the sweeps the police did to clear protesters from the street. His lawsuit is still pending, most likely he will wind up with a nice settlement, but the goal was to get these "troublemakers" off the street and that was accomplished. The same marching orders are likely in effect for the Republican Convention this year, and by the time the lawsuits are settled in four years the next election will be on the horizon. Kind of depressing that the police can get away with this bs.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
They didn't show their warrant?! We need to organize, write letters and make sure that justice is served. It's still our country no matter how many incidents like this happen. Take responsibility America!! Stand UP against this fascist bullshit! Write your congress/senate write the police station. When that doesn't work (it won't) we need to protest at their front fucking door! OUR COUNTRY
I mean I don't want to barge ahead. We only read the accounts of one side, but if it is even remotly true the US of A is far from being a free country. Why would the police even want to intimidate people that way? Only if there was a political reason. Semi-random police brutality is one thing, but the report looks like those were fairly large scale orchestrated moves by the police to influence politics. When the police stops working as law enforcment and starts working for a political party how far is that from a banana republic?
And then the W guy comes up and talks about spreading democracy in the middle east? How about spreading it in Minneapolis?
At least this gives us a textbook example for the good old "nothing to hide" misconception.
You can bet that a lot of illegal wiretaping was involved here to find the ringleaders, exactly like during the anit-vietnam protests. Also, note how they went straight for the computers: welcome to the world of "little brother"!
"- I've got nothing to hide!"
"- Then you agree with everything the government thinks. Oh, and the Church of Scientology, too."
(alternate: "- Then you don't have a political life")
Don't take my posts literally; it's just code to control my botnet.
It obviously doesn't.
But consider this : in order for Those In Power to keep their power, they have to do a number of things;
1) Subvert the Constitution - because it gets in the way of their plans.
2) Create an atmosphere of Fear - this is accomplished in a number of ways;
a) Create more criminals - this is done by adding lots of laws.
b) Engineer situations where you can create enough world tension that eventually you can say you
are in a permanent state of "war".
3) Dumb the people down - again, this can be accomplished in a number of ways;
a) Culturally - dumb down the Press, TV
b) Educationally - dumb down the system.
What you have seen is the use of point 2)(a) in that basically They Can Get You For Anything if you do something
to disrupt their plans.
Welcome, America, to your Police State.
Could the fact that we didn't see such an article about last weeks DNC be because there wasn't anybody bothering to protest? HBO's Real Time had footage from the "Free Speech Zone" in Denver which had more kids on bikes than protesters.
That's because they were elsewhere in Denver, doing things like trying to levitate the Denver Mint, and screaming Kill Michelle Malkin!.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Transportation Troubles - This includes blockades downtown (at key intersections), on bridges (10 bridges over the Mississippi River in the metro area), and other sporadic and strategic targets (busses, hotel and airport shuttles etc)."
Nothing like annoying thousands of people who are late getting to work to convince them that your cause is just.....
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
That will never pass Constitutional muster and you will have hard time getting it past a jury
And charges need to be filed against those responsible for such raids.
I'm not into teh politics either way and as such I can see without bias, this was wrong.
Perhaps its time to again read the declaration of independence.
Does anyone get the feeling this has all happened before, then laws were enacted to stop it, then Bush was elected and said laws were repealed?
Hell man, I must be at war every day driving to work. My traffic is disrupted. It's not peaceful. Someone should be arrested. That will fix everything.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Well, it could mean that it's a good, old-fashioned violation of civil rights. Peaceful protest is a right in America, and if these raids were designed only to violate that right, there will be successful lawsuits.
However, it's far more likely that although they have only (so far) been charged with "no crime other than 'fire code violations'", more charges are forthcoming. They don't take computers unless they intend to scrutinize them for evidence.
Plausible scenerio leading up to the raids: An idiot on a message board was going on and on about icing McCain and Bush II, and even bigger idiots were playing along.
PROTIP: The secret service takes all assassination threats seriously no matter how ridiculously they were hatched. See, e.g., the nazi meth-heads that the secret service caught en route to fail miserably at shooting Obama.
According to KSTP: "The sheriff's office said it confiscated weapons on Saturday including a machete, hatchet and several throwing knives, empty glass bottles, rags and flammable liquids, homemade devices used to disable buses, metal pipes, axes, bolt cutters, sledge hammers, empty plastic buckets made into shields, an Army helmet, and large amounts of urine." http://kstp.com/article/stories/S561752.shtml?cat=1
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Crookandliars.com has some interviews and coverage on these raids.
story #1
story #2
Time once again for the Fascist National Conventions. Featuring:
Confinement of protesters to "Free Speech Zones"
Jailing of Journalists
Authoritarian Scare Tacticts
And remember, the best part about the FNCs are that no matter who is nominated, one of their candidates always wins.
I came here for a good argument
Transportation Troubles...
Sounds like a Critical Mass rally.
yes 20 or 30 years ago it was alot worse than some urine or a tomato. Do you not remember the riots in chicago in 68? I seriously doubt these guys were planning anything even close. Just google it if your too young to remember.
How close are we to arresting people applying for permits to demonstrate like the chinese did at the olympics?
Hum, after reading TFA, the "tools of civil desobidiance" were indeed just that, and the claim that all the information was obtained from informants seems plausible. Oh, and I apparently dreamed the seizing of computers. Am I getting paranoid?
Not that it won't be a textbook example when we get more details; protecting their conventions seems so important to them that they always go way over the line.
Don't take my posts literally; it's just code to control my botnet.
They might have refused because they didn't want the person on whom they were serving a warrant to call up their lawyer and have him hover over the officers' shoulder to make sure they didn't overstep the bounds of the warrant.
In most countries you would get arrested for throwing the urine, not merely thinking about it.
Bob
Listen to my latest album here
No, they are required by law to show the search warrant when asked.
To me, their refusal clearly indicates that they didn't have one.
If you had super powers, would you use them for good, or for awesome?
Government arrests people for planning to speak in public
Sounds like some other headlines I've seen recently:
Severe pollution in Minneapolis is expected to hamper the Convention
John McCain alleged to be 14 years old, not 72 as claimed
Urine is not very dangerous. By all means arrest these people if they actually go out and throw it on other people, but there's no justification for a preemptive strike.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
This is how we do it in a civilised country
Note the quote from the police - Police said despite the massive traffic disruption on the motorway, the man had the right to protest peacefully.
Bob
Listen to my latest album here
Things like this prove that America is heading in the direction of a dictatorship. They may not call it that, but that's what we will soon be. It's like George Orwell's "Animal Farm". As the public loses insight and opinion, the manipulative government gains power. Finally, FUCK THE POLICE!!
The chuckleheads with the rifles aside, there were Republican protests at the Democratic convention, why weren't they arrested and photographed? The same thing happened in '04. The FBI started intimidating political activists. And now we find out the FBI was behind the raids in St. Paul.
There have been rumors going back a long way that Rove had friendlies in the FBI that were using police powers in primarily political investigations.
Don't forget that a lot of /. readers supported this administration and are, at least in my mind, partially responsible for the thuggish, heavy-handed tactics our government feels it can employ with near impunity. Guess you could call it trickle down stupidity. But many of you voted for the bozos at the top. If they keep to their usual form they'll either blame the victims or blame Clinton.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
"Well a couple of brain dead anarchists breaking windows and throwing bottles does not create a riot."
Anyone that says the Seattle rioters (PRIOR TO the police response) were just "a few brain dead anarchists" are at best misinformed, or worse, utterly full of shit. Everyone from Greenpeace to Earth First planned "direct action" in Seattle, and lots of violence was on the menu for the Earth First types. The cops may have overreacted, but lets can this BS meme that the cops were overreacting to a handful of rowdy boys. There were people that had planned violent activities for weeks prior to those meetings, and they were certainly more than a handful. Furthermore, once they got started, the crowd seemed plenty eager to join in the festivities... including things like busting up every Starbucks and McDonalds they could find.
Don't pretend it was a bunch of naive innocents vs. the gestapo.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
From: http://www.nornc.org/
This isn't a peaceful assembly if you ask me:
"How we get there (the strategy): 1. Start Strong - Throw all of our energy into the first day. We'll kick this off right and stretch the militarized police state out so far that it can no longer contain and suppress our voices and desires.
2. Transportation Troubles - This includes blockades downtown (at key intersections), on bridges (10 bridges over the Mississippi River in the metro area), and other sporadic and strategic targets (busses, hotel and airport shuttles etc)."
This is the group that the Star article describes as having been arrested.
And what part of this advocates violence? This is a perfectly fair, if not particularly effective, way to protest.
I came here for a good argument
Your comment made me laugh, it really did. Go look at the civil liberties raped over and over by both sides during the American Civil War or during the First World War in the US, then compare/contrast to the current "erosion" of civil liberties.
What has gone on for the last eight years is nothing compared to what happened in the past. How many languages have been outlawed in the last 8 years? None, go back to the teens, the government did the equivalent of making Spanish outlawed when the German language was all but criminalized.
In 1918, these 'anarchists' would be getting deportation hearings right now, even if US citizens or born here.
We've been tolerating it a lot longer than that.
Remember Waco?
What about the War on Drugs?
Or the Alien and Sedition acts?
What about the death of Socrates?
In Democracy, image -- how we communicate to a Crowd -- matters more than reality. So we often trade sanity for insanity.
Uninformed people will tell you this is a question of liberty versus tyranny. What if liberty empowers tyranny, through the bad judgment of most people?
I know this is a unpopular opinion. Most truths are until they reach a tipping point of smart people believing in them. You can help make this change!
Anti-Globalism, Traditionalism, and FreeBSD.
Nerds are people too, and this is definitely news for people.
Besides, /. knows their market, and knows that these articles will get a lot of traffic and activity. Taglines be damned- they're a business and a media outlet like any other.
"The cup is in turn designed for holding hot or cold liquids, and has an open rim and closed base." --US Patent #5425497
Look, whether they were planning on being colossal douchebags or not doesn't change the fact (if it is a fact) that they were raided without a hint of a warrant. People need to get it through their heads that the Constitution was implemented largely to constrain what government agencies can get away with. Whether it turns out ex post facto that the victims of government overreach were guilty is utterly irrelevant. If the police thought that there was probable cause they could have easily gotten a warrant and done things the right way. That they (apparently) didn't shows that civil liberties are well on their way to being nonexistent in this country, not only for the guilty, but also for those who might only appear to be guilty, or who might've pissed off the wrong person at the wrong time.
--Ford Prefect
I personally known and have spoken with individuals, who have made a "pilgrimage" of sorts to the RNC, with the express intention of causing as much chaos and disorder and disruption as they can possibly get away with -- even the illegal kind.
They're all members of the local campus chapter of SDS, Students for Democratic Society. That organization bears no affiliation with the similar group from the Vietnam era except that they stole the name and ideology -- violence and social upheaval are the appropriate tools to cause a change to a global communist utopia. Some of these people are my FRIENDS, and they make me (middle left politically) look like Rush Limbaugh.
I have no doubt whatsoever that some of the individuals raided were planning something felonious and potentially dangerous. But, there's a very fine line between preempting a crime, and just shutting up people you don't agree with.
And people following the speed limit on highways are pulled over for *following the speed limit*.
Disruption of everyday traffic is part of peaceful protest. Pulling you from your car and beating you senseless (er police?) is not. Not that I envy the police in such situations.
Yelling fire in a crowded theater is indeed permissible under free speech. look it up on wikipedia.
In my experience, hearing just one side of a story almost always leaves out important facts.
Before we go apeshit, shouldn't we maybe get the government's / police's side of the story?
I'm not saying that nothing bad happened here, just that until we know (or at least give an opportunity to be voiced) both sides of the story, we're really flying blind.
TFA seems to say the warrent was for the wrong address anyway.
...you get dismissed as a crackpot druggy even when you have guns, bullet proof vests, disguises, fake IDs, walky talkies etc. http://www.crooksandliars.com/2008/08/31/scant-coverage-of-obama-assassination-plot-irresponsible-or-cautious/#more-32351 Just think if those were African Americans on crack admitting they wanted to kill McCain???!!! Or god forbid MUSLIM.
"Jane Hamsher and I were at two of those homes this morning"
So this is sure to be an unbiased account of these events!! Wow! You guys crack me up!!
Well they DID ban French fries for a while.
They might have refused because they didn't want the person on whom they were serving a warrant to call up their lawyer and have him hover over the officers' shoulder to make sure they didn't overstep the bounds of the warrant.
TOUGH SHIT.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Right, so what you're saying is that because it's not as bad as a century ago, it's OK? There was also a point where not actively following the state's religion would get you killed. That doesn't make today's religious hysteria acceptable, even if it's not as bad relatively speaking (though it seems we're headed back in that direction).
Please get out of the country now, for everyone's sake.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
In an unrelated event, members of the party faithful went ahead with a public bonfire and barbecue event to celebrate the last 8 years of prosperity enjoyed by party affiliates. A reported 18,000 books, err, cellulose fuel bricks, were ignited as a demonstration of our commitment to pursuing the development of alternative fuels in anticipation of the next 8 years of prosperity.
Long live the party! Bless the USA!
-end satire
Where does the constitution guarantee you a right not to be disrupted, or declare disruption of traffic as an act of violence?
You think your wish not to be disrupted should trump the right given by the constitution to peaceful assembly and to not be subjected to unreasonable searches and seizures?
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you just misunderstood my post. I said:
I do not approve of the actions of law enforcement in these cases. These people were not violent. They were not violent anarchists.
Let's say they are anarchists. That is not a crime (sometimes it's just common sense).
Thank you Dave Raggett
No, they had one of the pointless votes that isn't binding to change the name of them in the commissary.
Looks like someone forgot to read the first addition to The Constitution...
I very much hope to see someone very publicly hauled in front of a judge over this. Even if they were all let go, breaking up this assembly was itself a violation of the First Amendment.
Trampling on and interpreting laws nowadays isn't too hard to get away with, but direct violations of amendments are still a good deal more difficult to slither out of.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
The /. summary kind of cherry-picks the bits that it mentions. If you read the Star-Tribune article, you'll note that the protesters had buckets of urine at the ready, in addition to the slingshots, bow and arrows, and gun that police seized. It's pretty clear that whatever protest these people were planning was going to go beyond peaceful words, unless someone has a better (serious) explanation for the buckets of urine.
It also notes that these informants were working on the inside of the protest groups for quite some time, to minimize any doubt that these folks were up to no good. So, in other words, the cops were doing their job, and Slashdot has, in typical form, made it some sort of repression of the proletariat by the current administration.
Were they planning on doing something illegal? I doubt it.
So they were keeping buckets of urine on hand because they liked the smell?
Let me play a bit of Devil's Advocate.
I ride a motorcycle. Statistics say that it is more dangerous for me to be riding in heavy traffic. If someone deliberately increases risk to me, is that still peaceful? Ok a stretch I know but...
Make it more concrete. Accidents go up in traffic. And then there's road rage. I'm not saying this isn't peaceful, but I think enough risk is there to be grounds for debate. And honestly, traffic sucks, don't be jerks and make it worse for us. I'd probably be against it just because it pisses me off so much.
To quote LongNoi "QZTR was right and won't leave me alone because I called him a moron when I was wrong" FYS
What the hell are you guys doing over there? You have a good list of stuff that the government should and shouldn't do. This is firmly in the 'shouldn't' camp. Sort it out.
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
You think your wish not to be disrupted should trump the right given by the constitution to peaceful assembly
Keyword: peaceful assembly. Blocking traffic is just about the textbook definition of disturbing the peace and/or disorderly conduct, i.e.: disturbing the rights of your neighbors to be left the hell alone. It's called the public order and it's generally one of the things that society demands from the Government.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Really? I wonder how many people were inconvenienced by civil rights marches 60's. You must not be a big fan of local parades.
You, sir are full of shit.
No, but the police, FBI, sheriff, etc. ARE part of the government. I didn't mention the RNC once in my post.
So what? Being an anarchist is not a crime. If you read TFA, you'd note that no search warrants were given, and that they were charged with 'conspiracy to riot.' I said they were not violent anarchists, in the sense that they were NOT planning violence or rioting.
I know that's not in TFA. Please cite a source. If you do not, then, well...
Thank you Dave Raggett
Um... possibly. From the article: "On Saturday afternoon, he [Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher] displayed a number of the confiscated items: a gun, throwing knives, a bow and arrows, flammable liquids, paint, slingshots, rocks and buckets of urine."
Assuming the items were legitimately confiscated (and not planted), there's a fair indication that something illegal may have been planned. Buckets of urine aren't standard household equipment (and throwing it around would be a crime).
Furthermore, large scale protests _do_ attract idiots who like to cause violence (on both sides). Raids to disrupt such activity would be legitimate police work.
However, the scale of the raids, the nature in which they were conducted (e.g. refusing to show a warrant), and the fairly indiscriminate targeting is far too extreme. SWAT tactics aren't needed, and the only purpose is to intimidate people who intend to protest in a legal fashion.
"Software is too expensive to build cheaply"
The "urine" is hard to explain, but some people are saying it was actually grey water.
Most of this stuff is not unusual to be found in a home. When I was a kid, most of my friends had "wrist rockets"; I got mine at walmart for $15 or so. The novelty wore off quickly, once we realized that we didn't actually want to go around breaking windows and they just gathered dust mostly.
The throwing knives are suspicious, but since they've not been charged with weapons possession, I suspect they are actually paring knives or something. Recall that almost everyone in this country has "drug distribution paraphernalia" in their homes (as polyethylene baggies or latex balloons).
Caltrops, well OK. Maybe. Or they might have had a couple of these, possibly homemade (I did). If I could trust the police and media just a little bit, I'd take them much more seriously.
I mean, really. "Flammable liquids"? I'd be more suspicious of a suburban home without any flammable liquids.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Yeah...I bet anyone who loses their house or family member because emergency services couldn't get there in time is going to be more than happy to join their cause. This is why I hold nothing but contempt for those idiot students that thought it would be a good idea to march out and lay down in the road to represent dead soldiers. I only wish that a firetruck would have run them all over.
Protesting in a public area is not the same thing as being an irritating asshole looking for 15 minutes of fame. People that pull this kind of crap also are the ones that allow for justification of these kind of gestapo tactics. It is a bit harder to justify "we raided and arrested 1000 people that were going to show up in the park across the street" rather than "we raided and arressted 1000 people that were going to cause major disturbances and endager innocent people"
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
I don't know a lot of people who have to go to work Monday (Labor day)... Mostly just retail.
If the police had treated them as any other vandals, there would not have been a problem.
The problem with symbols is that they depend upon interpretation.
And the interpretation depends upon the viewpoint of the person doing the interpretation.
Like I said, there have been broken bottles and windows ever since. And not once has it resulted in a riot.
That is because it is interpreted as plain old "vandalism" rather than "inciting a crowd to riot".
And it is handled correctly.
"From April 1924 until late February 1925 the SA was known as the Frontbann to avoid the temporary ban on the Nazi party. The SA carried out numerous acts of violence against socialist groups throughout the 1920s, typically in minor street-fights called Zusammenstöße ('collisions')."
They did not plant IEDs, nor did they spray urine on anyone. Kudos on the police for raiding Dr. Kool's home and confiscating his carving knife, computer, journal, dirty bathwater that his wife was bathing in and his sex toys.
At least five suspected leaders of the RNC Welcoming Committee, a self-described anarchist group, were taken to the Hennepin County jail, and another was being sought, said Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher. On Saturday afternoon, he displayed a number of the confiscated items: a gun, throwing knives, a bow and arrows, flammable liquids, paint, slingshots, rocks and buckets of urine. "We know these things were going to be used as weapons," Fletcher said, a charge protesters and their advocates vigorously disputed.
It seems to me like they had some evidence that this protest might get violent. Granted, being in possession of some weapons shouldn't be used to incriminate these folks, but if the informants were worried about general public safety, then there might be a more logical reason to these strong-armed tactics besides the knee-jerk reaction that they are evil fascist cops trying to hold us down. From their perspective, risking a law suite might outweigh the risks of having someone injured or killed.
So which group has a greater right to free speech? I would argue that the protesters do simply because they hav enot spent the past 8 years trying to deny everyone else's rights.
Clearly keeping your urine is a federal offense!! Damn those citizens to hell for that!! And they had an Army helmet (gasp)-- oh my god!! Clearly they were up to some seriously evil shenanigans.
Oh yeah, and all the things listed are perfectly legal to own.
If that list had any of the following items I might take it seriously:
- 500 assault rifles
- 50 pounds of C4
- 5 tons of fertilizer
- 20 boxes of hand grenades
I am open source, and Linux baby!
And who's this mysterious "Gustav" character? An old-school anarchist's name if I ever heard one. Where're the feds when you need them for that kind of violent protest?
I agree! Most of this stuff can be found in half of the teenagers homes in America. I know when I was growing up these things were commonplace to have.
Machete for camping
throwing knives -- because they are fun
calthrops because your a ninja
throwing stars were cool too.
Doesn't mean any of us did anything other than throw them at boards or trees-- wow.
I am open source, and Linux baby!
With USA supposedly being "leader of the free world", you'd hope that the USA (48th) would be comparing itself to the top free countries, (Iceland, Norway, Estonia) not China (163), Russia (144) etc.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
SO you are saying we should simply ignore a foundation of our government?
Good-bye
Is owning any one of those things or all of them together illegal? The only one I see is the "homemade device to disable buses", but I'm gonna have to know what that is before I can comment. You can disable a bus with sufficient wads of paper stuffed into the gas tank if you so desired.
As far as I know, on the books, thoughtcrime is not actually a crime yet.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
Your comment made me laugh, it really did. Go look at the civil liberties raped over and over by both sides during the American Civil War or during the First World War in the US, then compare/contrast to the current "erosion" of civil liberties.
You're a tool in every sense of the word. It's 'enablers' like you that try to justify every wrongful action. Who cares if it was worse a century ago, who cares if Mexico is worse. The only reason we're better NOW is because we iterated towards a better society.
How exactly is defending this going to make the world a better place? Indifference is the enemy of progress and you're worse. You're a piece of garbage weighted around the ankle of positive change.
I'm talking about the political and legal history of the United States since 1860. Compared to the American Civil War, the First World War and the Second World War, the crackdown on civil rights has been tame, compared to the dangerous faced with new asymmetrical weapons and tactics.
Two wrongs don't make a right. Just because what happened before was worse doesn't make this ok.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
...one of those locations would have been an ambush, and which one wouldn't have been decided until the last minute.
If you are hit by a bat, do you get mad at the bat? No, you get mad at the person who swung it at you. The police aren't totally innocent, but there is someone out there "motivating" them to behave in this way.
Just following orders is stupid, and not worthy of being a citizen in a democracy. Giving out these types of orders speaks of fascism
..........FULL STOP.
Correction.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Just wondering if anyone among the posters to this article was at the scene of the raid when it took place (and can prove it) or is everyone reacting to what may be inaccurate press reports? We all know how precise the press has been in the past many years.
First they came for the protestors. Then they came for the hackers. Then they came for the geeks. Then they came for the engineers.
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
What they had was greywater—wastewater that is undrinkable but perfectly useful for simple jobs like filling the toilet tank for flushing. Re-use of greywater is a well-known practice among conservationists and environmentalists and anyone concerned about fresh water usage. I'm in Saint Paul, and I know folks hosting protesters. I'm not making this up.
Think for a second... How practical would it be—even for a so-called "anarchist"—to store and tote buckets of urine up the hill to the convention site and fling it at anyone? A five-gallon bucket of water would weigh over 40lbs. If someone were aiming at causing that kind of trouble there are better, easier ways I'm sure.
The reports I have read from local sources indicate that the raid in Saint Paul was lead by the county sheriff, not by St. Paul police (though St. Paul officers were present). The Saint Paul police have saved my tail more than once and have my respect. I hope they don't get mired in this mess.
Especially when you have journalists and lawyers tied up in the whole mess.
I really, really hope that this time those self proclaimed autocrats will pay for it. Fuck it's more than just time to put down the foot and say enough. Actually, it was enough quite a while ago.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If, instead of a machete and some throwing knives, they police an automatic rifle and a NRA membership card, the protesters would be True American Patriots(tm), right?
And pretty please explain to me why it's illegal to have pvc pipes, chicken wire and duct tape.
Why do some people continue to believe every bit of crap (ha, a pun) that comes from the police or Prosecutors? I heard the 'buckets' were from a guy who had no plumbing. Oh - you know when they characterize someone as having porn? Often times it's that old Playboy Magazine collection. It's the job of Police and Prosecutors to CYA -Cover your a**. And they are good at it. Some of you folks who call religious people gullible will just sit there and peep like hungry chicks when some authority figure in a suit and tie tells you all manner of BS.
Enjoy your Karma, after all you earned it. Feel your Karma Joe, feel it burn.
Whooopsie. Should be "the police found an automatic rifle.." etc
The FBI's own press releases used to say that they were NOT a police organization. I guess the Ministry of Truth changed that while no one was looking.
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
So your comparing this to the civil and world wars in danger?
I assume that's what "compared to the dangerous faced with new asymmetrical weapons and tactics." means.
It is hysteria like that which allows the erosion to happen. We had one tragic accident caused by a lazy executive branch, ad then done far more damage to ourselves (financially, and life till wise) in a massive over-reaction.
That is not including the moral cost of killing tens-hundreds of thousands of people in a country not even involved (Iraq).
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
I think it's funny these groups make up excuses when they are caught, and only stand up when they have the mob behind them. they don't really believe in free speech, or they wouldn't be disrupting someone elses speech, they are just out to destroy property and abuse other people under the guise of righteous indignation.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I call it repression of freedom.
Well, I dunno where you pee when your plumbing is shot, but my neighbor got really pissed last time I used his door, so please enlighten me what would be a more suitable receptacle for my waste than a bucket.
Aside of that, what are "these kind of rally groups"? What gives you the goddamn right to assume I'm going to be protesting violently just because someone else has in the past? If I did, ok. It is under some circumstances allright to assume that I may protest violently again if I did in the past. To issue the recommendation back at you, RTFM. Nobody ever had any problem with those college kids whose houses were raided. So what visionary powers give you the idea that they would be?
Oh. Right. "these kinds of rally groups" are always like that. Ain't stereotyping fun? It saves the thinking.
IF they get violent, arrest them. Until then, I cannot see any good reason to use the force that was used.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This is a perfectly fair, if not particularly effective, way to protest
Never mind how effective it is (it's not - pissing off the people you're trying to make listen to you rarely works). But fair? How is it fair for a group of idiots to block off the bridges and roads that their fellow taxpayers are paying to make available? How is it fair to do what you can to physically intefere with other peoples rights to free assembly as they hold a political event? They can stand there and chant all they want. But the group in question had stockpiled buckets of urine to throw on people, were planning on blocking streets in a way that would prevent emergency services from being able to respond, and so on. Are you actually asking about 'fair,' here?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
This groups track record and stated goals don't help their claims of innocence. easy to act tough in back rooms, but they fold when the big boys take notice. what pussies.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Unless, of course, it's Faux News telling you it walks like a duck, and it's the Wall Street Journal telling you it quacks like a duck, and it's Katie Couric telling you it looks like a duck. They could tell you a hippopotamus was a duck and you'd believe them. Sad what suckers Americans have become.
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
Everyone should read his blog. It's amazing... covers lots of civil-liberties-related stuff like this. http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/
I doubt they even know what the law says...
The mentality of police in such cases has always been to shoot first, ask questions later. In this case, they arrest first, then get the courts to either throw out the case or sue the municipality. Since they're not directly punished, they don't really care. And, even if the guy in charge is punished, Rove and friends will have a "position" ready in some dummy company and nice fat check in the guy's mailbox every month. It's the same with the shooting, just that the guys who pull the trigger tend to be able to get off scott free, and if not, they'll go into the bodyguarding or mercenary business afterwards anyway.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
The Democrats are coming! The Democrats are coming! BOO!
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
The government has figured out that as long as we have our "bread and circuses" we mostly can't be bothered to complain about this stuff.
Especially since they've lowered the living wage to the point that all adults pretty much have to work full time. No more free time for Mommy while the kids are in school.
The people in charge of this country didn't get where they are by being dumb, and they won't let a piece of paper stop them from crushing anyone who is against the status quo either.
99% of the people prosecuted through the terror laws since 2001 have been US citizens with no links to any terrorist organization. But of course the government HAD to have these laws to "protect" us. NOT.
"There are laws that enslave men, and laws that set them free. " - Sean Connery as King Arthur
The right to assembly for redress of grievances is protected in the First Amendment. The right of protection from search and seizure without a warrant* is protected in the 4th. Are they so afraid of these protesters making them look bad to the GOP that they went and preemptively shut them down? Was this a botched strategy to make the Democratic convention look like the Los Angeles riots?
What are they thinking, that they can nab these people for some arbitrary thought-crime? The most severe crime they will be able to charge them with is conspiracy. Even with a boatload of evidence, I doubt the local or federal prosecutors will be willing to bring this to court now that it's out in the open.
* I realize they probably had warrants for search and arrest, but planting moles inside groups of your critics gives your critics hundreds of witnesses and evidence. They also are running the risk that some of their moles will become turncoats and whistle-blowers on them-- not likely, since cops look out for their own 99% of the time.
"We are Microsoft. You shall be assimilated. Competition is futile."
W-T-F happened to freedom? How can one be arrested without charge? Detained without accusation or council?
Stalin did this kind of thing!
Pride in America and Patriotism are becoming things to be ashamed of.
The world hates the USA because we press our view of freedom and democracy all around the world and back it up with big guns but we can't even enforce those ideals within our borders.
Soon it will not be "dirty ragheads" hijacking planes and planing bombs, it will be white kids from Indiana and Iowa. Oppression requires revolution.
excuse the anonymous posting. id just rather post this from stolen wifi on TOR anonymously than get on the express bus to gitmo(which is also completely criminal and wrong!).
"We know these things were going to be used as weapons," "
maybe you can explain away the other items (depending if they were "stockpiled") but buckets of urine? that shit was going to be flung at someone monkey style. given the track record of these kind of rally groups i'd say the cops were rightfully concerned, remember they planned on disrupting someone elses right to free speech, possibly in a violent manner. Or isn't that a problem because their republican?
iirc, a recent judgement affirming the right to bear arms was recently reached in Washington DC. They raided houses, if mine were raided, they would likely also find a gun, knives, flammable liquids, paint, slingshot with rocks, etc. These items are well withing my rights to have. Suspicious or not, no crime has been committed with them, and (depending on the context in which they were found) might have absolutely nothing to do with the protests (I highly doubt the gun would be used..). Yes, the urine buckets are quite suspect, but unless they have hard evidence it was going to be used in an illegal way, its well within their rights to have it (religious ceremony?).
As to excessive, I am holding my final opinion until more details come out, though my thoughts are it was a bit over the top. Six houses and several public spaces raided and they got A gun, A bow and arrows, other common household goods, etc. The only suspicious thing is the buckets of urine, which could have been one person's demented/stupid idea. The tactics described are also seemingly to spread fear and harass rather than to quell an actual threat. If it were a true threat, they would have been brought in on more serious charges than "firecode violation". Since when do people get booked for that?? Seriously, in todays post 9/11 police state, they would have been booked on some sort of terroristic threat charge.
Unfortunately, once the oh so dense population finally gets it through their think little heads that they have been lied to and generally fucked in the ass by you right-wing buffoons, they will not restrict their wrath to the elite who rule them but will seek out all those who have supported their oppressors, including the pawns like you who just parrot the talking points of the Party of Exxon and the General Armaments and Bombs Corporation in all its many forms. You might want to rethink what you post in public.
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
Considering the weight of a bucket of urine and the amount of security that's going to be at the RNC, wouldn't it have been better to fill a bunch of super soakers with urine instead of buckets? Seems the would-be protesters have a better explanation than the police "thrown on people" or you "flung at someone monkey style." How do you throw urine with your hands exactly? Besides, it was one bucket of urine from a nonassociated third party (he just lived in the illegal apt) and two buckets of gray water. Spend some time in the southwest if you don't know what it is.
How is it fair for a group of idiots to block off the bridges and roads that their fellow taxpayers are paying to make available?
It's called civil disobedience. When the choice is to break a law and protest where you can be heard or to be placed in a 'Free Speech Zone' miles from the convention where no one will see you, it is fair to choose the former. Don't like it? Demand that they be allowed to protest at the convention. Hell, they already have that right. They just aren't being allowed to exercise it.
How is it fair to do what you can to physically interfere with other peoples rights to free assembly as they hold a political event?
This is a story about police terrorizing a group planning to protest and you're claiming the PROTESTERS are interfering with the right to free assembly? The RNC have their convention hall and the power of the entire government behind them. Nothing any protest can do will stop them from getting their message across.
Show me where it says they were planning on blocking emergency service vehicles.
When unjust laws are passed that make visible protesting illegal, then you break a law to protest. Again, if you're upset that they protest in the streets, then demand that they be given a proper place to voice their dissent at the convention.
I came here for a good argument
This suggests that the urine was not part of the protest plans. The other buckets were apparently to flush toilets which is a pretty good idea for the environmentally conscious.
Mind the frickin' laser...
I don't support anarchists in anyway shape or form. They by definition would never be pleased and only "protest" as an excuse to destroy property (public/private). After what they did in Seattle the City of Miami took steps to stop them at a latin American summit some years ago. The babies cried, but Miami was spared damage by these hooligans who aren't even from here. I support the Twin Cities and their efforts to shut down these groups. Peaceful protests is one thing, using any excuse to wreck havoc is another.
FUCK YOU anarchists, fuck your own home and not mine!
good,great, arrest all these villianess scum. protesters?free speach? there own press releases state that they only intend to disrupt and prevent law abibing citezens from cunducting lawful activities. if any of these save the world from the evil republican types had a ounce of intestinal fortitude they'ed be in iraq building houses and teaching children. and when they were done there the could do the whole world a favor and stop off in the former soviet union,china and india and clean up some landfills,and create some nature reserves. yes i protested the vietnam war and had my hair down to my ass regards mike 53 year life long resisdent of saint paul,minnesnowda uffda!
Yea, but it's not constitutionally guaranteed. The other two are though. :-)
Send your spendthrift head of state this
Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and the rest might disagree. You, sir, do not deserve to be an American.
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
I'm not justifying anything, simply point out that most folks have no sense of how laws and rights change during war times.
Then why has there not been a riot in Seattle when those other windows were broken?
Because although everyone knew what it meant they still chose not to riot.
Argue that point if you want to. But it's a fact.
I know what you mean by a fact, but I disagree.
Looks like you lose.
Looks like you can't make an argument.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Actually, planning to block all traffic in an area is most certainly an illegal protest. Protesting is perfectly legal, effectively forcing everyone to stop and watch your antics is not.
The "Free Speech Zone" has been moved to somewhere on the Michigan-Wisconsin border.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Hey, these are descendants of immigrants from places like Italy. Do you think they understand the damned constitution? They're still waiting for Jesus to return. Yeah I'm a troll. What are you gonna do about it, call the fucking Homeland Security?
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
For those who were talking about the mainstream media covering this adequately...Go listen to the 2600 recordings of Emmanuel Goldstein being rounded up during the NY RNC convention. You'll get an entirely different feel for what's it's like to be detained for just being on the street. What planet did they land us on, anyway?
The civil war was definitely not worse than WWI(poison gas, trench warfare, crappy leadership) or WWII(concentration camps - both sides, atomic weapons, large scale bombardments of civilian targets) in the way or numbers that died and are still dying. Even slashdot has some damn fools.
http://www.seattle.gov/wtocommittee/history.htm
And the facts contradict your claimed experience.
The videos are still available. Check YouTube for them.
In February 2002, the World Economic Forum was held in New York City, and I planned to (and did) protest it. The alter-globalization movement had been protesting these things for years. New York newspaper headlines screamed that "anarchists" had better not come to NYC and cause trouble with the WTC still smoking and all of the claptrap. What made it even more nonsensical is it hadn't been planned for an NYC meeting, Giuliani had convinced them to move the meeting to NYC after 9/11/01, despite knowing the WEF always brought out massive demonstrations since evil types like Bill Gates always hobnobbed at such events. So working to bring a demonstration magnet to NYC after 9/11, and then decrying that there demonstrators would bother New Yorkers still grieving from 9/11 sounded a little hollow.
Anyhow, a friend of mine suggested we go to a building in New York called ABC No Rio. They are a "progressive community space" type of place they have art shows there, live bands, a progressive/zine library, a feed the poor group Food Not Bombs and that type of thing. Anyhow we went in and they were organizing a demonstration. I should point out I had never been there and my friend had rarely been there, we were just nearby and at the spur of the moment he wanted to see if a friend of his was there.
I should also point out that of all the progressive demonstrations in the US in the past twenty years, I can't recall an instance of physical violence against someone. There may have been one or more cases, but I can't think of any. A handful of way-out folks smashed windows in Seattle, burned down some new unoccupied houses in a new housing development somewhere out west and the like, and in the case of the latter a massive federal investigation sent some of those people to jail. So one has to question the need for a massive federal "monitoring" of progressive groups is needed for. Especially considering the history of these things - Nixon had a bunch of burglars break into the Democratic Party election headquarters, the FBI used these extraordinary powers granted to it to interfere in the political sphere - stating as a goal the need to stop a "black messiah" from arising, which including bugging Martin Luther King Jr. and leaking tapes they made of him to the press, particularly extra-marital affairs. When Warsaw Pact secret police did such things in their countries, it was decried as tyranny here - when our secret police work to dismantle organization of African-American and progressive people (as the FBI did, Google COINTELPRO), it is soon forgotten and you hear the need for the PATRIOT Act and the like giving power to the same people who abused it for political purposes before.
Anyhow me and my friend leave ABC No Rio. We hail a taxi and go about half a mile to Greenwich Village. My friend wants to go to a bar he went to a few months before, but can't find it. Anyhow, he realizes we are headed in the exact opposite direction than we should be, so we both do a 180 degree turn and start walking the way we had been coming. A man in his late 40s who looks very out of place for Greenwich Village on a Friday night was about 10 meters behind us. He sees us loop around and then has a look in his eye for a second, and then he also spins around and walks the other way. All things considered, especially his facial reaction when we both did a sudden 180 and began walking towards him, I know as sure as the sky is blue that he was following us, and that he was following us because we had gone into ABC No Rio. ACLU lawsuits and that type of thing after the WEF protests, and after the Republican National Convention talked about the extent of the surveillance, and fortified in my mind what I already instinctively knew was true. What scared me was the extent of the surveillance. I would dislike, but would not be as alarmed by them monitoring who went in and out of that building (where nothing was even happening! Except for planning a legal political demonstration that even the AFL-CIO was protesting in). But to follow two guys across New York City, through cab rides, on foot, who had very little to do with even organizing the demonstration much less doing anything violent during it, spooked me.
By that standard, there would still be Jim Crow. It was civil disobedience, sitting down in streets, blocking traffic, sitting unwanted in bus front seats and whites-only lunch counters that started the eventual end of the apartheid that existed in America. It was absolutely legitimate and warranted.
Times now are different though, I think such kinds of protest these days are almost always completely ineffectual and actually damaging to the cause of those engaging in them.
This space available.
Or -- they didn't produce it until last because they didn't want any evidence destroyed before they could secure it. People with incriminating evidence do that.
This of course, presumes the innocent anarchists are telling the truth. I believe the very term anarchist implies heavily they wouldn't be above lying.
Um, yes it is. That's why they used the word peaceful for the kind of assembly.
How exactly is defending this going to make the world a better place? Indifference is the enemy of progress and you're worse. You're a piece of garbage weighted around the ankle of positive change.
Well your chicken little hysterics aren't conducive to progress either. Now, these actions appear to be a gross violation of civil liberties, and as such should be investigated and dealt with, but running around claiming this is as bad as the really bad shit that happened in our nation's history just makes you look like a tool. As is calling anyone who lacks your zeal for going batshit crazy an enabler. Btw the reason we are better NOW is b/c we behaved liked rational beings not frenzied animals.
I laughed at the weak who considered themselves good because they lacked claws.
Well they DID ban French fries for a while.
Yes, but wasn't that just to break our addiction to oil?
Yelling fire in a crowded theater is indeed permissible under free speech.
It is also a good idea if there is an actual fire in a crowded theater.
But this isn't a war time, we're fighting an idea. You can't have a war against terrorism more than you can have a war against the dark. What do you fight?
You can't justify this as war time on the scale of the civil war or WWII
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
You're a tool in every sense of the word.
First off, please don't ever utter that nonsensical phrase again.
Who cares if it was worse a century ago, who cares if Mexico is worse. The only reason we're better NOW is because we iterated towards a better society. How exactly is defending this going to make the world a better place? Indifference is the enemy of progress and you're worse. You're a piece of garbage weighted around the ankle of positive change.
Stopping to congratulate ourselves is something I think we should do more. Racism and sexism have been damn near erased. Politics and civil liberties are at one of the cleanest points in history. We can recognize that, while still admitting that there is a lot more work to be done. Yes, we need to stop all instances of feds cracking down on free speech. Yes, this may have been excessive (although maybe not; the ALLEGED crimes of the Republicans tend to get more coverage). Yes, it needs to be scrutinized publicly, and if civil rights are violated, people need to be fined or otherwise punished.
You know what? That WILL HAPPEN. It's already happening.
You mean like you just were? Please. I exercise that right every day and don't get 'quashed'. Then again, I do it peacefully and don't make threats.
Well, assuming the rifle was a Class III registered weapon, the police would have been perfectly within the law to go into the house. It's one of those things you give up to legally own a fully automatic weapon in the US. Thank the Democrats for that one.
and in this case, republican puppet local administration. its as simple as that.
im sure there are republican zealots among you to the extent that they would STILL insist that republicans are not causing this, all parties are bad and whatnot.
keep that crap to yourself. in this world, everything comes in degrees. there are better ones, and worse ones of everything, and from last 8 years and this, republicans are the worse among what's there in u.s.
its as simple as that. now mod this troll in all your zealotry. people using mod points to suppress truth you dont want to face doesnt bother me, the ones who bother me are the ones who let it happen by remaining silent or 'sarcastically aloof'.
life doesnt care whether you are sarcastically aloof or not, you have to choose better of the choices you have among your hands in every choice.
Read radical news here
next time you are on /., take time to read the goddamn article, before spurting your brainwashed rant around.
those people were arrested for attempting to use their LEGITIMATE FREE SPEECH RIGHTS.
now go get some brain cells.
Read radical news here
...and show some class? Or is that in limited supply at RNC conventions?
While the event in Dayton wasn't something that would attract a ton of protests, they handled it well. They gave the only one quite a bit of room to decide how they wanted to leave. Also, they did so in a manner that didn't necessarily cause others to join in.
While this may not be typical of all of their conduct, they exercised restraint(versus creating a case for force out of nowhere) where things could have gotten worse.
I'd wonder how much of the protest is derived out of the convention reaction over novel threat. Another thing would be to find out what part of the law enforcement detail is responsible for the overreactions.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
How in the hell can you say it's "Republican bashing"?? This is illegal activity by the authorities! No matter whose "side" it is on!
What the hell is wrong with you?
those people didnt refrain from inflammatory and very dangerous speeches to give on national television, like 'repressive elite', 'challenging established order' and whatnot, and now ALL major networks ceased broadcasting anything about democrats, since all of them belong to time-warner or other interest groups.
all of them, not even withholding hillary or bill or gore, made speeches that were almost half 1968. or half 1964. the seal in the deal was when they pumped 'let the sunshine in' from the loudspeakers into the 75.000 crowded stadium.
guess what happened - even cnn cut the broadcast immediately at that point. its clear that both parties have determined clear lines as both sides have grown increasingly hardliner, and at current duality, democrat party seems to be sitting on top of the line nearest to 1968 line.
stop being 'sarcastically aloof' and bantering about how 'both parties are bad' or 'there isnt any decent party to vote for' and how you will abstain from voting.
the people who turned your last 8 years (and consequently world's) to hell do not care whether you vote or not, its even better for them if you dont vote, or go 'sarcastically aloof' and not vote for or support the party that can put out any challenge to them or revert what they did.
yes im talking about republicans. just like any conservative party around the world these days, they have gone from being a conservative party for moral values to being a control freak, repressive bunch. its happening all over the world, for god knows why, and your country, usa is no exception.
see at what point you are. your homes are being raided by your own police so that you wont be enjoying your legitimate rights. how do you think you came to this point ? with what republican administration did in the last 8 years.
do you think it will be ANY different, IF they ever get the chance for 4 more years ? if there was any chance of that, do you think those raids would have happened ?
so please cut the sarcastically aloof shit, and vote for their opponent.
and yes, democrats are their opponent. and as of now your only chance for returning to pre-2001.
yes, they are.
Read radical news here
then they aren't even guilty of "conspiracy" to disrupt the conference.
Dude... you have to have a legitimate CHARGE to detain people... otherwise you are guilty of Prior Restraint.
And when it comes to speech and protests, they had better have a damned good charge. Otherwise THEY are acting criminally.
The US civil war had concentration camps (both sides equally and wretchedly, little to no rations meaning starvation, no clothes or shelter winter or summer,just whatever uniforms they were caught in that soon turned to rags, and that's it, disease was rampant, etc) and a lot of generic genocide involved with it, especially the rape of the south, Sherman burned everything, farms, cities, he didn't care, total war as he went, he burned and hung. And both sides used what weapons they had extensively. The only reason they didn't use poison gas is it wasn't invented yet. The weaponry though was still horrific, and medical care started out with no pain killers and went downhill from there. Causalities, direct battle deaths or later on from injuries and disease, was around 600,000 for a combined around 4.5 million soldiers. For comparison, WW1 - 115,000 US deaths, WW2 400,000.
The US civil war was a *big deal* not to be discounted as some little popgun war.
The fear of a police force, or a politician, do NOT trump civil rights. They can be as "afraid" of some event happening all they want... that does NOT mean they get to do things that are illegal! The very concept is ludicrous.
Police -- and politicians -- knew the jobs can be dangerous when they took them. If they dislike the danger, then they can fucking well quit their goddamned jobs. Pushing around "innocent" people is not excusable for these reasons!
The problem comes in where protesters make a disruption at the event (usually during the middle of a speech). This seems to be an effort to stop that kind of activity.
Where is there any evidence anything illegal was planned? Or is this going to be an "oops, we made a mistake" after the convention is over?
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Although the police are required to _have_ a search warrant, they are not required to show it to you. See this article I agree this sucks, but such is the current state of US law.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
You're a tool in every sense of the word. It's 'enablers' like you that try to justify every wrongful action
And it's ad hominem attacks like that that give the internet a bad name.
Mod parent down because:
Quote: "Personally I'd love to join the protests but I seriously fear for my freedom and my life."
Uh... I hate to break the news to you, but that is EXACTLY the reaction they are hoping for, and you are lying down and letting them do it to you.
Resisting this kind of bullshit takes the kind of person with the guts to stand up anyway!
Wimp. Sheep. I will stop short of "traitor" but you and your tirade disgust me. YOU are the cause of the problem.
Dude, it's a joke... he's referring to the movie "Minority Report".
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
This isn't how we do things here, rounding people up for political reasons ahead of time like Russia or how we hated China for before the Olympics. Let them protest and make complete asses of themselves and show everyone how ridiculous and consumed with vitriol they are.
Then let those that disagree fight it out in the streets. That's the American way.
FISTICUFFS!
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
Bullshit. You know very well that many downtown businesses suffered major physical damage. Your cherry-picked YouTube propaganda do not change the reality that was documented by numerous major news organizations.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
First: according to several of the sources, the police did not produce warrants at some of the sites raided, and at other sites ignored several requests to produce a warrant, but did do so eventually.
Second: when you have a search warrant, and you use it to search a private apartment, you can't just arrest a person for everything wrong in the place. You need to get them on something related - so yes, you could bust them for counterfeiting checks, but if all you found was that they were stealing cable, you can't arrest them for that. There are certain exceptions - e.g. if you were looking for stolen goods, and you find a meth lab - but they are exceptions, not the rule. Fire code violations are way out.
The fact that the cops couldn't even pull out charges of "resisting arrest" or "interfering with an officer in the course of his duty" shows how much the protesters went out of their way to avoid doing anything wrong. When fire-code violations are all that get applied, it's very clear to see that the cops over-reacted.
"Software is too expensive to build cheaply"
Can somebody please put these police thugs in prison? Wait, they are the police? F.U. Minnesota police. Come and get me.
The Ba'athist parties are about all thats left of that classical Socialist-Fascism
And guess who supported Saddam and the Ba'athists in Iraq in the 1980s? Republican presidents Reason and Bush Sr. Guess who was on Bush's staff or is now on Jr's staff who helped Saddam? Here are some photos of Rumsfeld and Saddam together. They're shaking hand like old pals. At first Secretary of State Cheney also supported Saddam during Bush Sr's term in office. Support for Saddam only ended after he invaded Kuwait who, Saddam had accused of and was later verified, was slant drilling into Iraq to pump Iraqi oil as if it was Kuwaiti oil. Before his invasion of Kuwait Saddam could do no wrong no matter how many people he used chemical weapons against.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Yeah, because blockades are soooooooooo non-peaceful ;)
I made the mistake of comparing Slashdot's responses to this article and to the one about the German tradeshow IP busts.
FFS, what have we come to when people are more willing to denounce patent dickery in the consumer electronics space than blatant misuse of police power and suppression of political expression.
By that reasoning, we have always been at war. The Germans (pre-WWII), the Communists, China, North Korea... No country has invaded us. No country is even remotely poised to invade us. A few rouges acting generally on their own accord (it was not espionage by any other country, that has been more or less proven) does not constitute a war. If it did, every country would be at war. The most ironic part is how all the terrorists who took part in 9/11 were more or less American citizens. It was more equatable to an act of dissent than a hostile action by any other country. Does that mean we are at war with ourselves? Judging by your rhetoric and acceptance of these actions, which are echoed by the GOP-loving Bible-belt, I think we in fact /are/.
If we are at war with "terrorism", we may as well declare war upon people wearing blue hats. At least that one we could win. Terrorism is not only a non-physical entity, but not even a strict idea. The founders of the country you live in committed terrorism. As did those of just about every other country on the planet. It is also arguable that the fear-mongering the government does on a daily basis is more along the lines of terrorism than blowing up a building. Maybe we should send Bush to gitmo?
Great Intellect...
Um, no, "disturbing the peace" means causing or triggering violence or war; it doesn't mean "causing an inconvenience".
Blocking traffic isn't disturbing the peace -- it is disturbing your morning commute, which isn't protected by the constitution.
First, the Democratic and Republican National Conventions this year are in VERY different places. Did you consider that perhaps the attitude of the police in Minneapolis might be just a LITTLE different than that of the police in Denver? In fact, I can just about guarantee that they are.
Not to mention the attitude of the FBI. The FBI, after all, has demonstrably adopted the attitude of the governing administration over the last 8 years. It is to be expected that if the FBI overreact, it will be in regard to the Republican convention, not the Democratic. Thus, bias is built into the system by the very people who complain about the "offenses".
Second, if you really, honestly, wonder why Republicans have been bashed so much lately, maybe you should consider the fact that a great many (a majority, in fact) of the American people are PISSED OFF at the Republican Party over the outrageous botch job they have made of our government over that same 8 years.
Do not misunderstand me! I am NOT a Democrat! But any person who pretends to possess some objectivity about the matter MUST admit that the Republicans have gone a very long way to make a hash out of what used to honestly be a perfectly decent democratic republic form of government. They have botched literally everything: foreign policy; domestic social policy; privacy; "the war on terrorism" (what a joke); "the war on drugs" -- an even bigger joke; fiscal policy; education; the economy; taxes; and the personal freedoms of the citizens of this country. Not ONE of those areas is better off today than it was when Bush took office. Not one. And during most of those 8 years they were IN CONTROL over not only the white house but Congress as well.
THERE IS NO EXCUSE. There is nobody to blame. The Republicans have f*cked things up so badly that I despair of things returning to normal within my lifetime.
Once again: I am not a Democrat, and I do NOT trust Democrats to fix everything. But that has NO bearing on whether the Republicans messed things up. They did. Badly, and big time.
The argument that things have been worse at other times in our history won't wash. All of those things were BETTER, 8 years ago. Period. And the Republicans literally have nobody to blame.
So before you go accusing people of discriminating or acting preferentially against Republicans, you should ask yourself: "Do they have legitimate REASONS for doing what they do?"
You might find, if you are honest with yourself, that the answer is "yes".
The person to whom I was replying is not the OP. Maybe you should read the threads, and pay attention to who said what. Then maybe you would not look like such a dumbass yourself.
No, it is an act of mass murder. It's was no more an act of war than the Oklahoma City bombing was.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I've seen horseshit comments like yours before and they all have one thing in common. I have NEVER seen anybody like you continue to take that attitude when just once those attacks are done to you.
You can disguise it in fancy language all you want but if "it was okay a hundred and fifty years ago so it's fine now" is truly how you see the world, show us your outhouse, your one set of clothes, your coal oil lanterns and lack of electricity. Show us female friends who see no point in tampons. Or that you can't be bothered with painkillers beyond a pint of rotgut.
"Wyatt Earp", huh? Show us, do you walk the walk or do you just talk the talk?
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
but not necessary ;)
Gun: Weapon protected under the second amendment. Common item found in many households.
Bow and arrow: Weapon used for hunting and target practice. Probably protected under the second amendment. Common item found in many households
Throwing knives: A slightly more unusual weapon, but still legal. Assuming they were "throwing" knives in the first place, and not paring knives or something.
Flammable liquids: Found in almost EVERY household. Gasoline, turpentine, paint thinner, lighter fluid, etc.
Paint: Incredibly common item. I have oil paint, acrylic paint, latex paint, spray paint, and several bottles of enamel paint.
Rocks: You're kidding me, right? More common than paint.
Slingshots: Another common item.
Buckets of urine: Oops, turned out they lied about this one. Two contained dirty water used to flush toilets (damn environmentalists, always trying to conserve water), one, which did contain plumbing, from an apartment without working plumbing.
In other words, no indication anything illegal may have been planned. Unless you think that an environmentalist who is also a weapons enthusiast is suspicious in itself.
I
I'm missing this. Who in this thred said that the Civil War was "some little popgun war"?
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
And compared to Joe Stalin, Jeffrey Dahmer was a piker at murder. Your point?
I'll also note that WWI and WWII were actual declared wars. We are not in a state of war with any nation at the moment.
More people die from drowning every year than were killed on 9/11; to claim that we face a terrorist danger necessitating that we abandon our civil liberties is ridiculous.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Your comment made me laugh ... [rambling nonsense omitted] ...
What makes me laugh is that America still calls itself the "Land of the Free" *snicker* and the "Home of the Brave" *guffaw*. You appear to be neither from over here. I'll probably be modded as flamebait or a troll for this, but really, after reading these types of articles again and again what else are we supposed to think?
I wouldn't care except that I am a citizen of the "Free World" and America styles itself as the "Leader of the Free World". What the fuck is up with that? Maybe we should vote on it; you Americans are okay with voting, right? Even if it means you might lose?
That's what I thought.
Bullshit. We had college-aged, playtime anarchists that wanted to start some shit. Daddy - in this case, in the body of law enforcement - came in and scared the shit out of them.
What's bullshit is you, then again maybe you're an authoritarian who wants a police state.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Their job is to follow procedure and not overstep the bounds of their warrant.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Falcon PUUUUUUNCH
Fixed that for you.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
So aircraft flying into some of the tallest buildings on Earth, and one flying to the largest office building on Earth and leaving 3,000 dead is an "idea"?
No, that isn't a war. That's a CRIME. Like a bank robbery or somebody going off to kill everybody in the local school or church or post office. Like, for that matter, Timothy McVeigh and his buddies. Oh, make no mistake, it was a horrific crime. One even more effective that the Japanese subway gas attacks. I assure you that I take no pleasure in being in the World Trade Center Health Registry, like all the tens of thousands of us who still don't know how much damage those attacks did to us.
But it was not an act of war. Especially since even if we want to blame the Taliban, most of the world's governments, including our own, were loudly proclaiming that they weren't the legitimate government of Afghanistan even before 9/11.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
LOL. Quite a while ago was the time for protests, strikes, and maybe even rioting. You want your country back *now*, make a revolution.
There were people on the street corner selling at least clothes (food was often more regulated) decades before the Berlin wall fell, for the most part perfectly legally (though the exact position of private enterprise, and the rationalizations for why it "wasn't capitalism" varied according to the ideological whims of the day).
The state aimed for control over large-scale aspects of the economy, but wisely didn't go for all-out confrontation with the petty-bourgeois class, with the partial exception of Stalin's disastrous rule. Their status ranged from officially permitted, to technically illegal but nobody cared.
The best-known era of legal (promoted, even) private enterprise was during Lenin's New Economic Program, but with ebbs and flows it was quite significant throughout, and extensively so from the 1970s. The right to privately sell small-scale goods and services was even enshrined in the 1977 version of the Soviet constitution, and it was never seriously challenged after Stalin's death.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Really? What country do you live in?
I live in one where the black prison population per capita is six times higher than for whites, and the poverty rate for black children is more than twice that for white children. Racial profiling ("driving while black") remains a pervasive problem. Women still don't get equal pay for equal work, and efforts to criminalize abortion - and even birth control - continue apace.
Are things better than they were in this regard 100 years ago? Sure. But that's damning with faint praise.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
A tin of lighter fluid the size of a, well, pack of ciggies. Some adhesive. A couple dozen rocks.
I love that a small pile of bricks was seized and displayed. OMG! They own BRICKS! OMFG! ThE ENTIRE HOUSE IS BUILT OF WEAPONS!!! Kill them all!!!!!!!!
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Dude, count the digits. His ID is in the low six figures. His ID is waaay older than yours.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
30+ People and a house with dysfunctional plumbing. That's why they had buckets of piss.
The US is not fighting a war?
So aircraft flying into some of the tallest buildings on Earth, and one flying to the largest office building on Earth and leaving 3,000 dead is an "idea"? No, that is a tacit act of war.
War is between nations, this was a majorly bad criminal act perpetuated by some people with an agenda.
Saying one can not fight "terrorism", in this case the fight is against Islamic-fascism, is like going back to 1942 and saying there can not be a war against fascism because that is like having a war against the dark.
The United Nations did have a war against an idea, from 1941-'45, and following that war, there wasn't much Imperial Fascism left in the world was there? National Socialism pretty much went away as did Japanese Imperialism. The Ba'athist parties are about all thats left of that classical Socialist-Fascism, and theres only one state left with that form of ruling government, Syria.
The United Nations didn't even exist until after the war. It was not a war against an idea. The war was started by Germany invading a sovereign country (Poland) and a good chunk of the world said no and declared war on Germany. Btw this was in 1939. The USA only declared war on Germany because Germany declared war on the USA. Read that again, America went to war because another country formally declared war on it. If the war was against an idea then Spain would of been invaded as they were also fascist yet Franco ruled till his death.
And the fascists were about as much about socialism as N. Korea is about democracy. Just because they have the word in their name means nothing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
We don't need no stinkin' free speech anyway, now do we?
The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power. -- Daniel Webster
Without doubt, our law enforcement agencies have been even more throughly subverted and are even more corrupted than they used to be. And as we've seen from early retirements if nothing else, our military services are being subverted, too. Take a look at evangelical pressures on service members, most famously within the Air Force academy, if you don't know about this already.
So be it. We need to do something. Quite a few somethings, actually.
Well, speaking as a former workflow consultant, why the frack aren't we looking at our police and service academies with a fine toothed comb? The academies, the promotion system, and the way that duties are assigned are the things that police and military officers cite again and again when asked how to address these problems. They're right.
Just as we would if they were clients with organizational problems, if you are trying to change how things work, you don't just yell at them, you study how they operate, pass commands, train, and compensate.
Protesting is fun and all but if we're serious, then we need to turn a few thousand spotlights on how these organizations run, document and share what we find, and change those things that cause problems. Anything else is pretty much just wanking.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
He didn't physically stand in front of and block traffic traffic.
The "buckets of urine" are repeatedly addressed above, as they are if you RTFAs to the end. Please do not allow spin to mislead you.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
This issue is not just a matter of "cops oppressing people because the man told them to do so". The FBI had a full case going on, including informers and other kinds of information sources. They had info on what the group was planning to DO, but not much info about HOW they were going to do it. They asked for a warrant so they could search the place and get important (and official) information about who is participating, how, when, and where. And also, if lucky, arrest everyone for having bombs, smoke canisters, molotov cocktails and other kinds of "riot-starting tools". Unfortunately (I think that because I'm not sympathetic with fools who invest their times at those activities) the FBI only managed to get a room full of people and no illegal tools at all. But it's still a victory.
Finding nothing is still a victory? A 'victory' for / of what? The WMD gambit.... You cite all sorts of things which were not found. Oh, I forgot. Urine in 1 bucket. Dangerous stuff, that...
Women still don't get equal pay for equal work
and from the other side, men still pay 25% more on average for medical, life, and auto insurance, and are treated in the media like emotionless "things" to be leeched from and divested in divorces of half their assets as a business.
The sexism cuts both ways.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
I'm not sure what peaceful demonstrators need with a 5 gallons worth of urine, gas masks and home made caltrop to disable buses.
I'll see your Star_Tribune link, "The alleged urine, Nestor maintained, was actually three buckets, two of which contained dirty water used to flush toilets while conserving water. The third was seized from an illegal apartment occupied by someone not connected to the RNC protests. There was no bathroom in the illegal apartment and urine was collected in a bucket, Nestor said."
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
The Constitution doesn't say "non-violent assembly," it says "peaceful assembly."
Peace is not simply the absence of violence.
To be sure, it's up to interpretation as to what a peaceful assembly is and is not. My interpretation is that blocking bridges in a major metropolitan area is not peaceful (even if it's not violent).
From WP
"Peace can be a state of harmony or the absence of hostility. "Peace" can also be a non-violent way of life. "Peace" is used to describe the end of a violent conflict. Peace can mean a state of quiet or tranquility -- an absence of disturbance or agitation. Peace can also describe a relationship between any people characterized by respect, justice, and goodwill. Peace can describe calmness, serenity, and silence. This latter understanding of peace can also pertain to an individual's sense of himself or herself, as to be "at peace" with one's own mind. peace can be also the living of the family calmly together without any quarrels."
They caught people about to break the law ... period ... that's it.
Which law? Or should that be, "Witch law"?
-FL
This of course, presumes the innocent anarchists are telling the truth. I believe the very term anarchist implies heavily they wouldn't be above lying.
Hardly, many anarchists are fond of the truth. The fact that they do not believe in the legitimacy of government does not make them any less honest than any other group.
Xavier Rabourdin for president 2012
I'm so sorry. Your logic comes from what exactly?
How can you conclude that the harrassment of possible participants, most of whom, let us note, were planning only to videotape the actions of others, justifies "to make a difference, you need to shed some blood"?
Explain this to me, please. Because to me you sound just like a police plant.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
There was an informant inside this organization that told authorities what was planned.
Here's a link about your informants: "Moles wanted". Informants only get paid if an arrest is made. Let's see, I'm a mole and I know if the info I give doesn't lead to an arrest do I tell the truth or do I lie?
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
uh flamebait? lol.. me? why? oh boy.. that's too funny :)
you sure you're a real AC and not a government plant to incite violence?
They're using their grammar skills there.
So they were keeping buckets of urine on hand because they liked the smell?
Another troll who hasn't even read the /. thread which debunks the urine in a bucket 'biggie'. Urine - How utterly dangerous! Urine should be classified as an WMD (or maybe it already is...).
The police have a higher standard to hold to because they're the professionals.
I disagree. They're the equivalent of the old German SS at best these days.
If we don't respect our own rights who should be expect to respect them for us?
Part of the brilliance of the American experiment is the enumeration of inalienable rights and if we don't uphold those rights the American experiment fails.
Jefferson called it eternal vigilance.
Quack, quack.
To search a residence you need probable cause AND you have to serve the warrant when you go.
No, to search a residence you have to have probable cause or a search warrant.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
so this behavior is OK because the government hasn't crossed "X" line yet? We know where this leads, they know where this leads, and they do it anyway. Call them all traitor, while there's fewer of them. After all, that's what THEY'RE doing by singling out people like this! A Dickinson style class war is already started but only one side is making their move.
Close, but from what I've been reading, they had to "send for" a warrant which arrived a few hours later.
But I'm quibbling. Fundamentally, the point of a warrant is to serve as a guide to law enforcement officers to limit and define their actions, to explain those same limits to those whose privacy is being cut into, and to require law enforcement to wait for judicial approval before violating somebody's rights. A warrant is supposed to keep a citizen from ever having to just accept an officer saying "trust me" in a position where they are clearly about to do injury. If the warrant shows up so much as a nanosecond *after* an action is taken, then it's absurd to expect citizens to treat it as valid and it has failed.
It's like giving an officer a bulletproof vest *after* a firefight. When you know that the firefight is about to happen. Such an action is contemptible at best and criminal at worst.
This was, in most sense that should matter, a warrantless search. Plain and simple.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Don't forget women almost always get custody over the children and then rape the father with child support too.
Many of us already do take actions beyond writing here. I sure do. Hell, I've published political stuff that I already know was on display in places the police have been watching. And I've done plenty more than that, all of it peaceful, for what it's worth. If you had read the comments you would know that several others here have also taken a more active role.
In no way does bearing witness, which is, by the way, what we're doing here, preclude taking other action. Bearing witness is also a key part of democracy and, for that matter, Christianity.
If you have some factual grounds for *knowing* that "We're all keyboard corporals here", then please share them. Then again, don't bother since, as I already pointed out, I already know that you're wrong.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Someone will surely point out that I'm wearing a tinfoil hat for having predicted this to my wife, but here goes anyway.
Posted Aug 27, 2008 - Police Seize Journalists Notes About RNC Protest Plans
They obtained the list of contacts and locations by seizing them from an independent journalist, then they put that information to use.
"Lame" - Galaxar
Perhaps you should of read more. For instance here's a good read:
"The alleged urine, Nestor maintained, was actually three buckets, two of which contained dirty water used to flush toilets while conserving water. The third was seized from an illegal apartment occupied by someone not connected to the RNC protests. There was no bathroom in the illegal apartment and urine was collected in a bucket, Nestor said."
allowing people to run around with weapons
Unlike Australia in the USA we have the constitutional right to own and bare firearms.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Hold on, you think that if you searched any random six suburban houses you wouldn't find at least one hunting rifle, lot of kitchen knives, lawnmower petrol, house paint, kids toys, and stones in the garden??
What, do you live in a rubber walled room or something?
I've known plenty of cops. Have probably dealt with at least fifty or sixty enough to have some idea of their intelligence. And in my experience they are some little bit smarter than the populations they police. More authoritarian? Yes. Hyped up on their power? Yes. But not dumb or, for that matter, lazy or fundamentally corrupt or most of the other things of which they are so typically accused. The job pays well, provides full retirement at fifty or younger, and has lots of bennies. Plenty of capable people are willing to say yes to that.
If you want to change the police, look at what I've written above. It's not about some inherent deficiencies of theirs. It's about how they're trained, managed, assigned, promoted, and compensated.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
I worked with a group of kids when I was in my teens one Summer. --You know, games and sports and arts & crafts and such. This one day, we made tie-dyed shirts.
Well the shirt I made turned out pretty good and I wore it for the whole afternoon and kind of forgot it was on me. Then after the kids all went off back home, me and a few of the other 'leaders' decided to head out for a movie and burgers and stuff. At the end of the evening, we all split off and I was on my way back home alone.
My opinion of humanity then began to plummet.
Taking public transit, I was getting all these freaked out looks. Everybody was acting as though they were scared of me. --I was used to being totally ignored, but people were really, really nervous. It was baffling. It happened not just with the occupants of one bus, but on another and on a train as well. I didn't work out it was the tie-dye shirt they were all reacting to until this one Stephen Colbert clone actually measured me up and down with an expression of abject, "Small-guy-on-his-first-day-in-prison" and then made a comment about the Grateful Dead being really cool in some kind of weird effort to. . , not get hurt by me? It was utterly unreal. I couldn't believe just how limited a set of lives people must lead in order to react in such a manner. As just a teen-ager, (back when I wasn't aware of politics in the slightest,) even I had worked out that hippies were the last form of political life you needed to back slowly away from.
I filed the incident away under, "Fear and Ignorance" for later reference and have dusted it off for you today.
-FL
Like I said, there are many symbols that you do not know how to interpret. Now you are disagreeing with that.
Fine, if you want to claim that you understand every symbol, you can claim that.
Fascinating.
So it's always a symbol that everyone understands the same as you do ... but 99.9% of the time everyone just decides not to act as if it were a symbol. And instead they act as if it were just some vandal.
Yeah, you go with that.
What weapons?? Take my house and just two of my friends. In our combined houses we have:
Throwing knives - one friend is a black-belt, I think he made them himself.
Gun - Other friend is a a pistol shooter.
Bow and Arrows - I foolishly took up archery a year ago, slacked off after three months, still have the gear.
Flammable liquids - we all have petrol cans
Paint - yup, we all have that
Slingshots - Friend's kids have one I bet
Rocks - Seriously? I have a garden path full of them.
Are those the same news organizations that told us how there were "WMD's" in Iraq?
I'm linking to the seattle.gov web page.
No, they did not. Most of them lost money because it was the peak shopping season. Some were damaged. Unless you choose to define "major physical damage" as "broken windows".
I'll just stick to the facts. You can have your claims.
I was going to accuse you of inaccurate quoting, but now I find (while writing my comment) that there are TWO articles: the one you link to and the one the summary links to, which I checked first. In the article I read first I found this:
Quote
The alleged urine[...] was actually three buckets, two of which contained dirty water used to flush toilets while conserving water. The third was seized from an illegal apartment occupied by someone not connected to the RNC protests. There was no bathroom in the illegal apartment and urine was collected in a bucket.
End quote
I haven't seen anything about coltraps or equipment for disabling buses in that one either. All I found was that
Quote
[The sheriff] displayed a number of the confiscated items: a gun, throwing knives, a bow and arrows, flammable liquids, paint, slingshots, rocks and buckets of urine.
End Quote
I have not enough time to read all of the article you link to (gotta go to work :-( ), but I find this interesting...
To be clear: I quoted from the linked article.
The weird thing is that the article you link to is on first sight
What person will donate an airborne act of love?
uh flamebait? lol.. me? why? oh boy.. that's too funny :)
people have a right to protest other peoples' allegiances.
Since the 60's the republican party has been about protecting corporate america and intolerant nutbags from individualism in any way shape or form, including the suppression of those annoying minorities, those lazy poor, and of course uppity people trying to point out the pools of molten rock formed from the friction of our forefathers spinning in their graves.
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Might be time to reconsider your stance on the issue, folks on the left.
Yes, I am a smart ass; it's better than the alternative.
As I've asked before, what is your evidence that the OP is somebody who needs to "move out of your parents house and see the world" and isn't doing anything? It's just as easy to take your posts as whining as his.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
When the police stops working as law enforcment and starts working for a political party how far is that from a banana republic?
And when they work for corporations as well, how far is that from a fascist oligarchy?
-- thinkyhead software and media
You can't have it boy ways and call it fair.
I'm not advocating for the republicans, don't get me wrong here.
But they have a legitimate right to set up conventions for their party to spread their message.
Protesting about it, is wrong.
If you want to show your way of thinking as better than theirs, you don't protest them, instead, you up and do better than them.
How do you do that?
Simple, have your own convention.
In that convention, list the issues and problems and then, give answers and solutions.
That's how it should be done.
That's why I say it is uncivilised to protest, because the entire political system is an adversarial one. It is based on conflicts.
There are rules and one of them is free speech on either side.
Don't go kicking the other party out, because you don't like their message, instead, be constructive and advertise your own message.
If you feel they don't have the solutions to the problems at hand, then, you dissiminate their solutions, find the flaws for all to hear and then, you propose your own answers.
If your party has the right answer, demonstrate it, prove it, and be effective about it. That's what this is all about.
I firmly believe that if you have the right message to give, if you can prove you have the answers to the solutions, then it doesn't matter what your party is called, people will listen.
But protesting and cause nuisance to a political convention is juvenile and counter productive.
It is a reflection on the strength of one's character, which, in this case, not good at all, in my honest opinion.
1. War - War is a political dispute, characterized by organized violence between national military units, Clausewitz calls war the âoecontinuation of political intercourse, carried on with other means" - War is an alternative (and violent) form of political interaction in which two or more militaries have a âoestruggle of wills.â
AQ and the Taliban, even if they are not National or State actors are still military units, even if its just cellular.
2. The United Nations was the term used for the Allies in the Second World War following the American entry into the war. The term "United Nations" was first used by Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt, in the 1942 Declaration by United Nations, which united the Allied countries of WWII under the Atlantic Charter, and soon became a term widely used to refer to them.
3. Fascist governments, like Germany, Italy, were pretty damned socialist.
you're right, you can't have it both ways and call it fair. You can't grant the republican party the right to hold a convention there, and deny activists the right to stand in the streets and protest it.
whether it's juvenile or not has nothing to do with it.
They have every right to piss and moan about their convention in the streets outside.
whether it's good form or not (a subjective viewpoint) is not in question here.
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How far does something have to be to the right to count for you? Law enforcement is bought and paid for and working for the people in power.
The FBI says: this.
ABC says this.
Do the police there have a history of unjustified assaults into houses and then trying to pretend that it's okay? Yes, they do.
Are there more police assaults not being mentioned here? Yes, there are. They've been quite busy. Overwhelming force against people who haven't resisted seems to be a constant.
Now, like all of us, I would love to see a more detailed statement from the police. But I've just been looking and what I'm mostly finding is variations on: "Minneapolis/St. Paul police could not be reached for comment Saturday."
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
The much cited "buckets of urine" were from the house being overcrowded, resulting in a shortage of bathrooms. Please look above where this is addressed.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
On Saturday afternoon, he displayed a number of the confiscated items: a gun, throwing knives, a bow and arrows, flammable liquids, paint, slingshots, rocks and buckets of urine.
"We know these things were going to be used as weapons," Fletcher said, a charge protesters and their advocates vigorously disputed.
Fletcher however, stressed that he and other agencies had informants planted inside this and other groups for "a long period of time."
Clearly, somebody is guilty of conspiracy here. I wonder whether it's the activists or the fuzz, but after reading the Star Tribune article, the arrests look legit and the anarchists look dirty. I also suspect that they're criminals. Responsible gun owners never store their buckets of urine nearby. Corrosion.
But then, Salon includes a very important detail that the Star Tribune omitted: the cops never presented a warrant! Because they failed to present a warrant, Title 18, USC, Section 242 says they were "acting under color of law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom to willfully deprive or cause to be deprived from any person those rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution and laws of the U.S."
In the house that had just been raided, those inside described how a team of roughly 25 officers had barged into their homes with masks and black swat gear, holding large semi-automatic rifles, and ordered them to lie on the floor, where they were handcuffed and ordered not to move. The officers refused to state why they were there and, until the very end, refused to show whether they had a search warrant. They were forced to remain on the floor for 45 minutes while the officers took away the laptops, computers, individual journals, and political materials kept in the house. One of the individuals renting the house, an 18-year-old woman, was extremely shaken as she and others described how the officers were deliberately making intimidating statements such as "Do you have Terminator ready?" as they lay on the floor in handcuffs.
I hope that the fraudulent arrests are prosecuted as kidnapping, committed during conspiracy against rights.
Title 18, USC, Section 241
Title 18, U.S.C., Section 241 Conspiracy Against Rights
This statute makes it unlawful for two or more persons to conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person of any state, territory or district in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him/her by the Constitution or the laws of the United States, (or because of his/her having exercised the same).
It further makes it unlawful for two or more persons to go in disguise on the highway or on the premises of another with the intent to prevent or hinder his/her free exercise or enjoyment of any rights so secured.
Punishment varies from a fine or imprisonment of up to ten years, or both; and if death results, or if such acts include kidnapping or an attempt to kidnap, aggravated sexual abuse or an attempt to commit aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to kill, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for any term of years, or for life, or may be sentenced to death.
These jack-booted thugs need to be reminded who they're responsible to protect and serve. If standing trial for a death penalty offense doesn't put them in line, convict and execute.
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p
The catch with it all in the US system, is most of the egregious behaviour falls to the State Governor to ensure the principles of law and justice are adhered to within the state excluding of course the political involvement of the FBI which is of course a federal abuse.
The problem with this is that the state governor is a member of the same political party as the protesters were going to protest against. Before Republican presidential candidate McCain picked his running mate there was even talk about the governor being his running mate. His office is even in the same city.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Evidently physics works differently on your planet. But here on this planet, people who are handcuffed, face down, on the floor, under the eyes of a crowd of cops, some with drawn automatic weapons, aren't going to be "destroying" much of anything.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Well, I guess we can agree to disagree! :) Don't forget I'm being called a "flamebait" for my views in this article :)
But "pissing and moaning" about it, as you say, is far from constructive...
That much I'm pretty sure of.
Protesting just for the sake of protesting is wrong. Activists who protest the right of an established political party, aren't taking the right approach.
Anyone who wants to make an impact and try and change someone's mind, should in my honest opinion, be good mannered about it.
If you want to "woo" the republican supporters onto your cause, then "pissing and moaning" isn't the way to go, instead, challenge them with insightful thoughts and give them answers to problems which they are plagued by just as you are.
But as you say, they have the right to moan about it in the streets outside, as long as it is done in a peaceful manner, I agree with you on that point.
No. There are plenty of witnesses who were not members of the "RNC Welcoming Committee". In fact, if you had RTFA, you would know that the biggest raid was against a house full of people who were simply there to videotape the event. A thing that scares the Minneapolis police since over four hundred arrests at the 2004 RNC were proven to be on false grounds due to videotapes that proved that the arresting officers were lying.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Do you own "flammable liquids"? Paint? Rocks? How many Americans own guns? Should they all be arrested for that? As for the "buckets of urine", I'm quite impressed how far and fast that b.s. is spreading. Look above and you'll find that addressed at least five or six times right here in this thread.
Oh, I certainly do hope that there will be a 'law suite", if by that you meant "lawsuit". There are certainly grounds.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
This was a guy who got thrown out of the Labour conference for protesting (I don't agree that he should have been BTW) - not surprisingly the backlash against this in the national media was massive.
What we're talking about here is to not even be able to voice dissent anywhere in the whole city where the party convention is happening, with people being arrested because they might be thinking about protesting. This is in a whole different league, and I suspect the US national media will barely touch on it.
Bob
Listen to my latest album here
The FBI almost openly plants people in areas where activists congregate, and keep tabs on where and when groups will be staging events. Ordinarily they don't use the information gathered to disrupt the groups - though disruption is still performed in various ways. Planted people may be encouraged to sow seeds of discontent and disinformation, but of those I have heard reported, it's usually pure information gathering - dates and times.
The disruption of activists implies to me that ahead of the RNC some fairly high-up people decided to make use of the information the FBI and/or local enforcement regularly gathers through covert means... though it seems really odd that they impulsively arrested all these people then couldn't figure out how to make them disappear.
So maybe it's all some kind of PR stunt to throw some red meat to the ravenous right wingers who'll have a laugh to see some anarchist hippies get kicked in the nuts. "Ha! Ha!"
The media-for-idiots (i.e., news networks, talk radio) will smear the airwaves with the usual shitty lowbrow opinion theater, confabulating activists with terrorists. Despite the transparency of their game, they find lots of hapless people who will play along, who automatically join the apparent throngs sympathetic to the powerful... the soldiers of God.
We witness this the way these appalling scoundrels - our political class - pretend-o-cratizes its way to the bank in the classic style of corrupt servants of power. They stir the rest of us up such that we sycophants slaver and bicker over the falling scraps of our so-called "leaders."
Certainly we all strongly sense the corruption and pettiness that exists across the board in the halls of our government, and how cavalier they are becoming. It seems as though the ordinary men and women who hold offices of government - these supposed servants of the people - are more likely than ever to succumb to the inducements offered by large-scale capitalists, war profiteers, and disaster recovery specialists.
The audacious series of acts we have seen from the right wing especially in the last 8 years, the absolute disregard for the founding spirit that is this country's beating heart, the way that our airwaves have become vile with propaganda breeding cruelty, jingoism, and cynicism - these are the fruits of unbridled capitalism. Another seems to be a policy of undermining public education, presumably to create a larger pool of angry discontented mentally handicapped people who will be more likely to buy into their idiot brand of propaganda.
But that is a subject for another day.
Meanwhile, hey, what's to stop these people in the in-group who currently have power from using the FBI and law enforcement any way they want? To me this seems no less a crime than Watergate, except in this case the public can be fooled into thinking the break-ins were necessary to protect lives and property from domestic terrorists... well, anarchists... uh, whatever, same thing! ...pass me another beer.
-- thinkyhead software and media
It's fuck "tha" police.
Kids these days. No respect for tradition.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Not directly, but the police stopped it for him (so that if he fell he wouldn't be killed).
These guys definitely stop traffic though. You'll notice that although the police tend to break up the event, people don't get arrested and people certainly aren't arrested before that've started to protest.
Bob
Listen to my latest album here
Your examples are very different. From TFA: the police in Boston were "looking for people who had defaulted on warrants for crimes including shoplifting, rape of a child, and assault and battery with a deadly weapon".
Say what you will about the actions but no way will you convince me that the police actions in Minneapolis this past few days are done to find career violent felons.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
I find myself hoping there is something missing from the story...some detail that removes how horrible this seems on the surface. Ignoring "he said, she said" and "Republicans" or "Democrats" blah blah...
/maybe/ I can say "these people were about to do something they shouldn't"?
...
...is...at..the same price it was when fuel was 2.89 p/gal...*rolls eyes* ...ok...I give.
What in the holy hell happened to basic human rights? Was there a thing missing from the story that we don't see that shows these people were making bombs? Were the "insiders" witness to horrific hate crime behavior that
It's been said to death... "This sucks" "that sucks" and "geez, where'd our rights go".
What are we doing? We've let the country just creep into this hole where no one cares enough to vote, or write congressman...
And now, I am getting older, and caring more and more about how much I used to be able to do, and now, I fear everything, even our own police.
My then (3 years ago) 2 year old daughter was snagged out of my hands when visiting the liberty bell going through the guards gates. By a guard, btw. I hadn't made it through the check point, yet. Now, mind you, he's thinking "I'm the good guy, I'm the hero here, protecting these people from the bad guys." He snags her to bring her through the gate, forcing me to go through behind her before I have emptied my pockets. I am not letting my kid out of my hands so easily, Mr. Guard. Well, of course, they get riled, and start pushing me backwards through there. I went livid, and said "Give me my kid, or I call the police". They started getting on me like I was a terrorist all of a sudden. Oh, and when I finally got calmed, and through the gate, I told the officer to never do that again and his only reply was to say "We're here to protect the innocent, sir", and from there, they were walking behind us the rest of the tour.
Best part? When I get through the exit, they insist you go through this "line" to go back across the street. My kid steps off to the side, and so I follow, not realizing that it is apparently a federal offense now to be belligerent when an officer snags your kid away from you, and oh, when you walk over the little white line on the pavement. That's bad too. So, the officer accompanying me says "Sir, I need you to step back into the line". "Um, why? We're headed to the same place, and I don't think I can cause too much trouble being 5 feet outside, moving towards the same side there" Well, of course, they are already pissed at me for making a scene...Anyway, when I get to the other side of the street, he says "Sorry for being such a hard ass, sir, but things changed when 'they' attacked us on 9/11" "Oh really?" "And, I suppose walking outside of the lines somehow adds up to blowing up buildings?" Geez...those guys have no sense of what this country is about. Following orders, I guess...?
The Liberty bell. Definitely part of history, and nothing to do with modern US.
Where'd all this truly start? I've seen a couple of posts on "well, it started 8 years ago"
Stop and think about this. For the last 100 years, or more, the centralized federal government has been power grabbing, and short changing us on every turn, snagging little bits and pieces away.
They'll do something horrible, then take it back, and then do something less horrific so we can feel comfortable with being screwed...
I really hate to even fan this flame, but, gas is 3.40ish in NC. I hear people say "man, that's great!"...um...oil barrel
I have a home owners association that is a very tiny scale perfect model for the US on this; hear me out...
They sent out fliers saying they were going to assess each unit for $5,000 to repair a swimming pool for the community. Sounds like a great idea, save, they've already been getting money for 3 years in a column titled "repairs" that has a n
I was under the impression that the UID comment was about Steve Franklin.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
The OP and GP were debating a matter of degree of wrongness. The OP citing the fact that the country experienced greater wrongs in the past is sufficient to refute the GP's claim that we had in the present "almost hit rock bottom". I'm not sure how your "two wrongs don't make a right" got modded insightful, since the OP and GP had a disagreement over magnitude, not sign.
The /. summary kind of cherry-picks the bits that it mentions. If you read the Star-Tribune article, you'll note that the protesters had buckets of urine at the ready
Who's cherry picking now? If you read the Star-Tribune article you would have read how there was only one bucket of urine, and it was in an apartment without a toilet where a illegal occupant was. And you would have read who that person had nothing to do with the protesters.
in addition to the slingshots, bow and arrows, and gun that police seized
I used to own at least one of each of these as well as a rifle and a blow-gun. Does that mean I was planning something illegal? In that case my dad was a criminal because he gave me the rifle when I was young. And the person who sold me the gun was one too even though we were both in the US Army when he sold it to me.
It's pretty clear that whatever protest these people were planning was going to go beyond peaceful words, unless someone has a better (serious) explanation for the buckets of urine.
It's clear to whom? To you? Maybe you don't need much information as I need to decide guilt.
It also notes that these informants were working on the inside of the protest groups for quite some time, to minimize any doubt that these folks were up to no good.
And those informants were getting paid, but they only got paid if there was an arrest. Let's see, if I became an informant and I knew I would only get paid if the info I gave led to an arrest but there was nothing being planned that was illegal, would I tell the truth and not get paid or would I lie so I would be paid?
So, in other words, the cops were doing their job
No, so either you don't have enough info or you're trolling.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Then I'll cut you some slack. Having just looked through some of your posts in other threds, I'll even agree that you do make a consistent effort to bring some politically aware clue to discussions.
But I still don't think that name-calling is effective. I understand your frustration. I've done my time, too and it gets kinda lonely out there sometimes. Or, more to the point, perhaps, it's bloody hard to sit in a room full of people complaining and know that you're the only one actually putting your all too fragile ass on the line to do anything about it.
But there is considerable value that comes from somebody, especially somebody like "Garcia" who is pretty upfront about who he is, being willing to come forward and say, "yes, this chilling effect IS changing my behavior." It's gotta be embarrassing, if nothing else. The truly cowardly thing is what thousands have probably done in the past day, which is to be a Twin Cities resident who read this thred and said nothing at all. They are the ones who truly make it harder to judge how much dissent is warped by government actions like these.
Frankly, I planned my trip to Minneapolis a few months back in part specifically to avoid the RNC. I thought about going. Same for Denver. I had offers of transportation and places to crash. And I'm sitting here in the safety of my home a thousand miles away in part because I prefer to reduce my odds of time in a jail cell or even handcuffed on a floor somewhere. And that's a thing worth having on the record, too.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
I'm far from pleased about this (as my many posts here show) but the Minneapolis cops are NOT comparable to the SS. They really aren't. What they're doing may be wrong but to equate it with, for example, shooting people down in the streets for having the wrong ethnicity is pathetic. That kind of false equivalency just makes it harder to judge how bad things really are.
Trust me on this; things can get a hell of a lot worse than they are right now and if they do (which I increasingly suspect they will) it will do us no favors at all to misremember how things were.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Recently we have heard about political demonstrators being arrested, in China during the Olympics, and now in the US before the Republican Convention. I believe we all agree that this is wrong - if freedom of speech has any significance at all, it is to secure the freedom to express your political views without fear of intimidation.
But, bad as it is in China, I think what happens in the US is doubly bad. At least, in China you know in advance that what you do is illegal before you do it, and that it can have negative consequences - you can prepare yourself for it. In America people think that they have the right, that taking part in a political demonstration is not going to have big amd bad consequences, because you have the right to speak your opinion.
True, these Americans are not going to spend long time in a prison or work camp; but in both cases the free expression of political opinions has been oppressed. As far as I can see, America is not living up to its own standards; so - with China, we get to see that they are always doing better than what we expect, and America is always doing worse. Come on, Americans, I know you can do better.
My initial reaction was to say nothing because I wish to protect my anonymity. After some thought, however, I believe I can relate a bit more without giving away very much. This is a sampling; it is not a comprehensive list.
When most in my small community (at the time) were too afraid or too apathetic to protest illegal actions by the local police, I went down to one of the big town events and performed a one-person protest, complete with picket signs leaving no doubt as to my position. I was later intimidated by some VERY unfriendly people who also made a very big deal of taking many pictures of me as I passed. Nevertheless I continued my activity. My position on the issues were later vindicated by the courts, and two innocent people were awarded damages from the police department by the court, which also publicly reprimanded the officers and the police department. (Sadly, they did not lose their jobs.) I do not pretend that my actions influenced the courts, but maybe -- just maybe -- they showed other people that they don't have to stand still and put up with it.
When the local police were "breaking up a riot" that did not actually exist (the only people "rioting" were, in fact, the police... members of the public were merely trying to get out of their way), I stood my ground against a gang of fully riot-geared police officers, who illegally tried to force me off of the private property on which I was standing, minding my own business. One of the officers had his can of mace pointed at me, 3 inches from my face. I held my ground. The commanding officer told them to leave me alone, and I was left unmolested, but it was close. I had no way of knowing he was NOT going to spray me straight in the eyes... but I was in the right, he was not, and I did not back down. That is what mattered. I am not completely ignorant of the law; I would have fried his ass in court if he had sprayed me. There were witnesses too. But I was willing to get sprayed if necessary to make the point... and that is sometimes what it takes.
On a different occasion, when I found a police officer doing something that was clearly illegal and dangerous, I physically attacked him and took his gun, painfully injuring him in the process (though not permanently). He was later reprimanded for his actions. (Sadly, this one did not lose his job either. However, I honestly believe he will not try that again.) Note that I was not charged with anything, because I was in the right and they knew it. But if I had done nothing, he would have gotten away with it.
There are a few other incidents that I will not detail. But my point is: if you lie down and let them walk on you, then you are part of the problem. Despite the inherent risks, I have instead chosen to be part of the solution. And unless someone is mentally or physically handicapped, I have no respect for those who CHOOSE to be sheep and just bitch and whine, like that poster up above.
I'm not sure how your "two wrongs don't make a right" got modded insightful, since the OP and GP had a disagreement over magnitude, not sign.
I don't know why either. However I replied with "two wrongs don't make a right" because GP said "the crackdown on civil rights has been tame". Just because it's "tame" does not justify it. Now if GP didn't mean to justify it then he could have said that.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Yes, in exactly the same way that the DPRK is democratic.
That was just one of the groups affected. You're ignoring the raid done at the I-Witness Video group's gathering. There was no evidence anyone in that group was planning any violence. Heck they weren't even planning on protesting. Just video-recording everything.
And you're calling the "anarchists" "hooligans" before either side has their day in court, based purely on the police statements. In this day and age, please don't tell me you still take the police at their word for every action they perform. Haven't you seen enough video evidence to the contrary to plant a few seeds of doubt in your mind?
We are the 198 proof..
On the other hand, here is a person who says "Fuck you America", but is unwilling to do what it takes to change things. I have a difficult time letting that go unchallenged.
So because they have worse riots other places, it's OK to break windows of innocent local businesses in St. Paul and Seattle?
What windows were broken in St Paul? I live right across the river in Minneapolis and I haven't heard of any broken windows.
What a load of bullshit.
Who's speaking shit?
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
What is all Bush's fault? If you mean Saddam, no it's not all his fault. Actually Reagan is more at fault. If it's not Saddam I have no idea what you mean.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
What makes me laugh is that America still calls itself the "Land of the Free" *snicker* and the "Home of the Brave" *guffaw*.
Those are ideals that have never, in no time in America's history, have ever been fully lived up to. Still, it's nice to have ideals.
You appear to be neither from over here.
Where is "here"? Every country has it's problems.
I'll probably be modded as flamebait or a troll for this
No you won't, because you included this phrase, which often results in upmods, as I'm sure you're aware.
Maybe we should vote on it; you Americans are okay with voting, right? Even if it means you might lose?
Go ahead, why the fuck should Americans care? The world will continue on in pretty much the same way, since America has no official position as "leader of the free world". That point was made pretty clear when a lot of the "free world" countries were against the invasion of Iraq.
The horrible number of casualties were the result of
A) First and foremost, failure to adapt fast enough to new weaponry and tactics. E.g., took an awfully long time to sink in that a rifled gun shoots accurately to IIRC 300m, while against muskets it was reasonably safe to march to 100m and stand tall. (Oh, you could get hit by musket fire too, but, as an officer in the age of muskets put it, only if it was aimed at someone else;) There were years of horrible massacres, where thousands of soldiers were marched in formation to 100m, and then they shot essentially point blank at each other, standing tall and taking the volley.
B) Incompetent charges that ignored the officers' advice and marched some soldiers to slaughter. E.g., Picket's Charge.
C) Essentially, the first attempt in history at having a broad front war. Previously war had been historically a set-piece affair, where two armies would meet, fight, and that was it. E.g., when the Gauls invaded Rome, or Rome smacked Carthage, or whatever other historical war, don't think that they had a front across Italy. It was basically the army of one side vs the army of the other in _one_ point, and that decided the fate of the war. They might leave a detachment behind to besiege some city or whatever, but there was no coordinated effort by multiple armies. The American Civil War was arguably the first where that was even attempted, and it resulted in hideous casualties as essentially there were more battles all over the place and more generals trying to win some glory by breaking the opposite line in some God-forsaken place.
D) Railroads. Unlike previous times in history, it was now trivial to keep reinforcing and resupplying a lot of army. Where previously you'd admit defeat or fortify and wait for reinforcements for a year (see Hannibal), here it became a case where it was possible to throw more soldiers at anything. And they did. With the logical results.
E) Lack of modern medical care. Wars had always been a crappy affair in that aspect. The Minnie ball caused horrible wounds, and there were no antibiotics or even anesthetics.
Additionally:
1. Focusing on _US_ casualties in WW1 and WW2 is rather misleading. The USA took only a minor part in the trench battles of WW1, for example. The finance and industry of the USA played a bigger role in both world wars, than the actual soldiers in the trenches.
For the countries which actually held the line in those wars, the casualties were a lot more horrible. The USSR in WW2, for example, lost ten _million_ soldier and some thirteen _million_ civillians in WW2. Let that sink in a bit, next time the "we won WW2" willy-waving contest comes by. China lost some 4 million soldiers and 16 million civillians, and their contribution to the attrition and over-extending lines of the Japanese should not be overlooked in the Pacific War. On the Axis side, Germany lost 5.5 million soldiers, and almost two million civilians. You don't think you were that good that you fought Germany single-handedly and caused 10 times more casualties than you took, do you? But at any rate, that's what WW2 was really like, for those in the middle of it. There's an estimated 72 million people who died in that war.
In WW1, the Brits took almost 60,000 casualites just in the first day of the Battle of Somme. Almost half of what you took in the whole war. And while I'm too lazy to look up numbers, France almost depleted their manpower to the point where they were out of conscripts for many years after the war. There's a reason for the pacifism and (in the USA isolationism) after the war. Humanity had never seen such carnage before, and was thoroughly shocked.
So writing only the USA casualties for both wars is IMHO highly misleading.
2. Again, the fact that something has happened before, doesn't excuse the present.
The general history of humanity started from ritualized mass-murder and slavery, and we had a long way to gradually become more... civilized. And I don't mean just having TV and Sla
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Throwing urine on convention attendees is free speech?
The urine was taken from an illegal living space that had no toilet, and was occupied by people unrelated to the protesters.
They DO NOT have the right to plant IEDs, spray urine on delegates, etc. Kudos to the police in Minnesota for busting these Stalinists.
Yes, hooray for their psychic ability to see crimes in the future and prevent them now!
When there's actually a bunch of guys with tanks and guns waiting to land on your shores and occupy your lands then you've got a war that requires serious changes to laws and rights. When a few people want to blow some stuff up your in the situation that has occurred in many countries in the rest of the world since Guy Fawkes' time and earlier.
You will _never_ have a world leading democracy that doesn't inspire hatred in the hearts of those that can't accept, understand or tolerate your freedoms. What you propose is to give up those freedoms to destroy them, when all you will achieve is to become like them.
Aided by informants planted in protest groups
It shouldn't be terribly hard to find the folks who ratted on these people.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
We've been tested over the last 8 years to see how much of our freedoms we are willing to give up, and unfortunately all of us this demonstrates that too many of us have given up far too much. If the police were to break into my home they might find items that could with a little spin be considered weapons. Who in this country has never owned a baseball bat? I keep pepper spray next to my bed in case of a house break in, because I don't won a gun and don't want one. I have a large smoker for barbecue and smoke cooking which I use a liquid flammable propellant to ignite, and I have long skewers and pointed objects that I use as well. Never mind the chefs knives in my kitchen.;D
McDonalds is probably the most popular restaurant in the country. Have you looked lately at what they're serving?
Feces, blended with enough chemicals to disguise its true nature, could become a popular snack. Of course they don't just serve you shit next to fine wine; they're smarter than that.
Much of democratic liberal capitalist societies is dressing up low-cost turds as high-value products. That plastic junk you took home from Wal-mart was a bargain... until it broke six months later and you realized it was an inferior version of something better. But most don't realize. They keep buying.
In the same way, in a democracy, you depend on making a situation appear to be something that gives people warm fuzzies or dark fears, when the situation is actually more complex. You don't deal in reality because most of the electorate can't handle reality in their own lives, and they definitely don't want to hear it from their figureheads.
Tell me, why does history record no successful democracies?
Maybe it's because all that matters is the perception of the person voting when they place that vote. Just like all that matters is the perception of the person buying when they slide that credit card. There's no followup, no correspondence to reality.
If you think about it, there's a lot of political complaining on this site, but no one has any solutions other than to "try harder" at certain aspects of the system as it is. Why do you think that is? And when do you think it will succeed?
Anti-Globalism, Traditionalism, and FreeBSD.
Why would the officer even want (let alone need) to go outside the bounds of the warrant? If the officer did do that any evidence they found would have been suppressed at trial.
An officer searching for things outside the scope of the warrant is illegal.
I have generally held that republicans and democrats are two faces of the same coin and that they are generally the same. But I don't remember hearing this kind of oppressive crap prior to the democratic national convention. Yes, there were protests and police and stuff like that, but the FBI doing pre-emptive strikes against people wishing to exercise their constitutionally protected rights? I would really like to know what individuals requested these acts. These people and their party should be held to the light over this.
We hear about events like these in China and think "human rights violators!" What could people be thinking when that happens in the U.S.? And who are these people "following orders"? They have to know what they are doing simply amounts to silencing critics and preventing the exercise of constitutional rights and freedoms. Each member of these law enforcement parties are sworn to protect... not this.
I find it interesting that the Anarchists are protesting the Republicans more than the Democrats, especially when theoretically the Democrats are for MORE regulation and MORE Government (I say this as a matter of theory, not as a matter of reality). I also am not criticizing more gov and more regulation, just thinking of what an Anarchist might object to more.
We haven't been at war in decades.
Oh, why not? I don't see any references to violence in the paragraph you've posted. *confused*
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
Doing something bad is bad, even with provocation. However, to say that it's as bad when there is provocation is ridiculous. Actions taken during the World Wars were bad, but there were legitimate security concerns at the time. Yes, there was fear and hysteria, but we were in the midst of REAL wars against nations that either declared war on us or actually attacked our shores.
Today, these actions are like "Free Speech Zones" -- a deliberate attempt at removing every civil liberty from the Bill of Rights on down. To condone them is to condone a coup intended to replace the Constitution with a tyranny.
Meh. I deserved my troll mod before (and was expecting it), but this is unjustified.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
Racism and sexism have been erased?! Holy shit, that's great news! I can't wait to tell my sister, who still makes about 70 cents on the dollar compared to me. And I will sit here and hold my breath while I wait for the people responsible for these most recent violations to be held responsible.
Sparky, you *are* a tool, in every sense of the word.
If this sentiment is confusing or nonsensical to you, consider that the fault may not lie with the message. After all, what does a hammer know of the carpenter's will?
"All these years believing you're the signified monkey, only to find out you're just a big hunk of nobody cares."
... there should be preemptive raids on people drinking beer in stadiums, just to make sure people don't get drunk and break shit after their team loses.
Really. Let's check the list.
Hobbling of the press. Check.
Illegal detainment of US citizens. Check.
Unconstitutional invasions of personal homes and effects. Check.
Unconstitutional use of federal agents and armed forces in civilian jurisdictions. Check.
Executive abuses of "war powers." Check, check, and check.
So how is this not exactly like the Civil War, or the First and Second World Wars? Well, there is one difference. We are not at war. Except with Eurasia. We've always been at war with Eurasia.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
Write him in for what? You do realize we don't have a democracy here and its a republic?
Your 'vote' for president is not a vote, its just a suggestion to the people that actually do vote of who you would like to see as president..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
We still have free speech? I thought that was effectively taken from us long ago and were left with the *perception* of it to make the unwashed masses feel good.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Yet. Sure you are allowed to dissent, but you are also liable to be investigated and detained for 'national security reasons'.
Think that fear isn't a real deterrent? Who among us can withstand a hardcore investigation where they strip your house clean and even check out your pocket lint from 40 years ago? Who here wants to cast the first stone?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Yes, I am aware that most of those items can be found in most American homes, which is why I mentioned that simple possession should not lead to investigation and arrest. My point was that the summary and commentaries are rather slanted to believing that the cops are evil and the arrested are the underdogs. Simply put, I'd like more information as to the context of the situation before casting blame. Maybe all those items were not in the closet but out, ordered and ready for use. There is some evidence to support that the use of force was rather excessive but there is also some evidence that it might not have been unjustified.
:/
You really have a backwards view of things. A political convention is a private event held by the party that pays for it, organizes it, and invites the people it invites to participate in it. They make arrangements with a facility to host it. The city in which that facility sits usually gets a lot of money to cover the costs of the extra burden that the private entity in question is placing on them - just like they do when they host a sporting event, a trade show, etc.
The gathering of an organization is protected by the First Amendment. You know - freedom to assemble? It's a big one. The protesters planning on blocking the streets - so as to prevent the peaceful assembly of the people going to the convention, and the supporting services required to make it safely happen - are specifically seeking to deny that group of people their right to assemble and talk.
Hell, they already have that right.
No, they have the right to have their own convention or assembly. And they can do exactly what the DNC and the RNC do when they make arrangements to have a large meeting and convention: they talk to the city hosting the event to make sure everyone knows what's going on. They don't (as the group in question here did) jot down their plans to specifically strain the local law enforcement and safety people "to the limit" so that they'd be unable to function. They don't prep large collections of urine-filled buckets with which they plan to assault other people.
Civil disobedience? How about if someone in that group of people, meeeting in their urine-stocking event warehouse, had a heart attack, and a couple thousand people from the DNC or the RNC thought it was civilly disobedient to form a large crowd on every street that would allow EMTs to reach the address in question, and stop them? How about if they explicitly planned to do that in advance?
Free speech zones? The idiots in question can have their OWN private event, just like the political parties do, and can expect exactly the same protection if they also make arrangements for it. Is your idea of civil discourse simply the right to use force and disruption to physically impede and shout down anyone that's gathering to have their own private event? If the RNC could have gathered enough people in Denver to physically block all of the streets leading to Obama's Temple On The Mount speech, and prevent the crowd from being able to attend that little bit of theater, would you consider that to be protected activity, or appropriate? Would it be simply "disobedient" to keep those 80,000 from crying in person at The One?
Physically stopping a group from assembling and carrying on with a private event isn't civil disobedience. It's not debate. It's childish BS, and you know it. We're not talking about the government, here. It could have been a quarterly meeting of the Sierra Club, or a trade show. Should a group of rabid real estate developers be allowed to prevent them from having a meeting in a space they've rented? Prevent the city that hosts that venue from being able to ensure that emergency services can get to that venue? How is THAT free speech? It's the opposite. It's the angry group being too lazy to ever hold an event of their own that's in any way interesting or persuasive to some audience they want to reach, and settling instead for attempting to deny other people the right to do the same.
Show me where it says they were planning on blocking emergency service vehicles
They said they were planning on blocking the major roads and bridges in and out, and doing it simultaneously, specifically to tie up the police in those spots. I'm sorry you have trouble grasping how those two things relate. That explains a lot, actually. Even without their specific call to occupy emergency services and police on the first day, to strain those services to the limit, all you have to do is look at the simple consequences of shutting down streets. I know, it's an advanced concept.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
You're an archetypal Fox viewer.
Why is that? Because I don't see disrupting the day to day activities of people unrelated to the object of your protest (the RNC convention) as being an effective method of convincing people that your cause is just?
Do you live in the Twin Cities? Need to go there on business? How would you feel about people blockading the airport, bridges and intersections? What if it was your hometown that they were planning to disrupt?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Blocking traffic isn't disturbing the peace -- it is disturbing your morning commute, which isn't protected by the constitution.
Eh, in my state it would be disorderly conduct:
A person is guilty of disorderly conduct when, with intent to cause public inconvenience, annoyance or alarm, or recklessly creating a risk thereof:
5. He obstructs vehicular or pedestrian traffic; or
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Looks like somehow part of my comment fell away or I did not check my preview good enough as I was in a hurry (had to go to work).
The article I quoted was the one /. links to. On first sight the article jlarocco links to is the same, but it is not, although it is the same site.
Hope my reply is clearer now.
What person will donate an airborne act of love?
If I have access to 25 heavily-armed police officers, could I not just wait politely outside? If they come out sans-weaponry, all is well. And if they come out with weaponry, then you have some cause to start knocking heads. But I would suspect that a minor amount of respect (read: hi, glad you're going to the rally, but I can't really let you wander downtown armed like that, hint hint) might go a long way.
From the protester side, I'm amazed no-one's come up with a way to combine those USB "internet sticks" to a digital camcorder and stream live video (or at least live upload to somewhere more secure).
Hum, republicans doing illegal actions to try and enhance their chances in a Presidential election. Where have I seen this before? Hopefully there is some film coverage of this that can be used in ads.
That's a disgusting law. All protest has the goal of annoying some portion of the public and all large-ish groups of people who stand close to one another are obstructing either vehicles or pedestrians.
That's a disgusting law
That depends on your perspective, now doesn't it? Disgusting from the vantage point of the protesters..... probably just fine and dandy from the perspective of someone who just wants to get to work or the grocery store in a reasonable amount of time.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
The gathering of an organization is protected by the First Amendment. You know - freedom to assemble? It's a big one. The protesters planning on blocking the streets - so as to prevent the peaceful assembly of the people going to the convention, and the supporting services required to make it safely happen - are specifically seeking to deny that group of people their right to assemble and talk.
You apparently don't understand the First Amendment. It's protection from interference from the government, not other private groups.
The only interference from the government here is against the protesters. They have not DONE anything yet. Preventing them from assembling is unconstitutional, bottom line, doesn't matter how many laws and city ordinances say otherwise.
And it doesn't matter if the cops think the protest will get violent. You have to wait until they start committing crimes before you can arrest them. That's why the cops need to have a presence DURING the protest, so that they can control it if it starts getting violent. If the cops are being overwhelmed, then quit bitching and get more cops. Borrow them from neighboring counties and states if you want. Shortage of manpower is not an excuse to start violating the Constitution!
They don't prep large collections of urine-filled buckets with which they plan to assault other people.
This shows you haven't read much about what's going on.
To be sure, it's up to interpretation as to what a peaceful assembly is and is not. My interpretation is that blocking bridges in a major metropolitan area is not peaceful (even if it's not violent).
It seems like any large crowd is going to be blocking somebody. It makes sense to have your protest at chokepoints where you maximize your exposure. I don't think that they would have blockaded the bridges in the sense that they would sit there with machine guns not letting anybody get through.
We're talking about stuff recovered from ALL of the police raids. If those items had all been in a single room, sure that's suspicious (I would still say not illegal though). But come on, pick a random set of 50 people from across the country and you'll probably get even more crap. Cops are as bad as the RIAA when it comes to hype, from the street value of drugs to calling shoes "dangerous weapons".
Certainly the cops themselves aren't evil but the people in charge need to be punished. This doesn't seem too different from the malicious prosecution in the Duke lacrosse case.
I'd like to know what evidence you've heard of that suggests the use of force was justified. Not that there shouldn't have been search warrants and all that, but that RAIDS with automatic weapons were required, as if they were expecting these people to be sitting around heavily armed and ready to fight. These weren't the secret hideouts of terrorists and mafia bosses they were raiding, right? I think the whole thing is pretty fucking ridiculous.
So, if you have solid information that someone is planning a murder, and a judge agrees, and issues a warrant... that's too much prior restraint for you, because despite the conspiracy to commit a crime, it hasn't happened yet? How about something simpler, like a theft? How about an assault? How about vandalism, say, of your car? Which crimes, in the planning stages, and with evidence of that planning in hand, do you consider only worth doing something about after the crime has been committed?
If you are staging a political meeting of your own, and a group is allowed to shut down your event - and it cannot in practical terms me held again - you're OK with that? Your idea of freedom of assembly is that private parties should be left to screaming matches on the grounds that one of those parties has rented in order to hold the event? Other parties should be allowed to used force and disruption and assault - even when they've said in advance that that's exactly what they're going to do - to disrupt a one-time event, because nobody should ever prevent a crime in progress or one being carefully planned?
So, if some nutjob group had a good plan to cut the power to the DNC's event just when Al Gore was going to talk, and you knew it, well... it's no crime until they actually do it, right? And since it's not the government doing it, there are no protections that can be invoked?
Just wanted you to clarify your position: that no assembly should be free from any action that anyone wants to take to stop it. Say, if your sister or daughter was getting married, and someone thinks that it's in bad taste because she's marrying someone who doesn't look right... well, it's fine to trash that event? Fine, even if the police have evidence that someone's planning on throwing buckets of urine on the bride, to allow that to happen, since it's not assault until the assault actually occurs?
You're obviously OK with the notion of a private assembly being fair game to anyone who wants to stop it, but how are you on the issue of criminal conspiracy? Some people don't care what happens to them, as long as they get to do the crime. That's true of tantrum-having idiot protesters, and for suicide bombers. When you know you've got either one of them sitting in a room passing each other notes about what they're about to do, stockpiling the wares they'll use to do it, and gearing up for the act... oh well, huh? No? Or is it only a bad thing if the private assembly being disrupted is one that you personally like?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
No, I meant it's disgusting because of how it can be misapplied. Obviously it wasn't originally meant to target protesters and people assembling for political speech, because that's protected by the Constitution. But it's vague enough to be used for that purpose, as you noted.
But he never said it was justified. Someone posting a followup mistakenly mischaracterized his response as justification (and somehow got modded 5 insightful for it). OP never said the crackdown was justified.
So, if you have solid information that someone is planning a murder, and a judge agrees, and issues a warrant... that's too much prior restraint for you, because despite the conspiracy to commit a crime, it hasn't happened yet?
If there were not a law against conspiracy to murder, then obviously you couldn't arrest a person for murder until they actually murdered someone. As it happens, there is a law against it, so your example would be fine. Do you see how that works? Bad analogy.
Other parties should be allowed to used force and disruption and assault... because nobody should ever prevent a crime in progress or one being carefully planned?
Wow, did you even read my post? Like the part where I said "That's why the cops need to have a presence DURING the protest, so that they can control it if it starts getting violent."
Just wanted you to clarify your position: that no assembly should be free from any action that anyone wants to take to stop it. Say, if your sister or daughter was getting married, and someone thinks that it's in bad taste because she's marrying someone who doesn't look right... well, it's fine to trash that event?
Bad analogy #2. How is a wedding, presumably taking place on private property like a church, equivalent to a political protest taking place in public?
Sparky, you *are* a tool, in every sense of the word.
You misunderstand. Look at the words; they really make no sense. "That comment LITERALLY BLEW MY HEAD OFF!" would be just as incorrect.
The 70 cents on a dollar wage discrepancies are largely eliminated once you account for factors such as education/time on job. In fact, I think people are generally lying when they give examples of it. I have never in my life encountered any business that pays a lower wage for a woman who is working the same job, with the same seniority, experience, etc.
I love the fact some of the guns were later 'taken from suspects' so they know they're back on the streets.
Man, if I were one of those suspects, I'd be asserting that the gun wasn't taken from me at all, and that the guns are not, in fact, on the streets at all. But rather some of the police stole them to plant on people.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
And, about the the fire violation arrest: if you don't want to get arrested for fire violations, don't violate the building codes. It's pretty easy.
Hey, moron. They didn't violate the building codes. They rented a building that the cops claim is in violation of the fire code, which mysteriously means they can arrest everyone in the building.
I can't even imagine how that works. Maybe I can see some misapplication of the law that lets them arrest the people who rented the building, but being physically located in it? How are you supposed to check for fire code violations without entering the building?
You've just argued that it's illegal to be in a specific place that it is impossible to know beforehand. That is, for example, illegal to shop in Walmart because Walmart has, in a back area that is offlimits to shoppers, paint stored next to gasoline.
You are truly an idiot.
Oh, and the cops also broke down the front door to a private residence, arrested everyone in it, and then attempted to have the building condemned that same day because it didn't have a front door. Probably because no one had repaired it because they were all in jail.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I have 3 pocket knives, of different sizes, and I almost always carry the smallest one with me.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Deal with the threat before it can strike.
Move to North Korea, don't turn my country into it.
Benjamin Franklin:
"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both."
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
What's your point? We also used to have legalized slavery in the United States. Does that mean we should "laugh" if someone tries to claim that racism is still an institutional problem?
It seems to me that in this day and age (instant messaging, SMS, cell phones, blogs, etc) that it's going to take a lot more than disorderly conduct laws to stop people from assembling for political speech.
As with most things a balance needs to be struck. Your right to freedom of expression shouldn't trump my right to be left the hell alone if that's what I desire. There are ways to protest without disrupting traffic and "blockading" (to use their word) airports.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I can tell you it engenders a strong desire to smash shit belonging to the gassers.
That didn't happen to me or others I knew. While in the US Army my unit would have drills where we'd go into this room gas would be released into. Some of us would try to beat each other in how long we could stay in the room before we had to leave.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Why is that? Because I don't see disrupting the day to day activities of people unrelated to the object of your protest
No, because you believe traffic disruption is not peaceful assembly.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Pawlenty has been almost as bad a governor of our state as Bush has been a president.
Though I live in the Twin Cities I have to admit I don't know how well, good or bad, Pawlenty is doing as governor. I love it that Jessy Ventura is running for the Senate though. "Shake things up." I've said on /. before that he were to run for president I'd vote for him.
Honestly I'm an independent but I find myself voting against the republican party consistently because they continue to crusade to take away my rights as a human being and a citizen of this country.
I'm independent too, er in MN No Party Affiliation, however I lean towards liberalism but in today's climate libertarianism is a better description as "liberal" has been maligned. As I see it both Democrats and Republicans want to take away our rights. Democrats what to restrict people economically, tax people to death, and Republicans want to tell people what they can and can not do to their own bodies.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Cops are human too. And people can be disorganized, arrogant and abusive. Those behaviours are even more pronouced when people think they're doing the right thing and fighting thugs who are trying to destroy society.
That only means that the cops were not acting right on a lot of stuff. Still doesn't mean that they were working "for the man". To me, it looks just like normal (unfortunately) cop behaviour.
A cop can arrest or move anyone at any time for commiting crimes or violations that justify arrest or forced evacuation. There is no "magic table" crossing warrant context and crimes that can motivate arrests.
Large groups of people gathering at small and unsafe places can and will justify arrest against the responsible, and if none is found, everyone. After all, if the cop walks away and the whole place burns down a few hours later, I can assure you that not a single judge in the entire US of A would let the cop go free because "he respected those cool protester dudes and avoided arresting them for small reasons". And places with lots of nutjobs smoking and driking DO burn into flames FREQUENTLY.
You can be sure they acted like idiots. The cops are just... people. As I said: if you don't want to get arrested for fire violations, don't violate building codes.
If no person responsible is found or produced, they can arrest everyone. The law includes that possibility to avoid several ways of people not being responsible for their actions. Otherwise, thugs like those could just rent the building using cash and a fake name and just go home with impunity after being questioned by the cops.
You can't be an accomplice to a wrongdoing and expect not to pay for your acts.
You ARE supposed to check for gross fire violations before using ANY building for any kind of official activity. It's not just a matter of "passing by" but a matter of commiting yourself to actually USE for any kind of activity.
These people weren't just shoppers. They were USING the building for THEIR purposes. So violations are also their responsibility.
If the law says that a building without a door must be condemned, it doesn't matter where the owners are and who put them there.
But he never said it was justified. Someone posting a followup mistakenly mischaracterized his response as justification (and somehow got modded 5 insightful for it). OP never said the crackdown was justified.
He didn't say it wasn't justified either. As for me mischaracterizing him, I didn't.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Or -- they didn't produce it until last because they didn't want any evidence destroyed before they could secure it. People with incriminating evidence do that.
I didn't know people could destroy evidence when they're forced to lie down with handcuffs on.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
How is a wedding, presumably taking place on private property like a church, equivalent to a political protest taking place in public?
... that's the sort of thing I'm talking about. To you, that's just warm and friendly free speech, I know.
Because the event that protesters said they were planning to disrupt was also on private property. And access to that property via public streets is one of the things that the host city provides to the people using the facility. Obviously, the citizens of the city also have a more general interest in being able to actually use the streets that these twits were planning to make unavailable.
Of course, there's more to it, isn't there? As of this evening, groups who showed up in St. Paul are - as they said they would doing things like smashing windows, slashing tires, starting fires, and otherwise trying to keep the emergency services people expensively busy. That's their idea of free speech. And the group that got raided? You know, the one with the warrant issued because of information demonstrating their plans to destroy property and whatnot? Weapons (including firearms) were siezed. The presense of those non-MN-residents with firearms, and written-down plans about "striking hard on the first day to keep the police strained to the limit"
There ARE laws against assault, vandalism, property destruction, and the rest - as well as for conspiracy along any of those lines. What do you propose, exactly, when a group of people announces their plans to perform those acts on their arrival at someone else's event, and then meet in a place where the tools of that mayhem are being stored, along with their carefully jotted down To Do lists of exactly those sorts of actions? Heck, they're just freedom loving kids, right? Only smashed windows, arson, and slashed tires will help the world to understand the need for peace and for peaceful assembly, right?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Keyword: peaceful assembly. Blocking traffic is just about the textbook definition of disturbing the peace and/or disorderly conduct, i.e.: disturbing the rights of your neighbors to be left the hell alone. It's called the public order and it's generally one of the things that society demands from the Government.
It's also a pretty good definition of Civil Disobedience. When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man she disturbed the public order as well.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Your right to freedom of expression shouldn't trump my right to be left the hell alone if that's what I desire.
Except you only have the right to be left alone on your own property. In public you have no such right. Like some of those detained I am photographer and I have the right to take photos of anyone in a public venue. What I do not have the right to do is to then sale, for anything other than as an editorial or news item, any photo of a person who can be clearly identified without a consent form signed by them.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Sure it is. As I said, those people are now recorded on their database and if they get in trouble, they might face jail time.
No, that isn't a war. That's a CRIME.
It was indeed an act of war because Islam is not a religion, but rather a body politic with a religious component.
Democracy Now! reports that federal agencies were involved:
This should hardly be surprising as federal Senator McCain, President Bush, and Vice President Cheney were all planned to appear for the RNC. It would be unusual if county and citywide police were doing this on their own without any input from any federal agency. As time passes I'm sure we'll learn more about the specific people involved at all levels.
Also, Amy Goodman, host of DN!, and two DN! producers, Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar, were illegally arrested and detained. Goodman was arrested while trying to free Kouddous and Salazar. From the article:
Today's DN! (video, audio) has more on these preemptive arrests and detainments including footage of the police action in progress.
Digital Citizen
Don't you understand what the war on terror really is about? It's not about the terror, it is a practise war to prepare for the war on water! No more shall innocent children drown in the ocean! No more shall elderly people without umbrellas get wet in the rain! No more shall evil floatational device manufacturers employ child labour in third world countries! No more shall the weak and infirm get splashed with water from taps when they misjudge how tight the faucet is and turn it on too hard causing a high volume spray to mercilessly erupt into the sink and spreading water across several tenths of their kitchens! United we stand, divided we drown!
I like my coffee the way I like my women - roasted and ground up into little tiny pieces.
the group in question had stockpiled buckets of urine to throw on people
Making things up because you don't like the what or how they protest aren't you?
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Except you only have the right to be left alone on your own property
I'm pretty sure that I have the same right to use the roadways and other transportation infrastructure as these "protesters" who were planning on disrupting them.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Some turn violent in GOP convention protests
Antiwar protesters cross line and get arrested
Perfect? no but he is a solid Governor and the fact he won in Minnesota a state which *always* goes Democrat in presidential election just goes to show he is not to partisan that many here are trying to pain him as.
"Pawlenty made a pledge to *never raise taxes and has worked hard to reduce taxes. Sounds pretty straight forward, right? Well.. to balance the budget while not raising taxes and ALSO cutting taxes and spending state coffers on a small feel-good refund he eliminated several public services from the state responsibility (you know.. the things I pay taxes for like roads, education, snow plowing, public safety)
The result?"
Ummm no, while he might have cut spending in some areas he did not 'eliminate from the blah blah blah:
Education: Is 12,000 a head from Minneapolis schools *really* not enough money?, Really?; please give me 24K to home school my two kids I guarantee I could do a better job than the Minneapolis school district. He also started letting local school boards have more control *gasp* more local accountability of school districts to local kids and parents we cant have that now.
Snow Plowing: Other than state roads *why* should this not be a local function?
public safety: He has not cut funding for state troopers or other agencies wht he has done is stopped subsidizing property owners by paying off towns so they can keep property taxes low via hitting up everyone with income tax.
Roads: Right the tight funds have nothing to do with the fact that construction is much more expensive than it should be (asphalt is partly made of oil after all). As to the I35W that bridge was built wrong in the 60's multiple governors from both parties dropped the ball on this one over the decades.
"Statewide inspection of all bridges yields a vast majority are in need of serious work and a large number are just as in danger of critical failure as that one was."
This is true in *every state in the union* and these bridges did not just go bad in the past 6 years, 35W had been sporting gusset plates of the wrong thickness for 40+ years.
"Education, Snow removal, Public Safety: These activities still had to occur so they fell to the local municipalities."
As they should do you really think a bureaucrat in STP knows better which roads need to be done in Blue Earth County than say the county board does? so what if its paid for at the local level rather than the state?
"SO my state taxes went down $30 / year. MY PROPERTY TAXES went up by over $1500 / year to compensate! It's called blind loyalty to ideals without recognizing the practicality of the real world."
Dude if your property taxes went up 1500, when my taxes on a 150K home in Dakota county are only 11 in total I smell 3 possibilities
1) Your county is run for crap
2) Your home is worth millions of dollars so stop complaining about 1500 you selfish twit
3) Your shoveling BS
"Ahh! Arrogance and stupidity in the same package, how efficient of you!" --Londo Molari
I love how 'fire violations' turned into 'gross fire violations' in your mind. They were not, in fact, 'gross' violations.
First of all, no, you aren't supposed to check buildings for fire code violations. That is, in fact, the job of the inspectors. Who had checked the building on the regular schedule and determined it was just fine.
The law includes that possibility to avoid several ways of people not being responsible for their actions. Otherwise, thugs like those could just rent the building using cash and a fake name and just go home with impunity after being questioned by the cops.
You are a complete moron, you realize that, right? Yes, people could rent buildings with fake names, but the problem is that people who rent buildings that have been inspected by fire marshals and determined to be within code should not be responsible at all if the building is not, in fact, within code.
It's not a matter of possibly 'escaping punishment', it's a matter of fact they shouldn't be punished. The owner of the building should be.
Actually, he shouldn't be. People who rent property have a requirement to make sure their building is within code. The government said it was within code. If it changes its mind, it actually is required to either wait until the next inspection or inform him.
The only time they can barge in like this and remove people (let's not even talk about the arrest, just simply removing people), is when a building has become dangerous due to being overcapacity. Which this one was not.
These people weren't just shoppers. They were USING the building for THEIR purposes. So violations are also their responsibility.
Hey, dumbass. People shopping are also using the building for their own purpose.
I like how you're talking about 'official activity', like this is some corporation and the people arrested were all officers. This was not a corporation, this was an organization with some volunteers. Members of an organization, as opposed to officers, are no more responsible for criminal behavior they don't know about on the part of the organization than cashiers are responsible for a company buying old meat and relabeling it.
However, you're rather explicitly wrong anyway. Several of the people who were arrested were simply visiting. Some of them were, in fact, outside.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
The #1 threat to the government is YOU.
A 9/11-style attack that can be blamed on "foreigners" does not threaten them at all; in fact it strengthens their position as they can spin it into public fear. "We're tough, we'll protect you from the terrorists." A full-scale foreign invasion would not threaten them either.
What the government is terrified of is an angry public finally figuring out what's going on. That's the only thing that can bring them down.
They need to crush dissent, silence protest, and neutralise those sectors of society who criticise and may undermine them. (Honest journalists are high on the list. Independent thinkers. Students. "Anarchists." Liberals.)
This is exactly how they do it: by intimidation. The excessive force is a measure of how scared those in power are. In history the tyrannical personality is insecure and paranoid: Stalin is a classic example. This was what brought Nixon down: An obsession with his detractors and paranoia that led him to compulsively and indiscriminately spy on critics, journalists, political opponents. Kissinger was no better.
And they have real reason to be afraid - as they have broken many laws and violated the Constitution, ethics, morality, and public trust in innumerable ways. The "accountability moment" has not passed: it has yet to arrive, but your tyrants will do anything to avoid it.
Watch Naomi Wolf explain how the US is precisely following the historical totalitarian blueprint - what is happening in St Paul is part of it.
you had me at #!
ANDREW BACEVICH: (about Reagan) It's Morning in America. And you don't have to sacrifice, you can have more, all we need to do is get government out of the way, and drill more holes for oil, because the President led us to believe the supply of oil was infinite.
BILL MOYERS: You describe Ronald Reagan as the "modern prophet of profligacy. The politician who gave moral sanction to the empire of consumption."
ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, to understand the truth about President Reagan, is to understand why so much of what we imagined to be our politics is misleading and false. He was the guy who came in and said we need to shrink the size of government. Government didn't shrink during the Reagan era, it grew.
He came in and he said we need to reduce the level of federal spending. He didn't reduce it, it went through the roof, and the budget deficits for his time were the greatest they had been since World War Two.
BILL MOYERS: And do you remember that it was his successor, his Vice President, the first President Bush who said in 1992, the American way of life is not negotiable.
ANDREW BACEVICH: And all presidents, again, this is not a Republican thing, or a Democratic thing, all presidents, all administrations are committed to that proposition. Now, I would say, that probably, 90 percent of the American people today would concur. The American way of life is not up for negotiation.
What I would invite them to consider is that, if you want to preserve that which you value most in the American way of life, and of course you need to ask yourself, what is it you value most. That if you want to preserve that which you value most in the American way of life, then we need to change the American way of life. We need to modify that which may be peripheral, in order to preserve that which is at the center of what we value.
The connection of reckless consumerism supported by military imperialism, to the erosion of civil liberties is by now obvious, so I'll spell them out for the Republican readers. Reagan, and the GOP generally during and since his presidency, have simultaneously transferred wealth and legal privilege from the lower and middle classes to the upper class, and appealed to American consumers of "Law & Order" products like the interventionist foreign policy advanced by such crimes as the Iran-Contra treasons of Reagan and Oliver North, and the creep toward our present surveillance society in which victims have no functioning legal process for demanding documentation of federal government violations of our right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure, because nobody knows which 3-letter agency to petition nor where to address our complaints. Public protest is the last legal recourse of those who have exhausted, or never had, any judicial remedy available for their grievances.
War and spying of course always go hand in hand, and convincing voters to fund either requires appeals to fear. Whether those fears are real or fabricated, accurate or exaggerated
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p
Or -- they didn't produce it until last because they didn't want any evidence destroyed before they could secure it. People with incriminating evidence do that.
Some do, and they can be charged with evidence tampering, but their guilt is no excuse to violate other suspects' legal rights. Burden of proof is always on the accusers. You "law & order" types need to remember that the body of law that the government is responsible to uphold includes "innocent until proven guilty."
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p
Actually, no. Their right to use it for peaceful assembly is protected by the constitution, while your right to use to commute to work isn't.
Note that the constitution, when it guarantees a right to peaceful assembly, doesn't limit it to what doesn't cause inconvenience. If it causes you monetary damage, you have the right to take them to civil court to get just recompense. And if they break the peace, they can be charged with felony charges for causing harm to others. But short of that, they enjoy special protection, for good reasons.
And even if there hadn't been such a special protection, your rights would not have trumped theirs.
Since the police had a warrant, some judge thought they had enough reasonable suspicion to go in and make these raids.
Wrong. The judge has the legal right to provide a certificate of reasonable suspicion, which the law calls a "search warrant." That document provides only limited rights to search and a judge's power does not allow him to provide anybody permission to conduct these raids, which were illegal, nor any other criminal abuses of search warrants by performing searches in a manner that exceeds the parameters of their warrant. A crime was committed when the warrant was illegally executed before it was presented. No judge has the power to make these raids legal.
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p
neat http://twitter.com/coldsnaplegal
The Constitution was put in place, first and foremost, to protect the people from a tyrannical government. And now that is what we have. I'm starting to feel that if we don't force a change in direction, then the US will be the next Nazi Germany. After WWII, we asked "how could we have let that happen?" Now we know... It's back again folks. It's time we stand up and make a change.
Spoken like a good Stalinist era informer! "You didn't do anything but in case you do we've got our eye on you and your urine..."
I, for one, do NOT welcome our new jack-booted overlords.
I, for one, agree with you... and won't bother to post anon. Behavior less egregious than this started our revolution. I'm not advocating violence, ever, but I can understand those who have less self-control. There are way too many disaffected people, with stages of anger starting at merely mad and going through to spitting apoplectic.
This comment is my opinion and does not represent an official position of Donald Trump or others I do not work for
Especially when you have journalists and lawyers tied up in the whole mess.
I really, really hope that this time those self proclaimed autocrats will pay for it. Fuck it's more than just time to put down the foot and say enough. Actually, it was enough quite a while ago.
I do too. I really do. I felt the same way after the same shit was pulled in New York. I was sure that those responsible would pay. They should be disgraced, arrested. I was so positive justice would prevail I held my breath, and am now a lovely shade of blue.
This comment is my opinion and does not represent an official position of Donald Trump or others I do not work for
Women still don't get equal pay for equal work
Bullshit.
The way that this fallacy has continued to thrive is that people keep looking at an average of all workers in all jobs... which ignores the reality of the situation.
The fact is that when you compare men and women with similar job titles within actual buisnesses as well as qualifications you find that gender disparity in wages vanishes.
Should or shouldn't doesn't really matter. The law is very clear: every time you get involved (rent/buy/build) with a building, you MUST check if all permits and inspections are up-to-date. Stop whining.
The building was so old, damaged and CROWDED that PEOPLE WERE PISSING INSIDE BUCKETS. You can't be THAT dishonest to pretent that it was a nice and cool building with only a few people inside it. It is PRETTY OBVIOUS that things aren't ok in a place where people have to PISS INSIDE BUCKETS.
Oh!! Praise the small man!! Allow him to do anything he wants!! He is so cute and weak! Let's allow him to do anything at all!
It doesn't matter if it's just an organization with volunteers. If you are officially involved at some activities, you're also responsible for them. And joining a protest reunion on a death-trap building IS a case of "getting officially involved". You don't need to be the group manager to be responsible.
Sorry, but I don't give a shit to your rant about the FBI. They had a case, with valid suspicions, informers and also an official request from other government agencies. What do you want them to do? Avoid the case, just because you're pissed off because too many agents know Arabic?
What does Iraq has to do with anything related to this context? NOTHING.
It's just you, again, saying that cops shouldn't proceed with investigations because you're pissed off at them. Wake up, bitch: the government doesn't work that way. Agents can't go and say "Oh man, just let it go. I know it's illegal but, man... Iraq! Do you see? That Iraq thing we did was fsckep up! Let the people protest!". They follow those cases because of THE LAW, you idiot.
If something you want to do is a crime and you think that it shouldn't be, you should fight for it. Not expect 300 million people to bend over to you just because you want something and want it now.
"Establishment"... What a bunch of crap. Go back to the 70's, you fucking craptard.
What about what you quoted isn't peaceful? There are no violent words at all. A blockade is not violent, just annoying, and has been a staple tactic of demonstrators (union strikers do this all the time, it's called a picket line) for a long time.
Maybe there's something else on the site you 'forgot' to mention.
For the sake of the country, the people responsible for these raids must be fired (and very possibly sent to prison) for this. This is utterly unacceptable.
Looks like your sweet, innocent protesters were planning some serious criminal shit:
Kidnapping, sabotage was part of anarchists' plan to disrupt convention.
So I'm sure you'll want them to go to prison.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
I'm pretty sure that I have the same right to use the roadways and other transportation infrastructure as these "protesters" who were planning on disrupting them.
Sure you do but you don't have the right to be left alone while in public.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
What you don't seem to get is that if Obama actually tries to disconnect the military-industrial-congressional complex like JFK tried to do, they will simply have some "lone nut" blow his brains out and swear in Joseph "LBJ II" Biden. It's not about campaign contributions. It's about having a frigging gun to your head and an electrode up your ass. I've seen this all before, and the bastards who did it or their spawn are still walking around loose. Nothing has changed.
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
What you don't seem to get is that if Obama actually tries to disconnect the military-industrial-congressional complex like JFK tried to do, they will simply have some "lone nut" blow his brains out
Come on, don't tell me you believe in that "lone nut" theory. Ever wonder why you never saw Winston Churchill, Elvis Presley, Earl Warren, and Lee Harvey Oswald in the same room together? HMMMMM.....
Follow the trail, man. It's all there. It all ties back to the Harvard Law Review, a publication of which Obama just happened to be the president, just long enough to get noticed. He saw what was coming and, with the wisdom of a grandmaster, preempted it before anyone else had a clue. They can't touch one of their own.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
You for one.
Your completely ignoring the law enforcements accounting of the situation and pressing the one sided "oh we are innocent" side and your links actually show that.
Unless you meant "you are completely" I don't know what you mean. My completely? Makes no sense. As for my links, as I said before in case you did not understand what I said, I got those links from others. Those links are not mine.
If the cops didn't have solid evidence, the judges wouldn't have issued a warrant.
If they had warrants then why didn't the police show them when they were asked for the warrants? Most were only shown after hours of waiting. Why did they not show the warrants as soon as they were asked for them?
Don't make the mistake that I'm saying the cops are right, I'm saying that informant told them what was going on and they acted on it. That is a good investigation and police work, not some threatening situation or something like your attempting to portray it.
And as one of the links I provided said, those informants only got paid of there was an arrest. Of course you overlook that because it doesn't fit in with your beliefs.
And I looked at a non-biased site and found this.
Perhaps you didn't pay attention but I previously posted 2 links to the same newspaper as you just did. Actually one of them was to the same article.
Yea, and those informants were getting paid only if there was an arrest.
Who cares. If they didn't product enough evidence and someone got killed because of their actions, you would be bitching that they knew and didn't do anything about it
Bullshit. First, so you only care if someone's arrested? Ok, I'll lie to the police so they'll arrest you so I can get paid. If the police wanted the truth they would have paid whether there was an arrest or not, by only paying if there is an arrest you're inviting corruption. Maybe you do mind it but I do, As for what I'd bitch about, so you can read my mind? You're lousy at it. Not only do I bitch about corruption, but in fact I have said a number of tymes I'd rather 1 guilty person go free than to falsely punish one innocent.
the people arrested in the raids and the stuff confiscated along with the information presented by the informants does not point to some innocent intentions or unfounded actions/accusations
How do you know? Ooh, that's right you can read minds.
There were plenty of people in those houses as well as other places in the area who showed no indication of illegal acts and were not arrested nor denied their lawful right to a lawful protest.
Including those who were there to eyewitness and record the raids, and they got detained as well.
That alone debunks your claims of systematic police abuse.
The detaining of those eyewitnesses debunks your claim nothing wrong happened. Even your " non-biased site" said this: "On Saturday afternoon, law agents surrounded 951 Iglehart Av. in St. Paul where members of I-Witness Video, a New York-based group that monitors police conduct during protests, were staying. They were detained and handcuffed but eventually freed without charges. "
Wake the fuck up.
Move to North Korea!
Falcon
Should there be a Law?