Slashdot Mirror
The Future of Protest In Panopticon Nation
Hugh Pickens writes "James Fallows writes that you don't have to idealize everything about the Occupy movement to recognize the stoic resolve of the protesters at UC Davis being pepper sprayed as a moral drama that the protesters clearly won. 'The self-control they show, while being assaulted, reminds me of grainy TV footage I saw as a kid, of black civil rights protesters being fire-hosed by Bull Connor's policemen in Alabama. Or of course the Tank Man in Tiananmen Square,' writes Fallows. 'Such images can have tremendous, lasting power.' We can't yet imagine all the effects of the panopticon society we are beginning to live in but one benefit to the modern protest movement is the omnipresence of cameras (video) as police officials, protesters, and nearly all onlookers are recording whatever goes on bringing greater accountability and a reality-test for police claims that they 'had' to use excessive force. 'What's new is that now the perception war occurs simultaneously with the physical struggle. There's almost parity,' writes Andrew Sprung. 'You have a truncheon or gun, I have a camera. You inflict pain, I inflict infamy.'"
I almost immediately thought that it looked like the cops were fertilizing the tree of liberty.
There's a good idea there for a political cartoon, if it hasn't been done already.
At least, we hope it's the tree of liberty and not just weeds; but it's certainly something.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
What is this propagandist tripe doing in Slashdot? I don't idealize anything in the Occupy movement, and am part of the growing 65% who feel the same way. I don't recognize it as stoic resolve, but rather unending stupidity, on the part of the protesters who refused to leave after multiple warnings by the police that it was long past time to go. I don't consider obstructing the police to be "peaceful" or "protected" protest, and if I'd been there myself with a pepper spray container the size of a small fire extinguisher I would have hosed them down myself as a lifelong lesson to quit being so stupid. There are valid ways to protest -- and this was none of them. Those protesters won nothing in my book.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The sheer inanity of the OWS crowd is only one-upped by the people attempting to analogize a bunch of spoiled rich kids demanding more 'free' stuff (and refusing to accept responsibility for their tragic error in 2008) to actual freedom-fighters of America's past and the world's present. You know how these kids like to chant "the world is watching"? Yeah, the world is watching ... and laughing. All around the world we are the laughingstock of poorer nations.
And by the way: pepper spray IS 'non-violent' law enforcement. The purpose of pepper spray is exactly that for which it has been used: to force compliance from people who have been given every chance to voluntarily comply.
In addition to needing education in economics and politics, it seems our kids now need education in basic rights. You do not have the 'right' to occupy public property indefinitely, or private property at all.