This Youtube video, put out by the AP, is amazing.
Horrifying and shocking to me, though perhaps I’m more than a little naive.
That said, it’s also disappointing to me that the protesters felt the need to turn to violence (smashing windows, police vehicles, etc.), as those actions some how. . . well, I don’t want to say invalidated their protest, but I can’t think of the right word to sum up my feelings while watching this video.
What are your thoughts?
I have been involved in marches from back when we were marching for black rights. Then came anti Vietnan protests. The violence was precipitated by the cops. They always claim ,someone threw a bottle. Can’t say it has never happened but people I knew were aware what the price of starting trouble was. You were likely to get beat up by the cops any way. It is not fun.
It is worse nowadays. They are carefully photographing all marchers. That is why you see them covering their faces. It will get you on the FBI and Homeland security lists. Yesterday Amy Goodman ,a reporter for Democracy Now and 2 of her camera people were being violently arrested. She had high level press passes. Cop ripped it off and said not now.
Whether it was a ‘splinter group’ of the peaceful protest that occurred beforehand, a seperate group with its own agenda hiding in the crowd, or a gang of thugs hired by either side to discredit the main body of protestors (any Frat houses nearby…?), the result is the same:
No matter how peaceful the protest, precedent has now been set to beat mercilessly to a bloody pulp anyone who dares voice an opinion or hold up a sign expressing any opinion other than the official glad-handing party line.
Page 20 retractions and dropped charges after the photo Op not sold seperately. 
This is not the Saint Paul I thought I lived in.
I don’t know about this. I think the protestors provoked the response they were looking for from the police by going just far enough to do so. I don’t think the protest was meant to be “non-violent” I think it was meant to garner just the response it did to reflect badly on the republicans. It backfired, and made the dems look like the kooks. This didn’t happen in Denver.
Right, because there was one large monolithic protest.
Or, maybe, this didn’t happen in Denver because the Democratic Party hasn’t been raping our civil liberties and Constitutional rights over the last 8 years.
But no, that probably has nothing to do with it.
So you’re actually in a position to advocate violent civil unrest, vandalism and the destruction of personal property as a means of displaying ones’ displeasure at the current administration?
When the Pubs were in NYC, there was a huge, non-violent protest. However the police planted undercover officers in the crowd. They tried to get the crowd to be violent, when that failed these officers would be grabbed out of the crowd and roughed up and when people protested, they would be arrested, rather roughly, for obstructing ‘justice’.
Well, if you gather enough frustrated protesters in one area it’s inevitable that emotion will transform into action. The Dems haven’t been as obnoxiously Draconian so they didn’t warrant quite the level of unrest that the Republicans did.
No, the end result wasn’t right, but it was totally natural and precedented throughout history. I’m just glad nobody’s whipped out a guillotine yet.
Link for that?
Cite please?
Some of the protesters were just there to rabble-rouse, but many (and I’d guess most) were there to stage non-violent protest. I think it’s awful that a few resort to violence, since it means that there are a lot of people who get caught in the middle. After all, under those conditions a cop isn’t going to know who threw that bottle, but to protect themselves and their charges they have to put down anyone nearby, which probably mostly consists of people who had no intention of starting anything.
However the cops aren’t squeaky-clean either. This guy was a spiritual teacher of mine a couple years ago. His hands are up, he’s submitting to the mountie and allowing himself to be dragged around by his shirt, and they tackled and tazed him anyway. It was completely excessive and unnecessary given the way he was behaving. I’ve gotten reports that he was in jail for several hours before the cops allowed him medical attention to remove the tazer barbs from his hip.
I always take front-line news written by protesters with a grain of salt; I don’t believe the cops are uniformly jackbooted thugs any more than I believe all protesters are there to start a fight. The whole situation is tense, there are too many people to keep track of, and no one, not the cops, not the protesters, is going to see exactly how every incident went down. But I can’t see that video as anything but police brutality. There’s been some discussion in my immediate circle over whether my teacher was passively resisting and therefore the use of tazers was appropriate. My take is that even if you qualify what he was doing as passive resistance (and I don’t: he didn’t go limp, was walking under his own power and obeying the non-verbal directives of the mountie, up to the point where he was tackled and tazed), given that tazers are designed to make a person go limp, how is that necessary or better if he’s gone limp on his own?