I saw some people who I’m pretty sure were right-wingers arrested. But not one hundred percent sure. I was, you know… over --> there. Not with them. Cause they were morons. Remember, I’m a right-winger, too. Just not a stupid one.
Good point, and it goes with Ludovic’s. In any comparison, we have to factor in circumstances particular to each city, such as geography, police force strategies, etc.
Point taken.
But at the very least, the question of who, exactly, was arrested is still an open one, whereas the issue was apparently assumed by Shodan to be closed.
You can’t turn on the History channel without hearing reference to Hitler’s evil “das Waffen Sahnetörtchen” squadron.
If you have a legitimate gripe about Shodan’s behavior, or analysis, or conclusions, would not it have been far better to have brought it up way back when your linked thread was active? I don’t really care about any beef you may have with him and I’m not taking you to task for it. My objection lies solely with what appears to be an unnecessarily stubborn focus on his activities. Even though you claim it was not your objective here to disparage Shodan, the numerous references to him and his posts detracts greatly from what is ostensibly your main thesis (which I willingly granted to be both valid and and accurate). Furthermore, you didn’t merely mention these things in passing offering them as examples; you went out of your way to append several of them with a derogatory analysis *not germane to your disputation. You say you’re surprised by the “diversion this thread has suffered over your attitude towards Shodan.” My response is that should not be at all surprising given the number of times you invoked his name and editorialized. You could quite easily have genericized all that stuff, but you chose not only to not do that, but went out of your way to bold his name making it all the more visible. And it’s left the distinct impression, that Shodan was a secondary (and quite petty) target.
Actually, I would like to change the issue from who was arrested to who was convicted. Now that new evidence is available.
Because “who was convicted” makes much the same point as “who was arrested”, albeit with much less dramatic numbers. You still get “convictions for protesting against the Republican convention” outnumbering “convictions for protesting against the Democratic convention” by over thirty-to-one.
FWIW, I am assuming that factors affecting who the protestors were, and what they were protesting, are roughly equal. Maybe some proportion of the RNC protestors were actually socialists who hate the Democrats almost as much as Bush. Fine - what reason is there to disbelieve that the same fraction of DNC protestors are Pat Buchanan supporters, or are counter-protestors, or whatever you like? This strikes me as somewhat of a finagle factor.
Because, now that we are aware that 91% of the RNC protestors do not have enough evidence to convict, and you apply the same 91% to the DNC protestors, the ratio changes almost not at all. Indeed, if you round the figures, it indicates that more than likely none of the DNC arrestees were innocent in the same sense. (5*.09 = .45)
So, again, I think my point, at least as a point of debate, stands. Arrests at the RNC greatly outnumbered those at the DNC. Convictions at the RNC, again, greately outnumbered those (as far as I know) those at the DNC.
And, also FWIW, I appreciate the comments from other Dopers about the embedded insults. But I am not terribly offended, because [list=A[li]This is the Pit, after all[]It was pretty mild stuff anyway []I don’t think my point has been refuted to any significant degree[/list][/li]But if it helps, mhendo, you are a festering hippopotamus hemmorhoid with gonorrhea and poor dental hygiene.
Regards,
Shodan
As I’ve pointed out, that the police will go out of their way to restrain certain political stripes of protesters is hardly unpredictable. I understand that many people don’t know this.
Does anybody have data on how many protesters were at each convention? I realize such numbers would be approximate to say the least, but it could make a difference in how we look at the arrest/conviction rations.
If, for instance, there were 1000 protesters at the RNC, of whom 100 were arrested, that would be 10%. If there were 250 protesters at the DNC, of whom 505 were arrested, that would be 20%. Clearly, more people were arrested at the RNC; a 2:1 ratio, but a smaller percentage.
I’m not suggesting this is the case. I’m asking if anybody knows the raw numbers.
Actually, no, it doesn’t. You haven’t even addressed the objections to your line of thinking.
This is true. But it’s a long way from there to “Liberals are brownshirts!”
Show us what the political stripe is for all those convicted.
Is this the new math? 
Indeed. As Hamish can testify, the following convulsed me with laughter, and I think we all need to point and giggle:
LOL! Wouldn’t it have been fabulous if the Brownshirts actually had used pies? "Vaterlaaaaaaaaaaand!! splut "
How would the Allies have responded? Maybe custard? Mousse? And of course there would have been the horrors of the chocolate bombe-ing of Dresden, and the triumph of the liberation of the pâtisseries of Normandy…
Lemme get this straight. You’re telling me that a protestor’s ideology is a determining factor is whether he’s arrested or not? And that protestors of conservative causes are apprehended with greater frequency than protestors of liberal causes? And ultimately that this is predictable?
Pretty much.
The problem with this thread, and the one it’s based on, is that even if he proves that all those convicted were card-carrying democrats he’s STILL a long way from showing that Democrat’s have browner shirts then Republicans.
There are an awful lot of reasons why this is so:
[ol]
[li]The Republican president was the incumbent, and thus the Democrats had more reasons to protest this election cycle.[/li][li]New York and Boston are different cities, with different laws and different police forces. Differences in law enforcement and crowd management could easily have accounted for the differences.[/li][li]Party convention protestors (and even pie throwers) aren’t a representative sample of violent partisans. For example, the right has abortion clinic bombers, white seperatists, etc.; the left has Earth First, the ALF, etc.[/li][li]It’s not known that the people arrested at the RNC were democrats, and vica versa: some conservatives aren’t happy with the Republicans; some liberals aren’t happy with the Democrats.[/li][/ol]
I don’t have much knowledge of rates of arrest in right-wing protests, but I do know it’s hardly unusual for mass arrests and other highly repressive police action to take place at the types of protest I attend, regardless of the actual behaviour of the individual protesters involved (actually, fairly often, regardless of their collective behaviour as well).
Here are two more examples of this from my experience. Of the multiple antiglobalization, anti-poverty, and anti-police-brutality demonstrations I’ve attended between 1997 and the present, many have been met with disproportionate mass arrests.
In nearly all cases, protesters arrested during the protests are released without charge after the protests are finished, which suggests that the actual intent is to restrain the protests rather than actually prosecute crime. I know of at least one case where most of the protesters were simply arrested, bound with plastic cuffs, placed in chartered buses, driven to the outskirts of the city, and allowed to reenter the city on their own steam.
If I had to guess, given my experience at protests, at the reason for the arrest differential between the Republican and Democratic protest, I don’t think the following factors have been given sufficient shrift in this thread so far:
-Difference in size of protest.
-Difference in size of police presence.
-Difference in police’s tendency to react.
Yeah, but he has to walk before he can run. The only thing he’s proven so far is that some people were arrested. The rest is wild speculation.
Well, i bolded Shodan’s name in the way that i bold the name of every single Doper that i refer to in any of my posts. If you care to examine my posting history, you’ll see that i use this device indiscriminately in order to make clear when i’m referring to a particular person. I was under the impression that many other Dopers follow a similar procedure. For me, at least, the bolding itself has no relevance.
It’s true that Shodan was a secondary target of my thread, mainly because it was specifically his comments that i used, and because they represented, to me, the most clear-cut example of what i was talking about. As to whether he was a “petty” target, i’ll leave that for others to decide—but i will say that anyone making generalizing allegations of brownshirt behaviour opens themselves up to criticism and even some scorn. If my analysis seemed in any way derogatory, perhaps that merely reflected the attitude of Shodan’s contribution.
As for why i didn’t bring this up back when the thread was active, it’s because i never participated in that thread. I did participate in a bunch of threads on the Conventions, though, and when i saw yesterday’s NYT article i recalled that some people had made disparaging comments about Democrats and liberals based on these arrests. I couldn’t remember specific names or commments, though, so i did a search. The search turned up a few examples, of which Shodan’s represented, for me, the most overwrought example. And that’s why i used it, and why i’m dealing with it now, not then.
I’ve never disputed either of those facts. What i disputed was your generalizations based on them.
And your own post still does nothing to address the methodological and statistical flaws in your analysis. You continue to assume that the disparate numbers of convictions at these events somehow directly correlates with overall tendencies among Democrats and Republicans, or liberals and conservatives. You fail to take into account the number of people convicted as a percentage of total protesters. You still don’t know exactly who was arrested and/or convicted. You don’t, and maybe can’t factor in possible differences between the Boston and NYC police departments. And your argument takes no account of the fact that the group nbot currently in power (in this case, Democrats and liberals) have more incentive to engage in demonstrations and civil disobedience than those who support the current government.
And even if you could account for all these factors, i still don’t think it would really make a very strong point. At most, it would allow you to show that a higher number of Democratic protesters than Republican protesters were arrested, and that more Democrats than Republicans believe that civil disobedience is a legitimate form of political expression. It certainly wouldn’t justify an allegation of fascism or bullying (which is what your brownshirt comment amounts to), especially since the very people the protesters were opposing were the people in power—hardly a defining characteristic of mid-century European fascism.
If the protesters had mainly been arrested for being violent or physically intimidating towards their political opponents, you might be able to make a case for brownshirt behaviour, but as far as i can tell even those who have been found guilty of something in NYC were generally convicted of things like failure to obey police instructions and other rather non-fascist offences. About the only case of violence i’ve heard of is the case involving the police officer on a scooter, and even in that case it has now been conceded that (contrary to original police claims) the crowd had no idea that he was a police officer, and actually thought that he was driving into them on purpose. This doesn’t excuse beating the guy, of course, but neither should it lead to dramatic conclusions about all liberals.
And Twin, i share matt’s scorn at your equating of pie-throwing with the brownshirts. I think the whole pie-throwing craze is silly and unproductive (but still quite funny). And, while some of you conservatives might not believe this, i guarantee that i’d laugh just as hard if Michael Moore or Al Franken or some other liberal celebrity were hit with a pie.
No, I have shown that both in raw numbers of arrests, and in convictions, those protesting against the Republicans are disproportionately overrepresented in going over the edge from legal protest to illegal disruptions.
Which was pretty much my point all along.
Regards,
Shodan
Illegal disruptions=brownshirt?
If not, then retract that stupid fucking term.
If so, justify.
Seems pretty simple.
Daniel
Well, I wasn’t the first to use the term brownshirts. The OP did. Upon further reflection, the use of brownshirts is a little extreme. Replace all uses of brownshirts with rude cowards unwilling to hear an opposing point of view. I’ll also take your laughter as an admission that my point (and Shodan’s point) is valid.
No, you most certainly have not. You have shown that more people got arrested in New York than in Boston. You seem to not get the whole idea of proving what political stripe the arrestees were. You simply assume that if a person got arrested in New York, that person must necessarily be a Democrat. You also assume that every arrest was due to an illegal disruption. You have not proven that, either.