Are you serious? Because if you are, you need to get out more. A lot more.
I don’t know - what do they do on those OTHER days (you know the ones - MOST Mondays through Fridays) when there are NORMAL traffic jams and the emergency vehicles can’t get through?
Or, as here in Seattle, when some rich guy in his yacht decides that he HAS to get from Lake Washington to Puget Sound at rush hour, so they have to open the drawbridges JUST FOR HIM, causing traffic delays. That’s OK, but protesting isn’t?
You must REALLY hate rush hour, when all those thousands of people are trampling all over your rights. If your sitting in a car, (without your radio on) and you come across the REAR of the backup, how can you tell the difference if it’s caused by protesters or an SUV roll-over?
If the bridge is on a route with heavy traffic, whomever is in charge of that bridge should only open it at set times each day. That’s how it’s done with the Capitol Beltway’s Wilson Bridge, the last remaining drawbridge on the interstate system.
DING DING DING
You mean like when I said all these protesters blocking the street accomplished with me is to stir up feelings of violence and then proceeded to discribe those thoughts? :eek:
But to be honest, if the cops did a little '68 style head-busting I wouldn’t shed a tear for the protesters.
No need to apologize, as I don’t particularly adore protests. While it certainly is in every American’s rights to do such, I think they are completely useless and at this time send a negative message to our troops. The protesters can claim to support troops all they want, but that is not how they are actually perceived by the troops or by much of the public.
Protest to your hearts content, it’s your right. But just because it’s your right, doesn’t mean you are right to do so. If anything, these peaceniks due more harm than good. But they are too busy pushing their partisan views, vandalising monuments, blocking commuters and taking up our valuable police force resources to notice (or care).
They can usually use the shoulder, actually. The cars aren’t going to just willfully stand there and block the way, unlike some of these idiots taking to the streets.
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thanks god she lives nowhere near bellevue anymore
you make a good point. and the idiot who does this is just as annoying as the protesters who block the streets.
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Once again, you are making a good point, but I hardly think that normal rush-hour traffic has anything on par with the deliberate blocking of a roadway by huge groups of people. Rush hour traffic is a fact of life that is a result of many people coming and going to work- it is predictable and can be planned around. It is caused be the people who are USING the road with you, so it is far easier to tolerate. (Think of it like this: If your internet connection is slow because many people are using it, you would tolerate that. However, if some asshole down the street wanted to fuck with your ISP and cut of the connection of everyone on your block, that would piss you off, and you would have good reason to go knock him upside the head.)
When protesters block the street, they do it at unpredictable times that causes probems for everyone. They further compound rush-hour traffic, and are a nuissance and hazard for everyone in a car. They are not a part of slowly moving commuters. They are nothing but a hinderance to public passage on major roads.
FWIW, I was at the earlier part of the Thursday protest in Chicago, but left before the marching part started (ironically enough, to host an event for the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations). I’d been on several e-mail lists for information about the protest, and none of them mentioned that a march was planned. I know several people who were at the march, including my 60-year-old mother; all have said that the march was basically unplanned, and that those in front of the marching column apparently made a dash for the drive after the police blocked access to the less-arterial road(s) they were trying to use.
My mother and friends all said that those who wanted to leave the march once it started down LSD were prevented from doing so by the police (Mom said she tried to duck out around Chicago Ave. to use the unerpass across the Drive and go home on the train, and the cops told her “tough shit, you started this, you’re going to have to continue north on the Drive”), and that the police also blocked progress down the Drive by forcing things to move very slowly, until finally diverting everyone west off the Drive once they hit the curve by Oak St. Beach.
Seems to me the whole thing would have been much more brief than it was, if the cops had just let the march progress at normal speed. Less people would have been stuck in their cars on the Drive, and everyone could have been on their way much sooner. It’s almost like they wanted people to get pissed off at the protesters for trapping them. As it was, the blockage lasted for a couple of hours.
i think the protesters are trying to tell the rest of america that it is not “business as usual” of course all i wanted to do today was watch the abc coverage of the hockey and throughout the game they kept threatening to switch over to breaking news if it occurred, if i wanted the breaking news i’d have been watching cnn, fox news, msnbc et al
Riiiiight. It’s all the cops fault. Got it.
:rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes:
So do you plan to do anything constructive to support your beliefs? Because we all know that rolleyes smiley can change the world, or at the very least, U.S. foreign policy…
Did I say it was all the cops’ fault? I don’t believe I did. I merely stated that their actions didn’t seem terribly sensible as their aim was ostensibly to minimize disruption to normal Chicago life. Actually, the protests here have been, for the most part, remarkably civil on both sides. I just spoke to a friend in SF who agrees with me about 98% of the time on these matters, and he’s purposely stayed out of the SF protests because he disagrees with the behavior of the protesters. He doesn’t see how smashing store windows or keeping regular folks from getting to the few remaining jobs in SF will help anything, and I agree with him.
If the cops in Chicago wanted to minimize disruption, they should have let people disperse peaceably when they expressed the desire to do so. They didn’t.
I do.
'Nuff said.
Ummm, **Weirddave, ** you’ve left out any mention of whether it was a good idea to go down Lake Shore Drive to begin with. I don’t think it was, but given that the march did end up that way (much to the surprise of many participants), it would have caused much less of a mess if a) the cops had let people leave the march before that point, which past a certain point they didn’t (the demonstration was down to probably 1/5 of its original size by that point, as it had already been going on for 2+ hours and many people just wanted to go home and eat dinner); and b) the cops had let the march move forward at a normal speed to whatever point the cops were perfectly well able to determine at that point, which they also didn’t.
So no, I never said it was “all the cops’ fault,” but yes, a significant part of the disruption would not have taken place if the cops had behaved differently.
Well, fair enough. I still think that expecting the cops just let protestors go where they want is unreasonable-maybe LSD was the only road big enough to contain them while allowing the cops to still control the crowd? ( Dunno much about Chicage geography and am disapointed that I can’t afford Chi-dope next month) I read that the mayor had asked that the protestors stay put to demonstrate, but they felt compelled to march, which in my mind puts the blame square on their shoulders.
In a sense, it is.
We can depend on the protesters to act like screaming fucktards. That’s a given. But we should ablso be able to rely on our police to whip out the water cannons and CN gas when needed. I sure as hell don’t want my taxes going to pay police to stand around and watch these morons block traffic.
So **Brutus, ** you support the use of violence to disperse people who are basically walking down the street, then? You’d rather have your tax dollars go to cause injury to peaceful human beings, a fair number of whom have simply been caught up in the crowd and not allowed to leave and go home? And more tax dollars to pay for the inevitable personal injury lawsuits against the city?
A resounding ‘Yes!’. These cretins can protest all they want, but once their tactics directly impact me, it is time for the police to impact them.
They have no right to block public roadways. Due to the pussyfooting by the police, I am sure we will see more of this sort of low-grade anarchy.
Well, I’m proud to call myself a low-grade anarchist, then.
How is injuring people morally superior to taking up a couple of blocks of roadway for a few minutes? (I’m not talking about LSD, as I don’t agree with the decision of those who made the initial dash for the Drive; I’m talking about the smaller roads that they took on the way from Federal Plaza to the Drive, a distance of about a mile or so. The column of marchers never took up more than 3-4 blocks at any one time; most of the initial demonstrators had dispersed by the time they reached the Drive.)
Plus, you’ve just called my mother a cretin.
Oh, and would you be complaining about a blocked roadway if yesterday’s pro-war demonstrators had done it?
When people intentionally block my ability to travel freely, it is time for the authorities to step in. If the police keep refusing to do their job (probably ordered not by wishy-washy mayors), we will see both more disruptive protests, and more incidents like the one where a bunch of protesters had the snot knocked out of them by an irate driver. (Huzzah! to him, by the way.)
You can’t conveniently dismiss the blocking of LSD, as if that was a fluke. And smaller roads being blocked is no less disruptive to the local populace. What of the people who couldn’t get to their home or places of buisness, thanks to morons blocking the roads?
You talk about ‘morally superior’? How the flipping hell is it ‘morally superior’ to impose your little gaggle on others? How the fuck is it ‘morally superior’ to intentionally delay others, who only want to get from point A to point B?
Damn straight I would! Unless it is ‘We Love Brutus’ demonstration, I want nothing to do with them.
Have you ever set foot in Chicago? Or in a demonstration?
So far, in Chicago anyway, the blocking of LSD was indeed a fluke. And FTR, by the time the march got there it was about 7 pm, well past the worst of rush hour. Downtown Chicago isn’t as deserted after working hours as it would have been a few years back, but still, a relatively small number of people live downtown. And if the cops hadn’t kept people from dispersing, or from corssing the march route in either direction, it would have been much easier for the other people in the area to go about their business.
The marchers were happy to let people cross through the march route, up until the point where they were prevented from moving anywhere at all by the police. When I went to Friday’s demonstration, the police were also blocking both sides of the march route, to the extent that when I started to have an asthma attack and decided to leave, it took several attempts to be allowed to do so.
And for the THIRD time, I am NOT supporting the blocking of LSD, if for no other reason that I don’t think it accomplishes anything beyond pissing off people who might otherwise support the protesters. Blocking other, smaller roads for a few minutes (which is all that any particular block of roadway was blocked off) is no more than a minor inconvenience to others; all they have to do is go around the block.