You would not want that. They are not nice and it is not fun. You are in their field of work. They have weapons just for that purpose. You can get gassed, tased, clubbed or beaten. They have guns that shoot wooden bullets that cause severe damage. Now they have noise machines. They are using a microwave heat machine in Iraq. I am sure that will be here too.
You have a severely misguided notion of what protests are like. They’re not run like a tight ship by one organization that has say over everything that happens. They’re an open call for anyone and everyone with strong feelings on the issue to come out and make those feelings known.
Which means, yes, there’s the potential for people for whom anarchy is a lifestyle, not a political perspective, to show up and trash things. But that is by far not the majority of protestors, nor are their actions given a pass by the rest of us at the event. Such stunts have more often than not provoked a negative reaction from the crowd, who usually try to persuade these people to knock it off. Unfortunately, there is no obligation for the instigators to actually listen, and restoring to any physical measures is just going to escalate the situation. I speak from personal experience - I had to stand ground as a protest marshal between a group of masked anarchists and a group of Freepers who’d showed up to pick fights once at an anti-war march in DC. We got the Freepers to leave, finally, but the anarchists weren’t about to listen to me and help keep things calm.
I think such antics are completely stupid and that kind of destructive street theater takes way too much focus off the real issues at hand. That’s what inevitably filters through the corporate media and allows all you armchair quarterbacks to dismiss the whole thing without serious thought. It’s an incomplete, distorted picture.
Wooden bullets, huh? I am sure that a claim like that can be substantiated.
Right?
Let me get this straight. Without some sort of central organization the protests sometimes turn violent and the perpetrators won’t heed the wishes of the other attendees. And the purpose of the protests is to advocate a system without a hierarchical power structure. Do you see the irony?
And exactly where in my reply to Dan did I say I did want that, or that I thought it was a good idea? While my friends can attest to my being a bit different in some ways, anarchist is not a word that would be used to describe me by anyone that knows me.
Sure, they’ve been around since like the '50s.
Wrong. Protests have all sorts of purposes, and the G20 protests certainly did not have this particular demand in mind. So no, I don’t see the irony because there’s no irony to see.
I don’t understand what this video is supposed to prove. Is it that….
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The protests are violent because the police were arresting marchers?!? (Except nothing on the video shows anything violent by the protesters. It definitely didn’t show the arrested person doing anything wrong.)
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The police are being over aggressive because they are arresting marchers?!? (On the other hand the police didn’t seem to use any more force than was necessary to arrest the protester. The video doesn’t show them hitting or doing anything more violent than pushing the protester into a car.)
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Something else?!?!
I haven’t attacked anyone lately. Why didn’t I get the memo that it was time to start hitting people?
That’s in case the vampires step out of line? 
Except that there is a problem with those guys actually being cops, supposedly they were part of an interagency task force according to that blog upstream. Really , it looked more like a snatch team , rather than a police take down.
Declan
As a pointed conservative, I’d like to say that this is one of the most illogical, ill-reasoned, wacko, fringe, demagogue statements I’ve seen around these here parts.
Seriously, you’d like to be responsible for the actions of everyone in your family that you know?
Really? They’re “your family.” So you must approve of everything they do.
Idiot.
He’s parroting the argument made by numerous non-conservatives on this board (myself included) that conservatives have to take responsibility for the conservative lunatic fringe.
Can’t say I disagree with either side’s use of the argument, although at a certain point it loses validity. I don’t blame William F. Buckley for the actions of Timothy McVeigh, and I don’t blame John Edwards for the actions of ELF.
I am not responsible for the actions of people who I have never met whose political beliefs I do not even share. No amount of bloviating on your part will change that.
E-Sabbath, if you look at the first video in Gonzomax’s link you can see that the do have armbands on their left arms. I don’t know if that satisfies your need for labelling but they were not totally anonymous.
This applies to both liberal AND conservative. And, it is a true statement. None of us should be held accountable for the loonies and psychos. At least, not unless we had the power to DO something about them, or to control them somehow (not gonna happen).