A couple of follow-ups from yesterday
* One point I forgot was how impressed I was that none of the crowd attacked (or even threatened) the police. That's really hard, but it's so easy to imagine that if anything sudden had happened the police might have felt threatened and it might have led to a massacre (the one good thing about the situation is the policeman didn't walk down a row of peaceful protestors shooting them).
* Another example: police physically attack accredited reporters to stop them taking photos: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/22/nyregion/nypd-stops-reporters-with-badges-and-fists.html?_r=4&ref=nyregion
* I -- rhetorically -- asked if it was possible to be less violent that sitting passively huddled on the ground with your eyes shut. But no, I was being really stupid, and I'd apparently never heard about a much worse case in 1997, when four (?) protestors (mostly young and teenage women) and others in a small number of similar incidents, were sitting huddled on the floor tied up and begging not to be hurt, when the police, supposedly to protect them themselves and the protestors from an imagined fire hazard, ( Read more... ), denied them medical attention, and threatened them with repeated sprays directly in the face if they failed to cooperate. I understand the police were eventually given some sort of sanction, but there still seemed to be widespread doubt as to whether this constitutes "torture", but I don't know from whom, because it just seems like a dictionary definition. The sort of thing Jack Bauer would do it 24 after hours of agonised self-loathing and moralising, to international terrorists who are murdering large numbers of poeple and this is the only way to prevent them.
(Not a perfect cite, but a summary: http://www.nopepperspray.org/factsheet.htm)
* One point I forgot was how impressed I was that none of the crowd attacked (or even threatened) the police. That's really hard, but it's so easy to imagine that if anything sudden had happened the police might have felt threatened and it might have led to a massacre (the one good thing about the situation is the policeman didn't walk down a row of peaceful protestors shooting them).
* Another example: police physically attack accredited reporters to stop them taking photos: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/22/nyregion/nypd-stops-reporters-with-badges-and-fists.html?_r=4&ref=nyregion
* I -- rhetorically -- asked if it was possible to be less violent that sitting passively huddled on the ground with your eyes shut. But no, I was being really stupid, and I'd apparently never heard about a much worse case in 1997, when four (?) protestors (mostly young and teenage women) and others in a small number of similar incidents, were sitting huddled on the floor tied up and begging not to be hurt, when the police, supposedly to protect them themselves and the protestors from an imagined fire hazard, ( Read more... ), denied them medical attention, and threatened them with repeated sprays directly in the face if they failed to cooperate. I understand the police were eventually given some sort of sanction, but there still seemed to be widespread doubt as to whether this constitutes "torture", but I don't know from whom, because it just seems like a dictionary definition. The sort of thing Jack Bauer would do it 24 after hours of agonised self-loathing and moralising, to international terrorists who are murdering large numbers of poeple and this is the only way to prevent them.
(Not a perfect cite, but a summary: http://www.nopepperspray.org/factsheet.htm)