OK. Here’s the influential Madison Method for dealing with crowds and protests.
I don’t know if I need to say anything else. I guess you’re right in the sense that it is just as much US policy to shoot parking violators as it is to shoot protestors. If you think this makes the US—which has has not used live ammunition on protesters in a long time—equivalent to Yanukovich’s Ukraine which shot and killed dozens of protestors in the last couple of weeks, then we aren’t going to agree.
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Fight the officer that gives you a jaywalking ticket with a weapon in your hand and see what happens. Video tape it and post it for me. Then we can talk about those six levels again.
[/quote]Hey, do you think anyone has ever fought someone over a jaywalking ticket or being arrested or anything else? How many of them get shot and killed?
As will the election in May. And given the widespread accusations of electoral fraud in 2012, it’s far from clear that elections under Yanukovich would be as revealing as you hope. But I’m sure you probably regard accusations of electoral fraud as being an illegitimate byproduct of the democracy building that the US has tried to support with its aid money.
Wait. So I have to protest in order to have a legitimate thought? Haven’t we had protests here? How many protesters were shot in the Seattle WTO protests? In Toronto for the G20? In any other protests? The evidence already exists. If you want to prove that protestors are shot at with live ammunition in the US, you can become the first protestor in a very long time to do so if you wish, but as it stands it’s pretty clear that this is not part of current US policy.
How are we telling them what is best and how are we rigging the election? Actual evidence, and not aid money spent over 23 years for the promotion of democracy. How is US involvement getting people killed? What is your evidence that these protests happened only as a result of US involvement?
By the way, having an especial interest in geopolitical hotspots is not incompatible with occupying the moral high ground.
Paet is not the EU Foreign Minister: he’s the Estonian foreign affairs minister.
And here’s what Paet’s source had to say to The Telegraph:
Our correspondent, Damien McElroy, has spoken to the doctor at the centre of the claims that snipers that shot people in Kiev were hired by Maidan leaders:
Olga Bogomolets said she had not told Mr Paet that policemen and protesters had been killed in the same manner.
“Myself I saw only protesters. I do not know the type of wounds suffered by military people,” she told The Telegraph. “I have no access to those people.”
But she said she had asked for a full forensic criminal investigation into the deaths that occurred in the Maidan. "No one who just sees the wounds when treating the victims can make a determination about the type of weapons. I hope international experts and Ukrainian investigators will make a determination of what type of weapons, who was involved in the killings and how it was done. I have no data to prove anything.
"I was a doctor helping to save people on the square. There were 15 people killed on the first day by snipers. They were shot directly to the heart, brain and arteries. There were more than 40 the next day, 12 of them died in my arms.
“Our nation has to ask the question who were the killers, who asked them to come to Ukraine. We need good answers on the basis of expertise.”
Mr Paet’s assertion that an opposition figure was behind the Maidan massacre was not one she could share.
“I think you can only say something like this on the basis of fact,” she said. “Its not correct and its not good to do this. It should be based on fact.”
She said the new government in Kiev had assured her a criminal investigation had begun but that she had not direct contact with it so far.
“They told me they have begun a criminal process and if they say that I believe them. The police have not given me any information on it.”
