Obstructing pedestrian traffic? They are pedestrian traffic.
Lets have a revolution.
Wait no one said we would get arrested. Iām going home.
That kind of sums up the issue right there.
This is interesting, but then arresting peaceful protesters isnāt exactly a modern phenomenon.
What I want is a good postmortem on OWS analyzing what went right, what went wrong, what was accomplished, what was not, etcā¦ Is there one out there?
Really? And the NYC cops deciding what political speech is okay and what needs to be stoppedā¦ thatās just a non-issue, because privilege.
This knee jerk reaction of a post has nothing to do with anything I said in my post.
Except for the part where you used ridicule to lay the perceived failure of the movement completely on the shoulders of the protestors, thus exempting both the police and the powerful interests they protect from any responsibility. But feel free to use more ridicule to dismiss this as well.
You know I can only speak from my view on the ground here in Orlando where we had a very small Occupy movement. I was for about the first 12 hours very very excited.
I then went and found the Facebook page for the local protesters here. Instead of this page giving important status updates on news and info you would need to have a protest of this sort, they simply spammed me with tons of photo memes. When I pointed out that this is not what the page should be used for I was then banned from making comments, yeah thatās right they were banning people who were trying to make productive comments.
So after my fist initial horrible run in online. I started getting more hands on and involved in person.
What I found was the issues present in the online forums and promotion were all present in person on the ground.
From what I saw in my little microcosm here is Iām pretty sure representative of what was happening in the large cities.
No organization. It was like herding cats.
No clear mission or goal. There was somewhat of a common ideology, but no one was there for the same reason. Tons of good intentioned people were there pushing there own very noble agendas, that really had very little to do with what occupy was about. Ours was over run by a feminist group, great cause, Iām all for it, but because they were the loudest and got the most attention and had the most bodies suddenly were primarily a feminist crusade.
Another big problem. Thugs, no other way to put it, and a ton of people want to sweep this one under the rug, or claim they were police plants, or it was all exaggerated by the police and the press. There were tons of bullyish criminal thugs who latched on put on, Guy Fawkes masks, and just cause chaos. Woohoo lets smoke some pot in the park!!!
Then it became this silly crazy game of lets try to out lawyer the lawyers. If they say our tents are permanent non-mobile structures therefore not allowed in the park letās put wheels on everything and try to find tricky loopholes to the BS reasons they are giving us. The movement had once again morphed into something else, now itās lets play a game of tricking them into letting us stay in the park.
When they finally did come in and sweep the park only 2-3 people stood ground and got arrested.
So when the eventual eventually happened and the cops came and broke things up people scattered because there never really was a core tying it all together. Everyone had there own agendas and everyone just simply went back to wherever they were doing that before the whole thing started.
The officer was very clear, obstructing traffic (by lingering in a crosswalk, hopping up and down, chanting) is obstruction. Individuals doing this in a coordinated manner are clearly violating the letter of the law - and verbal warning by the police. Had the crowd kept moving - and stayed on the sidewalk, they wouldnāt be arrested.
OWS protesters are misguided, economically illiterate tantrum throwers.
The police tolerated way too much nonsense and law-breaking from these folks.
Those arrests are rightfully āchillingā, in that it shows you shouldnāt break the law in the process of free expression.
Yeah you like reading between lines.
Cops are doing what cops do.
Iām not excusing them Iām stating a reality.
Yes the failure is 100% totally on the protesters. They folded instantly.
They didnāt decide anything, they enforced the law. The protesters decided to break the law.
Great summary of the disjointed nonsense. OWS was a thrift store full of vague lefty-grievances, not a serious movement.
Forming
Storming
Norming
Performing.
Any group has to go through the first three stages before they get to the actually useful fourth stage. Blaming OWS for not immediately leaping to the fourth stage is like wishing water wasnāt wet. Criticising OWS for taking too long to move through the first three stages is a little more valid, except that it ignores the inherent complexity of OWS as a group.
Iām a bit confused about the threats being made when heās being arrested, as I canāt distinguish the voices very well. If heās making the threats, it doesnāt seem entirely unreasonable to arrest him. If the police are making the threats, I would think he has a reasonable legal claim against them. Or perhaps thatās simply common speech thereā¦
Some of the claims being made really need more evidence, though. Showing video footage of a small fraction of arrests in order to claim specific targeting could likely make it seem like any particular group was being targeted.
The video mentions that his face was pushed into the shoulder of one of the cops. I assume that other cops were the ones threatening him if he bit the cop. Which to them probably meant if he opened his mouth while his face was shoved into the copās shoulder.
Uh huh. And BoA and Wells Fargo laundered money for those pleasant import/export guys down in Mexico who have a habit of beheading anyone who grumbles about their business practices. That seems a little worse than the jaywalking done by the people in OWS. So I guess the police were right on that one, huh?
The āchillingā part is that some USians can break laws in ways that really matter and not suffer any consequences while those protesting such lawlessness can get arrested for littering/jaywalking/looking at a cop funny.
Itās always interesting to me what people are willing to condone and what to condemn. Itās almost always a tribal affiliation game rather than a serious moral argument. For example, your comment screams āIām not an OWS protester!ā but fails to put any perceived moral transgressions into context. Thereās an element of overwrought concern over breaking āthe letter of the lawā in your own words but I donāt think youāre really worried about that as much as youāre worried about telling off those damned hippies.
I donāt understand the value systems that lead people to rant and rave about a bunch of well-intentioned mostly harmless leftists while staying silent about egregious abuses of power by the wealthy and well-connected but I know it when I see it in the wild.
Your simplistic logic has a lot of flaws. Occupy protests are viewed as āsubversiveā by law enforcement and our legal system. Tea Party events on the other hand are left alone to disrupt and create angst as they are viewed as āfree speechā. If the cops were pepper-spraying Tea Partiers and the courts sending them to jail than even though itās wrong since they are in fact expressing their thoughts in a civil disobedient manner at least there would be some justice in that the law and judicial bodies were not being subjective and discriminatory in accordance to their own politically and financially motivated beliefs.
Neat story broā¦ Why didnāt you organize the rest of your libertarian friends to stand strong against the cops or be more focused? Or were you too lazyā¦ None of them even wanted to leave the house and stop spamming comments sections?
Funny that you still felt compelled to create an account to troll this story. I mean why bother with such a failureā¦
The key puzzle piece is exactly who is breaking the law. We only pretend to be created equal.
