Amid a media blackout of the Standing Rock protests, law enforcement targets the rare journalists on the scene

Of course, not all journalist are welcome at the protests. https://youtu.be/kK9Bp6jPtPY

I’m shocked that the US police use them on their own citizens. The British wouldn’t, they only used them on Irish people who didn’t want to be subjects. Horrible things.

This situation is really frustrating, your fourth and first amendments seem to be completely bypassed when required. It’s only your crazy fucking second that is accorded any respect.

Your fifteenth amendment seems to be a rather cute relic of the past also.

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Native Americans aren’t really citizens. Maybe on paper, but the US treats Indian lands as vassal states within a state.

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They aren’t entry level any more.
In 1980 I helped design an industrial computer. I understood how it worked more or less down to the gate level. One of my colleagues had built a working 24 bit cpu with a simple (original PDP-8 size) instruction set as a student project.
In the mid 80s email was plain text with a few simple headers.
Nowadays I refuse to offer to “fix” computers because they are such a complicated can of worms. If you think it’s an entry level job, I ask you to think again.
The world is actually getting far more complex and far more abstract. Credentials aren’t perfect but they are surely better than nothing. When it comes to journalists, how do I tell someone who has signed up to a code of ethics and has a clue about the legality of what they are doing, from someone who just intends to misreport and misrepresent me? How do I tell a man with a gun from a policeman without credentials?

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Does anyone know exactly what munitions are being used at standing rock?

I dunno - the rebranding effort has been going on as long as police forces existed, because that’s been true that long, and it’s still not stuck.

I don’t know precisely. From pictures I’ve seen it looks like shells loaded with pellets.

They are a “PR weapon” with a nice sounding name for a nasty thing. But, much as I dislike what happened in NI - I support Irish reunification - it has to be pointed out that the British Army discontinued the use of rubber bullets in 1973 because of their lethality, and used the less dangerous plastic bullets - aluminium/polymer*.
The disgusting Boris Johnson, on whom it is not possible to heap sufficient obloquy, was prevented from using water cannon in London by Teresa May.

*A friend, a former army officer who served in Iraq during the attempts at reconstruction, tells people that nowadays the rules on the army shooting people are actually a lot more strict than the rules for the police. The army could not have shot Mark Duggan within their rules of engagement.

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Many tier one support positions (the phone line you call to have someone ask “did you turn it off and on again” require A+ certification, Microsoft certification, or a full-on comp sci degree. You don’t need any of those credentials to do the job; they are a signal that this person may know what they are doing, but their absence certainly doesn’t indicate that they can’t do the job. (Source: I was a triage queue manager for a tier one support line.)

Another manifestation of this problem can be seen in job listings asking for three to five years experience in new programming languages (there are many examples from when Swift was released, for example).

In either case situation, dogged adherence to a credentialist regime created unrealistic hiring expectations and may have kept otherwise-capable applicants (perhaps from disadvantaged backgrounds) out of the running for a position.

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Well, when the “me” in that sentence is “the government”, arbitrarily enforcing that distinction becomes basically censorship.

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Wait, FEMA has “officers”? why wouldn’t local constabulary/national guard suffice?

It has always been routine for many police around the world to arrest and threaten journalists and to erase camera footage.

This is why most Cop Watch chapters have a talker, a camera person, and a backup camera person just in case the first two people get arrested. That person’s job in case something really vital gets captured is to make sure that the footage survives, which means not getting arrested.

I have been arrested with journalists whose cameras were busted and their memory cards erased, and my own phone was destroyed along with most other peoples’ arrested with me. None of us were ever actually convicted of anything. The whole innocent until proven guilty thing is absurd.

I understand the fear that people feel about Trump but honestly the Occupy crackdown was pretty brutal in the bigger cities and it was coordinated nationally between the Obama administration and local government; most people involved were Democrats. So while I understand the new fear of Trump I think it’s difficult to overstate how authoritarian things already are and always have been.

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people back from Standing Rock that I just met on Friday said tear gas, plus “stun” grenades, and rubber bullets - aka concussive grenades and metal bullets thinly coated with rubber. also, indirectly: the cold.

also, another thing that gets you targeted is wearing a more effective gas mask- for this reason the woman I was talking to said she instead holds two cloths, one in each hand, one to protect herself from the gas preemptively and one soaked in vinegar to breathe through after the tear gas has been sprayed

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I have wondered why people do not use better PPE at protests, but it makes sense that sensible preparations, like effective gas masks, would make you stand out.
I have not been able to find info on the rubber or plastic coated bullets, except in relation to their use in Israel. Documented use here would probably prove to be illegal.

Exactly. I was under the impression that the entire fucking country was a “Free Speech Zone”, but there’s my naivete exposed again…

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I’d try to teach these morons a bit of physics by demonstrating on them F=ma with a supersonic pencil eraser decelerating instantly (on their body), but even then I imagine that the lesson would be lost…

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That is pretty much what the majority of the Supreme Court held in Citizens United.

In other words, they held that the government does not get to differentiate between “Designated Credentialed Media” and “Everybody Else” in determining who gets to spend money on disseminating opinions.

We do, however use them on a regular basis on US citizens.

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Major media not being interested enough to report does not equate toa “media blackout”. This has been far from a “peaceful protest” but law enforcement is supposed to be better than this.

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