This is actually brilliant! The police in these situations have to exist in society and would likely have a very different reaction if their anonymity was stripped from them and their familie’s and close community saw them as not just regular beat cops but part of the oppresive gang.
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Thank you. Your reminder that we’re not alone means a lot.
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Chad and Bob are saying that the presence of leaf blowers means these “aren’t ordinary criminals.” In other words, time to bring out the terry-wrist laws and the whole machinery of oppression we spent 19 years perfecting,
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I read this, too. I wonder how effective is the tear gas after being launched, blown back, then-reblown, (and presumably iteratively volleyed back and forth)? How many returns before it’s just useless?
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They. Don’t. Care.
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The usefulness of tear gas, such as it is, is that it can be launched at specific small areas to make people within that area miserable enough to leave. The tendency of tear gas to diffuse makes this hard to control.
The usefulness of the protester’s fan is that diffuses the tear gas away from an area that the protesters want to control. It blunts the effectiveness of the tear gas.
The use of a police fan just makes everyone equally miserable. Far better to not use tear gas in the first place.
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It would be interesting if, instead of marching and chanting protestors came to the public space and just sat down and stayed silent. Just more and more people not moving, staring at the goons. How long would it take for them to break and start gassing people that could in no wise be considered at threat to persons or property?
There is already no justification for their actions, but assaulting a crowd of people just sitting in a public space might make it even more clear. No way to claim to be afraid of waving signs, people walking, people making noise, people drawing with chalk.
“Mom! They were looking at me!” stops being a viable excuse after age 6.
I mean, it coats everything in the surrounding area at this point to the point where you still get whiffs of it in the daytime as breezes blow, so there’s that…
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The “Naked Athena” protester, and the fact that the World Naked Bike Ride got cancelled this year have been percolating in my brain.
Imagine the optics of the cops tear gassing and beating a diverse crowd of hundreds of thousands of folks who are literally the most unarmed and vulnerable you can be. It would be deeply Portland and an unforgettable visual.
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Why, in other words, do we ban chemical weapons, but not equally deadly weapons like machine guns that rip through bodies and barrel bombs that tear them apart?
One answer is that while gas attacks are terrifying, the weapon has proved to be militarily ineffective. After Ypres, the allies provided masks to their front-line troops, who stood in their trenches killing onrushing Germans as clouds of gas enveloped their legs. That was true even as both sides climbed the escalatory ladder, introducing increasingly lethal chemicals (phosgene and mustard gas), that were then matched by increasingly effective countermeasures. The weapon also proved difficult to control. In several well-documented instances, gasses deployed by front-line troops blew back onto their own trenches—giving a literalist tinge to the term “blowback,” now used to describe the unintended consequences of an intelligence operation.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/why-the-world-banned-chemical-weapons-215023
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Do you have first hand knowledge of the Portland protests? Have you personally observed what seems to work, and what doesn’t? Or are you relying on second hand accounts, filtered through obsolete ideologies?
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Interesting quote:
Korean riot police use the pepper gas developed during the Vietnam War, which is fast becoming a favorite with busy dictators everywhere.
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I only know that town as the location of the International Congress on Medieval Studies. One of the two most important ones in the world.
Guess where I will never go.
Not that that matters to the cops in this video of course. They probably see it as a plus that their actions keep away academics and *gasp* foreigners.
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If something like that happens, that might be the tipping point for something much worse…
Many thanks for this solid info. Can you recommend any reliable source(s) for more analysis & updates?
It actually was. In polling after the shooting a majority of Americans blamed the students for their deaths. 1970 Kent State shootings are an enduring history lesson - USATODAY.com Rhodes, who ordered the murderers in, went on to be reelected in '74 and '78 (he wasn’t eligible to run in '70 due to the state constitution). 1974 Ohio gubernatorial election - Wikipedia He went to his grave never taking responsibility in 2000, but not before buildings on campuses throughout the state were named after him. The school’s enrollment plummeted afterwards. Four years after the shooting the school dropped all official ceremonies, leaving it to students and the community to handle the memorial, until this year when the school took it over for the 50th and put a former CIA staffer in charge of the event. It is only later that any reasonable chunk of the populace decided that murdering students is not okay and Ohio has apparently still not learned.
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Hate leaf blowers. Awful for the environment and it only takes one jerknugget “getting an early start on the day” to wake up thousands of people in a downtown. There was one guy who liked to do it around 6:30 AM here and I chased him all over the neighborhood one mornining. He was surprisingly understanding when I caught him and he never did it again.
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Balloons filled with Putrescene or Cadaverine, like in Neil Stephenson’s book ‘Zodiac’.
‘Course, you’d want to be upwind; very, very far upwind…
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