Bellingcat are the guys who do the deep-diving into the murky soup of the interwebz - maybe they could be persuaded to work their magic on The Don’s Goon squads.
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Amateur…
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2009/06/11/things_i_wont_work_with_thioacetone
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Well, no, this is actually a very low fidelity and potentially inaccurate form of doxxing, so not a great plan.
But I would enjoy seeing Pdx cops wait until they are too far from a Federal building and then slap a pair of handcuffs on them. Let the court decide if they are really police or not.
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No matter what they do, somebody thinks they should do something else.
You’ll never get everybody to do the same thing.
There are plenty of historical examples of people doing exactly what BakerB suggests. The examples that got the most attention in the media were where the cops abused the protesters in some grotesque way, but obviously it wasn’t enough to get them defunded yet.
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When we get on the other side of this mess, I would want an amnesty for violent protesters, too. Nonviolence didn’t work; for society to become more just, property damage and violence (two separate things) were necessary. That’s not the protester’s fault, but the state’s.
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We already know how that works. Sit ins and die ins are both very established techniques and the answer is that they generally don’t use tear gas, they prefer arrests and off camera beatings in that situation. During Occupy one of the popular ways of police dealing with people doing that was to cuff them behind their backs and “accidentally” drop them when they “resist”. The people fall on their face with no ability to break their fall. Once they’ve done that once or twice, they can count on someone in the crowd reacting in a way that provides a pretext for an order to disburse and the use of more aggressive measure. It takes a lot of training to not provide that reaction and it is hard to provide that training to a crowd large enough to create change. But really, sit with your request. You are functionally asking people to be beaten calmly because you think it provides better optics. If you aren’t doing it yourself, then it is a simply cruel demand.
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Thanks for posting these threads. Very compelling.
I was so frustrated to read this article this weekend:
Because the only “explanation” of what protesters want is a very vague list of intangibles like addressing inequality and such. I know they must have measurable demands that we could expect or hope people to be acting on.
They didn’t have even one quote from any of the protesters, let alone organizers.
I hate to jump on the “bashing the media” bandwagon, but the reporting is dismally inadequate.
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The idea that protestors must have demands, or a list of desired changes in order to be taken seriously is really irritating. In any protests of size there are going to be people who want different changes in society. There are rarely people “in charge” in any meaningful way. Perhaps people are looking at these protests like a form of union action-and union actions, being focused on particular industries and run by the unions, really did have an organizational hierarchy and limited, tangible goals.
The cry to change policing has been interpreted to mean everything from adding a few social services to the mix to the abolishment of all law enforcement agencies.
Every attempt at a simple slogan or solution will have detractors.
I suspect, at the moment, that the people in Portland want to be allowed their rights to peacefully assemble without being attacked by mercenaries hired by their government.
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Stephenson lifted that from Poul Anderson’s “Operation Chaos”
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