I’m not American, but I’ve lived here for 6 years. I’ve also traveled to a number of former SSRs in the past few years.[quote=“time, post:253, topic:24467”]
You’ve turned yourself into an apologist for American police in which you have little knowledge of in order to hang on to an imaginary moral high ground argument. You move the goal posts constantly. Every time you are shown police actions against protesters in the US after you claim they would not do such things, it went from US police don’t do that to they don’t do it unprovoked, to well you could sue them.
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My position has been that the police don’t use lethal force against US protestors and that people who protest in the US don’t expect violence to be used against them. It is not US policy to do so. And since it is not policy to act this way, if something does happen there are ways to get redress.
Now, if this seems like shifting goalposts, these goalposts have shifted in response to the new goal posts you have introduced. I say something about how the US doesn’t use lethal force, and decries such force when deployed by any government against protestors. The “rebuttal” to this is to introduce incidents that happened 100 years ago, individual police shootings unrelated to protests, or individual non-lethal incidents of rogue officers pepper spraying students (who later received compensation, got an apology and an investigation, as well as the officer fired). If I address to these new arguments, apparently I am the one shifting goal posts. OK.
So the protests immediately stopped happening as soon as shots were fired?
You’re right. It’s a strange world where Americans would expect lethal force if they protested with violence but Ukrainians would not, but that is the situation you’ve described. And since according to this mindset the US is objectively worse than Ukraine, as well as being just as bad when it comes to democracy, police excesses, corruption, human rights, and just about everything else, these Ukrainians must be incredibly stupid to even be protesting at all. After all, their country is already better than the West, according to the comments you and other Americans have left here, so why are they complaining and protesting at all? Why do they want to be pro-Western, and not pro-Russian?
Or maybe the fact that they’re protesting the pro-Russian Yanukovich government actually means something, and tells us something about the conditions there. But those would be real Ukrainians trying to tell Yanukovich, Russia, and the world something with their actions and their willingness to risk death. But it seems actual Ukrainians aren’t going to change your mind about how conditions there might differ from conditions in the West. You should tell them they’re wrong and that they’re better off under Yanukovich.[quote=“time, post:253, topic:24467”]
And I wonder why the police in Kiev armed themselves?
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Yeah, reports from Kremlin-owned RT probably aren’t the best resource. But note that that report is from Feb 23 (the day the 4-man bobsled medals were awarded, as you can see in the bottom creep). By that date, over 100 deaths in Kiev’s Maidan had already occurred, so it’s not like the police were arming themselves in response to this nutbar’s rhetoric.
