Ah, you meant governance, which is (at least in casual conversations) a slightly different concept. That clarifies things. Yes, governance implies rules and rules in turn imply enforcement (sometimes with emphasis on the second syllable).
Absolutely. That was the main point of failure in this case. The issue that progressive and liberal orgs like HOPE face is that they want to err on the side of open discourse and as a result don’t anticipate the activities of bad actors.
In this case, they saw a progressive hacker organisation holding seminars aimed at disrupting and exposing their highly unpopular on-line activities. A smarter group in that position would have sent techie spies to sit quietly, take notes, and improve their opsec; neo-fascists and white supremacists (esp. American ones) aren’t known for their smarts, aversion to drama, or impulse control.
This right here is bullshit. Blocking aisles means people can’t get to fire exits, restrooms, or other people in your party who might have your inhaler in their bag. If the convention doesn’t have a rule against it, the fire marshal and human rights do.
If they were using Scientology’s infiltration tactics as a study guide, I’d expect them to next try mass-joining the conference-running organization, and then attack with lawyers when their applications were tossed.
You don’t need a cop to get someone out of an event. Civilian security can eject someone just fine, and in most cases probably do it better and more safely than a cop would.
But either way the event organizers need to decide to eject them - that was the shortcoming at HOPE.
I think they also probably recognized a fault line within the strongly idealistic HOPE community: Many are staunchly against fascism, many are free speech maximalists, and a lot are probably both.
Normally these values are aligned, but by bringing the values into conflict, they can bring the community into conflict. Free speech maximalists will oppose and obstruct anti-fascists and vice versa. Those who hold both values equally will be confused and unwilling to act.
This works because our political common sense about free speech and fascism is overly simplistic. Fascists have figured this out, and will exploit this weakness in all idealistic communities until we collectively get a clue.
There were a few con-running organizations here in Arizona that had something very similar happen to them; in that case, it resulted in the (progressively greying) members of the organization losing something that’s absolutely vital to running conventions: young people who are willing to invest their time, energy, and effort into it. It killed one convention completely dead after two very successful years by making almost all the founders quit (in one case driving the chair to a nervous breakdown!), which left them with almost no organizational guidance or experience- the third year was best described as a trainwreck, and it died sometime during the fourth year.
It also had the knock-on effect of damaging all the fan-run conventions in arizona (which didn’t exactly had that great a rep to begin with!) as well.
Nope. Don’t need em. Civilians can eject people just fine…
Then you understand my point. A cop is much more likely to be too aggressive and spark an aggressive response. This is the goal after all. We want Nazi’s being arrested and jailed as often as possible. We want the police and Nazis to be at odds at all times.
After all, this isn’t Black Bloc vs “Patriot groups”: “Hi, we’re the people paying for this space. Here is our contract with the hotel. These people are causing a disruption and refused to leave when asked. Here’s our conference lawyer.”
People commonly believe that if they have called the cops, or asked them for help somehow, that the police are sure to inflict violence and punishment on the desired target. But often the cops end up directing their violence indiscriminately, or even specifically against those who asked for help.
People in these situations will exclaim things like “But I’m the one who called you!” or “I hired you, that’s not what I paid for!” Unfortunately, these observations are irrelevant.
Counting on the police to take your side in a conflict is a very risky move, especially if the conflict is you against a fascist.
Scientology would hire an off-duty officer for our Toronto picket events, bend the officer’s ear about how we were awful people, but rarely would an officer act the hard case towards us, since we non-violent, non-yelling, citizens conducting a peaceful protest on the public sidewalk.
It would get surreal when they’d send out one of their people to distract their own off-duty officer while someone else could do some dirty against a protester down the sidewalk.
I’m with you brother. If you don’t understand the psychology of how to hire the right one and how to handle them properly to keep them feeling very important by escorting your CoC person around looking for troublemakers, you definitely do not want to hire an off duty cop to boot out Nazis from your event. You have to understand the dynamics involved and control the situation closely. Reading your post tells me that hiring a cop would likely be a bad move for you so yeah, it could get real bad real fast or it might just end up a waste of money.
This reminds me of when a social worker friend of mine noticed the same ‘concerned local’ showing up to speak at three different safe injection site public consultations - to protest “not in my neighbourhood”, even though the three neighbourhoods were far apart. She asked some questions and found out he was a National Front activist. Up till that point organizers had been trying very diligently to address his issues and hold honest dialog with him.
These infiltrators can be much more subtle than what they talk about here. But these crude tactics can be very effective too. Why in the world would any lefty take away “I’m going to boycott this conference” from the shenanigans.
