Oh yes, those are all dangerous activities that you do while aware of the danger. Unless you are suggesting that protesting by it’s very nature is and should be construed as physically dangerous, all I can say is this sort of tacit understanding masquerading as “realism” is bullshit of the highest order that allows this sort of thing to happen.
That’s exactly what I’m suggesting, particularly in light of the fact that police have been used to disperse OWS protestors in other cities.
I am fully aware of the possibilty of protests turning violent - yet all of the violence from these protests has been from the police, the ones tasked to use force responsibly. This isn’t fucking Cairo, bro.
I wasn’t accusing the pregnant woman of instigating violence; I merely pointed out the hypocrisy of heaping blame on police for the reported death of her unborn child while ignoring that the mother might have engaged in what could only be called reckless endangerment. That observation isn’t excusing the police for any unprovoked assault, lessening the severity of any crime committed against that pregnant individual or her fetus, or denying pregnant women the right to make their opinions known.
Hey, you should tell that to rape victims! That will certainly help, considering most rapes are committed by people the victims know and not by complete strangers. Strangely, people do have a strong sense of self-preservation. This shithole of an argument gets paraded around constantly and it is blatantly wrong. Especially because, assuming it is true, it still puts the onus on the victim for being dumb enough to get raped.
Really loving a particular analogy doesn’t make it accurate or compelling. You’re confusing analysis of the choices that make somebody vulnerable to predation with the ultimate assignment of culpability for that predation. A predator is no less guilty whether a woman is wearing a parka, or else walking the streets nude; whether she is on Broadway or in the darkest alley in the worst slum. There isn’t any excuse for rape. None. However, there is reason to question whether somebody who put themselves into a bad situation might not have met with tragedy if they had elected to be elsewhere.
A similar analogy can be built with respect to jaywalkers. In many cities, drivers are liable for collision even when pedestrians do not have the legal right of way. This places increased responsibility on the driver of the motor vehicle, because they have the greater capacity to cause harm. Frankly, you should not be driving a motor vehicle in such a manner that it would be impossible for you to stop safely in the event that a pedestrian violated traffic laws at an obvious intersection. Of course, the pedestrian has also been foolish if he sets out to cross the street without first looking in both directions. Just as somebody who is pregnant made a bad choice to attend a protest, regardless of the tragedy that followed. It’s more difficult to feel that a driver was completely reckless when a pedestrian has not used common sense, even if the driver had a stronger obligation. It’s more difficult to feel that the police acted in an especially foul manner if the woman put herself in the middle of a bad situation (which I can’t verify, but which is possible), even if the outcome was undeniably foul.
It’s almost like the point of every protest is to make people stop and listen. Oh, shit, wait, that is the point! Conflating that to “well, if you make a loud noise the police should come and beat the shit out of you” is lazy thinking, and I expected better of you considering your tag is not “brettmcd.” It is one thing to call for attention. It’s quite another call for a beatdown.
Which isn’t at all what I did. Questioning whether the police made the right decision is fine. I don’t happen to think that the use of pepper spray in cases like this is necessarily a bad choice. Clearly, evidence has arisen proving that it was misused, and I think that people ought to be held responsible for that.
Finally, what happened to picking people up? It’s not like there aren’t plenty of examples of sit-ins from the Civil Rights Movement where four cops grabbed a limb and literally picked up the non-resisting protester. The point was to use up manpower. This is also ignoring the fact that no policemen have been injured by the Occupy protesters, as far I know.
In summation, your insistence on placing the blame squarely on the protesters and absolving the police of all responsibility to use their power and force reasonably is the same top-heavy thinking that in recent decades made okay the use of torture. But, hey, as long as the good guys do it, it’s ok, right?
I’ve alluded to this many times already. It’s fine to criticize contemporary paradigms of policing and crowd control. But the point of pepper spray is to reduce the likelihood of resistance, thereby lowering the theoretical number of police necessary to safely take members of a crowd into custody. That may be what happened here: the students expected to get manhandled, but were pepper-sprayed instead. Of course, several were already wearing hoods, which confirms that they intended to brave the spray even after they had been told what would happen.
