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DC police used sonic cannon to direct crowd flow during Women's March

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Re: DC police used sonic cannon to direct crowd flow during Women's March

#41

Post by gaadd33 »

djsumdog wrote: post #33
jachee wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the way districts are Gerrymandered, the electoral college and the amount of money required to even come to the fight: This is an oligarchy. More people DID vote for Hillary. Fat lot of good it's doing us.

Even if she won, she was still the Secretary of State that gave us more predator drones, more bombing and served under a president that spent every day at work (the first president in history). I feel like people don't realize the corruption is pretty equal between both candidates/parties, they just toss a few pandering policies here and there to get people angry, or spin things differently.

> and served under a president that spent every day at work (the first president in history).

...That's a negative? Also I didn't think that Obama spent every day at work, at least not from what the news reported.

Re: DC police used sonic cannon to direct crowd flow during Women's March

#42

Post by stevenjohns »

secret_island wrote: post #32
djsumdog wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I support them not being allowed ever. But just like the totally ineffective body scanners at airports, too much money has been sunk in for officers not to use them. No one actually cares about the sunk cost fallacy.

Quite right. Israel's El Al simply profiles everyone that flies and by doing so they obviate the need to use stupid, expensive equipment that does nothing other than bottleneck airports and cause frustration. The Israelis are the best in the world at what they do regarding air security. The West has considered using the same techniques and they likely should. I'm not opposed to profiling if the person fits the profil…

El Al security is not a good model at all.

I'm still yet to figure out what they achieved by seizing my backpack (that had all of my personal documentation) and damaging my brand new MBP 2016 and Pixel tablet (by very clearly dropping them a dozen times) had to do with security. Especially when they lied about putting it on the plane and I arrived at Ben Gurion with literally nothing other than a passport in one pocket and a dead phone in the other.

El Al's actions say the opposite about what you say about Israelis: El Al clearly believes that they are better at what they do than the IDF or Ben Gurion airport security, so they take it upon themselves (as private citizens) to pick up the slack. For what it's worth, the woman who interviewed me at Ben Gurion didn't have a lot of nice things to say about El Al either.

Re: DC police used sonic cannon to direct crowd flow during Women's March

#43

Post by code_duck »

mc32 wrote: post #13
jstanley wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If police are unable to control the crowd, at what point is that simply because the crowd is so large that the police should be unable to control them? If the DDR had this sort of technology, would the Berlin wall still be standing? And, if so, would that be a good thing?

The DDR "let" people cross the wall. If they had not wanted to allow the people to cross, they would not have let them cross. I mean, it's not like they didn't have storm rifles or were unwilling to fire upon civilians. That is to say, they had more powerful weapons and were willing to use them. They made a choice to let people cross. So it was only after the spokesperson for the Berlin Communist Party announced they…

It’s likely that a government in that situation would prefer to use these less lethal weapons. Mowing down the crowd en masse with something like firearms would magnify problems at home and abroad, whereas turning them back with something like a sonic cannon would cause less complications.

Re: DC police used sonic cannon to direct crowd flow during Women's March

#44

Post by abawany »

jachee wrote: post #9
SamReidHughes wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the crowd is large enough to show up at the polls and get more votes for the candidate of their choice than anybody else. This is a democracy.

With the way districts are Gerrymandered, the electoral college and the amount of money required to even come to the fight: This is an oligarchy. More people DID vote for Hillary. Fat lot of good it's doing us.

I have been thinking about how to work around the gerrymandering/gigantic 'war chests' that the incumbents have and the following idea comes to mind: run against these incumbents locally in the party primaries to help drain their truckloads of 'campaign contributions' and help give the election candidate a fighting chance to upset this stinking pile of evil.

Re: DC police used sonic cannon to direct crowd flow during Women's March

#45

Post by JoshTriplett »

djsumdog wrote: post #31
jMyles wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When the crowd is large enough to show up at the polls and get more votes for the candidate of their choice than anybody else. This is a democracy. This is a strong indictment of political science education in this country. First of all, you need to understand that the policy preferences of the voting constituency in any given national election are not strongly correlated to policy results. This is shown convincing…

I really agree with this. Specifically, American politics, although technically democratic, is not representational. The US elections are first past the post, where as Australia's is order of preference with instant runoff (you literally cannot throw your vote away) and New Zealand's is MMP (where 50% of Parliament gets equal representation based on party preference and the other 50% get the majority vote). Also, Ame…

> where as Australia's is order of preference with instant runoff (you literally cannot throw your vote away)

This is a tangent, but IRV is horribly broken: it throws your vote away for you, by ignoring all your preferences other than the top choice until it decides that your top choice no longer matters. If you vote A > B > C, IRC ignores that you prefer B over C until it eliminates A. That can cause C to win. That is not a theoretical concern; it's something that you would expect to happen when third parties become more popular.

Re: DC police used sonic cannon to direct crowd flow during Women's March

#46

Post by sidcool »

djsumdog wrote: post #35
sidcool wrote: post #18

America's becoming the scary police state we all despise. And with good tech.

becoming? It's been this way for a very long time. Very few major media outlets cover the Democrat/Republican National Conventions, but you can watch videos online of the protests from past years going back quite a bit. Rage Against the Machine use to do protests at both the DNC and RNC which I thought was hilarious. It's very common for protesters to be smoke bombed, herded, arrested and detained. There are several…

Scary as hell

Re: DC police used sonic cannon to direct crowd flow during Women's March

#47

Post by [deleted] »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #45
djsumdog wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really agree with this. Specifically, American politics, although technically democratic, is not representational. The US elections are first past the post, where as Australia's is order of preference with instant runoff (you literally cannot throw your vote away) and New Zealand's is MMP (where 50% of Parliament gets equal representation based on party preference and the other 50% get the majority vote). Also, Ame…

> where as Australia's is order of preference with instant runoff (you literally cannot throw your vote away) This is a tangent, but IRV is horribly broken: it throws your vote away for you, by ignoring all your preferences other than the top choice until it decides that your top choice no longer matters. If you vote A > B > C, IRC ignores that you prefer B over C until it eliminates A. That can cause C to win. That…

[deleted]

Re: DC police used sonic cannon to direct crowd flow during Women's March

#48

Post by mc32 »

code_duck wrote: post #43
mc32 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The DDR "let" people cross the wall. If they had not wanted to allow the people to cross, they would not have let them cross. I mean, it's not like they didn't have storm rifles or were unwilling to fire upon civilians. That is to say, they had more powerful weapons and were willing to use them. They made a choice to let people cross. So it was only after the spokesperson for the Berlin Communist Party announced they…

It’s likely that a government in that situation would prefer to use these less lethal weapons. Mowing down the crowd en masse with something like firearms would magnify problems at home and abroad, whereas turning them back with something like a sonic cannon would cause less complications.

Let's suppose Kim, Jung-un has a problem with people crossing over into SK. Do you think he'll use less than lethal weapons, or do you think he'll go for the assault rifles?

Parent Post implied that had the DDR had these sonic weapons the Berlin Wall would not have fallen... as if The DDR would not have had the willingness to put a stop to it if they wanted to. What happened is they announced publicly that they had a change of heart and would let people cross. And so people did.

If you're leading a country as a stong[man] and you want to retain control, it is imperative you use strong tactics --anything less is seen as a weakness by (good or bad) adversaries, and rightly so.

Re: DC police used sonic cannon to direct crowd flow during Women's March

#49

Post by stevenjohns »

alexeldeib wrote: post #34
secret_island wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite right. Israel's El Al simply profiles everyone that flies and by doing so they obviate the need to use stupid, expensive equipment that does nothing other than bottleneck airports and cause frustration. The Israelis are the best in the world at what they do regarding air security. The West has considered using the same techniques and they likely should. I'm not opposed to profiling if the person fits the profil…

I agree broadly that the Israeli model seems the one to follow. My understanding differs, however, in that it's not strictly profiling in the sense that carries heavy negative connotations in the US. I haven't traveled to Israel so can't comment, but I understand that in "profiling" the focus is on more objective metrics than an American might think when they hear the word -- e.g., physiological responses (sweating,…

None of those are the metrics they use. Despite being an Australian citizen with a very clean record, as well as having a very Western name, I was red flagged before I even arrived because of my country of birth.

With El Al, you're interrogated before you board the plane. When you go to check in, there is a "pre check-in" where you show staff your passport and they check your name off against a paper list. That paper list would already indicate whether or not you're going to be interrogated and at what level.

My coworker flying with me was also red flagged, and he was explicitly told it was because of my country of birth and that he was flying with me.

He had much less of a rough time than me, though, where I was being interrogated over where I got the 100 shekels they found in my wallet (apparently exchanging a nominal amount of Aussie dollars for shekels at Sydney airport "just in case" astounded El Al security, and it was much more likely that there was something much more sinister going on).

Re: DC police used sonic cannon to direct crowd flow during Women's March

#50

Post by ajmurmann »

djsumdog wrote: post #33
jachee wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the way districts are Gerrymandered, the electoral college and the amount of money required to even come to the fight: This is an oligarchy. More people DID vote for Hillary. Fat lot of good it's doing us.

Even if she won, she was still the Secretary of State that gave us more predator drones, more bombing and served under a president that spent every day at work (the first president in history). I feel like people don't realize the corruption is pretty equal between both candidates/parties, they just toss a few pandering policies here and there to get people angry, or spin things differently.

I think it doesn't matter which side you see it from, democracy in the US is completely broken. In most states your vote doesn't matter. Both parties ended up with candidates that were disliked by more people than liked. Trump keeps bringing up Hillary because she probably is the only candidate who makes him even remotely look good to anyone meanwhile even most Democrats didn't want her. Both parties had to fight off what in essence were third party candidates because it's more viable to hijack one of the big two than running as a third party. And that's completely ignoring that once in office completely unpopular measures get pushed through my either site. It's completely broken!
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