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

muckrock.com

51–60 of 216 posts

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

#51

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.

The crowd was large enough to show up at the polls and get more votes for the candidate of their choice. Hillary got 2,868,691 more votes. This isn't democracy.

And that wasn't even a candidate with a positive approval rating...

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

#52
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Some dudes I work with went nuts over Obama being a tax burden when he stopped in Hawaii and it was reported he was stoked to have a plate lunch. To be fair though, they kept talking about Hawaii like they didn't realize it's a state.

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

#53

I wonder what kind of hearing protection the police use while this is active. I feel like it'd be a hazardous job to operate this frequently. Also, is it illegal for a civilian to own and use one?

If it is just a speaker I doubt it is illegal to own but operating it such that it causes hearing loss could probably be considered assault.

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

#54
post #17

High power directed ultrasound can potentially cause brain damage from induced mechanical strain in brain tissue. I feel like parametric ultrasonic speakers should be more stringently regulated before every single police department starts using them as if they were regular loudspeakers. I support requiring something akin to an amateur radio license to operate high powered parametric ultrasonic speakers.

> brain damage

Surely that's a feature, not a bug, when the police have to deal with civil rights protesters. Recall the dogs, batons, and water cannons of the south.

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

#55
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…

Little known fact: 1984 is based on WW2 and immediate post-war Britain. Orwell was a propaganda correspondent for the BBC; his wife worked for the Censorship Department. 1984 was based on his experiences then, and the disillusionment of the Cold War immediately following WW2. He had initially intended to title it 1948.

Actually, this is not that little-known: it's in the Wikipedia page for George Orwell and easily accessible on the net, and the text itself says it's set in Great Britain after the major powers have divided up the world and entered a state of perpetual war.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell#Second_World_War...

http://www.ministry-of-information.com/the-origins-of-orwell...

People get thrown by the title, though, thinking that it's a prediction of a future dystopia while Orwell was actually writing about the world he lived in then.

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

#56
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being singled out for invasive searching and questioning whenever you fly for no reason other than your ethnicity goes a little beyond "not being offended."

It's not simply (ed: only) based on ethnicity.

It's definitely not. My dad had one of those 'extensive questioning' sessions the first time (and only the first time) he flew to Israel because (we think) he is former non-US military. He's also whiter than snow, basically the definition of Caucasian.

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

#57
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think that the reason the DDR did that was because of their power was already slipping. If they massacred a lot of citizens, they would probably have a revolution on their hands… They practically already did.

It’s a difficult comparison to North Korea because the regime is not in that situation. The situation is more nuanced than that. I elaborated on possible motivations for using nonlethal force earlier... In the case of North Korea, they also might prefer to not kill citizens who they use for labor.

I wasn’t intending to discuss specific events or political situations, though. I meant to merely touch on the political dynamics of non-lethal crowd control.

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

#58
Hacker News, can we come up with clever ways to undermine this growing trend toward authoritarianism? How effective are ear plugs as a countermeasure? Parabolic mirrors?

How can we divest from organizations employing these anti-populist, anti-democratic measures?

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

#59
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

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

#60

There are legitimate (IMHO) uses for these. For example, a crowd panics and people start getting trampled. An LRAD can be used to communicate directions quickly at long range to help stop the panic. The report sounds like the police were doing what they should be doing. Have the organizers of that March complained about police actions or disputed the report? If not, then I would tend to believe the report. If correct…

> I also believe that these abuses do not represent all police.

The institution of police was created to undermine labor movements. It may behoove you to re-examine your assumption that they're there to keep you safe.

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