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Occupy Portland's Dec 3rd Tactic to Neutralize Police

portlandoccupier.org

31–40 of 113 posts

Re: Occupy Portland's Dec 3rd Tactic to Neutralize Police

#31
post #3

What drew me to this article was it's discussion of the tactics a unorganized group can do and try all at once. A neat superposition of several topics. Like a glorified case of the wisdom of crowds.

unfortunately any mass movement is dependent on being able to apply political pressure. It might work if there is a growing momentum and you end up with an 'orange' revolution. Most likely it's going to simply die out by itself unless it can actually transform into a political force. Being in Spain I can tell you the protests accomplished nothing, changed nothing politically and ended up dissolving themselves once it…

On this point: while they are at opposite ends of the political spectrum, the Occupy movement has a lot of structural similarities to the Tea Part movement.

The sad thing about grassroots politics in the US is that the conservative grassroots movements, like Tea Party, form loose, non-hierarchical yet highly organized coalitions where as the liberals end up going lowest-common-denominator and form protest groups.

The problem is that the political system in America is geared up to accept pressure from political groups like Tea Party but isn't particularly affected by protect groups on the street. As a liberal I find it depressing that folks refuse to take on the political system at it's own game like the Tea Partiers have done.

Re: Occupy Portland's Dec 3rd Tactic to Neutralize Police

#32
post #11

So here's HN in 2012: the Hiring Thread, which leads this month with a chorus of comments about how effective HN has been for finding people awesome jobs or companies awesome candidates, is at the bottom of the front page just a few hours after submission. Meanwhile, "Occupy Portland's Dec 3rd Tactic to Neutralize Police" is at the top. It's unsurprising. The kinds of people who are interested in Occupy protest tacti…

I actually have the exact opposite point of view: 1) To the best of my knowledge, I've never gotten a gig out of the freelancer thread in the past six months, although I am a full-time freelancer. The thread is essentially a list of facts and does not expose me to any new ideas, which would be forgivable if I consistently got gigs out of it, but I do not. As for its cousin the Hiring Thread, I am not nor do I know an…

I don't participate in the freelancer thread (which is a new development) but I don't so much have to make the case for the Hiring thread, since (like I said) it leads this month with testimonials about how awesome the hiring thread is.

The quality of discussion on this article is already poor. That's also not surprising, because while the ostensible topic (tactics) is interesting, it's an advocacy article on an advocacy site and is mostly a coatrack for Occupy --- so, again unsurprisingly, it's not allowed for anyone to question the idea on this thread without starting a debate about the value of Occupy.

Think about it for a second and realize that any political story can be shoehorned into a "tactical" narrative; horse-race politics (which I follow like my siblings follow White Sox Baseball) are also full of tactics; there's a whole NYT subsite for political nerdery (fivethirtyeight) --- I highly recommend it, but would flag most 538 stories submitted to HN as well.

The argument that any given political story is "something that hackers would find interesting" and not "just politics" is as old as the site. There is also an infinite number of arrangement of cat pictures that satisfy the literal definition of "interesting to hackers". I concede immediately that the guidelines --- I think unfortunately so, and to the clear detriment of the site --- are squishy on this point; it would be better if they simply said "NO POLITICS EVER". They don't. But this is an advocacy piece for Occupy and it is pushing good stuff off the front page of the site.

Re: Occupy Portland's Dec 3rd Tactic to Neutralize Police

#33
post #30
post #11

So here's HN in 2012: the Hiring Thread, which leads this month with a chorus of comments about how effective HN has been for finding people awesome jobs or companies awesome candidates, is at the bottom of the front page just a few hours after submission. Meanwhile, "Occupy Portland's Dec 3rd Tactic to Neutralize Police" is at the top. It's unsurprising. The kinds of people who are interested in Occupy protest tacti…

From your comment, I'm still not clear what your exact objection is to the article. You appear to be complaining that an 'Occupy' thread is rated higher than a 'hiring' thread, yet don't explain why you feel that the Occupy thread doesn't 'gratifies one's intellectual curiosity' the way a 'hiring' thread does. I recognise that the 'hiring' thread is valuable to some people on HN and am glad that the post appears, how…

My politics are closer to Occupy's than to the Tea Party's, by a big margin. I'm not asking you to flag the story because I have a problem with the politics.

I'm asking you to flag this story because the argument for it being on the site is a slippery slope that also includes the fundraising dynamics of the Iowa GOP caucus.

Like I said earlier: stories like this have a systemic advantage over most real "hacker news" topics. A "Comparison of 6 USB Stick Micro Dev Boards" --- unquestionably more germane to the site than this --- is welcome by everyone, but passionately supported by few. Occupy (or Tea Party) advocacy is largely unwelcome on the site by charter, but passionately supported by enough people to peg stories to the top of the front page.

The result is a site that looks more like 2008 Reddit than 2008 HN. In fact, because HN is doing such a good job attracting the Slashdot "Your Rights Online" crowd, we're seeing more and more stories for which Reddit threads are better than HN's.

I used to think the big problem with 'pg's guidelines were that it was squishy about politics; it should, I thought, be rewritten to say "No politics, no religion, no cute pictures, ever." I still think that. But the better thing for the guidelines to say is even simpler:

No advocacy stories.

Re: Occupy Portland's Dec 3rd Tactic to Neutralize Police

#34
post #6
post #5

I don't know if this is a difference between UK and US police tactics, or if it's specific to Portland - I also don't know if it's the case that the difference was caused by not caring as much or just by not being as successful: UK police have done a much better job in the past, and rendered this article nonsense. The key difference: > Since we had no clear destination, the police were unable to get ahead of us and s…

I think this may have to do with cultural and geographic distances. U.S. cities, for the most part, may not be as easy to do something like kettling in as most are less dense than U.K. cities and may simply have more open space to cover to effectively "kettle" people and contain them to one area. Also, although the police are clearly acting as if they are militants at war, they still don't want the non-protesting pop…

You shouldn't discount 25 years of experience trying to control football (soccer) hooligans in the UK has given the police a lot of experienced bodies and equipment (i.e. horses) to help implement such tactics.

Plus, in the UK the cops aren't generally armed with anything more than a club. So they have to use their heads a bit more.

This is what happens when UK cops get guns http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Jean_Charles_de_Meneze...

Re: Occupy Portland's Dec 3rd Tactic to Neutralize Police

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, suddenly very important political discussion is "off-topic"? I'll admit, it isn't standard fare for HN, but I'd say, that's a good thing, not a bad thing.

Per pg, very important political discussion has ALWAYS been off-topic on HN.

Oh engineers. Shirking morality again.

Re: Occupy Portland's Dec 3rd Tactic to Neutralize Police

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Per pg, very important political discussion has ALWAYS been off-topic on HN.

Oh engineers. Shirking morality again.

This comment (verbatim, "Oh engineers. Shirking morality again.") is an extremely elegant statement of why political threads, even when they "gratify the intellectual curiosity of hackers", are terrible for HN: they generate comment threads that consist of or are repeatedly sparked by comments like this.

Re: Occupy Portland's Dec 3rd Tactic to Neutralize Police

#37
post #14

The military analogy is broken. The hack isn't to use the superiority of "light infantry" over "heavy infantry", etc. The reason the protestors can "take a park" even when the police oppose them is because they operate in a political system where the police can't fire on crowds. You probably think this is always a good thing. That's the hack.

They can't fire live rounds, but they sure can (and do) fire rubber bullets, flash grenades, tear gas, sound cannons, and tear gas.

Re: Occupy Portland's Dec 3rd Tactic to Neutralize Police

#38
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this may have to do with cultural and geographic distances. U.S. cities, for the most part, may not be as easy to do something like kettling in as most are less dense than U.K. cities and may simply have more open space to cover to effectively "kettle" people and contain them to one area. Also, although the police are clearly acting as if they are militants at war, they still don't want the non-protesting pop…

You shouldn't discount 25 years of experience trying to control football (soccer) hooligans in the UK has given the police a lot of experienced bodies and equipment (i.e. horses) to help implement such tactics. Plus, in the UK the cops aren't generally armed with anything more than a club . So they have to use their heads a bit more. This is what happens when UK cops get guns http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Jea…

Yea, its two different situations completely, U.S. police often look like military combatants by the gear they wear and often seem to view themselves as urban military units. While this is horrible and an obvious sign of our country going down the shitter, it does make them have to be more conscious of how they use force because it looks so bad to the general public to see images of cops in riot gear who are armed to the teeth chasing around protestors.

Re: Occupy Portland's Dec 3rd Tactic to Neutralize Police

#39
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually have the exact opposite point of view: 1) To the best of my knowledge, I've never gotten a gig out of the freelancer thread in the past six months, although I am a full-time freelancer. The thread is essentially a list of facts and does not expose me to any new ideas, which would be forgivable if I consistently got gigs out of it, but I do not. As for its cousin the Hiring Thread, I am not nor do I know an…

I don't participate in the freelancer thread (which is a new development) but I don't so much have to make the case for the Hiring thread, since (like I said) it leads this month with testimonials about how awesome the hiring thread is. The quality of discussion on this article is already poor. That's also not surprising, because while the ostensible topic (tactics) is interesting, it's an advocacy article on an advo…

I did not say that the hiring thread is a total waste of time for all involved, as it is clearly not. But when you solicit "So how has the hiring thread worked for you?" you are not within a mile of a representative sample.

One can make the very same argument that you made about this thread--the sort of people who are interested in the hiring thread are vociferously interested, as either employers or employees, their very livelihood and life satisfaction for years may substantially hang on a comment in that thread. If we are talking about articles that are colored with commercial self-interest or bias, that is the very definition. I would posit that there is a silent majority who are relatively satisfied with their current employment, who read a few comments to see if anyone is hiring to do orthographic drawing theory or NLP in Erlang or topology or [obscure area of research interest] and failing that alt-tab back to Vim to work on arbitrarily less exciting yet still interesting projects.

I don't necessarily disagree with you that it wasn't a particularly high-quality article, that we can do better. But I would not hold out the hiring thread as the example we should follow.

Re: Occupy Portland's Dec 3rd Tactic to Neutralize Police

#40
So their ground breaking discovery for outsmarting the police is to ... leave and then come back. And maybe play some music. The Art of War style write up is humorously grandiose for something so silly. These people take themselves entirely too seriously.

On another note, pay attention to whats happening over on Reddit and their attempt to unseat Paul Ryan in protest of SOPA/PIPA. They're putting their collective time, effort, and (most importantly) money into something that might actually have an effect. Ultimately, the 72 hours or so that Reddit has taken up this initiative is already appearing more effective than months of misguided OWS noise.

Going back even further, look at the Internet's success with GoDaddy and the few other companies changing their stance on SOPA. Get out of the streets already and go actually make a difference with some concentrated focus and brain power.

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