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Occupy Portland's Dec 3rd Tactic to Neutralize Police

portlandoccupier.org

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

#51

Post by pvarangot »

Please if you think you will ever take part in a protest, for the sake of your own safety and that of your co-protestors, don't read this article. Or if you already did, don't take it seriously.

It has a misleading title, and poor and dangerous content. Protests and police columns so don't work that way that it's actually dangerous for this to be on the front page and upvoted by so many people.

I do agree with most of what Occupy is about, but if the writer of this post is trying to make any political point, he is failing.

Also, I think that a blog and an HN thread are so not the place to learn about how to safely occupy public space and how to participate in a protest, that I simply don't understand how hard some are trying for it to be that place...

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

#52

Post by tptacek »

tobtoh wrote: post #47
tptacek wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

I agree with your 'no politics' stance (although does SOPA opposition fall under that?), however, I read the article more as a 'tactics developed by accident' than a Occupy advocacy thread. I guess we have slightly different thresholds on the same slippery slope. Having said that, I definitely prefer an article on micro dev boards than protest tactics.

Paul Graham clearly likes the SOPA threads. I pick my battles. He owns the site, he's entitled to use it to advance his causes. (My politics overall are leftish, but my politics on SOPA aren't within a mile of the rest of HN).

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

#53

Post by dotBen »

nerfhammer wrote: post #44
dotBen wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Brit now living in US, I came here to mention Kettling too. (Kettling is when the police entirely surround a protest group and will not let anyone enter or leave for many many hours). Unlike the other comment on this sub-thread, I don't see any reason why Kettling wouldn't work here in the US (sadly) if the police used it. The density of the streets in UK doesn't come into it when you consider the Kettling that…

In my experiences with NYPD blockades as a passerby they typically forcefully imply rather than directly state you're not allowed through, and if you insist I've always seen them sheepishly give up.

The whole point with Kettling, which kinda makes it punitive, is that they are 100% clear that you are not leaving the enclosed pen they have created.

Sometimes the kettling can go on for 6+ hrs and even with protestors demanding toilet breaks, water or medical issues from standing up for so long, the police have refused them to leave.

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

#54

Post by pvarangot »

tobtoh wrote: post #30
tptacek wrote: 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…

  > The 'occupy' post did satisfy me intellectually - I don't have a position on the
  > politics either way, but the explanation of 'battle tactics', how they developed 
  > by non-military people and how they can be used 'on the street' was 
  > intellectually interesting.
Read The Art of War (I would recommend some annotated version, can't point to an specific one since I'm only familiar with spanish translations). Then go take part in some picketing, and please please write an article with factual and accurate data about tactics. Mail me, count with my upvote and I'll participate on any discussion related to tactics. This blogpost is factually wrong and amateurish as a discussion on tactics, also full of wishful thinking apologetic of naive ideas about the military power of large groups of protesters.

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

#56

Post by nerfhammer »

dotBen wrote: post #53
nerfhammer wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experiences with NYPD blockades as a passerby they typically forcefully imply rather than directly state you're not allowed through, and if you insist I've always seen them sheepishly give up.

The whole point with Kettling, which kinda makes it punitive, is that they are 100% clear that you are not leaving the enclosed pen they have created. Sometimes the kettling can go on for 6+ hrs and even with protestors demanding toilet breaks, water or medical issues from standing up for so long, the police have refused them to leave.

sounds like that would be unlawful here on several levels

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

#57

Post by _delirium »

tptacek wrote: post #36
quinndupont wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have a related but different complaint about them: political threads are bad because they bring out a chorus of rose-tinted nostalgia about how HN is going down the drain, is "becoming Reddit", etc., etc. I only hope that y'all copy/paste them instead of wasting effort on writing a new comment to that effect each time. ;-)

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

#58

Post by kmfrk »

tptacek wrote: 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…

HN generally seems to have become overtly political, especially in its submissions (that make it to the front page).

SOPA obviously has relevance to HN, so I don't mind that at all, but with increasing frequency, political submissions pop up, and I'm sure the submitters are enabled by the amount of upvotes they get with little to no input from mods/admins who clarify HN's stance on political submissions with no relation to the site's field of interest.

I don't mean "HN is getting more like reddit" as a slur, but the lines between the two are becoming more blurred, and the two serve better as separate entities with different topics of interest rather than some soon-to-be-merged hivemind on political matters.

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

#59

Post by bitwize »

dotBen wrote: post #31
christkv wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The Tea Party people think they're opposing particular liberal policies.

The Occupy movement is rebelling against an entire POWER STRUCTURE, the entire hierarchy backed by corporate funding, which funding also pays the GOP apparatchiks that started the Tea Party.

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

#60

Post by nerfhammer »

devs1010 wrote: post #38
radicalbyte wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Riot police look pretty scary everywhere

https://www.google.com/search?q=arizona+police&tbm=isch

and generally only armed with batons outside of low-human rights countries due to the obvious danger of losing control of weapons amidst violent crowds.

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