Occupy Portland's Dec 3rd Tactic to Neutralize Police • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by msg » Mon, Jan 02, 2012, 2:07 AM UTC

_delirium wrote: post #57

tptacek wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. ;-)

This is Hacker News. We don't copy and paste text. That would be a waste of time and energy. We write Greasemonkey bots that talk to each other.

-- SnarkTron TM 2012 Edition --

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

#62

Post by eternalban » Mon, Jan 02, 2012, 2:19 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #32

drewcrawford wrote: post #28

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…

> 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".

That is a bit of a red herring.

We geeks have pretty much addressed the technical challenge of "infinite number of arrangement of cat pictures" and have delivered. It is hardly an urgency, at this point. You wanna see cat pictures? I'm sure there are an equally infinite number of image sites, and various frameworks for creating yet even more.

Today, as technologists, we are very likely to find ourselves employed by financial institutions, security services, military, various "social" big brother platforms, and, corporate media. We are, each and everyone, enablers, for better or for worse.

To discuss larger, relevant, sociopolitical matter and events here on HN, with a focus on the tech dimension, is not merely an 'idle interest' for the subset of us that do very much care if it is "for better or worse".

[edit/ps: to be clear, I am addressing the OP's general remark and not this specific article.]

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

#63

Post by bdunbar » Mon, Jan 02, 2012, 2:31 AM UTC

radicalbyte wrote: post #34

devs1010 wrote: 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…

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.

I attended riot-control training in the Marines: from the way things look on teevee the cops are doing pretty much what we trained to do.

Guns are out[1]. Clubs, chemical agents, are in. Using your head is the order of the day.

Because it only takes one guy not using his head, throwing a CS grenade into the crowd, upwind from your lines, to ruin your whole day.

[1] Let me (slightly) expand on the guns thing and Marines. We _had_ rifles in the Marines, but doctrine and training had us running around without ammunition, or with ammunition kept in pouches, and only allowed to be used with permission of a commissioned officer.

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

#64

Post by devs1010 » Mon, Jan 02, 2012, 2:32 AM UTC

nerfhammer wrote: post #60

devs1010 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wasn't talking just about riot situations, U.S. police look sort of like this (especially where I am in Arizona) all the time, except without the masks.

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

#65

Post by devs1010 » Mon, Jan 02, 2012, 2:34 AM UTC

oldstrangers wrote: post #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 tim…

Agreed, I am all for reform but we need to outsmart them, from what I've read lately it seems online activity, like that of Reddit, has effected more change than the in-person protests. The problem is that change won't happen overnight, its a gradual process to awaken more and more people to whats actually going on and get each person to do their small part to help change things.

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

#66

Post by jberryman » Mon, Jan 02, 2012, 2:58 AM UTC

oldstrangers wrote: post #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 tim…

> These people take themselves entirely too seriously. > ... > look at the Internet's success with GoDaddy and the few other companies changing their stance on SOPA.

What exactly is your metric for success here? A sleazy company changed their stance on a bill that the public is completely unaware of and couldn't give two shits about?

I think "the internet" is taking itself too seriously.

Meanwhile a nation-wide protest movement has at the very least succeeded in planting the issue of systemic economic injustice into mainstream public discourse on a daily basis. History may show OWS to be the catalyst for the resurrection of a real progressive movement in America.

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

#67

Post by georgieporgie » Mon, Jan 02, 2012, 3:06 AM UTC

I think Occupy is the most interesting (and, yes, annoying, but that's part of the method) political development in recent history. This article, however, was very long, with little meaningful content, and I don't see how it's of particular interest to HN. Flagged.

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

#68

Post by cpeterso » Mon, Jan 02, 2012, 3:07 AM UTC

graupel wrote: post #4

Sounds like the way Critical Mass (cycling) rides in Chicago work - with no pre-set route the police join in and make sure no one gets hurt but they can't really push the ride in one direction or another - the 'hive' decides where to go. With 5,000 to 10,000 people it's a pretty huge event/example.

Critical Mass is a good example of how not to gain sympathy for one's cause. Blocking traffic, running red lights, and shouting at or kicking cars of people trying to commute home after a long workday does not endear bicyclists to drivers. In San Francisco, the riders are sometimes known as "Critical Massholes".

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

#69

Post by josephkern » Mon, Jan 02, 2012, 3:12 AM UTC

The author:

1. Underestimates the superiority and effectiveness of the Command and Control of the police force

2. Overestimates the superiority of a mob vs a phalanx.

3. Makes generalized assumptions over why the police allowed them to stay.

4. Assumes that the police will not use their formation with calvary (automobiles, aricraft, and actual horses) as a means of denying the flank or the retreat.

This reads like someone who just went through a college course in ancient combat and has little practical experience in the matter of Command and Control or strategic thinking.

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

#70

Post by cpeterso » Mon, Jan 02, 2012, 3:22 AM UTC

To keep the park, one must leave the park.

Why the military tactics and metaphors? Many occupiers seem more interested in "fuckin' shit up" than expressing a message. In Oakland, the city was willing to let people assemble every day (when other people would actually see their protest), but the occupiers insisted that anything less than camping in Frank Ogawa Plaza was defeat.