“We won! We won! They pepper-sprayed us!”: Proof that the purpose of protests is to provoke a police response |
April 4, 2012 - 11:20 am
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Doesn’t matter what the protest is about. Doesn’t matter who is protesting or what they’re protesting against. All that matters, in modern political activism, is that you provoke a reaction from the police, which you can then spin as an over-reaction, and claim moral victory.
The goal of protests now is to achieve victimhood. Thus, when police arrest, tear-gas, beat, or otherwise try to control an unruly mob, the protesters are ecstatically happy, because that’s why they were protesting in the first place.
But of course you can’t admit this publicly; part of the script is to act injured or sad or angry when the police respond to your provocations. That’s an essential component of your victimhood posturing.
Unfortunately, yesterday a protester at Santa Monica College let the mask slip during a mini-riot at a trustees’ meeting. Over a hundred screaming demonstrators were trying to force their way into the already over-capacity meeting room, and the overwhelmed cops assigned to guard the door felt the only way to drive the rioters back was to pepper-spray them. As soon as this happened, one of the rioters yelled in glee,
“We won! We won! They pepper-sprayed us!”
Here’s the video, with the triumphant statement at 1:09:
Wait — you won? How does getting pepper-sprayed constitute victory? I thought the goal of your protest was to force the trustees to give you a “free education,” as the protesters were chanting? That didn’t happen (tuition fees were not eliminated by the college’s trustees), so wouldn’t that mean that you lost?
Well, the statement wouldn’t make any sense unless the purpose of the protest was in fact to get pepper-sprayed. Which it was.
I couldn’t help but laugh when the officer pepper sprayed them. Medic! Medic!
MEDIC! and Lawyer too!
Hey, if a technique we use for training our own troops is torture, then I guess pepper spray must be torture, too, right?
Right.
Hey anchovies are torture. No Anchovies are allowed in SERE courses.
The reason that they stopped water-boarding in Sere school was they didn’t want the students to learn how to do it until they were captured.
– pep-spray me, Bro!!”
I wonder if juvenile claims of “victimhood” would have worked on my Old Corps father.
…
(does it really need a sarc tag?)
I am reminded of the scene in Under Siege 2 where Steven Segal’s daughter (Katherine Heigl in her first action role) threatens the mercenary leader with “mace.”
His reply: Not mace, sweetheart. Pepper spray. Sold to civilians.
[snatches canister from Sarah]
But once you get used to it…
[sprays some into his mouth]
…it just clears the sinuses!
Lefties getting pepper sprayed… always a delight… only I’m puzzled as video seems incomplete.
The police were closing (at the start) then defending a door that at the end of the video appears to be opened freely and allows some people to pass through seemingly unchallenged.
Why was it important to control it for the first two minutes (of the video)… but not after that?
Different door.
Call 911!, they scream. Even while protesting the establishment, they plead for government help. Do they not think that dispatch already knows what went down?
Perfect Storm by Dumb and Dumber.
One or more of the cops wanted a confrontation, several of the protestors wanted a confrontation, the Board failed to prepare a larger venue for what they knew was coming and had already seen several years ago, and for which they had at that time prepared. So now the cops will request more personnel and equipment for their already bloated arsenal, the Board will publish CYA letters taking no responsibility for their failure, and those protestors who provocatively charged the police will imagine that they have suffered a great injustice and a moral victory. All of that to protect a non critical door for two minutes that could just as easily have been used as an exit by the police prior to their mindless and unnecessary, but gleeful maceing of the protestors, followed then by the ecstatic “We Won” by one or more of the now mindless mob.
They are Losers all!
It says a lot more about how lame the media is than it does about the protesters. The protesters are playing to the media’s coronation of VICTIMS as the highest pecking order in society. I wish our illustrious media would look at this and see how badly they’ve let themselves be played.
Tantrums are apparently what democracy looks like.
How does getting pepper sprayed constitute victory? Simple, they weren’t shot dead. More’s the pity.
After the Kent State shootings by National Guard troops campus protests dwindled.
Maybe we should try that again. Shoot a few protestors, when a mob forms to protest that, shoot a few more.
Then next time the agitators send out tweets to enlist people for a protest they’ll tweet back “Umm, yeah, I’d love to but I’m uhhh, gonna be busy studying for finals or something. So good luck with that.”
So don’t wait. Just pepper spray them at the first opportunity. What a bunch of freakin’ idiots.
I enrolled at SMCC for my premed and predental courses in 1957.
The tuition was around $7.50 plus the cost of books. I got a great
education and was accepted at several prestigious universities for
my training.
How times have changed.
Ahh the foolish speech of the drone. Devoid of individuality, brainwashed into one-track thinking, and following the “purpose”.
This is the same mindset as the ones that parade around, in mob form, and attack, rape, kill, set fire to, others who are not the same religion (sometimes deemed inferior), possibly not of the same culture, race, ethnicity, sexual preference, etc.
In this case, the group wants to gain credibility by showing some sort of Ghandi-like passive protesting to get the authority to attack them. Fools.
These same people could be foolish enough to do anything; walk into a cafe and detonate a bomb in order to make the owners of cafes to know that their businesses are not respected by the “mass”, and so on.
These people are no longer a benefit to society. They no longer represent the dream to do better than their parents and grand parents. They have been ruined by the very people we sent them to for a hope of gaining a better education.
It is time to facce facts. No education in ethnic/gender studies does anything beneficial. Programs in anthropology, sociology, or any non-math required studies should seriously be scrutinized by the public when their tax dollars go to local and state colleges and universities. When our money goes to fuel these programs and radical teachers, who brainwash these students, WE must take actions through the ballot box, right?
If a democratic society can vote for things, they can also vote to remove things.
If a state referendum vote by the people calls for the complete removal of tenure status for all professors, teachers, etc. It would be extremely difficult for a teacher, union, organization of “concerned” citizens to fight this in court. Especially in Right to Work states where your employment is at will.
I think it is time to make “at will” a bigger measure in both university life as well as public employee sectors.
This strikes the union out and makes the individual matter more.
“Santa Monica College” – You just know that the street dreck is there for but a diversion from their otherwise fun-in-sun, pot-smoking, beach-lounging existence.
I suggest that the “college” hire themselves a Dean Wormer. Then, they can ALL go together “through life fat, drunk, and stupid”.
I prefer the more effective methods of days gone by to disperse rabble, thank you.
IT WORKED!
If you’re going to whine, at least get a lump, a cut, a bruise, or something to remember those Halcyon days of “higher education”. Wimps.
(that goes for the wussification of cops too)
~(Ä)~
Winning!
Anybody want to bet the school’s “investigation” will ignore this tape?
Yes, and they are planning to come back AFTER spring break. Does that show importance to their cause? I think not.
Another staged event to make martyrs out of the protesters, just like they did at UC Berkley last fall.
Could be worse, I suppose. At Kent State, the SDS set up the useful idiots to surround the national guard troops and provoke the shootings. True manufactured martyrs, there. At least now they are just going for the red-eye.
This harkens back to the rise in “don’t spank/hit your kids”. Though I’ll admit my parents were remarkably restrained, there were spankings and a few times when dad swatted me a good one for being a smart-a**.
Somewhere along the line “discipline” got confused with “cruelty” and although sometimes a parent can go overboard, and there were those cases of child abuse by parents, the vast majority of us survived…and with a very clear idea of what’s acceptable and what’s not.
Sparing the rod has resulted in the situations as the article describes, where the person subjected to corrective action is somehow “the winner” because they got a rise out of the force in authority. The whole notion of right and wrong has been turned on its ear.
Um, has the right-wing author of this article ever heard of SARCASM?!? If the snide, tongue-in-cheek comment of one (rogue) protestor claiming ‘victory’ is “PROOF” that the entire student body protesting conspired to provoke being pepper sprayed, then this flimsy “proof” can be applied to any group of people who stand up for a cause. I guess every Tea Party protestor is a NAZI, using this misguided and contorted fallacious irrational ‘reasoning’. How desparate are you to support the authoritarian police state? Don’t forget those cops are PUBLIC, UNIONIZED WORKERS! This website is defeatist and fallacious. GROW UP!
He’s right your an idiot. Hell, you don’t even no what your for.
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authoritarian police state? are PUBLIC, UNIONIZED WORKERS!
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Aren’t all of you lefties supposed to be for the unions. Oh, that’s right anytime it suits your propose you just throw them under the bus.
I guess every Tea Party protestor is a NAZI, using this misguided and contorted fallacious irrational ‘reasoning’.
You left off the “oh, wait”.
If they really want to feel like they “won”, crack their skulls.
There really is nothing more entertaining than watching Spoiled Immature Obnoxious Socialists pepper sprayed.
Obviously, the authorities need something stronger than pepper spray. While shooting them is extreme and messy, at least those being shot aren’t going to sue. If the authorities actually hurt somebody, then the school would have to pay damages.
Why do we have so many public universities and colleges? Isn’t that something the private sector could be doing with out taxpayer subsidies? Some states, say Wisconsin, notice they pay for college educations for the young, and the young move away. Why should Wisconsin subsidize the education of a person who moves to a different state?
Official policy should have a randomized violence factor.
Roll 1: Shoot a protestor in knee.
Roll 2: Taze Protestor.
Roll 3-4: Pepperspray protestor
Roll 5: Arrest protestor, and demonstrate nightstick use, aka wood shampoo.
Roll 6: Arrest protestor, release after 24 hours.
It is the predictability of the police that provides the incentive to escalate.
Of course protestors that don’t understand maths will suffer disproportionately.
Life is tough. It is tougher if you are stupid.
Come over to my house if you really want to feel like a winner again. I’ll pepper spray you AND kick you in the nuts.
Yes, they won. Steven Den Beste laid it all out in his old blog. (http://denbeste.nu/essays/terrorism.shtml) The strategy is always to provoke a response that gets them sympathy.
72 hours in jail will cure a lot of this crap.
“As is the case in most of these incidents, once you actually see the circumstances, your sympathy almost always switches over to the police”
Boy are you right about that. When I decided to see the latest Occupy news a couple weeks ago, I happened upon an alleged victim of the attempted Zucotti re-takeover, a Ms. McMillan. The best video I could find of the attempt sure painted a different picture than Occupier claims.
It’s hard to believe they are so thick as to post the video recording themselves, as it disproves their own case.
http://nooneofanyimport.wordpress.com/2012/03/24/occupying-the-occupy-narrative/
How bout a more permanent solution:
1) Deputize the Populace and arm them under the Sherrif’s authority.
2) Instruct Deputized civilians only to shoot if they feel their lives are in mortal danger.
3) Put the protestors/pro-anarchists on notice that the population has been armed and instructed thusly as above.
4) Put the protestors/pro-anarchists on notice that in the case of any altercation that the burden of proof lies on the part of the peeps… not the deputized civilians…
After a few altercations two things would happen:
1) The 99% would realize that there are consequences to Anarchy… and that death is very much a possibility in said state of disorder.
2) ‘We The People’ would be able to do more than just sit on their hands and hope the police grow a pair and a spine… and thus feel empowered.
And if anyone from the MSM makes a peep… tell them thusly:
‘Anarchy is hell… if they so desire it it shall so be delivered.’
The unfortunate side effect is that all protests, including legitimate ones, are tarred with the same brush. The Left knows this, of course; as with their “march through the institutions”, their conquest of the media and their co-option of liberalism and liberal causes going back 100 years: the goal is not the takeover of these things, it is the destruction of these things. They don’t care who or what replaces them, so long as they no longer fulfill their roles in sustaining a civilized society.
The right of protest, to petition one’s government for redress, is no different. The Left’s end-of-road here is to burn up the public’s goodwill, to the point that people turn a jaundiced eye towards all protests. That way, when the protest is a Tea Party protest and the cops really are the bad guys executing some leftist power-luster’s instructions, the public will yawn.
It’s funny but even with the media on their side most people were against the OWS movement from the begining. I think most lefties read manuals from the 50s and 60s when most people believed the media, and that’s not the case.
I read more CNN and MSNBC then Fox but realize they’re either biased or outright lying, ie NBC putting out a fake Zimmerman audio.
So basically any leftie will believe these idiots no matter what, and everyone else realizes they whole point was to get busted then cry ‘facism’, so in a way it doesn’t matter because they’re not going to change anyone’s mind. Noone who isn’t a leftie idiot will read about the pepper spraying and think “oh those poor poor students!”
Haven’t you guys read “Return of the Primitive”, by Ayn Rand? The left wants to blur the line between violent protest and the “violence” of the police, thereby negating the public’s right to self defence.
Pick up a copy at your nearest bookstore, it has an excellent analysis of the Berkely “protests” of the 60s. Same principles are true today.