[lbo-talk] lbo-talk Digest, Vol 54, Issue 6

[Liza Featherstone]

Of course I don't think activists should be arrested for yelling at  
the police, and of course it's legal to do that. But it's annoying  
and juvenile, and while there may be times when it makes sense -- for  
instance, if cops are engaging in misconduct, sometimes yelling at  
them can help by drawing a crowd to witness it -- mostly I think it's  
off-putting to people who might otherwise agree with you, and as  
andie suggests, a waste of the time and money of all the worthy lefty  
organizations and people who will then work hard to defend your First  
Amendment rights. As for the notion that this stuff doesn't happen,  
sorry, I have no idea why you haven't seen these sort of antics;  
obviously we've just been to different protests.

Liza


>
> Message: 2
> Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2007 19:04:59 -0500
> From: "Yoshie Furuhashi" <critical.montages at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] NYPD acts like pigs
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Message-ID:
> 	<cd351fdc0702191604k75c3088aja6ab578d2964c261 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
> On 2/19/07, andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>> Bad attitude is not a crime and you have a
>> constitutional right to taunt the police at a demo. If
>> they bust your head for doing it, I and other Guild
>> lawyers will defend you zealously. But the question
>> here is not rights but smarts. You have a right to do
>> lots of things it's dumb to do. Pointlessly provoking
>> armed men and women who have a certain degree of
>> immunity to bust your head and throw you in the can is
>> basically annoying to everyone. It distracts from the
>> point you might have been trying to make at the demos
>> (end the war, etc.) and causes NLG lawyers, who work
>> enough pro bono hours as it is, unnecessary unpaid
>> work that might have gone to defense of people the
>> cops brutalized without provocation. Besides, do you
>> want to have your head busted and be thrown in the can
>> just to make the point that cops can act like pigs?
>> Don't they make that point clear enough a lot of the
>> time without provocation? Why wave, ahem, red flags in
>> front of angry bulls when there's no purpose to it or
>> need for it?
>
> I don't see any provocation by activists, not even of the "bad
> attitude" variety, let alone anything worse, out there.  All Quiet on
> the Home Front, it seems to me.  We have already internalized police
> state discipline in our minds so much that the real police are almost
> superfluous -- we just behave without them anyhow.
> -- 
> Yoshie
> <http://montages.blogspot.com/>
> <http://mrzine.org>
> <http://monthlyreview.org/>
>