I'm amazed to see comment like this.
Do you really say that in USA president could beat-out peaceful protest (yes, they started completely peaceful, I was there), and later say "it was done in order to install new-year tree"?
Do you really say that in USA president could beat-out peaceful protest (yes, they started completely peaceful, I was there), and later say "it was done in order to install new-year tree"?
Protesters are beaten and locked up almost immediately, huge "pens" are made to coral them like animals, and recently the new tactic is to make "safe zones" where people are not even allowed near the events anymore.
If there was even a hint of weapons being used, our police are heavily militarized now and would not hesitate to shoot someone even holding a smartphone if they thought they could get away with it. Virtually no police are prosecuted in any given year for shooting unarmed people in the USA, happens every week.
However what you have in the Ukraine is something I am jealous of, people actually care.
Here's a medical worker who had been shot https://twitter.com/HromadskeTV/status/436445556664066048/ph...
Here's a video of sniper shooting at people: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=570573343039007&set=vb....
http://espreso.tv/new/2014/02/20/poranena_v_shyyu_volonterka... (in Ukrainian)
From yesterday's news:
According to [Ukrainian Security Service head] Yakimenko, “over the last day more than 1,500 firearms and 100,000 rounds of ammunition have come into the hands of criminals.”
...
Meanwhile in Ivano-Frankovsk, rioters have seized 268 pistols, 2 rifles, 3 light machine guns, 92 grenades and 15,000 ammunition rounds, the deputy head of the Security Service, Vladimir Porodko, has said, adding that the police are searching for the stolen arms.
Most of the times I am inclined that snipers are 3rd party working for the benefit of pushing around people/police/media.
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[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Democratic_National_Conven...
Also, no-one is allowed near the conventions anymore. So much for freedom of speech unless you want to protest a poor woman going into a health center for an abortion, then be as close as you want.
Oh here you go:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Republican_National_Conven...
Note the pre-emptive arrests a week before the convention. I think we were criticizing China for that behavior.
Then why did you write this, implying that it's worse in the US:
>If this happened in the USA, every single protester (and innocent bystander) would be in jail or dead by now.
This is exactly the kind of bullshit hyperbole that makes political discussions on sites like this such a waste of time.
Because he knew it would be massively up voted. The maturity level on this site, at least with political stuff, is very low.
In the US if it got to that level, everyone would be in jail or dead.
In the US they would never let it get to that level. Police would not just stand by a peaceful protest without permits. They sure as hell would never let people occupy a government building, even peacefully. They would insert people to make it violent and then start arresting people, at the first sign of weapons, you'd start seeing some massive escalation. If fires were being set on that level the national guard would come in fully armed.
So we are fortunate in that it has not escalated like the Ukraine. But if it did, make no mistake, the US would be giving other countries lessons in brutality.
Our police are completely militarized. They even have tanks now decommissioned from overseas wars. People just do not realize this, or they do not care. But what is really scary is you do not sit on that kind of weapons and not use them, it would be like giving a police officer a taser or gallons of pepper spray and being surprised when they constantly use it.
For every political discussion, there is always a guy who A) drags the US into it, and B) tries to draw the conclusion that the US is actually worse than whatever is being discussed.
Hence the police know they better be even better armed than the civilians and shoot to kill first. This is why we have police officers that kill kids holding phones or game console controllers.
I cannot say the US is worse than elsewhere as is, I am saying it could be worse than elsewhere if the events you see elsewhere happened here. It would be a wasteland. We kind of got a mini-preview of that after New Orleans flooded, there was some seriously criminal police behavior.
They heard the calls to disperse but wanted to finish eating, so they stayed a few minutes extra figuring that they weren't a part of the protests anyway so they'd be fine. A few minutes later they exited the restaurant and got the full treatment: tear-gassed, tackled, handcuffed, and taken to jail. They saw someone who was running away get hit in the head with a tear gas canister.
It means that perhaps it will be. I think beyond that you'll find there are varying opinions on whether it's a moral imperative to enforce the law all the time, or whether there should be a degree of discretion exercised in doing so.
Laws can be changed, sometimes arbitrarily or to serve corrupt interests. If your morality changes with the laws your politicians impose upon you then you are little more than a serf.
It happens in the US too. An 84 year old nun was just sentenced to 3y in prison yesterday in Tennessee for taking part in a peaceful protect against the US nuclear weapon program. Being put in prison isn't as dramatic as being shot by snipers, but it does represent harm and it does affect public opinion (to what extent, who knows).