Massive New York Protest

[Makalakumu]

So are you saying that Republicans are like NAZI's and Democrats are Mandela-like?

Not by any means. It was just an analogy.

Taken to these extremes ANY comparison creates polarity. My question is where are the common goals and how can parties, individuals, AMERICANS regardless of diversity in general agree that, though it isn't your particular plan or idea, there is A PLAN that can be emplaced that will improve the current situation? I thought we were all one Nation. Consensus building is a social skill that teachers are suppose to promote. That way egos and 'special interests' (read possible political tunnel vision with no consideration how that one issue can impact the whole) don't get to call al the shots because they scream the loudest and get the most media attention and therefore induce the most political pressure

I want to work my Right leaning brothers. I listen intently to what they have to say. I am currently involved in trying to come to a deeper understanding of Republican principles. My family, being comprised completely of Democrats, have not been very positive or forthcoming with this informaton.

The point is that I can find common ground with Republicans regarding my personal principles.

As far as this discussion goes, by their own words, they do not care what I've got to say. By their own words, they don't want to work with me. They want me to shut up and be quiet or to move to Canada. I am just as American as them and it doesn't seem to matter.

upnorthkyosa

 

[Flatlander]

They want me to shut up and be quiet or to move to Canada.

Screw'em, Upnorth. Move to Canada. We have better beer, and a winning national hockey team!
:CTF:

 

[Patrick Skerry]

So, when is civil disobedience okay? Was it okay for a black person to refuse to go to the back of the bus in 64? That certainly was against the popular opinion.

Some people advocate breaking the law. So when is breaking the law O.K? Martin Luther King wrote in his 'Letters from a Birmingham Jail' that it was sometimes O.K. to break the law - did you agree with him?

 

[Makalakumu]

Some people advocate breaking the law. So when is breaking the law O.K? Martin Luther King wrote in his 'Letters from a Birmingham Jail' that it was sometimes O.K. to break the law - did you agree with him?

I think that breaking the law is okay when you feel that the law is unjust and that you feel it is your last resort. I believe that one should exhaust ALL possible avenues before this is done.

 

[Feisty Mouse]

Quote:
Originally Posted by upnorthkyosa
So, when is civil disobedience okay? Was it okay for a black person to refuse to go to the back of the bus in 64? That certainly was against the popular opinion.

Some people advocate breaking the law. So when is breaking the law O.K? Martin Luther King wrote in his 'Letters from a Birmingham Jail' that it was sometimes O.K. to break the law - did you agree with him?

Yes. It's a complex issue, however. Saying, "I want to break the law" and gunning down a bunch of people is very very very different than making a choice to stand up for your rights, or the rights of others, in a peaceful manner.

 

[loki09789]

Not by any means. It was just an analogy.



I want to work my Right leaning brothers. I listen intently to what they have to say. I am currently involved in trying to come to a deeper understanding of Republican principles. My family, being comprised completely of Democrats, have not been very positive or forthcoming with this informaton.

The point is that I can find common ground with Republicans regarding my personal principles.

As far as this discussion goes, by their own words, they do not care what I've got to say. By their own words, they don't want to work with me. They want me to shut up and be quiet or to move to Canada. I am just as American as them and it doesn't seem to matter.

upnorthkyosa

I think the point is negotiation/consensus and cooperation (which are things that Martial arts teachers, classroom teachers and parents try to encourage students/children to apply instead of tantrums and back alley tactics) are the key to focus on.

The differences don't go away when people discuss things with the motive of consensus and accomplishing a common goal, they become points of discussion and items of examination. Even if it isn't 'your way' of doing things but the job gets done and there is improvement, isn't that the important thing (of course assuming political, moral and legal limits are respected)?

Protesting, peaceful and topical IMO demonstrates (hah! just got that) maturity and respect for everyone as well as a conviction that 'I am right on this issue' because you don't feel the need to use Machiavelli tactics.

How do you deal with a seemingly (notice the qualifier here) insensitive, unresponsive counterpart or the 'powers that be'? Lobby, vote and support your interest group.

Dr. King, inspired by the likes of Ghandi, showed people how passive resistence and peaceful demonstration can bring dignity to civil disobedience because his supporters did not respond to what they deemed unjust/immmoral with immoral acts of violence or 'pranks' but resisted local ordinances of segregation. Boycotting a service or a business is not illegal. Marching or sitting in a legally (though immoral/unconstitutioal IMO) designated segregated section of a bus or restaurant is illegal I admit BUT the fact that they did such acts without letting them escalate or compound into other things like violence or domestic terrorism (though other groups did/do practice such methods) is where I respect the action. It was focused, controlled and respectful of other laws that had nothing to do with the issue of the protesting action.

 

[Makalakumu]

Good Post, Paul. I greatly admire Dr. King and think the civil rights movement was a great example of what peaceful protest should look like (at least on the side of those who are protesting).

As far as building a consensus and trying to actually get things done, this can't be done without trying to understand the other side. I want to understand what Republicans are saying so I can work with them to accomplish the things that I care about.

I don't see this happening on the other side. I see the Republicans doing what they want and ignoring the opposition. The only way this is possible is because they have become masters at controlling the message. Their spin is so good, the details aren't important.

upnorthkyosa

 

[Feisty Mouse]

If it is right (proven over time possibly...not saying it is or isn't for sure just saying "if it is") it doesn't matter if only one person believed it or one hundred... remember a group called the Christians, Muslims, American Colonists, French Revolution.... all 'minorities' that were motivated by an ideal that proved successful (not necessarily always morally right or rightous, but successful) over time and gained 'majority' influence.

What you say is true... *but*... the nature of scientific research, and how we find out about the world, is in part based on consensus among rational people knowledgeable on a subject. That's how we understand the way the world works - even if ideas change tomorrow, or in 1,000 years. As of now, the consensus is that human imact is affecting global climate change. If someone disagrees with the majority, he or she had better present one heck of a good argument. I haven't seen that good argument yet.

 

[SMP]

Good Post, Paul. I greatly admire Dr. King and think the civil rights movement was a great example of what peaceful protest should look like (at least on the side of those who are protesting).

As far as building a consensus and trying to actually get things done, this can't be done without trying to understand the other side. I want to understand what Republicans are saying so I can work with them to accomplish the things that I care about.

I don't see this happening on the other side. I see the Republicans doing what they want and ignoring the opposition. The only way this is possible is because they have become masters at controlling the message. Their spin is so good, the details aren't important.

upnorthkyosa

Wow you are on your way to understanding republicans already - republicans feel the same about the democrats.

 

[SMP]

Yes. It's a complex issue, however. Saying, "I want to break the law" and gunning down a bunch of people is very very very different than making a choice to stand up for your rights, or the rights of others, in a peaceful manner.

Breaking the law does have varying degrees but the right to own firearms that some of us agree with strongly was based on the people being able to defend themselves against an unjust government. If a law is unjust people have a responsibility or right to question/alter/ or break it.

 

[Makalakumu]

Wow you are on your way to understanding republicans already - republicans feel the same about the democrats.

Like I said, the details aren't important.

I was driving home today and I started reading the signs on the churches I passed. So many of them had right wing political statements, it wasn't even funny.

When politics mixes with religion, why even argue. Of course that may have been the point all along...

upnorthkyosa

 

[michaeledward]

Today ... we find this article concerning the New York City during the Republican Convention.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6049361/

Arrests at GOP convention criticized
Many in N.Y. released without facing charges

NEW YORK - One late August evening, Alexander Pincus pedaled his bicycle to the Second Avenue Deli to buy matzo ball soup, a pastrami-on-rye and potato latkes for his sweetheart, who was sick with a cold.
He would not return for 28 hours. As Pincus and a friend left the deli, they inadvertently walked into a police blockade and sweep of bicycle-riding protesters two days before the Republican National Convention began. "I asked an officer how I could get home," Pincus recalled. "He said, 'Follow me,' and we went a few feet and cops grabbed us. They handcuffed us and made us kneel for an hour."
Police carted Pincus to a holding cell topped with razor wire and held him for 25 hours without access to a lawyer. The floor was a soup of oil and soot, he said, and the cell had so few portable toilets that some people relieved themselves in the corner. Pincus said a shoulder was dislocated as police pulled back his arms to handcuff him. "Cops kept saying to us, 'This is what you get for protesting,' "said Pincus, whose account of his arrest is supported in part by deli workers and a time-stamped food receipt.
Pincus was one of 1,821 people arrested in police sweeps before and during the Republican convention, the largest number of arrests associated with any American major-party convention. At the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968, which unlike New York's was marked by widespread police brutality, cops made fewer than 700 arrests.
In the days after the convention, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly stated that "every NYPD officer did a great job." But interviews with state court officials, City Council representatives, prosecutors, protesters and civil libertarians -- and a review of videos of demonstrations -- point to many problems with the police performance. Officers often sealed off streets with orange netting and used motor scooters and horses to sweep up hundreds of protesters at a time, including many who appear to have broken no laws. In two cases, police commanders appeared to allow marches to proceed, only to order many arrests minutes later.

'Indiscriminate arrests'
Most of those arrested were held for more than two days without being arraigned, which a state Supreme Court judge ruled was a violation of legal guidelines. Defense attorneys predict a flood of civil lawsuits once protesters have settled the misdemeanor charges lodged against them.

"The overriding problem during the convention was the indiscriminate arrests . . . of people who did nothing wrong," Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said at a City Council hearing last week. "They were arrested because they were . . . participating in a lawful demonstration."

Police officials declined to talk about these problems last week, citing a pending court case. But the city's criminal justice coordinator, John Feinblatt, said in an interview that city lawyers tried to weed out the unjustly arrested and that the volume of arrests -- more than 1,100 on one day -- overwhelmed the police department. More broadly, Bloomberg and Kelly defended the vast majority of the arrests as justified and described holding cells as clean and humane.

Bloomberg, in interviews during convention week, said that protesters expected prisons to look like "Club Med." Kelly said police encountered other delays as they tried to find separate cells for a large number of female detainees.

The first mass arrests came three days before the Aug. 30 to Sept. 2 convention, when police swooped down on Critical Mass, a loosely knit collective of bicyclists who periodically flood city streets and slow traffic. Police usually tolerate the disruption, but that night officers arrested more than 200. Kelly told New York magazine that he wanted to send protesters a message.

The next few days were quiet, and a quarter-million-strong march went forward Aug. 29 without incident.

But the mood changed Aug. 31, when police made 1,128 arrests. Anarchists had pledged a day of resistance, blocking traffic. Police arrested hundreds, and civil liberties lawyers on the scene described most arrests as lawful.

But farther downtown on the same day, the War Resisters League, a decades-old pacifist group, was readying a peaceful march from Ground Zero to Madison Square Garden, where it intended to conduct a civil disobedience "die in."

A video provided by the New York Civil Liberties Union shows police commanders laying out the ground rules: As long as protesters did not block traffic, they would not get arrested during the walk north (No permit is required for a march on a sidewalk as long as protesters leave space for other pedestrians to pass). Within a block or two, however, the video shows marchers lined up on the sidewalk, far from an intersection, as a police officer announces on a bullhorn: "You're under arrest."

"They came with batons, bicycles, they came with netting," said the Rev.G. Simon Harak, a Jesuit priest. "The kind of forces you expect to be turned on terrorists was unleashed on us."

Police arrested 200 people, saying they had blocked the sidewalk.

About the same time Tuesday, several other groups of protesters started walking two abreast from Union Square, the city's historic protest soapbox, to Madison Square Garden. However, several demonstrators say -- and photographs show -- that police soon stopped them, asked them to raise their hands and arrested them.

Throughout the week, police also picked up dozens of people who appeared to have nothing to do with demonstrations, the New York Civil Liberties Union said. Among those swept up by police were several newspaper reporters, two women shopping at the Gap, a feeder company executive out for dinner with a friend, and Wendy Stefanelli, a costume designer with the TV show "Sex and the City," who was walking to get a drink with a friend.

'Always going to run the risk'
She saw a police officer pushing a demonstrator against a wall and asked him to lay off. Police flooded the street, and she was arrested. "I don't know how this could happen," Stefanelli, 35, told the City Council last week. "I was coming from work."

Bloomberg has acknowledged that police may have arrested some innocent bystanders, but he suggested that it was partly their fault.

"If you go to where people are protesting and don't want to be part of the protest, you're always going to run the risk that maybe you'll get tied up with it," he said on a weekly radio show on WABC.

Police hauled those arrested to newly built holding cells in a former bus depot on the Hudson River. In interviews, two dozen protesters from six states described floors covered in oil and officers who denied access to family and lawyers.

During this time, Deputy Police Commissioner Paul J. Browne twice stated to The Washington Post that most protesters had been released after six or seven hours. Only on Thursday, the last day of the convention, did he acknowledge the much longer delays.

Last Friday, Feinblatt, the city's criminal justice coordinator, attributed the problems to a glut of arrests. Other city officials have spoken of state delays in processing fingerprints.

But senior police officials had said for months that they anticipated 1,000 arrests a day during the convention. Citing such warnings, state court officials, prosecutors and Legal Aid lawyers doubled staffing and opened extra courtrooms during convention week.

"What happened for several days is that we had resources available and we simply were not getting the bodies produced, the defendants in the courtroom," said David Bookstaver, spokesman for the state office of court administration.

State officials also released figures showing that they had processed 94 percent of all fingerprints within one hour.

The backlog created a legal crisis for the city. State Supreme Court Judge John Cataldo held officials in contempt of court. "These people," Cataldo said of those arrested, "have already been victims of the process."

'Willing to look away'
His order resulted in the release of almost 500 people. Tricia Schriefer of Milwaukee had spent two days trying to find her daughter, Claire, 19, a college student who had been arrested Aug. 31. Tricia Schriefer called the police and city offices, only to be told that her daughter was in a legal twilight.

Her daughter was finally released -- without charges -- after Cataldo issued his ruling. "To be held for 50 hours and not be charged . . . it's pretty outrageous," Schriefer said. "It's just counter to everything I had understood about our legal process."

Since the convention ended, protesters have flocked daily into Manhattan Criminal Court, where most of them are accepting misdemeanors and violations -- charges that would typically carry no jail term. The difference between them and someone caught double-parking is that the protesters already had spent two days in jail.

"Too many New Yorkers were willing to look away," said Norman Siegal, a civil liberties lawyer who is representing Pincus. "We don't lose our rights overnight with a big bang; we lose them incrementally over time."

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

 

[michaeledward]

It appears the NYC Police Department may have stepped beyond its legal authority before and durning the Republican National Convention in 2004.

Imagine that.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/25/nyregion/25infiltrate.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin - This link does require a login to the NYTimes.

...

“Detectives collected information both in-state and out-of-state to learn in advance what was coming our way,” Mr. Browne said. (chief spokesman for the NY Police Department)

...

Before monitoring political activity, the police must have “some indication of unlawful activity on the part of the individual or organization to be investigated,” United States District Court Judge Charles S. Haight Jr. said in a ruling last month.

...

In its preparations, the department applied the intelligence resources that had just been strengthened for fighting terrorism to an entirely different task: collecting information on people participating in political protests.

 

[michaeledward]

It appears the NYC Police Department may have stepped beyond its legal authority before and durning the Republican National Convention in 2004.

Imagine that.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/25/nyregion/25infiltrate.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin - This link does require a login to the NYTimes.

Wow, a negative rep for this post ... (unsigned of course).

I wonder what the are complaining about? I do not work for the New York City Police Department.

If one didn't read the article, one might not understand that the training NYPD received to deal with terrorism and terrorists was turned toward protestors; many of whom offered no intent of disobedience, civil or otherwise.

But, what the hey - let's treat all protestors as terrorists.

As President Bush has said, 'governing would be easier if it were a dictatorships. As long has he was the dictator'.

 

[crushing]

Sounds like a difficult situation for the police. They had thousands of people to protect at a potentially prime location for another terrorist attack with all the news crews and big name politicians, and apparently police hands are tied until there is an explosion or someone is actually committing a crime. I'm not saying what they did was right, I'm just saying it is a difficult position to be put in.

The ol' "as long as I'm dictator" joke. Someone could make a lot of money creating a mockumentary from out of context quotes and data.

"You know one thing that's wrong with this country? Everybody gets a chance to have their fair say." -A President