• 28 Posts
  • 19 Comments
Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: November 12th, 2024

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  • Good question.

    Marches are often cleared with the local government first. Marching in a circuit downtown is a common route, where the police already have plans drawn up to protect the protest from vigilante attacks, and prevent vandalism by protesters. If the march organizers are trying to not antagonize the local police, they’ll probably pick a familiar and easily approved route.

    Creating conflict with the police is likely to get more press attention to a demonstration with less people, but if the organizers are trying to maximize the demonstration’s attendance, telegraphing the intention to keep conflict to a minimum is likely to encourage participation from a larger swath of the population.

    *edit* The more I read about this demonstration, the less it seems it was organized along the same lines as the “Hands Off” demonstrations that follows the volume over spectacle strategy. Maybe a better answer is that it is easier to assemble lots of people in Daley Plaza, Broadview is a long walk, and CPD are unlikely to have permitted a large group from doing something that direct.













  • are public protests the only way to fight oppression?

    No, of course not. Just doing your job as a journalist documenting the government breaking the law is a great way to fight oppression without engaging in public protest.

    I ask because, while I stand by that if someone with a gun tells me to leave, I will leave

    Are you a journalist? Do have have a responsibility to the public to document how the government is responding to the protests? As a private citizen, you’re free to follow the dictates of your conscience. But I suspect you’d be a terrible journalist.

    It seems strange you’re asking about protest ethics, when there were no protesters in the video; only police and journalists. I hope you’re not trying to shift the goalposts, derail the thread, or muddy the waters. There is no order to leave recorded in the video, only police approaching and immediately firing rounds. Journalists in the United States should not expect to be targets of police violence when they’re clearly engaged in first amendment protected activity and not breaking the law.















  • For some reason performative neutrality is the line that ‘journalists’ are not allowed to cross, even against fascism. Morans’ statements are weak-sauce compared to the Michelin star grill marks the typewriter hammers of Hunter S. Thompson indelibly branded on Nixon’s legacy.

    There is no ‘left’ and ‘right’ mainstream media, just a slippery slope of appeasement to tyranny from NPR down to OAN, and then there is the sidelined and suppressed resistance trying to break through. It has always been this way, and is the reason things have deteriorated to our current state.