The Occupation of Wall Street Spreads

[JointStrikeFighter]

Christ on a fuckstick you are all retarded idiots!

Perhaps if you weren't fat nerd sociopaths sitting back herp derping with your 2 dimensional and ultimately irrelevant hydrophobic/hydrophilic argument you'd come to the blatantly obvious conclusion that the water has other important effects besides dissolving OC including:

1. Running water will mask the pain at least temporarily; the same reason a hangover feels less bad in the shower

2. The victim feels more in control of the situation, and consequently less pain

3. Prevents the actual eyes from drying out



And your chemistry analysis is wrong anyway; sure capsicum is hydrophobic, but not all the fucking molecules are going to stick to the skin/eye so of course water is going to wash some away.

Pretty fucking sure too most pepper sprays use alcohol ketones as the carrier agent, which sure as hell are water soluble.

[SVPD]

Water will not remove capsacin, you retarded, dishonest sack of crap. Not through dilution, not through "mechanical means". Attacking Keevan's education will not change the facts of chemistry you refuse to even address. I do not care what your manuals state (and you refuse to cite them anyway). IF they insist the same things you do, they are effectively tools of disinformation. End of line.

Hey, asshole, making your text bigger does not make your Wall of Ignorance correct. I have not claimed, AT ALL, that water will carry away OC - if the OC is in pure, unadulteraed form. It WILL take away the carrier agent, and the excess OC with it, allowing time and air to act on the stuff that is actually doing the burning and gradually reduce that symptom in the specified time.

You are ignoring my argument and outright stating that you don't care what a manual written by a qualified professional said if I did cite one (and someone did a few pages back.) In other words, you do not care about either evidence or addressing the argument that is actually being made. That's very interesting.

[SVPD]

I would have put it rather more calmly, but Formless does raise a good point. If your training manuals are instructing you to use plain water in order to mitigate the aftereffects of getting nailed with pepper-spray after a suspect is no longer resisting, they are dead wrong. Water will eventually work if you keep enough continuous pressure up, but in the short term it will only make things worse by spreading the stuff all over your face.

It doesn't tell you to wash away the stuff with water in order to get rid of the effects; it tells you to wash them with water to get rid of the excess. That way they don't contaminate you, other parts of their body, other prisoners, the station, the police car, or anything else. What is so fucking hard to understand about this?

It does not make it worse by washing it all over your face unless you have a minimal amount of water and use it like an idiot. You turn their head to the side and pour the water across the affected area thus allowing gravity to pull it off the side of the face and to the ground, not down their fucking neck, all over their chest and so forth. This is all part of the training.

The only thing that mitigates the symptoms is time, but that doesn't work either if you are constantly recontaminating yourself with the excess foam, gel, or spray.

[Block]

I would have put it rather more calmly, but Formless does raise a good point. If your training manuals are instructing you to use plain water in order to mitigate the aftereffects of getting nailed with pepper-spray after a suspect is no longer resisting, they are dead wrong. Water will eventually work if you keep enough continuous pressure up, but in the short term it will only make things worse by spreading the stuff all over your face.

The longer this trainwreck of a thread gets, the more I'm convinced enhancement of pain is the whole point of the 'lol plain water' nonsense advice.

Do you really think the Army Field manual for Nuclear, Biological and Chemical weapons is going to suggest decontamination methods for soldiers that are intended only to enhance pain?

[SVPD]

Screw calm, how many times does it have to be explained to him before he gets it? That's right, never, because he flat out stated he will not concede anything. Mr. Coffee even made the same point about it spreading the shit all over your face (remember, this stuff does not just burn the eyes, it burns the mouth and nose as well, and would burn the skin too if it didn't create such an effective barrier of dead cells), and he ignored my point about how in a real encounter you don't get the opportunity to clean it off. Heck, I would expand that and say that you really don't get an opportunity to clean it off when your hands are cuffed.

Does any of this matter to him? Nope, because he said he will not concede anything he must keep on making these inane arguments (even when at other points he admits it will not stop the burning).

That's because nothing is being explained to me. I know, you don't. I got my training from actual professionals, based on materials from the actual engineers that design the stuff. I've been actually hit with it, and I know exactly what it's like.

Water does not "spread it all over your face" unless you use very little water and are a total moron about using it; you turn your head down and to the side and pour the water over the affected area, taking it away to the ground, because water does wash away the carrier agent, and with it, the excess.

As for your hands being cuffed, if they are cuffed you are in custody and the officer will do the decontamination for you if, for some reason, he cannot uncuff you, and that will occur at a time and place where it is safe for both of you.

Here's a clue: You do not just get to make up whatever claim you want, "explain" it, and demand a concession while totally ignoring counterarguments. That's called a Wall of Ignorance, and yours is fucking blatant.

[SVPD]

The longer this trainwreck of a thread gets, the more I'm convinced enhancement of pain is the whole point of the 'lol plain water' nonsense advice.

That's because you're emotionally invested in the idea of conflicts with the police being a matter of the OWS being irrefutably, invariably in the right and the police in the wrong, and you need OC spray to be some horrible torture invented to allow sadistic cops to torture arrestees in order to validate your view of the issue.

This isn't about whether OC is ok to use, or what its effects are, or anything like that, it's about you agreeing with OWS and these fantasies that it's going to be some worldwide movement that ushers in some new era of social justice, which is about as likely as the lolbertarians getting their idea of utopia out of the Tea Party. Amusingly, this attitude that the OWS protestors can do no wrong and any action taken against them must be about jackbooted cops beating hippies (never mind that a lot of cops should probably agree with a lot of the OWS positions seeing as how cops are working people likely to get fucked in the ass by banks too) is exactly the sort of rose-colored "we're the good guys!" thinking that people decry when Americans apply it to foreign countries.

This is just like your ignorant, arrogant, self serving claim that "hippies" are inquisitive people who seek to learn while "cops" are people who just like to have authority because they are "control freaks". What you are doing is called otherizing; the police, or anyone who disagrees with your chosen champions at the protest are the other. They aren't a flawed human being in a stressful situation, or anything like that, they're a faceless jackbooted stormtrooper who just wants to beat protestors who you just happen to agree with. It's a way of making the police into a sub-human automaton you can justify hatred of, and if someone points the "video evidence" doesn't exactly show what you're reading into it, well, probably it did happen the way you imagine because, hey, you just know the cops must have done something wrong because they're in conflict with the forces of Right and Righteousness represented by OWS. It is exactly the same kind of inexcusable bigotry directed towards muslims by ignorant hyper-patriotic conservatives.

If you were actually a grown-up you could confront the fact that OWS probably includes people who are not nice, that some of them probably came there hoping for a fight with the cops, that some of them do throw rocks and bottles, engage in rape and other victimization of their fellow protestors, and that some of them would definitely post a video that's a carefully selected snippet, edited, or taken out of context in order to create the appearance of police brutality. You'd also admit that just because it appears brutality was committed to the peanut gallery here does not mean that's automatically true and that until and unless there's a fair hearing in a court of law, the police should no more be subjected to punishment or vigilante justice than anyone else.

You'd also understand that admitting that OWS protestors are far from perfect does not mean that OWS is not right to be protesting the things they are protesting, nor does it somehow taint those OWS protestors who do obey they law. You see, unlike you I am an adult, can understand that, can admit that yes there have been abuses by police officers and in those cases the officers should be arrested, tried, and punished for their crimes in a court of law. I also understand that the fact that some officers have engaged in abuse does not relieve the rest of the cops from their obligation to enforce the law in a professional manner, or somehow taint all the cops, because unlike you I recognize that hasty generalization, bigotry, and otherization do not suddenly become ok because they are dealing with protestors I agree with.

[Edi]

All right, I've had it.

Flagg, Einy, Keevan, Formless and all the other fucking morons in this thread, do you even read the posts you are replying to?

As far as reading the tail end of this trainwreck from page 18 forward is concerned, it seems to me that you lot are completely unable to deconstruct fairly basic arguments to their constituent parts and then go on screeching at the top of your lungs in answer to whatever you think the voices in your head are telling you. Get a fucking grip.

As far as the pepper spray argument here is concerned (something which was articulated several pages ago by Simon_Jester, by the way, and which SVPD and KS have also repeated), water may not be the optimal agent for removing the pepper spray delivery agent, but it does have a (less than optimal) effect of removing the delivery agents that have not yet begun acting on the subject who has been pepper sprayed. The easy availability of water compared to the other potential removal agents has also been pointed out repeatedly.

That's it for the mechanics of pepper spray.

Now, for procedures of response: For those who have no police, military, medical or any other kind of emergency response training, let me lay it out very simply so that you may (or not, as the case may be) understand how this kind of shit works:

• When you have an emergency to respond to, you use whatever is at hand
• Procedures are designed with the assumption that you do not have any specific equipment designed for that emergency at hand
• If such equipment by chance happens to be at hand, it is to be preferred above jury-rigs and other scavenged stuff
• Response to the emergency is to begin immediately instead of waiting for optimal conditions
• Another assumption in designing procedures is that conditions are NEVER optimal

I could go on at some more length about it, but what it boils down to is that everything about the procedures is designed so that it can be done even when you don't have optimal conditions, which is why emergency personnel are able to save lives in suboptimal conditions instead of sitting with their thumb up their arse wailing at the sky because they don't happen to have Agent/Equipment Optimus XYZ right at their fingertips in a given situation.


Then there is the situation where pepper spray has been used and whether that use was justified, which several people have been conflating with the mechanics argument even when they are entirely separate things.

Which SVPD for one again pointed out. Repeatedly.

WHAT THE FUCK IS SO DIFFICULT TO UNDERSTAND ABOUT ALL THis?

*****

Now, as regards to the justifications and police brutality, that's an entirely different kettle of fish. The single greatest problem with US law enforcement is the Blue Wall of Silence, which leads to a culture of corruption and impunity the kind of which leaves a lot of non-US posters like me going "You have GOT to be kidding me! Why the fuck has the entire department not been fired already?!" on more than one occasion and which also quite obviously contributes to a willingness of the American posters here to regard the police as an enemy whenever police crackdown on protests goes wrong. In some individual cases and in the cases of certain police departments, it is actually not unreasonable to assume police coverup of crimes committed by officers if somebody ends up in the hospital in what should by all accounts have been a routine arrest (or did not necessarily warrant an arrest at all).

Once that kind of situation develops somewhere, there will be retaliation by unconventional means (such as computer crackers releasing personal information on entire departments if they get their hands on such data). Failure by the police to rigorously keep their own in check will then result in innocent officers becoming collateral damage that way. And since a situation leading to that should never have developed in the first place and could only do through departmental corruption, the blame doesn't lie on just one side.

One thing that might mitigate this kind of thing is if the police did something about abuses (or if they are doing already, as the case may be), they also make sure they are seen to be doing it. If they're doing but are not seen to be doing, it's as if they are not doing as far as the reactions are concerned.

*****
Now, try to get this fucking trainwreck into a shape that at least somewhat resembles a decent thread.

[Thanas]

What whiteknighting? Point it out. I never said those officers were justified. All I did was remind people that if you're placed under arrest and you resist then force can be used against you and that force can be escalated.

How was this is in any way a reasonable application of force? How was it limited?

Also, I labelled you as whiteknighting them because you conveniently forget to mention their other actions, which included leaving him screaming in pain, vomiting and diarrhea for 18 hours. That casts a serious doubt about how they feel about him in reality. What is your excuse for that?

[Formless]

Hey, asshole, making your text bigger does not make your Wall of Ignorance correct. I have not claimed, AT ALL, that water will carry away OC

The stuff doesn't need to be water-soluble, chemically speaking. The water washes it away through mechanical action. It's going to burn for 45 minutes or so, tops, and that depending on the person who is hit, and the conditions under which it occurs. The active ingrediant is cayanne (sp?) pepper extract and the individual little particles are "spikey"; the water doesn't dissovle them, it pushes them away mechanically.

Yes, ignore your previous statements in favor of Ad Hominim attacks. That's totally reasonable.

if the OC is in pure, unadulteraed form. It WILL take away the carrier agent, and the excess OC with it, allowing time and air to act on the stuff that is actually doing the burning and gradually reduce that symptom in the specified time.

You are ignoring my argument and outright stating that you don't care what a manual written by a qualified professional said if I did cite one (and someone did a few pages back.) In other words, you do not care about either evidence or addressing the argument that is actually being made. That's very interesting.

I care about the goalposts remaining where they were on page 19. Not this crap about carrier agents, what you actually said when this shitstorm started. Likewise, we only have your words that your training manuals state the things you say they do. And if they do say the things you initially said (and believe it or not, I do hope this is merely a matter of your personal stupidity), they are flat wrong.

How hard is this for you to understand?

WHAT THE FUCK IS SO DIFFICULT TO UNDERSTAND ABOUT ALL THis?

The fact that SVPD has refused to acknowledge the difference between his initial assertions and his current ones. It is not merely a matter of him failing to articulate himself the first time, its that what he actually articulated was flat wrong, and clearly had nothing to do with whether or not water can carry away the carrier agent, but the irritant itself. This is a problem with Simon_Jester's argument as well, before you try and make me give a crap about that Know-It-All jackass. Read the quote I provided above if you don't believe me.

And that IS a problem. IMO, before someone uses a weapon (and you can sometimes see similar logic with non-weapons as well) they should have some understanding of how that weapon works. Without that knowledge, they lack the ability to assess the consequences of using it; thus, they cannot truly be responsible with it. If a cop hits someone with a billy club, they should realize that they can break things inside that person (like, say, their spleen, or more commonly their head). If you shoot someone, you should realize that any shot capable of stopping a Bad Guy is also potentially lethal. If a SWAT officer goes into a building with flash-bangs, they should know the risk of setting the place on fire. Even if you are technically unarmed it can still matter-- if you Judo throw someone onto concrete you need to know the possible consequences of using that technique. Especially when concrete is involved, obviously.

SVPD's statements demonstrate that before he came into this thread he did not have even a basic understanding of how these chemical agents work, just knowledge of how to use them. Knowledge of procedure. That's not the same thing, not really, and it makes me wonder if he really does appreciate the risks of, say, asphyxiation that come with all these irritants. Maybe he does-- I don't know and I don't ask for police to understand perfectly how a tool works before they go ahead and use it where they think appropriate. For instance, the first person to accidentally set a building on fire with a flash bang is not as culpable as the next guy who does it, because the next guy should have learned something from the first guy's mistake. But that's the difference between procedure and actual knowledge-- procedures adapt to experience whereas knowledge lets you predict mistakes before they happen. And not everyone who listens to him describe procedure is going to appreciate what his procedure is actually supposed to accomplish when his explanation of how it works is dead wrong.

Plus, even if water does remove the carrier agent, I already provided a counterargument; I.E. assuming someone knows the procedure (yes, I read SVPD's other post), by the time an arrested person gets a chance to wash up the agent has already been delivered to his eyes and mucus membranes (which, you might notice, are not addressed in the described procedure) in sufficient quantity that it will take at least 45 minutes for the effect to wear off. In an arrest it might take even longer. Oh, right, I forgot-- the police officer will do it for you (again, SVPD, I read your other post). However, even if officers regularly do so this same information also applies to protests/riots, where people are trying to clean themselves who have been tear gassed who do not actually know the procedures the cops were trained in (and a few actually might know a better one). As usual, we're supposed to just take it for granted that what the cops say will happen will actually happen, all around the country. That their manuals are the last word on how these things work out in reality. Malice or no malice, police brutality or no police brutality, that's just a stupid assumption to make.

If SVPD would simply acknowledge that his initial argument provided in the quote above is 1) not equivalent to his current argument about carrier agents 2) dead wrong, I will stop hounding him about it, and I suspect Keevan will too.

[Simon_Jester]

You must be addressing someone elses argument. I have not made such a claim.

That post was directed more towards Simon's points.

That leaves the problem that the establishment as it stands has no motivation or inclination to release the information.

Answer me this, how exactly does this differ from such wonderful things as requiring sex offenders to be registered in terms of potential for vigilante justice?

Sex offenders aren't put on a list until after they've been tried in a public court system, so that we can tell whether they really did it or not. You have to be proven guilty before registration.

Here, policemen are being put on a list because Anonymous has decided they beat people up. Why is Anonymous more trustworthy than, say, whoever writes up the list of targets for assassination by US drone strikes in the Middle East? Anonymous is anonymous, with no defined leadership or places to go to get them to stop doing things. If you are wrongfully accused of a crime by Anonymous, you have no recourse- you cannot convince them to stop, you cannot appeal to a higher court. And yet you are now listed as a "police abuser" and are going to get treated the same way as all the others.

And they may have made this decision based on ten seconds of carefully selected YouTube footage. Which might very well leave out mitigating circumstances- say, one protestor who's drunk and decided to pick a fight, or a guy who showed up to rob protestors or something and is being stopped by police, or a guy who had a grudge against either a policeman or another protestor and decided to act on it. Hell, the guy in the footage might even be someone else entirely who happens to look like you.

But you have no recourse, because Anonymous is at least as unaccountable as any police agency in the free world, if not more so.

Are you so indignant about this, and so terrified, that you are prepared to throw away your right to a fair trial? Or are you only willing to throw away that right for policemen, and not for yourself?


Once again, I am not a fan of police brutality. But I'm also not a fan of lynch mobs, and the only reason Anonymous's conduct is more ethical than that of a lynch mob is that their exploits probably won't kill anyone.

[Kamakazie Sith]

How was this is in any way a reasonable application of force? How was it limited?

Obviously, we aren't aware of the full situation. The narrator in the video states we caught the tail end of a take down and in the video we do not see any strikes being delivered. We see an officer walk away in pain.

Also, I labelled you as whiteknighting them because you conveniently forget to mention their other actions, which included leaving him screaming in pain, vomiting and diarrhea for 18 hours. That casts a serious doubt about how they feel about him in reality. What is your excuse for that?

When we first see Sabeghi in the video it is after the altercation and he is secured in handcuffs. Is he screaming in pain? Does he look like he's in pain? A bit. Did he ask for medical attention? "I'm hurt...ow...I need help" No. He did not. Instead he says "I'm an Iraq war vet. I did two tours in Iraq...one tour in Afghanistan"

To me those facts mean that an investigation is even more critical. If he was fine post arrest then why did he end up in the hospital with a ruptured spleen. How, when, and where needs to be determined. Also, I will remind you that the only people that say his spleen injury was caused by batons are his friends and not a medical professional unless I missed something.

[Winston Blake]

To me those facts mean that an investigation is even more critical. If he was fine post arrest then why did he end up in the hospital with a ruptured spleen. How, when, and where needs to be determined. Also, I will remind you that the only people that say his spleen injury was caused by batons are his friends and not a medical professional unless I missed something.

I have not been reading this thread in any detail, but I will just note here that there is actually a phenomenon called 'delayed rupture of the spleen' or 'delayed splenic rupture':

Injuries to the body of the spleen that do not disrupt major vessels cause an initial blood loss of about 500 ml that ceases spontaneously without signs of abdominal distention or shock. These types of injuries, however, have the potential to cause rupture at a time remote from the injury and account for the phenomenon of delayed rupture of the spleen.

We believe that this represents an "Injury in evolution" minor enough to go undetected on initial CT scans of the abdomen. [...] We conclude that "delayed rupture" of the spleen is a true clinical entity. The occurrence of a delayed rupture may prove hazardous to patients discharged early from the hospital after blunt abdominal injury.

[madd0ct0r]

...lots of stuff, mostly insinuating SVPD is an idiot who only knows how to follow a set of instructions if they're printed in big font...

The thing is, reading the thread over again this morning - you've lost the argument.
You're reduced to arguing the exact definitions of mechanical action, carrier agent et al, which is frankly the only point you have left to stick at SVPD. You're technically correct, but nobody is impressed.

I've been hit the eye with chilli. I've known guys who used to carry a bag of chilli powder in their pocket so when (not if) they got into a fight they could blind the other guy with a well aimed punch.
In my case, it was chilli on my fingers from a chilli eating contest. Scotch bonnets as I remember. Burnt a little, reached up without thinking and found myself curled up on the floor.
Staggered to my feet, made it to the nearest sink (via memory, couldn't see shit) and WASHED IT OUT WITH WATER.
took a while, especially as I didn't think to clean my hands first, but with all your hysteria you'd think I'd have been completely incapacitated.

And yes, I do protest on occasion (not in Vietnam, I like being not on fire) and I know that some people who come along on a protest aren't interested in the cause, only in 'smashing the pigs' much as how some police officers are callous thugs. Most of them are just trying to do their job, and not get bricked as a bonus.
As to whether the police were justified to spray a protestor to get them to unlink their arms, it's seems like an appropriate use of a tool. Certainly less likely to cause significant damage then brute force.
as to whether the police were justified in making the arrest at all- that's a different kettle of fish.

[SVPD]

The fact that SVPD has refused to acknowledge the difference between his initial assertions and his current ones. It is not merely a matter of him failing to articulate himself the first time, its that what he actually articulated was flat wrong, and clearly had nothing to do with whether or not water can carry away the carrier agent, but the irritant itself. This is a problem with Simon_Jester's argument as well, before you try and make me give a crap about that Know-It-All jackass. Read the quote I provided above if you don't believe me.

Except that what I articulated wasn't flat wrong at all; it was completely correct, just extremely sloppily worded on my part. I'll take the hit for that, but the fact of the matter is that I have clarified my argument repeatedly and your continued attempts to tell me what I was actually saying because you're in love with the idea that I didn't know what I was talking about reveal your basic dishonesty.

The water pushes away through mechanical action the excess carrier agent, and with it, the excess active ingredient. The individual particulates of OC that are already acting on the skin are "spikey" for lack of a better term, and cannot be easily pushed away. That's why the agent continues to burn after the excess is washed off.

You're correct that my initial argument could make it sound as if I was saying water would push away through mechanical action that particles that were actually acting on the subject, but that isn't what I was saying; if it were I would not have mentioned the nature of the particles as it would have been irrelevant.

The only thing I didn't know (and which no one else knew either, Keevan's claims of knowledge of chemistry to the contrary) is that other cleansers are no better than water at removing the burning sensation, although they might still be better at cleaning off the excess. I, however, was the one who discovered that, cited it, and was completely ignored in that regard.

So, get off your fucking high horse. I have clarified this repeatedly, and rather than accept the clarification you've been jumping through hoops trying to pretend that clarifiying an unclear or sloppy argument is somehow a problem.

[SCRawl]

A nitpick, ending with "If SVPD would simply acknowledge that his initial argument provided in the quote above is 1) not equivalent to his current argument about carrier agents 2) dead wrong, I will stop hounding him about it, and I suspect Keevan will too."

You are mistaken. You will not beat this equine corpse any longer. SVPD's initial explanation, which you deem unacceptable and worthy of a retraction, is not 1) really all that different from his current argument, and 2) not dead wrong, unless you want to require that his every utterance be science journal-grade language. That isn't a standard that we generally require here.

That argument is over, there is nothing left to discuss unless a completely new angle is uncovered. Bringing it up again will get those posts barreled and those who post them subject to disciplinary actions.

As always, disagreements with this directive are to be handled through the proper avenues.

Edit:
SM93, this is no place for you to offer your $0.02 about board decorum. Edi has posted on this, and now (on a specific issue) so have I. AR-1 (the directive against back-seat moderating) is still in effect. If you want the other kids to play nice, ask a grown-up, preferably via PM.

[Formless]

I was actually about to accept SVPD's most recent post as a (grudging) concession, so fine. I will only say that if he mentioned a link between carrier agents and the nature of the particulates before now, I must have missed it. But again, I accept his concession, and as promised I will stop hounding him for it.

[SVPD]

I was actually about to accept SVPD's most recent post as a (grudging) concession, so fine. I will only say that if he mentioned a link between carrier agents and the nature of the particulates before now, I must have missed it. But again, I accept his concession, and as promised I will stop hounding him for it.

It must really take a low self-esteem to have to pretend your opponent conceded when 3 or 4 people just told you to shut up because you lost the argument. Really, that is fucking pathetic.

There's no concession for you to accept. There's a clarification, and there's you being wrong.

[Lonestar]

I would have put it rather more calmly, but Formless does raise a good point. If your training manuals are instructing you to use plain water in order to mitigate the aftereffects of getting nailed with pepper-spray after a suspect is no longer resisting, they are dead wrong. Water will eventually work if you keep enough continuous pressure up, but in the short term it will only make things worse by spreading the stuff all over your face.

We used water to rinse out OC spray during training when I was in the USN.


Granted, it was just a brief splash and may have been purely pyschological in nature(especially considering how that afternoon while I was showing the stuff in my hair went into my eyes again), but I can easily where the "spray off with water" thing comes from.

[madd0ct0r]

moving away from chilli spray, one occupy protestor gives fox news a coherent earful:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wO4hU3kc ... ture=share

no transcription sorry,

[SpaceMarine93]

A nitpick, ending with "If SVPD would simply acknowledge that his initial argument provided in the quote above is 1) not equivalent to his current argument about carrier agents 2) dead wrong, I will stop hounding him about it, and I suspect Keevan will too."

You are mistaken. You will not beat this equine corpse any longer. SVPD's initial explanation, which you deem unacceptable and worthy of a retraction, is not 1) really all that different from his current argument, and 2) not dead wrong, unless you want to require that his every utterance be science journal-grade language. That isn't a standard that we generally require here.

That argument is over, there is nothing left to discuss unless a completely new angle is uncovered. Bringing it up again will get those posts barreled and those who post them subject to disciplinary actions.

As always, disagreements with this directive are to be handled through the proper avenues.

Edit:
SM93, this is no place for you to offer your $0.02 about board decorum. Edi has posted on this, and now (on a specific issue) so have I. AR-1 (the directive against back-seat moderating) is still in effect. If you want the other kids to play nice, ask a grown-up, preferably via PM.

Sorry.

But really, what's the whole point of getting so hyped up on pepper sprays anyway? I mean, it isn't such a big issue compared to the Occupy Movement as a whole.

[NoXion]

NoXion, I'm not going to hit you over the head, but I hope this sinks in anyway:

Would you like to have a civilization when all of this is over?

I'm not asking you what sort of civilization you'd like to have. I'm asking you if you want one. Because if you do, then that civilization will need police to enforce whatever law code you manage to enact over the trampled oligarchs you just got rid of.

Now, it may be that you need to scrap the entire enforcement system and start over. This is called a "revolution." They kill millions of people.

My understanding of history is that it's not so much that revolutions are bloody, but that the civil wars that can accompany them most certainly are.

Have you ever stopped to seriously imagine what a million dead means? Have you stopped to consider what kind of government you're likely to get after the revolution has killed millions? The kind of bloody-handed mass murderer you can depend on to kill millions for you will not become all smiles and sunshine after he wins. Look at what happened in France or Russia if you don't believe me.

You seem to be under the mistaken impression that I want some tinpot dictator or some self-appointed vanguard party to form a new kind of society. I don't think that's possible, and I'm pretty sure that ultimately those best qualified to decide are the 99% themselves. If the politicians in so-called representative democracies were really our representatives, then there would not be increasing numbers of people who feel their needs and voices are being ignored by the rich and powerful.

Me, I want a reformation, not a revolution. I want organic change to the system, big and ambitious but not done by blasting everything to anarchic pieces and rebuilding from scratch. Which means I need to worry about things like continuity of government, and making it possible for the rank-and-file of the current system to find a place to live in the new one, because I for one am not planning to kill them all.

Who said anything about "kill[ing] them all"? I want real justice and a better society capable of delivering same. As I see it, the current political and economic system is institutionally incapable of being reformed and/or remaining reformed for very long. The social safety net, created in an age of more "enlightened" capitalism, is being rolled back in many countries despite making no sense as far as stable and happy societies are concerned.

And I think before we decide to have a revolution, I think we'd better make sure we know what we're doing. As a rule, you shouldn't resolve to have a revolution, as opposed to a reformation, before you've found out you have nothing to lose. At the moment, you, we, do have something important to lose: our lives.

We'd have our lives to lose under any system, and despite past reforms there is still a professional political class alienated from those they claim to speak for, as well as enormous disparities in wealth.

When protestors start getting massacred a la Bloody Sunday, when machine guns and napalm rather than rubber bullets and tear gas are the order of the day, then we will know we are in need of a revolution.

Why should we wait until we are being openly murdered to do something effective? Sure, the Occupy movement as it currently stands isn't competent or popular enough for the task of creating a new kind of society, but such things take time and it's a false dichotomy to say that the only choices are between pro-capitalist and anti-capitalist oligarchies.

Tying this in with the issue of the police, I'd say that at this moment unprovoked aggression against the cops would be counter-productive, but that doesn't mean we have to trust them. They get their orders from the very people whom the Occupy protestors are unhappy with.

Until then, the Establishment is still playing by a set of rules which they did not write, rules which forbid the Establishment from butchering the opposition to stay in power, rules which quite a few of them would be happy to get rid of... but which they can't get rid of, because they aren't actually as all-powerful as you think.

You mentioned yourself that the Establishment is perfectly capable of casting aside the rules if they think it suits them (I'm pretty sure that even in Tsarist Russia, murder was illegal). If people are killed and/or assaulted while protesting a regime, the regime's reaction tells us something important. Suffice to say that the reaction by the various governments of the world to people being killed or assaulted by their enforcers and agents does not inspire in me confidence for any meaningful change without further tensions.

[Einhander Sn0m4n]

[White Haven]

...Wow. That video...wow. I don't think that video could see an extenuating circumstance with a telescope.

[Shroom Man 777]

The man was disturbing the peace and, as the man himself observed, proper police protocol was enacted. "Ow, he shot me" indeed.

[Kamakazie Sith]

The man was disturbing the peace and, as the man himself observed, proper police protocol was enacted. "Ow, he shot me" indeed.

For a second I though you were Flagg.

I agree with White Haven. I didn't see anything that justified that kind of action.