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Bring your cameras
Former Member
Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
If you're going to the G20 protest.
Story
Nice to see the police using their best diplomacy skills as usual. No doubt in combination with their new powers to cover up police brutality by preventing pictures being taken. So I guess the protesters should make sure that everyone has a camera with them. They can't confiscate them all, no matter how much "anti-terror" legislation they have.
How can anyone at that bumbling organisation have thought this was a good way to ensure a peaceful protest?
Yesterday, the Metropolitan police was understood to have contacted a number of protest groups warning that the main day of protest, Wednesday, 1 April would be "very violent", and senior commanders have insisted that they are "up for it, and up to it", should there be any trouble.
The force has refused to rule out the use of anti-terror legislation, with Sir Paul Stephenson, the Met commissioner, conceding that the week ahead, in which President Barack Obama will lead a cortege of other world leaders to the UK, will be the Met's greatest challenge.
Story
Nice to see the police using their best diplomacy skills as usual. No doubt in combination with their new powers to cover up police brutality by preventing pictures being taken. So I guess the protesters should make sure that everyone has a camera with them. They can't confiscate them all, no matter how much "anti-terror" legislation they have.
How can anyone at that bumbling organisation have thought this was a good way to ensure a peaceful protest?
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Comments
I think that it's a shame that meaningful and peaceful process is being sidelined in favour of a handful of morons intent on starting trouble.
Still though, despite not being a trader myself, I do know some and, while some of them are the public school stereotype that everyone seems to subscribe to, some of them are hard-as-nails East End boys who look like they can more than handle themselves. My fervent prayer is that if a protester does try to start something, he picks on someone like that and gets his face filled in. Just because we're unpopular doesn't mean we won't fight back if provoked.
Exactly. The police need to demonstrate that these hooligans wont be allowed to go around smashing property and disrupting London.
These protesters certainly aren't protesting in my name.
Yeah, but the protesters aren't supposed to be representing law and order in this country. Saying you're "up for it?" They might as well have said "come and have a go if you think you're hard enough." It's ridiculous that they would come out with such crap, rather than saying that they will do their best to ensure a peaceful protest. Which is their job after all.
Which hooligans? They're labelling the protesters before they've even started, which is precisely my point. If they genuinely know of anyone who has threatened violence, then they can arrest them now.
Which is why anarchists usually target teenage MacDonald's workers and overweight security guards...
And then uploading all their pictures to Indymedia taken off a digital, mass produced camera using electricity whilst they're at it.
The one thing that annoys me about protestors and activists, many of them are enormous hypocrites.
Animal rights protestors will do everything they can to upset the researchers, and anyone remotely linked to them, but are more than happy to use anti-biotics when the going gets tough.
Protestors against coal powerplants will use that same energy in their day to day lives.
Protestors against the police state will be the first to call on the police when they need help, and the first to recite chapter and verse on the law they despise if they think it can be useful.
etc etc etc
It seems they still have not learnt anything much about crowd management... And yes, the comments were completely out of order, and arguably gross negiglence. The only people talking about extreme violence and putting the fear into the hearts of the rightful have been the police- there is something disturbing and sinister about it.
The warnings of 'streets cut off with barricades of sand and people armed with buckets and spades' line the police have been peddling on the press are, in fact, impromptu playgrounds for children attending the demostration. So not violent anarchists burning cars, but 7 year old kids building sand castles. Who the fuck are they trying to kid?
There might be violence planned by a few radicals of course, but make no mistake: this is being overblown out of all proportion by the police and handled in the worst possible manner. I suspect it's for political reasons- the populace are being programmed to think this way and to soften their opposition to any over-the-top response by the police that might take place. And it is obviously working, seeing as how so many of your are already tarring everyone who might attend with the same brush and describing them as hooligans, scruffy, spongers, hippies etc.
How sad.
I strongly believe the police, and law and order to be a good thing. I also strongly believe a police state is to be avoided. Just becasue a aprt of it is bad, doesn't mean it's all bad
You should visit the Indymedia site, some of the bollocks they spout on there. Like I said, not all protestors are hypocrites, just the loudest.
I know what you mean, "warriors without a cause" often springs to mind with some of the noisiest / more political people I know, who seem to have followed the path of: I want to protest about something -> find something I don't like rather than something I feel is wrong -> I feel so strongly I am going to protest.
Not all of them or even most of them, but there are those odd ones that I just find insufferable. Though I'm probably a hypocrit too as some issues I am very laid back about (government expenses for example) but say Israel / Gaza / UK involvement I get pretty riled up about it all to the point where I avoid the subject entirely because I know I will end up getting mad
Seriously though, Saturday's march will be small fry compared with Wednesday and Thursday methinks...
Not bashing people who protest and those who protest legitimately.
Just pointing out the hypocrisy amongs some types of protestors who tend to preach about everyday things that they themselves probably do.
What is your response to the points that people have been bringing up so far?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/30938233@N08/sets/72157616220306514/show/
But it seems if they (on the whole) behave peacefully, they're ignored or even mocked. And if they thrash the place because it's the only way ordinary people get to get heard by those in power, many fellow citizens and the press are ready to shoot them down in flames.
Incidentally, barring the rather pathetic window smashing at the branch of RBS, it seems judging by the many twitters from many journos that the only ones behaving like violent thugs are the Old Bill:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/01/g20-london-summit-twitter
Quelle Surprise!
absolute cretins the majority of them.
95% of them just turning up because they think they can get away with causing damage under the pretense of it being a protest.
there were some scrubber on a radio interview complaining that their right to protest was being infringed by the police. How about other peoples freedom of movement or even the simple right to go and earn a living in their jobs?? hypocritical much?
should have been rubber bullets and water cannons for me. They'd think twice next time.
If protests turn violent, they deserve all the condemnation the press throws on them. I love it, a bunch of hippies complaining about alleged police brutality, dutifully recorded via Twitter from bored Grauniad journalists. No wonder the paper doesn't make any money. If these whingers want to see "police brutality", they should try holding a protest like this in Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe. Then they'll see what real police brutality entails. That's, of course, assuming that they actually live to tell the tale.
wow he's really stickin' it to the man
Anarchy 1 - Bankers: 700,000 basic + bonus
owned
and among all those idiots someone speaks some sense :eek: (that looks like a copy of the road to serfdom!)
fuck that.
1st one is covering his face, so obviously wants to be associated with the cause he's fighting for.
2nd one looks like he's just wandered out of Wetherspoon's.
Hope both these are arrested and charged, i like how there was time for a huddle of photographers to gather...hmmm
Same shit happens all the time at football matches, they all have the same outcomes with voilence. The police wont go raging in with batons at hand if everyone stays civil. What do people want, no police at all?
It's about irresponsibility on all levels and so many of the people getting angry about it don't realise they are completely part of that system. I guess everyone just expects bankers to be perfect but if a bank offers you a credit card you dont have to accept.
What a monumental load of bollocks.
If 95% (or even 10%) of them were there to cause damage, damage would have been caused aplenty.
Got any evidence to substantiate such breahtaking generalisation?
Do you apply this logic to all demostrations? Or only those of people you don't approve of?
China is that way -->
lol um no offense to thunderstruck but he's a banker, what do you expect him to say? people aren't blameless but it's mainly a) the lack of regulation and b) banks not doing the proper due diligence on their customers, because they can pass the risk onto bigger suckers like pension funds and collect big fat bonuses in the process.
the blatant mispricing of risk for short term greed without thought for the obvious long term consequences is what has got us here. and instead of letting the markets correct themselves the gov and central banks have a) reinflated the asset markets at every opportunity with cheap credit, and b) backstopped every failing institution reinforcing the notion that you don't have to be responsible or balance your books because if you fuck up you get a bailout.
when people see home owners wealth increase 20% YOY for sitting on their arse it's no surprise people bent the rules to get in on the action, and the gov actively encouraged it because they got a nice slice of the pie in tax receipts. in fact the people who were responsible and didn't take on ridiculous debt now look like the fools because they are the ones who end up footing the bill for all the excess. the truth is responsiblity doesn't pay in our current economic and social structure, c'mon shyboy this shit is basic.
Well since they haven't, it is a moot point.
What is that supposed to mean? Do you think they're making it up? :rolleyes:
So that makes it alright then...
I trust the next time the Countryside Alliance holds a rally in London, when someone gets their head cut open (as they did the last time) you will be saying exactly the same things about them as you do about this lot.
Yeah right...