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Your Right to Protest is Guaranteed by its Continued Use

People went looking for a confrontation. They found one and now they want to whine about it. There are designated areas where to protest and where to set up your cameras and do your journalistic duties. It's all planned out and well orchestrated well before the event. Protest in the designated areas and you'll be fine [note: emphasis added]. It looks like this person was not in the area and went looking for trouble to get on camera.

Her cries of "please don't arrest me" before she was cuffed is pure bad acting. This doesn't impress me much and I don't weep for her.

Or they were just picked on by the vast Republican conspiracy. You decide.

/Obama supporter.

posted by Fairchild at 7:09 PM on September 1 [1 favorite]

This is either a great troll or terribly misguided commentary from metafilter (the place for this kind of commentary, even the trolls are literate.)

I've covered my theory of how to protest in a previous post, so revisiting my discussions on Freedom Fences and Open Sharing Gulags might be an exercise in futility.  I'm collecting the videos of the protests and police action from the RNC 2008, in hopes that I can turn it into something worth posting, not that I'm not proud of my squirrel videos, but I want to make a statement other than "I like rodents".

As for the protests, I agree that there is a certain amount of "I bet you can't hit me!" going on among the protesters, I saw a fair bit of it in the videos.  That does not change the equation here, the police are in riot gear and firing "bombs" at the protesters, who are at worst throwing rocks and Molotov Cocktails at them (something I haven't seen on video but will concede appears to be something that may be going on).  Does that mean that the "peaceful" protesters should accept being corralled into some sort of designated indignation area? Hell No!  They should be allowed to get right up next to the people they are protesting, it seems to me that authoritarians are fine with protests that they support getting right in the face of the people, but not those that they disagree with.

This disparity of standards allows for such things as free speech zones to flourish.  The Entire western world is a free speech zone, simple as that.  There is no (reasonable) country in the western world that does not enshrine free speech as a right for the people, along with freedom of assembly and freedom of association.  These are cornerstones of a free society and the curtailing of these goes a long way to a strong authoritarian and repressive regime taking hold in a society.  It's the responsibility of the people to stand against this repression of speech, even if you don't agree with said speech.

Photo Credit: Eric W. Davis

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About NiteMayr

Before: Kevin was born on the mossy hills of Scotland and lived for a while in West Lothian before the mores of pre-Thatcher and REALLY pre-Oasis Great Britain sent his family across the ocean to North America. They moved here and there and Kevin did the same when he was old enough. Now he lives in London with his family and a Dog. Kevin Wardrop is an amateur writer, amateur photographer and professional pain in the ass. He has worked in the PC support business for most of his adult life and has been accustomed to simply answering technical questions as a matter of fiat, it was his career choice after all. Now he herds cats and puppies for a living as well as babysitting the web enterprises at the heart of western industry. He sleeps on an eastern-style bed and dreams of laying cable over country roads.