[Versus]

Originally Posted by wolf moon

Are you at all familiar with the concept of civil disobedience or what the movement is actually about? At all?

Really?

The police are pepper spraying people who are sitting down and linking arms. This has been considered, for decades now, to be a universally understood sign of nonviolence.

I don't argue that that is how it is generally interpreted.

Prison guards who use pepper spray after an inmate is sitting down, even if that person was actively engaging in violence just moments before, are fired for excessive use of force.

It very well could have been, contextually, the wrong decision to use pepper spray. That doesn't mean that the situation can be, or often is, different.

Your response to the police using these tactics on seated, nonviolent, nonaggressive protestors is seriously going to be "it's just pepper spray"?

Just because it doesn't physically hurt anybody doesn't mean it is not resistance, and to say otherwise is completely wrong. The people are really quite fortunate that they do not need to use violence to be in resistance. It's the moral high ground to say "I wasn't hurting anybody!" and furthers their legitimacy, regardless of how much of an entrapment it was.

That is not always my response, but in this instance, yes. It is just pepper spray. It was not meant to injure anybody, and it didn't. People will, of course, turn their nose up at it because they don't understand that pain is not always used maliciously.

The idea that this violence is justified by the fact that the protestors are not "cooperating" with a request to evacuate a public space is precisely what they're protesting in the first place. "Do whatever we say or we will use violence against you" is not supposed to be how this country works. The fact that you see nothing wrong with this mindset is terrifying.

The people of this country, regardless of how I feel about it, have given the state a monopoly on violence by allowing the police to exercise it to maintain the status quo by enforcing it's laws. That is exactly how this country has probably been since we've had police.

What people want to do to change it is fine, I don't really care that they're resisting and I say more power to them. However, their resistance is implicit in that it supposed to be aware that they are allowing the police to exercise their judgement in how to disrupt them as they break the law. And it is complete bullshit, knowing this, for the protestors to blame the instruments of that end state.

I think our major disagreement about the justification or legitimacy is that we have different understandings of what violence means.