One of the comments at this youtube video says it all: "Of course it was peaceful. The ones causing violence were not there: the cops." The story is here. More and more, we are seeing a militarization of urban police forces--America's military weapons and tactics turned toward her own people who are exercising their First Amendment rights.
New tactic to censor Facebook posts by those on the political right, according to Segway Jeremy Ryan:
People are suppressing information in Wisconsin by actively reporting people they deem to be a threat on Facebook. I myself have been reported and banned for one to three days for simply posting “Good job” or “The majority of Wisconsin doesn’t like Scott Walker.” People have been reported on pages for saying nothing more than my name and have been reprimanded by Facebook. The strategy is simple and Facebook lets it continue. If someone reports something as abusive to Facebook they don’t actually look at it, they just remove it and warn the person who posted it. If you get enough you are not able to dispute them at all, and with no admin contacts and no one at Facebook actually looking at the posts reported as “abusive,” the person gets blocked.
With the help of a DI reader who wishes to remain anonymous, I have created the following Declaration for modern Americans to wake up from their delusions. I'd recommend that all adults and school children put their hands over their hearts in the morning and say the following instead of pledging allegiance to the powers-that-be (but see here for an alternate form of the Pledge).
From Democracy Now's Amy Goodman, a discussion with Karen Smith, a retired judge who had served on the New York Supreme Court:
JUDGE KAREN SMITH (ret.): I was wearing—and I brought this—a hat, which says the "National Lawyers Guild Legal Observer." And as you can see, in color, it’s quite bright. And at night— AMY GOODMAN: It’s fluorescent green. JUDGE KAREN SMITH (ret.): It’s fluorescent green. And then I was wearing it, and I had a pad and a pen, and I was there to take down the names of people who were arrested so we could follow them through the system and just observe what was going on. And as I’m standing there, some African-American woman goes up to a police officer and says, "I need to get in. My daughter’s there. I want to know if she’s OK." And he said, "Move on, lady." And he kept pushing—they kept pushing with their sticks, pushing back. And she said—and she was crying. And all of a sudden, out of nowhere, he throws her to the ground and starts hitting her in the head. And I walk over, and I say, "Look, cuff her if she’s done something, but you don’t need to do that." And he said, "Lady, do you want to get arrested?" And I said, "Do you see my hat? I’m here as a legal observer." He said, "You want to get arrested?" And he pushed me up against the wall.
Whistle-blowers are often disliked, even when people realize that they are right. That is a point made by this NYT article by Alina Tugend:
Most of us say we admire people who stand up for what’s right (or what is eventually shown to be right), especially when they are strong enough to stick to their guns in the face of strenuous opposition. But again, research shows that’s not necessarily true. In “When Groups are Wrong and Deviants are Right,” published last year in The European Journal of Social Psychology, Australian academics argue that group members are often hostile to people who buck conformity, even if the members later agree with the dissenter. Even when, say, a whistle-blower may prove to be correct, she is not always admired or accepted back into the fold, the academics found.