{"id":892,"date":"2008-09-02T20:54:13","date_gmt":"2008-09-02T20:54:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/?p=892"},"modified":"2008-09-02T20:54:13","modified_gmt":"2008-09-02T20:54:13","slug":"rnc-protest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/?p=892","title":{"rendered":"RNC Protest"},"content":{"rendered":"


\nI hate this photo. I hate that this photo continues to be the media’s face of protest, nearly a decade after the Battle in Seattle. I hate that these black bloc anarchists fail to see that their tiny, worthless vandalism effectively neuters the voices of thousands upon thousands of others.
\nThe MSNBC headline: GOP delegates attacked by protesters<\/a>. It was “a violent counterpoint to an otherwise peaceful anti-war march”, but you don’t hear any more about the peaceful stuff.
\nThere’s a double-blind here, in fact. While the media covers the violence and transgressions of a tiny minority of protesters (see also CNN coverage<\/a>, Fox News<\/a>), the peaceful masses are pushed down the page and easily dismissed as a non-story; and deeper still, the efforts of the St Paul police and the FBI to stifle protest with a series of unlawful raids and arrests of protestors goes mostly unexplored, buried in the tenth paragraph of the stories above and told from the police POV.
\nGlenn Greenwald, always essential reading, has been on this story since the start (in one of the raided houses<\/a>, proof of FBI involvement<\/a>; the story develops with a range of photos and video<\/a>.) While excoriating big media for burying this story, he draws a comparison with China – everyone was ready to look darkly upon the suppression of protest in China, but no-one has much to say about the exact same thing taking place in the US.
\nThis is what corrupt state oppression looks like. This isn’t hypothesising some future dystopia – this is living in one right now, where the biggest and most powerful democracy on the planet can criminalise its citizens as it pleases to stifle dissent during a political campaign. The bleak future has happened, is happening, right now.
\nPerhaps the stories of those raids resonate with me because down here the trial of the arrestees from New Zealand’s own “terror raids<\/a>” is quietly moving along<\/a>, to general apathy. Does anyone take those ominous warnings of terrorseriously any more? I would like to think not, but sadly I think that would be too optimistic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I hate this photo. I hate that this photo continues to be the media’s face of protest, nearly a decade after the Battle in Seattle. I hate that these black bloc anarchists fail to see that their tiny, worthless vandalism effectively neuters the voices of thousands upon thousands of others. The MSNBC headline: GOP delegates … Continue reading RNC Protest<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[10,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-everything-political","category-mediawatch"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8D9ZE-eo","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/892","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=892"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/892\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}