Memories of my you't

Growing up in the Sault, many - if not most- of our neighbours were Italian immigrants. They were the nicest, most hospitable people you'd ever want to meet, but a one point my brother and I were largely convinced that the Italian language consisted mostly of gestures and that the vocalizations were just misdirection. I guess we weren't the only ones who thought so.

The Toronto Prison experiment

A lengthy account of what it was like to get swept up by the Toronto riot police and jailed in abysmal conditions for no reason at all. Read it and weep.  I especially recommend parts 11,12 and 13 -- and I hope someone or a group of someones catch up with "Special Constable Milrod" and few of the other sadistic disgraces to the law enforcement community someday soon.

 "A young guy on the new officer shift, with reddish hair and a goatee seems ready for a fight. He says to the guys in our cell “I want to see all you guys outside in the parking lot, then we’ll see what’s what. I’ll take you down.” Wow. He walks away laughing. I inform an actual Toronto Police Officer of what he said and his name. Next we saw Milrod, his nametag was gone and he didn’t look at us or speak to us. It’s on camera Milrod, with 30 witnesses."

From all I've read so far, this whole thing looks like the Stanford Prison Experiment writ large.

We keep reading about how the crowd of protesters should have taken control and stopped the actions of  the few vandals among them -- how about applying some of that reasoning to the police?
As discussed in the latest Maple Syrup Revolution podcast, this particular strategy is going to be a disaster the next time it is tried, because the next time a lot of people will resist being arrested for no reason and things are going to get bloody. Don't be surprised if there is a very expensive class action suit by the thousand or so people arrested and held caged and in cuffs for 20 to 40 hours, begging for water.
If you are not at least as outraged by the gross misconduct of sworn peace officers and political leaders as  you are by the misbehavior of a handful of asshole vandals, then you are part of the problem.

But Stephen Harper and the G20 leaders didn't have to be exposed to people shouting mean things at them, so I guess it was worth shredding the Charter of Rights and spending a billion dollars.

Let me be perfectly clear

A few commenters and correspondents have accused me of supporting or at least giving aid and comfort to the Black Bloc Anarchist protesters who grabbed so much attention in Toronto during the G20 summit. Such accusations are, to use the mot juste "crap."  My parents raised me much better than that.

I am most certainly NOT defending the brain-dead attention whores in the so-called Black Bloc, I think they are childish tantrum-throwing clowns. I am criticizing the ham-fisted police response to them, which is not the same thing.
As far as I can see the police played right into the hands of this tiny group of dingbats in Toronto by letting them run wild on Saturday smashing windows and giving them patrol cars to burn and then turned around let the frustrated riot cops off the leash to arrest and even beat innocent peaceful protesters. Entire blocks were surrounded by the police in a strategy called "kettling" in which they seal off an area and arrest everyone in it, protesters, reporters, residents - anyone and everyone on the street. This is a violation of the constitution. Add to that the Ontario government passing last minute laws of dubious constitutionality, in secret no less, and the Toronto police chief adding his own illegal addendums and lying about what the law allowed his officers to do and you a have the results of the G20 on Canada. Previous use of agent provocateurs by the police, such at the Montebello summit two summers ago, have lead to a situation where anytime the there is violence of this nature at a major event, there will always be some question of whether the police were involved. Public trust in the police has been drastically eroded, and not without cause. And THAT is what the anarchists really want.
In that sense, the Black Bloc were very successful. The police - who bragged they had infiltrated the group prior to the summit - did nothing to stop them, but fueled their antics by giving them free rein on Saturday and then used the damage they could have and should have stopped to justify an unconstitutional, heavy-handed response the rest of the weekend and as an object lesson to defend the ridiculous amount of money spent on security.
For the most part the television media lapped it up--pictures of burning police cars were all over the news and no one initially questioned any statement the police made.
One of your favorite journalists, Christie Blatchford, has been pushing this emotional story from Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair about how the black bloc protesters disrupted the repatriation ceremony in Toronto for a Canadian soldier killed in Afghanistan. Except that video taken at the event shows absolutely no indication of any kind of disruption occurring. This further erodes the credibilty of both the police and the mainstream press -- another win for the forces of stupid black bloc anarchist wannabe revolutionaries.
I am not a fan of the black bloc hooligans by any means at all. I think they are dangerous, have no agenda except breaking the system and offer no alternatives. Mostly, I think they are bunch of self-important grandstanding assholes and petty vandals. They consider themselves revolutionaries and the job of a revolutionary is to provoke a response by the state, to get them to crack down on the population and thereby provoke antigovernment sentiment and expand support for the revolution. This only works if the state panics and gives the revolutionaries what the want by cracking down and pissing people off -- and that is what happened in Toronto this weekend.

If the cops had just done their job instead of playing PR and political games to serve their own ends, there would be about 50 of the Black Bloc  in jail for variations on the charge of aggravated jackassery, most of them with scrapes and bruises, the rest of the weekend would have gone smoothly and we'd be talking about how badly the government overspent on the summits. Instead, the police and government have sowed the seeds of increasing public distrust in authority and undermined the foundations of civil society--which is just what the Block Bloc wants.

Men in black - Maple Syrup Revolution podcast

Dave of the Galloping Beaver guest stars with me on the Maple Syrup Revolution as we spend a full hour discussing what the heck happened in Toronto and why. Then I go and get all sentimental about my homeland.

This week the Maple Syrup Revolution is having a Two-for-One sale in honor of Canada Day, so get over there and download all the punditry you can stand.

Like this?

 Canada spent about a billion dollars on the G8/G20 summits and had an army of 20,000 cops on call with sound cannons, rubber bullets, pepper spray, tear gas, clubs, shields, body armour, horses, firehoses and everything else short of frickin' laser beams and yet couldn't stop 100 skinny little punks in black bandanas and hoodies -- a group they claimed to have infiltrated prior to the summits. (some might argue they had infiltrated them during the summit too)  Not only did they have the gear and manpower, they were even willing to completely make up imaginary laws to allow them to violate the rights of anyone they wanted to. Now it comes out that the cops were told to stand down on Saturday when the black bloc douchebags were having their little tantrum on Younge Street.

The conservative take on this whole thing has been to tar all the protesters with the same brush and blame the thousands of non-violent demonstrators who were exercising their rights as citizen for not doing the police force's job for them and physically confronting and stopping the terrifying masked anarchists on their own.

Like this guy did.

 

More here