Posts by Paul Campbell
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well our cops (usually) aren't armed .... I guess that claiming you meant to pull your taser and you pulled your pistol instead is probably becoming more plausible this year
(even if people have pics of you already holding your taser minutes before you claimed you pulled it)
I've been involved in a lot of demonstrations over the years - 3/4 of a million against the Iraq war for example - the '81 tour in NZ, .... one thing I'll say for US crowds - there's an awful lot of pent up hostility and anger, things can suddenly turn nasty in a way that I've never seen happen in NZ - we're so much more 'civilised', (mind you I wasn't in Auckland that last day in '81) - on the other hand I've been beaten by the NZ police but not by any US ones.
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I should add that friends with businesses in Oakland are closing right now, battening down the hatches (literally), standing guard, arming themselves (one has her chainsaw out, it's the only thing she has, I've implored her to put it away) ... the problem is that if the cops show up in force it will all turn to (even more) custard
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Ok - not a happy nice Friday thing - this news (caution: video shows someone being shot in the back and killed) has my back up.
I lived in Oakland for more than a decade, it's still home and to see it facing riots today leaves me horribly conflicted - trying the case with an all-white LA jury just so reeks of Rodney King - I was in the streets for those riots I remember the anger and understand it - but then again there's no reason to destroy our neighbour's homes and shops and cars - no one wins when that happens
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sadly yes
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the Dunedin City Council's web site handles all this quite cleanly, they explicitly allow linking:
Links to our pages must clearly reveal that they belong to our site. Representing our pages in subframes is prohibited.
The subframes thing is so that they don't get misrepresented which I think is fair.
My main issues with the DCC pages is the content (or lack there of)
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Bet you never had to go through the whole prep for a colonoscopy only to be told by the hospital that they made a mistake and you didn't need one after all. How we all laughed!
well actually it was from the other end - they'd found my humungo giant gall stone the day before (you go and sit, the only guy with all the pregnant women, waiting for an ultrasound...) and decided to do it anyway just in case
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damn my konqueror accesses just don't rate I guess - or do I show just up as safari (a distant descendent via webkit)
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Re: chants while marching
There are lots of reasons for chanting while marching, sure you have a message you want to get across - yelling "Amandla!" in '81 didn't mean much to most NZers at the time, but to South Africans with their brand new television system it meant a lot if it made it across. "2 4 6 8, we don't want your racist state" actually did mean a lot to Maori at the time and let a 1000 flowers bloom.
But there are other reasons I've seen for chanting, coming into the Exchange in Dunedin the echoes from the buildings were so great that people just started chanting louder to hear their voices come back, in a pro-choice demonstration in San Francisco we broke into a spontaneous "we're here, we're queer, we're not going shopping" (followed by a host of giggles) just to freak out the tourists at the base of the cable cars and to get their attention, and when defending clinics across the bay from there our chants helped us keep ourselves together as we had the crap beaten out of us by by the opposition.
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no, waterlilies
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But it's a really nice umbrella with a lovely impressionist print on it .....