Because many people unfortunately don't bother to read articles and merely check comments, the relevant section:
"HC is a highly regulated toxin, labeled as a “likely carcinogen” and skin irritant by the Environmental Protection Agency. Eye masks and gloves are recommended for people who handle the chemical. Defense Technologies, an imprint of Pennsylvania-based security equipment manufacturer Safariland, markets the HC canisters as “military-style” smokers, even though the U.S. military actually stopped using HC in grenades in the 1990s due to its extreme toxicity.
Activists are more concerned about the chemicals that leave the canister than those packed inside it. Firing an HC grenade triggers a two-stage reaction in which the chlorine in HC rapidly combines with metallic zinc, resulting in zinc chloride, a toxic metal fume that appears as a greenish-white smoke. “It’s a chemical reaction in a can,” says Simonis. “The zinc chloride is an intentional product of the grenade’s design.” The Material Safety Data Sheet supplied by Safariland, however, doesn’t mention zinc chloride at all.
Gaseous zinc chloride, also known as hexite, is more than an alternative type of tear gas. Because it contains the super-hot gaseous forms of both chloride ions and zinc, a heavy metal, hexite plumes are highly mobile and extremely dangerous to most forms of life. The chloride ions increase the uptake of zinc particles by exposed cells on the skin or mucous membranes. Zinc can accumulate in tissues and organs, then mobilize later and cause a new set of symptoms. The most striking effects of zinc chloride toxicity in the street — vomiting, burning skin, coughing — are only the first onslaught of a chronic, unpredictable respiratory condition that can cause severe liver damage, fatigue, weight loss, and anorexia, in addition to difficulty breathing.
Zinc toxicity sharply contrasts with the effects of tear gas, which tend to be excruciating but short-lived, with dangerous exceptions. “[Conventional tear gas] causes pain through a specific mechanism,” says B. Zane Horowitz, PhD, an emergency toxicologist in the Portland area and author of a recent op-ed decrying the city’s use of tear gas on protesters in the journal Toxicology Communications. Tear gas shorts the nervous system’s pain response, essentially creating the experience of pain without doing lasting damage — most of the time. Still, says Horowitz, “There’s no reason to have pain inflicted on you if you haven’t done anything wrong.”
Seems like some war crime style agent orange kinda stuff to me. Why not just spray asbestos into the air instead.
Using chemical weapons is already a war crime, so governments just decided that the chemical weapons they use on their own people are not chemical weapons. Tear Gas was the first chemical weapon used in World War I:
The classification of war crimes just doesn't have much to do with what's needed in the context of domestic policing. Hollow-point bullets are the canonical example; they're illegal in war but required for police, because the fully jacketed bullets used in war are much more likely to hurt bystanders.
The military can't use tear gas on the battlefield; military police can use tear gas against rioting soldiers and sailors. Soldiers can't use hollow point bullets even in those calibers, like 7.62x51mm, where that is by far the most common type of bullet used by civilians because of its effectiveness in hunting; but police use hollow point bullets all the time, in part because they are more effective against unarmored targets (though less effective against armored ones) and in part because they are much less likely to pass through a wall and strike someone the officer can't see.
These differences are not due to governments deciding that tear gas is not a chemical weapon or that hollow point bullets are not hollow point bullets, but rather because the laws of war apply in war and not elsewhere.
If you were serious about the war crimes thing, you'd have to acknowledge the Antifa and BLM committed war crimes by not having uniforms and clear insignia and by not distinguishing between civilians and non-civilian property when destroying things during their raids. There is no such thing as a body of law that applies to only one side. Talking about war crimes in this context really is disinformation: it confuses what those laws are about as well as the difference between international and domestic jurisdiction.
As far as I understand it the ban on using tear gas in war is less about morality and more about preventing escalation into use of other chemical weapons in reprisal attacks.
As a practical matter, many countries published doctrine restricting the use of tear gas and other riot control agents as a result of the Geneva Gas Protocol of 1925. The language of the protocol is very general: "Whereas the use in war of asphyxiating, poisonous or any other gases, and of all analogous liquids, materials or devices, has been justly condemned by the general opinion of the civilized world..."
It is probably this very general language that lead to the restriction of riot agents. Although they do not kill by poisoning or kill by asphyxiation, their method of operation certainly involves some combination of poisoning and asphyxiation.
The USA has tended to hold that riot agents are not what is technically called a method of warfare because they produce "...merely transient effects...", and thus do not technically fall under the terms of the protocol, but has also long held that they are not authorized for general use, either. Per a field manual from 1956:
It is the position of the United States that the Geneva [Gas] Protocol of 1925 does not prohibit the use in war of … riot control agents, which are those agents of a type widely used by governments for law enforcement purposes because they produce, in all but the most unusual circumstances, merely transient effects that disappear within minutes after exposure to the agent has terminated. In this connection, however, the United States has unilaterally renounced, as a matter of national policy, certain uses in war of … riot control agents. The policy and provisions of Executive Order No. 11850 do not, however, prohibit or restrict the use of … riot control agents by US armed forces either (1) as retaliation in kind during armed conflict or (2) in situations when the United States is not engaged in armed conflict. Any use in armed conflict of … riot control agents, however, requires Presidential approval in advance.
In Vietnam, riot agents nevertheless saw very wide application.
How does what you're saying make any sense to you?
Using non-lethal weapons like tear gas is not a lower standard of morality. Nor is using bullets that are less likely to pass through the intended target or the surroundings.
Military personnel are not actually held to a very low standard -- much lower than police -- when they are fighting unlawful combatants like citizens, because people who are not fighting as military personnel enjoy no or almost no protections under the laws of war.
Trying to draw a parallel here with the laws of war is silly.
None of these are non-lethal. They're less lethal. They still kill people. They still maim people.
But since many people share your view - that they're non-lethal and thus morally superior - these less lethal means are used frequently, and often inappropriately, when the use of force is not justified.
The parallel is clear: government funded and backed forces equipped with military gear, using military-developed weapons (chemical, sound, light, physical); some of which are restricted by international convention during war.
And there will be no trials to hold people accountable for mis-using these weapons; as pointed out in the article, the government is actively blocking such attempts.
Invoking the laws of war with reference to Portland doesn't make any sense unless you really believe that Antifa and BLM fall under the category of enemy combatants, which would mean that the government funded and backed forces were authorized to shoot them on sight.
It's not because there is tear gas that police are sent to disperse crowds. Without tear gas, they'd use some other non-lethal implement authorized for that purpose. Authorizing non-lethal force to disperse crowds is not holding police to a lower moral standard than that to which the military is held.
In fact, the military has the same kind of authorizations for dealing with (a) rebellious troops in its own ranks, (b) prisoners of war and (c) civilians in occupied territory. That is why the DoD does research on these incapacitating weapons. It's military forces that are held to police standards when these weapons are used, not the other way around.
> These differences are not due to governments deciding that tear gas is not a chemical weapon or that hollow point bullets are not hollow point bullets, but rather because the laws of war apply in war and not elsewhere.
This is a distinction without a difference. The fact that the media routinely reports things like “cops dispersed protestors using tear gas” and not “attacked them with chemical weapons“ demonstrates that this is also just ideological sophistry by those using the weapons.
A mask with a filter will help but it needs to be the right kind of filter and a mask with a good seal. Having that mask might make you a more likely target for police action, they don't like seeing people show up with masks or shields.
A bit unrelated, but a few weeks ago, I was watching some videos and reading related to disastrous industrial chemical spills, the incredible mess how they wound up in the environment, the effects they had on the population, and the seemingly incredibly long time it took for proper responses. I later on took a look at some of the former EPA superfund sites near me and out of curiosity started reading about the various contaminants and the history of the sites. Scary what multi-generational effects some of that crap can have and it could be very close to you.
It might be naive, but I would have expected that there is some approval process for stuff like that. It's an inherently dangerous thing to incapacitate people without harming them. An example of how this went horribly wrong was the Moscow hostage crisis, where a gas designed to incapacitate people ended up killing a lot of them.
I don't see any acceptable reason to introduce new agents here unless they are properly studied and considered less harmful than the existing ones.
In many cases the departments run out of their existing stock of the normal stuff and will either use old expired canisters or just use whatever they can get their hands on. Many departments were not prepared for the amount of unrest they saw this year.
> “It’s a chemical reaction in a can,” says Simonis. “The zinc chloride is an intentional product of the grenade’s design.” The Material Safety Data Sheet supplied by Safariland, however, doesn’t mention zinc chloride at all.
This is like (spoiler / 37 year old movie) in Superman 3 when he defeats the AI baddie because it determined the can of acid he was holding was harmless.
"The federal government’s refusal to cooperate with chemical weapons legislation and local lawmakers has further hampered research by CWRC and BES. Federal troops have erected an illegal barricade around the Mark O. Hatfield Courthouse and have refused to allow BES to test the storm drain inside the site, despite the city’s threat to levy a $20,000 penalty against the federal government for every day the barricade stands after September 10."
Using illegal weapons, refusing to follow the law, illegally blocking the collection of evidence, all in the name of Law and Order. What are the odds anyone who injured someone with this illegally-used toxin will face any repercussions?
Justifying this really requires psychopathic cynicism or some serious doublethink.
I believe this would be a valid use case for the National Guard. They should be able to remove any barricades in their state. Someone please correct me if I am wrong.
"Another method is when the federal government activates the Guard in what is called Title 10 status—that is what is meant by “federalizing” the Guard. The federal government pays, and activated Guard units are placed under the control of the secretary of defense and the president, with an active-duty military officer in the chain of command."
Oh I see, according to wikipedia, in 2006 the laws changed. The Federal government gave themselves power to control the state organized militias. That is intriguing, as there have been arguments in the past against non government funded militias being required, due to the existence of the National Guard making them redundant. In that case, the states have been rendered defenseless against the Federal government.
Political capital. A large part of the US population supports this. I'm reminded of an interview with a Kent State protestor. After going home unharmed she witnessed her father react to the news reports: "damn hippies should all be shot". That attitude, the dehumanization of young people and fear of public protest, remain alive and well today.
I don't care where you are politically. But if this doesn't terrify you then what will?
Does the state ever have justification to do this to the people it's supposed to be representing?
At what point are you going to realize tomorrow it might be you at the receiving end for this?
This isn't a Trump or Biden issue either. This was authorized by a Democrat. Biden winning the election doesn't mean this won't happen again. It only means this will happen but there will be more diversity in the officials that authorize it.
It wasn't the state. The governor and mayor were complaining. What I don't understand is why the governor didn't call up the national guard to kill the federal bully boys.
"At what point are you going to realize tomorrow it might be you at the receiving end for this?"
- April 1993. When the three letter agencies killed a bunch of white christian kids with CS gas then killed their parents with fire on live TV.
The senate hearings when they were scolded for it, should of been the end of these practices. Many people watched that on HBO.
There's been a lot of tomorrows since then.
The point is, people are supposed to be terrified. When the Justice employees say move and they have weapons, they mean move. We should all know what happens when you don't at this point.
Was using poison gas a significant factor in preventing more killings? Did it help arrest Reinoehl, and bring him to trial so he could be found guilty in a court of law and be punished appropriately? Aren't the protestors supposed to be the "unlawful" ones?
You must have just awoken from a cryogenic sleep if you still think Charlottesville was a significant incident after all the violence that occurred over the summer.
Just to give some context: huge volumes of variants of these products were used this summer in Portland. We're talking enough to reduce visibility to 10 feet over several block areas.
This was blocked by a court order, which was skirted by the local police department soliciting the irregular fed squad to do so instead. The feds were overstepping their jurisdiction in doing this outside of the very narrow perimeter of the ICE facility and fed court house, but in the current environment the proper legal channels to address this are willfully deaf.
One of the more reprehensible tactics the police bureau used was to deliberately kettle and push protestors down residential streets, delivering massive amounts of gas as they did so. This resulted in children trapped in their homes unable to escape the gas as well.
What happened in my town this summer should alarm everyone, no matter your political creed.
It doesn't alarm auth-right authoritarian bootlickers. What's alarming to the rest of us is just how many of our "friends" and families actually fall into that camp.
Ok, let's burn some karma. This is a question of lesser of two evils, or ends justifying the means. Not everyone agrees with the far left (the faction doing most of the rioting); being from an ex-socialist country I quite literally, not exaggerating, think they are morally equivalent to nazis. I think the US constitution really needs a "self-protection" amendment that would remove the first amendment protection for an enumerated list of ideologies explicitly hostile to the rights that it gives (free speech itself, freedom of/from religion, due process, to some extent racial/gender equality/private property/gun rights, etc.), then make them a crime and throw anyone marching with a hammer and sickle (or swastika) in jail; but you don't need to go that far to think roughing up rioters is justified as a deterrent. Kinda like shooting a burglar in your house is a justifiable self-defense, although shooting a burglar who is running away is not.
Completely detached from the more serious matters described in the article, I thought I had read that we should refer to they/them the same was we refer to "you". But this is the first time I've noticed this formulation:
>[...] whose pronouns are they/them, [...] Simonis, who is also [...]
I guess my brain had trained me to expect "who are" rather than "who is". But apparently "they is" is acceptable? Or was this a mistake in the article?
@minikites I didn't flag your post but this is clearly a politically charged and potentially biased article that has little to do with HN or its core demographic.
Here's the relevant rule from the guidelines:
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Using expertise and scientific tests on an unknown object to determine what it is and uncover a contemporary conspiracy? That gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
From this article and a one a month back(0). Simonis seems to have some major bias against law enforcement. As they participated on one side of the protest (not as am independent watcher) and even got arrested at the protest.
Regardless of that, what percentage of the gas canisters where HC?
To say that the protesters where completely peaceful and didn't deserve anything is really dishonest. I am not saying that the officers were completely peaceful either.
Straw man from the article made me question the intent of the study.
“The degree to which law enforcement believes Black lives do not matter is shown by their willingness to use known toxic hazardous waste chemicals indiscriminately,” Simonis says. “Now I don’t go around the feds without a gas mask.”
This has bothered me for a long time and the fact it still drags on blows my mind. Predominantly white protesters in Portland misappropriated protests over racial inequality for their own disphoric amalgamation of social issues. There's little agreement among them about the goal of the protests or even why they're protesting. I know many of those people. Many have no idea why they're there, it's just drama to them, something they can do in the face of the most socially regressive times of our generation. On the other side people see this, point and say, "See? Told you I was right about those people."
Nobody seems to give a shit about issues racial minorities and poor face, in the same breath ravenously supporting covid policies and their unprecedented impacts on income and social inequality along mostly racial lines. I'm surprised they aren't chanting, "black lives are essential."
This is not helpful for racial equality. It's not helpful for anybody except the psychopathic industry of military oppression of civilian populations. Of course they're walking all over our social contracts, the continued protests have opened the door for them.
Disruption of systematic inequality is needed, but this ain't the way it's going to happen. As a privileged work-from-homer, white person, whatever, our first obligation is to listen to what racial minorities are saying to understand the nature their struggles. Otherwise you can tell yourself you're a virtuous champion of wokeness, but you're really just a part of the same problem.
Did you just imply that it's racist to support face mask requirements and mandatory stay-at-home orders? Is it racist to support legislation against drunk driving? Against firing guns into the air? Against throwing objects out of cars and off overpasses?
Stay at home orders are selective. Focused primarily on industries and jobs where minorities overwhelmingly find themselves. School closures favor children from households that can afford a computer for each child; requiring a parent to stay home, namely a responsibility falling upon women who are dropping out of the workplace at an unprecedented rate. So what then happens to those households who don't have that privilege? Do you care?
The people paying the cost of public health are children, women, poor, and minorities.
Meanwhile I haven't given anything up, so it's very easy for people like us to sit here while earning our full income from home and say, "Yes, this makes sense. It is totally worth it." It's worth it to us because we aren't paying the cost. These stay at home orders and quarantines have overwhelmingly and profoundly impacted people who were already struggling without offering them a path forward. Rest assured the economic uncertainty from shut down was a catalyst behind the BLM protests. The people impacted by shut down are predominantly poor and minorities, and the fact we haven't considered how to share that burden before stabbing in the dark is what makes them racist.
At the global level, malaria kills almost a million people every single year, mostly children under 4. There's no herd immunity and it has and will continue to happen for decades. The WHO anticipates due to new covid travel restrictions on malaria relief workers an additional 3 to 4 hundred thousand deaths due to malaria will occur in Sub Sahara Africa alone. Surely malaria is a pandemic that shadows covid by any measure, except the measure where it overwhelmingly affects poor black people. Meanwhile the second our society is faced with something which mostly kills old white people, the average age of which exceeds the average human lifespan, we're cancelling school and creating a generation of illiterate 2nd grade children while their parents are left with no way to feed them.
So yeah the reaction to covid has been first and foremost selfish, and given the government is a historic institution of race, these orders are themselves the children of our racism.
It's sometimes hard to separate out things that are heartless, in that they primarily affect poor people, from things that are racist, largely because of racial inequalities that do exist and persist because of a history of systemic racism. I agree that poor people are hit the hardest by these measures, but they would also be hit the hardest if the disease were allow to run rampant. I don't like playing the death-counting game, but we've had 1.6 million COVID deaths with countermeasures in place; that might have been 10 times higher with no restrictions at all, as you seem to advocate for. So your 400,000 extra malaria deaths, while absolutely devastating to think about, still pales compared to a potential 10 million lives saved from these measures, plus 100 million more with long-term debilitating effects. I have never cared nor considered what color of skin the dying have and I will never accept being called racist for wanting to save 10 million lives.
Every analysis shows that however much restrictions hurt the economy, letting the disease just run rampant and overwhelm the medical system of every country in the world at once would hurt it much more. If every government had taken decisive action and forced (yes, forced) people to self-isolate for three weeks, this would have been over in March and poor people could have gone back to sending their kids to school and health workers could have gone back to helping stop malaria in Africa. But we didn't, because of our all-important freedom to harm others, and because of people like you who dare to call us racist for even trying.
You're right that it sucks being poor. It's awful. It's unconscionable how we treat our poor. I hoped that COVID would come with a silver lining where we could start really trying Basic Income on a country scale and seeing how it (almost certainly) works wonders. Maybe it still will help people understand that governments are actually capable of helping people.
How much zinc oxide do the hexachloroethane grenades release? Zinc oxide is extremely toxic and results in symptoms known as "metal fume fever." You only need a tiny amount of exposure - I once got sick from not wearing a respirator when doing a handful of quick spot welds on galvanized metal shelving (thought I could get away with it). All of the criminals involved in this deliberate toxic gassing should be on trial right now.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 166 ms ] thread"HC is a highly regulated toxin, labeled as a “likely carcinogen” and skin irritant by the Environmental Protection Agency. Eye masks and gloves are recommended for people who handle the chemical. Defense Technologies, an imprint of Pennsylvania-based security equipment manufacturer Safariland, markets the HC canisters as “military-style” smokers, even though the U.S. military actually stopped using HC in grenades in the 1990s due to its extreme toxicity.
Activists are more concerned about the chemicals that leave the canister than those packed inside it. Firing an HC grenade triggers a two-stage reaction in which the chlorine in HC rapidly combines with metallic zinc, resulting in zinc chloride, a toxic metal fume that appears as a greenish-white smoke. “It’s a chemical reaction in a can,” says Simonis. “The zinc chloride is an intentional product of the grenade’s design.” The Material Safety Data Sheet supplied by Safariland, however, doesn’t mention zinc chloride at all.
Gaseous zinc chloride, also known as hexite, is more than an alternative type of tear gas. Because it contains the super-hot gaseous forms of both chloride ions and zinc, a heavy metal, hexite plumes are highly mobile and extremely dangerous to most forms of life. The chloride ions increase the uptake of zinc particles by exposed cells on the skin or mucous membranes. Zinc can accumulate in tissues and organs, then mobilize later and cause a new set of symptoms. The most striking effects of zinc chloride toxicity in the street — vomiting, burning skin, coughing — are only the first onslaught of a chronic, unpredictable respiratory condition that can cause severe liver damage, fatigue, weight loss, and anorexia, in addition to difficulty breathing.
Zinc toxicity sharply contrasts with the effects of tear gas, which tend to be excruciating but short-lived, with dangerous exceptions. “[Conventional tear gas] causes pain through a specific mechanism,” says B. Zane Horowitz, PhD, an emergency toxicologist in the Portland area and author of a recent op-ed decrying the city’s use of tear gas on protesters in the journal Toxicology Communications. Tear gas shorts the nervous system’s pain response, essentially creating the experience of pain without doing lasting damage — most of the time. Still, says Horowitz, “There’s no reason to have pain inflicted on you if you haven’t done anything wrong.”
Seems like some war crime style agent orange kinda stuff to me. Why not just spray asbestos into the air instead.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3103718?seq=1
The military can't use tear gas on the battlefield; military police can use tear gas against rioting soldiers and sailors. Soldiers can't use hollow point bullets even in those calibers, like 7.62x51mm, where that is by far the most common type of bullet used by civilians because of its effectiveness in hunting; but police use hollow point bullets all the time, in part because they are more effective against unarmored targets (though less effective against armored ones) and in part because they are much less likely to pass through a wall and strike someone the officer can't see.
These differences are not due to governments deciding that tear gas is not a chemical weapon or that hollow point bullets are not hollow point bullets, but rather because the laws of war apply in war and not elsewhere.
If you were serious about the war crimes thing, you'd have to acknowledge the Antifa and BLM committed war crimes by not having uniforms and clear insignia and by not distinguishing between civilians and non-civilian property when destroying things during their raids. There is no such thing as a body of law that applies to only one side. Talking about war crimes in this context really is disinformation: it confuses what those laws are about as well as the difference between international and domestic jurisdiction.
It is probably this very general language that lead to the restriction of riot agents. Although they do not kill by poisoning or kill by asphyxiation, their method of operation certainly involves some combination of poisoning and asphyxiation.
The USA has tended to hold that riot agents are not what is technically called a method of warfare because they produce "...merely transient effects...", and thus do not technically fall under the terms of the protocol, but has also long held that they are not authorized for general use, either. Per a field manual from 1956:
It is the position of the United States that the Geneva [Gas] Protocol of 1925 does not prohibit the use in war of … riot control agents, which are those agents of a type widely used by governments for law enforcement purposes because they produce, in all but the most unusual circumstances, merely transient effects that disappear within minutes after exposure to the agent has terminated. In this connection, however, the United States has unilaterally renounced, as a matter of national policy, certain uses in war of … riot control agents. The policy and provisions of Executive Order No. 11850 do not, however, prohibit or restrict the use of … riot control agents by US armed forces either (1) as retaliation in kind during armed conflict or (2) in situations when the United States is not engaged in armed conflict. Any use in armed conflict of … riot control agents, however, requires Presidential approval in advance.
In Vietnam, riot agents nevertheless saw very wide application.
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docs/v2_rul...
Using non-lethal weapons like tear gas is not a lower standard of morality. Nor is using bullets that are less likely to pass through the intended target or the surroundings.
Military personnel are not actually held to a very low standard -- much lower than police -- when they are fighting unlawful combatants like citizens, because people who are not fighting as military personnel enjoy no or almost no protections under the laws of war.
Trying to draw a parallel here with the laws of war is silly.
But since many people share your view - that they're non-lethal and thus morally superior - these less lethal means are used frequently, and often inappropriately, when the use of force is not justified.
The parallel is clear: government funded and backed forces equipped with military gear, using military-developed weapons (chemical, sound, light, physical); some of which are restricted by international convention during war.
And there will be no trials to hold people accountable for mis-using these weapons; as pointed out in the article, the government is actively blocking such attempts.
It's not because there is tear gas that police are sent to disperse crowds. Without tear gas, they'd use some other non-lethal implement authorized for that purpose. Authorizing non-lethal force to disperse crowds is not holding police to a lower moral standard than that to which the military is held.
In fact, the military has the same kind of authorizations for dealing with (a) rebellious troops in its own ranks, (b) prisoners of war and (c) civilians in occupied territory. That is why the DoD does research on these incapacitating weapons. It's military forces that are held to police standards when these weapons are used, not the other way around.
This is a distinction without a difference. The fact that the media routinely reports things like “cops dispersed protestors using tear gas” and not “attacked them with chemical weapons“ demonstrates that this is also just ideological sophistry by those using the weapons.
But this is an acceptable answer.
I don't see any acceptable reason to introduce new agents here unless they are properly studied and considered less harmful than the existing ones.
This is like (spoiler / 37 year old movie) in Superman 3 when he defeats the AI baddie because it determined the can of acid he was holding was harmless.
...until he heat-activated it.
Using illegal weapons, refusing to follow the law, illegally blocking the collection of evidence, all in the name of Law and Order. What are the odds anyone who injured someone with this illegally-used toxin will face any repercussions?
Justifying this really requires psychopathic cynicism or some serious doublethink.
"Another method is when the federal government activates the Guard in what is called Title 10 status—that is what is meant by “federalizing” the Guard. The federal government pays, and activated Guard units are placed under the control of the secretary of defense and the president, with an active-duty military officer in the chain of command."
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/right-way-...
Who's part of the next layer? State police?
Does the state ever have justification to do this to the people it's supposed to be representing?
At what point are you going to realize tomorrow it might be you at the receiving end for this?
This isn't a Trump or Biden issue either. This was authorized by a Democrat. Biden winning the election doesn't mean this won't happen again. It only means this will happen but there will be more diversity in the officials that authorize it.
- April 1993. When the three letter agencies killed a bunch of white christian kids with CS gas then killed their parents with fire on live TV.
The senate hearings when they were scolded for it, should of been the end of these practices. Many people watched that on HBO.
There's been a lot of tomorrows since then.
The point is, people are supposed to be terrified. When the Justice employees say move and they have weapons, they mean move. We should all know what happens when you don't at this point.
This was blocked by a court order, which was skirted by the local police department soliciting the irregular fed squad to do so instead. The feds were overstepping their jurisdiction in doing this outside of the very narrow perimeter of the ICE facility and fed court house, but in the current environment the proper legal channels to address this are willfully deaf.
One of the more reprehensible tactics the police bureau used was to deliberately kettle and push protestors down residential streets, delivering massive amounts of gas as they did so. This resulted in children trapped in their homes unable to escape the gas as well.
What happened in my town this summer should alarm everyone, no matter your political creed.
>[...] whose pronouns are they/them, [...] Simonis, who is also [...]
I guess my brain had trained me to expect "who are" rather than "who is". But apparently "they is" is acceptable? Or was this a mistake in the article?
For my part, I think it's fine to say "they are" for a singular person, but "who" should stay singular.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Regardless of that, what percentage of the gas canisters where HC?
To say that the protesters where completely peaceful and didn't deserve anything is really dishonest. I am not saying that the officers were completely peaceful either.
Straw man from the article made me question the intent of the study.
“The degree to which law enforcement believes Black lives do not matter is shown by their willingness to use known toxic hazardous waste chemicals indiscriminately,” Simonis says. “Now I don’t go around the feds without a gas mask.”
0:https://pamplinmedia.com/scc/103-news/485705-390928-highly-t...
This is not helpful for racial equality. It's not helpful for anybody except the psychopathic industry of military oppression of civilian populations. Of course they're walking all over our social contracts, the continued protests have opened the door for them.
Disruption of systematic inequality is needed, but this ain't the way it's going to happen. As a privileged work-from-homer, white person, whatever, our first obligation is to listen to what racial minorities are saying to understand the nature their struggles. Otherwise you can tell yourself you're a virtuous champion of wokeness, but you're really just a part of the same problem.
Meanwhile I haven't given anything up, so it's very easy for people like us to sit here while earning our full income from home and say, "Yes, this makes sense. It is totally worth it." It's worth it to us because we aren't paying the cost. These stay at home orders and quarantines have overwhelmingly and profoundly impacted people who were already struggling without offering them a path forward. Rest assured the economic uncertainty from shut down was a catalyst behind the BLM protests. The people impacted by shut down are predominantly poor and minorities, and the fact we haven't considered how to share that burden before stabbing in the dark is what makes them racist.
At the global level, malaria kills almost a million people every single year, mostly children under 4. There's no herd immunity and it has and will continue to happen for decades. The WHO anticipates due to new covid travel restrictions on malaria relief workers an additional 3 to 4 hundred thousand deaths due to malaria will occur in Sub Sahara Africa alone. Surely malaria is a pandemic that shadows covid by any measure, except the measure where it overwhelmingly affects poor black people. Meanwhile the second our society is faced with something which mostly kills old white people, the average age of which exceeds the average human lifespan, we're cancelling school and creating a generation of illiterate 2nd grade children while their parents are left with no way to feed them.
So yeah the reaction to covid has been first and foremost selfish, and given the government is a historic institution of race, these orders are themselves the children of our racism.
Every analysis shows that however much restrictions hurt the economy, letting the disease just run rampant and overwhelm the medical system of every country in the world at once would hurt it much more. If every government had taken decisive action and forced (yes, forced) people to self-isolate for three weeks, this would have been over in March and poor people could have gone back to sending their kids to school and health workers could have gone back to helping stop malaria in Africa. But we didn't, because of our all-important freedom to harm others, and because of people like you who dare to call us racist for even trying.
You're right that it sucks being poor. It's awful. It's unconscionable how we treat our poor. I hoped that COVID would come with a silver lining where we could start really trying Basic Income on a country scale and seeing how it (almost certainly) works wonders. Maybe it still will help people understand that governments are actually capable of helping people.