zlacker

>>js2+(OP)
> Political protests are a threat to the order of this system

The quality of journalism for NPR has gone downhill so much.

A real "protest" is inherently violent. Your are encouraging the state to use it's monopoly of force against you. Your goal is to ensure that others see the state using force needlessly against you. When others see others using violence against you they begin to reconsider the conditions that put you into this situation to begin with.

So using the police as a tool against protesters only proves them right. A protest should never be met with violence, unless you want to encourage more action from protestors.

In other words the police are the wrong tool for the job. The police absolutely should not be involved in protests. This is a great job for social workers.

Riots on the other hand should be met with police action. However, if you have a riot then that means you didn't hear the demands of the people to begin with. If you make it to a full blown riot you have MESSED UP.

The whole philosophy behind protests is really easy to understand. Spend a bit of time reading Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau, a little Ghandi and then you start with a lot of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X to understand the philosophies behind American protests.

>>blueda+z9
Riots on the other hand should be met with police action. However, if you have a riot then that means you didn't hear the demands of the people to begin with. If you make it to a full blown riot you have MESSED UP.

Not necessarily. Riots can begin when bad actors take advantage of the cover of numbers provided by a peaceful protest. If there are enough bad actors, usually masquerading as peaceful protesters, to reach critical mass, then a riot can start.

All it takes is for one person to break a window to signal to the other bad actors that the riot is about to begin. This piece by Tanner Greer [1] examines the phenomenon in way more detail than I do here.

[1] https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2020/05/on-days-of-disor...

>>chongl+4b
I can see your point. However, I don't think that the full force of violence for the entire crowd is necessary.

What if we saw a bad actor at a rally for a politician, and then bring the full force of the state upon the entire crowd because of that bad actor. It would be absurd to use that opportunity to mace and teargas and shoot rubber bullets to disperse the crowd. It is equally absurd to do the same here in political protests.