whoops no this is UC Davis in 2011. the cop pepper spraying these nonviolent student protestors filed for worker’s compensation claiming “psychiatric damage” due to having his name released and won more than $38k USD in compensation.

  • iridaniotter [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    2 years ago

    Please be careful about posting this where Americans can see. The regime will lower their credit score and they’ll be barred from buying a house.

  • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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    2 years ago

    For anyone who wasn’t around, this was I think during Occupy (the social movement demanding economic reforms in the wake of the 2007 economic collapse. Obama said “lol no” and crushed it with overwhelming force". Those kids were just sitting on the sidewalk doing ineffectual nonviolence stuff. The cop just walked back and forth down the line spraying them in the face over and over. UC Davis caught a lot of flack for basically torturing students for having the gall to ask for simple reforms but nothing really changed. Probably seems quaint given the escalation of police violence in the last decade.

  • NaibofTabr@infosec.pub
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    2 years ago

    I’m sorry, you are right that there is oppression in the US, but to suggest that this incident is somehow equivalent to the Tiananmen Square Massacre, where people were run over with tanks, and their remains hosed down the street drains, is absolutely disgusting.

    The term “false equivalence” doesn’t even begin to describe this. The disrespect for what happened is so reprehensible that it completely invalidates any point you might be trying to make. People died in Tiananmen Square.

      • alcoholicorn [comrade/them, doe/deer]@hexbear.net
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        2 years ago

        Note, those tanks are leaving the square.

        According to the western narrative, those tanks just spent hours gunning down unarmed protesters, then crushing their corpses into liquid.

        And then stop to argue with a single dude trying to block them from leaving.

    • emizeko [they/them]@hexbear.netOP
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      2 years ago

      people were run over with tanks, and their remains hosed down the street drains

      no they weren’t. about 300 people died in clashes outside the square, more than half of which were PLA and police.

      The Myth of Tiananmen and the price of a passive press | Columbia Journalism Review

      The Tian’anmen Square ‘Massacre’: The West’s Most Persuasive, Most Pervasive Lie. | Mango Press

      https://www.qiaocollective.com/education/tiananmenreadinglist

        • emizeko [they/them]@hexbear.netOP
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          2 years ago

          responding to the Columbia Journalism Review article (by the WaPo’s Beijing bureau chief who was in the square) with an unsourced tone poem inspired by Jorjor Well, you don’t look like a shit-eating clown at all

          The actual content of the utterance as it spills out is no more complex or nuanced than “China Bad,” and the elementary mistakes people make when they write out statements of “solidarity” make that much clear. This is not a complaint that these people have not studied China enough — there’s no reason to expect them to study China, and retrospectively I think to some extent it was a mistake to personally have spent so much time trying to teach them. It’s instead an acknowledgment that they are eagerly wielding the accusation like a club, that they are in reality unconcerned with its truth-content, because it serves a social purpose.

          What is this social purpose? Westerners want to believe that other places are worse off, exactly how Americans and Canadians perennially flatter themselves by attacking each others’ decaying health-care systems, or how a divorcee might fantasize that their ex-lover’s blooming love-life is secretly miserable. This kind of “crab mentality” is actually a sophisticated coping mechanism suitable for an environment in which no other course of action seems viable. Cognitive dissonance, the kind that eventually spurs one into becoming intolerant of the status quo and into action, is initially unpleasant and scary for everybody. In this way, we can begin to understand the benefit that “victims” of propaganda derive from carelessly “spreading awareness.” Their efforts feed an ambient propaganda haze of controversy and scandal and wariness that suffocates any painful optimism (or jealousy) and ensuing sense of duty one might otherwise feel from a casual glance at the amazing things happening elsewhere. People aren’t “falling” for atrocity propaganda; they’re eagerly seeking it out, like a soothing balm.

          https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/