I'm an Indiana University alum and my dad was a professor there. During the protests there, they had a fucking sniper on the roof. The protests were in a park next to the student union which had been used for protests since the Vietnam War. I was there in middle school in a shanty that was protesting the 1990s Gulf War. Now the new semester has started and there's a chain link fence around the whole thing.
The president just got a raise.
Makes me fucking sick.
Here's the sniper:
I used to climb up to that roof where that sniper is with friends when I was in high school to smoke weed, so that was a trip to see.
"to escalate its warfare on its students"
Yep, my mind doesn't understand this phrase at all.
The french gendarmerie recently received a new vehicle, it's a tank equipped with a machine gun and 40mm grenade launcher. They're deployed in our colony, Caledonia, to enforce an apartheid. They were also used against ecology protesters recently. Last year, a racist cop murdering a kip sparked revolts, anti-terorism units were deployed and shot kids with 12 gauge shotguns. It's not just america, the rich and powerful are at war with the people everywhere.
Insanity
All paid by every increasing tuition
PR rules the world. Can’t allow free speech and protest if it might draw attention.
Better to show overwhelming military force on domestic college students at the first sign of protest. Keep it from spreading.
UC Merced annual training required only 7 rounds, while UC San Francisco used 7000 and UC Santa Barbara used 9000 🤔
Shoutout to UC Davis for having the only police department on the list who "did not use any military equipment during this timeframe".
For some reason the linked PDF varies from the screenshot in several ways, though most of the numbers are the same. (UC Riverside's number of rounds of .556-range ammunition used in training is 3000 in the screenshot but 6000 in the PDF now.)
I was curious how much this launcher costs:
... over here I see this glorified paintball gun is normally $2400 but currently on sale for just $1850.
Fucking excuse me?
LRAD is some fucked up shit, btw. (Part of the large family of sonic weapons)
An LRAD can thus emit a targeted "beam" of sound at very high volume, up to 160 dB at one meter from the device. This is louder than standing behind a jet engine taking off, or a nearby gunshot.[2]
Jesus, a fucking LRAD? Those things are NASTY
This was the second act of Shion Sono’s movie “Tag,” yeah?
This is the process of excessive liberality turning into excessive authority, and relates to what Republicans react to (with equally excessive zeal) by calling democrats fascist.
Democrats are not (necessarily) fascists. Republicans are not (necessarily) nazis. But the problematic tendencies of the extremes of the parties aren't resolved by going more extremely partisan and authoritarian.
Tbf though this is non-lethal stuff. And I don't know that much about American police, but maybe it's not such a bad idea universities don't let them handle crowd control? I hear they don't have the best track record.
(I get that in an ideal world universities shouldn't arm themselves against their students, but come on, Jeff from the economics department is a real douchebag, and ever since he has been hanging around with those extremists he is becoming more and more unhinged)
What people in this thread are missing or ignoring:
- The University of California is known for being a place for political protests
- These protests do not always stay peaceful
- These protests are not always primarily student-run or consisting of students
All combinations have happened. Peaceful student-run protests with overreactive police. Violent non-student protests with police doing their job to control things. And everything in between.
