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UC Davis Police Pepper Spray Incident - Occupy Protesters

A group of protesters seated on the ground at the University of California were pepper-sprayed point blank by police in riot gear on Friday.

Some were hospitalized after being sprayed directly in the face, including one who was coughing up blood afterwards.

Some of the victims were seen with their faces coated with the orange substance.

Another angle:

LA Times: UC Davis chief launches probe into pepper-spraying of Occupy protes...

"As some faculty members called for her ouster, the chancellor of UC Davis launched an inquiry Saturday into the pepper-spraying of apparently peaceful Occupy Davis protesters by campus police.

A video of the Friday incident that went viral on the Web showed a police officer dousing the protesters with a canister of pepper spray as they sat huddled on the ground. The police had been attempting to clear the university's Quad of tents and campers."

Tags: brutality, occupy, pepper, pepper spray, protest, wall street

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Permalink Reply by Paul Davis on November 26, 2011 at 8:05pm

The episode confirms the validity of my initial reaction to the whole OWS thing: They're onto something.

Some collective consciousness (perhaps it was) grokked the dynamics between large numbers of people practicing non-violence in a confrontation with the violence-based State and realized it was a no-win situation for the State. The State's only response to anything is coercion, force and violence; it is so by design. Thus, acts of civil disobedience eventually engender violent responses from the State resulting in more sympathy for the non-violent who are then energized to conduct even greater non-violent acts of civil disobedience resulting in even more egregious violence from the State, and so on until the whole country becomes so outraged that it topples the regime. I give you Arab Spring as a recent example.

To give credit where credit is due, this was not an original idea: the credit should go to Gandhi.

I'm quite certain I would disagree vehemently with the political leanings of many, if not most, of the people involved in these protests. A lot of them seem to represent the kind of Communist/Socialist ideology I see as the cancer underlying much of what's wrong with our country, if not our world. And yet I applaud them for their vision, for having found the soft underbelly of the beast and going in for the kill.

Well, maybe not the kill just yet, but the beast is injured and bleeding. This is terrifying to the beast, unaccustomed as it is to any loss of control. It doesn't know what to do except lash out with more violence in whatever direction it can.

This is amusing to me, and I don't know what to do except sit back in fascination and watch. And hope I don't get swatted by the beast's tail as it flails its way to its own perdition.