Manufactured spectacle at Oakland

The police toss smoke grenades, not tear gas grenades, a short distance upwind, between themselves and the protestors.

This is not riot control, it is a manufactured photo opportunity

spectacle

Manufacturing the appearance of significance

Observe the hand motion.  He is tossing a smoke grenade just in front, not at the protestors.  If you are wondering how heavily outnumbered protestors accomplished their goal  of occupying the city hall, despite announcing it at least a day in advance, the above photo explains the inexplicable.

And here are the protestors are in occupation, burning the vandalized and stolen city hall flag.  Although the photo does not show it, police are watching a short distance away.

stolen flag burning

Another photo opportunity while police watch

There were amply sufficient police watching to have seriously cramped their style, and yet, they did not.  First the photo opportunity, then the police intervene.  When the police finally intervene, the protestors yield without any resistance or fuss, revealing police complicity in this photo opp.

This post placed in the economics category, as well as the politics, being an example of your tax dollars at work, the government funding agitation for more government funding.

3 Responses to “Manufactured spectacle at Oakland”

  1. Red says:

    Where the leftist protests of the 60s and 70s the same type of kabuki theater? I know the national guard had their hands tied but were the local cops in on it?

    • jim says:

      There were a lot of protests about a lot of matters, and it would be unwise to generalize.

      However the sit ins of universities were theater, a conspiracy between the administration and their puppet students where the administration had the students demand that the administration do what the administration secretly wanted to do: politicize the university and politicize education, boycott Israel, ban military recruiting on campus, and on and so forth.

      When “student demands” were actually put to the vote of the student body, the left, aka the admin, invariably lost badly, and the “student radicals”, aka the admin responded by not taking votes, and just flat out barefaced lying about the outcome of student votes on “student demands”. So at least some of the leftist protest of the sixties, in particular the University Occupations which “Occupy Wall Street” sought to emulate, were theater.

      Much to my surprise, Wall Street declined to play along. Instead of meeting fake police repression, the movement met real property security guards, who swiftly showed them the door with the minimum of fuss and drama and the maximum of firmness. Occupiers that declined the security guard’s assistance to find the exit were tasered and hauled out like a sack of potatoes. When this happened to the front most occupier, the hindmost got the message. It was generally only necessary to deal with a single occupier who was unable to find the exit, for the rest of the occupiers to swiftly discover the exits and leave at high speed. So they rapidly switched to “Occupying” government and quasi government property.

      It then rapidly became apparent that the occupiers would make very bad boy scouts. Their camps were overrun with crime, disease, and human feces. So dramatic confrontations were staged to rationalize shutting down the camps.

  2. bgc says:

    These photo analyses of yours are great – really an education.

    Another education was to hear from a friend whose father was in control of the riot crew in a high security UK prison.

    It is known how to control mobs. It works, It is a question of how much you want to control the mob, and whether it is the main priority.

    Of course, in the UK at any rate – if you do the right thing, the bureaucrats will vote, sooner or later, to have you crucified; and bureaucracy goes all the way to the top.

    No individual is allowed power, only committees. Things can or cannot be done because a committee somewhere has voted – nobody is responsible nobody can change it.

    When the collapse comes, I suspect that the very first thing that will change is that all committees will be abolished, and the (ahem) ‘leadership-principle’ of individual power/ responsibility imposed: military hierarchy, not civil service hierarchy.

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