Photo by Matt McDermott of the Brooklyn Bridge occupation, October 1, 2011. McDermott is one of many demonstrators pushing the line that demonstrators were "lured" although his own photos and captions document how they went into the road deliberately. He styles the "backing up" of the police as a lure, when in fact it's merely a positioning when faced with a large crowd disobeying direct orders not to go on the bridge -- period. Biased activists like McDermott can never explain why these marchers went off their route in the first place and stormed the bridge.
Twitter had to turn over its records to the court in the case of an Occupy demonstrator.
Good!
I can see absolutely no reason why these records shouldn't be turned over. These aren't private messages, these are the public tweets of a demonstrator defiantly marching on the Brooklyn Bridge, bragging about his civil disobedience on Twitter and expecting no consequences, and it is absolutely material to the case. The judge wants to show that in fact this alibi that the Occupiers have put out in the media ever since the Bridge Occupation -- to the effect that the police "lured them off the path" and "into arrest nets" -- is pure baloney.
Of course, we know it's baloney from having followed it and heard from eye witnesses and other less, er engaged media. If you read the Twitter feed of this loon who uses the hipster Twitter handle of @destructuremal, you can see he specializes in rants against the Man, and frequently illustrates he has a father complex by hashtagging "nodads". Sigh. Here's one:
I'M ALL UP IN UR CAPITAL, ACCELERATIN' UR DEMISE
Mkay. Actually, it's the sectarian wack-a-doole Occupy that is in demise, not capital, but...whatever.
If the tweets were public, but just not accessible now because either the guy deleted them after the fact or they can't be pulled up on laggy dysfunctional Twitter, why can't we have them in court as part of the discovery? Truly.
The judge first used a gambit which I think was iffy -- he opined that tweets are not the users' property, but the property of the company Twitter. Well, I'd have to study the TOS again, but I don't think Twitter makes that claim, the way a lot of platforms do. That is, they'd like to have safe harbour status like any of the Internet social media giants facing tons of lawsuits, so they probably had their lawyers all over that. As users, we don't want content owned by the company and this isn't a good gambit to be deploying.
What's much more substantive and operative is the need to challenge the narrative of "we was lured" -- and the need to uncover that. I'm all for that.
And interestingly enough, the "reporter" who actually most contributes to the debunking of that narrative -- inadvertently! -- is none other than Natasha Lennard, the radical Occupy supporter who worked as a freelancer for a time at The New York Times, after stints at Salon and Politico, and then was, er, let go. Whereupon she bitched on Salon, Why I Quit the Mainstream Media. Or was fired?
What's interesting is that I was the first to uncover and publish the fact that Natasha had spoken at the Bluestockings Book Store teach-in on Occupy, covered on video by Jacobin, a radical leftist publication. I put up a blog with a link to the video on October 22, which I uncovered even before I did the blog, and included some notes from this long discussion among old and new lefties on what the politically correct "line" should be on Occupy. (Do the Jacobins favour guillotines?) The discussion made it clear that far from an unbiased journalist, or even a reporter cloaked in the typical "progressive" cocoon of the New York Times journalist milieu, she was very supportive of Occupy and picked and chosed what she covered about it.
I recall even posting a comment among the zillions of comments about Occupy on Breitbart, and interestingly, Lee Stranahan then did a blog the next day (October 23) referencing this very video, which I think was fairly obscure, but not mentioning me. Now, it's quite possible he did find this all on his own, but I do have to wonder. Anyway, I was first! He wrote a letter complaining to the Times about this bias -- actually, I did, too, but just didn't think to save and publish it, although I've referenced the problem in subsequent comments.
And here's what's relevant about what Lennard wrote for the Times:
The Internet was filled with pointed suggestions that officers from the New York Police Department led protesters onto the road as a trap to perform mass arrests; indeed, some video footage seems to show officers leading protesters onto the “illegal” section of the bridge. From what I saw, however, a couple of dozen marchers made the decision to move off the sidewalk into the road at the bridge’s entrance to chants of “off the sidewalks, into the streets.”
This breakaway group quickly gained support of surrounding marchers, numbers of whom jumped over barricades on the sidewalk’s edge to stream into the road, until hundreds of people eventually covered the passageway usually intended for a steady flow of traffic.
“ ‘Whose bridge? Our bridge!’ the marchers chanted as they walked onto the Brooklyn Bridge. Two vehicle lanes occupied,” I posted on Twitter at the the time. The mood was celebratory and confrontations with the police were not widely expected.
People who are being "lured" into their arrest wouldn't be crying "Whose bridge? Our bridge!" -- that's what occupiers chant as they commit occupation, or civil disobedience.
So despite her very biased approach to all this, Lennard was enough of a reporter to say that she saw marchers making the decision to go off the footpath and lure others -- not police. About police, she said videos only "seem" to indicate this. I hope the judge includes her report in his evaluation of the testimony!
After all, she was arrested and then let go, because she was "only doing her duty". Of course her tweets show her tilt toward Occupy -- and then she concedes it in her swan song to the mainstream media in Slate.
At the time, only James Taranto of The Wall Street Journal would report the truth about this Twitter dude bragging about his exploits and then expecting not to take the rap for them. Everyone else was getting all victimological about it. Of course, there was the obvious socialist tendentiousness around it.
My beef with Occupy all along isn't just the incitement to violence, the extremism, and the outright old-style communist Bolshevism in a lot of what they're doing, even if they also had earnest young people who owed school loans or authentic social movement types among them.
No, what I loathed about them was their unwillingness to concede what civil disobedience is: it means going limp, being arrested, and taking your medicine -- time in jail or a fine.
What these entitlement-happy freaks would do instead would claim their "rights" were violated even as they violated the law; they would fight and even push and hit policemen or knock fences around instead of peacefully demonstrating; and they would act as if they had an inherent right to take over spaces and foment revolution without any consequences.
So I'm all for them facing due and lawful consequences to their civil disobedience, because they did decide to walk off the path and make a deliberate nuisance of themselves -- they were not "lured".
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