How can you remain staunchly unmoved in front of protesters who insult you and hurl objects at you?
“We are trained for that. We hold back by telling ourselves that our boss will soon give us the order to charge. It’s our candy. What pisses us off the most is when we’re hit by objects and our officers don’t give us the order to charge.”
Do you hesitate to use your truncheon and are you afraid of hurting someone?
“No, we have no hesitation. However, we are trained to know how to hit and not hurt someone. We aim for the stomach, the front of the thighs and the arms, for example”. “When a protest is declared illegal, people have no more business there. They can raise their arms in the air and give us peace and love signs as much as they want, they’re gonna be arrested anyways”. “The guys call it National Geographic because when we charge, the kids run like gazelles! The kids find us athletic despite the 65 pounds we’re carrying on our backs.”
translatingtheprintempserable:
A police officer of the rapid deployment force reveals his state of mind
Daniel Renaud Journal de Montréal May 25, 2012
Original French Text: http://www.journaldemontreal.com/2012/05/25/on-reste-de-glace-en-se-disant-que-tantot-on-va-charger
Weightlessness in Nature by Cornelia Konrads
Cornelia’s outdoor installations seem to give Mother Nature the finger with their brazen defiance of gravity. Suspended in time, her works often seem to be in caught in the middle of construction themselves, an act we were never supposed to witness.
Read all the tweets for the full account of the Goldman Sachs sponsored Greensboro lunch counter sit-in reenactment at the Smithsonian American History Museum.
Rather than living inside us, as normal passions do, our sadness seems to envelop everything: we live inside it, as if it were a cocoon or a prison. At such times we seem particularly aware of the world as a world, as a place where we have to live. This awareness can become artistic or political: artistic, when the world made strange by our own detachment and dissociation presents it self as an object of fascination; political when the difficulty of going on living in such a world begins to reveal its causes in the impersonal circumstances of our personal sorrows.
Both kinds of awareness have their origins in desolation, in the sense that the world is frozen and that nothing new is possible. Both can lead to terrible paroxysms of destruction, attempts to shatter the carapace of reality and release the authentic self trapped within; but both can also lead away from the self altogether, towards new worldly commitments that recognise the urgent need to develop another logic of existence, another way of going on.
A domestic worker in the western Singapore town of Choa Chu Kang pleaded guilty in court today to mixing her menstrual bloodinto a cup of coffee she had prepared for her employer.
The incident reportedly occurred last year; no motive for the crime was given. The 24-year-old Indonesian…
Jean Charest’s Helpful Guide to Rioting!
Story here.
Quebec Premier Jean Charest has proposed legislation that will crack down on student protesters and the unions that support them…
Additionally, any protester found guilty of causing the cancellation of classes could be fined between $1,000 and $5,000. If the same offence is committed by a leader of a student organization, the fine could be as much as $35,000. If a group or student federation stops others from attending class, it could be forced to pay up to $125,000. For protesting groups of 10 or more people, there will also be a requirement to inform police at least eight hours in advance of a demonstration…
Stéphane Beaulac, a constitutional expert at the University of Montreal, told the CBC that the law is one of the most repressive he has ever seen, but that it doesn’t appear to violate the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
“I am 67 and at first I thought that students were exaggerating … no more, a special law is not the solution! Last night my wife and I went to join the kids in the streets. A policeman treated my wife like an old hag, so I approached him to say what I think and he pepper sprayed me. It was a Black Bloc who came to help me and put liquid in my eyes that eased my pain.
Before I was afraid of young masked Black Bloc … Not anymore. Now I’m scared of young masked SPVM.”
And
“At our last assembly, someone proposed to disrupt the Grand Prix. The proposal was rejected because it was considered too radical for the time being …
I bet that this proposal will come back on the table and will be adopted in force at the next Assembly. I who voted against it then will vote for it now.”
