re: #32 Killgore Trout

I’m sure it’s been tried before but I doubt premeditated self defense against lawful police activity is not a viable legal defense. Also the dude seems fairly certain that the specific conversation led to the warning about protesters shooting police. Why would he be so convinced? If it really was a non violent strategy discussion he would assume the warning came from somewhere else. He knows the warning came from that specific conversation for good reason.
I also strongly suspect that if that comment had been posted by a Tea Party organizer you would have no trouble interpreting it correctly. I’m not that flexible.

As one of the moderators on a Occupy* chat, we’ve had discussions on this topic several times through the years.
For the record, strict adherence to non-violence is still assumed and enforced, at least in the chat I mod, and I know that it was one of the core values of the people who got the ball rolling.
I’ve lost count on how many times I’ve asked chat participants to cease and desist when the discussion has veered into active self-defence, pointing out that one should assume the chat is monitored by law enforcement, and that the situation hadn’t deteriorated to the point where active self-defence measures would be a necessary topic to discuss.
The position of us mods was that once things got as bad as police or other snipers began taking shots at occupiers, like the case has been in Iran and Ukraine, then we would consider allowing a limited subset of the topic being discussed.
I’ve lost count of how many times we’ve had to kick people out of the chat, how many people we’ve had to ban outright when they clearly haven’t understood that Occupy* wasn’t limited to the United States, the importance of non-violence, and that hate speech is counter-productive.
And that the those rules apply across the majority of the Occupy* sites and internet fora. Man, if I had $1 for each butthurt soul that wandered into the chat after being kicked out elsewhere, then being even more butthurt after getting kicked and/or banned from us too.
Not to mention the very interesting common denominators of the individuals who showed unwillingness to abide by the rules, or the means they chose to express their butthurt, or what they tried to push on the chat.