Re: Nice Plant #7: Get me off of this planet
But greatly complicates the job of those whose job it is to bring such behavior under control. Presumably the much ballyhooed "outside agitators" aren't wearing hunter's orange vests to identify themselves.
Absolutely agree.
I heard a show called "Make it Plain" with Mark Thompson last night, it seems to be a sort of lefty equivalent to Rush, and he'd just come back from Ferguson. He was not letting the local community off the hook. What he said, basically, was whenever he goes to cover a protest like this the same couple dozen faces keep magically appearing in the crowd, and they are usually the ones who are disrupting the crowd and trying to draw it in other directions than the protest at hand. He called them "anarchists" and mentioned Seattle, but he also seemed to be talking about primarily African American protests and I may be wrong but I don't think there are a lot of black anarchists.
His point was that in a small community like Ferguson it ought to be very clear who is from the area and who is from out of town. They can't know whether those "usual suspects" are genuine advocates of some agenda or
agent provocatuers, but they can know they're outsiders. Thompson essentially said local community leaders should question those folks, find out who they are and why they're there, ask them to cool it, and if met with hostility coordinate with whatever law enforcement is there to keep an eye on them. I was very surprised by this, if only because I don't expect partisan shows like that to come up with reasonable solutions.
His opinion was that there will always be a handful of locals who are out of control or looking for attention, but that the lion's share of the serious trouble that happens during these protests comes from the same people who travel from incident to incident and do that thing they do.
