So, this is receiving still more international coverage than local it seems. I won't link to any sources, you can find the ones of whatever political bent you please. I guess we should thank the poorly trained NYPD officers last weekend for the extra dose of violence as that seems to have made this a bit newsworthy stateside.

No, not all the NYPD officers were poorly trained, but the well trained ones looked on with gutlessness as the poorly trained ones violated department procedures in the deployment of pepper spray and nightsticks. What is it about how police departments work that keeps you from intervening in even the most grievous abuses? I wish I knew so we could go about correcting it and put the citizens and the police back on the same side.

Yeah, it really is too bad that is hasn't been getting more coverage. The first day of it one my friends at university was interviewed by ABC news, which is cool, but really it has dropped off. The NYTimes has a good (for a mainstream media thing) article about global protests yesterday, with a tiny (tiny!) mention of the Occupy Wall Street stuff. But that is the trend: to not focus on what is going on here but on how the rest of the world is doing stuff.

This weekend Occupy Boston is starting and I think I'm going to join in with some of that, not all the time, but if it continues maybe the weekends when I am free to.

The point about how police stick together no matter what and even if some don't think the actions of the others are right they aren't going to do anything about it is interesting. It also ties into how soldiers will generally not actively stop comrades from committing crimes (I'm thinking of the example of people in My Lai) but instead will just excuse themselves from it.

It's pretty amazing how much most mainstream news sources have been trying to ignore these protests. The behavior by the police has also been pretty despicable (the latest seems to be that they've been targeting anyone recording what's going on), and the worst cases seem to have been perpetrated by the higher ranking members of the police forces. Unfortunately this is about what I've come to expect from the police these days.

One thing I'm waiting to see, though, is whether these protests (and any subsequent protests) have any momentum, or whether they just lose steam and go away as time passes. While there's a fair amount of anger out there over the financial crisis and the current state of things in the US, I think most people are still too comfortable for these protests to get big enough to result in any sort of change. We'll probably have to wait another 5-10 years of things getting progressively worse before there's enough seriously discontent people to force any kind of change.

Well the Occupy Wall Street has been going on for over 2 weeks, a lot of students and recent grads are essentially unemployed so I'm betting there's a lot of people with some free time.

This guy claims to have checked it out in person, it's his most recent three comments:

http://slashdot.org/~mckinnsb

Obviously you can find a lot of blogging about the violence over the weekend along with videos. What is hard to find is information about numbers of people. It sounds like there's 100s or even 1000s more people participating staying with relatives and friends. I don't know if the violence will drive anyone away or increase their numbers. Someone else pointed out the white shirted cops were absent by Monday morning (they were, by and large, the violent part of the NYPD present in the videos), perhaps some ass chewing happened.

German kid here, watching ze events closely.
Seriously tho, ppl do care.

They're paramilitary. They have a line of command. This kind of rhetoric reminds me of Anti-Flag's song Seattle was a riot (maybe a cover).

The citizens are not on the same side to begin with. One side is misusing the police as an instrument of terror. Putting a stop to it would mean removing an advantage from one side so you shouldn't expect that side to cooperate meekly with such an endeavour in the name of the rule of law and whatnot.