The very essence of Kiwi: while the French police are readying water cannons against protestors our police are deploying lawn sprinklers to get protestors off Parliament Grounds (after 4 days of ‘occupation’). 😆 🇳🇿
Miraz Jordan @pratik Apparently the protestors dug trenches in the lawn to drain the water. Also relevant: this weekend huge rainfall is expected thanks to an approaching tropical cyclone (it'll be an ex-cyclone by the time it gets here).
Miraz Jordan @odd Unfortunately our Police do have an extremely racist past that has seen outrageous responses to some events. This ragtag of protestors includes peaceniks preaching love and good vibrations at one extreme and bully boy thugs at the other preaching messages of executing politicians and media etc. If the Police can clear the protestors without escalating things that would be a good outcome.
Odd-Egil “Oddzthrash” Auran I’m sorry to hear that. Hope the police are doing better now. I was thinking about an analogy to the water cannon/garden sprinklers.
Miraz Jordan @odd One of our journalists has described it thus: "the protest comes to resemble a tiny woodstock with bad music and limited weed" www.stuff.co.nz/national/... 😆
Miraz Jordan @pimoore @pratik Apparently some of our protestors were 'inspired' by the Canadian convoy. Our media seem to be not mentioning numbers — this is really just a handful of folks that just doesn't stack up against the 4 million or so Kiwis who are vaxed to some extent (1, 2 or 3 doses). I expect the Police are aiming to not escalate.
Pratik @pimoore Ugh! And these are the same kind of people who ran over BLM protesters coz they were blocking the road.
The Micro Blog @pimoore It’s frustrating that a whiny minority of of the perpetually malcontent are getting such heavy press coverage. Between that and social media, they’ve been given a huge megaphone for such a small group.
It’s hard to see what they hope to accomplish (besides throwing a very public tantrum). They’re certainly not making allies of the group they’re affecting the most, a group that has no power to change what sparked their protests.
Cheri @pimoore My heart goes out to Ottowans. Such a scary and frustrating situation.
Michael Bogdanffy-kriegh @pimoore something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear… i am about to publish a long form post about how failure of society wasn’t part of my retirement planning…
Cheri @pimoore The last two years in a troubled city have taught me that A) governments are weaker than they appear and B) cable news & related media outlets will pour gasoline on every fire.
Cheri NZ to protesters: We will make you MOIST! 😂 That’d be enough to send me scrambling.
Jessica Smith @pimoore Huge anti-vax protests in Canberra this weekend too, linked to the Ottawa crew 😔 They forced a bookfair to shut down of all things, because they descended to camp at the showgrounds where it was taking place. (They're obviously not locals, Canberra has a vaccination rate of almost 99% in those 12+…) Apparently they're running around bullying mask-wearing children, and the PM has basically shrugged his shoulders and said "not my problem", and I'm infuriated too by the situation.
Odd-Egil “Oddzthrash” Auran