Comments

  1. says

    I wonder how many of those guys are veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. Does it seem like a flashback to them to be standing there backed by armoured vehicles not much different than the patrol vehicles they were familiar with in the armed forces?

  3. joel says

    This conflict makes me ashamed to be human. On one side we have the heavily armed and armored thugs of our law enforcement personnel. On the other side we have idiots. Yes, idiots:

    1) If oil doesn’t move by pipeline then it will move by rail, and there is already a rail line passing directly through the Standing Rock Reservation. Not just through the watershed, but through the *actual reservation*.

    2) The permitting process for this pipeline began two years ago and took eleven months. According to those conservative hacks at NPR, the Standing Rock tribe was invited to participate, but no one showed up. Ever. At any stage of the process.
    http://www.npr.org/2016/11/02/500331158/north-dakota-commissioner-standing-rock-souix-sat-out-the-state-process

    Thugs vs. Idiots. Pardon me while I ignore these protests and try to find examples of people doing something worthwhile.

  4. methuseus says

    @joel:

    The permitting process for this pipeline began two years ago and took eleven months. According to those conservative hacks at NPR, the Standing Rock tribe was invited to participate, but no one showed up. Ever. At any stage of the process.

    Was it 11 months or 13 months? The article you linked says both. Also, how was the tribe contacted? Did they actually go through proper channels? And they say one of the hearings (just one) was a *mere* 45 minutes drive from where the protests are. They also don’t say when the hearings were scheduled, or where the other hearings were. Tribe members on a reservation may not have been able to make it on short notice or at specific times. We are only hearing one side of the story in that NPR article. It seems suspect that they communicate with the tribe regularly on other matters but that they claim the tribe was silent on one, very important, issue.

    I’m not sure if Caine knows those details, but I’m willing to bet things were not completely on the up and up. NPR does some good things, but they get some things terribly wrong as well.

    There’s also the fact that IT DOESN’T MATTER!!! Even if what you say is true, the jack-booted thugs are still riding roughshod over peaceful protests.

  5. Rowan vet-tech says

    In Joel’s world apparently a train derailment carrying a shipment of oil *totally* has the capacity to do as much damage as a pipeline moving thousands upon thousands of gallons of crude. It’s not like ruptured pipelines have ever dumped 10s, or hundreds of thousands of gallons… or even millions of gallons into bodies of water or on land, right? There’s an idiot here alright, and it’s no the protestors.

  6. says

    2) The permitting process for this pipeline began two years ago and took eleven months. According to those conservative hacks at NPR, the Standing Rock tribe was invited to participate, but no one showed up. Ever. At any stage of the process.
    http://www.npr.org/2016/11/02/500331158/north-dakota-commissioner-standing-rock-souix-sat-out-the-state-process

    I love how that interview starts with DAVE ARCHAMBAULT II, then goes to the pipeline person and then never gets back to Archambault, because heavens forbid we hear what the actual Indians have to say…

    Also, anybody else having flashbacks to the start of the Hitchhiker’s Guide?

  7. methuseus says

    @Giliell
    Hitchhiker’s Guide was the first thing I thought of… For even routine stuff here you sometimes have to go through similar rigamarole to even find out there’s a hearing. And that’s after they say they’ve made every effort to make people aware.

  9. says

    Joel:

    1) If oil doesn’t move by pipeline then it will move by rail, and there is already a rail line passing directly through the Standing Rock Reservation. Not just through the watershed, but through the *actual reservation*.

    The original route for the pipeline was to the north of Bismarck. Some white people got a bit upset at the risk to their water. Solution: run it through Indian land and endanger them, no one cares!

    2) The permitting process for this pipeline began two years ago and took eleven months. According to those conservative hacks at NPR, the Standing Rock tribe was invited to participate, but no one showed up. Ever. At any stage of the process.

    I see you’re already drinking oil. Good, you can stop drinking water altogether, and switch now. Not one bit of this is true, and if you bothered to be informed enough to know what’s going on, you’d know just how much the oil companies lie, how much they cheat, and how much they buy their way into doing things that are illegal for everyone else. Standing Rock has been engaged in a legal fight from the very start. They’ve tried like hell to be involved, but have been blocked at every turn. If you had a brain and cared to be actually informed, you’d know Dalrymple sold all of nDakota out over oil long ago, he’s invested so heavily, if this doesn’t go through, he’ll lose everything. In Indian Country, our gov is known as KKKJack. Guess how he feels about us Indians? Christ, you are so fucking stupid.

    Pardon me while I ignore these protests and try to find examples of people doing something worthwhile.

    No, I won’t pardon you. If there’s an idiot anywhere, it’s you. An ignorant fuckwad, puffed up on self-righteousness, who wouldn’t know the truth or something worthwhile if it shot you in the back. It’s people like you who make this world much worse, day by day. Thanks so much, you asshole.

  11. wzrd1 says

    I do find it quite interesting that some police agencies have such a high budget that they can afford mine resistant vehicles, which were designed for the war in Iraq.

    Those vehicles had some issues, both with maneuverability, visibility restrictions and a high center of gravity making them rollover prone, especially in washed out areas.
    They also sunk in mud quite quickly, right up to their axles.
    Not that I’d ever hint at what could be taken as lawless action.
    But, it’s amazing how much it can rain on just 50 feet or so of road and wash it out overnight.

    More seriously, I’ll stay clear of that area. Otherwise, I’d probably start a war and the wrong people would end up getting caught in the middle.
    It’s just that seeing military hardware deployed against unarmed civilians really, really, really pisses me the fuck off.

  12. Onamission5 says

    Joel @#3, I’m wondering how much you actually know about this? Did you know that the ND official interviewed by PBS is in charge of getting the pipeline through, or that she lives in Bismark– which is very near one of the pipeline routes that wasn’t chosen? Do you know the history here? Do you know how long state and US government and US corporations have been treating legally binding treaties as if they were optional suggestions, and Indian land, Indian lives, Indian cultural symbols, as if they were disposable, or property of the US rather than Native people? Do you know how hard Indians have to shout to be heard? Do you understand the way corporations, in cooperation with federal, state, and local forces, run roughshod over tribal sovereignty, or how often that happens? Do you understand the way public notices for public meetings get posted? Where I live it’s often a blurb in a local newspaper, and a paper notice on site, nothing more. I have no reason to believe the ND official is being completely forthright, and neither do you. We’re supposed to take her at her unsourced word but not tribal leaders, nor protesters who’ve been trying to get heard through the courts since April?

    Or did you just look for the first pro-pipeline blurb you could find and post it so you’d have an excuse to call thousands of marginalized people idiots?

  14. Nogbert says

    Frankly I only know one thing about Sinclair Lewis.
    A very prescient fellow indeed.
    Y’all should have heeded his words.
    Heil Trump