I stumbled upon this old post someone wrote about a protest in Prague from 2000. It left me wondering where that era of activism went. The IMF and World Bank continue to impose a system of international trade that many people dislike, yet there seems to be less active protest than before.

First I sat down, then when the cars came up I laid down on my back across the street. Between S. we probably had two thirds of the street blocked. First a motorcycle drove up and revved it’s engine with the front tire resting on my stomach. For a brief moment I wondered what I should do if he tried to run over me, but then he pulled back and I went limp when I was grabbed by a number of cops. As far as I remember they didn’t say anything to me. S. who knows a little Czech said they told her “Come on, get out of the way.” They first dragged us of the side of the road and let the cars go by. Then the picked us up, one cop holding each limb. The carried me back behind the police barricades. There they started kicking me and hitting me. I don’t really remember how many times, but there were at least a couple of times they tried to kick me in the balls. They missed, but then they started trying pain compliance holds. Twisting my arms around, grabbing me by the neck, and a couple other things. They did some of the holds correctly and they hurt, others they didn’t seem to know how to do. It didn’t last very long, they hand cuffed me with plastic cuffs and put us both in the police van. S. had her shirt torn open and I had my glasses partially knocked off.

Once we were in the police van they searched through my bag and found a rock which I had picked up earlier as a souvenir. I hadn’t thrown any rocks, or really participated in the protest that much aside from marching around, and I tried to tell the cops that the rock was a souvenir. I couldn’t think of anything better to say. Needless to say, they flipped. They yelled, threatened to throw the rock at me, slammed my head in to the back of the van 3 or 4 times. I didn’t break anything or start bleeding but as I was cowering against the wall I noticed it was splattered with dried blood. I certainly wasn’t the first person who’d been hit against the wall nor did I get the worst treatment by any means.

We sat in the van for about an hour. After a while the cops went through S.’s bag and found a sweater that they let her put on. Once the re-cuffed her, they did it even tighter. I still have scabs from the cuffs, and one of S.’s hands went numb. After a while we were driven to a police station, KP in praha 4. At the police station I was put up against the wall, patted down, then taken in to the police station. After being pushed around and in to the holding cell they took me out and strip searched me. It’s funny, but I actually minded being strip searched less than the rough man handling that they did when they ‘patted’ me down. Even though I was in an open room with lots of cops walking by.

After the strip search, i was moved back in to the crowded holding cell. It was a pretty small cell considering there were 15 of us. 6 Czech 2 German 1 Polish 1 Solvenian 1 Dutch 1 Spaniard 2 Americans (including myself) 1 Brit

The Czech were taken out of the cell after an hour or two. The Germans had a number of cuts/bruises on their faces and heads. The Polish had a quarter inch open wound on the back of his head that was still slowly bleeding at 11pm, it looked like it needed stitches to me. The Solevian had a broken nose and hand, as well as a mangled index finger. R., the other American had a large bandage on his head. He had been hit by a rock thrown by the police and it was also still open and bleeding when we re-fit his bandaged in the middle of the night. He was arrested while the street medics were bandaging him up.

A., the Solevian was probably only 16 years old. He didn’t even get anything for his bleeding finger for many hours, and even then it was just some medical tape. It was not until Thursday, over 48 hours after he was arrested before he was taken to the hospital where he got a real bandages and xrays which confirmed his broken hand and nose. He had been arrested when taking photos during the fight between the blue (anarchist/autonomist) march.

The Polish activist who had the wound in his head told us that the police were accusing him of assaulting an officer. I’ve since heard stories of other people being accused of this by the cops but then let out with out charges. He was taken out of our cell in hand cuffs in the middle of the night.

R., the other American in my cell had huge bandage on his head. He had been hit in the head by a rock thrown by the cops. Mostly the cops shot the tear gas canisters, used their huge water cannon, and hit people with their clubs, but they also throw some rocks back at the crowd. R. had fallen over after being hit and was dragged to the side of the road where the medics helped him. They told him that he’d be safe while they were helping him but the cops came up and dragged him away anyway. He didn’t have his passport on him, a requirement by Czech law, so I lost track of him after I left the foreigners police station on Wednesday evening. I have not heard anything of what happened to him since then.

I am in the same building as before, but now I have moved up to the 3rd floor. I love my apartment. (Though the photos are from the previous tenant, my place is still a mess. It’ll take me a month or two to get it nice.)

The pro-car bias in American politics is totally insane:

Aaron Naparstek has a masterful demolition of John Cassidy’s bizarre anti-bike-lane rant, but he somehow skips over the most wonderful bit of all:

I view the Bloomberg bike-lane policy as a classic case of regulatory capture by a small faddist minority intent on foisting its bipedalist views on a disinterested or actively reluctant populace.

Yes, you read that right: the New York populace, it seems, is basically comprised of cars, to the point at which bipeds are “a small faddist minority”.

Now it so happens that I’ve met Mr Cassidy a few times and he’s always looked perfectly bipedal to me. And for all that he enjoys parking his Jaguar XJ6 on Manhattan streets — he’s just written 1,250 words on the subject, after all — I’m quite sure that he always gets out and saunters happily among the other New York pedestrians as he makes his way to his dinner in the West Village.

It can hardly have escaped Cassidy’s notice, on his regular peregrinations from car to restaurant and back, that New York’s streets are positively bustling with bipedal life. There’s good reason for this: New York is a very dense city, in which 8 million or so bipeds — birds not included — cram themselves into a rather small area. His Jaguar XJ6 takes up about 100 square feet of street space; if everybody in Manhattan was so greedy, we’d turn the city into something more akin to Manhattan, Kansas.