Ah, the Day of the Locust tendency. Large concerts and sporting events
often seem to bring that out in people. Terrifying, really. I try to
avoid really large crowds specifically for that reason. The eight
teenage girls protesting yesterday weren't really likely to descend
into some kind of Nuremberg freakout, though. I think officer Charlie
was just being susceptible to paranoia.
-Rob
On Friday, February 7, 2003, at 06:25 AM, Garth Wood wrote:
Part of the reason 'they' dislike it is simple. Regardless of the
political leanings (and implied or professed virtue) of the group
protesting, any mass rally has the possibility of descending into
chaos, violence and brutality because of crowd or herd mentality. No
human is immune to it, no matter what their political stripe, and the
trigger that moves a crowd from peaceful to violent is often chaotic,
and therefore unpredictable in advance. (In this regard, crowd
behaviour is a fractal system, which can be 'tipped' from one state
into another by a very minor event.)
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