I went to Middlebury and I approve this comment 💯%

Do you? It hardly ever snows in the state anymore

👍

Our prison population is indeed too damn high and I would like to see it reduced. One imagines that there are few women in prison who urgently need to be there

You mistake me if you think I am a "sympathizer" of DAPL or this so-called "Cop City." But I don't have any respect for the wild-eyed hyperbole of people like you either. Come up with some real solutions and then you can graduate from sitting at the kids' table.

When in doubt, just call your interlocutor a fascist. Works every time, or at least that's what people like you think

Because I’ve been around the world of public safety and I have taken the time to understand the history and structure of American policing and the myriad agencies involved, and I have also studied how it works in the rest of the world. Your average ACAB Redditor has not.

Really? You don’t think, that I think, that that is a problem? It’s not that I don’t think it is a problem. It’s that you all have no fucking clue what to do about it. Your comment is exactly the kind of DAPL-esque hyperbole I’m talking about.

Is this project the smartest use of this land? Probably not.

Is it designed to train police in “military tactics”? I’m not sure, I haven’t found any sources yet that confirm that.

Do most people who talk about the “militarization of police” have very little knowledge of the subject? Definitely.

It sounds a lot like DAPL in that it has become a lightning rod for people’s justified-but-ill-informed outrage and thus the breathlessly hyperbolic claims start to fly.

I did. It’s DAPL all over again

See, this is the problem, people know that they don’t like the police but they don’t know enough about how policing works to fix it. You can’t tell one police agency from another

Look at the bigger picture

I would wager a lot that the forest is not “old growth” as claimed above

EDIT: I looked on a map, and there's no way in hell that it is

For what agencies?

This has the same flavour as some of the hysteria over the Dakota Access Pipeline

Do you have any not-sensationalized articles about what this facility is intended to do? I can’t read most local news sites from Europe

I’m out of the loop. What is the beef here?

I know that. The author of the article suggests that he could have made a sincere apology instead, and my point is that no apology is ever sincere enough in these circles.

Show me one case where a white man like him ever apologized to the satisfaction of his critics.

> All Viens had to do was own up to his misstatement. Admit his words were hurtful to some. Apologize fully and without reservation. Express intent to get to know the WAARC folks so he can increase his understanding and empathy.

No apology is ever accepted in these situations. You and I both know that wouldn’t work.

Hot boxes (the term of art for failed wheel bearings) have been a hazard on the railroad since forever, which is why there are hot box detectors spaced in intervals along the line.

There was nothing “slapdash” about how these materials were included in the makeup of the train, it was a manifest train like any other that runs around the country every day. Watch your local manifests and see which UN placards you can spot. Hazardous tank cars have a placard, a stencil, and an emergency phone number on them.

You’re going to have to be more specific. Hazardous materials are mixed into general manifest trains every day. Information about the materials is included with the train orders. If there is a special “hazardous cargo protocol” that should have applied here, then tell us what that is.

It’s just as possible in Worcester as anywhere else. The Millers River watershed through Erving and Athol has more to worry about with Pan Am’s abysmal maintenance and all of the propane they are moving to New Hampshire and Maine.

I’d rather electrify the commuter rail than invest in platform edge doors

Hotboxes have always been a thing. People jumped on this incident as a chance to grab the media spotlight and complain about PSR. It wasn’t a direct act of negligence like Lac Megantic was.