It seems reasonable at time when "protesting" means shutting down infrastructure.
How does that justify potentially infringing upon the protected rights of the protestors?
So are armed mobs that murder political opponents. Might does not equal right.
People have a right to protest.
They don't have a right to destroy property that doesn't belong them.
They don't have the right to circumvent democracy and infringing upon the rights of everyone else by shutting down infrastructure that belongs to the all people.
Most protests happen because the government uses physical force, or the threat of physical force to infringe upon the rights of its constituents.
I don't agree that the police should be expected to confront protestors just because they shut down an interstate. You have no basic human right to not be inconvenienced at all by non-violent protestors. Non-violent protests that happen to shut down an interstate at some point should not be met with riot shields and swat teams.
You don't get an exception to law to harass hundreds, possibly thousands of innocent people just because you feel put upon.
Not to mention that almost every form of social progress came at the cost of inconveniencing all those poor, poor people who want nothing to do with the struggle for civil rights, universal suffrage, etc...
When you put convenience and order over basic human and constitutional rights, yes, you bloody well should be inconvenienced. The status quo 'inconveniences' these people every day - far worse then a blocked freeway. Perhaps you should channel your inconvenience at the oppressor, rather then the victim.
What if I disagree? What if you disagree? What if a whole lot of people disagree? You're not going to like the result, because you've already excluded the rule of law from this equation.
Historians do.
The rule of law made slavery legal. The rule of law made apartheid legal. The rule of law made sending black people to the back of the bus legal. The rule of law made killing millions of Jews legal. The rule of law sent 15 million people to the Gulags. The rule of law made the Divine Right of Kings part of the equation. The rule of law made human sacrifice in Central America part of society.
The rule of law is ephemeral, and has nothing whatsoever to do with justice. The rule of law is so often a fig leaf for barbarism.
160 years ago, an abolitionist stealing a slave away from a slaveowner was violating the rule of law. They were also damaging the property, finances, and livelyhood of an innocent person - all because their pet cause wasn't getting as much attention as they liked.
Read A Letter from a Birmingham Jail. [1] Martin Luther King puts this across far better than I can. (And he is only half of the story - the work of Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, and the NAACP, which could not be described as non-violent protest was a vital catalyst for civil rights.)
> You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city's white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.
[1] https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham....
So, let's try this again.
What are your thoughts on those gentlemen in Oregon who took over an empty building on federal land?
What about the 2011 riots in Vancouver when their hockey team lost?
What about the Trump rally in California this year?
What about Ferguson a couple years back?
Your absolutist position would place all of these events under equal justification.
Hockey riots aren't drunken looting - they aren't politically motivated, and they aren't for a political cause.
Not familiar with the Trump rally.
Ferguson is a pretty classic civil rights protest. A cause with large public support, but one that the government does not care to address - and judiciously uses violence to suppress.
The thing about Ferguson is that the "protest" was based on completely false pretenses. The guy the protestors chose to build their narrative on robbed a store, assaulted the clerk, then assaulted the cop who was there to investigate the robbery. The actual evidence was on the side of the state in that particular case, which is probably why the cop who shot him was never charged.
The thing about Ferguson is that the protest was based on over a century of racist policing across America, and particularly in Ferguson (And I'm not just speaking of police killings - consider the DOJ report on Ferguson.) Michael Brown, and the treatment of his body was the last straw, not the first one.
I suggest you educate yourself on the question of race relations. Between the World And Me [1] is a good start, if you want to understand why so many encounters between African Americans and police end as poorly as they do.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=between+the+world+and+me+pdf...
The fact that you can differentiate Oregon from Ferguson tells me that you have a mental model, I just want you to elaborate on it. Kind of like I asked you, point blank, three posts ago.
> When you put convenience and order over basic human and constitutional rights, yes, you bloody well should be inconvenienced. The status quo 'inconveniences' these people every day - far worse then a blocked freeway. Perhaps you should channel your inconvenience at the oppressor, rather then the victim.
You're begging the question. There's no direct evidence for systemic racial bias in policing, there are only disparities, some of which haven't been accounted for because the U.S. does a shitty job of collecting this data (and sometimes left-leaning politicians even censor certain data that don't support their narrative, like offender race statistics in the NCVS or various city-specific data sets). Insufficient data isn't proof or even strong evidence of anything. That said, there are actual victims--those who have had their property stolen or destroyed or who have been harassed, assaulted, murdered by BLM activists.
2. There is no conclusive evidence that anyone's "basic human and constitutional rights" are infringed upon.
I absolutely have a right not to be held hostage. I also have a right to use public infrastructure, especially when that infrastructure is used by emergency vehicles. Such protests should be met with the minimal necessary force to quickly restore order. Most importantly, these protests are often turn violent, so I'm thankful the police take (non-infringing) precautions to protect themselves and the safety and property of law-abiding citizens.
What does this have to do with anything? Is this supposed to justify the tactics?
> How does that justify potentially infringing upon the protected rights of the protestors?
Why do you think police need justification to enforce the law without infringing on the rights of protesters?
Original commenter specifically mentioned "at time..." which I took as an implication that there was something special about today's society.
>Why do you think police need justification to enforce the law without infringing on the rights of protesters?
Because you don't lose your rights when you protest, even if you break the law? The police don't have ultimate power to enforce the law. There are purposeful limits to the power of the police. That's the point of having certain rights enshrined into the legal system. Do you disagree?
"Shut up, go home, you live in a democracy, so complain at the ballot box" isn't a civilized response to a protest issue. When it's used to justify tyranny of the majority, it is borderline fascism.
> Further, would your tune change if the protesters were right-wing?
Absolutely. Conservatives, reactionaries, and fascists have exactly the same rights that I do.
> Would you support their right to block critical infrastructure (not to mention the violence that characterizes so many of these "protests") in defense of what they perceive as their rights?
Critical infrastructure almost always has redundancies, and in case there isn't one (e.g. a protest in front of a hospital), the police should just clear a route with minimum force and no legal actions afterwards. Violence is another issue entirely--if people are being violent in a protest, then stop and arrest them for being violent, not for merely protesting, and leave the other protesters alone.
No on is disputing this, the key part being "obeying the law."
>Critical infrastructure almost always has redundancies, and in case there isn't one (e.g. a protest in front of a hospital), the police should just clear a route with minimum force and no legal actions afterwards.
And here is the bait the switch. Now the protesters are no longer law abiding.
>Absolutely. Conservatives, reactionaries, and fascists have exactly the same rights that I do.
So you supported the Oregon protesters that occupied Federal land in protest?
You mean bait & switch. It isn't--in many cases marches and protests are lawful even if they block roads. If they aren't, use muscle, batons, and shields so that the law is no longer being violated. Don't go after them afterwards.
> So you supported the Oregon protesters that occupied Federal land in protest?
Absolutely, up to the point where guns became involved.
Is this really the hill you want to die on?
People turn to protest, violent, or otherwise, when other forms of petition have failed.
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> It seems reasonable at time when "legislating" means shutting down infrastructure.
I'm curious why you complain about one and not the other? The latter is being used to take away people's access to things like voting, etc. by shutting down polling locations, changing times, etc. to reduce access to people who vote for the "wrong" party.