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Comment by catmanjan | Hacker News Reader

As an outsider the George Floyd seems like every other police murder that the US has, I swear it happens every other year with similar outrage... BAU

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The Tunisian Revolution (the first and only successful one in the Arab Spring) started when a fruit seller self-immolated.

That blows my mind. I have no idea how the USA would react to something like that.

> I have no idea how the USA would react to something like that.

We know how USA has reacted in the past; it carries on as if nothing happened.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/29/us/politics/immolation-wh...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/apr/15/david-bu...

I assume there are more examples, that's just first page picks from a cursory google search.

Malachi Ritscher's suicide by self immolation in protest of the Iraq war made a strong impression on me at the time. That was near the end of 2006. It seemed to go unnoticed by most everyone else, though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malachi_Ritscher

The Tunisian revolution worked because the system was overloaded with protests in almost every single region of the country. Contrary to previous localized protests in 2008, that were more contained and effectively suppressed by the regime.

But it is also worth to remember that unarmed protestors rarely "just" overrun the barricades and enter the palace (figuratively). Someone with power (police or military) has to decide that they're OK with letting the protests go through, that is the signal of the end.

Obviously my opinion, but I was in Tunis, Tunisia during those times.

The Tunisian Army was impartial (still largely impartial to these days) and would not intervene. They did protect some government buildings so nobody really overrun the palace. What happened is that support for the old dictator become too low and most of his supporters decided to bail on him (many people hates him too).

The Tunisian army was mostly impartial, but there were instances where they actively protected protestors from the police (which gained them a lot of good faith).

And there was this rumor that Ben Ali and his close family were "tricked" by the palace guard and the military to leave the country "temporarily" because protestors were going to be closing in (which never happened).

But that is exactly my point, supporters in key power positions decided that it was too much trouble to keep Ben Ali around.

One of the oddest bits of recent American news was seeing armed protestors occupy a capitol building .. and then leave again, with no shots fired by either side.

There are loads in between the protests. Eventually the murders pile up and the evidence against the police’s actions is so strong that people collectively snap. If it were merely every other murder, there’d never be a day of peace.

Yeah, I expect this to last a week or three and then it will happen again in another year or two.

normally perhaps, It is perfect storm of other factors.

  - 40+ Million people are unemployed 

  - the mental strain of being up indoors

  - covid affecting the poorest potion of the population disproportionately

  - finally Trump being  president and handling the situation in the worst possible way everyday.

Not sure why you are getting down voted here. These are all very valid points, this situation has a lot of variables that make it remarkably different than any other and can encourage the resistance (protests, &c) to continue far longer than standard.

He is being downvoted for using a code block and making it difficult for those of us on mobile to read.

Sorry about that, did not mean to use a code block. just wanted to make a list. HN formatting is little confusing.

Personally I prefer explicit markup attributes. i.e. if I want to mark something as code an markup like ``` or {code} or whatever is clearer than inferring tabs for code formatting, this kind of accidental code blocks could be easily avoided.

On a side note I read on mobile all the time, I understand the frustration, but it not poster's fault HN has some poor formatting choices which are not mobile friendly and no preview options, you should direct their feedback towards HN rather than the poster, most of them do not do this intentionally.

HN has already said they will do nothing about it, it’s been this way for years. Therefore the only person people can direct their rage to is the poster.

If you want to make a list, there’s nothing wrong with using new lines, they will work just fine.

A code block however stimulates rage.

If you're on mobile, you need Materialistic.

Protests like this one happened before covid for similar reasons. While those might be factors, I don't think they're very important ones. I think the fact that there have been several such murders in the past few months is the main reason this is happening.

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