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Comment by 0xy | Hacker News Reader

I don't support unions because unions drag everyone's wages to an average (I'd rather be a top performer and be paid accordingly). Also, I've seen first hand the amount of incompetent teachers, police and government employees who are unfireable because of unions.

So the concept of a union for me personally means I'll be paid less, be surrounded by unfireable underperformers and have zero incentive to improve my craft.

I also truly don't understand how you can allow politics to be so deeply embedded in your work.

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> I also truly don't understand how you can allow politics to be so deeply embedded in your work.

The president of the United States is threatening military violence against its own citizens and you criticize people for being "political"? Seriously?

Your comment removes so much context that it's nearly deceptive. He threatened military violence against rioting and looting, driven by terrorism.

Some of these rioters set fire to occupied buildings with children inside and prevented emergency services from accessing the location. In other words, property destruction and attempted murder.

Do you propose this behavior should be met with praise and not violence?

Property destruction should absolutely not be met with violence, no. Things can be replaced. People cannot.

You carefully cherry picked one aspect of my argument and didn't address the arson of occupied buildings with children inside. That's one example, there's also kidnapping, rape and serious assault with deadly weapons to point at.

Someone was nearly stoned to death on the street with bricks by rioters for protecting a business.

I didn’t cherry pick, I’m simply not defending assaults on people. Any violence by protesters against humans (other than in self defense) is not okay.

That said, violence by police against civilians is far worse. It shouldn’t happen in response to property damage, but it especially shouldn’t happen unprovoked — and we’ve been seeing a lot more of that than violence from protesters.

Do you believe in an "eye for an eye"? If not, how could you say that there's been more violence from police than protesters? By my count, more people have died in the resulting riots than the initial incident.

That doesn't mean police are "less bad". It means they fucked up badly, and then rioters and looters are responding badly to a bad situation (including with attempted murder, rape, assault, property destruction, arson, etc).

In fact, numerous businesses owned by black people were unfortunately torched during the rioting. What part of that is justice? Further, what good does it do to black neighborhoods to have their houses burnt down, critical supplies interrupted in the middle of a pandemic and other such egregious behaviour?

Anarchists are using this situation to cause chaos and destruction.

There are a lot of layers here; I’ll do my best to unpack things as I see them.

First, violence by police is always worse than violence by civilians, full stop. They took an oath to protect and serve their communities in a job they knew could be dangerous, so they are obligated to go above and beyond in preventing violence and deescalating conflict. If necessary, they must be willing to suffer physical trauma in order for civilians to be safe. This is an axiomatic belief for me; if you can’t meet me on it, we’re going to have to agree to disagree.

I think everyone recognizes that the protests have caused far more violence than the murder of George Floyd alone. But the best way to prevent further violence would have been to immediately arrest the officers (as any civilian would have been) and hold them accountable. As it stands now, the other three officers who helped restrain him and prevent bystander intervention have not even been arrested. It seems to me that police and politicians across the country are willing to accept thousands of arrests, thousands more injuries and millions of dollars worth of property damage all to protect four officers who should absolutely face trial.

That brings me to “acceptable” and “unacceptable” rioting. There are no doubt people using the protests as cover to sow chaos, or to do “riot tourism” — we’ve all seen videos of that. That is not okay. But plenty of rioting is happening because a group of people have been crying out in every which way that they are drowning and nothing seems to help. I’ve seen even staunch conservatives acknowledge that Floyd’s death was beyond the pale. And it’s not just him: it’s Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and so many others. And those are just the deaths that make the news — that’s a small subset of all the times when someone was “just” beat up, or profiled, or arrested for no good reason. Plenty of black people feel that society is not honoring its contract with them; given that, can we really blame those protesting for feeling that they don’t need to honor their contract with society?

Police and politicians are not supposed to be involved in decisions of whether to prosecute crimes, so the fact you lay guilt on them for not prosecuting is puzzling.

Prosecutors are supposed to be making those decisions on behalf of the state or federal government.

The police did everything in their power (immediately firing them). It's up to prosecutors to do the rest.

Do you think police generally support what happened?

District Attorneys and Attorney Generals are both politicians elected by voters. Police also wield enormous political power.

I do believe police generally support what happened.

> That's one example, there's also kidnapping, rape and serious assault with deadly weapons to point at.

So you've pointed out what the police have been up to, and why people are out rioting.

Please point out exactly where I justified police behavior or said they're all innocent, or downplayed the initial incident. I saw the video, it's disgusting.

But torching a residential building with children inside as a response? How is that okay?

> But torching a residential building with children inside

"But the children!" It was vacant. Nice try, though.

No one is condoning this specific act, but I'm not going to damn everything else because if it. That's absolutely silly.

Which acts of destruction and rioting would you condone, if any?

Torching black-owned businesses? Looting critical supplies from pharmacies, supermarkets and other retailers? Stoning people nearly to death in the street? Murdering a federal officer in California?

Where's the line? What's acceptable?

FWIW, the vast majority of protesters involved are not involved in the aforementioned acts.

That's a weird stance. Law enforcement is always based on the credible threat of violence.

You can comply peacefully with everything they ask of you. That's because of the threat of violence. "No, we can't make this person come with us to present them to a judge, if they don't want to, they must be let go. No Violence!" sounds crazy.

"No violence, ever" just means "property should not exist as a concept".

These are protests against actual murders and property damage. Should the standards you're applying to the protesters be applied to the police?

Of course, the police are guilty of some despicable behavior when responding to the unrest.

As an example, firing rubber bullets at innocent people causing harm and arresting journalists.

That doesn't mean it's justified to burn down an occupied building with children inside and prevent fire crews from accessing it. That's diabolical.

It shouldn't be met with more violence.

> Your comment removes so much context that it's nearly deceptive.

How much more "context" do you need? You don't go around dispatching the military to shoot at your own citizens, not in a state governed by the rule of law. No amount of civil unrest will let an accountable government get away with that.

> Do you propose this behavior should be met with praise and not violence?

Please don't put words in my mouth.

>Please don't put words in my mouth.

It's a simple question, and I never implied your response either way.

Do you think violence by police or military is justified when individuals are setting fire to occupied buildings?

It's the job of the police to de-escalate. Sometimes, this may fail and some harm might be done in the hands of the police. However, being a police officer should never be a free ticket to inflict violence with impunity, and this is what people are advocating for. As for the military, it simply isn't their job to police their own citizens.

Frankly, I don't know why I'm having to say this. I'm just stating the obvious here.

How do you de-escalate an occupied building on fire with violent protestors preventing emergency services from saving children?

The police are obviously totally overwhelmed, and like it or not the military has the legal authority to operate domestically and without them being there more people could've died.

I don't understand your position. There's an occupied building on fire, with children inside. Protesters are attacking fire crews. What is the ideal outcome? I didn't see a fireman with his knee on anyone's neck. Why attack them, if not to cause destruction and murder people?

Arson against residential buildings is terrorism. That's it.

How do you stop civil unrest by ordering (or threatening to, at the moment) the military to shoot at people? You're making it sound like shooting is the only solution, but it's not. There are many forms of non-lethal force you could use to deal with the kind of situation you're talking about.

Anyways, you're ignoring the bigger picture, the mountain of bodies that led to this situation in the first place. The civil unrest we're seeing wouldn't have happened at all if policing across the country was done in a sane manner. The numerous reports of unjustified police violence in the midst of this crisis is already making things worse, and there's no need for the military to add to that.

> met with praise and not violence?

Yes. Do you have ANY examples in history where protests were met with violence didn't end poorly? Hell, America celebrates the Boston Tea Party in school.

Civil disobedience is an American obligation.

This viewpoint always seemed silly to me. Actors have a union, yet the variation between highest paid actors and low paid actors is in the hundreds of millions.

The highest performing teachers in a state with teacher unionization is paid the same as the lowest performing teacher who is totally incompetent.

This rewards ineptitude, punishes high performance and punishes children.

The worst thing about unions is protecting low performers, though.

So? Don't have that type of union.

Unions fight for what their members want them to fight for. Some unions fight for things i wouldn't want. Some unions fight for things that i would want in some jobs but not in the tech industry. It doesn't follow that just because one union did X all unions would do X.

> I don't support unions because unions drag everyone's wages to an average (I'd rather be a top performer and be paid accordingly).

I see so many more people with this viewpoint than can statistically all be “top performers”.

Given the low likelihood that any given person is a top performer, isn’t it better to organize in such a way that we all benefit?

Not when there's so much public information on wages. Compare your wage to the average among others in your location with your title. In my case, I earn about 110% more than the average salary for my title in my location. If I earned the average salary, I wouldn't be so high performing. I wouldn't care about my work beyond the minimum required to not be fired.

Why do you assume that a union would drag everyone's wages down to the pre-union average?

Even assuming (which is an incredible leap of logic) that a union for people who are famously a highly-paid and highly-competitive sector would want to "pay everyone the same" (which, frankly, no union on the planet actually does; the absolute worst in that vein is pay based purely on seniority), it would be vastly more likely that the union would be able to bargain with employers to increase that average salary—perhaps not to match the very top, but well above what it was before the union was formed.

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