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Comment by happytoexplain | Hacker News Reader

>Do you have a suggestion for a better way

>evil persons rioting and threatening to kill perfectly innocent children

This is a great and important question, and something that deserves way more R&D than it gets currently from the US's leviathan budget, but you should be aware that this lineup of statements is a bog standard bad-faith rhetorical tactic, and may be [mis]interpreted that way (i.e. this is often basically a paraphrase of "if you, Mr. Individual, do not have a solution right now, then you must be OK with the killing of innocent people").

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The research has been done.

It's largely a solved problem, and has been since the 70's. The cops in the US just don't use those tools and tactics.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/de-escalation-keeps-pro...

That requires that the protestors want the situation to deescalate as well. When they want to loot and burn buildings it doesn't work. Your options are to let them do that or use violence to stop them.

This implies that a riot was the intended goal of the protestors. I wasn't there, so I don't know for sure, but I can't imagine militarized police showing up gave the protestors warm and fuzzy feelings. The implied threat of violence amps up adrenaline, and it only takes one person doing something dumb for the police to violently swoop in and for everything to fall apart.

At the very least, there should be a parity in force used. The current police strategy seems to be overwhelming force, which is both not working, and a moral failure in my opinion.

You don't know what they want. If you deploy teargas before any of that has happened then perhaps the behavior you object to was in response to escalatory behavior of yours. You're essentially saying you have the right to deploy force because it's justified by any subsequent retaliation. If people don't retaliate or take any defensive action then you can declare a great victory and say they wanted to but you dominated them.

Your entire chain of reasoning is built on the claim that you have special knowledge of the future. Fine, so do I. If these people are not stopped then they're going to build Skynet and there will be nuclear strikes followed by terminator robots. Prove me wrong.

The cops should never be escalating. That's the point.

> but you should be aware that this lineup of statements is a bog standard bad-faith rhetorical tactic, and may be [mis]interpreted that way

Aha, so that's what is happening.

Thanks a lot for the explanation.

This is one of the things that really annoy me here: every time someone make an honest argument and someone else assume that it is a

- dogwhistle

- a "just asking question" tactic

- etc

even when they have to misread or stretch the meaning quite a bit to arrive at that result.

If you've noticed such a pattern and dislike it, you could have restructured your argument to avoid it. I toss or substantially rewrite more comments than I eventually post.

I reread it a number of times and I often do the same.

In this case it seems I had written what I meant though and a number of people just read mdorazios comment, saw that I was being downvoted and decided to continue piling on.

Also I guess a number of people like you are tired and angry and not in the mood for discussing alternatives-to-CS-gas-in-a-situation-where-the-use-of-force-is-actually-warranted.

Whatever, I don't care about stupid internet points, I just wish people here could read what I actually wrote instead of what mdorazio think I wrote.

I wish you luck with the protests.

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