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Comment by gindely | Hacker News Reader

Protests are inconvenient. But if you can amass enough people day after day to block major intersections with crowds of people, then the correct thing to do is to block major intersections with crowds of people day after day.

If people don't want their intersections blocked by crows of people day after day, then they should consider the extent to which their interests are compatible with the interests of the protesters, and if necessary and reasonable, consider joining the protesters to help them achieve their goal sooner. If seventy percent of the US population were protesting, the protests wouldn't last that long - unlike in Hong Kong.

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Being a large enough crowd to block an intersection does not mean your views are valid enough to be supported by everyone else. Would you really advocate joining KKK protests just because they were large?

White supremacists are actively trying to fly under the radar in open-carry protests right now.[1] There’s a lot of weird noise in that area online and off. So just because white supremacists and their sympathizers get to protest, that doesn’t mean other people get to protest? Sounds like separate but equal to me.[2] Not for me or mine.

This was your hypothetical, but it’s actually reality. Protest is protest. It’s for the whole society to decide what are valid forms of it, at every level.

[1] https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2020/05/27/the-boogaloo-move...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separate_but_equal

" It’s for the whole society to decide what are valid forms of it, at every level."

That's just lawlessness.

There's not way to make up the rules as we go along, using the 'winds of the day' and what's happening on the news to determine what's a legit protest and what is not.

We do decide collectively what's what by using laws and policies. We make those, we make them clear, and then we apply them.

It seems as though you can't block traffic at a busy intersection 'because' - and so whatever the protest is today, it's not right.

We can't make up as we go along, that's chaos.

People can protest in parks, in front of city hall etc. - that works, it's peaceful and within civil framework.

As I said before, that is not backed up by Supreme Court precedent. You need to cite your claims as to constitutionally-protected protests being synonymous with lawlessness. As I read the Constitution, any act determined to be protest by the courts is legal until found otherwise. Police decisions about lawlessness are only valid in a law-enforcement context, and such police determinations are only provisional, and are not exclusively binding; they can be superseded by higher authorities in the executive branch, and challenged by the public, legislature, and judiciary, on legal grounds as well as humanitarian grounds.

You haven’t responded to my legal arguments and justifications. You are moving the goalposts and doubling down. Please keep on point or I will not have any substantial points to respond to.

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