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Comment by pstuart | Hacker News Reader

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Nuance is not so important in this situation. The effect is that people have been effectively given a pass to disregard the virus, as long as they're "protesting". Look at the protests and all the riots, do you see social distancing happening? People are throwing punches out there my dude. It's chaos.

People living in a certain form of hell aren't afraid of dying of corona... I personally would rather die of pneumonia than 20 or so bullets to the back from an agent of the state operating with a hair trigger and impunity.

Do people really think MLK felt safe when he was protesting? He was brave, new assassination was likely, and still marched.

Yeah, but if all the proponents of BLM die to Covid-19, who is going to be there to keep up the fight afterward? This is all very short-term thinking. There are other ways to protest.

> There are other ways to protest

I'm genuinely curious. Would you care to elaborate?

Instead of destroying local businesses and terrorizing innocent people in their own cities, maybe they should be targetting the rich multinational corporations? Those corps will bend over for basically anything if to avoid backlash and protect their profits.

If BLM could get enough people to boycott corporations who have benefitted from this status quo, then they could force them to push through the changes they want.

If you have numbers, theres a bunch of things you could do without even stepping outside, let alone go and protesting, causing mayhem and chaos for our essential workers during this pandemic. My idea may not be the right one, they'll have to figure it out.

Here's the thing: I'm not advocating for violence and neither are most of "us". This violence is not because of the protest, it's because of interlopers.

You only see these protests as exercises in violence and mayhem, which is exactly what the powers that be want. It completely delegitimizes these First Amendment protests in the eyes of many.

Much of that violence comes from interlopers who hijack the effort, and of that violence is manufactured by outsiders intentionally stirring up shit. The recent "antifa" account that was really a white nationalist organization comes to mind.

Consistently framing the protesters as being the ones who are inciting or participating in this violence can only be disingenuous at best.

Again, violence is bad, m'kay? We get that. It also means that it's bad when it comes from the police as well.

Boycotting is a luxury, and is a dilute and indirect route to change. Perhaps they should just calm down and file a complaint with the police department and a manager will straighten everything out just right?

I think that is irrelevant to many of the protestors. Most know that black Ferguson, Missouri protestors started to mysteriously die weeks after the protests ended (suspect foul play), they know the state may target them for the rest of their lives, and many made peace with putting their life on the line for this cause -before- they walked into the streets.

>There are other ways to protest.

Feel free to share any protest ideas you have that keep them safe and achieve Civil Rights Act level reforms without requiring people in the streets making the powerful uncomfortable.

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