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Comment by stonogo | Hacker News Reader

That's not a double standard. That's just a standard. When one group of people is holding signs that say "stop murdering people" and the other group is holding signs that say "I need a haircut," and you're mad that "the commenters" are not treating them the same, the problem is not with the commenters.

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> When one group of people is holding signs that say "stop murdering people" and the other group is holding signs that say "I need a haircut," and you're mad that "the commenters" are not treating them the same, the problem is not with the commenters.

This is at best an extremely distorted comparison of the two messages.

40 million people are unemployed. The stakes are much larger than just getting a haircut.

Yet those were the signs being held. There are clear goals for police brutality protests. The anti-quarantine protests had no clear goal, the narrative seemed to be “the government hit their ‘disable economy’ button and we want them to turn it back on” as if relaxing legal restrictions would suddenly make everyone ok with the rampant disease and go spend time rubbing shoulders again. People were self quarantining before it was a legal requirement.

There were many other signs being held. You’re choosing to focus on the people holding a haircut sign.

In any case as a legal matter it makes no difference. Government restrictions on 1st amendment rights to assemble and protest can only survive strict scrutiny if they are viewpoint-neutral.

As soon as governors are deciding which protesters to fine/ticket based on their agreement or disagreement with the contents of their protest signs, as a matter of law the protest/gathering ban is done for. (See the recent 5-4 Supreme Court decision where justice Roberts ruled that, at the time, there wasn’t evidence that church services in California were being treated unequally with other equivalent non-religious services. When the case comes back up again with Gov Newsom’s approval of protestors marching outside, but not Christians marching in religious processions, the ban is going to fall apart in court).

> Yet those were the signs being held.

Those are the signs you were shown, or chose to notice.

With the exception of restaurants, people mostly do seem to be going about their business now that legal restrictions are relaxed. As we've seen this past week or two, even giant crowds don't stop people.

You're making my point. You politically support one side more than the other, right down to belittling the side you unsupport as "I need a haircut". Maybe I agree with you politically, but when arguments from principle pivot from one week to the next based on which way the politics point, it's not really about principle.

One group of protestors makes awful points, so I judge them to be engaging in pointless and risky behavior.

The other side doesn’t, so I’m much more supportive of their protest, even though there might be associated risks.

As long as I don’t call for the first protest to be made illegal this is a perfectly consistent argument.

Sometimes you have to look at the content of a protest to judge if it’s valuable or not. And it’s perfectly ok to judge a protest as not being valuable.

It's not belittling them - that was their argument.

That might have been what one sign said, but picking that as if it were "their argument", let alone the best argument, is sample bias and clearly intended to belittle. That's politics: build up your own side as much as possible, smear the other side as much as possible. If someone actually wanted to be fair, they'd reference a stronger case for protesting the lockdown, such as the economic pain it has inflicted and the case that it also leads to deaths, such as by suicide and addiction, as well as social ills like increased child abuse and domestic violence. I'm not trying to take that side, just pointing out that intellectual honesty is the first casualty of politics, just like truth is the first casualty of war.

You must be under informed. Are you aware there are people who want society to reopen so they can start collecting income to pay rent and bills?

So because one of the "protesters" for BLM was literally holding a sign and going on live TV threatening to put fire to property, should we be equating all of BLM to that?

See how a strawman argument works?

No it wasn't. The argument was that the costs outweighed the benefits. Let's do this:

The economic devastation wrought by the pandemic could ultimately kill more people than the virus itself: https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-05-11/more-t...

With kids stuck at home, ER doctors see more severe cases: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/with-kids-stuck-at-home-er...

The Untold Toll — The Pandemic’s Effects on Patients without Covid-19: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMms2009984

COVID-19 Is Likely to Lead to an Increase in Suicides: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/covid-19-i...

Coronavirus could deplete Social Security as early as 'this decade': analysis: https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/coronavirus-could-deplete...

"Deaths of despair”: The deadly epidemic that predated coronavirus: https://www.vox.com/2020/4/15/21214734/deaths-of-despair-cor...

'Biblical' famines could double global hunger as a result of the coronavirus crisis, UN warns: https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/04/22/coronavirus-biblical-fam...

How COVID-19 may increase domestic violence and child abuse: https://www.apa.org/topics/covid-19/domestic-violence-child-...

Millions of Credit-Card Customers Can’t Pay Their Bills. Lenders Are Bracing for Impact: https://www.wsj.com/articles/millions-of-credit-card-custome...

Now to dare dumb down the argument to being only about haircuts is, well everyone can understand what I would say, but I don't want to run afoul of the rules.

Your framing of the situation is biased.

I could say: "One group is holding signs that say 'Let us reopen. I have 2 children to feed' and another group is calling for police abolition while smashing in the windows of small businesses and murdering people" and it would be just as valid of a description as yours. It's not a fair description though.

Maybe your framing is the result of not having a wide enough array of news sources.

If by "I need a haircut" you mean to say "I am unemployed, verging on destitution and eviction, along with 30 Million other Americans" then maybe you have a point.

The trivialization of other people's causes, especially those that should engender sympathy (literally 10's of millions of those in the weakest economic situations), is a 'root cause' here.

If a very serious healthcare issue is politicized, we're all in trouble.

neonate I agree with you. "I need a haircut" is a proxy for economic freedom of choice and freedom of movement, regardless the purpose. Freedom of movement only for the causes you believe in is not freedom at all.

They want to be the judges that get to determine which movement is worthwhile and which movement is not worthwhile.

I don't agree that "I need a haircut" is a good argument, or even that what it is a proxy for is a good argument. It's also lousy politics because it's so easy to dismiss.

The good argument is that if we care about mitigating suffering and death, we should also be looking at the suffering and death the lockdown measures lead to. Counting one side and not the other is dishonest.

This is the literal definition of a 'double standard' .... you know the same behaviour (protests) judged by different standards.

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