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Comment by neonate | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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.

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?

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