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Comment by TeeMassive | Hacker News Reader

The problem right now is that there are a lot of people who want to (and did) commit violent acts and use black block tactics. They openly encourage lawful protesters to dress homogeneously all clad in black under the pretense of protecting protesters against police but in fact they do so to commit acts of violence and then meld away in the crowd, effectively taking hostage the lawful protesters.

The argument can be made that to protect peaceful assemblies, tools need to be engineered so those rioters can be differentiated from the lawful protesters and bring them to justice.

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> The argument can be made that to protect peaceful assemblies, tools need to be engineered so those rioters can be differentiated from the lawful protesters and bring them to justice.

This is the same reasoning behind the argument for putting backdoors into crypto algorithms, and it's a bad argument for the same reasons.

As a law abiding protestor I don’t buy this because it was done to me without my knowledge. They can use tools to watch criminals without compiling data on peaceful protestors without their knowledge

> dress homogeneously all clad in black

Much like the police when they obscure or remove their names and/or badge numbers, no?

> but in fact they do so to commit acts of violence and then meld away in the crowd, effectively taking hostage the lawful protesters.

Yep, you got that right.

> tools need to be engineered so those rioters can be differentiated from the lawful protesters and bring them to justice.

Tools need to be engineered to bring murderers, killers, rapists, and jackbooted jarheads to justice.

Murderers are being let free. Society should revolt at such injustice. I wish folks talked with such conviction about the folks raping, murdering, and killing with impunity. Beating protestors without care, etc. Instead they reserve "bring them to justice" for broken windows and stolen Nikes. What a country.

You write with such conviction and certainty, and yet I must point out that it's black bloc, not "block".

I, too, used to be a grammar fascist.

Then I fell in love with an otherwise quite intelligent woman with dyslexia

At some point I just stopped trying to correct her to/too/two confusion

It would be nice if everyone used correct grammar. But you understood what they were trying to say, which is what made it possible for you to suggest the correction.

What I'm getting at is that I now think it's impolite to call someone out on their grammer in a public forum (I know you saw what I did, there)

The tone of online discourse has eroded so badly of late that I think it's best to become a politeness fascist now.

We don't call people out on their lisp, their tics, their stutter, their mumbling, their gait... but calling people out on their spelling online is OK apparently

The grandparent also wrote with absolute conviction but you take no issue with that because spelling, right

I'm expressing doubt that 'TeeMassive is well-informed about black bloc tactics or that their claims are rooted in truth, since they made a basic error that would seem to stem from third-hand hearsay.

Or it could stem from mere auto completion or any kind of spell checking.

Do you have a problem with grammar anarchists?

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