Hacker News Reader

Comment by beervirus | Hacker News Reader

Why are we still calling riots “protests?”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHb3xVqxcp8

You'd be absolutely livid if you found out how your ancestors earned the right to a weekend and a 40 hour work week.

I'm trying to recall an incident (19th or 20th c.) where a mine or a factory hired strikebreaker snipers to climb into towers and shoot down into the strikers.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_View_Massacre https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thibodaux_massacre https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morewood_massacre

And the list goes on...

The only reason we have days off is because of productivity gains due to investment in capital goods. If we can wean ourselves off of a debt-based economy, then we might be able to whittle that workweek down even further. We seem to have stalled right around 1971 when dollar convertibility was suspended.

The reason you have days off is due to decades of labor agitation. Productivity has continued to climb even after the 70s.

Where did you get the idea that is how it happened? That claim is not backed up by history at all.

Lots of factual claims, no support included.

Learn some history.

Because there’s riots and protests. They’re not one and the same.

The cops are after evidence on arson and gun theft, not protests, as the headline says.

The protests are specifically about abuse of authority by police; there’s legitimate reason to be wary.

Protests are when you peaceably assemble to air your grievances.

Riots are when people assemble and commit crimes. Especially felony crimes like arson, destruction of property, etc.

These are riots.

Is it infeasible that rioters aren’t simply colocating with protesters to take advantage of the chaos like they have always?

The implication is the police are after the protestors rather than rioters, which is not observed.

I think that's plenty observed actually. When you look at who's been shot, beaten, and gassed it's largely protesters, not people rioting. Although it's easy for police to make the claim that it's rioters, since they seem to declare every protest a riot.

As someone mentioned above, some people are protesting peacefully while others are committing crimes and rioting. The concern is that police, and now federal agents, aren't acting in good faith and aren't interested in distinguishing between the two. It's possible to be concerned about abuse of power by law enforcement - which has been rampantly on display these past few weeks - without supporting anarchist attempting to set fire to buildings.

If we could know for sure the police weren't going to abuse their authority, there would have been neither protests nor riots.

Last I checked protests don't involve destruction of property, arson, and murder.

I think this claim lost any validity long, long ago.

Last I checked, law enforcement didn’t involve kneeing people to death on the ground, abusing power, and so on.

As long as you want to paint all protesters as rioters, then to be consistent you have to put all of the police into the same bucket as well.

No, you don't because while there is widespread acceptance that law enforcement abused power, there is no such acceptance that the rioters have

So you are suggested that the police get a pass because we already accept that some are bad but protesters shouldn’t because some people don’t realize that rioters like to hang out and cause mayhem at protests?

Nobody is suggesting this.

No sane person can look at the riots and say this is protest it stopped being that long ago.

It stopped being that the moment it turned into riots.

Those still participating are complicit at the very least and I would hazard a guess are well fucking aware of what they're doing.

I should clarify, I am well aware there are still ongoing peaceful protests.

Those are not an issue, and nobody on this side is confusing them or labelling them as rioters.

If you want to see what biased but relatively fair coverage of this, go watch tim pool on youtube. There is a bit of exaggeration but by and large what he speaks is mostly pretty solid reasoning.

The extreme left has taken over this issue and is destroying our chances at finally removing trump. And I'm pissed about this, because the issues these riots started over are real, and need resolution, but these riots don't result in this outcome.

They result in more people falling down the right side of things.

> No sane person can look at the riots and say this is protest it stopped being that long ago.

Plenty of us sane people can still see the protests going on, the actual riots are not that common but are covered disproportionately by the press (but especially by FoxNews who is making out Portland and Seattle as apocalyptic hellscapes). I assume you are either in Portland and just not paying attention or you are getting all your information from the media.

I am not painting all protestors as rioters.

I am saying what we have here is not protest. Its rioting.

I don't know what law enforcement have to do with this.

The cops are just looking for evidence of felony crimes, not all your notes to your mom and coworkers – but if you were reluctant to hand over your email credentials, would it seem fair to characterize you as complicit in covering up for felony crimes?

The judge granted them recordings taken by professional equipment in specific area in specific time range, not mom notes.

Sorry, I didn’t mean my analogy to be a wholesale dismissal of the subpoena or its justification. I meant to address what seemed like circular reasoning in your reply to this thread.

The thread started out with someone arguing that the "protests" are actually "riots". Someone else replied by pointing out "because there's riots and protests", which are not the same thing.

So then you replied with, "The cops are after evidence on arson and gun theft, not protests, as the headline says." – which I took (perhaps mistakenly) as an argument that the media's footage should not be considered as innocuous "protest footage", because the cops believe that it contains evidence of crimes.

But that seems like begging the question? Ignoring the whole "innocent until proven guilty" concept (two suspects have been arrested and charged, but not tried), it seems problematic to argue that the media should handover its riot footage on the basis that the police believe it contains evidence of riotous activity.

Just as it would be problematic to characterize someone's personal email account as being non-innocuous, on the basis of what the police assert they might find if they do a few keyword searches of it.

> would it seem fair to characterize you as complicit in covering up for felony crimes?

The way this part was written in context was hard to parse for me - on first read it seemed that you were arguing that it would be fair to say that you were complicit. This reply shows that you intended this in a more hyperbolic way, or in such a way that you would mock-suggest that “surely this would not be fair,” which is obvious when I already know your meaning, but didn’t seem clear to me on first read.

Yeah I agree with you. I had a muddled analogy and likely muddled line of reasoning

Good talk though

The cops are nominally after evidence on arson and gun theft. It could be legit, it could be just an excuse. The fact that we can't trust them not to use the data for other purposes once they have it is very much part of the reason these protests exist.

Well the distinction usually depends on the observer. In Israel we have a palamentary system as opposed to a presidential one. PM netanyahu, which is about to be under criminal trial, is trying to pass a law where he will have basically the authority to make any decree without the authorization of the parliament. Making him the defacto.president, minus checks and balances.

Naturally large scale protests are taking place. Israel protests are usually very tame, no looting and practically no violence,atleast when to what you see in French or the US.

The most violent things protesters did was sitting on the road (which was blocked by police) in front of the PM residence. This did not stop media controlled by Netanyahu to pump the notion that these protesters are all rioters and anarchists. While a lot of them are yound middle class educated family people, Led by 60-70 yo without any political aspiration.

So when the person being protested against calls the protesters rioters, I tend to take it with a grain of salt.

> practically no violence,atleast when to what you see in French or the US.

To be frank, i don't know about the US, but violence in French protest used to be well-contained and limited to a few buildings (often a mcdonald, a bank or two and sometime a Tesla, nothing an assurance wouldn't cover, and free time for a dozen employee during the repairs) until recently when lawkeeping doctrine were changed to avoid making our government looking like they lost.

Violence from protesters used to be limited to black blocks, and black blocks are organized and carefull, attached to symbols. You could predict which batiment could be targeted ahaed of time, take preventive mesure for those batiments. They never put fire in commercial building if there were occupied appartement nearby.

Then, because of a macdonald destruction that looked bad on a camera (despite looking really, really good for anybody aware of what lawkeeping really is about: 3 minor injuries, 90 BB arrested for a quarter of a million of property damage), police were asked to start protecting batiment.

That made mobile brigade and CRS immobile and unable to follow and limit property destruction, so a minister door was fractured.

Easy solution, just had more police. even if the ones we add are not trained in lawkeeping at all and are used to anti-drugs operation and are a bit trigger-happy. And also, change the doctrine, instead of letting black blocks destroying property to scare protesters off and nest BB more easely, meet them earlier. If "normals" protester don't want to be hurt, they shouldn't be near these black blocks!

We are two deaths, three hands, around twenty eyes, battered poicemen and a dropping confidence in the police after those "clever" decisions.

Violence call for violence, and now the protester are really violent. Their rights.

I'm sorry if I came off critical of French or US protesters. I only meant that we are not there yet, I fear that the abuse inflicted by the current netanyahu regime might lead to escalation. I'm agree full heartedly that violence calls for violence. I'm also pretty sure that the outcome the Netanyahu regime hopes for is violent protests. This way he can instill fear in the more well off people and have the mandate to use more extreme violence against protesters until he breaks them or no one but the actual anarchists are willing to continue.

So yes, violence calls for violence. But, we must break the cycle, I think nonviolent resistant is the only way to go.

Sadly, a lot of the media in Israel is either controlled by netanyahu via a web of corrupt interests or out right fear. Now it's mainly commercial fear, but he has been targeting and enflaming against top tier journalists that won't back down. Anyway, they don't show the peacful side of the protest.

The police minister conversation with the chief of police was just leaked. In it he demands more violence against protesters, and his argument his, that it's not fair the police won't violently suppress these protests with the same level of violence they use against minorities.

:Facepalm:

Because “riots”, “mobs”, and “chaos” are racially charged words that are used in lieu of the proper terminology—protests.

See: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/10/protes...

Also, Jason Stanley’s book, “How Fascism Works” also has a write up on this usage of language too.

> Because “riots”, “mobs”, and “chaos” are racially charged words

No, they’re not. What a ridiculous stretch to further broaden and water down what is considered racism.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com