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Comment by rhegart | Hacker News Reader

Upper middle class morons who’ve never faced hardships or seen true evil, just lived in their bubble want to feel important and hyper tribalism reinforced via social media anger bubbles makes it a waste of time to have any nuance or discussions. These mobs are ruining primarily low income and minority lives while blue check marks rile them up and media gaslights and fans the flames. Every single city which has had these riots has seen a dramatic upshot in violent crime and economy ravaged. None have recovered since Ferguson

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Well yes. But it goes both ways. I would argue that the Right doesn't have the ability to have a nuance discussion around this topic either. They read the headline "defund the police" and assume that means less police to deal with violent crimes. "defund the police" means to reallocate resources from police to people better capable of resolving low impact community issues. And let the police deal with violent crimes. If done properly you might see more police resources available to keep the community safe from violent crime.

If the staff in your local monopoly grocery store is underperforming, do you defund the store? How about your engineering company? In each case, the solution is to replace/remove under-performers while increasing funding, rather than to defund.

This is what Camden did when they "defunded": dissolve the city police, bringing the city under county sheriff jurisdiction, then pay for new staffing at the county level. They may have been able to save some money because they broke the police union, but in the long term funding increased.

But the grocery store doesn't do surgeries or tennis lessons. If the grocery store was responsible for surgeries and doing a bad job, i absolutely would defund them and give the money to surgeons instead. Surgeons are trained at doing surgery. See what i did there? Same applies to police dealing with mental ill people. Mental health professionals should be involved instead.

This sounds like an absurd analogy but only because America doesn't know how to operate community services in any other way than with a heavy police force. It's a failure of imagination and / or unwilling to look at the rest of the world for successful examples of alternative methods.

Agreed riots against individualsand businesses and people in communities is extremely counterproductive and is mostly a result of directionless and angry people acting like idiots.

Instead, there should be organization and all violence should be directed to the state sponsored goon squads that can break into people's home and murder them with little to no consequence.

Of course, this has happened before and ended with the comical exposure of the right wing clowns that still serve as idols of right wingers today.

also a lot of the riotets are young, upper middle class, white males

what says black lives matter better than trashing their neighborhoods?

read ellison's invisible man written in 1950s to see how long white people have been exploiting African Americans in this way!

A number that have been caught actually rioting are white supremacists seeking to provoke a race war, and at least some caught encouraging it online (haven't seen any caught actually rioting)have been specifically police officers that are also white supremacists seeking to provoke a race war.

just look at any photos of the protests and count the white to black ratio

if those are all far righters white rioters, this is even more confusing!!!

plot twist, they are actually anti fa claiming to be alt right and start a race war so there is more police brutality and there is more evidence to call for defunding police !$$!

> just look at any photos of the protests

[...]

> if those are all far righters white rioters

1. You are falsely drawing an equivalence between protesters and rioters; they aren't identical groups.

2. I never said all the rioters were white supremacist provocateurs, just that a number of the roots that have been arrested, and some of the online encouragers, have turned out to be (and, in the latter case, specifically also law enforcement officers.)

so you are claiming majority of the rioting is by alt right and law enforcement? i am very interested to see you substantiate that claim

i attended one blm march in my town and it was mostly (almost entirely) white, and the most active participants seemed to be mostly white non local college kids, who gave no indication of being alt right

the organizers were also predominantly white, some seemed very experienced with this sort of thing (and pretty elderly)

i cannot help but draw comparisons with ellison's book

it also seemed to be mostly organized as a photo op, and had us spend most of our time marching around an abandoned high school, with perhaps a few minutes along a main road which is when some participants spent their time taking pics and filming

i personally was highly disappointed with the march, and do not see how it can bring about greatly needed local change in the most racist county in my state

> so you are claiming majority of the rioting is by alt right and law enforcement?

Am I? I don't see the word “majority” or any synonym used in my description.

The point of provocateurs isn't normally to numerically dominate.

what is your point? what are you trying to say in response to my original claim?

I'd like to see some sources for this claim. It's not impossible, and it would even make some sense, but... evidence?

[Edit: Even harder: There's a difference between "it happened, but rarely" and "it's responsible for the majority of the cases". If it happens, how often does it happen?]

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