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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

> There is no oracle that says civil disobedience for cause X is just but cause Y is unjust.

I'm not making any comment about the justness or unjustness of the underlying cause of the protests

> The police cannot simply allow it to occur so they will react with the amount of force needed to end it swiftly.

This statement, however, is simply bullshit, and the US has literally hundreds of years of examples of how civil disobedience can be dealt with reasonably and humanely (of course as well as other examples where it's dealt with viciously). The protest would have eventually died down (an effective strategy to dealing with these kinds of protests is just to cordon them off and wait it out, they'll eventually need food and water), protestors would have been arrested and cited with an appropriate misdemeanor.

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Your proposed strategy opens civil society up to endless denial of service attacks. Normal life grinds to a halt every time someone feels like they need to "protest". Would you be OK with a single person just sitting in the middle of a highway holding a protest sign? 5 people? 10? 50? Is the nature of the protest important?

The classical notion of civil disobedience is that you have to be willing to accept the consequences, so you can't resist arrest and you have to accept being jailed or paying the fine etc. What I don't see in the recent "protests" is any willingness to be arrested. In fact I see lots of people resisting arrest.

Civil disobedience only works when there's civil reciprocity in a reasonable time frame. It's being abandoned as a tactic because it has been yielding diminishing returns, and radical folk are conscious that conditions keep worsening, in terms of both direct violence and funding of a repressive status quo.

Just as every single human being desires peace in the same way they desire happiness. The love of peace, therefore, is not a virtue. When those who are leading their nations sing the praise of peace they are sincere. They seek war to achieve their peace. Even violent criminals demand peace, if only for themselves. They do not love war; they aspire to an unjust peace.

St Augustine, The City of God

> It's being abandoned as a tactic

That is at least an honest statement that what is going on isn't "civil disobedience". Yet there are people who are insisting that the riotous activities can be accurately given that label.

Just as there are lots of people that insist on conflating all protests with riots and cheer when the police gas the former only to act surprised when that leads to the latter.

I realize that we all struggle to overcome confirmation bias, but I really am not seeing the police preemptively gassing people prior to the riotous or threatening behavior. I don't doubt that there might be some examples of this but it is overwhelming outnumbered by people rioting but claiming that they are "peacefully assembling". What I really can't figure out is how many of these people are honest in thinking that the riotous behavior is legitimate (and useful) protest, how many of them are just excited to participate in a very realistic LARP game, and how many are attempting insurrection/rebellion.

Go back and look at the George Floyd protests in Minneapolis around May 30 - people were protesting peacefully the day after the incident (the most disruptive thing I saw was blocking intersections and some graffiti), but cops broke out the tear gas. That heavy-handed behavior in my view led directly to the full on riot the following day. (There's also an allegation that a right wing provocateur got things going by smashing the windows of an Autozone store, but I'm not sure how much of a causal role that played, and think the riot would probably have happened anyway).

Certainly, this is not always the case as local and temporal contexts vary widely. Some riots are spontaneous, some are planned to target state property or force its defense, some are engineered to exploit chaos for profit. You might find it informative to drop in on one if it is occurring in your area; counterintuitively it's not particularly dangerous to attend as a neutral person, though you should be prepared for the possibility of being tear gassed.

There is no repressive status quo. Watch the damn video. If one insists on maintaining a delusion, the. I agree, nothing will ever be good enough.

Folks, this concept isn't that difficult, and there seem to be a bunch of comments arguing about what civil disobedience really is, as if we didn't have hundreds of years of examples and jurisprudence to go by.

I'm in no way disagreeing that there were clear, obvious examples of violence and property destruction, just as clearly as there were many examples of peaceful protests. But these protests are like Rorschach tests: everyone sees in them what their mind tells them to see. I can say for a fact that in the particular instance I cited in Austin there were clear examples of police firing into the crowd in an indiscriminate fashion. Not even the police chief is really trying to defend it anymore.

My understanding is that in many historical examples of civil disobedience there was often an prior understanding between the protesters and the police as to what was going to happen. In a sense, it was scripted.

I'm not going to try to justify the police actions in Austin -- I don't know the details, but it seems to me that taking a large number of people into custody with no "script" and with the people not ready to be detained is probably quite hazardous, stressful, and ripe for something to go very wrong.

> Folks, this concept isn't that difficult, and there seem to be a bunch of comments arguing about what civil disobedience really is, as if we didn't have hundreds of years of examples and jurisprudence to go by.

I think what I've learned it discussing this is that in fact most people don't understand the philosophy of civil disobedience. Most people seem use the term to mean "breaking things, intimidating people, and baiting the police to draw attention to a just cause". And there is a unexplained rule that determines when the cause is "just" enough to excuse committing the crime that draws the attention.

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