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Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

> 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.

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