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Comment by ffggvv | Hacker News Reader

i remember during the BLM Riots, we had stories going around that jacob blake was just "breaking up a fight" between two women. when it turns out he had just finished robbing someone he'd previously sexually assaulted with her kids in the house. and twitter let it trend

i remember they had a video of gunshot sounds trending with a description saying that an innocent 16 year old girl was shot by police when in reality it was an armed 30 year old man who had just killed someone else.

i think its finally time to #deleteTwitter

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> BLM Riots

This is a harmful characterization of an important movement. No protests on that scale are going to go without a hitch. That shouldn't minimize their importance.

> Researchers at the US Crisis Monitor analyzed over 10,600 nationwide protests between May 24 (the day before George Floyd was killed by police) and Aug. 22, and found that nearly 95 percent were peaceful [1]

Jacob Blake was shot seven times in the back children while his children watched. He was unarmed. Even if the alleged sexual assault charges are found to be true, this is not how justice should be carried out.

Also. He is charged with sexual assault and trespassing. I can't find any source that he's been charged with robbery. These are serious charges. But it should be up to the courts to determine his guilt. Not the police or the court of public opinion.

1. https://mashable.com/article/black-lives-matter-protests-pea...

>He was unarmed

He was armed, and he admitted to it, and it is documented in the DOJ statement.

Please don't speak facts.

Can someone actually point to those "facts" y'all claim to have? Because I'm the only one actually citing sources right now.

Google search "blake knife screenshot"

Can you provide a source for this? The best I can find is that he had a knife on the floor of the truck. But was otherwise unarmed. This is consistent across all the main sources I've checked.

1. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/08/28/fac... 2. https://en.as.com/en/2020/08/25/latest_news/1598382234_23093... 3. https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/local/2020/08/26/jacob-b...

https://www.doj.state.wi.us/news-releases/update-kenosha-off...

5th paragraph

>Mr. Blake admitted that he had a knife in his possession.

From the USA Today article in regards to the paragraph:

> The DOJ has not clarified whether the knife was on the floorboard throughout the confrontation, or if Blake may have held it at some point. Spokeswoman Gillian Drummond declined to answer that question when asked by USA TODAY on Aug. 27.

We can discuss what kind of armed he was, but the fact that he was armed is not controversial, and that it the one and only point I am making.

I'm also making it in good faith, because it's entirely possible that all of the bad reporting on it would lead someone to believe that he was unarmed. That's the only reason for any of these replies.

That’s just it. I don’t think it can be stated that he was armed at this point. We know a knife was in the car. That’s about it.

Personally, I wouldn’t consider him to be armed unless he was actively brandishing it. Which the USA Today article says he was not.

Regardless. They shot a man in the back seven times while his children watched. The standard for that kind of force should be much, much higher than “he may or may not have had a knife in his possession”.

He was armed. That is not in dispute. See [here](https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/kenosha-police-union-gives-its-...). You could also see the knife in his hands in the video and hear the officers tell him to drop the knife.

The fact that you thought otherwise illustrates the problem precisely. Social and traditional media companies had no issue allowing this misconception to spread unfettered because aligned with their political beliefs.

so >500 riots then?

No.

> When destructive protests by demonstrators did take place, the "victims" were often statues of slave owners, Confederate leaders, and colonial figures.

Wipe it, like with a cloth?

You might as well delete most liberal media as well since anytime they mention a crime being committed and they omit the race of the perp you can assume they aren’t white. If they are white they will shout it from the rooftops.

I watched Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine and I’d assume that for some reason these journalists thought that they can fix racism just not mentioning the race of the perpetrators.

I haven’t seen what you’ve seen, so I’m not going to deny your experience/impression, but my opinion is that the only case where the races of those involved in a crime matter are when the crime is racially motivated. And that’s the standard I’ve seen major media adhere to, but obviously there’s grey areas. If you want every crime tallied up against the race of the perpetrator, I’ve got bad news for you; that’s what the kids are talking about when they take to the streets against good ol’ racism, my friend.

Well I am not going to deny your experience/impression, but my opinion is that news is valuable to the degree it has actionable information that is accurate.

e.g. Knowing which areas are more likely to be dangerous means I can avoid those areas. If an area is regularly the site of dangerous altercations, I know to be more careful around it. But if the news white-washes that actual factual information it becomes much less useful as actual actionable information.

What a wonderful racist analogy. Know the color of people is like knowing which areas are dangerous.

That's for explaining.

Pretending the problem doesn’t exist isn’t solving the problem.

Maybe fixing the crime and poverty is more important than calling it racist.

> There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps... then turn around and see somebody white and feel relieved ~ Jesse Jackson

Maybe the crime and poverty are direct results of centuries of racist oppressions. Slavery, segregation, denial of voting rights, economic opportunities... and maybe, the solution to racism isn’t more racism? How do you think we got here? And how do you propose we address the issues? You yell “look at the crime” and smugly pretend that the other side is blind to it; well, what’s your solution?

> and maybe, the solution to racism isn’t more racism?

So we are agreed that affirmative action should go.

If your conscience hasn’t been forcing you to face the fact that you thought “my kids can’t go to yale, and I blame minorities” was a badge of victimhood you can hold up against slavery and segregation... fellow human, you’ve got some reckoning to do. But it proves my point that you either have no solution to contribute, or you yourself know that your solution is wrong and are afraid to say it out loud. When I find myself in that fork, I take it as a signal that I should question my assumptions and values, before getting in the way of those who’ve come out with and committed to theirs.

I didn’t realise we were here to discuss a solution (universal basic income). I am here to point out institutional racism and leftist hypocrisy.

It's a web site so you can't delete it ;)

I agree. We have no reason to give our data and power of speech to these shit companies. We need a decentralized authority in charge of social networks. Nothing these companies provide is of any substantial value that cannot be open sourced and decentralized.

How do you go about decentralizing it? I'm fairly new to the industry and have career aspirations in this direction, so please fix what I'm missing:

1. Build out a good FOSS alternative.

2. Market the snot out of it until the unteched masses use it.

3. ??? open a foundation with that niche's leaders, or something?

4. FOSS is the new normal for that niche.

(edited for line breaks)

my question is how we decentralize it without allowing child exploitation etc. it seems like you need moderation at some level but the second you add it, they have the leeway to abuse that authority for political reasons

That question could be rephrased as "how much entropy should a system have?"

Specifically, I refer to "chaos/evil" as a type of entropy. It's a perversion of virtue. We live in a world system that always seems to have self-interest in there somewhere, but self-interest taken to extremes becomes evil.

So, "Freedom v2.2" is a system that allows for some entropy to motivate independent decisions that affect the public good (e.g., an entrepreneur), but are also punitive toward the public bad (e.g., child porn).

The real battle here that becomes political is the quantity and scope of controls. Generally, in the USA, the Republicans are presently leaning away from more controls and the Democrats toward it. The voter decides based on whether they think the system is self-correcting.

Or, to put another way, the entire essence of free information is either a self-correcting negative feedback loop (like the stock market) or a holy-crap-let's-stop-this-train-before-we-all-die positive feedback loop (like a horrifically dysfunctional family).

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