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Comment by jMyles | Hacker News Reader

> It is despicable how tepid the police response

Having been gassed and flashbanged all summer in Portland while protesting for Black Lives, the last word I can imagine using to describe police restraint is "despicable." I don't wish that shit on anybody.

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You're right, practicing restraint is very important. What I meant is that the difference itself is what's despicable. An actively hostile, antagonistic response to protestors who were almost entirely peaceful versus doing almost nothing to impede armed rioters breaking into the Capitol.

It seems widely agreed that 93% of BLM protests were peaceful [1]. That remaining 7% slice was responsible for $1-2 billion of property damage [2], on par with a serious natural disaster. I don't know how someone can continue to use the "mostly peaceful" line with a straight face.

[1] https://time.com/5886348/report-peaceful-protests/ [2] https://www.axios.com/riots-cost-property-damage-276c9bcc-a4...

Last I heard, 50% + 1 is the definition of "mostly". 93% is "overwhelmingly". To be clear, any property damage or loss of life is a tragedy but "mostly peaceful" isn't just accurate, it's an understatement.

Point taken, but by this standard, we could defend drunk driving as overwhelmingly safe, war as overwhelmingly non-fatal, Vioxx as overwhelmingly heart-healthy, ISPs as overwhelmingly customer friendly, etc etc.

It strikes me as pyschopathic to endorse actions that stand a 7% chance of ruining numerous innocent lives.

I didn't endorse any of the violent protests. But I don't understand your analogy at all. Drunk driving is never ok. Are you saying any kind of protest is never ok because it has a chance of turning violent? confused face

There are over 110M drunk driving incidents in the US every year and nearly 7M crashes, drunk or otherwise [1][2]. If we conservatively attribute all of these crashes to drunk drivers, we find that 94% of drunk driving causes no damage or injury. It is, to borrow your words, overwhelmingly safe.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/transportationsafety/impaired_driving/im...

[2] https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-highway-...

I ask you again, are you saying protests of any kind are never ok? Because that's what it sounds like you're saying.

All I ask is that your social movement be less injurious to society than being wasted behind the wheel.

If I flipped a coin and it came up heads 93% of the time would you say it came up mostly heads?

I feel like people are just talking past each other on this. Yes the protests were technically mostly peaceful, but if the loss from a violent protest is 15x the magnitude of the gain of a peaceful protest, the impact is no longer mostly peaceful. I do not think this extreme minority should warp one's overall opinion of BLM for the record, but I do think the lack of acknowledgement for the damage that was caused is counterproductive.

I think the double standards are despicable.

Yeah. I understand the unfortunate symbolism of right-wing intruders taking the chambers but I still think in terms of injuries/ fatalities while staff and lawmakers were evacuated, this was a successful de-escalation. (This [well, 'taking' the parliament] happened in Germany, too, and no-one was talking about it anymore days later because nothing really happened.)

It is unfortunate though, that this strategy is only seemingly applied to white people.

> It is unfortunate though, that this strategy is only seemingly applied to white people.

It is much more than unfortunate.

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