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Comment by s3th | Hacker News Reader

The police officers responsible for the murders of countless innocent Black people.

They are anything but countless. There’s a specific number of unarmed Black people who are killed each year by police. That number is typically less than 30.

OP said innocent, not unarmed.

So we can quantify how many innocent unarmed people the government is allowed to kill each year, and I guess it's more than 30?

You're implying that destroying innocent people's property and starting riots that lead to deaths, including 18 murders in Chicago alone on May 31st, is a justified response to an act of injustice, which is an absolutely irresponsible moral outlook, exhibiting morally elitist entitlement.

In fact, it would be the 'incitement to riot' that the parent comment is referring to, that an impartial application of the proposed rule would identify as worthy of banning.

Please stop taking HN threads further into flamewar, as you did repeatedly in this thread and are doing repeatedly on the site elsewhere. Comments like e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25526385 are unacceptable, for reasons which will be obvious to you once you review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

If you keep posting like that we will ban you. I'm not going to ban you right now because you've also posted some ok comments within recent memory, but the not-ok comments are seriously not ok. No more of this, please.

Sorry, I'll try to not incite flame wars. In my defense, anything related to these kinds of issues is highly likely to rouse emotions. The only way these topics can even brought up without a flame war is if every one agrees, and no one expresses a dissenting viewpoint. Just Food for Thought.

But yes I could certainly have been less provocative.

> anything related to these kinds of issues is highly likely to rouse emotions.

You can say that again! And yet the seemingly innocuous mandate of this site—gratification of intellectual curiosity—actually requires us all to work hard at not succumbing to that dynamic. If you think about it (well, when I think about it), two odd things follow from that: (1) this is a rather larger project than it seems; (2) it's actually doable.

Yes it is doable. I made a mistake in how I dealt with inflammatory comments, in responding in kind instead of reporting it. I wrongly assumed moderation was more lax, and the forum was more of a free-for-all, than they are.

Equating protests with riots is a bit nonsensical. We should consider how the police has treated black people for the last 100+ years, to start. Protests like these have been long overdue.

I don't understand your point. There were widespread riots across the US during the summer of BLM, with many police forces standing down in the face of them.

And your point about black people in no way justifies the indiscriminate violence perpetrated by the rioters.

One act of injustice, or centuries of injustice?

At what point does brutalizing innocent people become a justified response to injustice?

The answer is at no point.

Any way, from what I recall 350,000 white men died fighting for the Union, in a civil war to end an institution that had existed since the beginning of human culture, and that continued to be practiced all around the world into the 20th century until imperialist powers ended it.

I’m not justifying anything. I’m simply pointing out the absurd false equivalence.

I thought the riots were about the abuse inflicted upon George Floyd. Sorry for not being adequately sensitive. I think you're over-reacting a bit and it shows misplaced priorities.

>I thought the riots were about the abuse inflicted upon George Floyd.

Ah yes the old "i can only remember 1 event at a time" defense

Your accusation lacks the generosity of a benefit of the doubt.

It could be the fact that George Floyd's death triggered the movement, that his character figured centrally in it, and hashtags of his name were the primary symbol of it.

But instead you take the typical high handed approach of the moral elitist movement.

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