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Comment by caconym_ | Hacker News Reader

IIRC there are 25 deaths attributed to the "BLM protests". That includes all of them, across the country, likely a number of events in the high hundreds or low thousands. AFAIK that number does not include any police deaths, though there were a couple attributed to right-wing extremists in the same period.

In a single medium-sized event, Wednesday's riot got 5 people killed. One of them was a policeman, and at least three of them were due to violence. So in terms of fatalities per participant-day, Wednesday's event was probably at least two orders of magnitude more violent than the "BLM protests" taken as a whole.

I think that's a significant difference, and one that exposes this sort of whataboutism as false equivalency (in addition to the other issues with whataboutism).

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BLM is responsible for many police killings, including one incident in Dallas in 2016 where 5 police officers were murdered in one event.

I know this country has memory holed the negative actions of BLM, but they have a lot of law enforcement blood on their hands.

Let me help you understand my comment. I put “BLM protests” in quotes because I am specifically talking about the protests last summer that resulted from several high-profile police brutality incidents with black victims. I don’t really consider any particular group labeling itself “BLM” to speak for that particular movement, hence the quotes.

In a similar vein, I’m not blaming the people who stormed the Capitol on Wednesday for previous right-wing attacks, including on LEOs e.g. the boog boi murders earlier last year.

The police murders were committed under the BLM protests.

Consequently, the media mislabeling of the reign of terror campaign this summer doesn’t legitimize destroying communities because a few people were pissed off and corporations attempted to add an air of legitimacy to it.

I watched a bunch of people chant at a door on Wednesday, a couple windows were broken, a guy in viking shit flexed on a chair, an unarmed woman was shot climbing through a window, and my feed is filled with hyperbolic morons screaming sedition and traitors.

I’m over it.

It’s interesting that there is one place in this country where protest should be encouraged and that is at the halls of power in Washington DC, and the media feeds the lie that destroying your communities in fire is legitimate protest while being angry at and petitioning your federal government at their seat of power is sedition.

Ask yourself that question, why the reaction to this event?

> destroying your communities in fire is legitimate protest while being angry at and petitioning your federal government at their seat of power is sedition.

Do you seriously actually believe this is a balanced representation of the events we're talking about? A simple yes or no, please.

Please stop adding to political battles and flamewars on HN. It is not what this site is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It looks like you've been using HN primarily for political and ideological battle. We don't allow that, because it destroys what HN is supposed to be for: curious, thoughtful conversation on topics of intellectual interest.

I'm not going to ban you right now because you posted better comments several months ago, but please don't do this. Instead, if you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.

The police murders occurred before 2020, so they can't have occurred during the protests I'm talking about. That seems pretty darn simple.

> Consequently, the media mislabeling of the reign of terror campaign this summer doesn’t legitimize destroying communities because a few people were pissed off and corporations attended to add an air of legitimacy to it.

Engaging with any subjective representation of the protests I am talking about is outside the scope of what I'm willing to discuss—for those who've been subjected to it, I can't compete with the right-wing media's firehose of disinformation. My point about fatalities per participant-day stands as a metric of the violence during last summer's protests compared to the riot last Wednesday, and you can take it or leave it.

the problem is that both sides of this issue have internalized a subjective representation of events and their doctrine moving forward is based on that subjectivity. this is how politics work. to understand where the right is operating from, you need to be willing to understand their narrative as they understand it and the same goes the other way. this imo is the only way to begin broaching the utter communication breakdown that is happening. for a not insignificant portion of our country, the cultural lockstep that emerged between corporate avatars, media, and government officials cheering on what they experienced as months of violence, destruction and lawlessness (and not to mention a jarring reversal on the necessity of lockdowns that have served as a de facto economic sanction on middle america) has fundamentally destroyed trust in these institutions, more alarmingly, it has shown that violence is the path to results. it is very important to understand the mindset of these people and how it brought them to the capital.

on my part i think my initial comment was poorly constructed as this was the main point i wanted to communicate.

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