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Comment by mlthoughts2018 | Hacker News Reader

mlthoughts2018

That’s not much of a point. It’s really just you being on the demonstrably wrong side of actual facts, but acting like your extreme and indefensible take deserves equal validity or ontological status as a “right” belief, but it completely and unequivocally doesn’t.

You wouldn’t be saying this stuff to BLM supporters, only an echo chamber filled with your non-fact-based alternate world. There’s a complete difference of kind between what you’re saying and actual reality, one that can’t be overcome or mitigated at all just by your own gainsaying. Your stance just is, factually, invalid, and you calling the opposite stance invalid as if it’s just two sides of some coin is likewise just invalid all the way down.

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It's only demonstrably wrong if you're going to insist on the very literal "almost none of the BLM protests involved violence" and ignore that that statement, in isolation, is rather misleading. Sure, most of the protests were peaceful. But when they weren't, it was was very bad.

I was living in Downtown Chicago during the two major BLM protests that went violent last year. From my window, I saw people shooting out windows, starting fires, and looting. Even if it were a moot point to call 911, it didn't matter because you'd get a busy signal if you tried calling. Businesses I frequented, including the coolest camera shop I've ever seen, were destroyed. In the days following these riots, it took 45 minutes to an hour to enter my neighborhood because of National Guard checkpoints. The grocery stores and pharmacies were closed because their windows were smashed in, they were looted, and they were generally smashed to hell. And local BLM organizers infamously defended their actions as the "cry of the unheard" and the looting as "reparations."

I've read accounts similar to my own from people in Seattle and Minneapolis.

I get that some opponents of BLM want to use these riots to discredit what the movement stands for. But BLM proponents shouldn't try to gas light me and others who were victims of these demonstrations in defense. They were horrific. People died.

Nobody is gaslighting anyone. By your own account, the perpetrators of the looting, property damage, etc., were not part of the BLM protests, but clearly differentiated groups adding violence to something non-violent.

I live in NYC and in my neighborhood we also had windows boarded up after days of looting, cars smashed in the street, fires and more. Literally none of it was related to the BLM movement.

Similarly with Portland where many friends and coworkers live, the violence there was literally brought about by Trump and his false allocation of Homeland Security agents to “protect” federal landmarks, yet they abducted people off the street with no due process.

I’m certain looting happened, destruction happened, violence happened. It happened literally around the corner from my apartment.

That absolutely does not give anyone any entitlement to indulge racist or fascist biases to blame that violence on BLM or associate it with somehow representing the purpose of BLM, etc.

You assert that the groups responsible for the rioting were clearly differentiated from the BLM protests, but I don't see how one can differentiate them without making a no-true-Scotsman argument that the rioting somehow goes against the principles of the movement and they can be distinguished on that basis. At the time, some people were claiming that the rioting was the work of alt-right agents provocateurs, but that doesn't seem to have panned out. (Cf. the assertions that the Capitol rioters were antifa agents provocateurs.)

It's also not a good argument given there were loud voices claiming to speak for BLM that were justifying the rioting and looting. Reparations, smashing the racist capitalist system, etc. Maybe they don't represent the movement as a whole, but if so, the movement had lost its voice to extremists by that point.

An example of this kind of thing, posted by a friend who took part in BLM protests, in response to a status update I made: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EnCI4_9W4AAAxDf.jpg

Bad actors doing embarrassing or destructive things is a real problem for ad-hoc decentralized movements. And that's why I'm careful to not hold the acts of individuals against a movement unless said acts are the whole point of the movement. But at the same time, "Black Lives Matter riots of 2020" is the most accurate label for the events in question that I can think of.

I hope you understand how unreasonable you sound to me. You're telling me that what I both saw and experienced, with verified fact and video evidence, isn't real. Your conviction that you know more about me and my life, than me, and your insistence on how invalid it is, makes you sound, frankly, like some sort of political zealot.

I tend not to waste my time convincing other people of things to this degree. I will share my experience, but beyond that, it would be unreasonable for me to tell someone else that their experience isn't even real, which is what you're doing.

What you are saying is simply not ok. If your take away of your experience led you to believe BLM is responsible for significant violence, that is a manifestation of problems with you and your beliefs, not an accurate fact-based conclusion drawn from a legitimate interpretation of the BLM movement or any experience of BLM protests. You saying that I sound unreasonable by not letting your shit slide doesn’t change anything. You can say that. You can cling to racism-based biased refusal to accept the facts or accept your stated understanding of your experience is wrong and unduly biased, but it does not make what you’re saying any more legitimate or worthy of respect. What you are saying is just unacceptably wrong - it really is, really - in a way where you cannot just say, “well I believe different” and have that be treated like it’s valid or on equal footing.

You are starting off from a position so irredeemably far from acceptable fact-based reality, that for you to say my response sounds unreasonable is completely unsurprising and carries no weight.

It might sting to have your attachment to what you think is an acceptable interpretation of your experience called out for the unreasonable anti-BLM bias that it is. Oh well, the anti-BLM fantasy stuff is not OK, not going to slide.

I'm confused... it's verifiable fact... insurance claims from the riots are between $1-2 billion in damages... dozens of people died and between just a few cities thousands of police were injured, who knows how many protestors and bystanders... support for the movement dropped rapidly once things escalated... these are the facts. How can you look at this, and when someone says they witnessed just a small piece of it, say they're "irredeemably far from fact based reality" and you just can't let it "slide". Consider at least, that your extreme position harms your movement. What is your exact criticism of my opposition? Or at the very least, to what I witnessed?

Please stop.

Please do not perpetuate flamewars on HN and do not cross into personal attack yourself. It's not what this site is for and it's no ok here.

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

I'm respectfully exchanging ideas. I challenge you to find my personal attacks. Please do not blame me for the content other users post.

You needn't look far—there was a personal attack in your GP comment: "you sound, frankly, like some sort of political zealot". Swipes like that are certainly not respectful, and they're definitely not ok in HN comments. Actually, every single sentence in that comment had some sort of swipe in it.

If you don't think that was crossing into personal attack and breaking the site guidelines, you're underestimating the impact of your comments. it would be a good idea to recalibrate by reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and remembering that this sort of comment always lands with far stronger impact on the reader than the commenter thinks it will. Objects in the mirror are much closer than they appear.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

"you sound, frankly" -addressing their extreme rhetoric, not them. How they come across is different than who they are. Every statement was a "swipe" at their disrespectful and unreasonable arguments, not them as a person. If I'm not allowed to defend my ideas and position, respectfully, in the context of discussion, within site guidelines, what's the purpose of discussion? It's enough that respectful, in-context posts I've made on controversial topics have been flagged and removed regularly here. Is this supposed to be another reddit/4chan echo chamber?

> addressing their extreme rhetoric, not them. How they come across is different than who they are. Every statement was a "swipe" at their disrespectful and unreasonable arguments, not them as a person.

That's not how internet comments work. If you tell someone they sound like a zealot, you're calling names. If you then say "I didn't mean it about you, only about how you sound", that's a distinction that makes no difference to the receiver, with whom your comment has already landed like a punch.

I'm afraid the problem is that your comments aren't as respectful as you think they are. This is a common problem, as I tried to explain above. Swipes that feel harmless or perfectly kosher to the commenter can easily land with readers, and especially with whomever they're replying to, as aggressive.

Because of this asymmetry, it's easy to end up with a flamewar in which all parties feel aggrieved, like they're the innocent one who did nothing, while the other is the one who behaved badly and escalated. Everyone ends up feeling like they're just defending themselves from unprovoked attack. In reality we're all subject to this cognitive bias, and if we're to avoid having this place go into a downward spiral and burn itself to a crisp, we all need to be extra careful to err on the side of being respectful and editing swipes out of our posts here.

I was writing about this in another context, in case or anyone wants more information: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25995375.

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

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