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Comment by djanogo | Hacker News Reader

You should provide proof of actual law/bill, penal code and case law where what you claim was applied before posting bigoted comments on entire state.

Edit: Did you even bother to read the law before you commented?, the first fkin line, and (b), Line (1) burden of proof is on the defendant, not the prosecution, it will be judged by his peers. The (2) will fail if protestors are on allowed/blocked road ways and will only apply if protestors are illegally on non-permitted road ways.

(1) the person operating the motor vehicle was exercising due care; and (2) the person injured was blocking traffic in a public right-of-way while participating in a protest or demonstration. (b) This section does not affect a person's liability for an injury caused by grossly negligent conduct.

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https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/851/billtext/html/HB00250I...

what else can I google for you? While I agree the "whole state" is a really big brush to be painting with, it's not an inaccurate description of what the state legislature is doing.

>what else can I google for you?

I don't think asking for clarification was an unreasonable ask. Too many people today use emotional charged rewordings to describe things. It's honestly hard at times to know what people are referring to anymore.

I'm glad that the cat is no longer being killed by curiosity.

You can dismiss anything because no proof, or you can prove to yourself yay/nay. It took seconds to find the specific texas legislation. It's not like it was hidden. You can then come back and say, "hey i tried looking for this in a websearch, but it was too muddled. got something more definitive?" vs "i don't believe you so the onus on you."

The onus is inherently on the person making the claim to support it with evidence. That is just how burden of proof works.

That aside, people supporting their own claims with evidence provides a whole host of secondary benefits. It makes it more clear makes it more clear who is claiming what, it pushes back somewhat on the problem of "it takes an order of magnitude more effort to produce bullshit than to refute it", and it prevents some obnoxious debate tactics that reduce discussion quality.

To be honest it don't understand why anyone would advocate any other convention on a discussion board. It seems super short sighted to me.

Because the person doing the claiming is only going to provide links that support their claim. Only a bad debater would make the other person's argument for them. Do your own searching would allow exposure to both sides of an argument.

That is backwards, because the second person has their own biases, so that person is going to give evidence that is biased against the original claim. The only way to get strong evidence on both sides of the argument is for both participants to supply evidence that supports their own arguments.

That someone is likely to provide biased sources when asked for them isn't a reason to just shrug and allow unsourced claims to go unchallenged. It doesn't matter whether or not djanogo could have found the bill on their own (from their edit, it looks like they did read it), the point is that it was irresponsible for the original poster to have made unsourced claims in such an inflamatory tone.

If the sources they provide are biased and therefore suspect, that is a separate concern that can then be addressed. But having some source for your claims is table stakes for an intelligent discussion.

If you're the one making the challenge to an unsubstantiated claim, you're the one that could do the posting of information to proves the claim false. Otherwise, you too are just making unsubstantiated claims. Otherwise, you get this kind of conversation debating who should offer the evidence rather than just offering the evidence one way or the other. It wasn't my thread, but I knew it to be one way, found the evidence and posted that as a counter to the argument. After that, it's kind of case closed unless someone posts a counter link, but nobody has done that. Instead we've gone back and forth on when to post a link.

The person making the claim needs to provide the proof, it's really not that complicated. I could claim an infinite number of complete bullshit claims the burden of proof should not be on anyone but me.

> (1) the person operating the motor vehicle was exercising due care; and

That law clearly states twice that "due care" needs to be taken otherwise it's not applicable. So compare and contrast this with the original claim by the parent commenter:

> legal for car drivers to mow down pedestrian protesters

I call bullshit on that. Thanks for the link.

>> legal for car drivers to mow down pedestrian protesters

>I call bullshit on that. Thanks for the link.

Sometimes hyperbole just isn't the right thing, but I seriously doubt the original poster honestly believes laws were created that allowed for mowing down of citizens willy nilly. Pedantic people go nuts and throw out the rest of the conversation on a caveat rather than keeping focus on the discussion. Laws were written that allows for a defense after running people over with your car. There's plenty to be left to the interpretation of lawyers to argue and judges to decide.

It's still bullshit, mind you, and OP is probably deliberately misconstruing the law here. The law isn't "mow over protestors, we'll cover you". It's "If the driver was taking proper procedures and wasn't negligent and the person was blocking traffic, the driver will not be liable".

similarly:

>(b) This section does not affect a person's liability for an injury caused by grossly negligent conduct.

That is to say, you're not allowed to just mow them over.

Sources are nice not because they magically add quality to a post, but because you can check them for yourself.

“Legal to mow down protestors” is about as disingenuous of a take on that law as one could imagine.

It basically says if someone is protesting in the middle of the road and a driver taking reasonable precautions hits them they aren’t liable.

Seems entirely reasonable to me.

Out of curiosity were all the 60’s civil rights marches permitted or would this law have, if passed earlier, allowed segregationists to run the marchers down if an all white jury (keeping with the times) was “convinced” the driver was “exercising due care”

They would have been protected under this legislation because if the road has been appropriately blocked off by the police then the law doesn't apply.

So in order to stop protesters, all the police would have to do is not provide a venue (not block off the road). "Go ahead and march without police support if you want, while people will legally slaughter the lot of you with their cars."

> So in order to stop protesters,

No, in order to stop protesters from blocking traffic, then that is all the police need to do. The protestors can always protest in a park or literally anywhere other than in the middle of roads.

In a just society, some group's right to protest does not take priority over everyone else's right to travel and use roads. Roads do not belong to activists, and no activist group has a right to shut down public roads without arranging this with police ahead of time so that appropriate detours can be made for normal traffic.

A society in which civil rights protesters unlawfully marched over the Edmund Pettus Bridge, interrupting traffic, and withstood the violent attempts at suppression by Alabama state troopers, forcing the nation to confront its fundamental injustice and pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965, is _in every single way_ a more just society in which the 'right' of travelers to pass over that bridge on March 7, 1965 is kept sacrosanct.

It is precisely this type of self-righteous posturing that causes people to pass laws to block radical groups from blocking traffic and as well as driving the public into opposing whatever legislation you are advocating.

Sorry, but no civil rights gains were made as a result of people harassing pedestrians and motorists. They were made despite these selfish tactics, not because of them. These types of tactics significantly set back the civil rights movement in the U.S. just as the watts riots set back African American rights.

Always be suspicious when an angry mob tries to justify antisocial behavior with claims of "the greater good". It is never about the "greater good", but is always about theft, domination, and harassment, and it always ends up hurting your cause.

Last week an English high court judge said

> protests “causing some degree of inconvenience are to be expected and, up to a point, tolerated” in a democratic society that recognised the right to freedom of assembly.

(but in this particular case, the protesters went too far by breaching earlier court orders.)

Whether it ends up hurting their cause in this case remains to be seen. They were trying to be jailed before the COP conference began, but despite continued illegal protest nothing much happened until afterwards.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/nov/17/nine-insulat...

I'm glad you agree that while protesters are allowed to cause some inconvenience, they are not allowed to disable critical infrastructure like access to roads.

This is why most areas in the U.S. which are concerned about rule of law (some areas have "progressive prosecutors" that put activism above the rule of law) do not allow protestors to do this, and they make sure that the legal code discourages things like blocking highways or shutting down traffic.

That was not the case in the situation in Britain. Some disruption to critical infrastructure was tolerated, but not repeated disruption, and especially not after an earlier court case had ordered the protests to stop blocking roads.

> I'm glad you agree

Please don't assume my opinion. I tried to keep my comment neutral.

> It is never about the "greater good", but is always about theft, domination, and harassment, and it always ends up hurting your cause.

You can't imagine ever being in a position of non-privilege and needing to protest in order to be treated fairly, can you?

Thank you, that is exactly the event I was recollecting the vague details of when I brought up the hypothetical. It’s sad that commenters are on the side of pre-civil rights segregationists. Blocking the road was against the law just like the diner sit ins. Guess these people would not tolerate diner sit ins either.

What a nice strawman you've constructed here

Black people likely would not be allowed to request the police to block the road in this hypothetical.

It's not a matter of request.

Here's one: http://www.oklegislature.gov/BillInfo.aspx?Bill=HB1674&Sessi...

> It was introduced in response to a widely publicized incident in Tulsa last May when a pickup truck drove through a crowd that had gathered on an interstate to protest the police killing of George Floyd.

> The truck, which was pulling a horse trailer, hit and injured three people, including a 33-year-old man who was left paralyzed from the waist down after falling from an overpass.

> The Tulsa County District Attorney's Office announced in July it would not press charges against the driver, writing in a memo that he, his wife and two children were all "in a state of immediate fear for their safety" and had been the victims of a "violent and unprovoked attack by multiple individuals who unnecessarily escalated an already dangerous circumstance by obstructing an interstate highway."

The DA made the right call.

Sure, whatever, thanks for the valuable and really well argumented input.

I, however, don't know much about the specifics of the case in order to have an opinion about what the DA did. My only opinion is that the new laws are risky, as anyone can claim they were scared for their lives, especially in places where black people are considered 'scary'. I'm not a law expert but I'd be willing to bet that if a black dude ran over a pack of armed proud boys would have resulted in a completely different law. And for anyone asking why I say that, look up the Mulford Act.

What does "due care" mean here? Does it have a specific legal meaning? How is it possible to kill someone with your car while exercising "due care"?

I imagine due care means choosing the correct people to run down. Some people's lives are less valuable to society than others

What if some one is protesting in all black on a highway bind turn?

No one protests in a highway at night, alone, in a blind turn. When people protest on the highway, they do it in numbers large enough to stop the traffic.

Your argument is disingenuous.

I disagree that it never happens, but take it as a hypothetical test case. what then?

The devil doesn't need an advocate.

Im not playing devils advocate, I was answering a question.

>How is it possible to kill someone with your car while exercising "due care"?

It is extremely easy to kill someone with a 2 ton piece of metal traveling 70+ miles an hour.

Surely, even if you don't believe a protestors has ever been on a low visibility road, you can understand that they could be. There are limitations to how fast cars can react to pedestrians being where they aren't supposed to be.

>only apply if protestors are illegally on non-permitted road ways.

You say that as if it's uncommon for protesters to be protesting on non-permitted roadways. I think it's quite common.

Also, is there a difference between being "illegally on non-permitted road ways" and jaywalking?

You realize that most protests that block roads are on roads that they're not permitted to be on, right?

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