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Comment by colpabar | Hacker News Reader

What gets me is the way that people will see a picture of a swastika and immediately brand everyone involved as a racist, but then turn around and say that any wrongdoing that happened during a protest for a cause they do agree with was just a couple of bad apples who had nothing to do with the movement. Does that really only happen on one side?

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You mean the CNN “Firey, but mostly peaceful protest” versus someone honking horns and articles published about “the threat of non-violence”?

Perhaps i missed it, but how many other protests in canada involve defiling grave sites, stealing food from the homeless, etc.

I can certainly agree that humans tend to demonize the sins of the other while turning a blind eye to their own side's, but is that really what is happening here? To me it seems like this protest is of a different type.

The BLM protests ended up in a lot worse. A few murders, a LOT of property damage, and a whole lot more. And yet they were largely supported by the media despite the bad apples.

In canada? Do you have a source for that?

(Not saying they were 100% peaceful,i know there was some unrest in montreal, but my understanding is it was quite minor and nothing like what you are describing)

No, they don’t. You won’t get a reply. There were BLM protests across Canada, but they were widely considered to be peaceful, and the turnouts were minuscule compared to Those in the us.

My understanding is that they were very clearly comparing the Canadian government to Nazis, not expressing support for Nazis, but at this point I'd have to see photos to be sure.

My own image searches only turn up upside-down Canadian flags, "Fuck Trudeau" slogans, and stuff about "freedom". I'd have to think that if somebody really wanted to undermine them and had such a photo, they'd have posted it.

How bad is the reporting? I checked the NYT; https://archive.fo/Jny6X

It's not awful in any obvious way.

It does describe the protest as "mostly peaceful". As that phrase is a little notorious, I laughed a little. Since NYT staff spend a lot of time on Twitter, I imagine they know the significance. But hey, if it was peaceful and they said so, then they've done their job ok there.

The headline does have some negative connotations: The convoy "descends on Ottowa" (not, I dunno, "protesters gather to demand justice").

And there is one sentence that is incendiary enough that it really needs more context:

"Some of them carried Canadian flags upside down; at least one flag had swastikas drawn on it."

This invites the reader to draw one conclusion, but the meaning may be something else, as in my first paragraph.

So I'd have to see to be sure. But no photos are forthcoming.

Wearing a mask and mass genocide are not the same thing, they're not even in the same ballpark. If anything it weakens their entire argument. If you have any understanding of the holocaust you can in no way shape or form compare it to taking precautions during a global pandemic with a mask in public. All I see is a bunch on people that so badly want to be viewed as victims. I don't like wearing a mask either, but if me wearing a mask reduces the spread of a virus that has literally killed millions, I'll wear it, it doesn't hurt me, I'm not going to cry about it or use nazi symbolism to make a case.

Wearing and mass genocide are not the same thing, but wearing a Star of David is. That's how it started, and we know how it ends.

I'm not following you. The Jews were forced to wear the star of David as a form of humiliation. The people today wearing them are doing it by choice and it's in poor taste.

People are being forced to wear masks as a form of humiliation. People are being forced to present their vaccine cards as a form of humiliation. People are choosing to wear stars of David as a comparison of the two.

I can explain it to you, but I can't understand it for you.

This is blatantly false, and the Jews didn't have a choice which is why no one takes these pretend victims seriously. If you're feeling humiliated that says more about you then it does the people that understand how simple barriers(masks) work. Thanks for the explanation, it's laughable at best.

You have to wonder if they know how absurd their comparisons are.

It's weird how people want so, so badly to be in some counterculture. And to be "owed" something, in the moral accounting. That Green Day song plays in my head, with the music video: "I Want to be a Minority!"

I guess we sort of have a word for this, ressentiment? It's close, but not exactly.

People in Soviet Union (and in Russia, still) have to carry an internal passport (distinct from the regular passport, that is called smth like "foreign-travel passport" in Russian). The cops can legally stop you on the street and ask for ID. If you don't present your internal passport (or similar), they may take you to the police station "to determine your identity" at their discretion. Happened to me personally with an expired internal passport on my literal birthday that it expired on, I was about to go to a police station cause I didn't have much cash on me for a bribe, but they decided to let me go because hey, it's my birthday.

Vaccine cards (I am vaccinated and boosted and would have done it based on my own decision making) feel significantly similar to me. As in Russia, when dealing with totalitarian aspects of government, I find it easier to just comply, but if I had more free time on my hands I would refuse to show the card on principle. Needless to say politicians advocating for these would never get my vote...

In reality, I was asked for a passport once in 8 years in Russia.

That really depends on what you look like. I used to have long hair and wear leather jackets and band t-shirts and I was stopped about once every 2-3 months... then I got a job, cut my hair, etc. and I was stopped a couple times in 4 years. But, I had a girlfriend who lived in student dorms, and Central Asian guys living there claimed they get ID checked pretty much every day.

That's what's beautiful about giving government arbitrary power that is so broad it is not always used "in reality" - it gives individual actors discretion to discriminate. Like with literacy tests to vote, war on drugs, etc.

Moscow cops have a sixth sense for non-natives. Even I was not looking like one, I was stopped, like, 8 times during my 3-months gig there. Carrying a few bank notes in the passport was an ordinary practice.

I never had any reason to bribe them. Are you talking about 1990's?

Personally I obviously have never ever done this, but this friend of mine and his friends, throughout the aughts, have had to give trivial bribes to cops a few times. It's like real-life microtransactions. Usually with something like smoking in a non-smoking area as a pretext, the key is that cops would immediately go for the bribe schtik - they would tell him how they now need to bring him to the station to write up the protocol, and probably nobody would bother with such a small thing and they'd just let him go eventually but the mayor or whatever is not there right now, he's out on some assignment, so he'd have to wait for him to return for a couple hours for the protocol to be written up properly, and hey he is from the neighborhood and so he knows the station is actually a 20-minute walk too, completely out of the way, so maybe he can, like, go buy a pack of cigarettes, and as he opens it, absent-mindedly stuff the "change", let's say X, into the pack?.. and then they'd ask him for a smoke as he returns from the store and he gives them the pack and he can go?..

This is just poor student level; I bet others paid much more, Moscow road police were legendary, although I didn't drive so cannot confirm.

That said I think it's a separate issue from unprompted ID checks, although one could facilitate the other.

I never paid anything to any cop; nor that I needed or wanted to. Neither did you, it seems. As to friends or friends of friends, etc. - this is not really serious talk.

Well, would you tell me here if you did? This friend of mine is a very reliable guy, I trust him as much as I trust myself.

Definitely I would. Why not?

Early 2000's.

Yes, this was definitely happening back then.

Police ask for ID in Russia too? This might sound crazy, but police do this in the United States too. Failure to ID in certain situations (arrest) can lead to additional charges. Expired identification in the US is also invalid too.

Again, I'm not seeing the connection you're trying to make and if you want to see similar tactics employed by police in the USA, I recommend YouTube. The interesting part is I have a vaccine card and I've never been asked to present it. Then again, I was immunized to serve anywhere in the world when I joined the military and saw it as a perk when I travelled abroad.

That is in context of an arrest. In Russia, legally it's like a country-wide stop and frisk (stop and ID) with no requirement of suspicion or anything. Usually people who look like immigrants or some sort of "less-desirable" demographics get checked more, but sometimes they do just stop completely random people.

I totally get it, but there is big difference between a police officer demanding photo ID unlawfully which happens often in the US to similar demographics and a business saying in order to keep my workforce safe I need proof of vaccine.

The mandates are not that though. The mandates are government forcing the business to demand the card, and shutting them down (with police) if they don't feel inclined to enforce it.

Jews were allowed to move around without their stars of David - in the ghettos, literally the origination of the term. Jews were not allowed to take part in wider public life without them.

The word ghetto comes from the name of the Jewish quarter of Venice, not from the Nazi ghettos.

No. If there are Nazis in your group, and you don't kick them out, you're a fucking Nazi.

There is no reason to ever allow Nazis to have any sort of freedom. We literally had a world war about this.

But Naziism isn't a particular flag or moustache that everyone feels reflexive intellectual disgust towards. It's a seductive ideology harnessing the reflexive disgust of large groups of people. It's not defeated by punching or shooting 'the bad people' but by moral humility and careful consideration of second-order effects at the ballot box.

No moral self-examination, disgust of the outgroup, arguing against private citizens' medical and bodily autonomy... does any of that sound familiar? What do you do when you realise you were the Nazi all along?

If they wave a Nazi flag, they are a Nazi. If you don't immediately kick them out, guess what?

There is zero excuse for any group to put up with it.

They do kick them out. Here's a video of them doing just that: https://www.facebook.com/CornwallBJJ/videos/986522782241975/

What would it take for you to have an 'are we the baddies?' moment? Is symbology all that matters in that regard?

As the news keeps going, there is more and more white power movements being tied in.

My original point stands, if you don't kick out a Nazi, your being absorbed into a Nazi movement.

Yes, damn that checks notes Zero Mostel! What a terrible person.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z51xeox0Jlg

>What gets me is the way that people will see a picture of a swastika and immediately brand everyone involved as a racist,

There's actually pretty large bounty to identify the person who was holding that nazi flag. The assertion is that this was not one of the protesters at all. Afterall the trucker convoy is quite diverse given so many truckers are Indian.

The CBC has been caught creating propaganda so many times: https://www.mississauga.com/news-story/7081133-opp-shuts-dow...

My favourite is this one: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/dear-qallunaat-white-pe...

Don't worry, the CBC clears says "racism against white people does not exist" right on that page. CBC is on the record they don't hire white people anymore: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/cbc-no-caucasian

Are you trying to say that there are "very fine people on both sides"?

No, I tried to make my comment thoughtful and hoped someone would want to engage with it so maybe we could learn something.

this isnt a war against the nazis

all modern causes are normal people on both sides with a few crazies because thats how populations work

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