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Comment by User23 | Hacker News Reader

It’s hard to remember as long ago as last month when peaceful Canadian protestors had their assets seized without due process. We already live in a world where so-called first world nationals have this happen to them. It’s not about countries or individuals, it’s about power. And the rulers of the west have demonstrated the power to completely destroy someone financially by flipping a few bits as well as the willingness to use it at any scale. It used to be you had to send armed men to seize wealth, which doesn’t scale well. Now it’s all keystrokes which scale up to the total population just fine.

But wait you say, those are bad people, and I’m a good person, I have nothing to fear! Good luck with that.

Edit: It didn’t take long for a good person with nothing to fear to assure us of his status.

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> It’s hard to remember as long ago as last month when peaceful Canadian protestors had their assets seized without due process.

I have never had any expectation that when I am actively committing a crime, I can expect authorities to wait for the courts to decide if I should face any immediate sanctions or controls to stop my behavior.

What would you rather have happen? Rubber bullets and tear gas? Or are you actually suggesting that it is okay to hold the public hostage until you get what you want?

>Or are you actually suggesting that it is okay to hold the public hostage until you get what you want?

Ghandi and MLK have already given us the answer to that question. It's fine to peacefully protest until you achieve your objectives. Yes, people will try to malign you (saying that you're 'holding the public hostage') and insinuate things about you, but ignore them. It's okay.

It's okay.

So you're suggesting they were peacefully protesting, not blockading an entry point? To what extent can a protest go before the public has the right to force it to stop? Does blaring so many horns continuously so that residential apartments are subjected to 100dB indoors count as peaceful? How bad does it get before the police are allowed to take whatever steps necessary to stop it?

And before you say anything about BLM, recall than many thousands of people were arrested last year during those protests, and there were plenty of rubber bullets, tear gas, and beatings.

I'm always amazed at the extent people will go to absolve their own tribe from responsibility while accusing the other side of doing the same thing.

Personally I abhorred the violence in downtown Portland last year and I'm glad they finally stopped. I think the police need to dial it back a little in many cases, but I want them to be able to put a lid on the ability of protesters to destroy the lives of innocent people. And I think January 6 was an insurrection, but of course it was. I find all of y'all kinda annoying :).

It's really weird how from my defence of peaceful protest you've totally pigeonholed me and are now diverging onto BLM and Jan 6. It's weird.

>their own tribe

This is the problem in your thinking. These 'tribes' you worry about aren't real. It's an artifact of twitter, of terrible reportage, of lazy journalism and muck-slinging that puts lots of different typs of people in one box because that makes it easy to pick out the craziest of them and and say that they're all like that.

By and large the protesters were/are just normal people who want to be able to get on with their lives and accept the risks they're comfortable with. They spend all their life in their trucks, alone. They interact with maybe 5 people per week, if that, but they're forced to get a vaccination whereas grocery clerks who interact with 5 people every 15 minutes aren't. Most of them already have the vaccination but it's the principle, dammit. And they're sick of journalists and twitterati calling them - and everyone else, for that matter - nazis because a few lunatics showed up to the protest with nazi flags and got kicked out. It's boring that the media keep falling for this shtick. Every single time. You have a group of normalish people with normalish goals and all of a sudden some crazy fucker pops up with a nazi flag. You eject them but then all you hear on the news for the next month is 'nazi truckers...' It's just shit reportage. Utterly shit lazy yellow journalism.

When you finally realise that people just want to be left alone and not slandered and tarred with labels they don't deserve so much of this pointless infighting will go away. But then the media would have nothing to report on.

> And they're sick of journalists and twitterati calling them - and everyone else, for that matter - nazis because a few lunatics showed up to the protest with nazi flags and got kicked out. It's boring that the media keep falling for this shtick. Every single time.

At least this time the provocateur remembered to iron out the creases on the flag he bought brand new for the occasion. It happens so frequently and so reliably that one can’t help but wonder if the media malfeasance is more than mere laziness. Honest errors are not always biased in one direction.

>wonder if the media malfeasance is more than mere laziness

Of course it is. The modern media is absurdly woke and out of touch with reality and pretty much without principle either.

The trucker convoy was a perfect example of a modern working-class struggle and the media lined up to portray them as anything but.

I remember literally reading in some op-ed words along the lines of 'the truckers are not the working class, they are the modern bourgeoise; they do not work with their hands but merely direct from padded comfort the toil of their mechanical slave.'

It would be funny if it didn't actually affect things.

The government invoked the emergencies act which gave them the ability to freeze bank accounts of people the suspected of supporting an ongoing illegal protest. This means that the due process changed from what it normally is to something that allowed the government to quickly de-escalate a protest that was anything but peaceful.

Due process was still followed even if we don't necessarily like what it was.

>to quickly de-escalate a protest that was anything but peaceful.

It wasn't exactly violent either. Better hope you never have to actually use violence against a corrupt system

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