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Comment by dunekid | Hacker News Reader

Land of the free. Indeed it is.

Freedom on full display. Employees free to break their employment contract. Employer free to fire them.

Let me guess, you want power to control what people and companies can or can not do? I don’t trust you enough to put you in control of that.

You would be right if they were fired, but they were arrested by the state. Not so free to protest.

Well there are limits. You can’t for example protest in my living room or by breaking into the Capitol building. Trespassing can be a form of protest but it’s still illegal.

If they had broken into the offices after violently clashing with police, or if they were ransacking the place, I would be 100% in favor of arresting them - just like the Jan 6 protesters who attacked the Capitol.

Instead, as far as I've seen even from the Daily Wire, these people just walked into the offices of their company's boss (at worst breaking a lock?) and were sitting there without disturbing his papers or breaking his computers or anything violent.

What point are you making? Calling yourself a protester means you can do whatever you want with someone else's property?

They weren't arrested for protesting. They were arrested for trespassing.

They have since been fired too.

Freedom to profit from war in privacy.

In the former (socialist) East German GDR it was illegal to change jobs. You would need state approval to change jobs. The state could mandate your job.

If you didn't work at all or didn't work the job you were assigned, you were sent to prison.

If you didn't work, the state could take away your children and offer them for adoption.

People don't know what un-freedom is, so they don't know what freedom is.

next time lets protest at your house / business :)

Well, fine. If you are a member of my family, and you think that the family is in cahoots with those commit crimes against humanity, you might as well do that. If you had a bit of conscience, I hope you at least implore of doing it.

Yes free to own things that other people cannot appropriate..

In what form of government is a vocal minority of activist workers allowed to take over their employer's place of business?

Please don't say "communism" as they would be sent to the gulag or worse in every communist regime that has ever existed.

When that happened in Poland in 1980, the activist workers won.[1] That's one of the places where the downfall of the USSR began.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidarity_%28Polish_trade_uni...

The Czechoslovak velvet revolution in 1989 also comes to mind.

Oh please. USSR broke to pieces because of internal problems not because some Polish workers locked themselves up in a shipyard.

Animats did not claim otherwise AFAICT. The forming of a union in Poland in 1980 is something I’ve been taught was one of the earliest public signs that Kremlin was losing its grasp over the east bloc. That’s not at all incompatible with Soviet falling apart due to internal problems.

Well I read Animats’ comment in the context of activism producing change - not in the context of activism being a symptom of change…

These are called sit-ins or "sitdown strike", and are not particularly uncommon. They happen in many democracies around the world (not at google though).

This comment is confusing. It makes me think that you believe their endgame is actually become the owners of the office they occupied or otherwise gain something. Their goal was to make themselves be heard. Us talking about it right now means it’s working.

We’re discussing about a group of google employees. Not about the issue they were protesting.

The actual acts performed in the protest may very well be the goal for some of the protesters. The stated goals are in that case only rationalizations.

Communist countries absolutely used “vocal minorities” as a way to control people. The vocal minority might be organized crime, the Red Guard, or anonymous denunciation.

It wasn’t a coincidence that communist countries had massive police forces and widespread crime. They are both parts of the same function.

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