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Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

The term speech is very broadly defined because there are a lot of ways to convey meaning. Some of them then become ambiguous and you have to resolve those ambiguities and that gets messy. But only the messy cases are messy. Riots characteristically aren't a messy case, they're violence in the same way that publishing a newspaper article is speech.

Moreover, if you mess up the messy cases then you should try to do better but society will probably survive, whereas if you censor in the cases that are pure speech or don't punish the actions that are pure violence, you're the baddies.

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> Riots characteristically aren't a messy case

Riots are characteristically very much a messy case, because not everyone joins a protest with the same intentions. Some will join a protest intending a purely peaceful display of dissent, while others seek violent confrontation.

On top of that repressive regimes will routinely declare otherwise peaceful protests a riot at the first sign of violence. Sometimes there are even saboteurs within the protest that try and lure out violent incidents in an attempt to get the protest to be declared a riot.

Finding the right balance between allowing demonstrations and keeping the peace and order is one of the most challenging aspects of democracy.

> Riots are characteristically very much a messy case, because not everyone joins a protest with the same intentions. Some will join a protest intending a purely peaceful display of dissent, while others seek violent confrontation.

The people intending a purely peaceful display of dissent don't smash or set fire to anything, even if the people standing next to them do. Now, the court may have some trouble here with evidence because you then have to distinguish these people from one another, but that has become much less of a problem in modern days when everybody has a cellphone camera and police can be issued bodycams.

Either way this is a question of fact rather than a question of law.

> On top of that repressive regimes will routinely declare otherwise peaceful protests a riot at the first sign of violence.

Declaring something a riot shouldn't mean anything. If a specific person is breaking windows and looting they're breaking the law. If they're just standing there holding signs they're not.

It shouldn't be too much to ask to have the cops arrest the criminals and not the bystanders.

> It shouldn't be too much to ask to have the cops arrest the criminals and not the bystanders.

Have you ever met a cop before? The only disincentive to arresting more people is a bit of paperwork, and the whole court system is stacked against the arrested unless they can afford non-court-appointed lawyers to pave their way. Guilt-by-association doesn't magically disappear from the psyche when handing someone power and a gun, rather it gets easier to apply indiscriminately because it's very hard for people to oppose the one with authority over their freedom and state-sanctioned license to be violent.

I feel like you are the one who has never met a cop in a situation you were not a suspect , if you have and expouse publicly, that opinion.

What makes you feel that? The post you responded to makes complete sense and reflects countless instances of police brutality directed towards individual peaceful protestors.

Here's just one example out of literally countless examples of police brutality directed towards individual peaceful protestors: https://www.thecity.nyc/2022/08/29/nypd-cop-pepper-spray-blm...

Ironically (but unsurprisingly), this example of wanton and indiscriminate police brutality was the police response to protests against wanton and indiscriminate police brutality.

> this example of wanton and indiscriminate police brutality was the police response to protests against wanton and indiscriminate police brutality.

Actually probably not. Judging from them holding their hands up, their protest are probably motivated by the "hands up, don't shoot" hoax, based on a false claim that Michael Brown had his hands up when he was shot by the policeman. In reality, Michael Brown was not a victim of the indiscriminate police brutality, but rather repeatedly attacked a police officer and tried to relieve him of his weapon (no doubt out of mere peaceful curiosity). The whole "hands up" narrative has been invented later and distributed by the media, and had no basis in fact. One may notice here that while police brutality is indeed an existing and reprehensible thing, a lot of cases of "indiscriminate police brutality" touted by the press, after proper examination, turn out not to be so.

> The only disincentive to arresting more people is a bit of paperwork

This is indeed a problem in which the police are, essentially, breaking the law. The question is, how do we fix it?

The intuitive answer would be to impose penalties on cops who arrest people without cause. Which sounds great, until you consider the incentive it gives them to commit perjury and falsify evidence in order to avoid the penalty. So what else you got?

One possibility is to have better cops. Right now we need a lot of cops who are willing to get into shootouts with gangs and wrestle amped up meth cooks to the ground, which attracts a certain type of person to the profession, and not really the ones we might want. If we were to end the War on Drugs and thereby put all the drug dealers out of business because they can't compete with Walmart's pharmacy, the people you attract to a profession that is no longer so steeped in violence might be of a different kind.

Riot is not "peaceful display of dissent", despite the efforts of the "mostly peaceful" press to muddle the waters. There's a peaceful protest and there's a violent riot, and they are very different, by the presence of violence. Intentions don't matter, actual events do.

I find this very odd, that people think there's such a clear distinction. I never called a riot a "peaceful display of dissent", but even a peaceful protest has small incidents of violence. If you declare a protest a riot at the first sign of a violent protestor, then it's impossible to hold a peaceful protest.

There's no point in splitting hairs, I'm not talking about somebody walking on the red light or spitting on the pavement once during the protest. We witnessed plenty "mostly peaceful" protests that resulted in billions of damage and people dying, and literally everybody who paid any attention at all for the last 10 years knows what I am talking about. Pretending like it's impossible to see whether there's a massive violent riot or a "first sign" is extremely disingenuous - everybody can see it, because in real violent riots it's massive and widespread. It's just some people prefer to pretend it's impossible to see for ideological reasons to provide plausible deniability because people happening to be violent are ideologically aligned with them. It's very possible to hold a peaceful protest - don't set a courthouse (or even better, any house or anything at all) on fire, don't smash store windows, don't break windshields of the cars, don't burn the cars, don't loot stores, don't beat up people, don't hit them with bike locks, skateboards, or any other implements, don't bear-spray them, obviously don't beat up the police, and so on, and so forth. It's the advice that everybody should know by the time they join elementary school. It's not some kind of quantum theory level complexity. Everybody knows it.

A protest is not a riot. A protest may turn into a riot.

A protester, by staying in a protest that turns into a riot, may also turn into a rioter.

Usually, a protester would understand that there's law breaking and leave the scene. Staying put, he'd become a rioter.

If you are standing around watching a friend engage in a streetfight, and someone ends up dead, now you are at a murder scene, and if you stick around doing nothing, don't be surprised if you are arrested as a suspect

> A protester, by staying in a protest that turns into a riot, may also turn into a rioter.

Only if that individual protestor personally commits acts of violence. Obviously they are not a rioter simply by being near other rioters. That's an illegal concept known as collective guilt or collective punishment.

> Usually, a protester would understand that there's law breaking and leave the scene. Staying put, he'd become a rioter.

That would mean the government can outlaw protests by simply committing a single act of violence during one (or falsely claiming there was violence), declaring it a riot, and calling all the protestors, rioters. Obviously illegal.

> If you are standing around watching a friend engage in a streetfight, and someone ends up dead, now you are at a murder scene, and if you stick around doing nothing, don't be surprised if you are arrested as a suspect

Few would be surprised by police doing illegal things. That doesn't mean the illegal things are legal.

In the same vein, if you record police brutality in the United States, don't be surprised if you are threatened or targeted by police. If you insult a police officer to their face in the United States, don't be surprised if you get assaulted, arrested, or shot and killed. Does that make such police behavior legal or righteous?

> That would mean the government can outlaw protests by simply committing a single act of violence during one (or falsely claiming there was violence), declaring it a riot, and calling all the protestors, rioters. Obviously illegal.

That could happen, but in pretty much all known riots that is not what happened. Instead, massive groups of determined violent people have committed many acts of violence, arson, destruction and assault, leading to millions upon millions of dollars of damages and hurting a lot of people. Of course, each rioter would claim there were just present there and its some other people who did that, but it is almost universally a blatant lie. People come to this kind of events with certain intentions, and these intentions are not "mostly peaceful" - they are politically motivated violence. Their claims are just lies aimed at avoiding responsibility. It may be successful in strictly legal sense - that's why terrorist organizations like antifa insist on wearing similar clothing and masking up - to make attributing the violence to a specific person harder - but let's not be fooled by it. All people in that group have the common violent aims, regardless of whether it's possible to legally prove which part of violence were committed by which particular person.

> That doesn't mean the illegal things are legal.

That doesn't only apply to the police. It also applies to the rioters. If you are a participant of the event aimed at political violence as part of the group that explicitly declares political violence as its tactics, then don't whine about "collective guilt".

Your post seems full of assumptions and unsubstantiated claims, so many that they can't all be responded to.

Suffice it to say, if there are eyewitnesses or video evidence of a given individual committing an act of violence, then they might have. If there are not, then they are assumed to have not done so, and are not rioters, as I said above.

This goes even if someone such as yourself claims that everyone came there with violent intentions (a blatant lie).

This goes even in instances where law enforcement initiated violence against someone and claimed there was a riot, which is a common occurrence.

> All people in that group have the common violent aim

Another spurious claim. No matter how much you make it, it doesn't make it true, and it doesn't make the illegal claims of "collective guilt" true or moral.

> don't whine about "collective guilt

Please be respectful on this forum. Pointing out that the concept of "collective guilt" is illegal, fullstop, is not "whining". Not liking what someone says here is not an excuse for attacking them.

> If there are not, then they are assumed to have not done so, and are not rioters, as I said above.

That's bullshit. You are trying to purposely confuse the rules of criminal court (which are necessarily very strict about standards of proof) and common sense understanding of events. If a group of people clad in black with baseball bats, improvised shields and other implements sets buildings and cars on fire, attacks people and breaks windows, it is obvious they are violent rioters, even if when they remove their masks, I can't point to a video evidence of a specific individual breaking a specific window. One of them broke it, and even if I don't know which one exactly, I know they all participated in a riot and thus are violent rioters. Yes, their tactics makes it harder to prosecute them for their violence - that's why they are using it, they are not stupid - but that doesn't change the facts about their violence as readily observed.

> This goes even if someone such as yourself claims that everyone came there with violent intentions (a blatant lie).

There's enough easily discoverable social networking resources that advertise, coordinate and support various "direct actions" and other violent activities. They do not hide their intents, their purposes and their methods. While they prefer to operate in shadows - and violently attack journalists who try to report on them - they are not exactly a secret to anyone who is willing to look. You claiming it is a "blatant lie" just emphasizes how far you are willing to go to not look at what lies in plain sight.

> No matter how much you make it, it doesn't make it true, and it doesn't make the illegal claims of "collective guilt" true or moral.

You behave like just saying words "collective guilt" somehow makes any claim you attach to it correct. This is bullshit. First of all, "collective guilt" is very much legal - there's RICO statute which is pretty much embodiment of this concept, and there are multiple laws which criminalize affiliation or even cooperation with a terrorist organization, even if the person does not commit any terrorist acts by themselves. You could argue it is immoral, for whatever warped definition of moral you use, but certainly claiming it is illegal is just ignorant. Of course, legally speaking, a person can be convicted for participating in a criminal enterprise.

But, of course, the case I am discussing is even simpler. While one can argue that somebody who is merely driving a terrorist around may or may not be guilty in the acts of terror, the rioters I am discussing voluntarily come to the pre-announced place where violent acts are about to happen, voluntarily dress in the same way as those who perform those violent acts, voluntarily stay around while these acts are happening, voluntarily act in concert and cooperation with those who perform the violence, and do it repeatedly, for many instances. Claiming that they are random innocent bystanders does not pass the sniff test.

> Please be respectful on this forum.

I am not sure how you decided that you are the person who defines what "this forum" is and what is allowed here, but I don't think you earned this right by anything. Especially when boldly proclaiming complete hogwash at the same time. Even if what you said were true, you still wouldn't earn the condescending tone you adopt, but certainly it sounds even less earned when what you proclaim is easily seen to be completely false.

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