Hacker News Reader

Comment by elpocko | Hacker News Reader

Right. Because protests (however stupid they are) should be silent and easy to ignore, they should not disrupt anything or inconvenience anyone.

View on HN

Protesters do not have an untrammelled right to be disruptive; others in society do not have an obligation to facilitate or tolerate that disruption. If you want to stand outside the venue and shout, that's your prerogative. If you want to come inside the venue and cause disruption, then the organisers have the right to throw you out.

Strictly speaking, what we're discussing is direct action rather than protest. The aim of these protesters is not merely to make a public display of their disapproval, but to take active steps to prevent something from happening, i.e. to prevent a talk from taking place by "occupying" the stage. The participants in that action may feel morally justified and may indeed be morally justified, but that doesn't negate the consequences of their actions. Giving anyone impunity to break whatever rule they like if they feel it's justified is a very short path to anarchy.

>Protesters do not have an untrammelled right to be disruptive; others in society do not have an obligation to facilitate or tolerate that disruption

Go on then, polite member of society who doesn't understand the point of protests. I'm looking forward to your counter-protest that will not disrupt anything, will largely go unnoticed, be super polite but still be a huge success and change the status quo.

I'm not saying that protesters shouldn't be disruptive, I'm saying that they don't have a right to be disruptive. If you believe that your cause is just, then you have to accept responsibility for the consequences of your actions. Disrupting a conference may well be a more effective way to highlight your grievance, but you don't get to play the victim if the organisers throw you out or refuse you entry. You have a right to protest, but that right does not supersede the rights of other people to go about their lawful business. The alternative to that balancing of rights is nothing more than mob rule.

Yes, this is what modern protests do not understand. Of course they don't have the right to protest however they want. That's why Martin Luther King was arrested some 29 times. Many of the protesters I talked to in other movements all want to be protected from arrest or any harm to their well-being. In other words, they don't want to push their protest into civil disobedience.

People risk their livelihood and lives to protest because they think something is is wrong enough that it needs to be changed that desperately.

People today will complain all day about Amazon and Jeff bezos but ask them to cancel their Amazon prime subscription? No way!

Just look at what Sam Hussain and Max Blumenthal, the reporters, did the other day, and that should give people an idea of civil disobedience.

What FOSDEM is saying is that they don't want civil disobedience, only protests. And they want to set the rules for the protest. So FOSDEM is turning into the state.

FOSDEM is a conference for open source software, possibly one of the most functional demonstrations of anarchy working in the modern world. Seems only fitting to me.

Anarchy does not mean mob rule. Allowing protests to censor anyone from talking opens up a huge security hole: anyone can then organize a “protest” to censor anyone.

Anarchist here. Anarchy is the practice of establishing social order without central authority, coercion, or intimidation.

This is clearly an attempt by the minority of attendees to use coercion to limit the free speech of someone they dislike.

If a minority of people reject broad consensus and to prevent any person from peacefully speaking in an assigned time slot, they are not participating in anarchy. They are simply being dicks.

Adults respect the right of their enemies to speak peacefully. Quietly hold up signs, wear T-shirts, but respect peaceful free speech. Next year submit your own talk with an alternative prespective to try to form consensus on why billionaires and or companies with higher-than-x carbon emissions should be unwelcome, or propose an alternative method to gain broader community consensus on approving talks

Finally an articulation of the difference between anarchy and chaos. (Not being ironic.) Thank you.

I don't agree with the position, but I appreciate the distinction.

IIUC, the word “anarchy”, when being used as a synonym for “chaos”, is a simple political slur; like calling some country a “Socialist Regime” in the context of state overreach. It implies a negative but does not state it, in hope of creating an associative link between the two concepts. The word “anarchy” is merely one such (very old) slur which really took hold, and most people now believe the word “anarchy” actually means chaos.

Protesting should be about raising awareness of disagreement on a topic. It does not have to be disruptive to reach that objective.

Sometimes it does, but that's when protest turns into civil disobedience.

Martin Luther King was arrested 29 times and then he was shot.

Allowing protests to escalate to disruptions is equivalent to allowing protests to censor anyone they don’t like.

Civil disobedience is not synonymous with protesting and you can do the latter without the former. There are tradeoffs with everything and protests conducted with the tacit approval of the event organizers might be more convincing or more impactful than a disruptive protest that gets the protesters kicked out of the event.

Guaranteeing freedom of speech and preventing a talk from happening seems contradictory.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com