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Comment by btbuildem | Hacker News Reader

Let's not defend the konvoy agitators here, these were legit seditionists who were given far too much leeway to start with. Cutting off their access to crowdsourced funds was too little too late, they should have been shut down more forcefully much sooner.

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Authoritian through and through.

Go enjoy everything daddy gov tells you. If you claim it's an overreach you're a seditious agitator working for "the enemy (TM)"

One person's "sedition" or "insurrection" is another's "protest" or "activism".

As an objective matter, the convoy protests are documented to have resulted in no deaths, eight injuries and a few hundred arrests (and very speculative estimates of economic damage); whereas the George Floyd protests are documented to have resulted in nineteen confirmed deaths, over 14,000 arrests and ten figures of directly measurable economic damage (i.e. insurance claims resulting from vandalism and arson).

> ..who were given far too much leeway to start with.

Listen to your language. Freedom of speech and freedom of peaceful protest are now far too much leeway? The very rights protected by the Charter? Because they are protesting against things you like? Or protesting for things you don't like? Your like and dislike trumps their freedom does it?

You do realize who you sound like, don't you? Think about it. Mull it over carefully in your mind. Your rhetoric is dangerously close to a well-known Sozialisticher party.

"Now, when one demands liberty of speech and of the press, one is not demanding absolute liberty. There always must be, or at any rate there always will be, some degree of censorship, so long as organised societies endure. But freedom, as Rosa Luxembourg [sic] said, is ‘freedom for the other fellow’. The same principle is contained in the famous words of Voltaire: ‘I detest what you say; I will defend to the death your right to say it.’ If the intellectual liberty which without a doubt has been one of the distinguishing marks of western civilisation means anything at all, it means that everyone shall have the right to say and to print what he believes to be the truth, provided only that it does not harm the rest of the community in some quite unmistakable way. Both capitalist democracy and the western versions of Socialism have till recently taken that principle for granted. Our Government, as I have already pointed out, still makes some show of respecting it. The ordinary people in the street – partly, perhaps, because they are not sufficiently interested in ideas to be intolerant about them – still vaguely hold that ‘I suppose everyone’s got a right to their own opinion.’ It is only, or at any rate it is chiefly, the literary and scientific intelligentsia, the very people who ought to be the guardians of liberty, who are beginning to despise it, in theory as well as in practice.

One of the peculiar phenomena of our time is the renegade Liberal. Over and above the familiar Marxist claim that ‘bourgeois liberty’ is an illusion, there is now a widespread tendency to argue that one can only defend democracy by totalitarian methods. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means. And who are its enemies? It always appears that they are not only those who attack it openly and consciously, but those who ‘objectively’ endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines. In other words, defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought."

(https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...)

exactly, just like antifa "protestors" need to be shut down more forcefully

Next time you want to protest something your government is doing (ie, a bill to restrict internet access without due process), remember your comment. The truckers were peaceful and principled.

I wish I was surprised that people can hold opinions such as this, but I see so many cheering for authoritarianism in what once were liberal societies. Freedom dies not with a bang but a wimper after being crushed by people with "good intentions".

Crazy brigading going on in this thread. Up 5 down 7 back to 1... Wtf. I guess a little truth is too hard for some people

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