Assembly is valuable, but there's a certain misery that comes with self-isolating for two weeks living on canned beans, having many businesses shut down, and working so hard at this to protect the lives of your elderly parents or your asthmatic sibling...

... And then watching 10,000 people pack together downtown exercising their right to free assembly, and likely undoing all those months of progress.

It's not just misery, it feels fundamentally unjust. Basically some rule violations are deemed more equal than others, so why should I care anymore? If we're not "all in this together" why should I suffer?

>It's not just misery, it feels fundamentally unjust. Basically some rule violations are deemed more equal than others, so why should I care anymore?

Politicans politicize all that they can in order to use it as ammo against their opposition. The mainstream media creates and editorializes narratives in the name of garnering and sustaining attention and therefore advertising dollars.

If you're engaging with either, you have to approach it with skepticism, try to find balancing viewpoints, and make the best decisions for yourself, your family, etc. as a result.

Unfortunately, in the current case, healthcare professionals have allowed themselves to become tools of the above parties and have massively discredited themselves and their institutions in doing so. We're now even at a point where someone could rightfully be completely confused as to whether something as small as buying/wearing masks is a fruitful endeavour or a waste of effort, which is a dire state for us to be in.

That has long been a principle of law, not all violations are equal because of extenuating circumstances. One sizes fits all ignoring circumstances is foolishness, not justice even if it leads to 'equality'. There is a difference between smashing a window of a car to rob it or for shits and giggles, and doing it to save a life.

Is this law? Do these governments even have the authority they claim they do to issue these selective lockdowns? It's a gray area at best, and I'm sure many judges would consider these lockdowns actively illegal as is what happened in Wisconsin.

exactly, they’ve lost all credibility and are at risk of having cried wolf now

This is a baffling argument.

Far more lives are threatened by coronavirus today than will be threatened by police brutality over the next several decades [1]. You're basically saying that immunocompromised and elderly persons are acceptable collateral damage.

One thing that's been lost in the noise is that death by police brutality is a vanishingly small problem: less than 0.0003% of the population per year (and most of those are White people).

And the ultimate irony is far more Black people are going to die as a result of these protests (since Black communities are disproportionately affected by the virus) than will be saved by whatever temporary curtailment of police brutality this yields.

Those are the real facts. Not the alternative ones you and people like you would like us to focus on. It's like it suddenly became acceptable to wantonly suspend rationality because it suits certain interests.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_use_of_deadly_force_in_...

It is important to not the latter did not mitigating police brutality as a public health interest, but racism in general.

From the letter:

> White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19. Black people are twice as likely to be killed by police compared to white people, but the effects of racism are far more pervasive. Black people suffer from dramatic health disparities in life expectancy, maternal and infant mortality, chronic medical conditions, and outcomes from acute illnesses like myocardial infarction and sepsis. Biological determinants are insufficient to explain these disparities. They result from long-standing systems of oppression and bias which have subjected people of color to discrimination in the healthcare setting, decreased access to medical care and healthy food, unsafe working conditions, mass incarceration, exposure to pollution and noise, and the toxic effects of stress. Black people are also more likely to develop COVID-19. Black people with COVID-19 are diagnosed later in the disease course and have a higher rate of hospitalization, mechanical ventilation, and death. COVID-19 among Black patients is yet another lethal manifestation of white supremacy. In addressing demonstrations against white supremacy, our first statement must be one of unwavering support for those who would dismantle, uproot, or reform racist institutions.

The remainder of the letter goes into strategies for mitigating the spread of COVID-19 during protests.

I think it's incorrect to only count deaths as the fallout from police attitude towards minorities. An entire group of people is effectively controlled and held back my the police. As we have already seen, the impacts are generational and have gotten us to where we are today. COVID-19 is the thing will most likely be forgotten next year with some sort of vaccine or herd immunity arising. Even if the protests are successful, it will still be only another step on a long road of equality.

> In my mind, there is almost no cause that warrants the avoidable death of even a single person, let alone tens of thousands

I agree with you! I don't think I was clear in my original post. The human toll of systemic racism and police brutality is much greater than the 'deaths by cops' number. Look at how COVID-19 is much more dangerous to the Black communities. Why is that? Lack of adequate healthcare, opportunity, and lagging economic outlook linked to systemic racism.

You see the deaths from COVID-19, and they are horrible. I'm thinking about COVID-19, and the next 10 pandemics that will disproportionally impact Black and minority communities. In aggregate the death toll could dwarf COVID-19. How do we avoid those deaths?

Even if police shooting were brought down to zero, I think it would take like 100 years to save as many lives as we’ve lost to Covid, right?

And some people think that without intervention it would be more like 480,000 in the UD alone.

So ...

> From the perspective of the protesters, taking this opportunity to protest and possibly achieve change means hopefully lowering the general mortality risk for generations to come, not just in the immediate COVID future.

I didn't mention police because this was never just about the police.

It's not clear to me how this protest attempts to solve racism, even if that is a goal of participants. Demands I've seen have exclusively been for changes to policing. The words Black Lives Matter refer to police violence.

I definitely agree that it would be morally acceptable to suffer even a hundred thousand deaths in exchange for a permanent end to racism. And I could even be persuaded to believe that such actions should be taken now, as opposed to say a year from now. But that is not an outcome I expect, as I haven't even heard proposals for how that might be done.

I'm all for the reform people are asking for. But it is not my belief that the net effect of this right now will be positive.

Race war ideology flamewar is not allowed here. Yes, related topics are of the moment, but you crossed the line, and the resulting subthread was particularly wretched. No more of this please.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.htm

I was under the impression that most violence happens between members of the same race in United States. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_S...

My opinion is policing of minority communities is generally ineffective and counter productive. Which leaves members of those communities at the mercy of both the police and criminals. At it's worst you have collusion between the police and criminals operating in minority communities.

> But are the protests really founded on something significant?

Fuck yes, they are.

This is such an ignorant take, it's astonishing.

The "general narrative" is about rampant police brutality that first and foremost disproportionately affects people of color. It's a problem that's existed since the inception of a police force in the US and that's what this movement is about. No one is trying to play a silly number game of which race kills more of what other race.

You're stopping short of spelling out your conclusion.

The aims of the protests are to shine a spotlight on police brutality and qualified immunity / defund the police / ensure that killer cops are prosecuted / damage property in pursuit of anarchy / score a new TV / whatever. It's all fairly clear and makes enough sense.

Your idea, however, leaves us with nothing but a knowing look and an appeal to not trust the narrative. If you can read any broader frustration here, it's because all the "but what about white folks?" people in my social circle have been following the same playbook.

So where does it go? Does your argument conclude that the police should be harsher still towards black people? Does it suggest that police who kill should suffer less scrutiny than they presently do? Is the status quo fine, and the resolution should be that everyone just shut up and go home?

What's your call to action here, and what would be the immediate real-world consequences of your worldview?

Thank you, I haven't been able to articulate this line of thought recently

The playbook is the knowing look and the consistently not reaching conclusions, or perhaps not amongst polite company. They're quite free to think differently to me.

If they had said that the protests were fine but next time we expect a shout-out, then the discussion could move on. Much like in this example.

Thank you for this thoughtful and well-reasoned opinion. I would also like to add a global take into the discussion. Who stands to benefit from the American people being both divided among white / black, male / female, old / young, and distrusting of the media? Certainly not anyone in America.

Not OP. When considering this line of thought, I think of meme's in the original sense of the word. So one could take a mildly-conspiratorial take on it and say that the "meme" itself stands to benefit from this sort of division rather than a nefarious agent or group. It's a self-feeding cycle because I would argue that this cause done in a bad/unfair way sows more racial/gender/etc division and as such creates more reason for itself to exist.

> Police brutality is wrong and there is reason to think that it is a worse problem for black people than for white people. At the same time, we recognize the disproportionate extent to which white people suffer from black violence. We may perhaps disagree about the extent to which the discrepancy is due to systematic racism or socioeconomic issues, but we recognize your concerns. We want to reach across the division and work together to fix all these issues

So you want to dilute the protest which is specifically about police violence against black people into something entirely different? You're essentially arguing to destroy the entire protest for something it's not at all about.

Protesting police brutality against black people is protesting police brutality in general.

I think anecdote, personal experience, and most importantly, history, are valuable when the groups in question (law enforcement) are collecting the data in question. Would you believe a survey taken by Coca-cola about what soda is the tastiest? A lot of the initial reactions of law enforcement to incidents of police brutality start with denial, and they don't change their story until there is video evidence to contradict them. In so many incidents where there isn't publicly available evidence, they get to shape the narrative. No amount of data are meaningful if the source benefits from them supporting certain hypotheses.

From your source, white/black people shot to death by cops in 2018 breaks down as 399/209. That's about 2x.

Now if I take a look at: https://www.ojjdp.gov/ojstatbb/crime/ucr.asp?table_in=2&selY...

And I focus on arrests made in situations such as incidents of weapons possession, aggravated assault, or the violent crime aggregate, I don't see much of a discrepancy versus that 2x. For example, for the violent crime aggregate it breaks down as 288620/187470. That's about 1.5x. That is, 1.5x as many white people as black people got arrested for violent crimes. Yet 2x as many white people as black people got shot by cops in that year.

I don't see the relevance. Can you help me understand how this is relevant to police shooting and killing 3x more Blacks than Whites per year?

They don’t. They shoot more caucasians per year by a significant margin.

> They don’t. They shoot more caucasians per year by a significant margin.

Not when normalized. See my parent comment.

Or, reposting:

    Ethnicity | EOY-19 killed | July-19 pop est | humans per 10m

    ------------------------------------------------------------
    
    White, non-hispanic | 370 |     198,256,671‬ |          ~18.7
    
    Black               | 235 |      43,984,096 |          ~53.5

You're normalizing to raw population. You want to normalize to "armed conflicts with the police" or similar.

Using the above FBI 2018 homicide statistics, blacks committed 3177 homicides in 2018, while whites committed 3011---in other words, blacks account for ~50%, despite only being 13% of the population.

Taking that proportion as a rough "criminality index," and multiply 53.5 by 13/50, and things look very different.

The whole point of the comment you are questioning is to also normalize it to something besides total percent of population. The new comparison seems to say that if you are a violent criminal your chances of getting shot by the police are higher if you are white.

This population measurement is not useful for determining racism. It does not consider that blacks make up 13% of the population, but commit 52% of the homicides. It doesn’t consider if the shootings are justified. It doesn’t consider black cops shooting black suspects.

There is in general insufficient data to support or reject that there is systemic racism.

Here is a good article on things to consider https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/08/police-officer-shooti...

"black cops shooting black suspects" ... that's still police violence against black people, still racist.

You think there's no black servants of white supremacy?

Yeah but that’s only one way to calculate it. Other ways might be to calculate based on number of encounters, or number of criminal acts, or to control for location, or control for income. Etc.

I think it’s important to be really careful saying a given statistic, any statistic, says what we think it says.

Please bring one such alternative that effectively captures the impact on a per-capita basis.

Otherwise, this is a false analogy, since the normalized measurement accomplishes precisely this.

It really doesn’t and I sense that you seem to be downplaying the whole concept that statistics can be interpreted in many different ways.

Edit: I can’t reply to your reply, I think it is a new hacker news feature that’s trying to slow down these back and forths. I listed several ways we could control the data, and I’m not proficient enough in statistics to do all that myself.

One talking point is: per police interaction, an unarmed non-Hispanic Caucasian person has a 4 in 10000 chance of being shot while an unarmed African American has a 3 in 10000 ... so the only huge person actually has a higher level of risk per interaction.

Again, this is not my area of expertise.

I’m not suggesting what all these numbers mean. I am suggesting that when you bring numbers, it’s only fair to discuss different ways to view the numbers.

> It really doesn’t and I sense that you seem to be downplaying the whole concept that statistics can be interpreted in many different ways.

Statistics can be presented in any number of ways; data can be used to lie in any number of directions.

But if you're not going to come here with a counterproposal, you're only undermining the movement Black Americans have been struggling with for so long by stating obliquely that these numbers are a lie.

Edit per yours (sorry you've been hit by rate limits. I get the feeling):

> One talking point is: per police interaction, an unarmed non-Hispanic Caucasian person has a 4 in 10000 chance of being shot while an unarmed African American has a 3 in 10000 ... so the only huge person actually has a higher level of risk per interaction.

The unknown variable here is the number of police interactions by race and whether they were the initiator or the intended target (or suspect, if a crime had taken place). That's why it's normally just reduced to shootings by police.

If you have the details and the exact breakdowns, it'd be helpful. But the BJS doesn't seem to discriminate between whether someone initiated the contact or whether they're the target of law enforcement action.

-------

Also, thank you for engaging.

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. This is one of the commonest and most inflammatory clichés of race war that exists, so your comment reads like concern trolling.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Thank you for taking the time for an individual reply. The thread was young and I was genuinely baffled, as I do not get much exposure to this type of... thinking in my daily life. I regretted my engagement the moment the response came back :(

I believe you that it was unintentional. In my experience, most of what looks like trolling actually is, which is why I try to use qualifying language like "reads like". Unfortunately, the troll effects are the same regardless of intent, and effects / likely effects are what we have to moderate by. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

I should have been clearer earlier: given the replies that my question prompted I completely understand why my post was flagged, even in isolation. I have no qualms about any of it.

The comment was not meant as "who does he think he is, putting words in my keyboard, I'll set him straight!", but rather a humble "whoa! instead of simply flipping an invisible switch, he took the time to explain what and why to some nobody: this is so cool!"

Thank you for sacrificing your sanity and keeping this site what it is ;)

2018 FBI homicide statistics: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

514 black-on-white homicides, 234 white-on-black homicides.

How do you feel about those numbers compared to the intra-racial ones listed in the same table?

Pretty typical of everyone that I have (anecdotally) ever met who contends that black violence on whites is the primary issue. They say one thing based on their intuition and when they hear any response that complicates their view they are out to lunch. A lack of curiosity about your own biases is not a great look.

Also worth noting is that the term homicide can only be applied by law enforcement, whose systemic bias against people of color is.. you know, the topic of the day. It does not include many or most of the cases of wrongfully being killed by law enforcement and it certainly doesn't include the illegal killing of people in other countries by our armed forces. I would be very interested in seeing these numbers included.

> Pretty typical of everyone that I have (anecdotally) ever met who contends that black violence on whites is the primary issue.

Wait, is this directed to me, or to the comment above me? Because I'm arguing the exact opposite of this, specifically that focusing on and misrepresenting Black-on-White violence takes away from the struggle against oppression endured by the Black community.

It's the OP I'm replying to who's been arguing the Black-on-White violence angle. I'm merely pointing out that they're using a strawman to defend it and that I have no intention of staying engaged when there are a broad array of fallacies being employed one after another.

You and I are on the same page.

sigh. i see that now. mea culpa.

This really only works if you consider said statistics to be reported in good faith. Black Americans tend to be disproportionately targeted by law enforcement and disproportionately punished. For example, black Americans are around four times as likely to be charged for Marijuana offenses compared to white people despite using marijuana at equal rates.

White-on-black crimes I would argue are far less likely to be reported, especially apparent by the bias that the police employ against black people.

We’re talking about murders here. It’s pretty hard to hide that a person no longer exists.

This people keep pointing to black incarceration rates as a symptom of a racist judicial system. When debating I focus on murder victims as that has nothing to do with the racist judicial system.

Still there is a problem with government tyranny and it doesnt matter if it is just a handful of people. Being killed by a thug vs being killed by the govt really are two different things even if you are just as dead either way.

It's pretty easy to lie about it and say you were 'afraid for your life' or 'he charged at me' though, as we've seen in multiple high-profile murders of black people. It's almost like that's what kicked off this entire protest.

If you're not charged for murder, then it doesn't get reported.

The issue is the double standard with which some protestors were condemned while others were lauded based solely on which causes (and which classes of people) the commenters happened to politically support. It's transparently unprincipled, to the point of being a sad joke.

That isn't a double standard but a fundamental result of judgement of costs, values, and outcomes. Somebody who shoots an armed and dangerous spree shooter is lauded as heroic while someone who shoots a kid thought they was shoplifting a one dollar drink is regarded as a psychopath with no regard for human life. Circumstances and outcomes vary, a form of 'neutrality' that ignores that fundamentally isn't a useful metric.

But that’s not a good analogy. The right to protest is important precisely to protect unpopular (but still widespread enough to have many supporters) demonstrations.

It’s important to differentiate.

If someone calls for protests to be illegal in one case and not the other then that’s a double standard and not such a great argument. (There are some subtle differences here, though: The situation a month ago was materially different – both in terms of the epidemiological picture as well as in terms of new scientific evidence about the relative dangers of being inside and outside – so it is possible for someone to argue for a difference on that basis, though I do acknowledge that’s a very shaky one.)

What’s happening here, though is that people judge the content of the protests: The content of the protests against the restrictions was irrational trash, so engaging in them is irresponsible stupidity. That’s a value judgement and it is perfectly valid to arrive at different conclusions with such a value judgement.

>That isn't a double standard but a fundamental result of judgement of costs, values, and outcomes.

What do you think the definition of a 'double standard' is? You know, applying a different standard to the same behaviour (protests).

>Circumstances and outcomes vary, a form of 'neutrality' that ignores that fundamentally isn't a useful metric.

Sure. And it's still a double-standard. You just associate the phrase 'double-standard' as a negative and you don't like to apply something negative to behaviour you approve of.

>a fundamental result of judgement of costs, values, and outcomes

Judge not that ye be not judged.

>Circumstances and outcomes vary, a form of 'neutrality' that ignores that fundamentally isn't a useful metric

Perhaps not useful to you and your cause.

I don't think it's a double standard but yeah I agree with you that cause is important here. 100% it matters what you're risking yourself for.

Lots of people on the left were calling for more support from the government to handle this. EU unemployment is half of what the US is. Germany's at 3.5%. So risking yourself, for the economy didn't seem worth it especially when other nations did so much more. Lots of states started eviction moratoriums to protect people.

So the people in Michigan that nurses were standing in front of vs the BLM crowds.

There is a difference between a couple dozen cosplaytriots showing up with guns to protest not getting a haircut and a hundred thousand+ of the general public showing up without guns to protest people getting killed and maimed live on camera--including the press.

However, if you want to talk about double standard, where are the cosplaytriots who were sooooo concerned about their rights? Where is the groundswell of Second Amendment defenders out protecting these protests against the government like the Black Panthers did back in the 1960's?

They all bluster about standing up to the government--here is the time. So why is silence all I hear? Seems like they don't really care about those pesky rights so much, after all. And it seems like they don't really like standing up when the government might actually shoot back. Cowards.

I'm torn, a little bit. Against your point: The current protests are at least mostly respecting the fact the disease exists, and encourages masks. Also, these protests are much more organic than the "re-open America" protests. And the left-wing who got mad at the anti-public-health protests never called for cops to shoot them or round them up. IOW: We respected their freedom to be out there, no matter how fucked the cause.

Toward your point: I fundamentally don't respect most conservatives, much less those who think they need to protest against public health measures. So to an extent, yes, this is a lot more important than what they were complaining about.

The first sentence of your second paragraph gets to the root of a lot of political polarization in the US. (and the converse is obviously true, too).

> I fundamentally don't respect most conservatives, much less those who think they need to protest against public health measures.

You're conflating political stance with intelligence. Also, you need to respect everyone. That doesn't mean agree-with or follow blindly, just recognize their inherent humanity and worth. I feel like that must have been a sentiment promulgated by someone famous at some time in the past.

I was being harsh because it's been a harsh week.

I don't think they are "worth less" than someone else, and I certainly know there are intellectually honest, well-meaning conservatives in the country. The line starts to blur <somewhere that I have defined> but that gets too politically specific for HN.

That's not a double standard. That's just a standard. When one group of people is holding signs that say "stop murdering people" and the other group is holding signs that say "I need a haircut," and you're mad that "the commenters" are not treating them the same, the problem is not with the commenters.

> When one group of people is holding signs that say "stop murdering people" and the other group is holding signs that say "I need a haircut," and you're mad that "the commenters" are not treating them the same, the problem is not with the commenters.

This is at best an extremely distorted comparison of the two messages.

40 million people are unemployed. The stakes are much larger than just getting a haircut.

Yet those were the signs being held. There are clear goals for police brutality protests. The anti-quarantine protests had no clear goal, the narrative seemed to be “the government hit their ‘disable economy’ button and we want them to turn it back on” as if relaxing legal restrictions would suddenly make everyone ok with the rampant disease and go spend time rubbing shoulders again. People were self quarantining before it was a legal requirement.

There were many other signs being held. You’re choosing to focus on the people holding a haircut sign.

In any case as a legal matter it makes no difference. Government restrictions on 1st amendment rights to assemble and protest can only survive strict scrutiny if they are viewpoint-neutral.

As soon as governors are deciding which protesters to fine/ticket based on their agreement or disagreement with the contents of their protest signs, as a matter of law the protest/gathering ban is done for. (See the recent 5-4 Supreme Court decision where justice Roberts ruled that, at the time, there wasn’t evidence that church services in California were being treated unequally with other equivalent non-religious services. When the case comes back up again with Gov Newsom’s approval of protestors marching outside, but not Christians marching in religious processions, the ban is going to fall apart in court).

> Yet those were the signs being held.

Those are the signs you were shown, or chose to notice.

With the exception of restaurants, people mostly do seem to be going about their business now that legal restrictions are relaxed. As we've seen this past week or two, even giant crowds don't stop people.

You're making my point. You politically support one side more than the other, right down to belittling the side you unsupport as "I need a haircut". Maybe I agree with you politically, but when arguments from principle pivot from one week to the next based on which way the politics point, it's not really about principle.

One group of protestors makes awful points, so I judge them to be engaging in pointless and risky behavior.

The other side doesn’t, so I’m much more supportive of their protest, even though there might be associated risks.

As long as I don’t call for the first protest to be made illegal this is a perfectly consistent argument.

Sometimes you have to look at the content of a protest to judge if it’s valuable or not. And it’s perfectly ok to judge a protest as not being valuable.

It's not belittling them - that was their argument.

That might have been what one sign said, but picking that as if it were "their argument", let alone the best argument, is sample bias and clearly intended to belittle. That's politics: build up your own side as much as possible, smear the other side as much as possible. If someone actually wanted to be fair, they'd reference a stronger case for protesting the lockdown, such as the economic pain it has inflicted and the case that it also leads to deaths, such as by suicide and addiction, as well as social ills like increased child abuse and domestic violence. I'm not trying to take that side, just pointing out that intellectual honesty is the first casualty of politics, just like truth is the first casualty of war.

You must be under informed. Are you aware there are people who want society to reopen so they can start collecting income to pay rent and bills?

So because one of the "protesters" for BLM was literally holding a sign and going on live TV threatening to put fire to property, should we be equating all of BLM to that?

See how a strawman argument works?

No it wasn't. The argument was that the costs outweighed the benefits. Let's do this:

The economic devastation wrought by the pandemic could ultimately kill more people than the virus itself: https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-05-11/more-t...

With kids stuck at home, ER doctors see more severe cases: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/with-kids-stuck-at-home-er...

The Untold Toll — The Pandemic’s Effects on Patients without Covid-19: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMms2009984

COVID-19 Is Likely to Lead to an Increase in Suicides: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/covid-19-i...

Coronavirus could deplete Social Security as early as 'this decade': analysis: https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/coronavirus-could-deplete...

"Deaths of despair”: The deadly epidemic that predated coronavirus: https://www.vox.com/2020/4/15/21214734/deaths-of-despair-cor...

'Biblical' famines could double global hunger as a result of the coronavirus crisis, UN warns: https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/04/22/coronavirus-biblical-fam...

How COVID-19 may increase domestic violence and child abuse: https://www.apa.org/topics/covid-19/domestic-violence-child-...

Millions of Credit-Card Customers Can’t Pay Their Bills. Lenders Are Bracing for Impact: https://www.wsj.com/articles/millions-of-credit-card-custome...

Now to dare dumb down the argument to being only about haircuts is, well everyone can understand what I would say, but I don't want to run afoul of the rules.

Your framing of the situation is biased.

I could say: "One group is holding signs that say 'Let us reopen. I have 2 children to feed' and another group is calling for police abolition while smashing in the windows of small businesses and murdering people" and it would be just as valid of a description as yours. It's not a fair description though.

Maybe your framing is the result of not having a wide enough array of news sources.

If by "I need a haircut" you mean to say "I am unemployed, verging on destitution and eviction, along with 30 Million other Americans" then maybe you have a point.

The trivialization of other people's causes, especially those that should engender sympathy (literally 10's of millions of those in the weakest economic situations), is a 'root cause' here.

If a very serious healthcare issue is politicized, we're all in trouble.

neonate I agree with you. "I need a haircut" is a proxy for economic freedom of choice and freedom of movement, regardless the purpose. Freedom of movement only for the causes you believe in is not freedom at all.

They want to be the judges that get to determine which movement is worthwhile and which movement is not worthwhile.

I don't agree that "I need a haircut" is a good argument, or even that what it is a proxy for is a good argument. It's also lousy politics because it's so easy to dismiss.

The good argument is that if we care about mitigating suffering and death, we should also be looking at the suffering and death the lockdown measures lead to. Counting one side and not the other is dishonest.

This is the literal definition of a 'double standard' .... you know the same behaviour (protests) judged by different standards.

I strongly disagree. Many people seem to believe this without any substance. Some people, as evidenced by comments here, only believe this when it aligns to their subjectively self valued concern.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_assembly

According to Wikipedia assembly is an example of a civil liberty. The preeminent doctrine on civil liberties is On Liberty. According to John Stuart Mill the greatest destroyer, as addressed near the top of chapter 2, of civil liberties is populism whether from an aggressive majority or angry mob.

https://www.bartleby.com/130/

Assembly only really means anything, to those observing, if the participants are assembling for a purpose of individually formulated passion opposed to an exertion of social pressure. That, as it would appear, is the difference between a protest versus an angry mob.

That said I would say the most fundamental right is freedom of expression which can occur from a group or individual and be every bit as powerful and influential.

I think a lot of people strongly believe things without substance, sometimes based on wikipedia and interpreting stuff written by people that died centuries before problems manifested in paradigms that would have been unimaginable to them.

I'm a fan of John Stuart Mill's writing, but having a memorable book title does not make a permanently relevant tome that applies to all of history backward and forward.

My understanding of assembly (no wikipedia reference here) is that it's a form of expression (which you also kind of said yourself).

Are saying that assembly isn't good or necessary for society? Or is this entire post specifically about the OP's word choice?

In either case, are you citing J. S. Mill as a form of "proof" for your assertion?

Assembly is important but perhaps not the most important form of dissent. Yes, I am citing Mill as evidence.

> having a memorable book title does not make a permanently relevant tome that applies to all of history backward and forward.

The definition of liberty has not changed, so yes that essay still equally applies.

Thank you for your clarification that the post was entirely a critique of a single bit of word choice.

Out of curiosity, what other philosophers do you consider to be so absolutely correct (and so clear in their statements that misinterpretation is impossible) that rise to the level of proof or evidence when cited?

I cannot provide a good answer for this. I do believe that Descartes’ Meditations are perhaps the most misinterpreted.

https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Meditations_on_First_Philos...

This is what people reference when they say: I think, therefore I am. I find that is not at all accurate to the writing. Really it says a thinking machine that can doubt can doubt away all things but doubting itself so then that ability must exist.

It can certainly go too far, but if a system of government angers a majority of the population one has to consider who exactly it is serving.

In that case consider a historic example. What is more important Common Sense by Thomas Payne or the protest it directly inspired?

https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Common_Sense

Commerce, working, mourning the dead, having weddings, creating art, performing music.

How is the ‘free assembly’ you are talking about more important, and even if it is to many, am I required to have come to the same conclusion, or to follow the conclusion someone else has made for me?

I have a feeling a lot of freedom of assembly protections were really more about the ability to get together and discuss stuff than it was about marches and protests.

In that case, our freedom to assemble has been massively curtailed for months.

Who gets to decide what assembly is worth violating the lockdown for?

Public assembly is critical, yes. So is the ability to work, run a business, get married, and engage in social gatherings.

Either COVID-19 is serious enough that it merits cancelling a bunch of “critical” features of normal life, or it isn’t.

I agree with this statement. At least here in Seattle the protesters and police are packed closely together and are yelling at oneanother. Very few if any police are wearing masks (I was ~20ft from anyone & wearing a mask but wanted to see things 1st hand).

IMO this will create a level of pandemic similar to NYC unless we really start testing and contact-tracing. It does feel like much of the left is OK with this, whereas everyone was freaking out when the reopen protesters were protesting. This is inconsistent, and unfortunate as I do have somewhat left-leaning views.

Do you think most protestors would be okay with contract tracing, especially when the most critical times to trace are during protests?

Contact tracing a protest makes no sense anyway.

Taking down a list of people who dined at a restaurant during a certain time period is one thing.

How are you supposed to contact trace a 10,000 person protest? No one is going to know the random people they happened to be standing next to and chanting at a specific moment.

If these protests are super spreading events it blows a huge hole in any attempt at contact tracing & targeted quarantine/isolation. Hopefully it turns out the virus somehow can’t spread well in these conditions otherwise this is a huge setback for a country that just sacrificed so much to reduce the virus prevalence.

If COVID can’t spread as well due to higher heat and wind that would be great. But literally this evening I saw the same thing again walking around with the thousand protestors in close proximity to the police. According to the CDC the last super-spreader event in this area was 53.3% to 86.7% infected [0] but that was in an enclosed space.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6919e6.htm

I doubt that.

Consider that when people are yelling and standing tightly packed together, even if there's wind it won't blow away the droplets, just the aerosols. And new aerosols will be continuously generated...

Agreed. Protesting in my country is going on but funerals are restricted and weddings forbidden. Grandparents haven't seen there grandchildren in a long time...

I agree that public assembly is essential regardless of what is going on.

But why were the people protesting the lock downs and business shutdowns and the limiting of freedoms the yahoos and crazy murderers? Why did nurses block them from protesting but not one would block someone now?

What ever the answer is (and I don’t think there’s a non-partisan one), we’re screwed. Hopefully we’ll get new data on masks giving us a 80/20 solution since I don’t think either side of the political divide is going to buy the stay-at-home order much longer. “How come they can break it but we can’t?”

We are screwed. Partisanship has been extended to such a degree that it guarantees that "both sides" remain opposed.

Science should not be a partisan topic. Mistakes get made, but those should be learning opportunities rather than a chance to discredit your "opponent".

Science is partisan because its being misapplied. It cannot tell you what you should do, that is the realm of leadership. All it can say is whether a course of action may lead to a certain outcome.

Whether such outcome is desirable vs the trade-offs is not a scientific fact as desirability only exists in the minds of each individual.

Your comment seems to actually mean that “science is partisan the moment it is being applied at all.”

No, and this is core to the point:

Science has found no universal "utility" function that applies to all humans. As such its impossible for science to maximize utility, or in laymens terms "outcomes" globally for all humans. We must choose what we find important and there is no scientific tool to do so.

Once you've decided what's important sure you can apply science to help you make the best decisions to achieve that outcome.

Well, science is partisan the moment it is being applied at all.

The most science can tell you is what are the consequences of some act. Deciding if they are good or bad and if they are worth taking is a completely politic act.

Don’t get me wrong. I agree with the thrust of what you’re saying. It’s just that the parent said it was partisan because it was being misapplied as opposed to applied at all. I was trying to point out the contradiction in the comment. That’s all.

I do believe you can apply science once a goal or desired outcome is decided upon. There is no known science that can help you come to a goal. E.g. science can't tell you that we should reduce pollution but can help if we decide that's a worthy goal and worth the tradeoffs.

Perhaps as we better understand the brain that may change.

The anti lock down people were allowed to protest. With weapons publicly displayed too...

This isn't a fair question, people will protest and go back to their lock down down life. Reopening is sustained interaction.

There was a lot of science denialism in those protests, conspiracy theories, and (based anecdotally on photos which are the best we have to go on) mask usage seemed a lot lower.

But now we're seeing science denialism on a whole other scale. Over a thousand "scientists" signed a document that says protests for their preferred causes aren't risky, but protests against their policies are.

Why should anyone be criticised for denying this so-called "science" when the people who made it are now openly denying it as well?

Also, whilst mass gatherings themselves can act as a vector for disease transmission regardless of what the cause is and despite some forms of masks, the objection to the lockdown protests wasn't that participants might put themselves and their immediate families at risk so much as their stated goal was to end the lockdown, and thus see millions of people not involved in the protest expected to go back to work and encouraged to socialise.

> the first group was protesting not being able to go to Applebee's

This is such a terribly uncharitable assumption and ruins any sort of ability to have reasoned discourse.

Are you aware how many people are unemployed in this nation right now because of the lockdown? Are you aware how many people’s businesses are destroyed, shut down permanently? And your assumption is that the only reason anybody could be upset is because they can’t go to their favorite restaurant!?

These protests are going to result in the deaths of thousands of people. They are clearly irresponsible during a pandemic. Gathering in large groups with no physical distancing is tantamount to conspiring to commit mass murder.

The problem of racial inequality has existed for "hundreds of years" so why not push the protests back 1 year so it won't unnecessarily cost many people their lives?

There is no reasonable suggestion that police will kill thousands of innocent black people in the next 12 months. There is no actual emergency here that can justify killing thousands of people.

It is incredibly obvious that the urgency here is false. The false urgency is driven by pandemic-related issues like stress and unemployment. Anyone can see how clearly thse protests have become an outlet for a number of issues, only one of which is racial inequality.

It is possible to fully support racial equality, elimination of poverty, and modernization of policing and also believe these protests have been carried out in an incredibly unethical and irresponsible way.

Claiming to support a good cause does not make it okay to inflict death on innocent people.

Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

Look up the Massachusettes death rates.

https://www.mass.gov/doc/covid-19-dashboard-june-7-2020/down...

In the age group of under 50 years old, the death rate due to COVID 19 is 10 out 100,000 (!), that is half of that attributed to the flu, no seriously

it is very unlikely that the protest will have much effect

if everyone that protested self isolates at all other times for 20 days after they stop protesting, yes, I agree.

Edit: The parent edited their comment with no edit note, so my comment might not make as much sense because it remains unchanged

There is a lot to unpack here but I will do my best.

> I shouldn't have to say this but people these days: I fully supports racial equality, elimination of poverty, and modernization of policing in the U.S.

It doesn’t appear that you do, as you are actively speaking out against an anti-racist movement supported by hundreds of millions of people around the world.

> The problem has existed for "hundreds of years" so why not push the protests back 1 year so it won't unnecessarily cost many people their lives?

This is not how social movements work. You can’t just “push it back”. Additionally, black people a disproportionately affected by the coronavirus, so these issues are not completely separate.

> It seems incredibly obvious that the urgency here if false

I suspect you feel this way because you are not an affected demographic. The police have been terrorizing and murdering black people in their own neighborhoods for hundreds of years. If this was happening to you, I’m sure it would feel ‘urgent’. Additionally, the president of the most powerful country in the history of the world has literally been calling for the military to kill protesters and labeling them as terrorists. This is incredibly scary and I’d say speaking out against this is very urgent.

> they were protesting because many of them thought the virus was a hoax or because they couldn’t get a hair cut or buy lawn fertilizer.

This is such a terribly uncharitable assumption and ruins any sort of ability to have reasoned discourse. Are you aware how many people are unemployed in this nation right now because of the lockdown? Are you aware how many people’s businesses are destroyed, shut down permanently? And your assumption is that the only reason anybody could be upset is because they can’t do low-priority things!?

there is no difference to covid, it doesn't ask 'oh were you protesting the right thing?'

5 Plain clothed police officers break into your house and execute your wife or daughter in their bed, then say it was a mistake and walk away scott-free (no charges)...

Would you stay quiet and wait for the covid threat to die down before protesting or taking action?

This happened in Seattle like 10 years ago to a white guy. It’s horrible. All these things are horrible. Absolutely disgusting and inexcusable.

It is also a tiny fraction of the number of deaths from the virus.

Also no one demonstrated regarding that guy. I wish people would have. Maybe we could have reformed no knock warrants, and the people you are referring to would still be alive.

>Would you stay quiet and wait for the covid threat to die down before protesting or taking action?

Absolutely. The only reason you'd ignore a pandemic and risk your life (and the lives of your friends and remaining family) is an expected and completely valid emotional response. That doesn't mean it's the right thing to do (or safe), though.

I wouldn't risk being directly responsible for killing more people (especially people I know and their circles) just to protest something a few months earlier than I should.

Because they compared governors to Hitler and their plight to how Jews were persecuted during the Holocaust. They also lynched an effigy of a politician they despised. That is why they were the crazy ones.

But there are clear enforceability issues with trying to establish "protests are allowed unless they're crazy" as a rule. Who gets to decide what's crazy?

and that is why the right to assemble is called an inherent right. it is owned and arbitrated ONLY by the individual. I know that this stuff seemed so boring in civics class, but it is all really rational. You cannot limit free assembly, because that limitation would have to be arbitrated. If it is arbitrated it must be arbitrated by the government. If it is arbitrated by the government the government can become corrupt and self serving and arbitrate based on self-interest... ie. TYRANNY. So it must be the individual that decides. And there are always and perpetually costs and challenges created by this arrangement, but it is the only alternative to tyranny.

Not getting a haircut won't kill you, the police will. Also, for the most part, anti-racism protestors are wearing masks, anti-lockdown people, for the most part, are not.

Losing your livelihood can kill you, however. If you are a small business owner, for example, and it's illegal to operate that business, your life is also in danger and your situation deserves empathy. Empathy is not finite resource. We can extend it to all people in bad situations, not just people we prefer.

Which is why the federal government passed a never-before-seen stimulus package that included forgivable small business loans and expanded unemployment income.

There is no equivalent safety net for people who are victims of positional asphyxia.

I know several small businesses that are closed forever despite that bill. Many reasons why, I’m sure; however, the most cited one I’ve heard is that the monies had too many strings tied to uncertain outcomes whereby the business owner could end up still out there f business but also with debt that they wont be able to service.

> If you are a small business owner, for example, and it's illegal to operate that business, your life is also in danger and your situation deserves empathy

This is a false dichotomy. Sure, these people (and their workers) deserve empathy and support, but that doesn’t mean they should be allowed to reopen. You can support business owners via financial aid or other measures while their business is closed.

no, this is not about empathy but personal autonomy and sovereignity and autocracy. Why not allow someone to do something if they are willing to take the risk, why treat them as criminals?

If you believe that you get infected at a store, don't go to the store ... case closed. On what basis is the state "protecting" someone that does not want to be protected? On what basis is someone considered a criminal when a crime could only potentially be committed?

what if the person is immune to the disease, already had the disease, or does not mind getting infected?

> Why not allow someone to do something if they are willing to take the risk, why treat them as criminals?

Because we live in a society and our actions affect others. When you take this argument to an extreme it becomes pretty obvious that it is fallacious. For example, do you think it is okay for someone to actively burn their garbage, venting toxic smoke into their neighborhood because they are “willing to take the risk” of developing health complications?

> If you believe that you get infected at a store, don't go to the store

It would really nice if this worked but it strikes me as a grand oversimplification of how society operates and diseases spread.

> what if the person is immune to the disease, already had the disease, or does not mind getting infected?

These people still risk infecting others and perpetuating the pandemic, which is why you shouldn’t do it, even if you aren’t afraid for yourself.

Presumably said people would be willing to forfeit medical treatment and quietly die at home if they did catch it?

I've been considering this line of reasoning for a while: if opening your business disqualifies you from medical treatment, what else does?

Being obese? Smoking? After all, both of those are the direct result of your choices and less dependent on other people than getting a virus.

Most people say "Oh, that would never happen!" but if we have a time where rationing healthcare becomes the norm or even just vital, it will just as it did in Italy a few months back.

Much of that purported "willing" is driven by an involuntary need to service debt. Without acknowledging this, it's disingenuous to talk about the shutdowns in terms of autonomy. I'd wager that the shutdowns actually allowed more people to act with their desires than they prevented. For example had the shutdowns not occurred, how many companies that are pure WFH right now would have just continued telling everyone to come into the office?

you could make the same case for the current wave of protests

'you should support blm and adjacent causes from home through donating without putting more people and lives at risk'

What exactly do you mean by "people we prefer"? I am unclear on the meaning and motive of your language.

> Losing your livelihood can kill you, however.

Why is "Reopen all the things!" the only solution, though?

Part of the reason why people got angry is because none of the people involved around the cosplaytriots wanted to consider any other options, and there are many.

1) The fact that losing your job costs you your healthcare is a political problem. The government can decide to extend healthcare by fiat, expand access, or several other choices.

2) The fact that people weren't getting paid unemployment that they filed for is a problem.

3) If you really believed in choice, give people $2,000 per month unconditionally but allow them to choose whether they wish to go back to work. Now we can see the free market in action.

Instead, the only thing on the cosplaytriot protest agenda was "Stay home and die or get back to work and possibly die". That's not exactly a protest sentiment that's going to get much grass roots support.

Putting a gun to people's heads is going to make them angry.

Additionally, mask usage is seriously high at these protests. I’ll literally be marching down the street and see folks on rooftop bars, beers in hand, elbow to elbow, not a mask in sight. that scares me more than a protest where you can freely trail behind at distance.

I went to a protest in my town and there wasn't an unmasked person in sight. I think that if you showed up without one, you would get called out and asked to leave.

Serious question from non-US person - isn't one of the main reasons to also get some anonymity? As IT guy I know damn well how good face recognition software works these days, en masse. With all the biometric data US govt has on everybody, pairing would not be that hard for many.

You might look up what happened to ferguson protest organizers: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/puzzling-number-men-tie...

I’m not going to claim that these were all retributive, but I can certainly understand the paranoia—legal protections only exist on paper.

The (peaceful) protests aren't illegal so anonymity isn't a major concern. Police might be violent towards protestors in the moment, but there's zero risk of the government tracking down and punishing protesters after the fact.

> there's zero risk of the government tracking down and punishing protesters after the fact.

ehhh I wouldn't be so sure about that.

As a matter of policy I would be pretty sure about it. If you weren’t looting or setting fires there will be no organized attempt to find you. Individuals within the government may take on personal vendettas from this but the risk of that to the average protest attendee is so low due to sheer numbers.

That's very good sarcasm right there. Perhaps the many years in the corporate world have made me too cynical, but I'd expect all and every protestor to be captured on cameras, identified later with face recognition software (remember that Amazon's FaceRekognition had contracts with PDs?), matched with photos on driver licenses and over the next few months they would be quietly, but mercilessly punished for the dissent. The only real question is whether the FR software work when face is mostly covered with a mask and sunglasses? It technically can, because ears, hair, head shape and shoulders shape is a unique enough combination.

The current consensus on face masks is they might/probably help when used in addition to social distancing. There haven't been enough good studies, second-order effects (like a sense of invulnerability, induced demand) aren't studied, and materials and construction vary too much. I have no idea how to feel about not seeing them, and I've seen enough common sense turn out to be wrong that I won't fall back on it.

masks, when worn by the general (or asymptomatic) population have not been proven to reduce the spread of SARS-COV-2 - no seriously there is no evidence to support mask usage - the belief that mask do anything is nothing more than a superstition - the virus take the form of an an aerosol that is not stopped by a little cotton thing in front of your nose

do you honestly believe that a little rag in front of your mouth will reduce the spread in big crowd everyone screaming at the same time?

the protest might just prove false all the scaremongering, this is what I see very as a likely outcome

and that the disease does not propagate outdoors, that the disease does not propage by touch etc.

The studies that show that masks reduce the R0 of COVID-19 are many and broad. https://www.livescience.com/face-masks-eye-protection-covid-... The latest ones that I have read indicate an 85% reduction of transmission and infection between two people wearing masks, a double 85% reduction.

Where is an instance of a study that indicates the opposite? Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

I find it interesting that the paper suggests that contracting COVID through your eyes is twice as prevalent compared to breathing it in. See 3% rate for non-mask vs 6% for non-eye-protection. Why are we not all wearing eye protection too?

From your link:

> the authors note that the findings on face masks and eye protection are based on limited evidence

You also have to consider second-order effects like a sense of invulnerability from the mask and added social interactions because people feel safer. Those haven't been studied.

if they’re outside and elbow-to-elbow, then it means they’re likely not continuously spitting in each others’ faces. it’s marginally better if they stood a little farther apart but that risk shouldn’t scare you. worry about real risks, like police with riot gear.

Somehow I don’t have your confidence—I haven’t even gone inside the bars.

Anyway I’m not worried for myself, I’m gonna be fine in all likelihood—it’s my at-risk friends and family.

too many people are beholden to irrational fear with this pandemic, rather than understanding. going into a bar is not a problem for your at-risk friends or family. it's what you do inside that matters.

having a physically distant beer with a friend (assuming an uncrowded bar, as is required in most places) is quite low risk. geting hammered and carrying on with a bunch of in-your-face strangers is not.

just avoid exchanging spit with strangers. being outside is the easiest and best method, and maintaining a little distance is a close second. wear a mask indoors if you can't maintain distance. it's easy.

then you can set the fear aside and move on with your life.

> Covid as bad as it is will be an issue of the near future, civil rights gains or losses will have an impact in decades to come.

There is a lot of truth in this.

In any war there is a level of acceptable losses. For most of the spring, the modern culture wars were on hold and there were no hills worth taking. Now there is something going on that has the potential for long term consequences, so the level of acceptable losses has gone up.

That’s also a case for reopening - or better never closing the economy - an abrupt stop and socializing losses will leave scars for decades.

Maybe people are just sick of being told they have to put the economy above all else. Can't have single payer healthcare because economy, can't have more days off because economy, can't have a higher minimum wage because economy, etc.

Ask me to take a risk because it is good for the economy and I'll tell you to fuck off. Ask me to take a risk to help reform violent police forces that oppress minorities and I'm more willing to do it.

Like quite a lot of lockdown supporters you appear to believe that there's this optional bit of frippery called the economy which can be switched off like a light switch, without consequence.

Let me explain some of the consequences.

In the UK people have been pulling out their own teeth with pliars because the dentists weren't allowed to be open, not even for emergency surgery. It was "too dangerous" for dentists to be close to their patients.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-devon-52321910

https://metro.co.uk/2020/05/20/mum-tried-pull-tooth-when-cou...

In India, all the factories and shops were closed. But because it's India the government wasn't able to replace people's incomes overnight. Those people started to starve so they tried to go back to their home villages, in the hopes of getting some food from the land. But because of the lockdown they couldn't get transport either, so they started to walk, in some cases they tried to walk hundreds of miles. And some of them died because of it.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-52086274

In the UK there's now a backlog of 2.4 million cancer tests or treatments. There's no obvious way to catch up and some people will die because of it.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8374697/2-4-million...

The economy is defined, literally, as every service or product people sell each other. But sure, it's also just a minor thing that doesn't matter.

There was reporting that if we have properly masked ourselves from the very beginning we could have avoided the shutdowns.

Even places that stayed mostly open got huge hits to their economy due to caution from people. For the economy to not take a hit you would need to force people into Applebee's even if they live with grandma, etc.

"So the level of acceptable losses has gone up." Yeah, right. But no one wants their own grandma to die though, for the cause.

All these meetings are meaningless, because they do not address several problems:

1. There is a serious neglect of educational system in black neighborhoods. There is no discipline in the schools in these areas. There is a lot of push from ultra-left to keep the things as they are "because this is black culture"; lots of ultra-left derive political capital off of misery of minorities - if there was no misery, there would have been nothing to fight against, to become somehow important.

2) Most of black people are killed by the black people in their neighborhoods. The numbers are of different maginitude when compared to police brutality. If the protesters were really concerned about well-being of black minority, they should have argued for better policing, security cameras, better schools, better foodstores in these areas. ASk any protester if they would part with their monety for that cause, raise taxes for exmpale, NO way, They would not.

Unless you assemble because you want to work. Then the media will paint you in the worst light possible an act like you are actively murdering grandma.

Assemble carrying weapons and with half the crowd claiming that the entire disease is fake, though?

Does what someone is carrying - but not using - make their assembly invalid?

Does what someone think make their assembly invalid?

>Does what someone think make their assembly invalid?

Point out above where GP said those assemblies were invalid. Pro tip: they did not.

Their right to assembly is not fundamentally invalidated, but the protesters are certainly open to a variety of critiques.

You're right. That comment didn't actually say or contribute anything at all. Consider my comment withdrawn.

assemble with weapons because blm and it will be much better. and covid will make sure to stop existing because this is too important to listen to science.

The GP was a bad comment for HN but crossing into aggressive personal attack is even worse. We ban accounts that do this, so please don't.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: flamewar comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23449798 are also not ok on HN, so please don't post them either.

> Care about something that matters and not just yourself

Maybe like feeding your family and keeping a roof over their heads?

I think the ship has sailed for that kind of support from the government, unfortunately, in no small part due to reopening.

To what extent is/should government be responsible for this?

Obviously a “values” question, but if “tackling collectivized problems collectively” ain’t on the government’s list, I’m not sure why I’m paying taxes, and our government’s bi-partisan efforts to collectively address this pandemic are currently the most pathetic in the world. The only place you see half-way decent propositions is before they hit the chopping block on Pelosi’s desk—this ain’t partisan.

Frankly the US government is rapidly losing any legitimacy to rule, though of course this is my humble opinion.

Did you also support the protests against the lockdown, with the same justification?

One can support the rights of any americans to freely assemble while being puzzled and horrified at the reason for the protest. To wit: I would support the right of assembly for anti-vaccination advocates and would support the ACLU in defending those rights. Hoewever, I feel that Anti-vaccination advocates are wrong, their actions are destructive and they horrify me.

Covid will last for decades, the virus will become a new common way to get sick. Theres simply no lying about the numbers, the virus will kill old folks in massive numbers, disproportionately those of color as well. Sad to say many lives will be lost, I hope some positive change is wrought despite the spikes in infections we are bound to see.

Strongly disagree, I think the freedom of speech (the ability to disseminate information widely) is massively more important than gathering in large crowds. How would you even know there were protests or something to even protest without free speech and press?