That passes beyond "nuisance". Extreme situations can utilize extreme language.
Objectively, the sonic onslaught of their constantly blaring truck horns is equal in effect to well-known psychological warfare tactics. It is fair and accurate to call it torture in this context.
I don't think making 80+ decibels of noise 10 feet from people's windows is even an okay way to protest, no matter who you are or what your cause is.
I used to live in this neighbourhood, right by Somerset and Metcalfe. Protests happened all the time. Some of them were anti-government, even. And none of them launched this kind of sustained assault against innocent citizens. I get the sense a lot of them think they're sticking it to the liberal elite, or something like that. But really - Centretown is (or was when I lived there, at least) one of the more affordable parts of Ottawa.
Are earplugs not a thing in Canada?
Calling honking torture is ridiculous hyperbole. That word should be reserved for the extremely serious kinds of acts it's normally used to describe, lest it become effectively meaningless.
Words themselves don't have any power, and if you try to harness the power of a concept by misusing a word that refers to it, you just cause the word's definition to shift and to weaken its association to the concept (potentially making that concept much harder to access and refer to).
Even if you could find such beasts (which I don't think you can), then you have the problem that you effectively can't use your hearing. You thought that social interactions were hard with a mask? Imagine not being able to use your hearing at all.
(yes, 60 dB is necessary because that's how much you'll need in order to sleep - the human ear has an incredibly large dynamic range and even 30 dB_SPL conversations are enough to keep some people awake for hours)
As it stands, many of the residents near these protests are being subjected to low-level sleep deprivation, which is literally torture (as in, used as such by organizations who actually want to extract information or confessions from people).
To clarify - it's not honking that's torture, it's sustained honking at a duration and intensity that will cause sleep deprivation and other psychological damage.
Completely independently of the reason that these people are protesting - this particular means is not humane.
> Even if you could find such beasts (which I don't think you can), then you have the problem that you effectively can't use your hearing. You thought that social interactions were hard with a mask? Imagine not being able to use your hearing at all.
> (yes, 60 dB is necessary because that's how much you'll need in order to sleep - the human ear has an incredibly large dynamic range and even 30 dB_SPL conversations are enough to keep some people awake for hours)
Per this (https://audiology-web.s3.amazonaws.com/migrated/NoiseChart_P...), 30 dB is rated as a "whisper." This (https://mynewmicrophone.com/what-are-decibels-the-ultimate-g...) calls 30 dB SPL a "Quiet bedroom at night."
It sounds like you're challenging me with overkill requirements meant to totally mute the horns almost like they're not there, when the realistic problem is to reduce the noise to the point where someone could sleep.
I kind of find it hard to believe that's not possible with and indoor location + silicone ear plugs (and maybe white noise if you're very sensitive).
> As it stands, many of the residents near these protests are being subjected to low-level sleep deprivation, which is literally torture (as in, used as such by organizations who actually want to extract information or confessions from people).
Again, calling it "literally torture" is ridiculous hyperbole, or at the very least invokes misleading associations. A noisy neighbor is being annoying to his neighbors, not torturing them.
Judging by your post history, you seem to be more interested in stirring up shit than actually contributing to the discussion. This bizarre defence of noisemaking jackasses fits with that.
I'm not, and I'm pretty sure your accusation violates site guidelines.
> This bizarre defence of noisemaking jackasses fits with that.
You should note I'm not defending them or their actions. I just think it's ridiculous hyperbole to call what they're doing "literally torture." If the ancestor comment had simply said they were being annoying and disruptive, I wouldn't have responded at all.
So are you going to set up crimes-against-humanity tribunals to prosecute all the noisy neighbors of the world for being torturers?
And were those truckers performing interrogations that I haven't heard about? Your comparison is as ridiculous as comparing compulsory school to prison. Yeah, you can find some similarities, but you're missing important differences that undermine the comparison.
And in the noisy neighbors scenario, are they just loud as a by-product of their self-centered preferences or are they making noise intentionally to make everyone miserable and get something they want? Either way, they are causing sleep deprivation and constant stress, which is a form of torture. In the second scenario, it's even done intentionally as a means to an end. Even so, folks are rarely prosecuted for crimes against humanity even for the most grotesque mistreatment of under a dozen people.
Comments elsewhere in the thread cite 120+ dB horns outside and about 80 dB indoors.
80-60=20. Let's say the earplugs only have to be 50 dB (and that the average person can sleep with 30 dB of noise in their ears at night) - I still bet you can't find any that fit the requirements above.
There's no "overkill requirements" - I'm handing you concrete, realistic numbers that are reflective of real life and you're trying to handwave them away.
> A noisy neighbor is being annoying to his neighbors, not torturing them.
You literally didn't read one of the last sentences of my comment - "To clarify - it's not honking that's torture, it's sustained honking at a duration and intensity that will cause sleep deprivation and other psychological damage."
Please read before responding.
Earplugs will dull the noise, but if I can't take a nap over two guys having a conversation at that distance, I really doubt most folks' ability to get a good night's sleep over truck horns. The earplugs will probably mitigate the physical damage done by the noise, but I highly doubt they do much for the psychological stress. People lose their ability to focus and sometimes their sanity due to injuries that cause a constant ringing in their ears. Even if you can reduce the volume, the constant noise is a type of torture.
Edit: Found the Noise Reduction Rating for a number of different types of hearing pro that I've used in the past. The best one was rated at 33, meaning it roughly reduces the noise by something like 33 decibels. That pair, of course, being the ubiquitous neon yellow 3M product with flames on the sides for enhanced performance. I don't wear them myself because while they're fashionable, they're incredibly uncomfortable for me. This also appears to be among the best non-powered hearing pro that's available on the market. They will take an uncomfortably loud worksite at 105 dB down to effectively under 80 dB and more-or-less within a safe range for hearing. Not a pleasant level for sleeping though, by any means, although I can pull it off myself if I'm tired enough. When you start talking about a truck horn which those earplugs might or might not be able to quiet down close to the level of that 105 dB you'd experience with no hearing pro on a worksite, you're past potential hearing damage and well into a range where there is no reasonable escape from the barrage of sound.
Edit 2: Most of these earplugs in the 25-33 NRR range are definitely available at the hardware store if anyone needs to know that. They're more expensive per pair and seem to come in higher count containers, but they're there and much cheaper than the doctor's visits and hearing aids will be in the future. If you find yourself in a situation where the background noise is uncomfortable at all, please, please, get yourself some if at all feasible. Half the old dudes I've worked with in my life did not think it was worth the hassle and I'm tired of having to scream in people's ears to communicate. Also all the near misses because you have to either throw something at them or close the distance if you see a dangerous situation they don't and need to warn them.
Unlike people with fixed addresses, they can just up and move to a quiet part of the city to sleep, and then drive back after.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. Note this one:
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
I'm arguing a slightly different thing, that authorities are quite aware and tolerant of the situation in many cases, so they don't care to do much.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
You pretty much proved my point by diminishing the one particular source of noise that you personally don't consider "as bad".
How about 24hrs? Now that's torture, or as we Americans like to claim "enhanced interrogation"... [Enemy combatants were exposed to sensory deprivation which included 24hrs of American heavy metal music and 24hrs of flood spotlights to prevent sleeping.]
I get it, after living peacefully before these protests started it might appear as torture, however it is again just annoying behavior not torture. As mentioned by other comments, ear plugs are a thing, sleeping pills could help, glass of warm milk perhaps.
You have options in this scenario, unlike when you are being physically tortured, you have no options but to endure.
Anyway, noise is noise, whether it comes from a truck, or a dog, a party, or w/e. If you're unable to understand that, then I guess this discussion is futile.
It's not just trucks blowing their air horns. That would have been annoying. A bunch of them installed train horns and during the first week were honking them 24/7. It was loud enough to cause hearing damage indoors. I'd be impressed if a dog could bark that loud.
You could stop right there. It is torture. Especially when you consider old frail people.
But, most of them are not residents of Ottawa, and the lived experiences of people in that city, particurlarly those who have had run ins with the protesters, or struggled through the 16-18 hours / day of honking, had to walk around or be harrassed by them, see the awful imagery of Trump, Confederate etc. flags being waved around, the yellow star morons etc. cannot simply be dismissed as bad or inaccurate media.
A city is being held hostage by an extreme minority and, even in OPs post they mention that the Toronto police handled it properly, but question the admonition levied against the Ottawa police.
The Ottawa police are complicit in this now as well as city council. They sat on their hands while allowing this to spiral out of control, and now want to play the victim or blame others (e.g. blaming counter protesters today).
It doesn't matter if you side with the protest or not. The sheer fact that they've been allowed to have large impact on the city and it's residents, for this long, is proof that the so-called lack of freedom that they're fighting for is simply not the bogeyman they've made it out to be. Especially if you're white.
>The Ottawa police are complicit in this now as well as city council. They sat on their hands while allowing this to spiral out of control, and now want to play the victim or blame others (e.g. blaming counter protesters today).
>It doesn't matter if you side with the protest or not. The sheer fact that they've been allowed to have large impact on the city and it's residents, for this long, is proof that the so-called lack of freedom that they're fighting for is simply not the bogeyman they've made it out to be. Especially if you're white.
This is really not much different than how Portland handled the BLM protests in 2020. 100 straight nights of extreme protests with violence against police and federal buildings. Only difference is this is during the night and many neighborhoods were terrorized as it moved from downtown. Not much media coverage of this other than conservative journalist Andy Ngo who has himself been violently targeted for simply recording and publishing video of what is happening.
This is not how Ottawa is being handled, this is not how January 6th was handled, and if BLM protesters decided they were going to shut down an international bridge that provided 1/3 of trade with the US, that wouldn't have made it a hour before an extreme response was taken.
If the trucker protest were treated like the BLM protests, you'd see people blinded and dead, and it would be completely torn apart every night to have to be reassembled the next day. At least compare it to Occupy, although they were in a park instead of blocking roads.
Comparing 100+ nights of protests and riots with Jan 6th is ridiculous...one was night after night of the same thing and having a plan in place to defend and the other is a single day where the police lost control and they actually shot someone with real bullets.
Whilst also advising Proud Boys and Three Per Centers of their "enforcement plans", texting them to "take cover" and that they'd be given an "all clear" when they come back out.
Or being advised that although their leaders had active arrest warrants, that they would not be arrested at any protests that were "supervised" by Portland Police Department, so they should "feel free" to come to protests.
And if you are ordering a protest to disperse, you don't tell one side to go home. If you have a curfew (leaving aside opinions there), it's not a curfew for one side.
If you're telling people who have warrants for their arrest that you will actively not only NOT arrest them but protect them, that's not working with them, that's working for them. Which is unsurprising in PDX, given how many LEOs are members of those same organizations.
Nothing in what you said was a good justification. You're right though, it's not a huge surprise that police would choose to work with militant right wing organizations.
January 6th police had real bullets and shot and killed a person. You could argue Jan 6th was handled more strictly than BLM.
They did all that for a photo op vs. Capitol police falling back as far as they could without risking the lives of members of Congress. Even in the aftermath once the building was evacuated and they were clearing the grounds they handled that with kid gloves compared to many of the BLM protests.
I'm not sure where you're getting this whole idea that there wasn't much media coverage on it. A quick google search shows literally thousands of news stories about it.
Eventually even the local news started showing what was going on when their crew were attacked covering the story. However this happened many times before and they simply left and didn't cover what was happening.
https://katu.com/news/local/police-declare-riot-near-justice...
oh this is absurd.
BLM was the lead story in just about every newspaper, news channel, magazine and aggregator sites for weeks.
I noticed on a sibling comment you claim to live near Portland and implied that local media did minimal coverage which is also absurd. Again, it was covered obsessively by just about every single local news outlets from their local networks, papers, and podcasts.
No media outlet was trying to hide BLM from you.
The media did not ignore it at all. If anything, I'd believe that tie-in with "antifa" is greatly exagerrated by the media, since it seems like the situation in Portland is better explained via the horrible police escalation that happened there and the fact that there's a variety of groups that jumped into the vacuum.
But some citations are nature.com, and some are People Magazine, and they all get the same superscript number.
You have to evaluate the evidence and the sources to decide which is more credible. Some things you have to take on faith, but that doesn't make it a dice roll. When it matters you can apply some critical thinking skills, and at least be able to justify the position you've settled on.
In this case I don't care enough about this Andy guy to dig into it, but I was able to determine that I couldn't justify forming an opinion about his credibility using what Wikipedia was presenting to me. If I wanted to get into the woods, I'm sure I could end up with an informed opinion based on more than a gut feeling.
To me the political bent of HN isn't relevant when reading a comment. I'd rather take each comment on its own merits, without guessing or assuming what the ideology of the commenter would have to be.
I recently lived in a country in which wearing the wrong color socks is grounds for instant prison, so I prefer when my government's monopoly on violence errs on the side of restraint, as in the case of these protestors.
Should individual protestors get shut down when they harass mask-wearing doctors or honk horns in the middle of the night? Obviously.
But there is some fuzzy line in which we let protestors do otherwise illegal or fineable things that we don't let individuals do.
I could be convinced that skin color is a factor as you mentioned, but at the moment I have no idea.
> is proof that the so-called lack of freedom that they're fighting for is simply not the bogeyman they've made it out to be
It's disingenuous to equate the lack of freedom that they are talking about with the lack of freedom to protest. They are not the same thing, the protesters are talking about vaccine mandates specifically.
These people are not the minority. They're self-professed victimes of so-called tyranny that doesn't exist. The sheer fact that they're able to protest for this long, in this way, at the nations capital is ample evidence that this so-called tyranny they're fighting is a delusion.
Equivocating that with the lived experience of millions of people who are fighting for true equality is truly a laughable position.
Honk, I guess.
However, the vast majority of organizations that did this were private though, and it was the organization that implemented these policies. I'd hardly equate that with government overreach, and especially not the federal government if you're a nurse/healthcare worker, or worked in a local municipal government.
My point is that these protests don't have anything to do with vaccines, mandates or some perceived minority status that not following them bestows (which, again, is a choice..). If that was the case, they would not be in Ottawa. There might be some people paying lip service to these ideas, but the majority of the people protesting are self-labelling as minorities due to some perception of tyranny from the federal government that does not exist.
Unless you're a federal employee that was fired due to your position on vaccines (over 95% of federal employees are vaccinated) then protesting in Ottawa doesn't make any sense.
Why should only people who are fired be allowed to protest? Most of the truckers are vaccinated, but they are protesting for the right of those who aren't to be allowed to do their job.
All of the health and COVID mandate policy is set at the provincial level in Canada, not federally. They should be protesting in Toronto, or other provincial capitals.
However, a good percentage of provincial capitals are currently Conservative governments. So, by deliberatly choosing Ottawa, they're protesting legitimately elected government to force them to step down (despite being democratically elected 6 months ago) and install a new leadership panel made up of the convoy leadership.
They are asking the prime minister to drop the mandates or step down.
I agree that it isn't reasonable to expect the federal government to tell the provinces what to do, but they have been protests in all the major cities as well (so far as I can tell).
That may not be true. It is common for governments to implement the really unpleasant policies by using businesses as an enforcement arm (eg, surveillance via banks and telecom companies). It bears asking why companies have all, in coordination, picked up a set of policies that are both ineffective and divisive - it is entirely on the table that it is because of government pressure in the form of OH&S guidelines.
Firing unvaccinated people barely does anything w.r.t. changing the odds that people get COVID eventually. We've seen ample evidence that being vaccinated doesn't change the transmissible situation. So why are companies doing this? Their employees are still going to turn up and transmit COVID. By this point, the anti-vaccine types have probably caught COVID and gained natural immunity anyway so these policies would represent companies shooting themselves in the foot. It is possible they'd do that of their own initiative but it is nevertheless a bit weird.
> My point is that these protests don't have anything to do with vaccines, mandates or some perceived minority status...
Why do you think these protests have just mushroomed up? Have trucker protests been an ongoing thing in Canada for many decades?
> > A city is being held hostage by an extreme minority
> These people are not the minority.
> A city is being held hostage by an extreme minority
Wait and you've extrapolated this from claims of a downvote made in the first hour after posting a reply on a politically controversial topic? HN is a huge site, are you really expecting unanimous political views? This is par for the course on these threads.
https://www.politico.eu/article/angry-dutch-farmers-swarm-th...
Anyway society loved it at first until they caused too many traffic jams. Public opinion turned and it was over quickly. If you are a work at home software dev these kind of protests don't affect you until Amazon stops delivering.
Please don't comment on downvotes like this; it's not useful.
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
And in this case, it's more than a little manipulative. "Truly a shameful display by the folks here."
Here's an interview with a MD in downtown Ottawa, speaking of her and her staff at a medical clinic getting harassed in the street for wearing a mask. https://www.npr.org/2022/02/12/1080354245/health-care-worker...
I must have missed where large trucks sit for days on end, engine running, horns blaring endlessly as part of their "useful public utility".
> The story also does not disclose that the interviewee is an Ontario public employee, essentially a spokesperson for the government position, which is in opposition to the protestors.
This is blatant bias on your part. Doctors employed by the state to provide healthcare are not government spokespeople, however you're trying to spin it here.
I deny that pointing out the obvious and undeclared conflict of interest is bias, blatant or not. The physician is articulating the same position as her employer who is in opposition to the protestors. Would it be fair for a Facebook employee to comment on an issue regarding their employer and not disclose it, especially if they worked in a portion of the company directly involved in the issue at hand?
EDIT:
Also, the parent comment to mine claimed of the NPR interview: "Here's an interview with a MD in downtown Ottawa, speaking of her and her staff at a medical clinic getting harassed in the street for wearing a mask."
This description is not true of the interview text available at the link when I read it.
We would not want confusion and ambiguity there either, after all.
Since both governments and nongovernmental actors use news media to advance their cases it is important to evaluate and understand the context of an interview especially if it doesn't make the assertions that the linking person claims it makes.
Also, I did not claim that the interviewee is a spokesperson, but that they articulate a position in such close alignment with their employer that they are essentially a spokesperson. It isn't that there is confusion about a person's role. It is that either NPR didn't disclose or the physician didn't disclose a conflict of interest and allow the reader to evaluate the interview with that in mind.
Why did you use the word torture here? Torture is a well-defined word with an accepted meaning. Do you feel that it is appropriate? Or are you looking for an emotionally-loaded reaction? Can I also claim that my loud college neighbors are torturing me when they stay up too late on the weekend? Of course I can, but it sure is disingenuous to anyone who has actually been tortured.
If they did it for a week straight after you'd lodged several noise complaints and had the police go nowhere, yeah, I think that would qualify. It's certainly not the most severe type of torture but intentionally depriving a person of sleep and attempting to damage their eardrums qualifies.
If your loud college neighbours were setting off a train horn outside your building, repeatedly, I think you'd expect them to be handled by the police (if not arrested) pretty immediately.
If your loud college neighbours were assaulting people in the streets, shouting death and rape threats at you, you'd probably consider them violent.[1] Another post of mine has many more links if you're interested.
I'm not sure how much actual violence is required for a protest to become violent. Is it just that nobody's been killed yet? That seems to be what everyone is waiting for and I sincerely hope we don't get there (thankfully it looks like things may be defusing today).
[1]: https://globalnews.ca/news/8594809/covid-freedom-convoy-otta...
Dictionaries, on the other hand, define torture as "inflicting pain and suffering on".
The UN Conventions on Torture in no way specify that imprisonment, formal or otherwise, is a required component for something to be defined as torture.
So my opinion is that your vision of torture in this instance is far more narrow, because it fits your worldview more.
I assume (charitably) they mean it in a hyperbolic sense
While there is no outright violence, there is torture to local residents, there was attempted arson, there is continued intimidation and harassment of those wearing masks, there is intimidation of visible minorities, there are attacks on businesses....
Is that enough to convince you that the situation is out of hand and than stricter action is needed?
The protestors haven't complied with not honking.
Please, please be careful with how you frame this. There was severe inaction and dangerous incompetence displayed by Ottawa police but please don't spin this as the federal government overstepping.
Edit - within seconds of posting, this is downvoted. Truly a shameful display by the folks here.