Comment by orionblastar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by orionblastar | Hacker News Reader

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Yes, peaceful protests achieve more than violent protests.

I feel bad that people die in protests or get arrested, etc. Current protests have people throwing bottles and rocks at the police, even peeing into bottles and splashing the police with their urine. That is not peaceful and provoking people.

Better than protesting is getting people out to vote against Trump and the GOP next election. Get some Democrats and third parties in Congress and make Trump compromise. That would do more than protests ever will.

I don't get this identity politics, and gender politics, etc. Identity and gender are social constructs I am told and the right does not control society the left does. I've never fit into society and getting an identity. I'm like an outcast because I don't have many social skills to get these social things. If the left controls society by tv shows, music, movies, plays, education, liberal arts, etc they would make better social constructs of identity and gender to help pass legislation to protect people in certain groups. But beware, for if you protect one or more types of genders or identities you have to protect them all, even the ones you don't like or agree with.

That went to some weird places

- Modern protests have largely been peaceful. There's a protest every week nowadays, and the only violent ones I can recall in the past few years were Baltimore and Charlottesville. Smaller scale violence does occur at these protests, but it's usually a few bad actors.

- It's a common and well documented tactic for governments to send provocateurs to delegitimize protests

- Protest organizers know better than anyone the importance of getting out the vote, and are often part of that effort. Also, the midterm elections are still a year away.

- Uh not even gonna touch your identity politics rant tbh

There have been quite a lot of protests over the last few years that have gone violent. G20, The Berkeley Milo Speech, The Free Speech Demonstrations in Berkeley, Ferguson, etc. I don't know what you call "small scale" but these events have had a substantial amount of brawling and property damage being done. Maybe not Rodney King level, but definitely noteworthy.

In many of those cases, it's far more than just a few bad actors. If you watched footage from the Milo event for example, the Antifa crowd had a lot of people out in force. Ferguson had a lot of out of towners come in to create trouble despite the locals trying to keep things calm.

I encourage you to spend more time thinking through your views relating to that last paragraph, as it comes across as pretty muddled to me.

Identity and gender are social constructs, sure. But social constructs like "black" and "gay" were created by dominant groups as means of control and exploitation. The left's desire to protect people in certain groups is about undoing that historical oppression. So it's not about "liking" or "agreeing with". It's about solving systemic problems.

As an example, I'm a straight, white dude. I'm also opposed to dominance as a way of running things. Historically, people who aren't straight white dudes have gotten the short end of the stick. So I support action to stop the deepening of that and to erase the historical effects. But I oppose similar action in favor of straight white dudes because that would reinforce the historical imbalance.

If you really struggle with sentences about, say, white men, then just replace words you don't like with things "group that benefits from structural oppression" and "group that is harmed by structural oppression". That may make it easier to see that it's not about you personally, but mainly about hundreds of years of history.

As a side note, I also didn't have many social skills. I was weird and awkward. But they are skills! You can learn them! Find a good therapist and spend a few years catching up.

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