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Comment by cheschire | Hacker News Reader

Well, yeah. You choose to wear a helmet because you expect to get hit. If you didn't expect to get hit, you wouldn't feel the need to wear a helmet.

This is a de-escalation technique that functions well in advance of a potentially violent situation.

Edit: for people downvoting, I would love to read your opinions too! The down arrow isn’t a disagreement button. It’s supposed to indicate a person isn’t contributing to the conversation. Otherwise you’re just enforcing groupthink.

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good point.

I wear my seatbelt everyday when I drive my car because I'm expecting a car accident. Strangely enough, it has yet to happen and I have yet to need my seatbelt. What a waste!

I think I'll just stop wearing it.

There’s an element of intent which your sarcastic response doesn’t really account for. But yes clearly everyone who wears a helmet to a protest does not intend to start a physical attack.

That doesn’t mean it’s not an effective preventative measure and de-escalating technique.

Police standards and the populace's standards of what constitutes legal gathering and protest are often quite different, as evidenced by the unnecessarily harsh deployments against protesters as seen in Hong Kong and less recently in the US. More often than not, police forces make the first move in otherwise legitimate protests either with direct oppression, false-flag tactics, or unnecessary displays of force (or potential force).

A helmet is entirely necessary in peaceful protests because the authorities resisting the demands of the protest do not play fair.

If you assume an all peaceful, restraint police who use violence only as a last mean, then yes.

But in reality, there have been plenty of peaceful protesters beaten to hospital or caught up in tear gas clouds, just because the police decided to dissolve the demonstration with force, because a handful of protestors were aggressive (sometimes not even that).

But and this is a big but! The german police in general is actually quite restraint and uses deescalation tactics. But sadly it is getting worse again.

This is interesting and I find myself on the other side now for the moment.

What about the love parade in Duisburg, and the use of kettling as a standard police tactic which resulted in deaths? I remember reading that this was intended to escalate so as to more quickly resolve issues. Time may have blurred my memory though so perhaps I’m remembering incorrectly.

Ok, well lets say the german police is restraint in comparison to other police forces. At least, thats what I heard lots of times. Also what I experienced so far. But I have also seen the BFEs in action ..

Not only are you wrong on both counts, you're also breaking the site guidelines while doing it.

Paul Graham:

I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness.

It only becomes abuse when people resort to karma bombing: downvoting a lot of comments by one user without reading them in order to subtract maximum karma. Fortunately we now have several levels of software to protect against that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

News Guidelines:

Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

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

While I applaud your reference to the guidelines, I find it hard to believe that asking people to write instead of clicking was the intent of that request. Nor do I particularly agree with PG on his sentiment about downvoting.

So please feel free to contribute to the conversation! Why do you disagree with my sentiment regarding thee banning of helmets at protests being a de-escalation technique?

A simpler deescalation technique is to not misappropriate public funds to pay armed thugs to attack protests in the first place.

Absolutely. For all our taxes, it’s borderline criminal how underfunded Polizei education and training is.

How dare I wear my hard hat to work at a construction site! It must mean I'm an unsafe worker, cause I expect to get hit, right?

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