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Comment by colorincorrect | Hacker News Reader

>These are not incredibly difficult to distinguish between

this is fundamentally misguided. who gets to judge who is the marginalized individual? global geopolitics is more complicated than there being strict good actors and bad actors

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"Are they being shot at by police, or are they police shooting at people" is a good place to start.

some things are not quite as well-defined as that: "whose home land is this" is a common motif you can ask. ask that question towards North Americans, and you might have to say all your land originally belonged to the Native Americans; Canadians are in the process of reconciliation with the Indigenous groups, but speaking as an outsider, it doesn't seem like the reconciliation process can do much justice compared to what they suffered through.

The problem with this is that context matters. I think we'd probably agree that the most conservative requirement for somebody to discharge a weapon is when he has a reasonable reason to believe his life, or the life of another person, is in danger. So what were the contexts of the shootings? Were they arbitrary, unjustified? Or did the officers have some reasonable justification in fearing for their lives or the lives of others?

Fortunately, unlike in times past, we don't need to rely on hearsay or propaganda. Everybody has their camera out and we can see what's happening, at least most of the time. This [1] is the video of the first shooting. And this [2] is the video of the second and, to my knowledge, final shooting. Do you feel the officers acted disproportionately, abusively, or in an otherwise inappropriate fashion?

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN4MvOrPotk

[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHKbe5mAoNo

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For those concerned the videos are mostly safe-for-life in what is depicted, even if it is somewhat unsettling.

That seems like an extremely bad rule of thumb to me. Neo nazis sometimes get into violent confrontations with the police, for example

Do they? More often I see the police protecting the neonazis, or marching with them out-of-uniform.

The FBI has been warning about white supremacist infiltration of police departments since 2006[1], and nothing has been done about it, because the infiltration is already complete: most cops are at least comfortable with white supremacy. Those who speak out against white supremacy from within police departments get kidnapped and beaten by their colleagues, or left in dangerous situations without backup.[2]

1. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/fbi-white-supremacists-i...

2. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/414/right-to-remain-silent#...

and don't forget the fact that police (by intended function) go after criminals: are you supposing that every obvious criminal that police go after are actually the oppressed one?

well.... maybe you can make that argument.... but i think that is beyond the scope of the original intent.

In the general case of offensive speech, we're not usually talking about global geopolitics -- that's a relatively unique feature of this specific case. The premise "there are specific cases where making a judgement call is going to be difficult" is true; that doesn't make the conclusion "therefore, we should never make judgement calls" true.

i agree with the conclusion: that we should make judgement, and step up if the occasion requires us to; but i find the general claim that "These are not incredibly difficult to distinguish between" to be very delusional and harming

in the case of offensive speech, i agree that usually we can see what is bad. but without going into detail, i think its also a bit more subtle that

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