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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

Reporting to the authorities in the US means calling the police. Don’t call the police in America.

Furthermore, virus or no virus, the right to peacefully assemble is a human right that cannot legally or morally be abridged.

I don’t want the police to shut down protests. I also don’t want them to shut down gyms, or voting, or churches, or any other peaceful reason (dumb) people wish to assemble.

Assembly in the middle of a pandemic is stupid and irresponsible. I don’t do it.

I also don’t want men with guns stopping those that do. You can’t fix (or stop) stupid with a Glock and a uniform, which is what TFA is illustrating.

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> Reporting to the authorities in the US means calling the police.

No it doesn't.

It could mean code enforcement, or the health department.

Same deal. If either of those groups tell you to close (and they already have, in the case of speakeasy gyms), who do you think shows up next to make sure you’re closed?

It’s not men carrying clipboards. They’re carrying pistols, and they have machine guns in the trunk of the vehicle they drove there.

DO NOT call the state to solve your problems.

If you wouldn’t solve the problem by taking a gun over there, don’t call someone else to do that.

We live in a society. There are rules and consequences to breaking them.

That doesn't mean that we have to agree with the rules or the way they are enforced. However if you are not in agreement with the majority your options are war or not reporting others for their rule breaking. In general war is not a good option.

Every society has this, it’s not really a valuable comment.

This seems like simply a dodge or dismissal of the legitimate criticism that breaking most of society’s rules should not cause an armed opponent to suddenly appear. It’s unreasonable and uncivilized and frequently results in the small-rule-breaker being physically abused or even murdered, especially if they aren’t white.

Your casual dismissal of these consequences suggests that you are never targeted by these people. For that I am glad. I hope everyone can be as callous about the consequences for minor rule breaking one day.

The virus has killed 175k people. Brazenly defying pandemic restrictions is not “minor rule breaking”.

>I also don’t want them to shut down gyms, or voting, or churches, or any other peaceful reason (dumb) people wish to assemble.

You are attempting to equate assembly for the purpose of fighting racism or exercising vitally important activities like voting, with "assembly" for the purpose of "sick gainz bruh". This is such a false equivalency that it's laughable, and honestly also a little insulting.

The right to peaceful assembly is not conditional on legitimate purpose; same as the right to free expression.

Free speech means freedom to shitpost, not just write literature.

Correspondingly, freedom of assembly is for stupid and pointless things like church, moderately important things like gym, and not just critically important things like insurrection.

The proliferation of “illegal” gyms suggests that many people feel similarly.

>The right to peaceful assembly is not conditional on legitimate purpose; same as the right to free expression.

Yes it absolutely is. I have no idea why you think otherwise. The right to "free expression" is conditional as well. We prohibit certain "peaceful assembly" and "free expression" every single day and have done so for centuries. The classical example: you do not have the "right to free expression" to go into a crowded place and falsely yell "fire", because that would be a public danger. Similarly, going to a gym during a pandemic causes a public danger. "Right to peaceful assembly" doesn't apply.

"Peaceful assembly to work out" is in no way similar to "peaceful assembly for protesting". It's ridiculous of you to claim otherwise. It's so ridiculous that I can only believe you're trolling or trying to make an argument in bad faith.

I am sincere.

It's equally insulting to posit the straw-men arguments like this. The degree to which BLM protests do any good is debatable. The degree to which they need to be public displays, mid-pandemic is also debatable, unless you are worried that the US is going to run out of seething hate and police brutality incidents by the time the pandemic is over.

Spreading virus is an act of violence. Intentionally spreading disease is in the law books as a violent crime. Is the casualty rate of police encounters higer than the casualty rate of COVID-19 encounters?

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