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Comment by cltby | Hacker News Reader

It seems widely agreed that 93% of BLM protests were peaceful [1]. That remaining 7% slice was responsible for $1-2 billion of property damage [2], on par with a serious natural disaster. I don't know how someone can continue to use the "mostly peaceful" line with a straight face.

[1] https://time.com/5886348/report-peaceful-protests/ [2] https://www.axios.com/riots-cost-property-damage-276c9bcc-a4...

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Last I heard, 50% + 1 is the definition of "mostly". 93% is "overwhelmingly". To be clear, any property damage or loss of life is a tragedy but "mostly peaceful" isn't just accurate, it's an understatement.

Point taken, but by this standard, we could defend drunk driving as overwhelmingly safe, war as overwhelmingly non-fatal, Vioxx as overwhelmingly heart-healthy, ISPs as overwhelmingly customer friendly, etc etc.

It strikes me as pyschopathic to endorse actions that stand a 7% chance of ruining numerous innocent lives.

I didn't endorse any of the violent protests. But I don't understand your analogy at all. Drunk driving is never ok. Are you saying any kind of protest is never ok because it has a chance of turning violent? confused face

There are over 110M drunk driving incidents in the US every year and nearly 7M crashes, drunk or otherwise [1][2]. If we conservatively attribute all of these crashes to drunk drivers, we find that 94% of drunk driving causes no damage or injury. It is, to borrow your words, overwhelmingly safe.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/transportationsafety/impaired_driving/im...

[2] https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-highway-...

I ask you again, are you saying protests of any kind are never ok? Because that's what it sounds like you're saying.

All I ask is that your social movement be less injurious to society than being wasted behind the wheel.

If I flipped a coin and it came up heads 93% of the time would you say it came up mostly heads?

I feel like people are just talking past each other on this. Yes the protests were technically mostly peaceful, but if the loss from a violent protest is 15x the magnitude of the gain of a peaceful protest, the impact is no longer mostly peaceful. I do not think this extreme minority should warp one's overall opinion of BLM for the record, but I do think the lack of acknowledgement for the damage that was caused is counterproductive.

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