Comment by j_walter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by j_walter | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

>A city is being held hostage by an extreme minority and, even in OPs post they mention that the Toronto police handled it properly, but question the admonition levied against the Ottawa police.

>The Ottawa police are complicit in this now as well as city council. They sat on their hands while allowing this to spiral out of control, and now want to play the victim or blame others (e.g. blaming counter protesters today).

>It doesn't matter if you side with the protest or not. The sheer fact that they've been allowed to have large impact on the city and it's residents, for this long, is proof that the so-called lack of freedom that they're fighting for is simply not the bogeyman they've made it out to be. Especially if you're white.

This is really not much different than how Portland handled the BLM protests in 2020. 100 straight nights of extreme protests with violence against police and federal buildings. Only difference is this is during the night and many neighborhoods were terrorized as it moved from downtown. Not much media coverage of this other than conservative journalist Andy Ngo who has himself been violently targeted for simply recording and publishing video of what is happening.

A major difference is that the police would issue dispersal orders, then attack the BLM protesters indiscriminately, or call curfews which basically declared open season on any kind of protester, journalist, civilian, doing anything outdoors after X o'clock. The police were shooting rubber bullets at people sitting on their own porches.

This is not how Ottawa is being handled, this is not how January 6th was handled, and if BLM protesters decided they were going to shut down an international bridge that provided 1/3 of trade with the US, that wouldn't have made it a hour before an extreme response was taken.

If the trucker protest were treated like the BLM protests, you'd see people blinded and dead, and it would be completely torn apart every night to have to be reassembled the next day. At least compare it to Occupy, although they were in a park instead of blocking roads.

> A major difference is that the police would issue dispersal orders, then attack the BLM protesters indiscriminately, or call curfews which basically declared open season on any kind of protester, journalist, civilian, doing anything outdoors after X o'clock. The police were shooting rubber bullets at people sitting on their own porches.

Whilst also advising Proud Boys and Three Per Centers of their "enforcement plans", texting them to "take cover" and that they'd be given an "all clear" when they come back out.

Or being advised that although their leaders had active arrest warrants, that they would not be arrested at any protests that were "supervised" by Portland Police Department, so they should "feel free" to come to protests.

They were in contact with both sides of the conflicts...only one side made their plans clear and also applied for permits. I'm not saying it was the right call, but one side was violent toward police and the other was not...not a huge surprise that the police would choose to work with them.

The Proud Boys applied for a small fraction of permits.

And if you are ordering a protest to disperse, you don't tell one side to go home. If you have a curfew (leaving aside opinions there), it's not a curfew for one side.

If you're telling people who have warrants for their arrest that you will actively not only NOT arrest them but protect them, that's not working with them, that's working for them. Which is unsurprising in PDX, given how many LEOs are members of those same organizations.

Nothing in what you said was a good justification. You're right though, it's not a huge surprise that police would choose to work with militant right wing organizations.

>this is not how January 6th was handled

January 6th police had real bullets and shot and killed a person. You could argue Jan 6th was handled more strictly than BLM.

Of the 3 fatalities during that riot 2 were self inflicted and the only remaining one was when a rioter breached the last line of defence between the people screaming "Hang Mike Pence!" and 60 to 80 members of congress. There's been speculation that the tunnel entrance down the hallway from where the shooting occurred was where Mike Pence was evacuated through. I was amazed at the level of restraint displayed by the capitol police in contrast to clearing of lafayette square in the summer with pepper balls, tear gas, flash bangs, etc. At that time the park police didn't even bother to order the crowd to disperse until after they had already started attacking the crowd.

They did all that for a photo op vs. Capitol police falling back as far as they could without risking the lives of members of Congress. Even in the aftermath once the building was evacuated and they were clearing the grounds they handled that with kid gloves compared to many of the BLM protests.

The police protected buildings from being set on fire and their officers being attacked with lasers and fireworks. Dispersal orders were only given AFTER the protests turned violent.

Comparing 100+ nights of protests and riots with Jan 6th is ridiculous...one was night after night of the same thing and having a plan in place to defend and the other is a single day where the police lost control and they actually shot someone with real bullets.

Not much media coverage? I saw coverage of it all the time. It was covered as if it was the end of civilization and it continues to push the narrative today that BLM protests were burning cities to the ground across the country.

I'm not sure where you're getting this whole idea that there wasn't much media coverage on it. A quick google search shows literally thousands of news stories about it.

Main stream media...I live near Portland and the local news covered very little about it. 30 second clip of the peaceful start...and little about the destruction and chaos that was seen night after night.

Eventually even the local news started showing what was going on when their crew were attacked covering the story. However this happened many times before and they simply left and didn't cover what was happening.

https://katu.com/news/local/police-declare-riot-near-justice...

> Not much media coverage..

oh this is absurd.

BLM was the lead story in just about every newspaper, news channel, magazine and aggregator sites for weeks.

I noticed on a sibling comment you claim to live near Portland and implied that local media did minimal coverage which is also absurd. Again, it was covered obsessively by just about every single local news outlets from their local networks, papers, and podcasts.

No media outlet was trying to hide BLM from you.

BLM was...Antifa riots every night were not. The media seemed to just ignore them...maybe with the theory that they would stop if not getting covered. Millions in damage, many police officers hurt and hundreds of businesses impacted nightly. Go look for stories on all the businesses that left downtown Portland because of the riots and the lack of city leadership to address them. On top of homeless, crime and drugs...it's an absolute shit show.

Again, a quick google search shows thousands of articles that specifically tie antifa to the riots in Portland.

The media did not ignore it at all. If anything, I'd believe that tie-in with "antifa" is greatly exagerrated by the media, since it seems like the situation in Portland is better explained via the horrible police escalation that happened there and the fact that there's a variety of groups that jumped into the vacuum.

Andy Ngo isn't exactly a reliable source.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Ngo#Credibility

But I'm sure his Wikipedia page is

The nice thing about Wikipedia is that claims are sourced. I had no idea who this guy was, but I looked over the statements critical of his credibility and at first glance many of them are sourced at heavily biased media outlets which isn't encouraging. I'm not digging into it enough to say those articles are wrong, but I'd say the clams that he isn't credibile on his wikipedia page aren't looking very convincing so far, or at the very least that view on the guy doesn't seem widely accepted by mainstream sources.

Since even a sourced and cited claim can be utterly bogus, it is actually worse. Because it looks authoritative at a glance when there are many citations next to a claim.

But some citations are nature.com, and some are People Magazine, and they all get the same superscript number.

Then if those claims are bogus, it becomes a matter of your sources vs. their sources, and it ends up all being a matter of faith and perhaps gut feeling.

It's not just their sources vs your sources, it's about the data those sources have, where/how they got it, and how much of it you can verify.

You have to evaluate the evidence and the sources to decide which is more credible. Some things you have to take on faith, but that doesn't make it a dice roll. When it matters you can apply some critical thinking skills, and at least be able to justify the position you've settled on.

In this case I don't care enough about this Andy guy to dig into it, but I was able to determine that I couldn't justify forming an opinion about his credibility using what Wikipedia was presenting to me. If I wanted to get into the woods, I'm sure I could end up with an informed opinion based on more than a gut feeling.

He posts video...how is raw video not a reliable source? He certainly has an agenda, but also posts things that many will not. He was not afraid to post video when the actual news teams were threatened and attacked during the riots (by specific groups that you can't really talk about since they don't exist...it's just an idea).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com