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Comment by bawolff | Hacker News Reader

Im totally A-ok with arresting people disrupting a funeral.

Like sessh. These are people too. Let them have a funeral, you can protest them afterwards.

Disrupting a funeral is one thing. Disrupting a funeral the public is forced to pay millions of pounds for, while other members of said public can't afford food and electricity, is a completely different matter.

I don't think that it is. The rich and powerful are still real people with real grief. I'm not opposed to people protesting parliment or whatever, but let the mourners mourn in peace.

I think you missed his point.

The public paid for this funeral, and therefor they have every right to participate in it.

They should show some respect, it is a funeral after all. If they wanted a "private funeral" they should pay for one.

Is it your view that just because the state pays for something the public has every right to do whatever they want with it?

This seems obviously false. Try walking into the petagon some time proclaiming "the public paid for this military base and therefor i have every right to participate in it." And see how far that gets you.

You can absolutely protest outside a military base and hurl insults at the soldiers if you believe it is a waste of taxpayer money.

The taxpayers pay for the inside of the military base, not the outside.

But not at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

Are you implying that people who protest military spending should "obviously" be arrested or hurt?

> The public paid for this funeral, and therefor they have every right to participate in it.

Since when? This seems like a misunderstanding of how taxes work. Taxes pay for a lot of things which taxpayers have no right, or even access to.

If this were some kind of private function I'd agree with you. But a large, public funeral for a monarch is inherently a political event. It's part of the process of moving from one monarch to the next, which is exactly what the protestors object to, and is literally politics. It is absolutely fair game to protest.

"The rich and powerful are still real people with real grief."

Then they should grieve in private and at their own expense.

12 days funeral is not 'a funeral'

It's a bit different when an unholy amount of people show up for it, compared to some regular 'a funeral'

Can't tell which side you're on based on this comment... is the number of potentially offended people greater and so it's a worse crime or is it more of a public event where the public should be entitled to express themselves?

While this isn't at all objective, my feelings on it all started to change when the BBC begun sneaking in pure praise for Charles/monarchy without any balance, having softened us up with the same thing but with the Queen for a few days, knowing no-one would disagree with that. It now feels political.

> Can't tell which side you're on based on this comment

I'm sorry, I didn't realize I needed to pick a side first.

I have no involvement, don't know the facts, haven't followed the discussion. From this thread, I gathered that people are being obnoxious and so they whipped out an ancient law to round them up for. Is selective enforcement good? Probably not. Is it good to stop people from being obnoxious at any funeral? Generally yes. Is the situation GP was posing comparable (random funeral vs. the queen's funeral)? No. Is royalty good? I don't know, I've heard pros (stable face of a country, for foreign relations, without the same person always being in power) and cons (costs).

I'd rather argue about merit and facts than "sides" you're on

...but probably that doesn't fit in a comment anyone is going to read and upvote, so alas.

Sometimes I toy with the idea of having difficult discussions (best example might be nuclear fission energy) in the form of a wiki, where the contents embody the current best known facts, with conclusions logically following from facts. When you change a fact, it cascades and the "thus"es are marked as needing an update. If you don't care for the whole discussion, you can just read the conclusion and find a "because" that you think is wrong somewhere and argue about that. But then, who'd find that enjoyable?

This "funeral" is basically shutting down lots of the country for a week.

I'll bet vanishingly few of the people with their hackles up over this spoke out in favor of the Westboro Baptist Church when it was in the news for their funeral protests.

Westboro was heckling at funerals for (and attended by) private citizens. The monarchs are public figures. I could imagine some hypothetical reasonable person seeing a difference based on this.

Private funerals and a multi day, country wide state funeral procession are just not comparable.

You’re comparing heckling a persons funeral over their sexual orientation to heckling a pedophile rapist. How do you make that connection?

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