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Comment by justwannasing | Hacker News Reader

I was always taught to respect others and respect authority. In a civilized world, you should be civil to everyone. I would no sooner mouth off to a cop as I would mouth off anyone else. It's disrespectful and speaks volumes about the person spouting off and nothing about who he's going off on.

Respect and civility to everyone is a higher cause. To even think of doing otherwise is beyond right thinking.

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Part of right thinking, I feel, is recognising the rights others have even outside your own philosophical framework. I completely agree with being civil to everyone, as far as possible—though, at a certain point, I think that an emotional response to uncivil provocation can be excused. With that said, I also feel that I should recognise others' rights to exercise their, well, rights, even when I disagree with them. As GBS said, "The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him; the unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself. All progress depends on the unreasonable man."

And yet, that doesn't make it legal for a cop to arrest you for being uncivil.

There's a big big difference between what's polite and what's legal.

My point is, every decent, moral, law-abiding citizen is unconcerned about the need for any article such as this.

Every decent, moral, law-abiding citizen should be outraged that the people responsible for safeguarding us and upholding the law are violating it on a regular basis.

This, right here, is exactly the point.

Your positio fails from the same fallacy as "if you do no wrong you have nothing to hide" arguments against privacy rights.

You can believe what you want and believe it is a moral stance, but as a response to the article posted your statement counts as an endorsement of the violent conduct exercised in response to those who do not share your perspective. That fact poses a damning implication on the morality of your beliefs.

Unless you would like to clarify that you respect the rights of those who disagree with you?

Telling people to be civil and respectful to each other is an endorsement of violent conduct? I think I stumbled on the wrong type of forum.

On this forum, we expect people to read TFA. Reading TFA and then making these generic, just-world sorts of comments, you evince inhumanely little regard for the life of Sandra Bland.

You act like she's a martyr. I don't care if I'm just standing in my front yard, if the police decide to arrest me, I'm not going to fight and kick them. The police are just the errand boys of the law. Fighting and screaming like a caged animal is stupid, and in itself makes you a criminal.

'See what she got when she was in jail? They obviously killed her and staged a massive government cover up. You have to fight them to the death if you disagree with their judgement in any way. We just have to train the police to let people go if they disagree strongly enough.' Right?

I wrote two sentences. In one of them, I referred to the life that Sandra Bland once had. If that's all it takes for martyrdom, we're all going to be martyrs. Your political judgement would be more sound if you were less emotional, or perhaps if you improved your reading comprehension.

Good for you.

Should disrespectful people be intimidated, arrested, injured or killed because they're not respectful, obedient citizens like you?

There are thousands and thousands of police interactions with the public every day and rarely does such a thing happen. Perhaps your total knowledge of this is based on what you read on HN or news blurbs on your local TV news.

> Perhaps your total knowledge of this is based on what you read on HN or news blurbs on your local TV news.

Is this the level of civility and respectfulness you use in your interactions with angry police officers? If so I would suggest it is probably not sufficient to keep you out of trouble.

We're glad you're here to set us all straight. How did you achieve total knowledge?

I think and read.

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