[Karunamon]

We're going to disagree on that because the alternative is a breakdown in the rule of law. If you're going to block a major thoroughfare, you should expect police response (it's illegal for a good reason), and that response to escalate if you don't cooperate.

You don't get an exception to law to harass hundreds, possibly thousands of innocent people just because you feel put upon.

[vkou]

The United States was founded on the principle that yes, you can harass hundreds, possibly thousands of innocent people just because you feel put upon. I think that even has been called the American revolution (With a little helping of the Civil War.)

Not to mention that almost every form of social progress came at the cost of inconveniencing all those poor, poor people who want nothing to do with the struggle for civil rights, universal suffrage, etc...

When you put convenience and order over basic human and constitutional rights, yes, you bloody well should be inconvenienced. The status quo 'inconveniences' these people every day - far worse then a blocked freeway. Perhaps you should channel your inconvenience at the oppressor, rather then the victim.

[Karunamon]

So at what point does a cause become "serious" enough that you have special dispensation to ignore laws in its pursuit, and who decides that?

What if I disagree? What if you disagree? What if a whole lot of people disagree? You're not going to like the result, because you've already excluded the rule of law from this equation.

[vkou]

> So at what point does a cause become "serious" enough that you have special dispensation to ignore laws in its pursuit, and who decides that?

Historians do.

The rule of law made slavery legal. The rule of law made apartheid legal. The rule of law made sending black people to the back of the bus legal. The rule of law made killing millions of Jews legal. The rule of law sent 15 million people to the Gulags. The rule of law made the Divine Right of Kings part of the equation. The rule of law made human sacrifice in Central America part of society.

The rule of law is ephemeral, and has nothing whatsoever to do with justice. The rule of law is so often a fig leaf for barbarism.

160 years ago, an abolitionist stealing a slave away from a slaveowner was violating the rule of law. They were also damaging the property, finances, and livelyhood of an innocent person - all because their pet cause wasn't getting as much attention as they liked.

Read A Letter from a Birmingham Jail. [1] Martin Luther King puts this across far better than I can. (And he is only half of the story - the work of Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, and the NAACP, which could not be described as non-violent protest was a vital catalyst for civil rights.)

> You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city's white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.

[1] https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham....

[Karunamon]

Excellent job at evading the fairly direct question that was asked of you, and lumping it in with a bunch of irrelevant comparisons to slavery.

So, let's try this again.

What are your thoughts on those gentlemen in Oregon who took over an empty building on federal land?

What about the 2011 riots in Vancouver when their hockey team lost?

What about the Trump rally in California this year?

What about Ferguson a couple years back?

Your absolutist position would place all of these events under equal justification.

[vkou]

They were morons, but they were protesters. It's really unfortunate that one of them was killed. Their cause doesn't have all that much public support, though. I also doubt that they've exhausted other options - generally, you don't escalate from 'petitioning the government' to 'martyrdom through a suicide pact'. They missed the 'block some freeways, chain themselves to city hall, march on Washington' steps. They were living a libertarian fantasy, not aiming for real change.

Hockey riots aren't drunken looting - they aren't politically motivated, and they aren't for a political cause.

Not familiar with the Trump rally.

Ferguson is a pretty classic civil rights protest. A cause with large public support, but one that the government does not care to address - and judiciously uses violence to suppress.

[Karunamon]

So, apparently not all causes are equally legitimate. Is "public support" the rubric here? How much public support?

The thing about Ferguson is that the "protest" was based on completely false pretenses. The guy the protestors chose to build their narrative on robbed a store, assaulted the clerk, then assaulted the cop who was there to investigate the robbery. The actual evidence was on the side of the state in that particular case, which is probably why the cop who shot him was never charged.

[weberc2]

The U.S. was founded on the principle that people have the right to a voice in government, and if that voice is denied people can rise up and overthrow the government. This isn't to say that the expression of this right was entirely just, moral, or ethical. In other words, the ends don't necessarily justify the means.

> When you put convenience and order over basic human and constitutional rights, yes, you bloody well should be inconvenienced. The status quo 'inconveniences' these people every day - far worse then a blocked freeway. Perhaps you should channel your inconvenience at the oppressor, rather then the victim.

You're begging the question. There's no direct evidence for systemic racial bias in policing, there are only disparities, some of which haven't been accounted for because the U.S. does a shitty job of collecting this data (and sometimes left-leaning politicians even censor certain data that don't support their narrative, like offender race statistics in the NCVS or various city-specific data sets). Insufficient data isn't proof or even strong evidence of anything. That said, there are actual victims--those who have had their property stolen or destroyed or who have been harassed, assaulted, murdered by BLM activists.

[weberc2]

1. This is a false dichotomy. Protesters can protest without shutting down infrastructure.

2. There is no conclusive evidence that anyone's "basic human and constitutional rights" are infringed upon.

[venomsnake]

Protests that do not inconvenience anyone could be ignored indefinitely.

[weberc2]

Correct, protesters have a right to free speech, and everyone else has the right to ignore that speech. No one has a right to threaten critical infrastructure because they failed to make sufficiently compelling arguments.

[mason240]

I can only assume that supported the right-wing protesters who took up occupying that piece of Federal land in Oregon.