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by vkou 3543 days ago
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.

1 comments

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.

You're reading what you want to read, not what I wrote about Oregon.

The thing about Ferguson is that the protest was based on over a century of racist policing across America, and particularly in Ferguson (And I'm not just speaking of police killings - consider the DOJ report on Ferguson.) Michael Brown, and the treatment of his body was the last straw, not the first one.

I suggest you educate yourself on the question of race relations. Between the World And Me [1] is a good start, if you want to understand why so many encounters between African Americans and police end as poorly as they do.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=between+the+world+and+me+pdf...

And you're responding to a point that I didn't make, given the whole point of the last two posts was to coax you into describing at exactly what point a random group of people is allowed to shut down major infrastructure without detractors being finger-wagged at.

The fact that you can differentiate Oregon from Ferguson tells me that you have a mental model, I just want you to elaborate on it. Kind of like I asked you, point blank, three posts ago.