De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer

They have a fiduciary responsibility to protect the union (the members and the dues). They are not accountable to or elected by the public (in their role as union leader).

That said, they don't have to be cartoonish villains, but frequently are because their role is to pull heartstrings for police officers, not for the civilian/victim in the narrative.

Did you look at either of the videos? Do you believe your anecdotal experience, or your eyes? What kind of evidence do you need at this point, to convince you that yes, the police do, in fact, gas people unprovoked?

Would you like another one from Seattle?

https://old.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/gu3qq1/cop_just_ca...

Did that sheriff look like was being attacked? Like anyone was throwing rocks or bottles at him? Like anyone was setting police cars on fire?

That needs a citation, seriously, even if English is your second language you must know that is a bold claim. Who's paying this $25 per person, how do the logistics of organising a group like that happen? I mean trump pays actors to turn up to his rallies, but they aren't going to get arrested or killed.

Occam's razor though says that they really are just fed up of people of colour being harassed and killed by the police that's why they are protesting, that's why there are so many of them. sure it's co-opted by a some people, or small groups, for financial gain, but these aren't huge global cabals, they are criminals who see an opportunity to exploit.

There was a video circulating of a streamer who tried to instigate trouble at a peaceful protest and he was called out on it by lots of those around him.

If you have ever been in one of these protests you would know that the spark is almost always a police charge or other offensive action like tear gas.

Also remember a riot is not looting, a riot is just defcon 5 on the protest scale, and some people will use that as an opportunity to loot, same people who would loot after a flood or a hurricane or an earthquake. That's doesn't mean the riot is wrong.

Technological and political topics overlap (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). That's why politics has never been excluded from HN (other than an experiment we once briefly tried and quickly rolled back). Maybe your formulation of that overlap is the right one, maybe others are better, but they all point to the same fundamental, which we agree on. HN has always, or nearly always, hosted a certain amount of political discussion (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 for some history).

The distinction that guideline attempts to draw is not "political vs. apolitical", but rather between two different forms of discussion: discussion whose purpose is communication and discussion whose purpose is battle. These are remarkably different in practice: one seeks to hear and learn from the other, one seeks to defeat and destroy the other. People are generally in very different states when they're doing those two things. It's not primarily a distinction of views; whatever your views are, you can either do battle or do communication about them, depending on what state you're in and what your intention is.

This distinction is existential for a site like HN, where the intention is to survive as a place for curious conversation and somehow escape the default fate of internet forums, which is to destroy themselves—or at least stave it off for as long as we can (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html, https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...).

By now, we have a lot of experience with moderating the site according to this distinction, and if there's a better way to do it, I'd love to know what it is. If you want to take a look at past explanations, https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... and https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... are good entrypoints. If after reading that material, you or anyone still have a question that hasn't been answered yet, I'd like to know what it is. And if you know a better way for HN moderation to relate to political topics, I'd really like to know what it is. Just make sure you've familiarized yourself with the material first, because if it's something simple like "just ban politics" or "just allow everything", I've answered many times already why it won't work.