Florida governor to investigate GoFundMe over Canada trucker donations

> The requirements changing for a job they may have had for decades is also a legitimate reason to be upset.

People are fired all the time because their job requirements changed, or they were made redundant. Where have the mass protests been for that?

> Let's not pretend there aren't legitimate concerns here.

Some concerns are legitimate, other's are not. But occupying the nation's capitol, and assaulting people who wear masks are not a legitimate avenue to express those concerns.

Like, I live in Finland. Here is an illustrative episode from what I remember from school. In Finnish case, the first world war manifested as a brutal civil war where about 1 % population died. The interwar period was characterized by political instability and sectarian violence, where it was near always people aligned with the "White" anticommunist side (victors of the civil war) doing the violence. People who publicly professed communist or socialist ideas often got roughhoused and in some incidents were killed; many times, their printing presses were burned by right-wing activists. The government turned a blind eye to these actions, but it wasn't something government orchestrated -- the actual activities were genuine "grassroots" effort from a part of populace that found any idea of communist action as totally opposed their mental image of Finnish nation, and certain democratic norms were not running very deep. (During some specific moments, the politicians were often afraid of facing a popular right-wing coup.) And granted, some of the communist action during that time was supported by the Soviet Russia and was publicly agitating for an international revolution.

However, what I am trying to say is this: Sure, a galactic alien with all the tact and deep understanding of human behavior that Lt. Commander Data possess could describe the events as "phenomena where communists faced consequences for their freely exercised speech actions because they found out their speech was wildly unpopular with some other people, without government doing censorship", but any sensible human being would recognize that there was political violence with express purpose of limiting the political speech of the left side. If you think these people had right to express their political message, it was repressed, with violence.

Now, I write about this episode of Northeast European history exactly because it is a distant analogue about any current situation anywhere in the world. But one can not pretend that if you inflict any kind of cost to other people either because they did something or because you want to change their behavior, the costs you inflict are some impersonal "consequences" which somehow makes it so that any other context of situation does not apply -- for example, your purpose for inflicting the consequences.

People who live in Ottawa disagree.

> To help you along, I also wouldn't be surprised for a charity to redirect 100% of its income to its executives. But that wouldn't mean I would say it was fine for them to do that, even though the reason I gave the money was for clean wells in Africa. That's what you're defending.

This is a textbook strawman. We're talking about a specific situation here, so stop trying to invoke entirely different situations to defend it.

The fact is that this has turned into an occupation. It's not reasonable to expect GFM to fund that.