zlacker

I have been meta-worried about the optics of protests because as a student of history i see echoes of 1964 and 1968, and i am horrified at the idea of a “law and order” second term.

USA Today publishing something like this does a bit to assuage my fears! For the non-American HN audience, USA Today is the anodyne newspaper you get for free at a business hotel chain with your crappy refrigerated muffin or yogurt and instant coffee. It’s about as intentionally bland and inoffensive to everyone newspaper as still exists.

If the message there is this, we might pull it off and meaningfully address something instead of wanking about protestors like we usually do.

>>hprota+(OP)
I'll raise you one level of meta, and note how surprised I am that the discourse right here on HN, which is normally populated heavily with a... let's say reactionary conservative worldview... has swung hard to the "left" on this issue and others in recent weeks.

Indeed the perception of "mainstream" seems to have shifted away from the messaging the administration wants to present in lots of forums like this.

>>newacc+q5
HN is more libertarian than conservative. The libertarianism often aligns HN with conservatives, but HN and conservatives diverge wildly when it comes to government overreach, whether that be police brutality, cryptography regulation, or the war on drugs.

Note how even within the police brutality issue, HN is focusing on organisational incentives for police recruiting and conduct instead of the more mainstream race angle. HN believes in well-designed systems of incentives. The (ideal of the) free market with appropriate minimal regulations is the dream, which usually sides HN with small-c conservatives on economic issues and even makes HN look reactionary from time to time.

Of course, as you say, the administration is anathema to any group of intellectuals. And I'm sure previous administrations would have spun their cases to be more appealing to HN and similar forums. But I don't think the basic position of HN on police brutality is particularly new or surprising.

Disclaimer: Obviously HN is many people who have many opinions which I wrote as a single entity for convenience.

>>newacc+q5
I, myself, have been wondering where the "free speech" crowd is this week. A common theme I see here is outrage about censorship by private companies. In the last 4 years, we've seen Trump railing against the press, encouraging people to assault members of the press, etc. In the last 4 days, we've seen members of the press getting maimed, falsely arrested, and assaulted by the police. This is overt suppression of the press by the government, plain and simple violations of our constitution (and quite relevant to this story). This kind of treatment of the press is something that's been used as a partial justification to invade other countries in my lifetime -- that it's happening in the US with hardly any commentary by the "free speech" advocates is a great disappointment to me.

But the "reactionary" crowd is still here -- looking at their patterns of posting on [1], it looks almost tailored to get the story flagged (accounts got banned, but that page only lasted on the front page for a few good minutes). The truth of the matter is that folks are uncomfortable discussing race, because our community has internalized a lot racism. Discussing our society's painfully visible race inequity is "flamebait" because racists gonna show up and drag the conversation down.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23355964