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Comment by nullc | Hacker News Reader

Dudes in buffalo costumes are pretty harmless.

And the senate floor isn't a particularly important piece of ground to hold (when the Senators are not there at least).

Expending lots of resources and good will smashing what was essentially theatre-- wouldn't have been a good move.

If only we treated more protests like that: Stood back and people show their anger, then move on with our lives -- message heard-- with minimal injury and damage.

[I'm aware that a protester was shot and killed inside the capitol building -- but relative the scope of the event, I think it's still fair to characterize it as that way]

FWIW, the Capitol building is normally substantially open to the public.

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I respectfully disagree that the siege of a national symbol, at the heart of a nation, is a harmless act. This was a substantial threat to democracy as we know it. That a Senate in session is forced to seek refuge due to safety concerns is nothing but dangerous and harmful to the very fabric of societ. If just a few of those 'protestors' had had slightly more nefarious intent the outcome could have been very different.

> This was a substantial threat to democracy as we know it.

The US democracy is not threatened by violence against any single building or even most sets of people.

Had they burned the building to the ground and somehow caused the deaths of everyone inside, the US democracy would continue. They did not achieve anything remotely close to that.

There is no basis for calling some angry rioters smashing windows and smoking pot "a substantial threat to democracy". None.

Exactly.

Protests that turn destructive are bad, no doubt about it. But the hyperbole is painful.

The protests/riots aren't that bad IMO, this kind of stuff happens. What is bad is the root cause - an elected official fighting tooth and nail to retain power after being voted out, and finding real support among a large fraction of the population.

A sieged Senate just doesn't fall into 'stuff happens'. The last it happened was by the hands and torches of British troops during wartime.

See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_L%C3%B3pez_Rivera (off the top of my head, there are probably others).

If you extend to the states, it's not that exceptional:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/black-panthers-california-196...

What the Panthers did in California is not comparable at all. I encourage you to listen to the account of the day in their own words.

They came armed (nominal, as they went armed everywhere) to a peaceful prearranged meeting at the statehouse. The media turned it into a crazy narrative because black men carrying long arms were photographed inside the statehouse.

There are other countries on the planet. Rioters breaking into parliaments is not exactly common, but it's not particularly shocking either

Anything that grinds ongoing Senate election proceedings to a halt by force is a threat to democracy. Regardless of the insurgents political agenda. There are no ifs or buts here. There can still be violence even if nobody gets hurt. Yesterday the violence of a few (temporarily) silenced the voices of all voting Americans.

You wouldn't be saying this if it was BLM protestors doing the exact same thing.

A lot of issues are partisan. What happened yesterday is not. Yesterday both Republicans and Democrats came out and denounced the insurrection in the stronges of terms.

I can't help but find myself on your side on this one. After years of horrific abuse of protesters by police, and denouncement of such, I get to sit here and watch those same people turn around and denounce non-escalation just because of who the protesters are this time. Like most protests, I feel sure that the majority of the violence was committed by a relative few extremists and a lot of people were content to express their anger with perfectly legitimate shouting and standing around. Had this event been escalated it is likely a lot of those people would be dead or injured, making this whole thing a lot worse.

Sadly, I am becoming quite used to being disappointed in my countrymen.

that's what makes it hard to fix stuff.

Group A gets treated unfairly w.r.t how group B is treated.

Clearly the welcome outcome is that group A becomes treated justly, at least as justly as group B.

Yet, some members of group A wouldn't mind that at, if that option were not on the table, group B were treated at least as badly as group A. It's stupid, it's counterproductive, but hey, humans...

When group A sees another instance of group B being treated (again) better than how group A would have been treated in those circumstances, I think it's not surprising how people can get a tad angry and when you're angry, your thoughts wonder a little bit more on the dark side, right?

When some people from abroad kill people in your soil, it's quite understandable that people get angry and talk about bringing pain to people in the countries where these attackers come from. It's that "right"? Will that create a better world? Clearly if you just found a way for that never happening again, that would be enough right? The sense of "punishment" is so deeply ingrained in our nature; it's not a prerogative of part of the political spectrum.

This whole thing was pretty harmless. The media and people who don't like the president calling it "insurrection" and other such breathless terms are giving it way more credit and import than it deserves.

As far as revolutions go, this one was... understaffed.

https://mobile.twitter.com/jamiefox1/status/1346972712670011...

I guess one person dead qualifies as "harmless" in america, huh?

That one person was (at least based on what we know currently) shot dead by police. All of the HN comments about how dangerous this is and how the police needed to be more aggressive are effectively calling for more people to have died - because that's the inevitable consequence of what they want. (I've seen people in communities less polite and aggressively moderated than HN, but pulling from more or less the same tech community, outright calling for the police to open fire.)

Normal police are trained in crowd control, and they plenty of non lethal ways to achieve that. Calling for police to be more aggressive is not the same as calling for more people to be killed.

> Stood back and people show their anger, then move on with our lives -- message heard-- with minimal injury and damage.

Disagree on that point. Allowing riots creates a lot of anger on the other side of the political isle. Also, the rioters are often not representative of the majority of protestors and undermine the entire movement (think about the BLM rioters' impact on how the overall movement was perceived). They also often lead to a violation of rights; property destruction, assaults, deaths, etc. Almost nobody - on any side - wants a small number of thugs to run the show.

Agreed, the first half of MLK’s famous “a riot is a language of the unheard” quote states that the conditions existing in America which foment riots “must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots.”

Our collective goal should always be to resolve the conditions that lead to rioting. But when a riot occurs it should be stopped and dispersed as safely and expediently as possible.

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