It’s hard not to see the bending-over-backwards academic justifications for why we shouldn’t be suppressing riots last year as anything other than the pretext and lead up to what’s happening now.
I’m not calling legitimate protesting riots - rather the media was fully complicit with ignoring blatant rioting last year. Buildings were burning and government buildings were being swarmed and destroyed.
Riots needs to be suppressed with law and order - full stop. Unfortunately many seem 6 months late to this concept.
By that logic, BLM led to the destruction of cities and neighborhoods across the country for months on end.
This isn't whataboutism, it's a call to suppress riots and call the activists and their sympathizers from last year to account for their bias.
BLM is a response to (repeated) racist murders from the state and general systemic discriminations. Yesterday's riots were a response to losing a democratic election.
It's hard not to see why one is legitimate and the other isn't.
Do you think rioting occurred last year?
What I'm saying is that insofar as government is concerned and law and order - rioting is never justified and must be met with police force.
Actually, some governments are so oppressive that sometimes rioting is all the citizens have left. Isn't it what the second amendment is for anyway?
I'd even support yesterday's "revolution" if it was justified and the election was actually stolen. But falsely calling an election stolen is dangerous. It's the equivalent of a false rape accusation at a country scale.
And oppressive governments do meet riots with police force. Sometimes they straight up kill the people, yet they keep on rioting because it's the only way they can defend their rights.
People powerless while they watch everything they worked for literally go up in flames at the hands of criminals. There's no justification for that, and it's a far cry from "justice."
Disrupting law and order - by definition - turns you into a criminal.
I'm not defending any side of the political spectrum, so it's interesting to see how people interpret this argument.
Manifesting for social change never justifies the type of chaos we saw last year, and if you think otherwise, don't complain about what happened to Congress.
That's only accurate if both the law and the ones who enforce it are reasonable and fair.
People feeling powerless is what fuels riots to begin with. I don't condone the looting and destruction, especially when it hits bystanders. But it didn't start that way. The movement against racism did go through peaceful actions to make itself heard. Their demands were pushed back and the discriminations continued so they had to escalate.
They were cornered into that position.
The protesters who invaded the Capitol were not discriminated against. They just lost an election. No one would've died if they protested peacefully.
You can't equate these protests, just like you can't equate self-defense and murder. The context is important.
What would you do if you were oppressed by your government? Some governments even make protesting illegal and rig the elections (if they're even having elections at all).
Desperate times call for desperate measures, unfortunately.
You’ve admitted to justifying and even supporting riots on the “left.” And that sets the stage for rioting on the “right.”
Political violence begets political violence and you’re (knowingly or not) supporting the dissolution of civil society.
> Let’s consider that your perception is fallible and possibly wrong. And hypothetically assume your concept of “the oppressed” is off to some degree.
Obviously I'm not always right. But neither is the rest of the world. Neither is the government. But then what? Should we just let everyone be?
It's a moral dilemma for sure, and I don't think there's a foolproof way around it. Similarly, you want to allow people to kill in case of self-defense but don't want to allow murder. Or censoring Nazi speech while keeping as much freedom of expression as possible.
You can't say all killings are bad (or good), and you can't say all speech is good (or bad). There's a moral judgement to be made there.
I'm not saying rioting is without risks or consequences. I'm just saying they tend to happen when people run out of alternatives. Then they're justified, and only if the cause is good.
We are all still tribal, barely evolved monkeys, and our manifold cerebral cortex is merely a tool to invent rationalizations for the tribal emotions that well up from our limbic system.
This is, of course, on both sides.
On HN, the effect is even more pronounced, because "I am smart, therefore my opinions are more valid than average" coincides with "I have concocted this justification for my hypocrisy" to grant even greater surety in personal belief.
The LessWrong folks worked pretty hard to inform people of these sort of biases, but the effort thus far has completely failed.
This was a coup attempt.
Ignoring? They practically endorsed it as a totally reasonable means of change! The fact that the Trump supporters didn't Riot and very few of them entered the Capitol goes to show the vast majority of those Republicans do believe in law in order!
If the situation was reversed, had Trump won and Biden was challenging the election, you can be assured DC would be completely on fire like it was back in May. The Capital Building would be burning right now.
You could only imagine the pearl-clutching if someone made the same image with Biden.
edit: looks like at least one person was inside the capitol with a firearm and four others were arrested in DC for open carrying firearms.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/07/ashli-babbit...
The molotovs is a tidbit I didn't know about thankfully no one actually used them.
If you knew this then why did you ask about whether it was an "armed mob" in the first place?
They did not. There was video of protestors both moving the ropes, and there is video of protestors on the opposite sides of the ropes. Both at least in NBC's coverage. (Unfortunately, they've made their coverage private on YouTube, so I lack a link presently.)
(Sibling comments cover the "armed" aspect well enough.)
https://www.uscp.gov/visiting-capitol-hill/regulations-prohi...
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