Hacker News Reader

Comment by Traster | Hacker News Reader

Further escalation beyond storming the capitol? Becuase that's what tolerance has resulted in.

Tolerance? Remember when the left taught America it's okay to use violence if it is for the greater good?

> The elite media class of academics, influencers, celebrities, and journalists who make up the #resistence, spent all summer saying "riots are the language of the unheard," as a way of excusing and justifying violence, vandalism, and riots in the streets

This thread will help you remember: https://twitter.com/wokal_distance/status/134693785297048371...

This is extraordinarily tame in the scheme of American history.

And as someone who lives in one of those areas of the country constantly scorned, belittled, and caricatured, I can say with confidence that you do not want those people to act in kind to Antifa.

There's been a lot of living vicariously through Antifa/BLM lately with portions of society that want to "stand for something." It's the same mentality as people who wear Che Guevara t-shirts but complain when the wifi on their plane isn't available.

On the other side of that is a enormous, peaceful, patriotic section of U.S. society that is heavily armed and competent with those armaments.

If you make this segment of society feel as if they are the enemy of the country they love, it will be a disaster. If there is ever armed conflict between urban areas vs everyone else, "everyone else" in the U.S. will win overwhelmingly.

There is nothing at all patriotic about what these people did. There is nothing peaceful about what happened this week.

These people demand Constitutional rights while trampling all over that very document.

They are not “patriots,” they are traitors.

I'm not saying these people who stormed the Capitol did the right thing. Far from it.

What we're seeing is this being used as a blunt instrument to suppress the non-extremist components of that disagreement.

That "non-extremist" component is patriotic. It is extremely large and also very angry. Treating them as if they are the same as the people who did this is ill-advised.

> “If there is ever armed conflict between urban areas vs everyone else, "everyone else" in the U.S. will win overwhelmingly.”

I remember back in third grade when kids would argue about how their dad would beat the others’. As I grew up, I realized that that’s not how conflicts work, and certainly not how they’re won.

> I realized that that’s not how conflicts work, and certainly not how they’re won.

Please tell that to the Afghanis.

This isn't about some civil war, it's about what would happen if Red State America decided it wanted to behave like Blue City America has been for the last year. People talk about "Proud Boys" as if that's equivalent and I just have to roll my eyes.

There is an immense reservoir of anger within America in people who feel overlooked and the system is stacked against them. If they receive the downsides of civil strife even though they haven't participated in violence, they might decide they want the upsides of civil strife as well. This culture, unlike the sadly tolerated insurrections of Antifa, has the ability to have real power through violence if it ever came to it.

Despite the often exaggerated claims of singular victimhood, I actually do realize that the current right-wing rage does come from real suffering, and sympathize to an extent. What makes me wonder is that extent to which this rage is directed at the new wave of black civil rights movement; they both have roots in economic or cultural marginalization of certain populations, and from what I can tell, they’re not competing for some common resource. Which, in my mind (and many others similarly puzzled), leaves racist hate as a likely candidate.

Point being, if your goal was genuinely to bring awareness to and address some real suffering in your community, you’d just do that; get out on the street, break a few windows, punch a cop, petition for legislation, like BLM does. That’s called civil disobedience. “Insurrection” starts when you try to override and overrule the very fabric of the system, like the federal legislature.

Man, are you bad at math. The urban areas account for over half of the population.

And of the 400 million firearms in the United States, what portion of them belong to Blue Cities?

There are a lot of higher steps, just look at US history. For example, the mob could murder someone. In the bad old days of civil rights resistance, the mob would regularly engage in homicide against targets they thought were upsetting their power.

They DID murder someone. US Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick.

He died of a stroke. That's not exactly murder.

On the other hand, Capitol police killed 4 unarmed citizens. If this were a BLM rally, and those people were black, we would never hear the end of it. We'd have to "say their name," irrespective of the circumstances of their death.

The woman who was killed on video is effectively nameless. She won't receive any encomiums or major press coverage.

I'm not even American and followed the events with idle curiosity, and I already know her name is Babbitt. NPR, The Guardian, NYTimes, etc all have headlines with it.

"""Officer Sicknick was responding to the riots on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol and was injured while physically engaging with protesters. He returned to his division office and collapsed. He was taken to a local hospital where he succumbed to his injuries. The death of Officer Sicknick will be investigated by the Metropolitan Police Department’s Homicide Branch, the USCP, and our federal partners."""

- https://www.uscp.gov/media-center/press-releases/loss-uscp-c...

Although his death was tragic, it was not an example of the targeted political murders that have occurred in America's past. To put this in context, take a look at some of the other riots that Wikipedians have co-categorized with the 2021 Capitol riot. We should not think of things like the Lincoln assassination as if they are mere founding myths - they happened, were perpetrated by humans with the same nature, and we are all descendants of the people alive at the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:White_American_riots_...

You call the past few years "tolerance"? Just about any and every application that attempts to support a fully free-speech network that isn't literally a web browser has been kicked off every app store out there.

Exactly. Remember when this was OK? https://twitter.com/MSNBC/status/1047935416182235136?s=19

Aside from the fact that this demonstration was limited to the semi-public atrium of the Hart Senate Office Building—historically, a location where many such demonstrations have been held, and all peacefully, to my knowledge—I'm willing to bet you that none of those demonstrators are armed. Nor did they arrive with zip ties to take hostages—didn't you see the footage of those armed thugs sweeping the Senate chamber looking for potential hostages? Nor did they rampage through the building, with the intent of targeting specific politicians for violence.

They didn't damage property, either. Nor did they impede the democratic process which we all put so much stock in. There's just absolutely no equivalence between these two events. I don't know if that was your intent or not, but there's absolutely no comparison.

I just want to make sure I'm understanding you correctly. Are you saying that:

- What the pro-Trump crowd did on 2021-01-06 at the capitol building is essentially the same as what the anti-Kavanaugh crowd did on 2018-10-04 at the Hart Senate Office Building.

- And so, the actions themselves have not escalated; what has escalated is our sensitivity to them in that we no longer deem them as "OK".

? Or am I totally misreading you? Because if I understood you correctly, um, see what 'benmaraschino wrote.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com