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Comment by iconjack | Hacker News Reader

Black Lives Matter is still allowed on Twitter. Dozens of people have died from their protests and riots, not to mention hundreds of businesses vandalized, looted, and set afire. Ditto Antifa. This ban is utterly political, which, depending on how "libertarian" you are, may be fine. But the precedent is not a good one in my opinion.

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Considering the sheer number of protests and protesters involved, BLM protests were mostly peaceful.

https://today.uconn.edu/2020/10/study-2020-protests-shows-di...

"While the summer of 2020 experienced 100 days of violence and destruction in cities, according to the the U.S Department of Homeland Security, the most recent CCC study of 7,305 separate events in May and June suggests that 96.3% of events involved no property damage or police injuries and 97.7% of events had no injuries reported. Pressman spoke with UConn Today about the new report."

In contrast, the attack on the capital building was a deliberately violent attack on the seat of our national government. Rioters brought zip ties to potentially hold lawmakers hostage, blunt force weapons, and firearms. It was inherently a violent undertaking with revolutionary aims.

It usually only takes one to change public perception. And DC was a sample of one. OTOH, BLM has media covering for them(1) to make the group look peaceful.

1. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cnn+fiery+but+mostly+peaceful&iax=...

And that was a small fraction of the people who were there to protest, so they were mostly peaceful as well.

Certainly most of the large BLM protests ended in destruction and violence, at least in my state of Minnesota. There’s a reason the national guard had to be deployed. People find strength in numbers.

I like how you respond to a thoughtful post with statistical data with your own conjecture.

That statistical data is pretty bunk. What constitutes an 'event?' It seems that they cast a pretty broad net if they came up with thousands of them. There was a protest in my town with all of 30 people in attendance - does that count? For several nights in a row I tuned in to the news in my state to watch straight up riots in Minneapolis.

It's clear from the pictures of what happened in the capitol that it was done by a tiny fraction of people from the protests, so you don't need any statistical analysis for that.

People brought firearms to BLM events, too. Whether they brought them before or after riots broke out is unknowable. I support BLM and not rioters, fwiw.

What makes this unique is that there are records online of people planning violence in advance.

> Considering the sheer number of protests and protesters involved, BLM protests were mostly peaceful.

This is a pretty terrible standard, since MAGA rallies are mostly peaceful as well. The issue is what do we do with the ones that aren't, not how many of them are.

I think the comparison was BLM protests to this “protest”, not all MAGA rally’s.

which is sort of silly. the source cited higher up is counting how many separate BLM events involved police injuries and/or property damage. how does it make sense to compare that figure to a single event? with a sample of one, it can only be 100% or 0% by that methodology.

But this wasn't a rally. This was literally them storming the halls of Congress to take back their country from what they believe are corrupt communist deep state agents. Why do they believe that? Because their leader Trump has been amplifying this type of conspiratorial misinformation on Twitter for the past 4 years

The “the percent of protests that are peaceful” largely depends on what you decide to include in that category.

Suppose the peaceful portion of BLM protests didn’t happen, would the violent riots go from being justified to unjust? Why would the presence of the peaceful protests change our moral assessment of the violent ones? Same with the MAGA demonstrations. It should not matter that there were numerous other peaceful MAGA rallies when assessing the storming on the capital.

If you murder every 100th day, are you 99% peaceful?

99% of days you are.

100% agree, these social media companies with their fake empathy and double standards are not fooling anyone.

Who has died? Can you name names?

19+ people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_and_controversies_dur...

I think that list is only Minneapolis. There are more.

How about David Dorn, retired St Louis Police Captain.

The suspects have been caught and charged. Dorn was not a Trump supporter and wasn't killed for political reasons. Debra White told the paper that her father opposed much of Drumpf's rhetoric and policies, including "the things he said about Colin Kaepernick, the kids locked up in cages, the racist remarks." Dorn's daughters stated their father did not want to support the "law and order agenda".

Jessica Doty-Whitaker shot for saying all lives matter.

This is a very strange case. But nevertheless it can't be said if she was killed for that. And the incident was not part of any kind of protest or riot.

"Ramirez said in the Fox59 interview the two groups separated because they realized people in each group were armed. He said both groups then fist-bumped and went their separate ways. But someone opened fire from a nearby bridge and struck Doty-Whitaker, Ramirez said. He said the shooters then ran away. Ramirez said he fired back but did not hit anyone. When contacted by IndyStar, members of Doty-Whitaker's family declined interview requests."

Police later released the video. She was shot just moments after yelling out “All lives matter”.

https://www.wthr.com/article/news/crime/police-release-video...

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