It's almost like there was some sort of catalyst event that occurred very recently that would provoke such a response. /s
I think protest is a fundamental requirement of democracy, and as Chris Cuomo himself reminded us: protest aren't always peaceful [1]. It seems like a lot of Democrats are conveniently forgetting that all of a sudden.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/202...
https://apnews.com/article/capitol-police-reject-federal-hel...
Your recent posts have been using HN primarily for political battle. Please don't do that—it's against the rules (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and it's the line across which we start banning accounts (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...), regardless of which politics they're battling for. The reason is that it basically destroys what HN is supposed to exist for, which is curious conversation on a wide range of topics.
Also worth noting that there was no property damage or injuries in more than 97 to 98% of protests[1]
[1]: https://today.uconn.edu/2020/10/study-2020-protests-shows-di...
Well, in the middle of Seattle. It's not clear whether chaz intended to secede from the US or merely Seattle policing; their demands were certainly very local so I suspect they really had no intention of leaving the US itself.
https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/protests/seattle-pr...
This isn't a fair representation of what happened and it reveals your bias. For one example, it appears a police officer was murdered with a fire extinguisher. We don't even have to get to what might have happened if the politicians weren't able to get out in time.
I also think the guy who shot that unarmed woman has no business wearing a uniform and carrying a weapon.
And if it wasn't 100 people spilling over a barrier (actually, the police pulled the barriers away and literally waved them in - explain that one to me) and entering a government building and disrupting an important session... then what was it?
I don't know what you are basing this on. He was apparently the last line of defense between the mob and some of the politicians the mob was trying to attack. Who knows what would have happened if they got through that door and he didn't act. There could have easily been a serious hostage situation.
>And if it wasn't 100 people spilling over a barrier (actually, the police pulled the barriers away and literally waved them in - explain that one to me) and entering a government building and disrupting an important session... then what was it?
Cops aren't apolitical. I guarantee there were plenty of people involved in security that sided with the insurrectionists. And that is exactly what it was, insurrection. They were trying to and were temporarily able to disrupt the function of the government recognizing the rightful next president.
Did this crowd of "insurrectionists" actually threaten anyone? There are reports someone set a couple of pipe bombs, but not in the building, and the FBI is investigating it and has offered a $50K reward, but inside the building, it was kooks and protesters who were pretty quickly rounded up and arrested. I don't condone what they did at all, but comparing it to burning down buildings like in Portland and Atlanta... the mind boggles at this moral equivalency. True mob violence did not occur on January 6, and thank God for that.
Wednesday's insurrectionists were trying to stop the recognition of the next president and take control by force. You can look through this Twitter thread for examples[1]. People entered the House Chamber armed with some sort of weapon and carrying flex cuffs. These aren't "people spilling over a barrier". They are insurrectionists that attempted to literally take our government hostage. The intent here was drastically more serious than any of the BLM protests.
[1] - https://twitter.com/jsrailton/status/1347011413101998080
Sure, that's the same as people angry when theyre throwing stones at cops after killing them in sleep. I don't support BLM violence, just that your view is showing some bias towards a particular narrative - I think you should see the storming of the US Capitol as massively symbolic thing that has shaken the world.
There have been multiple riots over multiple police-involved killings in multiple locations in the last decade.
So yes, what they did was far worse. They claimed to be defending the constitution while in fact they were using force to stop a constitutionally-mandated process: certifying the electoral vote. They were incited to do this by the President of the United States. None of this has ever happened before in America.
Over the summer, 8 men were arrested for plotting to kidnap the Governor of Michigan. There were multiple people with zip tie handcuffs in their possession in the Capitol. What do you think their aims were?
Open your eyes and see how truly insane Wednesday was, please.
> There were multiple people with zip tie handcuffs in their possession in the Capitol.
Maybe to tie some people up? Guess what the intent is of the people that have bombs and guns.
As Senator Graham pointed out in his speech, the security failure was so catastrophic that it could have been the death of the entire house, the senate, and the Vice President (lots of people with large backpacks inside that could have been loaded with explosives).
If there was any serious attempt at an actual overthrow it would have been a much worse day.
Also worth noting that there was no property damage or injuries in more than 97 to 98% of protests[1]
[1]: https://today.uconn.edu/2020/10/study-2020-protests-shows-di...
Some of the Lafayette Square protestors would have breached the white house if they could have too. 60 secret service agents were injured. The only difference, really, is that the Capitol Police did a worse job.
[1]I don't like using the term BLM riots since I have have no idea to what extent they are responsible as a movement (if at all).
Look things up before you throw fuel on the fire.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/09/03/kamala-ha...
Does no one wonder why Trump got 9 million votes more than 2016 and doubled his minority vote? The democrats encouraging and downplaying the riots is why.
You could also argue that Trump's previous tweets, the wink wink nod nod tweets to white supremacists, also fall under a similar category as the BLM tweet. Sympathy and possibly support but not actual incitement.
This time was different. Trump was literally inciting sedition. "Go to the capitol and stop the steal" was the message.
https://acleddata.com/2020/09/03/demonstrations-political-vi...
Seriously. I actually think making a comparison like that would be interesting and constructive.
Because it’s difficult to compare the events of this summer (a spontaneous response to the murder of George Floyd,choked to death under the neck of a police officer for over three minutes, on video, I’ll remind you) to the armed mob that invaded the Capital, threatening to kill or take hostage the entire Congress and the Vice-President, killed a Capital police officer, and planted pipe bombs in the Capital.
I think it would be easier to compare that event, since it’s a singular event, to another singular event, rather than a long series of events as I said.
What do you think?
[EDIT: Oh yeah the mob was also attempting to stop the process of certifying the results of the Presidential election. So much wrongness to have to remember.]
I don’t think Democrats should paint all Republicans with the same brush, and vice versa.
Forcing an evacuation of the VP, house and senate leadership and like 500 legislators while they are in session selecting the next president is a far, far cry from merely "not peaceful".
Literally the entire legislative branch of the federal government was attacked, along with the backup president!
And, but for a network of cold war escape facilities... they probably would have killed a few or taken hostages.
> ...93 percent of the protests associated with BLM were entirely peaceful...
Yet our government treats left-wing protests and right-wing protests quite differently.
> Between May 1 and November 28, 2020, authorities were more than twice as likely to attempt to break up and disperse a left-wing protest than a right-wing one. And in those situations when law enforcement chose to intervene, they were more likely to use force — 34 percent of the time with right-wing protests compared with 51 percent of the time for the left.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polices-tepid-respo...
This movement, on the other hand, is quite transparently rooted in white supremacy, and had an explicit goal of trying to undermine democracy itself, and people showed up quite obviously looking for a fight. I mean, the news over the past few days have been plastered with images of a guy in a weird Davy Crockett the Viking hat, with enormous white supremacist symbols tattooed across his torso, brandishing a frickin' spear.
Aside? isn't that the whole point?
Study Gandhi, MLK, John Lewis, Mandela - I understand BLM is a decentralized movement, but that's the problem. There is no leader and leadership. It has no coherency. It's dividing the society even more instead of pulling the entire populace behind it.
Social movement has a singular goal - to change the minds of people that oppose their views. BLM has managed to just bring out people who were already supporting them, it hasn't quite changed the hearts of people that were previously racists.
This is not how you make progress in the society. It is "pull", not "push".
Mandela was arrested and detained on Robben Island, in part, because he was part of a group that violently opposed the white supremacists of apartheid South Africa.
MLK never said that there wasn’t a place for violent resistance to white supremacy. In fact, he called out that if the white supremacists of his time weren’t careful, violent resistance would be all that was left (MLK and Malcolm X were more aligned than most people believe; MLK believed that the time for violent resistance to white supremacist violence had not yet arrived).
BLM is, in fact, a very _well_ organized movement and their leadership is consistently calling for protest that is vocal and meaningful, but not violent. Almost every single BLM protest last year that turned violent did so either because of (a) police rioting against the idea of being held accountable for their violence against BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities and persons or (b) white supremacists who thought it would be a lark to start some violence and blame it on the victimized.
BLM isn’t out to change open racists minds—they are correctly considered beyond redemption (and sometimes even beyond shame, like DJT and his coupistas)—and they don’t really care about changing the moderate person’s mind, either. They simply want the indiscriminate state violence against their community to stop. They want to stop the freedom with which the police murder their children.
They want there to be no more Rodney Kings, no more Amadou Diallous, no more Philando Castiles, no more Tamir Rices, no more George Floyds, no more Brianna Taylors, no more Jacob Blakes, no more Mike Browns. I could go on, but these are the ones that I can remember right now. Even _if_ some of them were committing crimes, the police are NEVER supposed to be judge, jury, and executioner…and most of the crimes with which those were accused had no chance of a death penalty. That the police have been able to not only murder BIPOC, but to do so with impunity AS A MATTER OF POLICY, is truly disgusting.
We as a society are lucky beyond belief that we _aren’t_ facing the violent revolution we deserve for our treatment of BIPOC communities and persons. Instead, we’re facing continued white supremacist violence.
Someone who turns up in a Viking hat, tattoos and a spear isn't looking for a fight. A person looking for a fight wears a mask, armour, carries a gun and probably camouflage.
When people wear imagery and slogans to any demonstration, I afford them the courtesy of understanding that what they're displaying on their bodies is part of the message they want to communicate.
The core of the protest is electoral integrity and calls for the politically marginalised to have a voice, not racial supremacy.
That's not a few bad eggs. That's an enormous crowd of people all deciding, tacitly or not, consciously or not, that democracy isn't for them anymore. And phrases like "take our country back" aren't even subtle; anyone who's been paying attention recognizes them as dog whistles. The obvious indication is that this crowd believes the votes of the democratic majority are not legitimate because they came from people who aren't entitled to run the country. And, while we can certainly spend an entertaining afternoon sealioning about particular examples, it would be easier to just take a look at some of the wide angle shots of the crowd. The crowd is clearly communicating exactly who they think isn't entitled to have a voice in how the country is run, either explicitly by holding flags and banners, or implicitly by consenting to be represented by the people holding the flags and banners.
I'm not so convinced of a supposed difference.
1. The BLM protests were planned, in public at least, as peaceful protests. Things went wrong and they didn’t all end up peaceful and law-abiding, but I did not see any reports of people using major internet platforms to plan to start riots or cause property damage. The reports of planning of the DC riots on Parler, in contrast, seem to have been quite explicit about the intent.
2. (In my mind rather less clear cut.) The BLM protests were not based on objective lies. The DC riots were. Ignore all the people saying there was no proof of widespread voter fraud — that’s like people saying that there is no strong evidence that MSG causes headaches. In fact, there isn’t even a reason to suspect widespread voter fraud. The proponents of the fraud theory have, when they’ve presented evidence at all, presented comically weak evidence. The theory is obvious BS.
Can you finish watching it and tell me which part of it is racist? It's unfortunately now people pick the lies they want to believe and claim it's the truth.
I’d you want, I will provide a source that Republicans encouraged violence this year.
This thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1346937852970483714.html
Insane articles like this:
- https://www.npr.org/2020/08/27/906729976/police-declare-port...
- https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/08/27/906642178...
- https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/blm-looting-prote...
There's much more but I'm not going to collect links all night.
1. Given BLM was protesting mistreatment and institutionalised racism (especially in the police), do you not think it’s at all plausible that the police response would be racially-charged in how they respond to the protests?
2. The headline it’s literally says “one authors controversial view...”: it is entirely reasonable to entertain an idea for the purposes of analysing it without actually advocating it.
3. “In defence of destroying property”: this is inherently ideological I think, I for one place human lives above that of mere materials, and if people need to smash some windows in order to make their voices heard that is ok: we can repair windows, we can bring unjustly-murdered people back from the dead. Maybe a better way of framing this particular one is in reverse: “why is a window shop-front more valuable/important than someone’s life and human rights?”
Edit: Twitter thread: conflating “we wish to overthrow the government and kill our opposition” with “please stop killing us; we will make these protests more uncomfortable until we are heard” is disingenuous at best, and a flat-out mischaracterisation at worst. Nelson Mandela spent time in prison as well: does that mean nothing he said has any value?
I do think some of the rhetoric from some Democrats was unwisely heated over the summer. This week was different.
That was the question I answered. I've showed that the left, which is most of the media and the democrats, encouraged the riots and set the precedent of using violence to achieve political goals.
(Local) democrats demonized the police as enemy of the people. Kamala Harris encouraged her millions of Twitter followers to donate to a Minnesota crowd-funding effort that paid bail for accused rioters. Both local and national media rigidly only referred to the far-left rioters as “protesters.” The Associated Press, which sets guidelines for journalists, amended its stylebook to discourage use of the word “riot,” given protesters’ “underlying grievances.” It took months before Biden condemned the riots and he only did it when he started to drop in the polls. In Portland BLM/Antifa rioted for months and they even tried to storm into a federal courthouse downtown several nights in a row. The respons of the mayor wasn't to condemn the riots but to tell Trump to take his “troops” and leave. Those showing righteous indignation now only months or weeks ago argued that the riots were “mostly peaceful” and that vandalism and looting don’t count as violence.
And it seems people have forgotten it's not the first time government building have been occupied to prevent a vote.
https://twitter.com/wokal_distance/status/134710749813463040... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Wisconsin_protests
My point isn't to defend what happened but to point out the hypocrisy and double-speak.
- BLM was not trying to replace our government with a new one. (aka a protest is not a sedition)
- Many BLM protesters were arrested. Some were charged with crimes. Similarly, any seditionists should be charged. This is probably true whether you agree with the final verdict or not
- Those at the capitol essentially held hundreds of lawmakers hostage, using guns and at least one pipe bomb, while Trump said nothing for approximately 2 hours
With regard to prominent Democratic politicians, this is factually untrue. They (and me) are good with peaceful protest, whether BLM or MAGA. There is absolutely no problem with peaceful pro-Trump protestors.
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-kamala-harris-l...
The invasion of the Capitol was not a peaceful protest - it was an insurrection.
This is AOC during the Capitol riots: https://abc7ny.com/aoc-alexandira-ocasio-cortez-capitol-sieg...
The hypocrisy is astonishing.
Do you have any evidence to back up your claim where any Democratic official agitated for violence in those protests?
Bad police were maiming innocent civilians with no provocation: https://twitter.com/greg_doucette/status/1266752393556918273
The protests were to hold those bad police accountable.
Do not compare people asking for the rule of law to be applied fairly and justly, to a President directing his rally to violently attack Congress and overthrow a democratic election.
I wouldn't give much of a damn if these people had burned down a Target or Quick Stop, either. But they ran into the capitol while many of them were actively talking about it being a revolution. With people talking about grabbing Congresspeople and having military tribunals. People went in with zipcuffs and firearms. Multiple bombs were planted.
This was an attempted coup. A poorly thought out one, a poorly executed one, and sure, not everyone that ran in had such grand aspirations. But plenty did, and plenty were open about it.
Go check out ParlerWatch on Reddit. Look at what's actually being posted on there. People calling for the violent overthrow of the government. People talking about murdering lawmakers. People cheering on those that invaded the capitol and calling for more.
Or, maybe the CIA just manipulated the blue into doing this! Conspiracy inception!
The cops didn't just let them in. The protesters pushed past the main barricades.
After the cordon had been broken, the police retreated back towards the Capitol building.
The police repeatedly did this until they were completely overwhelmed by the protesters.
One police officer died in the melee and several others sustained injuries.
The failure on the day was one of leadership and intelligence, but the poor guys on the ground did their best.
https://twitter.com/elijahschaffer/status/134696651499014963...
https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnewsvideo/comments/krvssn/trum...
https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/krvboi/clas...
> Speaker 1: There were a couple of groups that busted through, but other than that, I mean it was almost like they let everybody else through, like once a group kind of busted through just trying [inaudible] mad
> Speaker 2: They were just trying to run away [inaudible]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=52&v=BUE4TCLlv-c
As they admit, the mob broke through part of the police lines, so the police retreated back to the Capitol building. Doing otherwise, would have allowed the remaining officers on the line to be encircled by the elements of the mob that had already broken through.
In any event, nobody is all that mad that the Trump supporters made their way to the steps of the Capitol building, the central issue is that they actually broke into the building and started marauding and threatening its occupants.
Your video does not allege that the Capitol Police let the protesters into the Capitol building. Rather, both your video and the ones I provided show they clearly did not. The mob made it in by climbing walls and scaffolding and smashing through windows and doors.
Your video tries to blames Antifa, but that is completely illogical. True, it shows several people within the crowd decrying the forced entry and blaming Antifa, but yet somehow scores of confirmed Trump supporters made it inside the Capitol building.
Did the Trump supporters just happen to be on a tour inside the building when Antifa broke down the doors? Did Antifa somehow force them to rampage through the place, beat police officers, steal, and vandalise property?
The hypocrisy is unbelievable. This will not end well.
"Two out of three Democrats also claim Russia tampered with vote tallies on Election Day to help the President – something for which there has been no credible evidence."
The chronology of Russian involvement with and around the Trump campaign, illegal or not, is pretty damn well established now thanks to the Mueller report, disclosures from other parallel cases, and the recent senate committee report. Changing vote counts isn't part of it.
Meanwhile, as per YouGov [https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...] "One in five voters - including 45% of Republicans - approve of the storming of the Capitol building"
Amazing! Then please explain where they got that idea put into their heads?
"Two out of three Democrats also claim Russia tampered with vote tallies on Election Day to help the President – something for which there has been no credible evidence."
https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...
If you're trying to pin something on me, keep in mind that I'm not even American, let alone a Democrat.
"Those on the political left who play fast and loose with the term “hacked,” as in “Russia hacked the 2016 presidential election,” are aiding the Kremlin in its mission of undermining Americans’ faith in the democratic process, two University of Kansas researchers write in a new scholarly paper.
...
The authors lay the blame for this problem at the feet of the liberal media, which they define as media that liberals consume, including the Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC.
They wrote, “We demonstrate that the insular nature of much of the liberal media ... enabled the spread of this misleading definition. Through a rhetorical analysis of texts defining Russia’s influence campaign as ‘hacking,’ we demonstrate that Twitter and the publications produced by the liberal media were highly influential in creating the widespread notion that Russia ‘hacked’ the election.”"
An example of a name: Biden Appointee Neera Tanden: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/biden-appointee-neera-tande...
> Neera Tanden So one person subject to an extremely obvious narrative-driven article by someone who clearly has an agenda on this issue? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Greenwald#Donald_Trump_a...
Her tweets are stupid, but quite frankly her response to Greenwald he shows in his own article is a fair response.
Amazing how lightly you brush off spreading a baseless conspiracy as long as it's your side doing it.
https://elizabethwarren.com/plans/strengthening-democracy
>The harsh truth is that our elections are extremely vulnerable to attack: Forty-two states use voter registration databases that are more than a decade old. Laughably, in 2019, some still use Windows 2000 and Windows XP. Twelve states still use paperless machines, meaning there’s no paper trail to verify vote counts. Some states don’t require post-election audits. And ten states don’t train election officials to deal with cybersecurity threats. This is a national security threat, and three years after a hostile foreign power literally attacked our democracy, we’ve done far too little to address it.
I mean, even this very place always had a history of distrusting voting machines, etc.
More like excuse :)
Blocking parler does jack shit in stopping people’s ability to coordinate violence. Mass texts, email chains, WhatsApp, signal, 4chan boards, etc are all there.
It definitely helps. Just because people can coordinate using other mediums is not an argument against making it more difficult for them.
The simple explanation is usually the correct one: Parler's growing so fast that it simply can't keep up with policing the content. They need to add a lot more moderators and things will calm down.
Google and Apple are making a mistake.