Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

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> Let's hope that this time some people will take notice because while everybody seems to be happy that this effort failed from the perspective of the perps it looks like a major victory: they took the bloody capitol with such ease that 10 minutes more planning would have had them hold house or senate members or even the VP or the speaker hostage. Or worse.

Except that... then what? That isn't how a coup works. You can't just take hostages and then make demands about who gets to be the President. It has no effect. Official actions taken under duress are invalid. As soon as you leave the building nobody is going to honor anything you demanded.

It's easy to take a building. Just show up with greater numbers than there are cops in the area. But a building is not the government. Physical possession of the Senate floor isn't what grants the power to do anything. It's purely symbolic.

The fact is that law enforcement operates primarily through deterrence. You can install some bulletproof glass and things like that, but the main thing preventing murders and such is that if you do it then you go to jail for a long time after.

But if you play out the actual implications then you can use hyperbole and call it a coup. That's valuable language and you don't want to let a crisis go to waste.

This type of performative hyperbole coming from the left is going to make this whole situation worse. What those yahoo's did was bad enough, there's zero reason to throw gasoline on the fire.

>>> They are also presently discussing their next day-out for rednecks in the form of another insurrection and coup attempt on the 17th of January.

> But if you play out the actual implications then you can use hyperbole and call it a coup. That's valuable language and you don't want to let a crisis go to waste.

The GGP labeled this with an both the correct term and an incorrect term.

1/6 was an insurrection, not a coup. An insurrection is a rebellion against civil authority, which this clearly was, even if it was incompetently executed. I think a coup is typically used for when power is illegally taken by military or police authorities, which this was not.

A crowd enters the capitol building shouting for Mike Pence, they somehow know where to find the ziptie stash, and it's hyperbole to call it a coup?

Trump calls it "getting revenge" and we call it a coup attempt because that's what it was, a coup attempt.

I don't think the fact that taking hostages wouldn't actually succeed in making Trump president for the next four years is reason not to hope that law enforcement is suitably prepared to prevent emboldened 'patriots' from trying. Indeed it's precisely because such people are largely immune to normal deterrence measures you need law enforcement to be more effective.

I don't know if I can agree with the normal deterrence methods being ineffective. Despite claims of insurrection, they basically pushed their way into the building and then stood around. What stopped them from doing a lot worse wasn't that anyone could have stopped them in the moment, it was the deterrent (or the optics, which is effectively the same thing).

And different measures could make a marginal difference one way or the other, but if you have a huge mob of people trying to get into a building not explicitly designed to be a fortress, that's pretty hard to stop.

> and then stood around.

They did not just stand around [1]. This was extremely violent, and they intended to murder people. Deterrence meant nothing to them. They were only stopped because the Capitol Police and Secret Service shot one of them. Different measures would absolutely have made a difference and saved lives.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhjRXO72v1s

> Despite claims of insurrection, they basically pushed their way into the building and then stood around. What stopped them from doing a lot worse

...was that the people they were fairly explicitly targeting escaped the mob, in some cases with very little margin, because of successful use of barricades, delaying tactics, and in one case deadly force.

I'm trying to say this carefully, because what they actually did was not okay. People died.

But the amount of "it could have been worse" attributable entirely to what the mob didn't do, is large. And I don't think I'm wrong to attribute a lot of that to the ordinary deterrents being in effect.

There is a good reason we have different categories for 'attempted crime' and 'crime'. What they didn't do is mostly because it didn't work, not because there was no attempt. It all fell apart when their targets got to safety in time. Remove that one element, and take into account that they were given far more time to act because Trump held back deploying the NG and re-calibrate.

> There is a good reason we have different categories for 'attempted crime' and 'crime'.

One of the important ones is the line between planning to do something and actually doing it. It's one thing to stand in a crowd chanting something stupid, quite another if the moment comes and you have to choose.

> What they didn't do is mostly because it didn't work, not because there was no attempt.

What I'm referring to is methods, not goals.

Nobody wants to imagine the level of violence that people are capable of when unrestrained. I don't intend to describe it here, but the world has seen it in other times and other places.

I think what played a bigger role in stopping them from doing a lot worse was their targets had been evacuated, and when they tried to break into more secure areas one of them got shot. And sure, the truth is that a lot of people there weren't very bright and things got out of hand. But even the people taking selfies and souvenirs whilst the considerably-less-harmless guys in military fatigues carrying flex cuffs looked for Pence didn't fear punishment for their actions. You could tell that by the way they gave their names and itemised the crimes they'd committed to media outlets they supposed were sympathetic or livestreamed the whole thing.

Sure, a huge mob of people trying to get into a building not explicitly designed to be a fortress isn't easy to stop, and with the limited resources available evacuation was probably the right move, but what we actually saw on video in front of the Capitol was a line of about six police and a movable fence, and open doors. I've seen more convincing looking security at music festivals. You can try to deter people by what might happen if they try rather than what happens if they succeed, especially if they're crazy people who think what will actually happen if they succeed is President Trump giving them a medal.

Police regularly stops huge mobs of people, there are units dedicated to that.

What I still can't understand is why the police wasn't prepared for it. Isn't the FBI supposed to infiltrate dangerous groups? Or was the "march on capitol" completely unplanned before Trump suggested it? Finally, has nobody considered that something like this might have happened? (It was obvious to me, as well as at least one thinktank.)

Russia took Crimea by first just simply taking buildings. So once you physically possess important buildings you can do all sorts of interesting stuff.

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