I think the hand wringing from Facebook people is more concerning. They don't want people to be able to organize political protests on their platform? Or only protests they agree with?
While the instigators were a bit too hopelessly incompetent to really qualify for "insurrection" in my book, it was a dangerous mob attack on our central governing body. Absolutely unacceptable and should never be allowed to happen again.
Except our constitution essentially codifies it as a founding principal. That is, after all, how we started.
So, no, it shouldn't be forbidden. It should be avoided.
My response was solely to the statement that we should never be allowed to overthrow the government. The people of every nation should be allowed to do so, for that's how the people can be in control of their lives.
I imagine most here will disagree...until someone they abhor is in office.
I don't think the losing side should get to ransack the Capitol every four years because they spread some half-baked rumors and convinced themselves the election was rigged.
We have independent judges, including lots appointed by Trump. If the losing side couldn't convince those judges the election was wrongly decided, they are to wait four years to try again, just like every losing side before them.
The nation is not a playground for toddlers to throw a violent temper tantrum based on make believe when things don't do their way.
I would agree there is a difference in scale - more violence at the January 6th thing and more incendiary rhetoric from Trump's camp, but I don't think there is a difference in kind. They are both the same kind of thing. I would say they are both protests that got out of control and turned violent. You seem to be saying the January 6th thing is a coup, but it's odd that you don't describe the fundamentally similar Trump inauguration thing the same way.
Finally, on the subject of the difference in scale, I would just say that it doesn't seem particularly meaningful because there is a massive difference between a real coup attempt (say, the 2016 Turkish coup) and January 6th. The difference in scale between January 6th and Trump's inauguration protests is relatively slight.
Totally a normal country with normal people.
Oh, and that part about the crazy guy who was in charge who instigated it all months in advance — forget about all that. That wasn’t a big deal either.
Maybe, in some sense, some of the protesters really were trying to secede or dissolve the government of something. But, realistically, there was no chance that the autonomous zone was going to last or separate from America or anything like that. Similarly, maybe some of the protesters on January 6th thought that by delaying the certification ceremony then Trump would become President. Again though, realistically, there was no chance of that happening.
I think news outlets just sensationalize what happened and use hyperbole. Some people uncritically listen to the news and repeat what they are told. This gets us people who think January 6th was some horrible tragedy and we need to reign in free speech and social media platforms to prevent a repeat. I disagree with that and I'd rather have a January 6th style protest for every future President than have the government, media, and big businesses collude to suppress speech.
January 6th is much more like a protest turned riot than it is a coup or insurrection.
I agree with you there was a conspiracy with some Trump-loving higher-ups in the security establishment paving the way for the protest, but you can never call a few hundred fascists a "coup" unless they all have a gun and are dropping bombs at key sites to destabilize opposition.
It's also important to note that these fascist networks have access to considerable amounts of weapons. The fact they were not brought along indicates they were not planning a coup. To be clear, i believe Trump himself was planning a coup, but most fascists attending the demo did not because Trump did not request that aloud.
I agree that was not what was happening, but how is people living free from a government that exploits/murders them a wrong thing? I get that secession in the name of keeping institutional slavery isn't ideal, but now that we've had 150y of wage slavery that's not much better for people or the environment, doesn't secession of autonomous communes sound like a reasonable thing to you?
What Facebook should do in response I'm more ambivalent about. People forget that we're seeing this with the benefit of hindsight. Holding a rally disapproving an election result is not an unusual thing. Plenty of people marched in the streets chanting "Not my president" following Trump's 2016 victory. How are websites supposed to know in advance which ones are going to turn violent? Furthermore, without clear evidence that Trump directed this mob, banning him would set a precedence ripe for abuse: have some of your own supporters commit crimes under the guise of being egged on by your opponents to get said opponents banned from the public square.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/05/us/politics/jan-6-capitol...
It is a big deal.
The january 6th protest/riot involved 2000-2500-ish people, and 5 people died - 4 protesters and 1 police officer. Two more police officers committed suicide in the following weeks - could be unrelated, but seems....unlikely.
So that already puts January 6th in a category of its own in terms of deaths relative to number of involved parties (at least in modern times, I suppose the boston massacre had the same number of deaths with fewer protesters).
Then you couple the events with the context - a sitting president, disputing the electoral results, riles up a crowd of protesters, encourages them to go down to the capitol building, where the results of an election are being certified, and as a result - 5-7 people are dead. It's unprecedented.
I agree that some of the "coup" hyperbole is overblown - when I think of coup, I think of a highly organized plot to overthrow a government. However, I don't think the lack of project management around this particular initiative should distract from the fact that a lot of the people there were trying to "stop the steal", aka stop the legitimate counting of elections through force and violence.
So - a uniquely deadly protest, oriented around a presidential exhortation, that led to a group of people trying to disrupt the standard constitutional process of the peaceful transfer of power - that seems newsworthy, no?
Five people were killed, all protesters. I agree that's a bit extreme, but so is rioting in the Capitol. If the media coverage were about the severity of the police response or why so many protesters died - then I'd think it would be appropriate. As is, the media response is opposite of that.