Civil disobedience is a term that I don't equate to many of the violent actions that they are engaging in.

The protesters that are peaceful early in the evening are not the ones being arrested, pepper sprayed, etc...

The protesters that stay past midnight and assault the police are.

The notion that the "vast majority of protests are peaceful" is irrelevant, because the police actions we are talking about are against the violent protesters.

This is not a good faith depiction of what the protesters are doing.

If not "peaceful assembly", how are you defining "protests"?

Stopping a lawful vehicle with a traffic cone isn't protest. Harassment is not protest. Vandalism is not protest. Halting traffic for 60 seconds might be protest; halting traffic for 60 minutes definitely isn't.

Even civil disobedience, where someone deliberately violates the law, is predicated on being _peaceful_. (And IMO also on the willingness, if not the desire, to accept the legal consequences.)

IMO, media outlets have pushed this idea that violence is protest, but that's pretty new (and of course limited to issues where they agree).

No, it's not. The ones that are protesting are also being ordered to disperse and go back home. The reason they're not is because they're disobeying.

For those that aren't explicitly ordered, it's because it's pointless, given that civil disobedience is in the nature of protests.

I suspect the definition of properly looks very different when you're a victim, perpetrator, or a (privileged) bystander.

Let's march politely down the street with the rest of my college educated peers doesn't exist for everyone unfortunately.

The majority of the time, it's groups doing things like this that lead directly toward what you're calling "serious protests".

Isn't it a brilliant tactic deployed by the regime, making people think that freedom of speech equals riot on the street. Like the USA is burning in hell with all the black live matters protest and the capitol protest/riot?

This, exactly. It takes a lot to get people to resort to civil unrest. I wish it was respected as being that, the last resort of a populace losing faith in it's leadership, and not derided as it is so often as just people who disagree with something. Protests should be a sign of not just disagreement but profound disgust not just for what is being done, but for the processes and the system that permitted it to happen in the first place.

I'm not making any comment about the justness or unjustness of the underlying cause of the protests

> The police cannot simply allow it to occur so they will react with the amount of force needed to end it swiftly.

This statement, however, is simply bullshit, and the US has literally hundreds of years of examples of how civil disobedience can be dealt with reasonably and humanely (of course as well as other examples where it's dealt with viciously). The protest would have eventually died down (an effective strategy to dealing with these kinds of protests is just to cordon them off and wait it out, they'll eventually need food and water), protestors would have been arrested and cited with an appropriate misdemeanor.

I know several people personally who say this exact phrase, yet they mocked the football players who took a knee during the national anthem at games protesting exactly this issue.

Obviously most sane people would prefer an effective and peaceful protest, but there has yet to be one for this particular issue. So I am hardly surprised it has become this violent, especially with members of the police force and the president antagonizing people further. Also, I would add that any protest of great size naturally has people who try to take advantage of it and turn to anarchy. Shutting down such rioters with force seems to exacerbate the issue, as police force is what is being protest—an understandably difficult predicament.

No. Ordinary civil disobedience will do utterly nothing. You need a certain amount of violence - just look at France, only after the riots were utterly massive the government caved. The alternative is a massive general strike, which has fallen out of favor in modern times as many jobs are easily replaceable and people are afraid of getting fired.

Potentially if it could be organized.

> 19 states out of 34 states have already committed to the convention of states.

This is a non-sequitur and has nothing to do with civil disobedience nor the dissolution of the federal govt.

> The US Federal government knows all too well how to deal with violence but they don’t know how to handle peaceful mass non-compliance.

I think a lot of people would dispute this. The standard ways to deal with peaceful mass non-compliance have been known by western governments forever:

1. Split the population into factions with extremes who won't remain peaceful.

if that fails the:

2. Insert agents-provocateur into the peaceful group to spur violence.

Either way the formula is the same - turn an non-violent protest into a violent one and then deal with it as such.

Categorically false. There were dozens upon dozens of peaceful protests across the country in the past weeks that were decidedly not branded as riots. Very few police departments have declared groupings as riots, fewer than ten. Orders of magnitude less than the amount of protests.

>This should be obvious, as they have allowed looting and rioting in instances, as well as curtailing and meaningfully impeding constitutionally protected protest activity.

This makes little sense and actually disproves your point? City councils and mayors oversee the police departments and tell them to stand down.

>When law enforcement is allowed to designate people or groups as rioters indiscriminately, and then brutalize them, then arrest them, it’s clear that your rights are being impinged.

So you just said they're not able to since in other areas they've been told to stand down and not enforce or designate anything. You can't have it both ways.

>and can do as much or more “journalism” on a Twitter account today than William Randolph Hearst could on a good day in 1898.[1][2]

>An interesting historical footnote from

Total non sequitur.

Do you mean by suppressing the action before it occurs? I thought that one of the points of civil disobedience was to get caught, so as to increase visibility of the problem and become a catalyst for change.

Oh is this referring to the so called "insurection"? That was like a mild protest compared to other recent ones.

>[...] Admitting you’re trying to stop the process is an act of resistance against the government.

So you're saying resisting the government = insurrection? Is picketing outside of government offices (ie. the kind where you block people/cars from entering/leaving a building) an "insurrection"? Or does it only apply to capitols? Suppose you got a bunch of picketers to surround your state capitol, and representatives couldn't enter, would that be an insurrection?

Yes they do, it's called civil disobedience, and many Americans from marginalized groups wouldn't have the rights they enjoy now without it. In fact, as people like to point out, America was born from it.