>> No one had firearms at the capital, at least so far as I’m aware of.
>> I haven’t picked anything up like all 50 states protesting. A few surely, but idk not some crazy coordination or anything (honestly seems more from the left).
You're wrong about this, and you probably shouldn't be bragging about your platform or credentials if you're this ignorant of what is going on.
> Many in US media called the mostly white Jan. 6th Capitol rioters terrorists.
Interesting that you use this relatively new incident as an example. The name-calling was primarily by social media left, this is not a mainstream take.
Regardless, this isolated incident does not change the hypocrisy being displayed in the innumerable examples shown in the article.
> it seems like you are attempting to justify the insurrection on Capitol Hill
What mental gymnastics led you to this conclusion? It's obvious that the comment was pointing out the double standard and hypocrisy that pervades this discussion.
> As I said before, I have zero tolerance for the violent people at the Capital.
As you spend your entire comment denying the huge amount of violence that happened that day. Man you are really sold on ignoring any of the violence that happened that day, aren't you?
There are a great many more videos of violence happening that day, but really you only need one video of insurrections, in the capitol building after they broke in, fighting as a mob against an out-numbered group of frantic police officers, to conclude the event was violent. You can't have a group of people nearby or inside the capitol building literally beat a police officer to death and "undo" said violence by having a lot of people outside the building standing around outside innocently shouting, "Hang Mike Pence!"
Also, although it seemed like everybody posted every video they took that day, that probably isn't true. It's reasonable to believe that these people had some inhibition from posting videos in which their side obviously looked bad, which would bias the corpus of videos to be that much more "friendly" to the insurrectionists.
It's not an insurrection or an attack on democracy or any sensationalized label you want to attach to it.
I'm sorry your argument lacks any evidence other than subjectively trying to determine 'intent' and one off wingnuts whose significance is being blown out of proportion, with no hard objective facts to support this being an confirmed insurrection.
If you want to believe it was an insurrection or attack on democracy and demonize your fellow citizens, despite the lack of objective evidence, go right on ahead!
No. Identity politics is (for instance) being incredibly pedantic about the usage of a word because you take (glaringly obvious, btw) personal offense to its usage. We have all gathered you are some form of right-leaning conservative at this point. No one else would be as defensive as you have been about this topic. Whether you feel it was an insurrection or not, can we at least agree that it was an attack on democracy? These protestors may not have been armed, but they were threatening and intimidating as they chanted things like "hang mike Pence" and "where are you Nancy?".
The overall context of course was that many of these people believed themselves that they were there to prevent the electoral college votes from being counted by the joint assembly.
Please stop. I guess all the rioting, arson (of which at Berkeley nothing was done about by law enforcement), and assaults (by mainly people hiding their face, mind you) carried out by the anti-Trump crowd this year don't count right? And this isn't to marginalize what happened over the weekend either, but people with polarizing narratives like you are a large part of the problem. We didn't get to where we are while in a vacuum.
> The people who stormed into the capitol believe that they were doing so as a part of a fight against fascism, and I am now starting to think that a lot of my left wing friends simply don't understand what these people think.
>I literally didn't mention political beliefs or forcing people to accept what's best for them at all
To him and to me, you didn't literally say it, but you implied it. You don't have to say something explicitly to have people know what you meant. Certainly Donald Trump didn't explicitly say for people to attempt an insurrection, but every one of those cretins knew exactly what he was saying.
>perhaps you're upset that such people are choosing for themselves to avoid right-wing hate, and you don't like their reasoning (they don't want to be restricted / harassed / threatened / murdered by right-wingers) ?
On the other hand, the poster you are replying to did not say nor imply anything of the sort of thing that you are saying.
>we can't be surprised there, given said right-wingers don't care about politics when they're mowing people down with a range rover on a sidewalk, or in a shopping mall with a gun, just for looking different than them
You are using emotionally laden wording here, rather than just having a healthy dialogue where you disagree.
>BTW, you never explained why you felt the comment about privilege was wrong.
Because the person you responded to above didn't use the word privilege. I did in another comment, which I just explained in my response to you on the other thread. I just logged back on right now and answered your other statement to me.
If you are going to respond, perhaps respond to only the other one as it is difficult to have two separate conversations happening at the same time.
I can count six DC-area thousand+ employee firms that provided grief counseling in response. And as a reminder, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism - even if a subset of people implemented violence with political ends in mind (breaking in, beating innocent people, attempting to take hostages, all in the name of overturning a legitimate election), at the very least, that subset meets the precise definition of "terrorists."
> No, this wasn't "our 9/11."
The Capitol was breached as part of a coordinated and failed plot. Last time this happened was 1814.
> I have no doubt a few of the rioters really were planning terrible deeds, and the violence and property damage is inexcusable.
Yes, using the rest of the people in the crowd as human shields, but nonetheless:
> But most of these people just seem to be caught up in the moment -- taking selfies and LARPing around the capitol after hours.
This isn't a valid defense to any crime literally ever.
>Including the violence by civilians (whether we call them protestors or not), the leftist protests did lead to a lot more bloodshed. I misunderstood and thought you were talking solely about the police.
I was. Most of the victims during the protests were black. You cherry picked quotes from the article to support your views.
The reality is that a peaceful BLM protest was dispersed with greater violence so that the president can pose across the street with a bible, than a mob attacking and storming the Capitol.
> 1) Because there was just a single "capitol incident", and several BLM riots.
No, there wasn't just a single incident. Just to give some examples off the top of my head: large groups of III%ers participated in both the Capitol Attack and Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, and the BLM counter-protests were arguably part of the same phenomenon (and one of them shot three people in Kenosha).
> 2) So you seriously believe all violence at BLM riots was solely because of false flag white supremacists? Really?
That's a sloppy reading of what I said. I merely pointed out a fact that makes attribution of violence that occurred at the protests difficult.
> 3) Bullshit. Riots are not "democratic process" either - it's people rejecting the established laws (like property rights) and proceeding to do their own thing. I mean they installed an "autonomous zone", how is that not an attack on democracy?
It's pretty obvious that it wasn't an "attack on democracy" because they made reform demands to elected officials and were cooperating with the government:
> The protest zone has increasingly functioned with the tacit blessing of the city. Harold Scoggins, the fire chief, was there on Wednesday, chatting with protesters, helping set up a call with the Police Department and making sure the area had portable toilets and sanitation services....
> The demonstrators have also been trying to figure it out, with various factions voicing different priorities. A list of three demands was posted prominently on a wall: one, defund the Police Department; two, fund community health; and three, drop all criminal charges against protesters.
> I suppose you've never heard of right-wing militias showing up to left-wing protests while cops look on,
Note that the reverse is also quite common. "Punch a Nazi" was very popular for a while and antifa was big. Political violence is back on the rise in the USA, though its not as bad as the 70s.
> I suppose you've never heard Donald Trump suggest that "what you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening"?
It really sucks that it was Trump who popularised the idea of "fake news". It tarnished an idea that long predated the most untruthful politician in modern US politics: While the big reputable news corps will very rarely lie in their own voice (I've only seen a couple of examples over many years of news reading) it is extremely common for those reading the news to pick up an incorrect view of what happened. Two years later I'm still correcting educated people who believed that the 6/6 capitol invaders beat a policeman to death with a flagpole and a fire extinguisher. Or those who believe the Canadian protest truckers were Nazis proudly waving Nazi flags (as opposed to being disproportionately waving signs declaring the government were Nazis and these signs having swastikas or SS symbols etc on them).
You really should want what guns were used to be distributed between the people that went in to the building and those staying outside with no discernible patterns to argue against an organized insurrection. All the guns being outside just indicates that it was strategy (say to overwhelm the outnumbered inside security with numbers, melee weapons, and chemical agents, while reserving firearms to deal with the potentially more numerous and better equipped relief that could be sent).
Now, I don't care one way or the other, because I am not arguing it was a particularly well-planned or organized insurrection, because incompetence is not a mitigating factor. But as well as keeping moving the goalposts because you seem unfamiliar with the basic facts, you also seem to be very bad at even picking positions to defend which make a coherent argument.
>>Yikes. If this is the level that you're at, I really hope that you are trolling.
Please stop trolling. Comments like this are extremely pretentious, and qualify as trolling someone else.
>>Is the massive BLM protests just a massive misunderstanding - nostalgia of former injustices rather than current ones?
Is the massive Tea Party protests just a massive misunderstanding? How about the massive pro-Trump protests against the results of the election? How about the massive anti-lockdown protests?
You're acting like it's absurd to reject the beliefs of protestors.
> If you had simply asked me to share what I know, I would have given you some links. But I have a distaste for the "[Citation Needed]" meme because it's pompous,
Totally fair. That wasn’t very conservative. I’m sorry.
> That's not even close to what I said.
Could you clarify what you were saying? I directly quoted you, but I’ll admit your sentence isn’t clear. It says “More” but doesn’t indicate “more than what?”, so I assumed you meant the oppression that rioters are responding to. Maybe that’s not the case.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but nobody entered the Capitol with guns. I'm aware that sounds like downplaying the incident, which is not my intention. I just think accuracy matters.
The guy you're referring to (who was thankfully charged), did not enter the Capitol with a gun, according to the charging document. What gave you the idea that he entered the Capitol with a gun, the charging document is pretty clear?
>the main different here is that I don't recall there being a systemic effort to defend him and explain that it's really no big deal.
The effort was just to blame Trump's rhetoric for that guys actions. Which, Trump's rhetoric was less than helpful to say the least, but that was a poor excuse for trying to murder a bunch of congresspeople.
Alas, this is the problem with demanding accuracy. If someone says something false about a bad person or incident, we are unable to ask for accuracy unless we are willing to be seen as defending it.
No. I did not. I explicitly asked if anything else happened there that day as your comment appeared to ignore anything else.
> and then the labelling of half the country as terrorists
Again, no, I did no such thing.
> The left seems to think grandma was smashing Capitol Police heads in.
"The left" is a sweeping generalisation of a group in the US that don't hold homogenous views.
You appear only capable of strawmanning and false statements here, I'm sure you can do better IRL.
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