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It had been previously established that it was entirely acceptable for mobs to declare themselves sovereign from local, state and federal law enforcement, and to enforce this claim by burning police stations and courthouses, denying access to the actual police, arming themselves with rifles and shooting people in the street. When I and others like me stood appalled at the leniency applied by the government to such behavior, we were told that this lawless, organized and widespread violence was "mostly peaceful", that acting against these mobs would only "inflame tensions", and then that it was fine because they didn't actually achieve anything, ignoring of course the mass victimization of their fellow citizens and the mass intimidation of those who disagreed with them.
It seems to me that the same arguments apply here. The January 6th protest was in fact significantly more mostly peaceful than many of the leftist riots that preceded it. The protesters did not arm themselves with guns, did not shoot people in the street, and did not set the capitol building on fire. They scuffled with police, conducted an unscheduled tour of the capitol building, had an unarmed woman among their number fatally shot by security, and then left. To the extent that they intended to "overturn an election", it seems to me that numerous leftist protests involved similarly dire goals, and took far greater action toward achieving them to boot, and were given far more lenient treatment even when their crimes included serious violence with guns and arson.
Mobs have "mostly peacefully" disrupted government functions before, and it was not treated as insurrection. I see no reason why this should be treated any more harshly than previous mob disruptions, particularly given the violence allowed during the Floyd riots.
I disagree. My perspective on the riots is that Blue Tribe legalized political violence committed by their partisans against people like me within a significant portion of the country, and made it stick for the better part of a year. That is a profoundly corrosive action against any conception of "national respect" or "social cohesion". I now know for a fact that reasonable, thoughtful Blues are in fact willing to look the other way while my civil and human rights are violated and while lawless violence is committed against me or my family, because I watched them do exactly that, and I watched them argue at length that it was good, actually. That's the meaning behind "burning down police stations." January Sixth was not even close to that bad.
I understand that you think 2020 had a vast under response. Broadly I agree that there should have been less hand-wringing and more condemnation. But I don’t think that describing politics as Blue Tribe and Red Tribe actually justifies tribal argument. Many ‘blue tribe’ people I know were also outraged at the rioting and destruction.
You describe J6 like it was an overeager group of tourists ducking under a velvet rope. I can’t really figure out what to say to that. Generally I try to respond as genuinely good faith as I can, but this seems like a major break to me.
Members of J6, broadly:
Fought with police instructing them to disperse
Tore down crowd barriers
Broke and climbed in windows
Opened doors to let in others
Went through desks and offices of capital building members
Pressed further into the building, including secured areas.
Babbitt climbed through a broke window directly adjacent to a guard with a drawn weapon.
All of this in one of the most importantly political buildings in the country, second only to the White House. While Congress was in session. With the express intent of stopping the proceedings and in some cases calls for the execution of its members.
What about the situation am I missing that leads you to dismiss it? I don’t think this is comparable to previous protests since to my knowledge no previous protest has led to the occupation of the capital building.
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I think there's still a big difference in kind between effectively micro-secessionism and fucking with the election. One is an attack on one area of a city, the other is an attack on the entire country.
Correct. One, if accomplished by force, is literally treason, and the other is normal. It's the micro-secessionism which is treason -- "making war against the United States". Having a protest against election results in a democracy is normal. Having the protest become a riot is regrettable but also not uncommon.
To me it's not a matter of category but scale. And micro-secessionism does not affect the rest of the country, whereas fucking with the election does.
This is getting very Texas Sharpshooter. Austin, specifically, I suppose.
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