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They were invaded by the 2nd politest mob of the covid era. Politest goes to the canadian trucker convoy.
There was only a single death from violence, and it was a protestor shot by security. I think all the other deaths were via heart attack, including the one security guard that people originally claim was attacked with a fire extinguisher.
Nothing was burned down. No one was run over by a car. There were no large scale medieval weapons fights. The "mob" dispersed when asked to.
There were a few groups of FBI informants that roped in a few retards to plan on doing more stuff. They got caught and heavily prosecuted, the same way every other group like this has been caught and prosecuted. The racial makeup and supposed "motivations" of the retards has changed, but the FBI playbook hasn't.
I normally don't care to comment on Trump stuff, but I don't like the massive gaslighting that it feels like we all went through during 2020.
During the summer of 2020 there were massive riots in the streets. Cars, police stations, and businesses burned to the ground and looted. Large physical confrontations in the streets. People out at the wrong time being beaten to death by mobs. It was helpfully pointed out the time that the protestors themselves didn't carry out these beatings or killings. I'm sure the victims of the violence felt much better in their afterlives knowing that their deaths were only tangentially caused by the lawlessness that the protests created.
The health authorities that had insisted on everyone being locked down and not going outside to even mingle within parks also wrote a blank check to these protestors. They were no longer "super spreader" events, but some weird health carve out where protesting police violence somehow made you immune to spreading covid.
That was the context of the January 6th protest. Some people broke some windows and busted down a door, and then a bunch of others just calmly walked through the capital building like they were on tour and took silly photos like it was a fairground. Meanwhile every news station in the country breathlessly talked about the "violence" of the January 6th protest. The same news stations that were talking about the "peaceful" protests that same summer as buildings burned in the background of the newscast.
"They interrupted an important government function" - someone, hopefully not you
No, they interrupted a ceremony of the state religion. The presidential level of politics isn't a place of law and order, its a place of feelings, perception, and group consensus. At most it caused the equivalent of a rain delay, and it was all still done within a day. There was no plausible way that delaying the ceremonies on January 6th would have impacted who was president for the 2020-2024 term. Even if the ceremony had somehow never happened, Biden would still have become president. Because most of the US government acknowledged him as such.
The January 6th incident has caused the media to invent this weird perception that our government is one delayed ceremony away from being overthrown. As if every top leader in the country is a rules following robot, where if the proper procedures aren't exactly followed then they'll just collapse in a heap and stop functioning. We are supposed to believe this despite mountains of evidence to the contrary ... the explicit rules of the constitution have been broken many times, and the typical reaction, if there is any at all, is a collective shrug.
The claim that the Jan 6 mob was polite and peaceful is one of the most astonishing claims I see repeated in this otherwise pretty reality-grounded community. I don't understand how you can make claims like this when we have widespread video evidence of how violent the mob was. Like, are you just unaware of the video footage? Or are you of the belief that the existence of some footage showing peaceful and orderly intruders "cancels out" the violence, like some sort of algebraic exercise? I cannot overstate how baffling I find this.
I'm sorry, what out of the ordinary are you seeing there? At the beginning the Capitol Police just let their dinky barricade get pushed open like barn doors. This act wasn't caused by violence, but simply the accumulated crush of humanity that would occur at any large protest. That it breached the barricades is 99.99% Capitol Police incompetence. Then we go to some people climbing stairs, then walking through open doors. A few go through an open window. But then they just kinda walk around. They keep filling up space as the Capitol Police cede it...the police never engage in anything approaching proper crowd control in the Capitol building (If they just locked the doors the whole thing probably ends there). Then there is some footage of CP surrounded by protestors. Here's how you know its incredibly peaceful compared to a BLM protest: They would be getting stomped on at a BLM protest. If a CPD or NYPD officer was that incompetent they'd likely be dead. Almost all the confrontations on the video are initiated by Capitol Police who aren't engaging in anything resembling proper crowd control. No lines, no use of the natural choke-points and barriers to keep the protestors where they should be, no, instead it looks like a bunch of rogue officers barreling into crowds of protestors one at a time like they are playing Red Rover. At the end we see, seemingly, the one cohort of competent Capitol Police officers holding a choke-point, seemingly a door of some sort. And they get a flag swung at them. So, like, give that flag guy a misdemeanor battery charge?
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Maybe it's you?
Like, seriously; Have you considered that you might have the bias? Even you're example is really weak.
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If that's the worst you can find, it still looks... fairly peaceful?
The crowd is mostly just pushing the riot cops out of position, not even grappling them -- certainly not throwing rocks etc. Like a football offensive line -- the reason it looks chaotic and violent on the officer's side is that their line is too small, and can't stand.
The cops are the ones with the close-quarters pepper spray and wacking people with batons -- the level of discipline in terms of not much striking from the crowd in these circumstances is pretty good, actually!
Yeah, this is the most shocking stuff The Telegraph (obviously a very biased source) could come up with? The audio they spliced in does sound very panicked, but it doesn't match with much of what's happening in the video. I note that nothing was on fire, and the only thing approaching a weapon that any of the rioters used in that footage was a hockey stick (not clear what they were hitting with it, hopefully not a person). Decidedly NOT what you could say about footage of the BLM riots.
EDIT: I mean, I do agree that it wasn't "peaceful and polite". There was clearly anger, and some people went too far.
The Telegraph, referred to as the Torygraph by Private Eye and its readers, is the serious newspaper of the British right (as opposed to the Murdoch-owned Times, which is traditionally pro-Establishment with a mild right-wing bias). They gave Boris Johnson a column after he was fired from the Times for making up quotes, and continued to employ him after several of his anti-EU stories were exposed as fabrications. Needless to say, they endorsed Brexit, Johnson as PM, Trussonomics etc.
Given the lack of a serious right-wing newspaper in the US, the Telegraph is probably the most pro-Trump "reliable source" out there.
Interesting. I admit ignorance here - I just assumed any UK-based newspaper would be very far to the left. (The video itself still seemed pretty biased to me.) Thanks for the correction.
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Then, by my estimation, you're no different than the people who stood in front of the scenes of riots in the Summer of 2020 and declared they were Mostly Peaceful. Sorry.
Can we compare the results of Jan 6th with CHAZ? Which one had children being shot? How to the jail time for participants compare?
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Jan 6th was straightforwardly and very significantly less violent than many and perhaps most of the riots in the summer of 2020. The mob did not show up with guns and begin shooting people. No one was stabbed. The mob did not engage in arson. The mob did not set on individual people and beat them bloody. These are examples of actual, serious violence which were notable or common during the BLM riots, about which a social consensus was rigidly enforced that they did not count as "violence". These elements were entirely absent from Jan 6th, and no other purely physical actions replace them. The Jan 6th mob shoved its way through an inadequate police line, broke some windows, and then took an unauthorized tour of the capitol building. When it tried to push its way into the actual chamber, a security officer fired into the crowd, killing an unarmed woman, and the mob backed off and went elsewhere. Vandalism and theft was extremely limited.
In this thread, as in most discussions, people argue that it's the symbolism that makes Jan 6th significant. They are forced to do that because the simple fact is that Jan 6th was not a notably violent event by the well-established standards by which our society judges such things.
Even if the above were not true, the fact is that our managerial, administrative, and knowledge-production classes did in fact stand in front of the scenes of riots in the summer of 2020 and declared they were Mostly Peaceful. They declared that they were protests and not riots. They frequently ordered police to stand down and allowed the mob free reign. They organized aid and support to those arrested for rioting, declined to identify rioters, declined to arrest them, declined to prosecute them, organized nationwide funding for their legal defense. Many of them publicly expressed sympathy and support for the "protestors", and vociferously attacked anyone who tried to draw attention to the widespread, lawless violence. They zealously prosecuted private citizens who attempted to defend themselves, well outside any reasonable interpretation of the law.
My assessment is that some of them did these things because they thought appeasing the mob would cost less in the long run, while others did it because they recognized the BLM rioters as their allies. Either way, this went on for more than a year, and some parts of it are still going on today.
Now you are claiming that people who disagree with your assessment of Jan 6th are as bad as the pro-BLM riot people. Suppose that is true: so what? The pro-BLM riot people were rewarded with vast political, financial and social benefit from their actions. Negative consequences were extremely rare, limited to only a very few of the most egregious examples. Why should one be ashamed of an action to which no shame or censure seems to attach?
I'm not sure I'm accurately understanding what you're saying. It seems to me that you're saying it's acceptable to lie about what constitutes violence as long as the other side got away with that lie too? I'm all for holding people to their the standards they set, and as such I don't want to hear one bit of whining about January 6 from people who defended the 2020 rioters. But I'm concerned that some people here seem to be actually believing that January 6 wasn't violent and wasn't a bad thing simply on account of the other side being dishonest about these categories the year prior. I think it matters what's actually true and it's important not to become so focused on pointing out the Calvinball the other side is playing that we convince ourselves that falsehoods are true.
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I just watched the video you linked. It appears to break down into two sections: people pushing and shoving with the police line, and people entering the capitol unrestrained. The police line footage is some pretty serious shaky-cam, but I do not see much evidence of serious violence. People are grappling, shoving, pushing each other around. The cops are using pepper spray. It looks significantly less violent than something like, say, this. Once they break through the police line, they walk around pretty calmly.
The phrase that comes to mind is "mostly peaceful".
That particular phrase comes to mind because it was used to describe riots featuring multiple people getting shot by organized, masked thugs armed with ar-15s and AKs. It was used to justify mass arson, absurd amounts of property damage, random individuals beaten and in some cases killed, mass intimidation of the nation as a whole, and the organized application of indiscriminate violence against innocent victims in pursuit of a partisan political goal, with the tacit and occasionally explicit backing of government officials at the local, state and federal level.
It seems to me that you are attempting to appeal to common ground and common sense. You are pointing out that this is, in fact, a mob, and that this mob is, in fact, physically fighting the cops, and that that is violence, so therefore this is a violent event. This is true. But you are talking to people who have made this exact appeal in the past, in the face of considerably worse violence, and who were told categorically by both their social peers and by the government and knowledge-production class as a whole that what they were seeing was not lawless violence, because the violence was a small minority of a given event, as in fact it is in the Jan 6th video you linked. The common ground you are appealing to has already been burned, and there is no way to get it back. This is the closest to a consensus on political violence that you are likely to ever see. It will only get worse from here as incidents accumulate.
That's all I'm saying!
I'm extremely sympathetic to the complaint of the obvious double standard. I don't understand why we can't acknowledge that 1) both Jan 6 and Summer 2020 were violent and bad; 2) Summer 2020 was more violent; 3) people who defended the Summer 2020 riots should be called out and shamed.
Some people seem to have this bizarre need to believe that if Jan 6 is claimed to be more violent than Summer 2020 but isn't, then that must mean Jan 6 wasn't violent or even bad. No! That's not how logic works!
Why should people be called out and shamed for defending the Summer of 2020 riots? Presumably the idea is that by doing so, we punish them for what they did and therefore disincentivize them and others from doing it again, yes?
Can this actually be accomplished? Do you think that we can, from where we stand today, straightforwardly punish or disincentivize the BLM riots or their supporters in any meaningful way? If you had a way of doing this, it would seem to me to be the preferable course of action.
I can't speak for others, but I do not think you can actually accomplish this in any meaningful way, so I see no benefit in pursuing such a strategy. I think your argument is never going to be anything but an isolated demand for rigor. If this rigor could be applied to blue violence, it would have been done during the 2020 riots. If it could not be applied to blue violence in the 2020 riots, there is no reason to believe that it will ever be applied to blue violence. If it will never be applied to blue violence, there is no reason to accept its application to what you agree is significantly lesser Red violence. It is better to either demand that enforcement be meaningfully applied to blue violence first, or to simply accept that the label can no longer function in any meaningful capacity for either side.
It seems to me that this rejection of the label in its entirety is, in fact, the best available punishment for the defection of the 2020 riots. If the way people treated those riots was wrong, if that wrong should have consequences, this is the best possible consequence available to those of us who actually care.
You claim that people are ignoring physical reality. It seems to me that you are ignoring social reality. "violence" is a label, a social tool. It is a word, not an integer or a rigorous equation. It is supposed to be an objective term applied fairly. If it is not used in that way, it would be better to not use it at all, and I think this is more or less the position of the other people you are arguing against as well. You don't get a consensus you can't maintain, and this is a consensus you definately can't maintain.
It's not enough to recognize a double-standard. You have to either remove it, or adapt to it. We can't remove this one, so adaption is the best option available.
Even granting everything you just said for the sake of argument, I still don't understand how that can or should result in someone actually believing in the privacy of their own mind that Jan 6 wasn't violent and bad. Or do you suspect that the people on The Motte claiming such things are being mask-on even here?
There's a classic Scott Alexander essay about this exact issue, so I'm just going to quote a bit:
In such a situation, there's a lot of different approaches available. Two examples:
"No, King was not a "criminal", in the sense you appear to be using the word."
"Yes, King was a "criminal" in a very limited sense, but that sense is not germane to this discussion. Applying it here adds no relevant information, so I object to it being so applied." In any case, simply insisting that the technical definition is met and therefore the label is fair to apply is unproductive, because the context swamps the technical question entirely.
Another way to say this would be that I'd happily agree that the protest was "violent" in the sense that my last paintball game was violent, and "bad" in the sense that Taco Bell messing up my last meal order was bad. I suspect that this sort of agreement is not what you or most other people arguing that they're "violent" and "bad" are looking for, though, which sort of indicates that it is in fact about more than the words themselves, that the implications matter as well. And if the implications do in fact matter, than it is more honest to argue the point than to allow a pretense of agreement where no meaningful agreement actually exists. To most people, "violent" and "bad" mean "something significant and meaningful should be done about this", and I strongly disagree.
none of this is a matter of masks being on or off. People cannot generally bring themselves to believe that this is a purely pedantic argument over strict, rigorous definitions, and so they are arguing what they perceive to be the core of the issue as best they can, I think.
I'm familiar with that classic essay, but that's not at all describing what I'm doing. I think the Jan 6 mob's behavior was, on its own merits, worthy of contempt, shame, and mass criminal charges. This is not because I'm lazily applying words like "violent" and letting my opinion of the event be colored by the baggage the word and its central examples come with. I don't particularly care what words you or anyone else want to use to describe it, as long as we agree on what actually physically happened there on the ground (which, alas, I'm not so sure we all do. You seem perhaps more reasonable than some other posters in this regard).
My opinion of the Jan 6 mob also has absolutely nothing to do with the detestable behavior of the 2020 rioters and their shameful defenders in the Blue Tribe. I still can't fathom how one's opinion of the two even could be related. As if our opinion of the perpetrators would change in a counterfactual world where one event happened and the other didn't. That is such an alien moral framework to me I don't even know how to begin to understand it.
And most people would probably be with you in punishing J6ers if the previous consensus on violence hadn't been utterly thrashed by progressives and fellow sympathizers. So yeah, they're not judged as harshly because the standards changed. We weren't aware they had changed, but media consensus dictatated otherwise. And this is somehow incomprehensibly alien to you? Come now. That's a pose.
So you would be willing to throw the book at J6ers because you feel they objectively warranted it. Congratulations; now what? I am more interested in fair treatment than I am justice as a terminal goal, because I think that's the superior algorithm for a host of reasons. So what if I think J6 qualified as violent by some technical metrics? So does play-shoving a friend, and I'm not going to entertain anybody calling that violent just because Webster says so.
So if BLM wasn't violent, then neither was J6. As I said before, this is indeed partly cynical. But is also deadly serious. I refuse to call J6 violent because of the valence of that word, much in the same way I don't consider assimilation to be cultural erasure, that taxation is theft, or that the Israeli treatment of Palestinians is ethnic cleansing, even though any of those could be considered technically true. This isnt being cryptic, or hiding behind a mask. Why do you assume this some deliberate, self-inflicted partisan error?
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People aren't oblivious to the logic. Well, maybe some are. I dont think most people here. But you said this take was out of step with a community thats supposedly grounded to reality. I think from the responses you can maybe see that it is based in reality - such as it is.
One of the consequences of institutions playing favorites with mob violence is that it causes many individuals to second-guess their own definitions. If the BLM riots didn't qualify as violence in popular sentiment, then who is to say J6 should? Am I being cheeky, or am I being serious? Could you even tell? Honestly, I'm in limbo between both states. Where does 'reality' have a say? That's a socially mediated phenomenon, as demonstrated quite clearly since 2020 onward.
'Violent' is one of those fuzzy terms that can mean anything from a playful shove, to murder, to mean insults. We probably had more national consensus on the thresholds for qualification in prior decades, and then that was wrecked in 2020. That you now see so many (what you regard as) peculiar opinions on this subject shouldn't be too surprising. And while it's hard to often tell if this is sincere or troll-ish (just reacting to progressives 'reality'), I think its often both.
You are! And I am! As intelligent beings capable of reasoning on our own. It's fine to say to a Blue Triber who defended the 2020 rioters, "Hey, if you thought summer 2020 wasn't violent, then I won't grant you that Jan 6 was violent. Your rules!" But you shouldn't believe that yourself in the privacy of your own mind merely because you're rubbing your opponents' noses in their hypocrisy.
There is no reasoning on our own when it comes to the meaning of words, as the meaning is inherently dictated by how people perceive it. If I start using a word differently from how others use it, that creates a problem, because then I'm no longer using the same words as others and thus have my own language. This undermines the value of languages as a tool of communication.
There is absolutely no hypocrisy or bad logic in changing the way you use words, when others use it differently as well.
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I do appreciate what you're saying here. I think most people here are just used to the ridiculous media caricatures of Jan. 6, and lumping you into the same bag. I'm not a fan of Trump, but still I could easily imagine myself in the shoes of some of the random people in that crowd. They came for a protest, obviously, not planning to overthrow Congress and impose Trump as El Presidente. Then all of a sudden, they're in the Capitol building, probably having no idea why except that's where the amorphous crowd went. They shout a bit, take a few photos, and go home, then find out that they're now on a watch list and barred from air travel and at serious risk of prosecution.
Oh, and note that one of them was literally shot and killed. The media described this (and four people dying from health issues) as "a protest that led to five deaths." Which is about as honest as reporting that George Floyd "committed a crime at a convenience store that led to one death".
This isn't how we should treat protestors, left or right. You're allowed to protest! And to be clear, the peaceful BLM protestors should also not face any consequences - it's not their fault some opportunists used the protests (and media cover) as a convenient excuse to attack people, set fires, and loot stores.
Except, in my experience, the same people who are sympathetic to the nonviolent members of the J6 mob also howl in outrage when the actually violent members of the J6 mob face criminal sentences for their acts. And again, I'm fine with insisting on there not being a double standard between the J6ers and the Summer 2020 protesters. I absolutely agree there was a double standard, and I'm open to the suggestion that J6ers get off the hook just out of fairness. But these people seem to believe that the J6ers did basically nothing wrong (or at least nothing wrong beyond the realm of trivial misdemeanors), not just that they ought to be treated lightly to keep with the Summer 2020 standard.
That's what boggles my mind - the suggestion that they did nothing wrong. I can only assume these people didn't bother watching the videos, or that they're just that thoroughly mind-killed from perpetual incubation in the culture wars? I really don't know. I don't get it. If you can see all the video footage and think "Nope. Basically just lost tourists. No violence of any significance. No transgression of anything important happening here", then the inferential distance between them and me is so vast as to not be bridgeable.
It may have something to do with the contrast between how the actually violent members of the J6 mob have been treated and the how the actually violent members of another mostly peaceful mob from recent memory.
I mean, they did trespass, and they did shove some cops, but that doesn't sound like the end of the world. Write them a ticket, or something.
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It is one thing to say it, to treat this as a rhetorical device, a debate tactic. It is another thing to actually implement it, to cement in your own mind, "going forward, these are the actual rules I will live by and argue for". This is probably one of the core differences between extremists like myself and moderate normies generally. It's very easy to say "You shouldn't do this, or X would result". But if X doesn't actually result, then your argument was never valid in the first place. You have to actually commit. The social rules and definitions actually have to change, permanently. the new reality must be recognized and accepted, and equanimity with it achieved, otherwise it's just a stupid bluff that's already been called.
I'm trying to communicate to you that I have done so, that I consider the norm you are appealing to not merely threatened, but actually destroyed, past-tense, of strictly historical interest, expired, gone. What you are arguing for is, in the abstract, better, but it is not a feature of the world we live in, and I see no benefit in pretending otherwise.
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By the standards established by the media in 2020 it was peaceful.
That is my claim.
It is a different claim than "it was peaceful".
The media and most of the country was happy to apologize for a base level of violence and conflict at protests in 2020. I'm not arguing this is a good standard, I'd in fact be happy to return to the old standards. But the old standards for everyone, not just politically approved protests.
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Extreme minimization of the symbolic importance of a mob invading the seat of government. According to this perspective, the march on rome was just a health-conscious bald man taking a stroll with friends. Any state in such a situation is justified in using lethal force, and lots of it, way earlier than the US actually did here. It's a threat to democracy in a way burning the whole city of minneapolis to the ground isn't.
Ah, sorry was there a military general leading armed troops into the capital? I must have missed that news story.
Protests that get talked about tend to either be symbolically important, or violent. There is often a claim that the January 6th riots were violent. I'd say by all standards established in 2020 the January 6th protest was peaceful. Was it symbolically important, yes, obviously.
It wasn't a threat to democracy. It was a threat to the illusion and symbology of our democracy. There is a big difference. A threat to democracy would be something like withholding news of a major medical intervention until the day after the election. Or lying about evidence that suggests one of the candidates has a corrupt family member taking bribes from foreign governments. Or changing the rules of how the elections are carried out and risking massive security breaches in an untested process. Or working with all major social media platforms to censor your political opponents. Those things all hamper a people's ability to govern themselves. You cannot effectively govern if you are lied to, can't talk with one another, and can't trust the means of giving your voice to the government.
January 6th burned the symbol, but the deep state and media were busy trashing the thing it was supposed to symbolize for the last 4 years. We woke up afterwards, looked around and realized the power of the symbol was gone, and you blame the people that burnt it, not the ones that spent all their time undermining it.
Also the Roman Senate deserved what they had coming to them, they deserved much worse than Julius Caesar. It was a morally bankrupt empire that filled its coffers by looting foreign countries. They deserved to be ruled by force, because that is the way they sought to rule the rest of the world. So sad that one of their best looters realized he didn't need to ride all the way out to the frontier to do some good looting. Read the story of Carthage's fall and I dare you to tell me you don't hope there is a special place in hell for those people.
Mussolini, not Caesar, reference, but they were both bald, so understandable.
Same thing. Power resides where men believe it resides. You're telling me about BLM and the democrats did this and that, and I sympathize, but really, it has nothing to do with the issue at hand. Anyone attempting to take the symbol of power by force should die for it, doesn't matter who it is. It's sacro-sanct, like a vestal virgin or a tribune of the plebs. We have elections and stuff to decide who gets to hold the magic scepter.
Also, Rome.
Also, this guy was one of two generals that organized the "militants" for the march.
I mean, the italian army could have swatted mussolini's rabble like flies if vic emmanuel hadn't been such a wet noodle. Caesar's XIII's legion, and later the rest, could not be swatted, it turned out.
You mean they could have kicked off a civil war against the political faction favored by the military, police, and people that wanted to keep the factories running. That probably would have had a predictable outcome. Smart man to skip the bloodshed and get to the end result.
Vickem the third was a useless retard, I'll die on that hill. You're the friggin' king- right there, it's a good chunk conservatives in your pocket, including the military. Plus all of the left and center. No one understood his decision.
Edit: Here's what wiki has to say:
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Even by that standard Jan 6th was harmless. Do you or anyone else believe that delaying that event changed who is president, or who won the election?
I made the comparison in another post but I'll bring it up here. Man buys his girl $5000 engagement ring and proposes. A few months later she catches him cheating and throws out the ring in anger.
Man: "You are crazy why did you throw out the $5000 ring?"
Woman: "You cheated on me you asshole!"
Man: "I get that you feel bad and all, but what does that have to do with the ring? Can we please focus on the issue at hand."
Don't ruin the thing that is being symbolized and then complain that someone has trashed the now meaningless symbol. All of the complaints about ruining something sacred sound hollow.
No, it did nothing. But it may have emboldened the next mob, the next coup , and that is reason enough to crush it.
Seems like you’re implying I ruined things, but I’m not blue tribe, american, or progressive. And you owe me one ring. Sex is sex, but money is cash.
I don’t get your point. It’s over, democracy means nothing anymore, is that it? Boogaloo Day? Can’t tell the difference between the worst civil war and your day-to-day life? Wouldn't have pegged you as a blackpill overdose patient.
Or it did exactly what it needed to do, which was make everyone aware that the symbol is dead and meaningless. The next mob will be approved or denied depending on the flag they wave, just as it was in all of 2020. There was no coup on January 6th, that is a ridiculous idea. The deep state need not commit a coup, it was already in charge and continued to be in charge.
You are admittedly a stand in for people that aren't here right now. The people I blame would never be on themotte, but I have to hear them talk all the same. All public lobbies decided at some point that news channels are the only thing that can ever be displayed, and since then my ability to ignore the clowns in Washington has decreased.
I don't think democracy and our government are a very important aspect of America. I see those things as downstream of culture and the market, and those are still pretty good and healthy in most places in America. It would be a shame to ruin the culture/market by starting a civil war.
Having a broken system of government is going to mean that cultural and market problems pile up for longer and our less likely to get solved. The fact that I usually don't have to worry about or deal with government was a feature, not a bug.
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Ah, but then the true attack on democracy was the media telling people it was an attack on democracy!
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This happens routinely. Hell, it happened yesterday. For some reason it doesn’t seem important to the powers that be.
I’m just telling you what a self-respecting sovereign would do in his house. Put one of those ‘we don’t call 911’ signs at the entrance, and machine-gun anyone who enters without knocking.
That's honestly what I'd always assumed would happen if someone tried to jump the fence at the White House until this weird incident:
In retrospect, my perspective seems childish, but I legitimately thought that leaping the fence and running towards the White House would get you sniped, or attacked by guard dogs, or... well, at least something.
I don’t think it’s childish, it’s necessary. Current responses are too soft, dare I say, decadent. It is not unthinkable, and it has happened in history, that one day a mob will just waltz in there, slap the president around a little, declare they’re in charge now, and everyone will go: ‘What are we supposed to do, spill blood? We are civilized, let’s just do what they say and hope for the best“.
It comes down to the same disconnect I talked about last time, that somehow public life does not matter, only your private red lines. This is a gigantic collective red line, representing an almost unfathomable amount of lethal force directed at everybody. If it is not defended, nothing ever should be.
Oh, I mean I was being childish in thinking that the United States would have a competent response.
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The government isn’t a place, it’s a bunch of people. Occupied Capitol and White House? Send in the National Guard and some highly militarized Capitol Police, clear them out; or just let them have the buildings and reconvene elsewhere. America doesn’t have a magic throne or a Darksaber, the Q Shaman sitting in the Speaker’s seat doesn’t make him Speaker, and the Army won’t obey a mob.
It would take an assault strategically equivalent to that shown in Olympus Has Fallen to move the needle on government compliance with a mob.
I can't tell if you guys are blinded by partisan bias or if you actually believe this. Might as well hand them your ‘monopoly on force’ card right there. What if they start putting people in ‘prison’ like the bolsheviks 1917? Just negotiate for their release by granting the rebels taxing rights over fisheries in northern maine?
And this from people who are vociferous supporters of castle doctrine and stand your ground laws in any other context.
By your argument, the government already lost its monopoly of force card in 2020, so there's nothing left to discuss regarding Jan 6th. You think the riot has to be responded to or further riots are emboldened. Well, they didn't respond and further riots have, in fact, been emboldened; having tolerated and even endorsed well over a hundred riots within the last few years, there is no reasonable argument remaining why this one riot, far less violent than many and perhaps even most of the previous examples, is finally the point where the line must be drawn.
The actual problem is that it isn't actually possible for you to credibly advocate cracking down on riots in the abstract, because everyone watched massive, nation-wide riots not get cracked down on for more than a year, and then this one day of mild scuffling got treated like a national disaster. Your options are between no enforcement, or enforcement on only one side. If you choose the latter, the people on that side will recognize that your appeals to law and order only apply when it's to their disadvantage, and they will be increasingly inclined to decline their consent to our social system generally. This outcome is significantly worse than establishing a norm that low-level violence will be tolerated impartially, but people apparently believe that the integrity of the social system itself is essentially impervious. By the time it's obvious that they're wrong, it will be much, much too late to change course.
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Well Biden's got the attack dogs covered now I guess -- the Secret Service will need to pry them off of themselves first though!
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Arguably that is the most important government function. The shared illusion we all (for a given value of all) pretend to believe. The ceremony is more important than the actual way the system works. Any threat to that isn't a physical or procedural threat, it is in fact an existential threat to the entire edifice. Almost any type of government from feudal to oligarchic to democratic to republican has legitimacy as long as people believe in the ceremonies, whether that is the crowning of the King enshrining their Divine Right to rule or the counting of electoral college votes enshrining the victor has been chosen by The People.
We can run out onto the air off a ledge as long as we all agree not to look down...
A ceremony is supposed to symbolize something.
In this case a ritualized agreement that 'hey it was a good fight in the election, but we all agree it was fair, and we will now crown the winner'.
The obvious problem is that it didn't actually symbolize that for a decent portion of the country. I personally believe the actual votes were generally tallied correctly, but that it was not a "fair" election in many other senses of the word.
January 6th broke the symbol, but they certainly didn't break what it was supposed to symbolize. That was slowly broken over the preceding four years, and then quickly and fully broken in 2020.
I also generally believe that attacking symbols of a group is a bit more civilized than the alternative ... which is just directly targeting people in that group. When foreign protestors burn the American flag, its sometimes because they don't have an actual American to burn or behead. Taking a crap on pelosi's desk is better than showing up to her home and taking a hammer to her husband.
Oh sure, they had already lost faith in the symbology, for sure, they had already looked down so to speak. And on a personal scale you are correct attacking a symbol is much less severe than a person.
On a civilizational scale though, people are replaceable, shared symbols are not (though their physical representations can be). Very few people are as individually important as a shared belief system to the stability of a polity.
It feels very much like blaming a whistleblower for the crimes they uncover.
Or the toxic relationship equivalent of a guy calling his ex-fiancee "crazy" for throwing away the engagement ring when she caught him cheating. Yes, I get it dude, it was a $5000 ring, but maybe its your fault for cheating and ruining the relationship in the first place?
What people tend to forget is that a symbol being destroyed only really matters when the thing it symbolized has been hollowed out and rendered useless. If there had been a freak accident and the capital building was rendered unuseable on that day in January 6th, would democracy have been in danger? No, obviously not. They would have just reconvened and done the thing again. If that $5000 ring had been lost but they were a happy loving couple, its not like they would have called the wedding off. Even when the Capital buildings were burned down in the war of 1812 it was not a real threat to "democracy" or republican rule. Those institutions were strong at the time, and it meant they just put the symbol right back up and it continued to have meaning. And the fresh coat of white paint to cover up the burnt sections just became a fun new little tradition.
Sure, we're looking at a meta standpoint here. At this level we're not looking to blame individuals. At this level their behaviors are outcomes of society wide events and situations. Jan 6th is a symptom, and part of a cascade.
If you want to arrest the cascade (ie, you think the illusion is still worth propping up) you might need to take action against individuals/groups. But at this level they aren't specifically to blame, more agents of what social events are going on.
Is prosecuting Jan 6th protestors going to be the white coat of paint? Or the catalyst for further symbol failing.
Is the guy prosecuting his ex-fiancee for theft of the $5000 ring really hoping to have a harmonious marriage with her in the future?
If they were hoping to repair the broken symbology Harris should have made a point to pardon the most obviously peaceful protestors. Then she should have launched an investigation into the timing of the vaccine news release. Then launched an investigation into the people at the FBI responsible for suppressing the story about the former president's son and his corrupt dealings with Ukraine. Another large investigation would have been launched into the handling of the security at the event.
The outcome should have been a massive reform of the FBI, specifically making sure they get rid of all their "setup the retards to do terrorism" campaigns. An explicit expectation of non-partisanship, and a removal of the FBI and CIA from all internal political disputes.
And invite Trump to speak at Biden's funeral. The president passed peacefully in the night, two months into his presidency. Trump can hopefully be trusted to say a few nice things. He then is forced to retire from politics as the new old age restriction is added to the constitution. Trump goes back to being a cultural icon, and talking shit about how he is healthier than the young guys currently running.
That is the alternate history where I see things sorta kinda working out. The actual history we got looks like the American people saying "fuck it, lets try this again until you learn the lesson or we break this country apart".
All of that is pulling the curtain back further. Remember truth will not help. Truth is the opposite of what is needed, symbols were built on myth not truth. Which isn't to say doubling down will work, but you can't look down. If more people start to look down, you're done, the only possible option for success is to convince everyone else those people telling you to look down are wrong/crazy/lying/evil. That's pretty much been the tack we've taken in the past.
The guy prosecuting his fiancee for theft isn't going to have a marriage with her, but he might with his new fiancee, depending on the story he tells her. Though what works in interpersonal relationships is not the same as what works in society, so I am not sure the analogy holds. A relationship built on a myth is unlikely to succeed. A society built on a myth might be a requirement for success.
The new myth would have been something like Biden and the deep state geriatrics conspiring to ruin the country, with cooler heads prevailing and deciding that hey we need to get the old fogies out and let the hot young people run stuff. This would have also been a myth. I don't Biden is to blame for getting his pants on straight in the morning, much less some coup.
I said it elsewhere, I don't think the government is overall that important to American Society. Our culture and marketplace matter more, and government is somewhat downstream of those things. If government is broken it doesn't mean we all fall off the cliff. It will just increasingly get in the way of the good things like culture and the marketplace, and things won't get better as fast as they used to. But we are a long way off from the pain of government outweighing the pain of switching governments violently. Or at least that is the case from where I'm sitting. However, people reach that tradeoff threshold at different points.
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Now I want to watch a film Don't Look Down that parodies Don't Look Up based on this Looney Tunes premise.
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I want to emphasize the flip here once again, because I feel that many people either fail to remember how extreme it was or claim that it was exaggerated. In back-to-back blog posts, my county public health department went from this school-marm scolding:
To this endorsement of mostly peaceful protests:
...
There's some pro forma muttering about continuing to wear a mask, but it is just absolutely wild to imagine the shift from telling people that playing Frisbee is too dangerous to saying that the protests are "essential".
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