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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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