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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?
I think I didn't do a good enough job explaining what I mean, so I can genuinely see how you would think that. To clarify, I'm fine with outwardly downplaying J6 because of the new standard that Summer 2020 wrought. What I'm confused and concerned about is that some people seem to believe that J6 wasn't bad on its own merits. As in, if Summer 2020 hadn't happened, it seems some people still wouldn't think J6 was a big deal and that the perpetrators still shouldn't have been charged or even condemned. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding them.
As I explained to FC, it's not that Jan 6 was bad "because it was violent", as if we're robotically applying a flowchart of "matches dictionary definition of violent" -> "is therefore worthy of condemnation and criminal charges". Jan 6 was worthy* of condemnation and criminal charges because of what actually happened there. I don't care what words you want to use to describe it. I care that people see what happened and condemn what they're seeing as harshly as I believe it ought to be condemned. Yet so many people seem to have convinced themselves that it wasn't actually a big deal and that we don't actually see what we can plainly see on video.
* Again, on its own merits. There's a reasonable argument to be made that the new standard of Summer 2020 compels us to go light on J6ers, at least outwardly.
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