Of course it doesn't, the perps were discussing this openly and in plaintext on various websites which are still in the air. Who needs surveillance. What you do need is to react to available intelligence, but this isn't the first time in history that that doesn't happen.
They are also presently discussing their next day-out for rednecks in the form of another insurrection and coup attempt on the 17th of January. Let's hope that this time some people will take notice because while everybody seems to be happy that this effort failed from the perspective of the perps it looks like a major victory: they took the bloody capitol with such ease that 10 minutes more planning would have had them hold house or senate members or even the VP or the speaker hostage. Or worse.
The problem isn't that we don't have the tools to fight these terrorists. The problem is that many of our politicians and police are siding with the terrorists, or at the very least sympathetic to their cause.
This isn't a new phenomenon either. This has been documented [0] time and time again [1].
The fact that the DoD time line of events shows it took Army officials in charge of DC National Guard 90 minutes to approve deployment after DC mayoral request (while they watch it all in realtime on TV) certainly lends credence to the sympathy angle.
Who is the people in charge of keeping unauthorized people out of the capitol building. The police, or the army?
Let say we have the worst case scenario where a bunch of criminals successfully enter the capital building and occupy it. Is the best response to send the army, or as many police units as needed to apprehend the criminals and put them in jail?
By sending the army what we are saying is that there existed a creditable scenario that the people attacking could have taken control of the US government and ruled over the nation.
> Who is the people in charge of keeping unauthorized people out of the capitol building. The police, or the army?
The National Guard is not the Army, it's a dual-purpose force that is both a reserve for the Army and a reserve for civil authorities during emergencies including civil disorder.
> By sending the army what we are saying is that there existed a creditable scenario that the people attacking could have taken control of the US government and ruled over the nation.
No, even if we were talking about the Army proper, an existential threat to the government is not the criteria under the Insurrection Act for their use to disperse insurgents.
The militia, armed forces, or both may be used (among other scenarios authorized in law) against “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy” which “opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws”. 10 USC Sec 253.
The National Guard is a military reserve force, trained in military combat. A few hundred years ago the roles of the police and the army might have been much more similar, but today we have better ideas in how to address an occupied building.
History is full of examples and dead bodies where the military has been used against its own people who oppose or obstruct the execution of law. It many countries it also follows a period of regret and new laws in order to prevent something similar to ever happen again. Just because the government has a law that gives them authorization to send the military in order to secure a building, it doesn't mean it is a good idea.
Would the military trained personnel have done a better job during the capital attack than the police trained one?
> The National Guard is a military reserve force, trained in military combat.
The Guard is a force whose missions include support for Civil authorities during disturbances, and it's training, equipment, organizations, planning, etc. reflect that.
And, quite arguably, that are better than, and trained better than the police for, dealing with large scale civil unrest.
Also the DOJ and FBI have known for a while many local police departments are ideologically comprimised towards Right Extremism and aren't really doing much[0]
I don’t think even those politicians and officers wanted the Capitol breached; what happened was they didn’t think there people would do it. It’s a huge bias. If the same was discussed by anyone outside that category of people it would have been met with the appropriate preparation and mitigation measures.
This really speaks to the problem, though. They've proven to be more than happy to bait the mob when they think they can use it to consolidate their own power.
The GOP has been doing a large scale equivalent of swinging nunchucks around in public. The problem isn't that sometimes it swings around the wrong way and whacks someone they didn't intend to whack. Well, no, it is, of course that's a problem. But the more fundamental problem is that they're recklessly swinging an unpredictable weapon in public in an effort to be intimidating in the first place. And the problem is that people who didn't feel personally threatened by this behavior just sat there and came up with sorry excuses to try and rationalize it. This is deeply antisocial comportment that should have no place in the top echelons of civil society.
There’s also a huge difference between people standing in the street shouting that they don’t like you and breaking down the doors to a restricted federal building after saying they were going to kill you and/or shut down a civic proceeding.
There police protests included riots, arson, looting, and murders. Harris didn't condemn this until months later when specifically pressed on the point. Just as Trump has always condemned violence when specifically asked.
No police were killed by BLM protestors. And considering the vastly larger amount of protests with BLM (more than 9000 protests), it's a wonder more violence didn't happen.
Had every BLM protest been as violent and unhinged as the capitol protests, we would have had thousands of deaths.
> Had every BLM protest been as violent and unhinged as the capitol protests,
Aside from the single police officer, all the deaths seem to have been protestors. At least two were killed by police - one was shot by the police, and the other was pushed off a balcony.
It is the case that between two and three dozen people were killed during the BLM protests and associated actions like the autonomous zone, with nearly all of them, judging by the articles I have found, being victims of the protestors rather than protestors themselves.
IIRC there are 25 deaths attributed to the "BLM protests". That includes all of them, across the country, likely a number of events in the high hundreds or low thousands. AFAIK that number does not include any police deaths, though there were a couple attributed to right-wing extremists in the same period.
In a single medium-sized event, Wednesday's riot got 5 people killed. One of them was a policeman, and at least three of them were due to violence. So in terms of fatalities per participant-day, Wednesday's event was probably at least two orders of magnitude more violent than the "BLM protests" taken as a whole.
I think that's a significant difference, and one that exposes this sort of whataboutism as false equivalency (in addition to the other issues with whataboutism).
Let me help you understand my comment. I put “BLM protests” in quotes because I am specifically talking about the protests last summer that resulted from several high-profile police brutality incidents with black victims. I don’t really consider any particular group labeling itself “BLM” to speak for that particular movement, hence the quotes.
In a similar vein, I’m not blaming the people who stormed the Capitol on Wednesday for previous right-wing attacks, including on LEOs e.g. the boog boi murders earlier last year.
The police murders were committed under the BLM protests.
Consequently, the media mislabeling of the reign of terror campaign this summer doesn’t legitimize destroying communities because a few people were pissed off and corporations attempted to add an air of legitimacy to it.
I watched a bunch of people chant at a door on Wednesday, a couple windows were broken, a guy in viking shit flexed on a chair, an unarmed woman was shot climbing through a window, and my feed is filled with hyperbolic morons screaming sedition and traitors.
The police murders occurred before 2020, so they can't have occurred during the protests I'm talking about. That seems pretty darn simple.
> Consequently, the media mislabeling of the reign of terror campaign this summer doesn’t legitimize destroying communities because a few people were pissed off and corporations attended to add an air of legitimacy to it.
Engaging with any subjective representation of the protests I am talking about is outside the scope of what I'm willing to discuss—for those who've been subjected to it, I can't compete with the right-wing media's firehose of disinformation. My point about fatalities per participant-day stands as a metric of the violence during last summer's protests compared to the riot last Wednesday, and you can take it or leave it.
the problem is that both sides of this issue have internalized a subjective representation of events and their doctrine moving forward is based on that subjectivity. this is how politics work. to understand where the right is operating from, you need to be willing to understand their narrative as they understand it and the same goes the other way. this imo is the only way to begin broaching the utter communication breakdown that is happening. for a not insignificant portion of our country, the cultural lockstep that emerged between corporate avatars, media, and government officials cheering on what they experienced as months of violence, destruction and lawlessness (and not to mention a jarring reversal on the necessity of lockdowns that have served as a de facto economic sanction on middle america) has fundamentally destroyed trust in these institutions, more alarmingly, it has shown that violence is the path to results.
it is very important to understand the mindset of these people and how it brought them to the capital.
on my part i think my initial comment was poorly constructed as this was the main point i wanted to communicate.
It’s interesting that there is one place in this country where protest should be encouraged and that is at the halls of power in Washington DC, and the media feeds the lie that destroying your communities in fire is legitimate protest while being angry at and petitioning your federal government at their seat of power is sedition.
Ask yourself that question, why the reaction to this event?
It looks like you've been using HN primarily for political and ideological battle. We don't allow that, because it destroys what HN is supposed to be for: curious, thoughtful conversation on topics of intellectual interest.
I'm not going to ban you right now because you posted better comments several months ago, but please don't do this. Instead, if you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
> destroying your communities in fire is legitimate protest while being angry at and petitioning your federal government at their seat of power is sedition.
Do you seriously actually believe this is a balanced representation of the events we're talking about? A simple yes or no, please.
Supposedly more cops died in one day of (presumably Thin Blue Line supporting) riots at the US Capital than did many months of the so-called "anti-cop" demonstrations. Perhaps if the police cleared out the MAGA folks as enthusiastically as they did the peaceful demonstrators for Trump's church photo-op, then a lot of this could be avoided.
And the goal of the BLM demonstration was not violence, whereas that was the goal of at least some (if not many) of the MAGA folks. Quite a few folks walking around with zip ties and more than one noose as well.
Going back to July 27, 2020, Trump tweeted:
> Anarchists, Agitators or Protestors who vandalize or damage our Federal Courthouse in Portland, or any Federal Buildings in any of our Cities or States, will be prosecuted under our recently re-enacted Statues & Monuments Act. MINIMUM TEN YEARS IN PRISON. Don’t do it! @DHSgov
She was talking about BLM protests, whose goal was not violence:
> "I know there are protests still happening in major cities across the United States, I'm just not seeing the reporting on it that I had for the first few weeks," Colbert said.
> "That's right," Harris replied. "But they're not gonna stop. They're not gonna stop, and this is a movement, I'm telling you."
> “This is not America,” a woman said to a small group, her voice shaking. She was crying, hysterical. “They’re shooting at us. They’re supposed to shoot BLM, but they’re shooting the patriots.”
> Maybe that wasn't the goal, as it also wasn't the goal of most of the Trump protestors.
People were talking about storming Congress months ago:
> “Will you and several hundred more go with me to DC and fight our way into the Congress and arrest every Democrat who has participated in the coup?” Holland posted on Friday. “We may have to shoot and kill many of the Communist BLM and ANTIFA Democrat foot soldiers to accomplish this!!!”
> One of Lang Holland’s posts reflected Donald Trump’s baseless allegations that the presidential election he lost to Joe Biden was stolen, and said: “Death to all Marxist Democrats.”
> Holland, who led the police department in Marshall, Arkansas, also wrote “take no prisoners” and “leave no survivors”.
> In a popular thread referencing a Trump tweet promoting the debunked conspiracy theory of election fraud, one user asked, "what if Congress ignores the evidence?"
> "Storm the Capitol," was a popular reply.
> Five days later, on January 6, as pro-Trump militia proceeded to do exactly that, the mood on thedonald.win switched to jubilation and outright defiance of police, with thousands joining "watching party" message threads.
> "This is what Trump told us to do!" a top post in one of these threads read.
Yes, no doubt some people were talking about it. Some people participating in BLM were talking about killing all the cops. Neither one of these is a representative view of most the protesters. Indeed in the Trump case, apparently some of the violence was protestors fighting protestors to stop them from getting into the Capitol.
The claim for 50 secret service agents being hospitalized comes from one unnamed source in the trump administration; and both fox news and newsmax have a strong right-leaning bias, so it's hard for me to believe it's true at all.
I think that's possibly an over-charitable view, but if you accept it it still paints them as negligent and incompetent. "Some terrorists have explicitly said they will do this thing, in public, but, eh, they probably won't, so why worry about it" is a ridiculous take for someone in their position.
Do you have evidence to this? No one ever expects to have perfect trust in voting (or anything). There are 155 million votes that had to be counted. If we're talking about a few thousand errors, that doesn't change anything unless they are highly concentrated in specific areas. The question is if it is good enough the trust the results. But if you expect perfection that this is a game that can never be won. Never.
That's not an answer. I am well aware of defcon's voting village. I'm well aware of many of the issues with voting machines and actively advocate for better security (and voting methods).
But I think you'd taking the results too far. You'd have to hack into hundreds or thousands of machines within a single state to change its votes. Worse, you have to do this in a way that looks plausible. You're talking about a major conspiracy that would have to take place. And if Russia is going to change votes why wouldn't China, Israel, or others? So they would have to all organize together so they don't undo one another's work. And that would have to happen without us (NSA, FBI, CIA) finding out. You're talking about a conspiracy that would be very difficult to pull off and require high amounts of organization.
Hacking a computer is easy. Hacking a thousand computers in a room full of people that are worried about their computers being hacked? Different story.
There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.
The problem with verifiable voting is that it has to break one the properties of American democracy, the secret ballot, or else it doesn't really work. As a voter, I want to see that a) it was recorded that I voted, and b) what my vote was. In the case of invented voter fraud, both A and B need to be possible, but making both of those possible mean it's possible to show who I voted for. Who I voted for is a secret, and is one of the central tenants to American democracy. I can talk about supporting candidate A in public and vote for candidate B in private and a lot of properties follow from that.
The challenge isn't technical, it's a social problem, and technical measures won't solve social problems.
This problem might have a technical solution though. First, each voter generates a private key and publishes the corresponding public key. Then implement a homomorphic vector addition, everybody submits their vote as an encrypted vector, and then you somehow add the vectors together homomorphically, i.e. the addition can be done without decrypting them first.
You need some kind of way to prove that each vector corresponds to a legal vote (i.e. increases the vote total of at most one candidate by at most one vote.) Then you need some way to decrypt the encrypted vector sum using some amalgamation of everybody's public keys, but without allowing to decrypt subtotals for particular subsets.
You can publish all the encrypted votes received and the decrypting amalgamation, so anyone with the capability to download and process a large data set. Anyone can check that every vote was cryptographically approved by a distinct pre-registered voter and the votes were totaled honestly.
If we assume an upper bound of 1 billion voters, each 1 kb of encrypted vector size adds 1 TB to the raw vote data. Based on existing "clever" cryptosystems that do similar things (e.g. ZK-snarks), it's reasonable to guess we won't need more than 100 kb per encrypted vector. So an entire 1-billion-voter election could be processed by a small storage cluster with 100 TB, you can't verify it on your laptop, but the technically inclined could verify the vote themselves for probably somewhere around $1,000 - $20,000 of hardware and sysadmin time.
I don't know if there's existing crypto math to do this, but I'm pretty sure it at least hasn't been proven impossible.
The kind of crypto primitives needed for this kind of system might be found someday.
It's pretty sad watching all the comments here calling this suggestion mccarthyism, witch hunt, etc. Police departments should be doing this and holding their employees to a high standard that's not a witch hunt that's common sense.
If you are a member of a violent gang or are too racist to police justly you are too dangerous to employ as a cop. Not looking for and removing these people is intentionally turning a blind eye to the extreme danger they present to people in their communities.
Because just calling for it does nothing. It’s clear that a top-down approach would be much more effective at solving systemic racism in law enforcement than a bottom-up one. The racists get witch-hunted and fired? Good. People being scared to be overtly racist is a good thing.
When the East German police force was dissolved, its employees were allowed to apply for positions in the new police force (though without a guarantee of a position). Except for those with ties to the Stasi, who were barred. There is precedent for such an approach, and at least in that case it seems to have largely worked.
was this preceded by mass social and economic unrest and presided over by a government half the population views as illegitimate?
good governance can bring the country back together, crackdowns, purges and retaliation will create the monster that you think is already there.
We've banned this account for using HN primarily for political battle. That is not allowed here, regardless of your politics, because it destroys the curious conversation that this site is supposed to exist for.
You've been using HN primarily for political battle. We ban accounts that do that, because it destroys the curious conversation that this site exists for.
When I looked back through your account history trying to find examples of using the site as intended, rather than political flamewar, I ran across https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25626137 instead. That's not a political flamewar comment, but it still breaks the site guidelines badly. I've banned this account until we get some indication that you want to use HN as intended. If you do, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us some reason to believe it.
You don't see the irony of censoring a leftie in a thread that complains about the right getting censored by a 'left-wing witch hunt' do you?
I have had plenty of interesting debates on here; when it comes to politics however, HN has a certain bias and an ideological blind spot. The narrative that the left is censoring everybody while you have Republican legislators passing this[1] is laughable, yet the narrative persists because it's not being challenged.
I do try to see the other side[2] when I think it makes sense. Playing victim of the left while a right-wing mob just stormed the Capitol is not one of these times, sorry.
The cynic in me thinks this is what YC wants; it promotes the sort of thinking on which VC thrives. I have little reason to believe otherwise. There's few people on HN challenging these narratives and now there's even fewer.
This is a better-than-average reply to a we've-banned-you. I appreciate that and will try to respond.
I didn't consider your ideological preference when banning you. It would be the same if you were arguing for the opposite side, so no, I don't see any irony—the logic seems boringly straightforward. Sometimes I don't even know what ideological preference an account has—it turns out if you do something often enough, you can train yourself to mask out those bits.
Claims of "bias and ideological blind spot" about HN are legion, but they're wildly contradictory. The people you disagree with make just as impassioned claims about how overrun HN is with bias in favor of your side. I could give you so, so many links...
I totally get how a cynic would trace this back to YC's business interests, and there actually is a chain that connects HN moderation to that, but it's different than the one you imagine. Here's how we actually think about this: the way to maximize HN's value to YC is to maximize how interesting it is to the community [1]. I know it might be hard to believe, but it's that simple. It's a rare treat to get to work on a problem where you literally only need to optimize for one thing and you know what it is [2].
The neat thing is that you can imagine this motivation to be as sinister and greedy and evil as you like, and it's still awesome. If YC owns the leading place on the internet for good hackers to gratify their intellectual curiosity...that is crazy valuable [3]. Why would we manipulate HN for any other purpose? That would be dumb—it would lose us the good will of the community, which is the entire thing. Whichever way you slice this problem, YC's interests are aligned with keeping this community happy. It's a fortunate historical accident that we ended up in this position, and personally I feel grateful for that (because it allows me to do this job without much conflict of interest) and am pretty fierce about protecting it.
The things we ban accounts for—like snark, flamewar, attacking other users, ideological and political battle—are what causes a forum like HN to get less intellectually interesting. That's why we don't want flamewars. It's not a moral or an ethical point. It's just that flamewars are boring. They feel like they aren't boring, for a while, but that's an illusion—it confuses high-activation with curiosity, and in reality those two are mutually exclusive. Once the anger and activation have vented themselves, there's nothing left, and people are left feeling bitter and disconnected from each other—hardly a condition in which to playfully explore the world.
I don't mean to imply that the things you care about and are fighting for don't matter. They do matter, and that's true of the others as well. But this is an optimization problem. Our job is to keep HN interesting. Scorched earth is not interesting [4]. Therefore we have to ban accounts that take this place in that direction.
[3] I'm not saying HN is good at it—I wish it were better. The point is that the niche is so valuable that anything else YC might do to try to squeeze value out of it would be dumb. Also, it's all relative: if the rest of the internet descends into flames and HN can manage to remain interesting, its value grows. We're basically in an outrun-the-bear joke.
The hypocrisy is that the US has and is supporting 'which hunts' all over the globe, which the right largely supports. Perhaps it's just that it's also starting to come back home now.
Appeal to white supremacists to attempt to build a winning coalition has been a core GOP strategy for more than a half century; that part of the right-wing that isn't itself white supremacist relies on support from white supremacists to advance their agenda. (To be fair, that was true of the Democratic Party instead of the GOP from the founding until the 1960s, but for a couple of breaches between the extreme racists and the rest of the party that were usually healed in short order. White supremacy has always been a powerful enough force in America that it's always been a significant influence on at least one major party.)
I truly, truly do not understand. We know far right extremists have infiltrated law enforcement agencies. We know many people who participated in the terrorist attack on the Capitol were in law enforcement. We know even some of the uniformed officers were fraternizing with and aiding the terrorists. These are facts.
Why on earth would we not try to detect and remove these people from law enforcement agencies?
Many countries have had to prune their police forces of extremists. East Germany, Northern Ireland, South Africa... Generally, the negative consequences of this have been minor and manageable; it's a path already well-trodden.
That's absolutely a real and serious issue, but it's a separate issue to the dissolution and reform of the East German police during unification, which didn't lead to a communist insurgency.
I completely agree, 2 separate issues, one was successfully finished, as there are no new Stasi members joining the police ranks - but the other issue is ever present. I think there should be "radicalization" checks for any people in position of power (Police/Military), and if they don't uphold the values of the country anymore, they should be let go from their jobs.
Even if that's what would happen (and I don't think it is), an insurgency is better than those people being authorized agents of the state. Better of two bad alternatives, but deradicalization of in-power authorities while they still hold power is an impossibly tall order.
As for the mass infiltration of law enforcement by far right extremists, both official agencies such as the FBI and independent investigators have produced copious evidence and all reached that conclusion.
As for law enforcement involvement in the terrorist attack on the capitol, there are plenty of videos. Law enforcement agencies around the country have also disclosed that some of their officers were involved, which seems like an odd thing to fabricate.
I'm not at all interested in mob justice (going in either direction). But still, comparing this idea to McCarthyism is sneaking toward Godwin's Law territory.
There's a pretty big gulf between a relatively abstract set of political and economic opinions, and an ideology that views some groups of people as sub-human and inherently criminal, and specifically seeks to disenfranchise them. One can quite reasonably make the case that individuals who hold opinions along those lines are temperamentally incapable of protecting and serving their community. Their whole community.
The Chicago Public Library had a gallery documenting victims of torture by the Chicago Police Department. Plenty of photographs, making it quite clear that it was almost exclusively a thing that White cops did to Black and Latinx citizens. It's hard to see how we as a society can hope to eliminate state-committed atrocities like that if we're not even willing to weed the ideology that produces them out of the paramilitary wings of our local governments.
Are you saying white supremacy is just another political ideology in the marketplace of ideas? Because I don’t believe that. White supremacists must be removed from all law agencies. And they are usually pretty public about their white supremacy on their facebooks.
I'm sure if you went and asked them if they were racist, most of them would not claim to be. But, considering that the stated purpose of the protest is founded on the continued belief that the only possible explanation for Trump's election loss was a epic-scale government conspiracy, we're not exactly dealing with a group of people whose beliefs about the state of things are easy to reconcile with reality.
Speaking on a more macro scale, the movement that produced that protest and this insurrection is so transparently rooted in racism, with roots going back at least as far as the Southern Strategy, that we're now to the point that trying to apologize for them is, at the absolute best, an act of petty denialism.
Funny how you suddenly supposedly have sympathy for the victims of McCarthyism while the right is still today calling anyone left of the far right a communist marxist.
The problem is that absolute power means people in power can become the terrorist. Hitler, Mussolini, Mao, Polpot or Stalin took so much power that they became the terrorist themselves.
They killed hundreds of millions of people. You could be raped of tortured at any time.
It is not white supremacist. It is anyone with power.
Right now in the US, the antifa movement is as violent or more violent than anyone else. Certainly the Guardian is not an unbiased source.
Which doesn't mention anything about Mayor Bowser refusing offers of assistance - only the Capitol Police. Indeed, it cites her asking for assistance on December 31st in preparation.
> Let's hope that this time some people will take notice because while everybody seems to be happy that this effort failed from the perspective of the perps it looks like a major victory: they took the bloody capitol with such ease that 10 minutes more planning would have had them hold house or senate members or even the VP or the speaker hostage. Or worse.
Except that... then what? That isn't how a coup works. You can't just take hostages and then make demands about who gets to be the President. It has no effect. Official actions taken under duress are invalid. As soon as you leave the building nobody is going to honor anything you demanded.
It's easy to take a building. Just show up with greater numbers than there are cops in the area. But a building is not the government. Physical possession of the Senate floor isn't what grants the power to do anything. It's purely symbolic.
The fact is that law enforcement operates primarily through deterrence. You can install some bulletproof glass and things like that, but the main thing preventing murders and such is that if you do it then you go to jail for a long time after.
But if you play out the actual implications then you can use hyperbole and call it a coup. That's valuable language and you don't want to let a crisis go to waste.
This type of performative hyperbole coming from the left is going to make this whole situation worse. What those yahoo's did was bad enough, there's zero reason to throw gasoline on the fire.
>>> They are also presently discussing their next day-out for rednecks in the form of another insurrection and coup attempt on the 17th of January.
> But if you play out the actual implications then you can use hyperbole and call it a coup. That's valuable language and you don't want to let a crisis go to waste.
The GGP labeled this with an both the correct term and an incorrect term.
1/6 was an insurrection, not a coup. An insurrection is a rebellion against civil authority, which this clearly was, even if it was incompetently executed. I think a coup is typically used for when power is illegally taken by military or police authorities, which this was not.
I don't think the fact that taking hostages wouldn't actually succeed in making Trump president for the next four years is reason not to hope that law enforcement is suitably prepared to prevent emboldened 'patriots' from trying. Indeed it's precisely because such people are largely immune to normal deterrence measures you need law enforcement to be more effective.
I don't know if I can agree with the normal deterrence methods being ineffective. Despite claims of insurrection, they basically pushed their way into the building and then stood around. What stopped them from doing a lot worse wasn't that anyone could have stopped them in the moment, it was the deterrent (or the optics, which is effectively the same thing).
And different measures could make a marginal difference one way or the other, but if you have a huge mob of people trying to get into a building not explicitly designed to be a fortress, that's pretty hard to stop.
> Despite claims of insurrection, they basically pushed their way into the building and then stood around. What stopped them from doing a lot worse
...was that the people they were fairly explicitly targeting escaped the mob, in some cases with very little margin, because of successful use of barricades, delaying tactics, and in one case deadly force.
I'm trying to say this carefully, because what they actually did was not okay. People died.
But the amount of "it could have been worse" attributable entirely to what the mob didn't do, is large. And I don't think I'm wrong to attribute a lot of that to the ordinary deterrents being in effect.
There is a good reason we have different categories for 'attempted crime' and 'crime'. What they didn't do is mostly because it didn't work, not because there was no attempt. It all fell apart when their targets got to safety in time. Remove that one element, and take into account that they were given far more time to act because Trump held back deploying the NG and re-calibrate.
> There is a good reason we have different categories for 'attempted crime' and 'crime'.
One of the important ones is the line between planning to do something and actually doing it. It's one thing to stand in a crowd chanting something stupid, quite another if the moment comes and you have to choose.
> What they didn't do is mostly because it didn't work, not because there was no attempt.
What I'm referring to is methods, not goals.
Nobody wants to imagine the level of violence that people are capable of when unrestrained. I don't intend to describe it here, but the world has seen it in other times and other places.
I think what played a bigger role in stopping them from doing a lot worse was their targets had been evacuated, and when they tried to break into more secure areas one of them got shot. And sure, the truth is that a lot of people there weren't very bright and things got out of hand. But even the people taking selfies and souvenirs whilst the considerably-less-harmless guys in military fatigues carrying flex cuffs looked for Pence didn't fear punishment for their actions. You could tell that by the way they gave their names and itemised the crimes they'd committed to media outlets they supposed were sympathetic or livestreamed the whole thing.
Sure, a huge mob of people trying to get into a building not explicitly designed to be a fortress isn't easy to stop, and with the limited resources available evacuation was probably the right move, but what we actually saw on video in front of the Capitol was a line of about six police and a movable fence, and open doors. I've seen more convincing looking security at music festivals. You can try to deter people by what might happen if they try rather than what happens if they succeed, especially if they're crazy people who think what will actually happen if they succeed is President Trump giving them a medal.
They did not just stand around [1]. This was extremely violent, and they intended to murder people. Deterrence meant nothing to them. They were only stopped because the Capitol Police and Secret Service shot one of them. Different measures would absolutely have made a difference and saved lives.
Police regularly stops huge mobs of people, there are units dedicated to that.
What I still can't understand is why the police wasn't prepared for it. Isn't the FBI supposed to infiltrate dangerous groups? Or was the "march on capitol" completely unplanned before Trump suggested it? Finally, has nobody considered that something like this might have happened? (It was obvious to me, as well as at least one thinktank.)
Russia took Crimea by first just simply taking buildings. So once you physically possess important buildings you can do all sorts of interesting stuff.
Not only that, but multiple people were taking screenshots, linking authorities to posts, even sharing doxxed information with law enforcement prior to the event. They ignored it!
Election rules were changed in unorthodox ways due to a global pandemic. You have to admit that the election was unlike any other on recent memory.
The losing side, given this unorthodox election, wanted some validation of results, as well as to legally challenge the way they were done (PA's changes).
The response was one of derision and essentially shutting out the right from discourse. No effort was made a conciliation. This had the predictable effect of galvanizing people that there was indeed fraud.
If you think that these people had no reason to be angry, you aren't paying attention. If you can understand the frustrations and lead up to the BLM movement, but don't even want to pay lip service to this, you are either a horrible person or stupid. Take your pick: evil, ignorant, or both?
There are poll watchers from both parties - it's a role/position you apply beforehand to become a poll watcher. Their arrogance of the system, where in fact they all themselves could become poll watchers to make sure there isn't fraud, isn't a valid reason for them to be angry - though it's understandable that they would be angry with the propaganda they've been fed, when instead of they were told that there were Republican poll watchers at ALL of the polling stations - then their reaction would be "oh.. okay." Maybe if they didn't believe it then they themselves could work as a poll watcher to see for themselves. Likewise there were people saying exactly what I have - however it's highly unlikely the people watching Fox News (or other) would be putting that messages out, so who's at blame? Arguably the treasonous Republicans trying to start a civil war and mainstream media channels who are inciting themselves. In this circumstance, yes, it's predictable - but please do tell how you reach the ignorant people who will only listen to very specific sources and have primed for years, decades, to think Democrats are evil - and that the election is rigged, that is it's only rigged if their pick doesn't win.
What is the purpose of a poll observer? I’ve read some of the affidavits, and many are immaterial, but some do raise concern. For example from a Bloomberg article:
> Their affidavits raise a series of observations where the effect is not clear. For instance, one Republican poll challenger, Articia Bomer, said she saw 27 ballots inserted into a counting machine “at least five times.” An affidavit by a poll watcher named Brett Kinney said he witnessed a worker reach into an envelope marked “invalid ballots” and “process them with valid ballots.”
Why would this happen? Can we have an explanation that explains why this is standard operating procedure? Assuming good faith on the part of everyone, an explanation like “each ballot has a unique bar code and a misread would require re-reading, on a misread this red light on the scanner would light up and the ballot should be re-scanned until the green light lights, but even if the ballot is scanned successfully multiple times it would not be counted more than once” - maybe there is an explanation like this out there but I haven’t found it, only repeated insistence from every mainstream media outlet that there is no evidence of voter fraud.
Furthermore, there are credible examples of observers being disenfranchised - again, many not so credible (for example, building at capacity when there are already plenty of bipartisan observers, or “feeling intimidated” or whatever). But in Fulton County, observers insist that they were told by election officials that counting is over for the night, and that’s backed up by news reports from election night (https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/pipe-bursts-atlanta-arena-ca...) and then they continue counting - but now the election officials insist that nobody was told that counting was over for the night even though ABC reported that a specific responsible person, Regina Waller, had said so. Who is wrong? There are also many reports from several states where observers were kept 6 to 25 feet away or only able to watch the counts through a video monitor, which doesn’t seem like it would allow them to really observe anything. Many of the court cases were thrown out due to lack of evidence that the election outcome was altered - because affidavits aren’t investigations, they of course can’t show evidence of that.
I have heard plenty of rebuttals for some of the more far fetched fraud theories, but it still seems to me that observer rights need to be bolstered, including a more thorough explanation of procedures, a way to document and address/explain exceptions in the public view. However, there does need to be a way to filter out the specious complaints, because any system where exceptions require handling can be DDoSed.
So while there is a lot of easily debunked, meaningless, agitating noise, there are also still some valid, unexplained concerns. I think you are right that a lot of people just won’t believe it no matter what, but I also think a lot of reasonable people are still feeling pretty uneasy about this election, and the fact that a couple dozen radicals shut down the last chance for transparency for 75 million voters ought to concern everyone.
PA’s changes were not challenged when they were first signed into law in 2019. That was the time to act if there was a good-faith concern about them. The fact that the GOP waited until it would cause problems with votes already counted / in transit, and therefore undermine faith in the election, is further evidence that that was their goal in the first place.
"The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators."
Then they need to challenge it at the time they are changed, and not after the election regulated by those laws have already happened. You could still challenge them now, but it would flagrant assault on democratic principles to use this as an excuse to not count votes cast according to these rules.
There have been plenty of much more questionable elections in the past. 2000 is a big one. In 2004 there were a lot of hints that Diebold voting machines favoured Republican candidates. Still, those elections stood, because the votes had already been cast. If rules are unfair, change them, but don't demand the election gets blindly thrown your way for no good reason.
> It’s a violation of the constitution for an individual state to change voting laws like that
I mean, while we're making stuff up, lets say it's a violation of the constitution to allow for a Democratic government. Article IV, Section 4 requires Republican party rule. /s
How did the right get “shut out”? The entirety of the right? That to me seems a quite hilarious claim when the President up until quite recently had a huge platform on Twitter.
Validation of the result? Beyond all the official counts and recounts? I’m confused.
Also your last paragraph was completely uncalled for.
One can't point to a definitive set of facts that proves the right was "shut out" completely. Because they weren't all shut out and they weren't (for now) supposedly singled-out and "shut out" because they
republican/right-leaning. They had "plausible" and "official" reasons for doing the things they did in each case.
What did occur was a lot of little things and disparate things that had a huge dampening effect on the mobilization of discussion and questioning of details. And this has been happening for way before the election results were even out, it's been going on for years with a steady escalation.
There was also the constant repetitive narrative pushing, specific language and tone by reporters, activists and politicians that essentially gave "official" and "quotable" legitimacy to potentially-questionable election results, and gave plausible excuses/cover to de-legitimize and conspiracy-blame any criticisms of the election results. This stuff is downright scary, and a good chunk of the people not seeing it are the ones that are (for now) in the "good books" of whoever is overall in charge of driving the narrative and controlling public discourse. Right now, the left/Democratic party is in said good books.
Look how the discussion is so widely and suddenly revolving around conflating this protest with insurrection even though it was essentially a fart in the grand scheme of things, and implying that there is a huge overlap between right/republican/conservative individuals and "racists/white-supremacists". It's laying the ground-work to make it legitimate and acceptable to assume/claim that republicans are racists among other things. Next up we'll have dehumanization, firings and overall de-platforming because said protestors were "terrorists" due to their participation. The event will be labelled as a "coup attempt" and the storming of the building was a "terrorist attack". And if you question any of these accepted facts (because hey all news reports labelled it as such) you too will be de-platformed, ostracized and called a terrorist-sympathizer or a "something-denier" (hint look at the anti covid-lockdown protests for an example).
This was not a protest, and not a fart "in the grand scheme of things". This was a direct assault on democracy. They were explicitly hunting down specific politicians (Pelosi and Pence, for example), and several were armed with weapons, explosives, tie wraps, and by all evidence, it looks like they intended to hurt or abduct people. It was a coup and should be treated as such. Everybody outside the US sees it as such, and the US would see it that way had this happened in another country. The US would see it that way if these rioters had been black. The only reason many people don't see it that way is because they were white and right-wing, act like they own the place, and have always been able to get away with that. The US has a blind spot to right-wing terrorism.
The process you talk about in your first paragraphs: that some people get subtly shut out of the political process, does happen, but it happens mostly to poor people, black people, and university students. Various forms of voting suppression are aimed at preventing them from voting. Several voter ID laws require forms of ID that conservatives are more likely to have. For example, a gun license would be valid, while a student ID card wouldn't.
Also note the difference in DC police response against the BLM protests in the summer versus this more protest.
This is a misrepresentation. They got that validation. It was addressed in courts, but they expected thousands of voters to have their votes ignored, and the courts found that unacceptable.
Then the losing side didn't accept the results from the courts, and that's where it became a ridiculous circus. Also, the demands were ridiculously out of proportion. In the end, because they couldn't get their way, they tried to overthrow the legal result of the election and threatened members of Congress with serious harm.
> "No effort was made a conciliation."
They never tried. They demanded a total surrender of democracy to their demands. That is completely unacceptable. You can't compromise with something like that.
The reason these people were angry is simple: they were lied to and manipulated by media and politicians manipulating them to do their dirty work. The lived in an ecosystem of lies that kept telling them they should be angry, so they were. The lies they believed have been refuted time and time again, but they did not tolerate reason.
> "evil, ignorant, or both?"
Considering how eager they were to hurt people, they definitely check the evil box. It's hard to believe they honestly believed the lies, but it appears that some of them definitely did. But they must have been unbelievably gullible to take it this far.
I really, really hope they will finally learn that their leaders and media have constantly fed them lies; lies that they keep repeating to each other, and I hope they stop listening to them.
But there is no way to compromise with their attitude. You can't say: alright, let's have some lies and some truth. Let's have some freedom and some oppression. Some democracy and some autocracy. A movement that is so eager to hurt people our of sheer hatred should not set the political direction of a country.
This was the Beer Hall Putsch. It's good it failed, but it needs to have consequences. The US can't allow this to happen again.
They had their day(s) in court. They were heard out. There were recounts. What else would have been needed? Was there any amicable resolution that didn't involve Trump getting elected? If the alternatives are Trump is elected or there is violence, this is not democracy.
You are 100% correct. The attitude on display in the parent comment is the same type of rhetoric you see everywhere, and it is not winning over anybody “on the other side”.
Clearly you haven't been here. There are plenty of areas in San Diego County that are rural and quite conservative. Despite Duncan Hunter being a literal felon, the 50th district still didn't flip this election.
Being a felon or conservative doesn't make you a redneck, and yes I've been there. I'm not surprised to see you only know the term in a pejorative sense.
Nothing I said was pejorative in any sense, but I understand that some people are very, very sensitive these days. Most of the time when a politician is removed from office, their party pays the price e.g. San Diego Mayor Bob Filner (D) was replaced by Kevin Faulconer (R), even though the City of San Diego is pretty heavily Democratic these days.
I don't really know what any of this has to do with the term "redneck" or how it was used. Me calling out the inappropriate use of the term redneck and your contextualization/juxtaposition of it isn't being sensitive. Feel free to walk back your statement in a more direct manner.
You weren't calling out the inappropriate use. You said we didn't have people who would meet that description in San Diego. You are completely incorrect about that, if one were so inclined to use the term. I wasn't taking a position on the term itself, just your lack of knowledge about the place I live. Don't hurt yourself getting down off that high horse.
I live in San Diego too. I'm also from the Midwest/South where there are rednecks that are Democrats. The term doesn't mean what you think it means (at least based on how the author used it and how you continue to contextualize it).
I've also paid attention to the doxxing that's been going on in r/SanDiego and most (if not all) of these people live in the city and are business owners. They are hardly definitional rednecks.
I think what we are seeing is it's open season on poor whites. My family comes from Kentucky where there truly are rednecks and hillbillies. People, like that other user, are trying to expand its definition to include people that frankly are just normal conservatives in metro areas.
We saw this with the word thug. Everyone know what you're doing if you call black people from the suburbs thugs.
There's gobs of intelligence on what was about to happen, what was happening, and what might yet be about to happen, all out there in the open on social media. I'm way more worried about the complete and utter lack of using existing intelligence that was served up on a silver platter and continues to be. That completely destroys any argument for expanding surveillance right there, without even considering human rights or legal angles. If they can't even act on what's given to them, or what they already know, maybe that should get the laser focus for the indefinite future.
The breach of the capitol building is an embarrassment. There's not reinforced glass on the first floor windows? The secured interior is 3 cops in front of a wooden door with plate glass windows? And those cops just kinda slinked away letting a woman breach it and get insta killed? The outside perimeter is just a few cops in front of some fencing? What a fucking failure.
I think it should be reasonably defensible. It's not just a failure of the architecture though. The tactics used were mostly ineffective. Defensive forces were positioned thinly with few real blockades. I saw one instance of police blocking an entrance through sheer mass and it was effective. The cops could have been done the same in the interior hallways instead of giving up their spread out weak positions. This would have prevented the use of firearms.
If you can stomach it, I ask everyone to watch the full lead up to the shot. It is an absolute failure of policing. Start at 37:20 on https://banned.video/watch?id=5ff6857e00bac0328da8e888 and yes it's NSFL (shot at 39:10).
We've seen what the capital looks like when leftists protest. The security was intentionally lax and the president intentionally restricted national guard response. It was so easy because there were people inside helping them out.
They literally took over the Senate building for hours during the scotus confirmation, snuck in restricted areas to harass senators, took selfies in offices while refusing to leave, and tried to block hallways and elevators, all with the stated intention of intimidating senators into changing their votes.
Zero resistance from the Police and only arrested the people who still refused to leave hours later.
Defensive tools for law abiding citizens unable to carry in a "gun-free" zone. It only show any sort of offensive ill intent to people who want it to show ill intent.
Think it through logically:
It proves adherence to the law, not intent to break it. Neither zipties or tasers are illegal, but in DC, concealed carry, or even having any personal gun is.
If the intent was to forcibly take over the capital, or some sort of insurrection, it seems silly to worry about concealed carry laws while carrying out an open "rebellion". But even so, let's say you don't want to risk killing anyone with a gun.
You still have a problem, because neither tasers nor zipties are an effective tool if you're going up against an armed federal police force and possibly hundreds of politicians and staffers. Tazers have maybe a few discharges without needing to be recharged. That's not gonna deter multiple people, let alone a crowd. Not even an individual for more than a few moments. Definitely not capital police officers with guns, who are trained to avoid and overcome being tazed, by actually being tazed.
However, if you're a law abiding citizen protesting in DC, and you want to defend yourself against a potential attacker, a tazer is basically the only option you have.
With the mayor's restrictions placed on the National Guard and police officers, it seems especially reasonable, given all the violence of the past year that police and politicians have failed to prevent, sometimes willingly.
Since tazers only disable attackers temporarily, zipties make sense as a defensive tool, if you need to disable an attacker looking enough to get away, or between the time the tazer wears off and when the police arrive. Especially if you wind up in a situation where you are somehow confined in some space, trapped with your attacker.
If people would at least try to perceive Wednesday with an open mind, it's easy to explain 99.9% as well intentioned citizens, peacefully marching.
Even with the confrontations, it's easy to see how people could have unintentionally gotten caught up in an escalated situation.
I get that not everyone was an innocent bystander. But, again, these people deserve the same benefit of the doubt that the left got when taking over the Senate building while admittedly trying to intimidate senators into changing their votes. Yet they were kneeled to in deference by the FBI, before being given unfettered access.
If you can't possess a defensive weapon capable of deterring/ detaining an attacker, if needed, for an extended period of time, until you are either able to escape, or until the police arrive...
then zipties become a useful compliment to a taser (which is only able to disable an attacker temporarily).
If you are in a position to tie someone up, you're in a position to escape. There's no way it's a self-defense weapon.
But even if it was, why would you need it in the Capitol? Sorry, but everything points to them planning to abduct the politicians they were searching for.
I suppose you could make the argument that they could detain someone who's violent for the benefit of others in the crowd, but I agree that the implied intent of storming a building with politicians lends evidence to theory that they had the intention of taking hostages.
> The Pentagon said Miller approved the request without speaking with the White House because he had gotten direction from the president days earlier to do whatever he deemed necessary with the Guard.
Did you read everything or just try to cherry pick something to try to spread misinformation?
"Army leaders say the delay in the movement of Guard troops to the Capitol was because the initial agreement largely limited those forces to checkpoints and Metro stations and *stipulated they would not go to the Capitol*. As a result, authorities had to get approval for the new mission, then call Guard members to the armory, brief them and get them their riot gear, and then send them to the Capitol."
Would you please stop using HN for political and ideological battle? You've been doing it repeatedly lately and it's not what this site is for, regardless of which politics you're battling for or against.
HN is for thoughtful, curious conversation on topics of intellectual interest. The sets of that and political flamewar are disjoint. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use the site as intended, we'd appreciate it.
So me clearing up misinformation is a problem, but other using spreading information isn't? Isn't our unwillingness to challenge this misinformation exactly why we're dealing with violent seditionists right now? Did you somehow miss an attack on the US capitol largely due to rampant spread of misinformation?
I get that it feels that way [1], but no, that's not it. You can correct misinformation without breaking the site guidelines. Plenty of HN users do that respectfully and patiently, without attacking anybody. Moreover your corrections will be more effective that way, so it's in your interest to do so.
What you can't do is destroy this community by tossing bombs of snark, flamebait, name-calling, etc., at the side you consider wrong and bad. That is something completely different, and is what we warn or ban accounts for doing.
Especially on a day when there was a large protest planned for a vote taking place. It's a government building and it should be reasonably open to the public but common sense needs to raise its head at some point. Securing the building for a few hours would not have been unreasonable.
While the events of 1/6 are hardly justifiable, I find it deeply troubling that the same crowd who was calling for the abolition of the police a few months ago is now earnestly encouraging informing on their own friends, family, and neighbors because they deserve to be punished and most importantly, humiliated. I hardly believe the FBI needs any assistance in locating anyone, but I fear this is settling a troubling precedent that has not been seen since 20th century Europe.
In the months and years to come, we must try to not forget that the government exists solely for the benefit of its constituents, not the other way around.
The ruled class, red and blue, does not want freedom from oppression, they want to be the oppressors.
“Defund the police” (in general) doesn’t mean “don’t stop any crimes”.
It means things like “maybe we don’t need armed people to give tickets to drivers with a busted headlight” and “if we put more funds into mental health crisis teams we won’t have to send as many cops to violent incidents”.
There are full-on police abolitionists, but they’re far fewer in number.
I'm totally on board with that plan (it would be nice if there were someone I could call to check on a possibly-suicidal friend who wouldn't show up with guns drawn). Americans are four times more likely to be killed by cops than Canadians, and 1 in 1000 young black men is killed by a cop (or some number along those lines). Clearly something should change.
My question is, why call it "defund the police"? The core of the idea is that, in many cases we can change our response from involving police officers to involving some other group who will hopefully be able to do a better job. The fact that this can be accomplished by reallocating funds from the police department, to avoid needing to levy taxes to raise revenue, seems like almost the least important part of the plan. Even then, "defund the police" is only the first half of "defund the police and use the additional funding to create another group that picks up some of the police's responsibilities".
My feeling is that many people view police with antipathy, so they like the slogan and concept of "defund the police" because it feels like a retaliation against the police. I strongly suspect that other ideas, some of which may be much more beneficial than changing the response, will be ignored if they can't be phrased as a tactical strike in the culture war.
Here's one list of proposals [0] for police reform, many of which seem very promising for how little cultural sway they have (delegalize police unions, abolish QI, decriminalize victimless offenses, etc.) I wonder if they have so little sway because they can't be phrased in a sufficiently incendiary manner.
(And by the way, just because there's antipathy towards the police doesn't mean the police are directly at fault. For instance, if police are made to enforce unpopular legislation like the war on drugs, that will obviously make people dislike them but the root problem is somewhat upstream)
I don't know if the the more reasonable but equivalent slogans got replaced by the more spicy ones in some sort of meme survival of the fittest, or if it's a trend of today's social movements to use divisive or easy to misunderstand slogans on purpose.
Ex: "Black lives matter too" vs "black lives matter". or "replace / reboot the police" vs "defund the police". The police one I'm having a hard time thinking of a slogan that would be better, maybe that's why it stuck.
Because left wing rhetoric comes from grass roots ground up sort of activism. Right wing rhetoric is much smoother because they have full marketing teams and PR backing them. One is organic. One is designed. Organic movements are messy. Carefully designed messages are nice and succinct.
It still works out if we assume young people are just as likely as old men to be killed by police. Restricting us to young people would probably reduce the denominator of "300/19740000" enough to counteract the fact that the exponent of "69" is reduced.
In fact, if you assume that people are young for x% of their lives, and x% of black people are young, this exactly cancels out and you still get `0.001048` odds of being killed by police.
The violent crime rate for black men is roughly equal to the portion of police shooting victims which are black. Violent crime rate (excluding murder) is roughly 2x the average, and so is the death rate to police.
That's why I think we need to be focusing on why black people have a higher crime rate, and how we can fix the societal problems that lead to that. Reducing the number of police shootings is a great goal, but so long as there is a racial (and gender) divide in the crime rate there is going to be a divide in the police shooting rate.
They originally meant “remove all funding” which is why you would see this intermixed with “abolish the police”. It was an initial emotional overreaction that they’re trying to walk back. It would even be understandable (indeed, commendable) if they simply said, “we reacted emotionally to some troubling videos; we regret advocating for the abolition of police altogether, but we do want to see these other, more moderate reforms”. Instead you have some people doubling down i.e., “no, we actually meant ‘abolish the police’” and others who are cringingly pretending that “abolish the police” was some sort of metaphor. Both camps are more preoccupied with appearing to be correct than with actually being correct. Of course, someone will inevitably try to deflect to the errors of some other group, as though no one can be criticized except the worst group, which is the kind of race-to-the-bottom thinking that landed us here in the first place.
> “we reacted emotionally to some troubling videos; we regret advocating for the abolition of police altogether, but we do want to see these other, more moderate reforms”
Have you ever participated in politics? Because even in a small town government meeting, a board member stating they are changing their view because they "reacted emotionally" initially is going to immediately be followed by a call for them to resign.
I'm not opining on the issue at hand. It's just that when I read the suggestions here on HN about political messaging, many of them don't line up with any political reality I'm familiar with.
Even still, the appropriate response isn’t to double down or lie. If you don’t like those options, consider your response before expressing it in the first place. I agree that we should normalize honesty though.
> The problem is that "defund" means remove all funding. So these people are playing word games.
You have to that with slogans. They're low resolution, so there's an inevitable loss of fidelity. No one marches with a legislative proposal on a placard, and it would be unreasonable to do so.
IIRC, "defund the police" grew out of frustration with various police reform efforts that failed to address these problems [1]. It wouldn't make a lot of sense to take up the slogan of one of the things you're opposing.
[1] For instance I watch a video of some police deescalation training (in Seattle, IIRC), where the rank-and-file were talking back and not taking it seriously, and the instructors were not very enthusiastic or in control. I can't imagine that reform effort did a lot of good.
It's not accurate, unfortunately. Reform is as ambiguous as defund. Do you mean totally eradicate and then reform a department? Or do you mean just telling them "do better"? Are you talking about re-forming the police or reforms for police?
Better in some ways, worse in others. It avoids the confusion with abolishment, but it looses the connotations of seriously changing the status quo. Because of that, it's less attention-grabbing.
That's a poor excuse. They're low resolution, but not so low resolution that you can chant a slogan and then claim you meant something else entirely. Why not "reform the police", or hell, even "disarm the police"?
Do you think "disarm the police" would be going better than "defund the police"?
(I suspect it would actually be quite a bit more incendiary.)
Communication (even at length) is hard. We all bring different baggage to every attempt to speak and listen. It's probably ~impossible once you mix in uncharitable readers/listeners.
I can't speak for the campaigners, but I suspect "reform the police" won't cut the mustard for them because it's the sort of thing the establishment says before it fails to deliver meaningful change. "Today I'm calling for the establishment of a bipartisan commission on police reform", and its short imperative slogan--"reform the police"--could be an inspiring message if people had the impression that is how the gears sound when they're spinning up to change something.
But it's not very fair to insist people should be chanting a demand that seems to translate to "promise to look busy for a few months so that we'll go home and hope we don't notice when you don't solve the problem."
"Reform the police" has long been the tagline for ineffective measures. We've been trying to do it for decades; "defund the police" is in part a response to the reform argument.
"Disarm the police" would receive the exact same pearl clutching responses.
I'm not sure how either of these articles support your point.
Your first article is someone criticizing prior efforts by others to reduce public education funding. The only person using the word "defund" is the author. Though interestingly, there is a mention of conservative attacks on programs like sociology, anthropology, minority studies, and gender studies. I assure you that many conservatives really do want to abolish funding for those programs.
The second article is a single person using the word "defund" to describe Obama's reduction of military spending. Again, somebody using the word to describe somebody else's actions.
Interestingly, both of those articles are by people who oppose defunding. Perhaps they used that word precisely because it implies "remove funding entirely", which has an exaggerated emotional impact?
In any case, neither example is the same thing as a large social movement using it as a slogan, especially when that movement publishes things like "Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police": https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...
When things like that appear in the New York Times, is it so unreasonable for people to take their word for it? Or should we keep insisting that they don't really mean it?
And before you tell me that that's just one person's opinion, I'll just point out that so were both of your references, and those are the opinions of people who aren't even supporters of those movements. The "defund the police" movement has its own people using the term and saying "yes, we mean literally abolish the police".
The first article also quotes someone else saying defund. Eliminating sociology, history, anthropology, and language aren't mainstream conservative positions. Minority studies and gender studies maybe.
I picked 2 old articles from different political tribes to show it isn't new or just 1 tribe. Defund the Pentagon is a slogan now. Bernie Sanders[1] and Barbara Lee[2] proposed cutting the military budget by 10% and called it defunding.
I don't see anyone saying defund can't mean abolish. But most people who mean abolish say abolish because defund can mean reduce funding.
It's unreasonable to listen to people on the fringe of a movement and ignore the majority. It's unreasonable to read NYT opinion pieces and ignore NYT news pieces.[3] It's unreasonable to ignore actual legislation. It's unreasonable to ignore all the top search results.
When you march with something that’s objectively false and materially misleading, you lose my good faith engagement.
“Defund the police” is misleading in a way that “Trump Train” and “Ridin’ with Biden” are not. It’s not a real train and Biden isn’t with you, but people are not misled.
English is not my first language, but it seems an ambiguous slogan as the prefix de- not only means to remove but also to reduce / degrade. For instance, there were some recent calls for "defunding the Pentagon", in the sense of reducing military spending.
I mean, you're basically the problem here. You're very clearly being disingenuous and playing word games at the exact moment you're accusing others of doing the same.
Yes, I agree with you. I would also add the ‘spirit’ of the Defund the Police movement was that a lack of oversight created a safe environment for bad officers to victimize their community.
Now, many of the same champions of this cause are taking on the role of the police themselves. Across Reddit, Twitter, and elsewhere, people are creating open source documents with the names of anyone they believe was at the riot.
Most troubling of all, I am seeing many people openly advocating the police should have shot more protesters or brutalized them in some manner.
This seems highly contrary to the goals of the movement.
> Most troubling of all, I am seeing many people openly advocating the police should have shot more protesters or brutalized them in some manner.
I've seen lots of people ask questions like “where were the tear gas and rubber bullets?”, but I think you are missing the point of those and other references to the behavior of the police during BLM and other protests if you interpret them as a call that the violent behavior should have been repeated.
They are, in at least most cases, using the restraint shown in the attempted coup where top government leaders were targeted to highlight what they see as the inappropriateness of the violent response in earlier protests and the hollowness of law enforcement claims that the force used in those earlier events was reasonable, necessary, and justified rather than motivated by racial and political bias.
No, there were people also saying that the protestors should have been shot. On this very website, IIRC (rightly downvoted), but certainly on other platforms.
I've seen many of my peers, friends even (which hurts to see) openly calling for mass bloodshed and rejoicing in the deaths of those who were shot or died on 1/6.
Hatred and malice spreads like a viral wildfire on social media, no matter what your political ideology.
Well on the one hand, hoping people get killed is pretty dark.
On the other, these people literally attempted to overthrow the country, some were armed, some had bombs, some had the intent of abducting and/or harming people like Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi. So I would be very sympathetic to there having been a much more robust response, whilst still preferring nobody be hurt.
Yes, the lack of preparation for a mob which had been announcing its intentions publicly for weeks in advance leads me to believe someone higher up must have issued orders to stand down, essentially letting them in.
> We're not saying shoot them like you shot us. We're saying don't shoot us like you didn't shoot them.
The issue is with the double standard, and that's what's at the root of the BLM movement. Honestly I'm surprised that some people still haven't managed to understand what's at the root of BLM after like all the demonstrations that happened around it.
Even the name of the movement: "Black Lives Matters" aka "Blacks are not a lower class to be treated more arshly and with less humanity"
Which is why when someone says BLM nah ALM, it's absolutely missing the point of the movement. Cause how do you reframe that: "All people are of equal class"... Ok but black people aren't treated equally so like that's not true? That's why there are million of black people protesting. It's okay to maybe wonder... Wait is it true that black people are treated differently? Is it because they are black? Or is it more that poor people (happen to often be black) and are treated differently? Yes sure that's a question one can wonder, but you don't have to go very far at least to suspect that whatever it is, in effect, black people do get treated differently (be it because they are black or because they are poor, or because they're less educated, etc.) The why doesn't matter, the different treatment does, no matter what, nobody should be treated differently.
Sorry for the rant, but it's tiring having to explain these basics. Of course left and right can't even have a proper conversation around the issue when half the table doesn't understand what is the issue to discuss.
And I like to remind people, this isn't just the root of the BLM movement, this is literally the root of the United States itself. The declaration of independence:
> We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes;
>maybe we don’t need armed people to give tickets to drivers with a busted headlight
There are endless videos of normal cops being executed by unhinged drivers who were pulled over for things like "a busted headlight." You don't know who you're dealing with, how close to the edge some people are, or if they are dangerous felons, when you pull them over. If those situations were a very real possibility in your daily job, would you perform that job unarmed? I wouldn't. Maybe some very brave mental health professionals would, for a time, until some of them are killed as well, as indiscriminately as the police, which is inevitable.
What then? Stop pulling people over altogether, because it's not worth risking anybody's life further? Just let people speed and drive drunk, or drive with an unsafe vehicle?
When I get this far in discussions with people, it eventually comes down to "well dangerous people shouldn't have guns." It's a nice thought, naive in my opinion, but regardless, how do we deal with the reality of right now until those ideals manifest in reality? The reality is that dangerous people make regular traffic stops too dangerous for normal people to behave in any other way that to exercise extreme caution.
> There are endless videos of cops being executed by unhinged drivers who were pulled over for things like "a busted headlight."
Frequently, this is because they suspect the cop will find they have a warrant or contraband and the stop will proceed past a ticket to arrest and felony charges.
Separating the civil and criminal enforcement here makes these encounters safer; we can see this in countries where traffic cops aren't routinely armed.
How do you know to send a social worker or a cop before they're identified and checked for warrants? Or do we just do 100% unarmed social workers and ask the dude with a warrant to kindly wait about 5 to 10 minutes for cops to come over to arrest them?
> Since its launch June 1, the STAR van has responded to more than 350 calls, replacing police in matters that don’t threaten public safety and are often connected to unmet mental or physical needs. The goal is to connect people who pose no danger with services and resources while freeing up police to respond to other calls. The team, which is not armed, has not called police for backup, Sailon said.
> The team has responded to an indecent exposure call that turned out to be a woman changing clothes in an alley because she was unhoused and had no other private place to go. They’ve been called out to a trespassing call for a man who was setting up a tent near someone’s home. They’ve helped people experiencing suicidal thoughts, people slumped against a fence, people simply acting strange.
> “It’s amazing how much stuff comes across 911 as the general, ‘I don’t know what to do, I guess I’ll call 911,’” Richardson said. “Someone sets up a tent? 911. I can’t find someone? 911.”
There's also the fact that the scary "normal cops being executed by unhinged drivers" scenario is a vanishingly rare scenario. The rate of murders of police officers matches roughly the rate in the general population. https://www.newsweek.com/it-has-never-been-safer-be-cop-3720...
> The rate of murders of police officers matches roughly the rate in the general population.
And they wear body armor, can call for backup, and can engage threats with deadly force. I would imagine a job with those tactical advantages would have a much much lower murder rate than the general population.
Dude the reason the cat with the warrant hasn't been caught is because they dont show up to their known residence. They are EVADING. Their home isnt a safe space from warrants.
You just effectively nullified the entire reason to have a warrant out for someone's arrest, let alone reason for bail so someone shows up to court.
And no, it's not safer in the sense they aren't shot. Body armor has gotten better and the likelihood of surviving a few rounds to the chest has gone up. The shootings haven't changed, just the body armor. Get out of your sick fantasy world. Better yet, go be a cop to help reform. See for yourself before you think you have an opinion.
> Better yet, go be a cop to help reform. See for yourself before you think you have an opinion.
Cops who attempt to turn in bad cops get fucked up by other cops, so this is a no-go.
Otherwise I generally agree with your point that not checking for warrants has a really bad consequence of potentially letting go of people who have warrants out for committing heinous, heinous crimes. (Admittedly, often times cops have let go of people during traffic stops without checking for warrants. Several serial killers for example.)
OK, so then you're going to have some explaining to do when someone with a warrant commits another violent crime, and it turns out that the week prior he was pulled over for some traffic violation and was let go.
If only we had a similar expectation of "explaining to do" when the opposite happens, and an innocent person winds up dead because of an armed traffic stop?
This is a really bad faith response. Truthfully, out of all the traffic stops, which do you think happens at a higher rate: instances like Philando Castile, or instances where someone pulled over has a warrant for a violent crime and goes on to commit more violent crime? If you have to stop and think about it for an extended amount of time, then to me, that suggests you have a strong bias in one direction.
Harassment by police at traffic stops happens at orders of magnitude higher rate than the capture of potentially violent criminals with warrants.
And it does not matter: in the US and most civilized countries a police officer is supposed to have a reasonable suspicion before they start invading someone's privacy.
The idea of someone running warrant checks on the basis of a broken tail light is antithetical to notions like the presumption of innocence and right to privacy.
You have moved the goal post. The parent comments weren't talking about "harassment", it was talking about unjustifiable murder, like the instance of Philando Castile, vs capturing violent criminals with warrants.
> The idea of someone running warrant checks on the basis of a broken tail light is antithetical to notions like the presumption of innocence and right to privacy.
Hm, there's definitely a line somewhere. I'm with you in that I don't think cops should be able to demand ID and run checks on random people simply out and about in public. Broken tail light? Not sure. Speeding? OK now you're breaking the law and arguably creating a public safety threat, but probably not going to be arrested. DUI? Now you're in misdemeanor territory at least. When is it reasonable to check if you're also wanted for something else? Maybe when you're booked at the jail?
Yes, as a society we have to decide together where to place that line. But because of the aforementioned reasons it is my strong belief that any such warrant checks should be impossible to do by the officer on the spot as they have nothing to do with the current stop. Checks being done by a clerk at a court or in jail makes a lot more sense.
The DMV checks for warrants if I go in for a license renewal, despite being unarmed. Seems to work OK; if someone shows up with a warrant they just call the cops.
Census workers aren't expected to check for warrants, because it's not their job; I'm advocating the same for things like speeding enforcement.
Maybe so. Neither you nor I were on the jury though. We don't just get to ignore a jury decision and impose our own personal justice because from the outside it doesn't seem fair. There were two blacks on the jury, according to what I read on Wikipedia.
But you can make the same argument in favor or warrantless searches, phone call (metadata) dragnets, stop and frisk, mass surveillance, etc. You are basically making an argument against "the fruit of the poisoned tree" doctrine with respect to crime evidence. More generally, it is an argument against the 4th and 5th ammendements.
You're misinterpreting my "endless videos" comment to mean "happens with great regularly", instead of "this an established scenario to train for", within the context of traffic stops. People shoot cops at traffic stops, it's a thing that happens, and people should be aware of it.
From your comments, it seems that because you can show that it's relatively rare, nobody should expect, plan for, or train for it. I look at stats that show police murder rate comparable to the general population and I am honestly impressed that they are able to keep it that low while dealing with some of the most dangerous elements of society. Do you believe it is because violent criminals have a similar level of hatred towards police as they do a member of the general public, or is it because police train for the worst case scenario?
Adding on to what you said: What people dont get about traffic stops, to issue someone a ticket, their ID needs to be ran to be validated. What also happens when you run an ID? Oh this person has a warrant(s). Who tends to shoot cops or anyone who decides to pull them over? People with warrants because they dont want to go to jail! Or they're riding dirty. An unarmed ticket maid won't stop the problems.
Anyways, domestic disputes are some of the most dangerous calls for cops. A social worker to diffuse the situation seems like a good idea in theory. However reality doesn't give 2 shits about theory. The reason 911 is called out to these is because violence is about to happen, is happening or has been. Hell, Jacksonville sent a female officer to a a domestic dispute of something being stolen between 2 females last year. Body cam shows the officer walks up to the door, knocks, announces herself takes two steps back and waits. A chick just opens the door with a knife and stabs the female officer. "Anecdotal" you say. No. I used to do security integration for a few police departments in Colorado. I got to know a lot of them and would just hear and see this dumb shit nearly daily. Hell, watch Donut Operator on youtube. The amount of videos like this are ridiculously high.
Just out of the blue, a seemingly innocent call, someone gets their stupid on and attacks the cops. And this is Colorado (Denverand Co Springs area). Not the most dangerous area in the country. I now live in Florida.
Do I think cops need a few weeks of better deescalation training or even a better training program needs to be developed? Absolutely and I know for a fact about 80% of other cops want this because they were talking about it back in 2015. Do all cops need to have better hand to hand combat training so they dont need to always result to their firearm or the ineffective less than lethal countermeasures provided (yea tasers and bean bags dont work nearly as often as you think). My opinion doesn't matter because 100% of cops have begged for this, again, since 2015 that I know of. But that all requires funding, unlike Seattle deciding to cut the PD budget by a 3rd, saying they wanted to take more and made their black female chief the poorest paid chief in Seattle history. Who, mind you, even the most racist sexist asshole who looks at her resume will say she earned being the chief, without question.
I swear a majority of people are rational and understand that reality is a dangerous place and bad things happen. They know that defunding the cops and sending an unarmed social worker is just going to result in higher body bag orders or the police are going to get reinvented through them. That's enough internet for now.
That’s an interesting clarification as I’ve never heard this take before, especially from the press who’s supposed to speak for the left. They seem pretty happy with just plain: let’s defund the police, full stop.
As others have pointed out, the explanations have existed but perhaps not in your view.
From where I stand (Seattle, know multiple Defund folks), the reaction has been "So, the one true thing we think cops should do - prevent significant violent action and protect people - they failed at. This further proves our point". You can dither on whether blocking traffic is violent (it's not) but the events really only strengthened their case - BLM peaceful protesting is met with an order of magnitude more violence than actual attempted attacks on the government. So why bother having cops if they don't do anything when it actually matters?
It was a dismal communication strategy from the non-fringe leftists to adopt that slogan; there was no way it wouldn't be interpreted as "abolish the police" by a large fraction of the constituents, likely alienating many moderates and giving their opponents an obvious counter. Something like "demilitarize the police" would likely have worked much better.
It's true that there are differences of opinion among the many people participating in this conversation, and the reporting on it.
But to be fair, this article does say:
"But don’t get me wrong. We are not abandoning our communities to violence. We don’t want to just close police departments. We want to make them obsolete.
"We should redirect the billions that now go to police departments toward providing health care, housing, education and good jobs. If we did this, there would be less need for the police in the first place.
"We can build other ways of responding to harms in our society. Trained “community care workers” could do mental-health checks if someone needs help. Towns could use restorative-justice models instead of throwing people in prison."
I don't, and it would be very scary if it did. all I'm saying it's quite reasonable to be unsure what "defund the police" means. it's not at all clear that it has some generally accepted meaning.
well for one thing, the conservative slogan "defund planned parenthood" really does mean (AFAIK) remove all ways planned parenthood could possibly get a dollar from the government. it's not inconsistent to interpret "defund the police" the same way.
but more generally, it's inevitable that the opposing side will interpret a vague slogan in the most negative and scary light possible. I suspect this is often by design, ie motte and bailey: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy
That’s and opinion piece and I don’t believe she is a staff member, the byline is a clue.
The article ends “ Mariame Kaba (@prisonculture) is the director of Project NIA, a grass-roots group that works to end youth incarceration, and an anti-criminalization organizer”.
The lack of clarity in the slogan has frustrated me as well, but most news coverage I have seen (NPR, NYT) is usually clear about its established meaning among the people using it. Same with in-person conversations.
For my account, I’m in favor of arresting and charging everyone acting criminally lawlessly, whether wearing a Viking helmet, a MAGA hat, or a BLM shirt.
I want the public to be free from the oppression caused by lawless rioting.
I think a lot of people weren't thinking things through, and a lot of the "defund the police" stuff was hyperbole.
Also, a violent insurrection literally storming and occupying the seat of the U.S. government, with the goal of changing the incoming government, is very different from what happened this summer.
What happened this summer included a large number of violent riots, but they targeted mainly state and local governments and private property, and without the goal of regime change.
Both are very bad, but open insurrection against the sitting U.S. government is far worse.
Seattle protesters only wanted to assemble peacefully at the police station. The autonomous zone formed after the police abandoned the station and the area. People inside worked with other city departments up until the end. They even renamed the area because so many people didn't understand what autonomous meant.
"Defund the police" doesn't mean what you think it means.
I was glad the police, in this case, showed the restraint to not engage in violence due to an unruly crowd who seemed to pose no threat to their lives. They showed how it could be done, although due to planning failures, they were BADLY under-staffed, and it got perilously close to the VP and other leaders. Deadly force was only employed as a last resort.
And I fully support snitching on violent criminals.
There are many consistent positions a large number of people hold. Trying to make this an "us versus them" by proclaiming in your comment that the entirety of "red vs blue" are only out for their own interests is only feeding into a narrative of complete polarization where there is actually a ton of common ground.
Unfortunately, it seems all too often we are sorted into red or blue containers if we don’t choose a side ourselves.
> And I fully support snitching on violent criminals
And when the criminals have all been removed, the police will give back their power? Or will they create more? They don’t need your help to arrest anyone, they do need your help to not question their methods.
The thing is, people choosing to turn in offenders is not an expansion in police powers. If anything, good people doing nothing gives police justification to ask for an expansion of their powers.
For the police to be effective, I believe they need to work hand in hand with the people they are supposed to serve. They need the respect and consent of the citizenry. I think that's a two-way street. When that relationship turns adversarial, whatever the reason, we see an expansion in statutory powers, pretextual searches, etc.
No serious person was saying we should abolish the police, that is just another lie from the former conservative media (former, because there is nothing recognizably conservative about trumpism). There are legitimate questions about the use of police funding for militarization, and those questions have been raised by people all over the political spectrum. There are also serious problems with the differences in how the police handle calls, patrol work, and arrests in black neighborhoods and with black suspects versus white neighborhoods. Since the 90s the alarm has been sounded about the infiltration of police forces across the country by white nationalists and neonazis. Those concerns can be addressed by well-planned police reform, which is what people have actually been calling for.
As for 20th century Europe, we are already there when armed terrorists invade the Capitol in an attempt to, as they themselves said, overthrow the government.
>But don’t get me wrong. We are not abandoning our communities to violence. We don’t want to just close police departments. We want to make them obsolete.
Later in the article:
>What would the country look like if it had billions of extra dollars to spend on housing, food and education for all?
Even Kaba, who has been advocating for the abolishment of police and prison for a long time, doesn't just want these establishments gone. She wants all of the funding and resources currently budgeted for these establishments to go towards resolving the root cause of most violent crimes.
The spin that my conservative relatives were told by Tucker Carlson and friends was that "these people want anarchy and free reign to commit crimes" (paraphrasing). While anecdotal, it does seem that conservative media conveniently forgot to mention the rest of the argument to my relatives.
This is really just evidence that the political conversation is broken.
Slogans, headlines, and protest chants repeat the emotional overreaction, and then when questioned they retort "oh, well, we didn't mean it 'literally'.". This is Trump level political discourse.
Just like how some view Trump as dog-whistling support for the riots, even though semantically he's supporting their right to protest a fair election. Carlson views reallocating funding for the police to social services as dog whistling support for violent crimes.
160 years ago, Lincoln and Douglas were able to hold civil debates about slavery, which gave Lincoln the popularity he needed to win the presidency. I'm not sure how public discourse has decayed so significantly when we're more educated than ever.
Reading the article it doesn't exactly sound like abolishing the police in the sense that we revert to chaos and anarchy. It sounds more like what else could you do with all the money going to the police now, which could also reduce crime. And it seems the argument is that the police is designed to react to crime as it happen, while there might be ways that can stop the crime from happening in the first place, like better education, more housing, or who knows what else.
I think this is the key takeaway from the opinion piece:
> As a society, we have been so indoctrinated with the idea that we solve problems by policing and caging people that many cannot imagine anything other than prisons and the police as solutions to violence and harm.
I find it an interesting idea to be honest. I don't know that I'm convinced one way or the other, but it definitely seems an interesting area for research and innovation. We innovate solutions to all kind of problems, it seems it has been a while since we've tried to innovate solutions around crime reduction and prevention.
I think part of the reason we allow states and cities to operate with their own governments is just so that they can explore, research, and innovate on a societal level. Bringing politics nationally like has been happening in the USA stifles innovation and therefore could make it harder to find better strategies to handle nonviolent crimes.
(This is not a disagreement, this is mostly conversing on the nuances of exploring the policy given our current political setting. )
I think you make a good point, the internet has kind of brought people together to debate and discuss issues when their personal contexts are very different. This often leads to a kind of stalemate in the debates.
And like you say, nobody is allowed to be wrong or fail in politics anymore, which means we're not allowed to experiment at the local or regional level, or to rollback policies, or just have any kind of rational retrospective. Nope, now it's all ideological, like religion, you can't possibly push a policy that failed, or have a bad idea. That just means you're weak and shall be casted away for the better sharlatan to take your place, he is never wrong, if you doubt how right he is, you shall be jailed or mocked, if his policies don't work, we shall endure them and believe in them even harder.
This is the thing: you can always tell when people come from utterly useless propaganda bubbles by 2 huge red flags:
(1) They don't understand the difference between editorial content and reporting, because the media outlets they follow do their best to blur the distinction, all the way down to not even making a distinction organizationally or professionally, and making it seem like more legitimate sources of information don't make that distinction either. So the biggest red flag is that they don't even realize that there are professional standards and practices for keeping those things separate, and they don't understand things like fact checking or there being burdens of proof applied before something considered news reporting is published. To them, editorial content and news reporting are the same thing, with the same minimal burden of proof, because those are the nonexistent standards of literally every source of "information" they have.
(2) They think that when a media outlet voluntarily issues corrections (not from a lawsuit or threat of a lawsuit), that it's a sign that that outlet is less reliable than the places they go that never ever issue corrections unless legally forced to. The reality is completely flipped around, but that's their mentality. Culturally, that dovetails with "never admit being wrong" and "never apologize", which are ideals that resonate REALLY REALLY hard with people in these propaganda bubbles. The lack of accountability makes them trust untrustworthy sources even more, not less. Accountability makes them trust trustworthy sources less, not more.
I would add (3), how they react if they find out that something they themselves put out there isn't true. Watch what happens if they find out something they posted objectively isn't true. Instead of retracting it, they'll say something like, "well it doesn't matter, the meaning of the message is the same", or "well it doesn't matter the fake news media does it all the time". Which is the exact same thing that pathological liars and con artists say when their lies are exposed- that everyone does it, and maybe even that they are victims of hypocrites for being called out on it, because they assume the people calling them out surely lie about stuff all the time too. They're always looking for excuses to do worse, not better, and for excuses to think of themselves as victims, and for any possible reason to lower the bar for themselves rather than raise it for everyone.
When editorials only ever include the beliefs of the left, and even moderate republican beliefs are beyond the pale and mean that those responsible for publishing them are fired, it is obvious to all not willfully blind that editorials mean endorsement.
Have you ever noticed that when conservatives give an example of what "the other side" believes, they always pick fringe opinion pieces best suited to Tumblr. When liberals call out dangerous rhetoric, it's from major conservative media outlets and elected officials? One party is electing and promoting the craziest elements of their base. Just one.
Wait, are we already rewriting history to eliminate the idea that, for months last summer, many people actually did want to abolish the police?
Granted, a lot of that got walked back later, but it did happen. I live close enough to the CHOP that you can't really make me believe there wasn't an huge, loud, violent movement that unambiguously wanted to get rid of cops, period.
As far as serious people (true Scotsmen) go, I guess you're defining them as rational, learned experts. But I would urge you to at least pay attention to what crazed maniacs think too, since it turns out they can do some damage if you ignore them long enough.
Not just rational and learned experts; I also include people with significant political power or influence (significant meaning beyond well above the local level; senators, governors, presidents, etc.). The fact is that the people who were calling to abolish the police never amounted to anything more than the extreme fringe of the protests or activists. Plenty of attention was paid to the "crazed maniacs," but more important is the fact that nobody of any consequence actually told those crazed maniacs to riot, nor did anyone of consequence actively praise or encourage those who did riot (the worst were a few prominent politicians apologizing for riots by saying it is what happens when people's concerns are ignored -- not even close to praising the rioters or telling them to go riot).
This is not a "true Scotsman" argument. There is a meaningful difference between fringe elements acting on their own and powerful politicians or people with actual influence actively encouraging, directing, or praising that fringe. That is what separates the riots that happened last year from what happened at the Capitol on Wednesday.
Lots of people literally were wanting to abolish the police. The expression meant something different to almost everybody who said it. A city unanimously voted to do it[1]
> The suggested department would consist of peace officers
So there would still be officers, but the department would be rebuilt from the ground up. Sounds like a great idea. Some departments can’t be fixed and have to be rebuilt.
> No serious person was saying we should abolish the police
I don't think any serious person is saying that "no serious person was saying we should abolish the police."
Abolitionism has been a strong movement, close to the core of American values of liberty, since the beginning of professional police and the Charleston Watch, before the civil war.
I am a serious person. And I do not believe that the institution of the police is the best way for a nation whose laws are based on the commonlaw tradition to establish justice or promote safety. Especially in 2020, when there are cameras everywhere and the capacity to report emergencies at lightspeed, I think that continuing to fund and empower this particular experiment is irresponsible.
I guess a statement like that can always be true depending on how you define serious person. But millions of people were and are arguing for the strongest possible interpretation of “abolish the police”.
I have to admit I find it pretty disheartening that mainstream liberals are for the most part just as unwilling to take a critical look at the most extreme, “all cops are bad”, toppling statues of Abraham Lincoln and burning down police stations subset of the left or even acknowledge that it exists, as the mainstream republicans have been of condemning the trumpism/q-anon alt right.
The article also stated that there may have been problems with the poll, like not differentiating between total elimination and partially dismantling police departments.
If presented as total elimination of police departments, the survey might have missed support for more nuanced calls to dismantle police, said Phillip Atiba Goff, co-founder of the Center for Policing Equity. “One notion of abolition is the need for discontinuity from the violent and racist past of law enforcement,” he said.
The way I read it that quote is saying the 15% would be higher if you included both the people who want to abolish and those who want more moderate reform.
It’s not saying that it already includes both groups.
My speculation is that the actual phasing means very different things to very different people, and thus the actual nuance of what people believe in aggregate to be useless to discern by their agreement or disagreement with singular phrases. For example, "abolishing the police, with context that they would be replaced with equally strong mutual support systems, social workers, mental and physical health workers" could be a vast majority of that 15%, or it could be the vast minority of that 15%. We just don't know.
No, but it's pretty normal to think that the people attending domestic incidents to identify whether a crime has committed and the people guarding the legislature should have different rules of engagement, training and quite possibly uniforms.
I'm the first person to argue that 'defund the police' was a terrible slogan to adopt, but that's precisely because everyone jumps to saying "but we don't actually mean have no publicly subsidised law enforcement". Even if the rafts of related reform proposals are still far too idealistic for the real world, it's not a position comparable to the Q faithful having the numbers to win primaries.
Please stop using HN for political battle and flamewar. We've already had to ask you this once: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23173294, and we ban accounts that abuse the site like this, regardless of their politics.
Other people being wrong or behaving badly doesn't make it ok to break the rules.
The clarion call was "defund the police" not "abolish the police". Some people believe these are are synonymous but IMO most agree "defund" means things like de-militarize and add social workers to deal with things like mental health and quality of life issues instead of sending undertrained people with guns... I'd add "prevent them profiting from things like property seizures".
You know what the difference is? Those are fringe elements of left wing politics who get little to no endorsement from anyone with any actual power, and who remain mostly irrelevant in Democratic party politics. Whereas on Wednesday, you had the most powerful Republican tell a violent mob to go to the Capitol and "convince" the "weak" Republicans to change their minds. His lawyer, who is one of the prominent faces in the Trump media ecosystem, told them this will be "trial by combat." A Republican Senator showed an affirmative gesture to that very crowd on his way into the Capitol.
Stop trying to "both sides" this, because this is not a "both sides are just as bad" situation. We just saw the top level leadership of a major national party endorse and praise a terrorist mob that tried to overthrow the US government. The president literally said he "loved" those people when he told them to go home. That is problematic on a completely different level from anything that has happened on the left.
Did I say anywhere that both sides are just as bad? Did I say the things the left does are as bad as starting an insurrection? I did not, and in fact I think the far right is much worse. That doesn’t mean there aren’t parts of the left that are also in the wrong about certain things. And no it’s not just a tiny part of the left.
But why are you so quick to get so defensive? Why can nobody openly acknowledge their own side’s faults?
Going back to the topic at hand about abolishing the police, I don’t understand why I never hear anybody say “yeah you’re right, abolish the police is a bad way to say it. Here are the things we actually want. Wr should tweak the messaging to make it more clear”. Everyone is so insistent on doubling down on the abolish/defund language. And if someone doesn’t understand that this is now just a code for a more nuanced agenda, then we’ll extend our outrage to them too!
If we make the right own their extremists in terms of rhetoric, action, and ideology then I think the same standard is appropriate for the left. The only people that complain about "both sides" points are people who can't introspect their own ideologies.
All you've done here is ask that people on the right ignore your fringe groups, but would you do the same? Or would you do what they're doing and engage in hyperbole to make you deal with them?
Both your parties are junk to me, so I'm happy to keep saying "both sides" until you all get your bad behavior under control.
Get back to me when the most powerful Democratic politicians in the country throw their support behind violent extremists. The fringes of left wing politics have been kept at the fringe. For the past five years, if not longer, the extremist fringe of right wing politics has been allowed to enter the mainstream of the Republican party. The Republican President has endorsed them, encouraged them, praised them, and defended them, and the RNC just declared him to be their party's leader after what happened on Wednesday.
Nobody needs to "make" the right own their extremists because they have done so already.
The CHAZ is a good example that was well supported and well tolerated, even championed. [0]
> On June 18, a volunteer medic intervened during a sexual assault in a tent in the occupied park area; the alleged perpetrator was arrested.[133] NPR reported that day, "Nobody inside the protest zone thinks a police return would end peacefully. Small teams of armed anti-fascists are also present, self-proclaimed community defense forces who say they're ready to fight if needed but that de-escalation is preferred."
Spenser Rapone, who attempted to infiltrate the US Military, received notable support and has gone on to be a speaker at events [1][2]
This gives a better spectrum picture of what's going on [3] and this statement sums it up fairly well:
> According to Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at the California State University, if Reinoehl is implicated in the case, "it would mark the first time in recent years that an antifa supporter has been charged with homicide" as "hard-left violence has generally been less fatal and more directed towards property, racists and to a lesser extent police and journalists" which is unlike "the white supremacist and the far right, which glorifies mass violence by loners and small cells against minorities and enemies". Gary LaFree, chairman of the University of Maryland's criminology department, stated that "the case could potentially be included in the university's Global Terrorism Database as the first act of terror linked to antifa".
Left-wing radicalist groups tend to be self-organizing cells which makes them hard to track, much like the group Anonymous from back in the early days of the internet. This has precedent through history as well. [4]
The way your message and my message differ is that I'm not going to provide rhetorical cover fire for either of your groups. They're both disgusting and you both need to own them, because you all provided the foundation or lack of accountability that gave them material presence and impact.
>Get back to me when the most powerful Democratic politicians in the country throw their support behind violent extremists.
They already do. Barack was training and arming "moderate" rebels in the takeover and destruction of Egypt, Libya, and Syria. Hillary Clinton was laughing when she heard Gaddafi was killed.
CHAZ and and the Minneapolis Autonomous Zone indicate it was far more serious then your post indicates.
On Tuesday night, a cop killed a man in Modesto - it was the 4th person killed by the same cop [1]. As you say, their are serious questions to ask about the police force and militarization. However, the racist/right wing thing is far too reductionary and fails to capture lack of proper training, lack of proper post-shooting responses, etc.
In both cases they are working to replace the existing department with a new department with a large contingent of peace officers-- to tear down what's there and replace it with something new.
> Since the 90s the alarm has been sounded about the infiltration of police forces across the country by white nationalists and neonazis.
IIRC, there have been big scandals about that in Germany recently. The neonazis have been infiltrating the military there, too, to the point where they had to disband an entire special forces unit, because it was too far gone to be cleaned up.
Honestly, the liberal fixation on gun control seems a really short sighted to me, given that kind of infiltration and the general right-leaning nature of law enforcement and the military [1]. It seems far more likely to me that liberals (and minorities) would someday need to rise up against an oppressive government than conservatives would be, even though conservatives like to fantasize about that kind of thing more.
[1] Proven very clearly by the events in Kenosha: police shot an unarmed black man in the back, but didn't even stop an armed white kid who just shot three people.
> the events in Kenosha: police shot an unarmed black man in the back
I believe it’s been established as fact that Jacob Blake was armed with a knife when he was shot. I’m not drawing any conclusion about the justification [not comparison], but he was not “unarmed”.
> I believe it’s been established as fact that Jacob Blake was armed with a knife when he was shot. I’m not drawing any conclusion about the justification [not comparison], but he was not “unarmed”.
I stand corrected, though it doesn't detract any from my overall point.
The shooting was still BS:
> Blake details returning to his SUV while in possession of the knife. It was that knife that Sheskey said he saw moments before the DA said Sheskey followed his training and began firing until there was no longer a threat. Sheskey shot Blake seven times, paralyzing the 27-year-old father of three.
I don't think someone holding a knife and walking away from you can be properly categorized as an actual "threat."
Felony warrant for sexual assault at the address of the woman who called in the domestic disturbance, kid in the car, Blake has said "I'm taking the kid and I'm taking the car". They've tried to physically restrain him, but he is stronger than them, they've tried to taser him but he ripped the wires out. He's got a knife and he's trying to get in the car that the kid is in.
"P.O. Sheskey stated 'Blake, for the first time, showed intent to harm by driving the knife towards his (P.O. Sheskey's) torso.' P.O. Arenas also said, 'at that moment, he feared the armed subject (Blake) was about to stab P.O. Sheskey.' He (P.O. Arenas) would have tried to stop Blake's advances with the knife, but 'he did not have a clear shot due to the positioning of the door.' P.O. Sheskey 'feared that Blake was going to stab him, and he could not retreat because the child could be harmed, taken hostage, or abducted by Blake.' 'For these reasons, he discharged his firearm towards Jacob Blake.' He stated that he later determined that he shot (7) shots and did not stop until Blake dropped the knife."
> The neonazis have been infiltrating the military there, too, to the point where they had to disband an entire special forces unit, because it was too far gone to be cleaned up.
I think you’re talking about the KSK (Kommando Spezialkräfte, Special Forces) and it was only partially dismantled. Still, that’s bad enough, obviously.
> I find it deeply troubling that the same crowd who was calling for the abolition of the police a few months ago is now earnestly encouraging informing on their own friends
Uhhh, is that actually happening?
I think I have my finger pretty firmly on the pulse of one center of today's abolitionist movement, in Portland (where I was in the streets getting gassed many times this summer), and I don't know of anybody who holds the contradictory viewpoint you're describing.
I don't think most abolitionists care enough about the Capitol in the first place to get enraged about this.
There is a recurring theme in thin arguments where it is argued that "the same people" argue two different, apparently contrasting things (without evidence.)
The reality is that there are some groupings of people with contradictory beliefs, but more realistically, each individual has a belief of each issue somewhere on a spectrum. Polarization has further grouped issues together, and attributed each stance as one side or the other, but this is not a useful way to explore issues or try to find the right balance or compromise for individual issues.
You might be left-wing and also support a demilitarization of law enforcement, especially when you look at uneven responses to protests[0], but political affiliation is not nearly as consistent as that just based on race alone[1], despite the greater risk of lethal force being applied when you have black skin[2].
And if you are right-wing and support overrunning the Capitol and disrupting the election process, you believe what was done was right and a fight against a corrupt and oppressive government. But wherever you fall on the political spectrum, if you believe that the individuals broke the law by forcefully entering the Capitol, you may find it dutiful to respond to requests from the FBI to aide in identifying those individuals (particularly if you believe this behavior attacks an important component of elected representative democracy.)
What keeps surprising me, though, is the failure to see President Donald Trump as an oppressor. He labels roughly half of his own citizens as enemies, discredits alternative sources of information (basically anyone that disagrees with him); accepting that behavior is a dangerous way to choose your political leaders. You should strive to unite the citizens, and your government should not be the strongest, loudest voice you listen to, because you need checks and balances against government controlled information.
> The finding of elevated risk for Black victims in the Mental Health Crisis group suggests two worrisome features of police killings: First, training protocols focused solely on mental health may need to be redesigned to incorporate issues of greater perceptions of threat among Black civilians. Second, race may be more salient than other factors in the decision to use lethal force on a suspect across circumstances. This is particularly worrisome given the additional details of flight and threat in killings with less substantial bases for reasonableness. In other words, race appears to distinguish these killings even after taking into account the additional factors that might justify an officer’s use of lethal force. Police killings, then, are neither race-neutral nor linked to specific features of the incident.
This is very good. Not more policing, but better policing. Turning a blind eye to this or pardoning certain crimes but not others is just as much an injustice as over-policing.
And someone needs to have a deep inquiry into what happened with calling in reinforcements.
Of all the pictures and videos from inside the Capitol, has anyone seen any trespassers/protestors/rioters/insurrectionists carrying weapons? I caught some of it live and have been looking since and haven't seen any.
The killed police officer was attacked with a fire extinguisher, so things other than guns can be used as weapons.
Many photos show body armor, riot shields, and staffs.
Photos show Members of Congress escorted to safety in CBRN hoods (protection against chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear air pollution).
The C-SPAN live feed was cut off for the safety of Congress & the staff at the Capitol. You can watch the moment on YouTube, plus the subsequent audio only broadcast.
More photos and video are still being posted/released. If you’d like to help out, the FBI is asking the public to help collect and review evidence.
> The #FBI is still seeking information to help identify individuals who actively instigated violence on January 6 in Washington, D.C. Visit http://ow.ly/z9vt50D3Ovo to see images from current cases, and if you see someone you recognize, submit a tip at http://fbi.gov/USCapitol.
What's really interesting in the Capitol attack is how the terrorists ended up simply surveilling themselves, posting their videos and pictures onto their own social media with their own identifying information attached. You don't need a police state when the enemy is this stupid.
That tells me that they didn't think what they were doing was something to hide. Definitely stupid, but also probably not an attempted coup if that's the case. That is, I don't think the protestors themselves were attempting a coup.
If so, I struggle to see what the desired outcome would have been at the capital.
But people need to be careful, because by saying it was a coup, it normalizes the concept for those who saw Wednesday as a good faith protest march, regardless of what it's now perceived as.
Changing/ shifting the definition of words has behavioral consequences.
They didn't think they had anything to hide because police organizations and state AGs helped incite the event. This is a typical characteristic of right-wing, white militants. They do not see their actions as vigilantism because they earnestly believe their actions carry the weight of law. Veterans and police officers were among the insurrectionists in the Capitol.
And they terrorised people. They forced their way in, shouted the names of politicians they were looking for, forced their way through barriers. A mob doesn't need guns to be a threat.
Since when is a shut-in an act of terrorism? As far as I'm aware these protesters at the Capitol didn't kill or attempt to kill anyone. Yes, they damaged government property. Many will face prosecution for this.
Supporters of BLM have committed far worse acts in recent years but they are not labelled as terrorists. The only people that died at this event were the protestors - one at least was unarmed and murdered by a police officer. The whole thing is on video.
Is the talking point in the US that disgruntled Americans are terrorists?! Really? Right, wrong, crazy ... however you see them. Kinda scary calling citizens terrorists, especially on a political basis.
Protestors invading government buildings is quite common in the world, but calling citizens terrorists is usually something you see in non-democratic regimes.
Seems awfully disingenuous to call this "disgruntled Americans". Surely, out of all the possible traits to point out here, being "disgruntled" isn't the defining factor.
So let's not mince words and false pretenses here. Here is a fair definition of terrorism:
"the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims"
Now, let's go through the list. Was there violence involved? Yes. Was there intimidation. Yes. Was this against civilians and politically motivated.. well yes.
Then it begs the question, is this wilful ignorance, or is there some malice involved. I suppose that is for you to know. But I find it annoying that it's so prevalent. Whichever it is.
The talking point is that the violent extremists who broke into the Capitol chanting “kill [Republican Vice President] Mike Pence”, wearing body armor, armed with guns, pipe bombs, and zip ties for taking hostages are terrorists.
One of the most disturbing things about this event is the particular set of words being used to describe it: terrorist attack, assault on the capitol, violent uprising.
To me, and I'm sure to most people, words like "terrorist attack" conjure images of mass murder via gunfire or vehicles, kidnappings, and brutal executions. But none of those things happened here. If one does consider this to be a "violent terrorist attack", then what words are left to describe an actual terrorist attack?
Is anyone else disturbed that the discourse is being ushered toward these particular words; that you're being made to associate a riot of angry citizens with mass-murder attacks by men wearing balaclavas and wielding AK's? To use these words, "terrorist attack, assault on the capitol, violent uprising", for this event, it's imprecise, misleading.
HNers: Are you anticipating any sort of 'pendulum effect' where we over-correct for our present situation in the new Democratic executive and legislature, specifically in the area of surveillance and privacy?
What changes do you expect to have happen in the next year or two in this area? Are you taking any steps regarding your own privacy based on your predictions?
It doesn't seem they needed any additional surveillance to stop this. Just adequate security staff for a pre-planned rally of very angry people that they already knew about. They plan for this kind of thing all the time. This time, they failed.
I see the most likely initiatives of the new administration to revolve around reining in the powers of the presidency.
No administration ever "reigns in" the powers of the administration. This is always a priority and talking point of the party out of power, regardless of party. As soon as you are in power, you exploit and expand on the precedents set by the previous administration. The only very small exception I can even think of was Trump's one-in, two-out regulation policy [1].
It makes quite reasonable sense for this administration to distribute the presidential powers to the congress, since they control both anyway, and have proven to be most harmed by an opposition president.
The over-correction will be terrible. The Left has embraced authoritarianism, so this is a grand opportunity for them. They don't want to (nor now do they have to) negotiate or do anything "incremental". They want radical change, and the powers of the state to enforce it (environmental and social justice will be prominent). The idiots who perpetrated 1/6/21 have put us in an awful place.
I love how the issue is "the left does not negotiate" after years where right blocks any proposal from left on principle. And "the Left has embraced authoritarianism" ... right after when right decided that overturning elections is what they are entitled at.
Law enforcement/FBI have never been good at stopping terrorist attacks. The only ones they stop are the ones where the attacker is being stupid obvious like openly talking about it online. Most of the time they let them go through because "they need to build a case".
> The Capitol Attack Doesn’t Justify Expanding Surveillance
In the sense of paying a few people to monitor public social media sites so that widespread in-the-open planning of a mass violent attack on the Capitol doesn't result in the FBI having no indication that anything but First Amendment-protected activities are planned, it does justify expanding surveillance.
It doesn't justify additional government surveillance powers, or intrusion into privacy, though.
It will be used to justify the expansion of surveillance because Apple/Google/Facebook/Twitter are forcing the connoisseurs of the conspiracy theories into other platforms that don't have as high of protection from foreign intelligence service influence. Essentially, keeping debate in the open and public is the best option for everyone, even if you [rightfully] disagree with it or it's woefully misguided.
Apple/Google/Facebook/Twitter's actions are making things far worse for everyone by forcing conversations underground to alt platforms.
Freedom of speech and expression is really _really_ important on private forums for that reason.
So here's the latest thing circulating: Everyone is now turning "Auto Updates" off on their iPhones because they think this will prevent Apple from backdooring their phones.
Congratulations, Big Tech. Now we're going to have a million unpatched devices rolling around.
They don’t need to expand anything. We have all the tools we need to identify, arrest, and incarcerate the perpetrators.
Additionally there’s ample ability to deplatform them and their supporters through the agreements they signed with social media companies and payment processors.
The free market won’t have trouble deciding that these traitors are done with both public life and making enough money to ever have to pay taxes again.
Moreover, we are all well within our rights to practice the conservative principle of not doing business with those we find repugnant.
In my ideal world, the highly visible use of pervasive, systemic surveillance to rapidly identify, locate, apprehend, and prosecute the scores of folks that casually committed long-minimum-sentence federal crimes both discourages future criminal actions and sparks a debate over whether watching and recording everybody all the time is the way we want to live.
I’m not so naïve that I believe that’ll actually happen, though.
Tangentially, that pervasive surveillance is “saving” this investigation instead of letting most potential suspects go unidentified is indicative of the general trend of police departments getting lazy about doing actual investigative police work—-increasingly, if it’s not electronically recorded evidence, it may as well not have happened.
In 2020 I wanted DC to start looking at smart-city cameras. I have been living in DC for nearly 10 years and watched the crime in the area go up alarmingly during the quarantine. People being robbed in broad daylight, Porch pirates, Arsons, burglary, auto theft - not to mention other threats and hazards in the capital go on without being apprehended. I am specifically interested in the smart-city Forward Looking Infrared (FLIR) cameras which could identify sick people, terrorists, gun shots, and all other kinds of hazards, threats and security issues.
I spent a brief amount time working with smart city tech. You might be surprised just how many cameras and sensors already exist that are monitoring you at any moment as you walk down the street. The issue usually isn’t that there’s no evidence for crimes, it’s that investigating those mostly petty crimes, outside of secure areas is an extremely low priority for police departments. For example, I’ve had the police reject my video evidence of a hit and run where the driver admitted to it on camera, because they didn’t want to spend resources investigating something that didn’t result in a death.
I stopped working with smart city tech because I felt there’s only two realistic directions it can go: Excessive surveillance by the police, or excessive surveillance by people whose only interest is selling whatever data they can collect about you in public spaces to advertisers and other 3rd parties.
"Defund the police" folks would point out that the increase in crime likely stems from an ineffective safety net during the pandemic and the ensuing economic difficulties it has caused.
Well, obviously not. It was telegraphed beforehand that it would happen on Twitter and Parler by various loons, by the US president, his kids, and his insane lawyer, and no-one did a thing (or, arguably, people did less than the reasonable minimum). And presumably the surveillance that already exists picked up some more than that. The problem was (possibly deliberate) negligence, not a lack of intelligence.
Agreed. It does not seem like there was a breakdown in information here, a lot of detail was known both before and after. No justification for a power grab.
There have also been much larger protests in the capital where they never breached the capital building. No one properly prepared for this demonstration.
> capital police rejects offers for more support before the event.
While I think the demands for th resignations of the various Capitol officials involved were warranted, I suspect that it will turn out that reliance on the FBI intelligence assessment that there was no indication that anything other than First Amendment protected activities were likely played a significant role in this and the other preparation failures.
I'm guessing it's going to be more complicated than that. One thing I think I learned during the Trump presidency is that the federal bureaucracy will leak nuggets of information that make them look good or paint the story that they want. But when the full facts and truth of a given situation come out it tends to be far more complicated than far less clear cut than what the initial leaks seem to paint.
> forgets the events of last year when antifa forcefully took a federal courthouse in Portland.
A federal courthouse isn't the national Capitol, and the courthouse wasn't targeted specifically because officials were present and inspired in part by public calls to execute particular officials and in part by a direct call by the a defeated candidate as part of an ongoing campaign to reverse election results.
> They also ignore the general carnage of last year - violence and arson directed at business owners and people following the death of George Floyd.
No, in fact comparison of the events and the law enforcement responses is common in the media, even though the coup attempt is still portrayed as an unprecedented event. So the claim that the events of last summer are “ignored” by the media is simply false.
Did "antifa" force their way in past police officers while beating them and spraying them with pepper spray? Did they break windows and try to climb across barriers with secret service on the other side with guns drawn? Were they chanting about heads on pikes or about hanging Pence? Are you so completely biased that you think an group of protestors taking over an empty building without force is somehow equivalent to a group of people attacking police and literally breaking into a building occupied by congress while chanting about and actually performing violence?
One question that comes to mind in all this is how come RICO laws don't apply to Trump in this case. In a RICO case, if I told you to go kill someone and you went and did it, I'm as culpable for the murder as you are. But for some reason this doesn't apply to cases of free speech traceably inciting action by a third-party? I am entirely unsure when a situation can have RICO statutes applied, but the very existence of RICO also sorta contradicts free speech
The tech community has already been hitting the drum beat for stripping our liberties and massively expanding the surveillance programs under the guise of "stopping terrorism".
Why do you think Biden was quick to identify the protest as terrorism? It will set the tone for the rest of his administration. Civil liberties will be stripped in the name of security/stopping terrorism.
Zero chance any of that would have happened. It certainly could have gotten more ugly than it was. But a loosely organized mob of protestors is not going to achieve that. One SWAT team, or the military if necessary, would have dealt with it easily.
Zero chance bull. The majority of the mob were not organized, but there was a core of co-operating individuals that came prepared with Kevlar, weapons, specialized restraint zip ties, etc, and appeared trained. Who knows what would have happened if they had breached sooner than the Senators/Congressman could have escaped to safety? And without that branch being able to function, who knows what Trump might try to claim empowered to do?
Is this likely? Maybe, maybe not. But I tell you what. There is more danger to under-emphasizing the threat than over-emphasizing the threat. Indeed, fear and control over executive power is at the core of our Constitution and founders' fears. I will not play down what happened, and who instigated it.
The general mob could also have quickly instigated a massacre. Chants of "Hang M. Pence."
Over-emphasizing the threat could have taken the form of five times as many police in riot gear surrounding the Capitol. That would have been fine (hopefully). Or it could have taken the form of police deciding to open fire, which could have killed a large number of people and had enormous and unpredictable political consequences.
Over-emphasize isn't enough. It has to lead to the right actions rather than to damaging ones.
This could be the beginning of the end for anonymous social media. I can see lawmakers suggesting we move to a KYC model like fintech or like China has where a real ID must be associated with each social account. It would certainly help curtail bots and also make it riskier for people to promote violence in a public forum.
The thing is, these protests didn't expect the police to fight or arrest them. They did all this stuff in public under their real names. Someone wore their work ID lanyard to storm the Capitol.
It's not risky to promote violence in public forums in the US provided you're not specific about it. Heck, the ringleader was the president; it's not like we need him to submit ID to get his Twitter back.
We need to crack down on performative speech. Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson shouldn't be able to hide behind the legal arguments that their words aren't meant to be taken seriously because they are performative.
I didn't say get rid of it. How about requiring a warning label on these shows? I mean the lawyers for Jones and Carlson have already argued they aren't meant to be taken seriously. I think a label run on their shows would be enough.
Of course it does justify expanding surveillance. The Capitol riots caused a mild discomfort in very important Democratic politicians, which basically equates it with 9/11.
In contrast, many months long BLM riots, while they resulted in many deaths, made thousands of people unsafe and caused billions of dollars of damage, weren't nearly as important.
Why? Because they were controlled by the Democratic establishment and only affected working- and middle-class people, whom those politicians barely consider human. So obviously they didn't see a need for legislation or even condemnation. In fact, they seen the riots as a good thing.
> Reuters photographer Jim Bourg, who was photographing protesters trying to break down doors to the Capitol building, said he heard three older white men in red “Make America Great Again” caps talking about finding Vice President Mike Pence to hang him from a tree as a “traitor.”
> Security agents rushed Pence from the Senate chamber after protesters breached the Capitol building.
They are also presently discussing their next day-out for rednecks in the form of another insurrection and coup attempt on the 17th of January. Let's hope that this time some people will take notice because while everybody seems to be happy that this effort failed from the perspective of the perps it looks like a major victory: they took the bloody capitol with such ease that 10 minutes more planning would have had them hold house or senate members or even the VP or the speaker hostage. Or worse.
This isn't over yet.