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.
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.