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Something that's getting frustrating to me around the discussion of Charlie Kirk's assassination (man it feels weird to say that) is that conservatives are being told to eat the Paul Pelosi attack as a right wing thing.
But the attacker (David Depape), was, if he was even capable of holding any sort of political position at all, not even remotely right wing, at least not in any way that any right winger would identify as a bedfellow.
The guy lived in a bus in Berkley, CA doing drugs in a polyamorous sex cult. He clearly went completely insane, then attacked Paul Pelosi. This is the type of thing that conservatives are trying to stop. This event is neutral at best, and more realistically just left-wing cities eating themselves. The opening paragraph from a sfchronicle article about his daughter is one of the craziest I've ever seen:
I'm also getting sick of hearing that the right wing is supposed to eat January 6th. We've had every single right wing politician "disavowing" this for the last 5 years, despite the fact that the only person killed on this day was a right wing woman.
January 6th was one day of protesting which followed months of protesting by left wingers.
Generally my frustration is this idea that right wing and left wing politics and expressions of those politics are equals, or just different poles of an ideology. They're not. One of my favorite articles: https://newdiscourses.com/2020/07/woke-wont-debate-you-heres-why/ expands on what I mean.
(No the woke won't debate you, here's why - required reading around here imo)
These two ideologies, western liberal democracy, which the conservatives are still, maybe stupidly, trying to work inside of, and some bastard form of revolutionary marxism, are not two sides fighting over territory. There's no compromise where we meet in the middle. It's winner take all - either we remain a western liberal democracy, or we don't.
I think people are waking up to this, which is good. Sam Hyde's video today about this was pretty good: https://youtube.com/watch?v=_czBvLB-DwY (watch the first 5 minutes at least, please. It's good.)
JD's video was also really good (a slightly normie version of the same message): https://youtube.com/watch?v=ngofqx9EfcM
His own defence attorney literally said it was because he passionately believed in far right theories. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-67372363
They said this to fight charges against kidnapping a federal official (which requires it to be directly because of her official duties as a member of Congress and not outside motivations such as those far right theories). The goal was to present him as a crazy nutjob who took Qanon, 2020 being stolen, and other far right ideas spread online seriously rather than a targeted attack triggered by any official action.
He himself testified to this
What better evidence could there be than him and his defense literally saying it?
If it was disavowed, why did people who stabbed, tasered, threw bombs at, or otherwise attacked cops get pardoned? The idea that only murder is violence (and she herself was shot at by a cop as she refused to listen to a lawful order and continued illegal behavior so I guess you're saying police brutality is more of an issue than violence against police is) seems weak. All of those things are violence!
In fact here's something interesting, I asked chatgpt to run some numbers. "Per participant, was Jan 6th or BLM more violent towards cops?"
Of course it doesn't matter, at the end of the day everyone is an individual and should be judged as an individual. Whether you attended BLM or Jan 6th, if you didn't assault a cop then you don't deserve blame for it. But it is quite interesting to see. Even if we change it to say, 40,000 (a medium estimate of the total Jan 6th protestors and not just those who entered the capitol), it's still about 1 in 400 or so.
Edit: You know there's also an interesting thing to consider in right vs left violence discussions. The gender gap!
Men make up 80% of violent crimes (and some specific ones like mass shootings like 97%). Thus statistically a group composed of men should have more violent people than an equal sized group of women. And violence is typically a thing done most by youth, so the group with younger men should presumably have more than the group with younger women.
Combine this with
And it would make sense if right wing violence was a bit more common, just because it has more men.
No, it's not that simple. This is comparing apples to oranges. I'll try my best to make a more appropriate comparison.
Here is an article from the New York Times with the 140 number for police office injured on Jan 6th.
Here is a report from the US Government Accountability Office indicating at least 174 police officers were assaulted. Note that assaults and injuries are not the same, which could explain the different numbers.
A better comparison would be this statistic from U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley.
This source clarifies it's 277 injuries amongst 140 officers.
Here are some numbers from the DHS indicating that the crowd sizes were approximately 1000 around the federal courthouse in Portland.
This seems like a more appropriate comparison than using the entirety of the 15-26 million Americans protesting during 2020 BLM riots to the 2000-2500 on January 6th.
That being said, there are several reasons as for why even this cannot be a direct comparison:
If we were to have millions of right-leaning Americans protest on a level similar to that of the BLM riots, how much more violence would we see? I acknowledge the number of police injuries would go up just due to statistics. But I think the current right-wing response to Kirk's assassination is pretty telling. We aren't seeing cities being burned and looted to anything remotely close to the BLM riots after Floyd's death.
If we went up at the same rate at roughly 140 cops injured per 40k participants, we would have about 56,000 cop injuries at a 16 million participant Jan 6th. You're correct they aren't perfect comparisons, but real world data hardly is.
The relatively high rates of violence of Jan 6th and BLM, and low rates of any protest nowadays both left (no kings march) and right (now) suggest that the violence was more a product of its time than anything else. A lot of things were weird during 2020 and 2021 from the lockdowns and spastic economy of the time.
Decent chance like a lot of datasets, the 2020-2022 data is just a distortion.
You should not extrapolate 140 cops injured per 40K participants to 16 million for the same reason you should not extrapolate 140 cops injured per 2.5k participant to 40K participants to get 2240 cop injuries.
I can do bad math too. Hey, we were able to add 37.5k to the total number of participants in a protest without needing to adjust the number of cops being injured, so let's use the rate of 0 cops injured per 37.5k added to scale to 0 cops injured per 16 million to get a final result of 140 cops injured per 16 million participants.
The reason why my bad math is wrong is the same reason why your math is wrong.
I agree that data needs to be taken a look at more closely to get a more accurate picture of the truth, and that outliers happen in data all the time. But you're the one that introduced shoddy analysis of data. I gave a good effort to give the most reasonable comparison, and I even gave criticism of that comparison.
"If we went up at the same rate" of 1:400 then yes it would equal that.
I agree with you that a larger crowd is likely to have less violence overall though, since size is likely to correlate hard with how many normies are joining in.
We can't compare apples to applies with real world events, because the real world is messy. But it doesn't need to be perfect to have some amount of usable information.
The numbers should be self-evident why that assumption should not hold.
I don't understand what you're disputing here.
1/400 is the same rate as 2/800 and 3/1200 and the same as 10/4,000 and 100/40,000 and so on.
If your argument did not have any major flaws, we should've been able to extrapolate 140 cops injured per 2.5K participants (the most generous assumption that supports your argument) to 40,000K to get 2240 cop injuries.
We didn't get 2240 cop injuries for the 40,000 protestors. Nowhere even close. So we now have real world data that demonstrate how assuming going up at the same rate is an absurdly ignorant assumption to make for this particular scenario, and you should not do that to try to make your point.
Just saying you agree with me that a larger crowd is likely to have less violence overall does not excuse the extremely poor logic you have used to make your argument.
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