omw_68
16hr ago
I don't think it was or would be "terrorism lite",
Well that's just a matter of semantics. My point is that this type of harassment is one facet of a larger issue: Blocking streets; disrupting university lectures; etc. Doing things which are intentionally designed to harm, inconvenience, and traumatize other people; doing so for political reasons; but stopping short of full on violent activities like shooting, bombing etc.
In my view, this is enough of a phenomenon that it deserves a name. If you can think of something better than "terrorism lite," please feel free to suggest it.
omw_68
17hr ago
If the state government of Minnesota refuses to do that because they are on the side of the "protestors" ... well then you are in a state of exception ...One option then, is to hack federal law in order to go after the protestors, which is what the left usually does.
Another possibility is to have a procedure by which the NGOs who help organize and support these activities could be "designated" in a way similar to the way terrorist organizations are designated. Once that happens, the NGO loses its tax exemption, it becomes a serious offense to donate money to them, and so on. Admittedly, this is probably an unrealistic fantasy, but still, I think it should be considered. Because (arguably) it would go a long way to preventing these kinds of activities if there were a way to discourage not only the rioters themselves but the people and organizations who support them.
omw_68
17hr ago
I'd much prefer we returned to a time where people got their asses kicked for acting like an asshole and the cops wouldn't do anything if it was plain that a person had it coming.
I think this is a great fantasy, I'm just not sure how realistic it is. Part of the problem is that recent history has shown that police intervention decisions are often highly political.
omw_68
17hr ago
These people deserve prison, imo.
FWIW I agree. Partly because what they did was terrible, but also because the public needs to see that it's not necessary to take the law into one's own hands. I was once in a university talk that was targeted for disruption and the urge to smack the disruptors is pretty strong. Arguably, knowing that they will face serious negative consequences for their actions would make it much easier to refrain.
omw_68
17hr ago
Thanks for pointing this out. Arguably this would apply to university lecture disruptors; traffic blockers; etc. I do think there needs to be some kind of private right of action and a way to sanction organizations who support this sort of stuff.
omw_68
17hr ago
What I’m not seeing mentioned here is Lemon’s defense; he says he was watching the protest as a journalist, which to be fair was his career and he claims to be doing independent journalism after his retirement from CNN. We do have video of him doing things like interviewing protestors and the pastor (who asked him to leave), and commenting on the contrast between people yelling and protesting and people trying to pray as demonstrative of a divided America. I don’t know that it’s great journalism, but it’s a more complex situation than “Don Lemon was rioting in a church.”
Having had a chance to think about this, it looks to me like he was a part of the conspiracy or is otherwise criminally responsible. Arguably, part of the plan was to disrupt the church service simply by having a large number of people in the room. So I think that anyone joining the group; knowing about the plan; entering the church with the group; and refusing to leave when asked, should be prosecuted. I'm not familiar with the particulars of the law in question, this is just what seems reasonable to me. (I'm also assuming that Don Lemon was asked to leave and refused.)
Besides, I don't think being a "journalist" should give a person any more rights than they otherwise would have. I think anyone who was a part of the group; who entered the church; and who refused to leave when asked should be charged.
omw_68
17hr ago
The FACE Act was nominally supposed to be that universal law despite the name
Well the FACE Act is rather narrow, right? It doesn't cover general traffic-blocking or university lecture disrupting, does it?
omw_68
17hr ago
IMO the best response to this sort of thing is a re-invigoration of the right of self defense. If someone breaks into your church, they are forfeit. This is not a government courthouse or a Wal Mart. Its a church. Its a lot of people's second home. Just give that pastor and all his flock full immunity to any retribution, including shooting in the back people who flee during the, arguably, proper response of force.
Having been the victim of one of these planned disruptions, this idea seems appealing to me, but I'm not sure it's workable in practice. Keep in mind that the same types of people who invaded this church are constantly looking for ways to abuse the law (often with the help of Soros prosecutors).
omw_68
17hr ago
His arrest seems fine to me in isolation, but I'm pessimistic about any prospect for an even-handed underlying principle there.
Yeah, having had the chance to consider all of this,it occurred to me that my proposal is kind of a fantasy in that there is a sizable faction in the United States which is aggressively making use of Terrorism Lite. They don't want to give up one of their favorite weapons and it's likely that they have enough political power that they could stop any attempt to enact the kind of policy I am proposing.
I, for one, would be happy if this guy, abortion clinic protesters, university lecture disruptors, Samsung executives who greenlight patching your smart fridge to display ads and Motte ban evaders all had to share a prison cell going forward.
To an extent I agree, but I do believe there needs to be some room for free speech. If Don Lemon and his people had protested on the sidewalk across the street from the church without obstructing, blocking, getting in peoples' faces, etc., I would probably agree that there should no criminal consequences.
omw_68
1d ago
His livestream?!
What exactly did he do?
Edit: By the way, I think it's pretty likely that he helped plan and organize the disruption and/or actively participated. I'm just wondering what the evidence is.
omw_68
1d ago
Generally agreed, but the other approach is to empower those on the receiving end to immediately respond relatively harshly and given them legal support for doing so.
Having had the experience of attending a lecture that was disrupted by protestors, it definitely would have been satisfying to have the green light to kick some ass. But I'm not sure how workable that is in practice.
I definitely agree that a motorist whose car has been blocked/surrounded should have a good deal of latitude to use force.
Another idea is to give the victims of Lite Terrorists a private right of action to sue for statutory damages against everyone involved, including organizations that supported the wrongdoing.
omw_68
1d ago
But it isn't (and you don't). The judicial system understands that these laws are only supposed to be used against the right, so they refused to even approve charges against Lemon.
Well from what I understand, the feds requested arrest warrants as to 3 or 4 individuals (including Lemon) and the arrests were approved as to everyone except Lemon. This suggests that there really is some kind of weakness in the case against Lemon.
Do you happen to know what exactly the evidence against him? I've searched for it online but haven't found anything.
omw_68
1d ago
The law he's accused of violating is an abortion access law
Sure, what I am suggesting is that instead of using a patchwork approach of using one law for disrupting a church service; another law for blocking a street; another law for pulling a false fire alarm to disrupt a conference; and so on, there (perhaps) should be a more unified approach to dealing with this phenomenon. And more importantly, there should (arguably) be laws imposing sanctions on the persons and NGOs who support these sorts of activities.
omw_68
1d ago
As to your question “no serious person”
Me.
Do I understand you correctly? Hypothetically, suppose there is an ICE raid on a restaurant and a couple illegal aliens try to run out the back door; are tackled; and are arrested; booked; and sent to jail. Are you saying that under some circumstances, you would support capital charges and execution for such persons?
With the recent arrest of Don Lemon, I think it's worth asking how society should respond to the sorts of activities he (allegedly) engaged in?
Disrupting a church service is not exactly terrorism, since there was no actual violence used. But it's not civil disobedience either -- nobody is seriously arguing that the laws against disrupting meetings are themselves unjust.
It's sort of Terrorism Lite. It's kind of like, as another poster analogized, to holding your fist a millimeter away from someone's face while chanting "I'm not touching you." The point is to (arguably) inflict as much harm as you can get away with, to grab attention, to intimidate, to provoke a response, etc. while plausibly claiming that you are non-violent.
Maybe it's my imagination, but I feel like I've seen more and more of this Terrorism Lite in recent years. Things like traffic-blocking; meeting disruption; etc.
While it's true that there are already laws on the books against these sorts of things, I think an argument can be made that there needs to be a more focused and vigorous response. By analogy, in theory blowing up a bomb in a train station is already against the law, whether or not it's in support of some political objective, but there is value in having special laws on the books against terrorism and especially against those who finance or otherwise support it.
In the same way, there could be laws which sanction people, organizations, and governments for providing material support to what I have called Terrorism Lite. (Perhaps someone can suggest a better term.)
omw_68
1d ago
The "death penalty" thing is just always stupid in these situations.
I basically agree. It's just rhetorical slight of hand. And ultimately it's a strawman argument, because no serious person is arguing that someone convicted of attempting to elude the police or whatever should be sent to the electric chair.
As a sort of counter-example, one could imagine a situation where the police capture a bona fide serial killer. Perhaps that person really does deserve the death penalty, but nobody believes it's okay for the arresting officer to simply execute the guy.
To put it another way, the question of what the proper punishment is for a crime is largely irrelevant to the amount of force appropriate to arrest or apprehend someone who is committing such a crime. And yeah, a situation is conceivable where it's fine for the police to use extreme violence against a shoplifter who won't submit to a lawful arrest. The alternative is that people are able to steal, rob, and resist the authorities with impunity.
omw_68
2d ago
Yes, we are currently in a civil war.
Obviously it's a matter of semantics, but I would say it's more of an intifada than a war. In the sense that one side is attempting to get its way by means of sustained and systematic lawbreaking, violence, and the like. If both sides go that route, then yeah, it's a war.
omw_68
2d ago
So I disagree with the implication that you need shadowy influencers teaching this behaviour
I agree, I think there are plenty of Leftist "Community Organizers," "Activists" etc. with the know-how to set this up. But I think there's another issue which does require a shadowy influencer, which is that there needs to be some degree of consensus as to who should lead the activities. Because I can assure you that in a movement this large, there are many many people who think they should be running the show and are willing to damage the movement as a whole if it will help them seize the reigns.
My guess is that Soros or someone like him is using his money to choose the leadership. Because if there are one or two organizations with the money to fly people around; bail people out of jail; buy equipment; and so on, it kind of forms a natural Schelling point.
I think that without something like this in place, a movement this large and with this many hysterical unhinged people would have a really hard time accomplishing anything at all.
omw_68
3d ago
There is never an objective need
Assuming that's true, so what? As I understand your argument, your position is that "stop attacking Israel" is an unreasonable condition on the cessation of hostilities, because you interpret the word "attack" as being so broad as to include any violence of any nature by any resident of Gaza against any Israeli.
And I'm telling you that's not what I meant. I used the word "attack" in a more narrow sense.
And using that definition, it is clear that your argument is wrong. For example, Jordan has stopped attacking Israel (in my sense of the word "attacking" and Israel has stopped conducting military activities against Jordan. All that Gaza needs to do is achieve the level of "non-attack" reached by Jordan.
Page 6
Can you quote the relevant part of the paper for me? Are you claiming that page 6 shows that "rockets attacks dropped to a tiny fraction of what they were before the cease fire, but Israel refused to adhere to the agreement unless Hamas was able to stop all Palestinians from using violence, which is not realistically possible," because all I see is just a graph and nothing about Israel refusing to do anything.
This just runs into the standard problem of one side demanding this 'long-lasting' period to be infinite,
No it doesn't. Again, just look at the case of Jordan. An infinite amount of time has NOT elapsed since the last attack by Jordan. Agreed?
I'm talking about institutional bias on the part of Israeli institutions like the IDF, which is caused both by intentional and unintentional causes. Refusing to actually investigate things honestly is an example of intentional bias.
Assuming for the sake of argument that this is true (and I highly doubt it) your argument proves too much. As far as I know, Israel has not been recently shooting at targets in Jordan, military, civilian or otherwise. If Israel biasedly interpreted non-hostile behavior by Jordanians as being worthy of military action, that's what one would expect.
omw_68
3d ago
I suspect anything more uniform-like would be quickly pattern-matched to Nazi SS stuff
Yeah, I think that among the anti-ICE crowd, everything will be interpreted in a maximally uncharitable way. On top of that, it will be seen as a concession - an admission that ICE is worried about how it is perceived; and that the anti-ICE crowd has at least some degree of power over ICE.
In my experience, for Lefists, any kind of admission along these lines is like blood in the water. An institution which is worried about its image is a huge target.
omw_68
4d ago
First of all, your entire premise is ridiculous. 'Palestinians attacking Israelis' is something that is always going to exist at some base level, just like 'Israelis attacking Palestinians' or 'Israelis attacking Israelis' or 'Israelis attacking Dutch people (and vice versa)' or whatever groups are in contact.
Since apparently you don't understand what I meant by "attacking," allow me to clarify for you. By your reasoning, the Swiss are "always attacking" France, in the sense there are regular attacks by Swiss people against French people. Nevertheless, there is no need for France to conduct military operations against Switzerland in the way that Israel has conducted military operations against Gaza.
With that in mind, all that the people of Gaza need to do is limit their degree of attacks towards Israel to something roughly comparable to the level of Swiss attacks against France. At that point, the Israeli hostilities will promptly cease.
An example is the 2008 cease fire, where rockets attacks dropped to a tiny fraction of what they were before the cease fire, but Israel refused to adhere to the agreement unless Hamas was able to stop all Palestinians from using violence, which is not realistically possible.
I am skeptical. Would you mind providing a source for this so that I can scrutinize your claim? TIA.
Secondly, the idea that if there is a brief period of no attacks at all, Israel will trust Palestinians enough to just open the borders and let everything through is absurd.
Agreed. When I said "stop attacking Israel," I meant something long-lasting not something brief.
Finally, fact is that Israel perceives all kinds of fairly innocent things as attacks
I'm a little confused by this. Are you talking about fog-of-war incidents which will inevitably take place during armed conflicts, especially since one side disguises their military activities as civilian activities as a matter of policy? Or are you talking about official Israeli policy?
omw_68
5d ago
The amusing thing to me is that there is an unwritten seventh role on which the whole operation depends, "retard who gets shot." If the operation proceeded as written with everyone playing their roles perfectly, nothing would happen. So some women stand on the opposite side of the street from ICE and blow whistles for a while, so what? This whole system only functions when somebody is stupid enough to get shot. Of course, none of the participants know that, least of all the people that get shot, but it is how it works nonetheless.
Yeah it seems very likely to me that part of the game plan is to goad ICE into killing or seriously harming someone who can be held up as a martyr.
omw_68
5d ago
If this was the case, I would expect to see a nontrivial amount of people used to C, trying out F for a while as a result of travel, and saying "wow, this really is better".
To an extent I agree with this. There is a little bit of a confound because the choice between F and C will be perceived as a choice regarding America in general. For example, I can imagine a typical liberal American college student spending a year in Europe and then crowing about Metric units as a kind of virtue-signalling. That being said, yes, I would expect that a non-trivial amount of Europeans, Middle-Easterners, Africans, etc. who spend a couple years in the US would admit, at least privately, that the F scale is better.
What we seem to be seeing instead
Where is this coming from? Is there a subreddit for foreign ex-pats living in the US?
You could just as easily ask why traditional laws against murder, kidnapping, mayhem, etc. enough when it comes to full on terrorism.
Among other things, laws specifically directed at terrorism make it easier for the authorities to go after the people and organizations that support terrorism, to sanction them and cut them off financially.
Suppose George Soros gives $100,000 to some 501(c)(3) which nominally provides food and shelter for immigrants but also is involved in organizing these sorts of disruptive protests. As far as I know, there is no law at the moment forbidding him from doing so. Which, as a practical matter, means that he has a lot of freedom to hire rent-a-mobs to block highways, disrupt conservative speaking events, and so on.
Under my proposal (which admittedly is kind of a fantasy) it would be illegal to provide money or any kind of support to organizations which engage in this sort of behavior. Which means that a lot of their funding gets cut off; they are unable to buy a lot of the services they need to function, and so on.
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