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So it looks like WNBA’s Brittney Griner’s 9-Year Prison Sentence Upheld In Russian Appeal Court.
One thing I find interesting about the whole ordeal is the similarities between her case and the Jan6 detainees, in both an hostile government dishes disproportionate punishment to a member of an opposing tribe.
While I feel for Ms. Griner I can't help, but chuckle at the parallels and remind myself that in the real world there aren't good guys, just your guys and theirs.
Jan. 6 detainees say a D.C. jail is so awful that they'd like a transfer to Guantanamo
Glossing over the performative nature of this gesture, you'd think the travails of the Jan. 6 rioters would engender a degree of sympathy for criminal justice reformers. Instead, the reaction seems to be outrage that Upstanding Citizens like themselves should be subject to the same conditions as common criminals.
Well, yes, indeed I believe that upstanding citizens shouldn’t suffer the same condition as criminals, who should experience bad conditions in order to deter them from doing crime. Not sure what your point is, that I should lobby for improved conditions in jails so that political prisoners of my side have better time there? No, I’d rather the other side stop taking political prisoners.
That they are, despite their self conception, common criminals, not some weird edge case. That if you think they don't deserve the treatment they're receiving, your problem is with how we deal with criminal suspects in general. That their attitude is fundamentally rooted in a belief that they are not supposed to be subject to the criminal justice system.
Surely they're at the very least uncommon criminals. After all, it's not every day that the Capitol gets stormed.
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I find your suggestion that they get the same treatment as common criminals to be rather ludicrous, and I do not believe that you are making it in a good faith.
The criminal justice system did not treat the George Floyd rioters in the same manner, that is, by attempting to catch every single last one of them and keeping them in pretrial detention for months or years. Instead, George Floyd rioters were allowed to run mostly scot-free, and only a handful of the absolute worst ones faced any consequences at all. In the "100 days of Portland", for example, the handful of rioters that did end up getting arrested, was immediately released and often rearrested next night, rinse and repeat.
In fact, I wouldn't have minded much how the Jan 6th rioters are treated if BLM rioters were treated the same (in fact I suggested that we do exactly that at the time, the Jan 6th treatment is another good example along the Waco one I brought up that stopping riots is definitely doable when proper methods are used). The problem here is that you are asking me to play along the rules of the game, while your side of the "criminal justice reform" argument is rigging the game to punish my side and benefit theirs. I reject that.
I think you vastly overestimate how well criminals and suspected criminals are treated.
The vast majority of people present at the Jan 6 riot were not arrested or charged with anything. Justifiably, since all they did was mill around outside. (Many participated in attacks on the USCP, but not in a way where they could be credibly identified).
The 2020 protests led to ~13.6k arrests by early June (FBI). Much like Jan 6, most people weren't arresting and many were slapped with minor charges (e.g. violating curfew), but many were subject to more serious charges.
This is a common claim here, but allow me to offer an alternative thesis: right-wingers are really bad at protesting. They don't get that protests - the interesting, effective ones, that are more than just rallies - are as much about the police response as they are about the protests themselves. That means walking the line of riotous behavior, because fundamentally you're trying to garner sympathy by provoking a police overreaction. Too riotous and you alienate potentially sympathetic members of the public, too docile and you just get ignored. The point is to be able to gesture to the riot cop kicking the shit out of you and say "come and see the violence inherent in the system".
Where this becomes a problem for would-be right wing protestors is a) many view anything more disorderly than a Flyers' victory celebration as a riot, so the nuance of this is lost on them b) they don't do much protesting themselves. So they never develop the metis that left wing activist communities do about how to walk the line, how to self-police people who make a little too much trouble, how not to get arrested (e.g. don't film yourself doing crime and post it to social media with a public statement admitting you're doing the crime). They don't even understand that walking the line is something you're supposed to do. Nor do they have the social infrastructure set up to assist when their people do get arrested.
The result is that for the most part, right wing protests are cringe and a bit pathetic, and when it does get rowdy they blunder across the line and get in a lot of trouble. This seems unfair to them because they don't perceive the distinction between their cargo-cult protest tactics and what more experienced left wing activists do. The game isn't rigged, they're just new to it.
You've mistaken cause and effect. It's not that the right wing is bad at protests, is that they're not allowed to be good at them. They do not get the favorable press coverage necessary to sway the public, because the press hates them and presents their protests with scorn. It had nothing to do with their own tactics.
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It's very noticeable that there's a massive double standard in how this stuff gets treated depending on the political affiliations of the rioters or protestors.
When this topic comes up, I always think about the freedom convoy in Canada and the disproportionate fury directed towards it. Media reports about them were overwhelmingly negative to the point of even attempting to associate them with Nazis and confederates. GoFundMe shut down their donation page and seized their funding, and eventually the protest was deemed to be a public order emergency and the Emergencies Act was invoked to clear the blockade despite a lack of evidence that the Ottawa protests posed a salient threat to Canadian security. Trudeau's opinion was that "Illegal blockades and occupations are not peaceful protests", despite the fact that he supported protesting farmers in India who were doing the very same thing with the rationale “Canada will always stand up for the right to peaceful protest".
Meanwhile, BLM and Antifa (as part of a repeated pattern of behaviour) have committed arson, looted, rioted, assaulted people, tried to create their own "autonomous zones", etc. Yet these protests are considered to be "mostly peaceful", and the media has generally been very lenient on them and have attempted to justify their behaviour. But when a trucker convoy engages in a blockade in order to protest against government interference in what should be a private decision, that's a disruptive, threatening, fear-inducing, anti-government insurgency and everything possible should be done to get rid of them.
(@wlxd as well)
It's a little jarring how I see pretty much the exact same comment made by the other side on left-leaning social media. I see commenters on the left furious about how the January 6th protesters were handled with kid gloves, including being allowed to go home instead of being arrested immediately while the BLM protesters were tear gassed and roughed up by the police and kettled and arrested.
I really don't think this is evidence of leniency at all. Firstly, people were arrested on Jan 6th. I've seen a bunch of complaining about how the number arrested was less than the BLM riots, but I'd like to note that police were overwhelmed. "Since the police at the scene were violently attacked and outnumbered, they had a limited number of officers who could make arrests. 'Approximately 140 police officers were assaulted Jan. 6 at the Capitol, including about 80 U.S. Capitol Police and about 60 from the Metropolitan Police Department,' according to the Department of Justice."
It's necessary to remember that Jan 6th was a one time event, too, whereas BLM rioted for a much longer period and it's reasonable that officers would know better what to expect for the latter which would make them more capable of handling the riots and making arrests on the spot, so the two cannot be directly compared in that way. Still, hundreds of arrests were made in the aftermath of Jan 6th. "More than 855 defendants tied to the attack have been arrested in 'nearly all 50 states and the District of Columbia.'"
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2022/07/25/fact-check-false-claim-no-arrests-were-made-capitol-jan-6/10077303002/
If this is the basis for the argument that the left is being politically discriminated against, I have to say I think it's very weak. There are plenty of factors that can influence police response that have nothing to do with sentiment.
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