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These are a lot of words to just say you don't like someone.
How can you talk about fairness if you don't use specific examples. Isn't this just you saying 'Nah, I don't want to consider your points'?
I don't care about Jan 6th but are you really saying it was treated the same of the protests the summer before? I've never heard a good explanation as to why CHAZ was just forgotten about... Literal sedition, they shot 2 children!
How can you just ignore this?
...Who are you under the impression that I don't like?
I offered links to the two threads in question, with themselves contain links further back the chain of conversation. That's the evidence. I didn't actually compile together specific chains of conversation, so it's actually possible that I'm wrong here. Do you think I'm wrong?
I absolutely want to consider your points. I want to consider everyone's points. I stated fairly explicitly in the above that I am fairly confident that J6 was handled differently enough from the Floyd Riots. Notably, that certainty is less than it was before, because I got a lot of my information about both events from here, and it seems to me that there is, in fact, considerable misinformation floating around. Still, I'm down from 100% certainty to maybe 80% certainty.
What I'm saying is that my personal certainty isn't an argument. It's not evidence. And at some point, someone needs to actually make an argument, backed with solid evidence, and until that happens, and especially when people attempt to do it and fail, people should not allow themselves to round rumor into fact.
I don't. I think there's a pretty decisive argument to be made that the two events were the back-and-forth wrenching that tore the spine out of America. But that argument has to be made persuasively. Just assuming it should be self-evident is setting yourself up for failure.
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No, because it was a literal attempt at overturning a democratic election result, ie. a coup attempt. No matter how farcical or amateurish, that's what it was. The people invading the Capitol obviously thought in some way that their actions would lead to Trump being declared the president, despite that, according to the law, this wasn't supposed to happen, and indeed didn't happen. That's a coup attempt by whatever definition of the words you are using; it is absolutely not surprising at all that a coup attempt would be treated more harshly than an "ordinary" riot.
Suppose one argued that the Floyd riots were an attempt at Revolution? Is an attempt to violently seize power during an administration meaningfully different than an attempt to violently seize power during the handover?
Notably, I don't think the floyd riots were an attempt at actual revolution. But they were much closer to it than J6 was to a coup.
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The extra qualifiers are completely irrelevant or flat out wrong. Irrelevant in the sense that, similar to how people want to put themselves behind thought crimes, if I break a window in response to a republican getting elected am I then a better person than if I break a window due to a democrat getting elected?
Flat out wrong in the sense that the people went to protest, not to overthrow the rule of law but to, in their view, justly impose it. They believed that Pence had the legal authority to overthrow the FAKE election results and reinstate a the authentic election results.
In either case it's an wordgame of chess where the entire argument is based on bad faith assumptions about these people. But also, in either case, it would still be completely wrong and irrelevant since we have an example of the same actions taking place when Trump was elected. But then, every single time, the argument oscillates back to 'but that wasn't a serious threat' despite it being already established that no one believes that the J6 was a serious threat either.
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It was not a coup attempt, because (1) nearly all of them own weapons at home and consciously chose not bring them in the capital, (2) nearly all of them left on their own accord, (3) there was no meaningful action attempted which would conceivably lead to an election not being certified within the relevant time span.
I am bewildered at this idea that the protest was a coup. I know that this has been the DNCs chief messaging about the event. Why wouldn’t the same logic apply to BLM which demanded the end of policing, tried to blind police with lasers, firebombed a precinct etc? That is a coup of the existing powers that led to serious harm.
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There have been similar protests that included a small amount of illegal behavior every time a Republican has been elected president since 2000.
https://wgntv.com/news/hundreds-of-peaceful-trump-protests-overshadowed-by-violent-acts-arrests/
Some of these anti-Republican protests were even organized by foreign powers: https://thehill.com/policy/technology/358025-thousands-attended-protest-organized-by-russians-on-facebook/
Did those people not, in some way, think their actions might lead to Trump being deposed? Their explicit statements to the media suggest they too were engaging in a coup attempt:
There's a very obvious way in which these weren't similar protests; they didn't happen literally during the confirmation of the electoral vote (and thus the Biden presidency) in the literal location where that confirmation was taking place. The first link (I had to VPN it - not available outside of US) took place after the inauguration; it was literally a protest in the sense that nothing they could do at this point could make Trump a not-President and they were just expressing their frustration.
It's the specific context (location, timeline etc.) of Jan 6 that makes it a (farcical) coup attempt, not just there being protests against a presidency in general during some generic time around the election-inauguration period.
I guess you didn't read my links carefully. The specific quote I provided of a woman trying to prevent his presidency was from an inauguration day protest (i.e. before Trump assumed the presidency) at literally the location where he would be inaugurated. Violent actions - e.g. setting a car on fire - also happened. So by your stated criteria, it was a coup attempt.
But I guess you can gerrymander your definitions even more carefully now that I've pointed this out.
The protests against Bush in 2000 and 2004 were also pre-inauguration, and were generally aimed at influencing the vote counting process.
You seem to be claiming that because anti-Trump protesters (including violent ones) had no hope at achieving their stated goal of preventing him from becoming president, they are "just expressing their frustration". But when anti-Biden protesters (mostly peaceful) engaged in protest but had no hope of stopping Biden, it's a coup attempt. Weird.
I believe they had hope of stopping Biden. They had no chance of stopping Biden. Intent matters.
Similarly, people say this sort of thing all the time, and then one side or the other makes drama from it all the time; the critical factor is undertaking steps of a concrete plan to bring it about. It doesn't particularly matter if the plan is very, very hopeless, because you want to nuke any incentive gradient that could lead to a better second attempt. Conversely, "we don't like Bush, so let's set a car on fire" is not even based on any whatsoever plausible model of how an election could be overturned.
Is "lets take selfies while illegally wandering around and vandalize Pelosi's desk" based on a plausible model of how an election could be overturned?
From what I can recall the goal was to persuade Pence to do some maneuver of questionable legality, much like the protest attempts directed at vote counters/courts in 2000 and 2004. But those weren't coup attempts.
Anyway glad to know that the crux of the issue is how hopeful the mostly peaceful rioters feel.
P.S. There were literal death threats directed at members of the electoral college, also in an attempt to stop Trump. No arrests for that "coup attempt" that I can find either.
(I am not committed to these not being coup attempts. However, there is a difference in scale.)
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My response to this is what the previous poster said to your previous remark: You're slicing things very finely so that the exact definition of what counts as a coup is contrived to only count January 6, and to not count anything done by a leftist. This became especially obvious when he told you that the leftist versions did meet your criteria and you changed your criteria so as to exclude them. You're also using vague terms like (ironically) "concrete plan" and"plausible model". I can easily imagine setting a car on fire to be a concrete plan; someone has the general idea "people respond to shows of force" so burning the car will lead to the government reconsidering. Sure, there's a step in the chain of reasoning that's not likely, but that's also true for any January 6 protestors who wanted to change the result.
Those criteria are guided by my understanding of culpability in German law, where I live. Particularly the idea of a plausible model is founded in § 23 of the criminal law, where the presence of a crime requires that the particulars are suited to lead to success in principle. For instance, you are committing a crime by shooting at a plane flying overhead even if your gun is fundamentally too weak to shoot bullets that high, but not by attempting to curse the plane down via strategically buried nailclippings.
edit: Reread, correction: it is a crime but may go unpunished or be punished leniently.
I'm not sure how a judge would decide "burning a car leads to Bush not being elected", but I see it as more an expression of powerlessness, a substitutive behavior that is more an expression of psychological defeat than particular criminal intent aimed at overturning the election. In other words, the J6 protesters had hope of an outcome that favored them; an anti-Bush protester did not.
You just undermined your own argument; this "correction" pretty much says "yeah, I guess it is a crime, even under German law". Of course, you're finely slicing things again by saying that although it's a crime, it's a crime that often goes unpunished.
That's more finely slicing. It's an "expression of powerlessness", so it doesn't count.
Whether something counts as an "expression of powerlessness" is a completely subjective decision, and is obviously not synonymous with "has a low chance of working" (since both cases have a low chance of working). And you didn't state it until it turned out you needed to do so to explain how left-wing protestors are totally different. Of course, you're always going to find some minute detail on which January 6 protestors differ from any left-wing example, if you look hard enough.
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Does Germany still have any common law, or did it ever get a full civil code rewrite? I imagine there was some pretty high profile precedent about culpability for witchcraft at one point.
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So like with Disrupt J20? The distiction made here exists, but doesn't separate J6 from J20.
And if intent matters, /r/witchesvspatriarchy should be investigated for attempting to harm Trump using magic.
This specific case is actually explicitly not covered under my understanding of criminal intent! It'd be called a "superstitious attempt" in German law and be considered leniently because there's no actual danger.
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