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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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These are a lot of words to just say you don't like someone.

These post has gotten a bunch of responses raising a variety of objections to Jan 6th, arguing for violations of symmetry based on other events, questions about fairness, questions about framing, and so on. The objection that immediately springs to mind, for me, is that the posts are narrowly focusing on specific questions where the facts are on their side, in a bid to minimize surface areas to relevant counter-arguments relating to the Jan 6th riot in general.

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?

I don't care about Jan 6th but are you really saying it was treated the same of the protests the summer before?

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.

  • -10

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:

“Trump is illegal,” she said. “He is in violation of the constitution. I am doing everything I can to prevent his presidency.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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