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I’m sorry but that’s bullshit. There is the famous imagery of the CNN reporter stating fiery but peaceful with a building burning behind him.
It was a meme. People knew. Everyone knew. But CNN (mouthpiece of the establishment which is blue) was encouraging it.
This is a fair counter to the innocently-unaware angle, but not to the more layered second option I presented, where people were aware that there was violence happening, but thought it should be tolerated for the sake of the protests, because allowing the government to use the excuse of the riots to suppress the (purportedly historically important) protests themselves would be even worse.
Shouldn’t those people want the riots to stop even more?
Abstractly, yes. But so long as they believe cops are instruments of the would-be fascist blah blah blah, and absolutely cannot be trusted, then they cannot countenance the government actually doing anything to make the riots stop. (This is in many ways just a larger-scale version of the broader piece of BLM wisdom about how you should never ever call the cops on a situation involving a black person unless you want their death on your conscience - which is thought to apply even when wrongful actions genuinely have been committed.)
Isn’t this just another way of saying “blue tribe supports the riots because it thinks without the riots other what they view as good things won’t come to fruition?”
Maybe you think that’s unfair, but I really struggle to understand the above thinking as it’s divorced from reality.
Wouldn't you agree there is a meaningful, important difference between "supporting holocaust denialism" and "not wanting holocaust denialism to be censored by the government, because wrong and dumb as it is, suppressing it is the thin end of the wedge on the government choking out free political speech on a larger scale"? I think that is a good analogy for the mainstream Blue position on the riots. "Obviously looting and arson are wrong, but if we let the police seriously intervene, they'll use that as an opportunity to squash legitimate protests, too, so que sera sera." It seems worth distinguishing, on a moral and norms-maintenance level, from the accusation that Blue Tribe genuinely, actively wanted buildings to be burned and looted. Reluctant tolerance isn't support.
(Obviously this is reliant on a… biased… view of how institutionally untrustworthy cops are. But granting this factually-dubious belief, then it seems coherent to be leery of riots-suppression without properly "supporting" the riots. And in fairness, the validity of that leeriness is not necessarily reliant on the straightforwardly-wrong claims about how prevalent police killings are. Conceivably the police may be tempted to unfairly suppress legitimate BLM protests even in a world where the core claim of the BLM protests was wrong, precisely because it's all the more tempting to suppress your enemies' speech if you genuinely, sincerely believe them to be spreading damaging lies about you.)
Personally I do think there's some amount of illegal violence you just have to grudgingly tolerate, if you want a meaningful right to protest to exist in your country. Crowd control is notoriously hard, let alone in a grassroots, spontaneous movement. In the real world, "Sure, you can protest… but if even a hundred people nation-wide get violent, then we'll send in the troops and condemn the entire movement" is as good as a ban having large-scale protests at all. Now, I think the BLM riots clearly passed that threshold, at least in some states. But it's not a binary. Tolerating some amount of rioting makes sense to me, just on general principle - never mind that cops had plausible motivation to hold special ill will against BLM because their own interests were at stake.
I don’t think that argument coheres. There is just a step difference between permitting Holocaust denialism and permitting massive multibillion dollar mayhem.
One could make the argument about protest if there was maybe a car or two turned on fire. Still despicable but within the pale to say “but all of the peaceful protest is worth not shutting down the very small rioting.”
But when you get to night after night attempted to siege a federal courthouse it’s just too far removed from a concern about protest.
I think there's a deep difference of gut-level instincts between the tribes here. Someone left-wing will quite naturally think that permitting Holocaust denialism would be much worse than permitting arbitrary thuggish looting and mayhem, because the former is the first stepping stone on a road that leads potentially to dictatorship and genocide, while the second (they perceive) is only ever going to be a marginal problem, not an existential threat to civilization.
Well, I don't know that they'd see the besieged courthouse as falling under the "rioting", or indeed, that I do. That seems to be a different matter. By "riots" I would refer to the random, apolitical, anarchic mayhem using the broad context of the protests as an excuse to run amok and pillage from random businesses. The arson, the theft, the intimidation and extortion of random homeowners. This was clearly not the motivation behind laying siege to the courthouse, which was obviously a targeted political act. Perhaps the tactic is too aggressive to fall under permissible civil protest, perhaps it tips over into revolutionary violence; but that's an issue of degree, not of kind.
Except the left cheered on (or tried to downplay) the siege and was worried about “police violence” vis-à-vis the attackers. I would’ve shot the lot.
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