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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   31517 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026

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The central problem with Jan6th is that the Capital Police consistently failed to do their job, and those failures were the cause that escalated the protest into a riot

I had thought that riots are caused by the rioters rioting. I can kind-of see one making the argument that undercover agents incited the crowd, but I can't see how the police failing to prevent people from entering a building is what causes people to enter a building, as if this particular crowd of people is just a force of nature with no agency or responsibility.

Seems like you don't understand the psychology of riots. Very few people set out to riot, and certainly there is little evidence jan 6 was such a time. Instead protests escalate to riots when certain factors come to play, most notably on J6 was that no actual guidance was given by police as to what borders were going to be enforced. Instead there was a shoddily constructed perimeter which was quickly abandoned, and then the fleeing police failed to secure the doorways.

That is the proper, traditional Riot. What is muddying it is the conflation of "riots" where a group of people go to a protest looking for trouble ahead of time, armed and armored. Jan 6 seems like a traditional riot. BLM and Anti-ICE protests have been something else, but called a protest/riot for some reason.

Edit: Kids these days, can't even riot properly! SMH.

failing

You mean, given the command to let them in. I'm sure if the govt wanted to post the god damned military with rifles there they could have stopped an unarmed crowd of Q-propagandized boomers from entering.

A lot of people had to do dumb shit they shouldn't have done for Babbit's death to fall out of it, is what I take that person's point to be.

Pointing out that the police did something wrong doesn't require thinking the rioters were in the right. People have this zero-sum picture of how blame works that just doesn't correspond to reality at all. You see it from the other political direction in "victim-blaming" discourse - "maybe you shouldn't have dressed like that or gotten that drunk" does not mean "the guy who assaulted you did nothing wrong and you deserved it", but when people get emotional common sense gets left behind. In a lot of these situations, a lot had to go wrong, many people contributed to it, some of them doubtless behaved worse than others, but even so, it makes no sense to insist there is one and only party at fault.

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