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I don’t think it’s childish, it’s necessary. Current responses are too soft, dare I say, decadent. It is not unthinkable, and it has happened in history, that one day a mob will just waltz in there, slap the president around a little, declare they’re in charge now, and everyone will go: ‘What are we supposed to do, spill blood? We are civilized, let’s just do what they say and hope for the best“.
It comes down to the same disconnect I talked about last time, that somehow public life does not matter, only your private red lines. This is a gigantic collective red line, representing an almost unfathomable amount of lethal force directed at everybody. If it is not defended, nothing ever should be.
Oh, I mean I was being childish in thinking that the United States would have a competent response.
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The government isn’t a place, it’s a bunch of people. Occupied Capitol and White House? Send in the National Guard and some highly militarized Capitol Police, clear them out; or just let them have the buildings and reconvene elsewhere. America doesn’t have a magic throne or a Darksaber, the Q Shaman sitting in the Speaker’s seat doesn’t make him Speaker, and the Army won’t obey a mob.
It would take an assault strategically equivalent to that shown in Olympus Has Fallen to move the needle on government compliance with a mob.
I can't tell if you guys are blinded by partisan bias or if you actually believe this. Might as well hand them your ‘monopoly on force’ card right there. What if they start putting people in ‘prison’ like the bolsheviks 1917? Just negotiate for their release by granting the rebels taxing rights over fisheries in northern maine?
And this from people who are vociferous supporters of castle doctrine and stand your ground laws in any other context.
By your argument, the government already lost its monopoly of force card in 2020, so there's nothing left to discuss regarding Jan 6th. You think the riot has to be responded to or further riots are emboldened. Well, they didn't respond and further riots have, in fact, been emboldened; having tolerated and even endorsed well over a hundred riots within the last few years, there is no reasonable argument remaining why this one riot, far less violent than many and perhaps even most of the previous examples, is finally the point where the line must be drawn.
The actual problem is that it isn't actually possible for you to credibly advocate cracking down on riots in the abstract, because everyone watched massive, nation-wide riots not get cracked down on for more than a year, and then this one day of mild scuffling got treated like a national disaster. Your options are between no enforcement, or enforcement on only one side. If you choose the latter, the people on that side will recognize that your appeals to law and order only apply when it's to their disadvantage, and they will be increasingly inclined to decline their consent to our social system generally. This outcome is significantly worse than establishing a norm that low-level violence will be tolerated impartially, but people apparently believe that the integrity of the social system itself is essentially impervious. By the time it's obvious that they're wrong, it will be much, much too late to change course.
Oh no? The other riots should be crushed too; it’s nonsense to let it happen because they have ‘legitimate grievances’. Preferably by military-police, but backing rittenhouse style ‘vigilantism’ also works. But if you have only one unit available, definitely send it to the seat of government power first, even if those rioters are less violent, cause less property damage (which definitely is the case here). The challenge to state authority is of a much more grievous nature. Far more emboldening for any other group.
Do you not see the distinction between the riots? In minneapolis, a rioter says: ‘I am angry, I want to destroy, I’d like free stuff’. In washington, ‘Let me rule over you’. It's an attack on your power, a threat to your rights, not just criminality.
But they weren't, and that fact has consequences. One of those consequences is that you don't get to claim a norm against mob violence any more, because that norm very clearly doesn't exist, and in fact hasn't existed for decades. 2020 was not the first time Blue Tribe used organized, widespread lawless violence to advance their political values, profited mightily thereby, and got away with it. Pretending otherwise is foolish in the extreme.
It doesn't matter if it's nonsense. It's what actually happened. The police actually stood down. Individuals exercising self-defense were in fact viciously persecuted. The violence worked, the people committing it secured many of their immediate political and social goals and paid no significant penalty. You cannot operate off a theoretical model of what should have happened. You need to engage with what actually happened, and where that leaves us.
And where that leaves us is that large-scale political violence is legitimate for blue tribe, has been for decades, and will continue to be into the foreseeable future. You can't fix this. You don't seem to be in any great hurry to acknowledge the scope of the problem. Nonetheless, you think Reds should refrain from rioting, and should cooperate with severe punishments for Red rioters.
Why? Why should Reds cooperate with punishing Red rioters, when we know that Blues have no intention of reciprocating, and will in fact simply continue to abuse us? If we coordinate defection, this at least imposes a cost on their abuses. If we cooperate, they have no reason to ever change.
No, I do not. The BLM riots were an explicitly political movement, with serious political, social and financial consequences for our society at large. The violence they organized and committed was explicitly intended to usurp political power from our system of government, to coerce a wide array of significant policy changes and social outcomes in everything from corporate HR to the police and justice system to the subsequent national elections. Those riots had extremely serious impacts on the structure and nature of our society, and the effects of those riots will continue to reverberate for decades to come if previous history is to be trusted. In meaningful and significant ways, the BLM rioters did in fact use violence to rule over the rest of us. They were in fact an explicit attack on our power and a threat to our rights, and not just criminality.
And it worked. They secured dozens of billions of dollars in funding for their political causes. They secured greatly increased control over our work environment, over municipal policies, policing policies, prosecution policies. They greatly advanced their capacity for censorship and the hard enforcement of their social consensus. They carved out long-term, well-paid sinecures for their activist cadre I think it probable that they gained a significant advantage in the 2020 elections as a result of these successes. They greatly damaged the concept of a right to lawful self-defense. They caused the largest single-year increase in violent crime rates ever recorded, and they then used that increase in violence to successfully push for gun control through legislation and the aggressive reinterpretation of bureaucratic standards.
None of the above is fairly summed up as "I am angry, I want to destroy stuff, I'd like free stuff". Sure, that was the attitude of some of the actual rioters. Likewise, many of the Jan 6th rioters probably didn't think much past "I'm angry, and I want to express it." Your claim is that the Jan 6th rioters had a motive beyond that. Well, BLM and Blue Tribe likewise had a motive beyond that, and that motive paid off for them in spades.
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