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That's all I'm saying!
I'm extremely sympathetic to the complaint of the obvious double standard. I don't understand why we can't acknowledge that 1) both Jan 6 and Summer 2020 were violent and bad; 2) Summer 2020 was more violent; 3) people who defended the Summer 2020 riots should be called out and shamed.
Some people seem to have this bizarre need to believe that if Jan 6 is claimed to be more violent than Summer 2020 but isn't, then that must mean Jan 6 wasn't violent or even bad. No! That's not how logic works!
Why should people be called out and shamed for defending the Summer of 2020 riots? Presumably the idea is that by doing so, we punish them for what they did and therefore disincentivize them and others from doing it again, yes?
Can this actually be accomplished? Do you think that we can, from where we stand today, straightforwardly punish or disincentivize the BLM riots or their supporters in any meaningful way? If you had a way of doing this, it would seem to me to be the preferable course of action.
I can't speak for others, but I do not think you can actually accomplish this in any meaningful way, so I see no benefit in pursuing such a strategy. I think your argument is never going to be anything but an isolated demand for rigor. If this rigor could be applied to blue violence, it would have been done during the 2020 riots. If it could not be applied to blue violence in the 2020 riots, there is no reason to believe that it will ever be applied to blue violence. If it will never be applied to blue violence, there is no reason to accept its application to what you agree is significantly lesser Red violence. It is better to either demand that enforcement be meaningfully applied to blue violence first, or to simply accept that the label can no longer function in any meaningful capacity for either side.
It seems to me that this rejection of the label in its entirety is, in fact, the best available punishment for the defection of the 2020 riots. If the way people treated those riots was wrong, if that wrong should have consequences, this is the best possible consequence available to those of us who actually care.
You claim that people are ignoring physical reality. It seems to me that you are ignoring social reality. "violence" is a label, a social tool. It is a word, not an integer or a rigorous equation. It is supposed to be an objective term applied fairly. If it is not used in that way, it would be better to not use it at all, and I think this is more or less the position of the other people you are arguing against as well. You don't get a consensus you can't maintain, and this is a consensus you definately can't maintain.
It's not enough to recognize a double-standard. You have to either remove it, or adapt to it. We can't remove this one, so adaption is the best option available.
Even granting everything you just said for the sake of argument, I still don't understand how that can or should result in someone actually believing in the privacy of their own mind that Jan 6 wasn't violent and bad. Or do you suspect that the people on The Motte claiming such things are being mask-on even here?
There's a classic Scott Alexander essay about this exact issue, so I'm just going to quote a bit:
In such a situation, there's a lot of different approaches available. Two examples:
"No, King was not a "criminal", in the sense you appear to be using the word."
"Yes, King was a "criminal" in a very limited sense, but that sense is not germane to this discussion. Applying it here adds no relevant information, so I object to it being so applied." In any case, simply insisting that the technical definition is met and therefore the label is fair to apply is unproductive, because the context swamps the technical question entirely.
Another way to say this would be that I'd happily agree that the protest was "violent" in the sense that my last paintball game was violent, and "bad" in the sense that Taco Bell messing up my last meal order was bad. I suspect that this sort of agreement is not what you or most other people arguing that they're "violent" and "bad" are looking for, though, which sort of indicates that it is in fact about more than the words themselves, that the implications matter as well. And if the implications do in fact matter, than it is more honest to argue the point than to allow a pretense of agreement where no meaningful agreement actually exists. To most people, "violent" and "bad" mean "something significant and meaningful should be done about this", and I strongly disagree.
none of this is a matter of masks being on or off. People cannot generally bring themselves to believe that this is a purely pedantic argument over strict, rigorous definitions, and so they are arguing what they perceive to be the core of the issue as best they can, I think.
I'm familiar with that classic essay, but that's not at all describing what I'm doing. I think the Jan 6 mob's behavior was, on its own merits, worthy of contempt, shame, and mass criminal charges. This is not because I'm lazily applying words like "violent" and letting my opinion of the event be colored by the baggage the word and its central examples come with. I don't particularly care what words you or anyone else want to use to describe it, as long as we agree on what actually physically happened there on the ground (which, alas, I'm not so sure we all do. You seem perhaps more reasonable than some other posters in this regard).
My opinion of the Jan 6 mob also has absolutely nothing to do with the detestable behavior of the 2020 rioters and their shameful defenders in the Blue Tribe. I still can't fathom how one's opinion of the two even could be related. As if our opinion of the perpetrators would change in a counterfactual world where one event happened and the other didn't. That is such an alien moral framework to me I don't even know how to begin to understand it.
And most people would probably be with you in punishing J6ers if the previous consensus on violence hadn't been utterly thrashed by progressives and fellow sympathizers. So yeah, they're not judged as harshly because the standards changed. We weren't aware they had changed, but media consensus dictatated otherwise. And this is somehow incomprehensibly alien to you? Come now. That's a pose.
So you would be willing to throw the book at J6ers because you feel they objectively warranted it. Congratulations; now what? I am more interested in fair treatment than I am justice as a terminal goal, because I think that's the superior algorithm for a host of reasons. So what if I think J6 qualified as violent by some technical metrics? So does play-shoving a friend, and I'm not going to entertain anybody calling that violent just because Webster says so.
So if BLM wasn't violent, then neither was J6. As I said before, this is indeed partly cynical. But is also deadly serious. I refuse to call J6 violent because of the valence of that word, much in the same way I don't consider assimilation to be cultural erasure, that taxation is theft, or that the Israeli treatment of Palestinians is ethnic cleansing, even though any of those could be considered technically true. This isnt being cryptic, or hiding behind a mask. Why do you assume this some deliberate, self-inflicted partisan error?
I think I didn't do a good enough job explaining what I mean, so I can genuinely see how you would think that. To clarify, I'm fine with outwardly downplaying J6 because of the new standard that Summer 2020 wrought. What I'm confused and concerned about is that some people seem to believe that J6 wasn't bad on its own merits. As in, if Summer 2020 hadn't happened, it seems some people still wouldn't think J6 was a big deal and that the perpetrators still shouldn't have been charged or even condemned. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding them.
As I explained to FC, it's not that Jan 6 was bad "because it was violent", as if we're robotically applying a flowchart of "matches dictionary definition of violent" -> "is therefore worthy of condemnation and criminal charges". Jan 6 was worthy* of condemnation and criminal charges because of what actually happened there. I don't care what words you want to use to describe it. I care that people see what happened and condemn what they're seeing as harshly as I believe it ought to be condemned. Yet so many people seem to have convinced themselves that it wasn't actually a big deal and that we don't actually see what we can plainly see on video.
* Again, on its own merits. There's a reasonable argument to be made that the new standard of Summer 2020 compels us to go light on J6ers, at least outwardly.
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People aren't oblivious to the logic. Well, maybe some are. I dont think most people here. But you said this take was out of step with a community thats supposedly grounded to reality. I think from the responses you can maybe see that it is based in reality - such as it is.
One of the consequences of institutions playing favorites with mob violence is that it causes many individuals to second-guess their own definitions. If the BLM riots didn't qualify as violence in popular sentiment, then who is to say J6 should? Am I being cheeky, or am I being serious? Could you even tell? Honestly, I'm in limbo between both states. Where does 'reality' have a say? That's a socially mediated phenomenon, as demonstrated quite clearly since 2020 onward.
'Violent' is one of those fuzzy terms that can mean anything from a playful shove, to murder, to mean insults. We probably had more national consensus on the thresholds for qualification in prior decades, and then that was wrecked in 2020. That you now see so many (what you regard as) peculiar opinions on this subject shouldn't be too surprising. And while it's hard to often tell if this is sincere or troll-ish (just reacting to progressives 'reality'), I think its often both.
You are! And I am! As intelligent beings capable of reasoning on our own. It's fine to say to a Blue Triber who defended the 2020 rioters, "Hey, if you thought summer 2020 wasn't violent, then I won't grant you that Jan 6 was violent. Your rules!" But you shouldn't believe that yourself in the privacy of your own mind merely because you're rubbing your opponents' noses in their hypocrisy.
There is no reasoning on our own when it comes to the meaning of words, as the meaning is inherently dictated by how people perceive it. If I start using a word differently from how others use it, that creates a problem, because then I'm no longer using the same words as others and thus have my own language. This undermines the value of languages as a tool of communication.
There is absolutely no hypocrisy or bad logic in changing the way you use words, when others use it differently as well.
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I do appreciate what you're saying here. I think most people here are just used to the ridiculous media caricatures of Jan. 6, and lumping you into the same bag. I'm not a fan of Trump, but still I could easily imagine myself in the shoes of some of the random people in that crowd. They came for a protest, obviously, not planning to overthrow Congress and impose Trump as El Presidente. Then all of a sudden, they're in the Capitol building, probably having no idea why except that's where the amorphous crowd went. They shout a bit, take a few photos, and go home, then find out that they're now on a watch list and barred from air travel and at serious risk of prosecution.
Oh, and note that one of them was literally shot and killed. The media described this (and four people dying from health issues) as "a protest that led to five deaths." Which is about as honest as reporting that George Floyd "committed a crime at a convenience store that led to one death".
This isn't how we should treat protestors, left or right. You're allowed to protest! And to be clear, the peaceful BLM protestors should also not face any consequences - it's not their fault some opportunists used the protests (and media cover) as a convenient excuse to attack people, set fires, and loot stores.
Except, in my experience, the same people who are sympathetic to the nonviolent members of the J6 mob also howl in outrage when the actually violent members of the J6 mob face criminal sentences for their acts. And again, I'm fine with insisting on there not being a double standard between the J6ers and the Summer 2020 protesters. I absolutely agree there was a double standard, and I'm open to the suggestion that J6ers get off the hook just out of fairness. But these people seem to believe that the J6ers did basically nothing wrong (or at least nothing wrong beyond the realm of trivial misdemeanors), not just that they ought to be treated lightly to keep with the Summer 2020 standard.
That's what boggles my mind - the suggestion that they did nothing wrong. I can only assume these people didn't bother watching the videos, or that they're just that thoroughly mind-killed from perpetual incubation in the culture wars? I really don't know. I don't get it. If you can see all the video footage and think "Nope. Basically just lost tourists. No violence of any significance. No transgression of anything important happening here", then the inferential distance between them and me is so vast as to not be bridgeable.
It may have something to do with the contrast between how the actually violent members of the J6 mob have been treated and the how the actually violent members of another mostly peaceful mob from recent memory.
I mean, they did trespass, and they did shove some cops, but that doesn't sound like the end of the world. Write them a ticket, or something.
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It is one thing to say it, to treat this as a rhetorical device, a debate tactic. It is another thing to actually implement it, to cement in your own mind, "going forward, these are the actual rules I will live by and argue for". This is probably one of the core differences between extremists like myself and moderate normies generally. It's very easy to say "You shouldn't do this, or X would result". But if X doesn't actually result, then your argument was never valid in the first place. You have to actually commit. The social rules and definitions actually have to change, permanently. the new reality must be recognized and accepted, and equanimity with it achieved, otherwise it's just a stupid bluff that's already been called.
I'm trying to communicate to you that I have done so, that I consider the norm you are appealing to not merely threatened, but actually destroyed, past-tense, of strictly historical interest, expired, gone. What you are arguing for is, in the abstract, better, but it is not a feature of the world we live in, and I see no benefit in pretending otherwise.
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