Hacker News Reader

Comment by vorpalhex | Hacker News Reader

It's insurrection. Terrorism would be if it was against civilians with the intent to cause terror and mayhem.

Terrorism is "Premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience". Trying to coerce / kidnap / etc. Congress people sounds like terrorism. They don’t have to be successful.

> Terrorism is a form of warfare in which a social movement that opposes the state directs violence toward civilians rather than the military or the police.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/collective-violence/Coups-r...

Even your own definition doesn't apply - the insurrectionists weren't a subnational group (they don't have a cohesive identity other than sharing a common cause) or clandestine agents.

They definitely have a cohesive identity and are even organized in defined specialized identities like militias and Proud Boys. These are domestic terrorists and they attempted to overturn the fair and free elections in this country based on outright lies with NO evidence to support them and also kidnap and murder civilians, law enforcement and anyone else who stood in their way.

I and others have been following their discussions online and its clear that while not every single individual at the domestic insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6th seeks to murder and cause mayhem, many in the hundreds and thousands do. Many beyond that seek to downplay the danger and provide apologia for the criminal actions of terrorists they at least partially sympathize with.

Are you arguing that it is impossible for an individual acting alone to be a terrorist? I think even a small group of say 2-3 people under your definition could not be considered terrorists.

The people invading the capitol last week definitely had a cohesive identity. You can call them MAGAs or Red Caps or even Trump supporters, but their cohesiveness was strong enough to drive popularity for a social media platform (Parler).

A common cause seems like a sufficiently cohesive identity; I don't see why voluntary political affiliations should be excluded. They were not very clandestine, I agree. Their antipathy to wearing masks has been rather a boon to law enforcement, although even the ones who were masked were fairly easily identified later.

That applies to a lot of situations if taken literally. You have to use a lot of care when labeling somebody with such a charged word. We wouldn’t want to see a bunch of rioters from <pick a protest by whatever side that turned violent> sent to Guantanamo.

I don't want that because I don't want anyone sent to Guantanamo. But this absurdist doublethink has to stop somewhere. The IRA were terrorists. The Weathermen were terrorists. And setting fire to a courthouse in order to change laws is, in fact, terrorism. If we can't apply laws to people we agree with, we do not live in a society of laws at all.

Setting fire to a courthouse is already against the law. What benefit is there in calling it Terrorism?

Are there things which are currently legal that will become illegal under this 'domestic terrorism framework' that is being discussed? What are these things which are currently legal that will be addressed by a 'domestic terrorism framework'.

Were the result Church Hearings justified or did they go too far in the restrictions they placed on law enforcement?

Most of the protesters were just protesters. Some of them may have had quasi-violent intent, such as 'let's break in an make a point', but a very small few seemed to have some very dark intent.

If you rile up enough people, then a small slice of them will be on the radical margins.

It only took a ~5 Serbs to kill Franz Ferdinand.

That’s a scary observation. Those people weren’t the most important cause of world war 1, but they were the spark in an extremely dry barn that everyone kept adding gasoline to, daring the other side to spark it

Members of Congress are civilians.

Members of Congress and staff are civilians. But definition of these terms is somewhat slippery and mutable since they are also shaped by laws, both existing and in the future.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com