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Comment by CydeWeys | Hacker News Reader

> multi-month riots over the spring, summer and fal

There were no multi-month riots this summer. Multi-month protests, yes. But not riots. The riots were much smaller in number and generally only lasted a few days at any one location prior to order being restored (here in NYC we had a few nights of looting that could be described as a riot). Even the infamous 1992 LA riots only lasted a week. Multi-month riots would be downfall-of-society level.

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Not sure what media you watch but before I went to bed, I watched Portland livestreams of very violent "protests". These went on every night for weeks and I watched people throw Molotov cocktails and shoot mortars at law enforcement. Call it what you want, but this shit was happening for over 100 nights in a row.

Mortars or fireworks? That said, I agree that there were certainly protests that consistently became violent at night time for the span of at least weeks, maybe months.

What's the difference when it blows up in your face? Throwing explosives in urban centers is unacceptable and violent.

Mortars are a hell of a lot more lethal any consumer firework. So, yes there is a difference. Mortars also need to be used at range (100s of meters to kilometers) to be effective. I highly doubt mortars were in use.

> Mortars are a hell of a lot more lethal any consumer firework.

Well, some mortars are. Other mortars are consumer fireworks.

It's almost like, in the interest of clarity, we should use specific, non-overly-broad words that can't be misinterpreted. The use of the word "mortar" here is clearly causing problems, so how about "aerial firework" and "combat mortar"?

Good point, I wasn't thinking of actual military mortars. But I think "mortar" often means consumer firework in modern parlance.

I think there might be a lot of people here (my self included) that literally didn't know that about fireworks in modern parlance. It's because talking about fireworks just doesn't ever come up in my life. But I think "mortar" is commonly known as a military kind of weapon even if you know nothing about fireworks.

I was unaware of that terminology applied to fireworks. Good to know!

What's the difference between mortars and fireworks? Damage. Suggesting people were dropping a plate, siting a mortar and undermining a building is a much stronger image than "Some bro threw an M-80 near some stuff." I am not downplaying the violence as I wasn't there, just pointing out the difference.

Well US Army mortars tend to be 60-107mm in calibre and designed for anti-infantry use while fireworks are generally designed for aesthetic effects. There is certainly some overlap in the capability of fireworks and mortars to render damage to individuals and groups but this is generally a very limited shared range of effect, with mortars being explicitly designed to kill or incapacitate human targets.

> Mortars or fireworks?

“Mortars” and “fireworks” are overlapping categories.

https://fireworks.com/products/aerial/reloadable-mortars

When someone says "I watched people throw Molotov cocktails and shoot mortars at law enforcement", the obvious implication is that we are talking about the type of military hardware pictured and described at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortar_(weapon) being used to intentionally injure or kill a group of people, not a toy version intended for making a celebratory burst of color being launched against the side of a building.

There was at least one molotov cocktail captured on camera in September landing in the street between a group of protestors and a line of cops, though it is not clear whether anyone was injured by it.

> When someone says “I watched people throw Molotov cocktails and shoot mortars at law enforcement”, the obvious implication is that we are talking about the type of military hardware pictured and described at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortar_(weapon) being used to intentionally injure or kill a group of people, not a toy version intended for making a celebratory burst of color being launched against the side of a building.

I…disagree.

If I heard “small arms and mortars”, I’d think of the military weapon. (Or “rockets and mortars”, without other context.)

If I hear “molotov cocktails and mortars”, though, I’d think of either the fireworks or some improvised device, but not miltary hardware unless there was some other contextual indication favoring the latter. While its obviously not impossible for a group to both be using Molotov cocktails and have access to military heavy weapons, that’s not really, to me, the normal association.

well aren't you one special little snowflake

Don't do this here, please.

Here's the best summary I have seen of what happened in Portland last year (at least, up through July):

https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2020/07/20/what-you...

There was definitely some vandalism involved (and e.g. people shooting fireworks at the wall of a fortified building), but federal authorities were incredibly disingenuous in their descriptions of events and justifications of escalation.

Most of the dangerous violence was police-on-protestor.

That site leans left-wing. I wouldn't consider them necessarily a good source. You might as well quote Fox news on a right-wing event.

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/bellingcat/

Trying to compare Bellingcat, which publishes things like investigations into the downing of MH17, to Fox News. That is terrible.

Fox News has entertainment departments, fought in court to have Tucker Carlson lie to his followers with impunity. They republished incitement to ramming attacks.

Bellingcat.. They just do investigations.

If you want to try to break things down into black and white left vs right, at least try to do it with comparable organizations. Or even better, try to refute the substance of the article instead of going to a media bias site to see how you feel they land on the political spectrum.

Even the site you linked has them listed as "left-center" with "high factual reporting." How is this grounds to outright dismiss them? The slightest degree of "leftness" makes you want to exclude sources? Do you have any factual reason to be doing this, or is this your personal bias towards right wing content forcing you to seek means to exclude information you don't like the looks of?

Honestly, that comparison is very disingenuous just from the information on the site you just linked:

Fox News: "Overall, we rate Fox News strongly Right-Biased due to editorial positions and story selection that favors the right. We also rate them Mixed factually and borderline Questionable based on poor sourcing and the spreading of conspiracy theories that later must be retracted after being widely shared."

Bellingcat: "we rate Bellingcat Left-Center biased based on story selection and positions that moderately favor the left. We also rate them High for factual reporting due to proper sourcing and a clean fact check record."

These are vastly, vastly different forms and scales of "bias." They are nearly incomparable.

From your source, Fox is further right than Bellingcat is left, and Bellingcat is much better on factual reporting. I understand what you're saying about getting news about conflicts from a particular point of view, but your source seems to contradict the analogy.

Here are a few examples of violence in portland done by protestors:

Molotov cocktail(fire bombs) thrown at officers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H86W82Bgpq4

Molotov cocktails(fire bombs) thrown at court building https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMkTfGlM-f0

Man hits a federal officer with a hammer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7vlKbR3Gcs

Protestor knifes a black trump supporter https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/2020/07/man-knifed-in-back-...

Violent protests that did not lead to the death of a single police officer.

I mean, how violent could they have been.

My personal experience (not as a participant, but rather someone who observed a few protests from a distance) was that they were peaceful until the cops would engage with the protestors to impose the curfews that many cities had established.

And then the violence was largely 1 sided.

> Violent protests that did not lead to the death of a single police officer.

I did some quick fact checking, just for my own peace of mind. I view the George Floyd protests as overall peaceful, but it's good to question one's understanding. So for what it's worth Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd_protests_in_Portl...) lists one casualty. I'm guessing that was the August 29th event, which wasn't a police officer.

So yeah, seems you're right, and that's an important fact to keep in mind. 7 months of protests with only one dead, in an area people keep arguing is the worst of the BLM protests.

> and shoot mortars

Mortars? Are you sure about that? What kind?

Edit: Oh "fireworks mortars". Ffs. Just say fireworks.

They were professional fireworks. They were exploding at street and building level multiple times last year. The most recent was downtown on New Years.

Man if you think that's bad, you should've seen what many neighborhoods in major cities were like every night for a solid month leading up to July 4th last year. Aerial fireworks everywhere. There were even some structure fires as a result.

Not protest-related, mind you. Just idiocy-related.

I don't think you understand the severity of what antifa was doing in downtown Portland.

You see what you want to see. Classic confirmation bias. I watched the livestreams, and most of the time it was a lot of running and massive amounts of tear gas, and occasionally police brutally escalating violence against those protesting police violence. I think it's rather telling that you describe fireworks as mortars to try to make them sound more threatening.

I haven't seen any videos where a BLM protestor beats a fallen cop with an American flag, or kills a cop. Both of which happened during the violent far-right insurrection on January 6. I have seen many more credible stories about data and studies showing that violence from far-right extremism is a much more dangerous current problem than far-left extremism.

I will continue to call last year's protests what they were, remarkably peaceful world-wide protests against police brutality and for police reform. And I will call the Jan 6 event what it was, a deliberately stoked violent insurrection against the US government in an attempt to overturn the results of a democratic election, on the basis of nothing but lies and grievance. We should strive to accurately describe things as they are.

I agree it's misleading here, but people (in my area at least) commonly refer to the big professional-tier fireworks as "mortars".

This thread is a great example of how totally isolated news bubbles create totally different realities, each honestly and sincerely believed by their proponents. How do we get out of this?

stop consuming media, and focus attention on our own communities

Here are a few examples of violence in portland:

Molotov cocktail(fire bombs) thrown at officers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H86W82Bgpq4

Molotov cocktails thrown at court building https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMkTfGlM-f0

Man hits a federal officer with a hammer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7vlKbR3Gcs

Protestor knifes a black trump supporter https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/2020/07/man-knifed-in-back-...

You specifically went looking for instances of violence at the protests, and you found a couple. This is the very definition of confirmation bias: you have a conclusion, and then went looking for supporting instances.

You didn't look for data about how much violence there was relative to other protests, or injury statistics, and you certainly didn't look at comparisons between right wing and left wing violence. You started with the conclusion you needed. You need the protests to be violent to confirm your world view, so you went looking for some instances to try and support your conclusion.

However, nothing in your paltry few examples refutes anything I said. Given the vast numbers of people participating in the protests, and the length of them, they were remarkably peaceful.

On the other hand, a tiny fraction of that number of right-wing violent lunatics concentrated in DC on Jan 6 and in one day committed more violence and slaughtered more law enforcement officers than at all the BLM protests combined. BLM protestors want police officers to stop killing people, the Jan 6 insurrectionists came looking to violently overturn the results of the election, and are feeling emboldened to commit more violence in the next week.

I hope this helps you stop and think.

FWIW I think you may have confused me with the op of this thread. I don't actually disagree that most of the BLM protestors were peaceful, as BLM did not explicitly encourage property crime and violence. Antifa however did, and the worst crimes were mostly committed by antifa members and not BLM.

There is alot of odd cognitive dissonance in your comment which I appreciate proves your own point, you were presented with evidence that goes against your own world view, but instead of "stopping and thinking" you just decided to outright dismiss it instead of acknowledging it.

You stated you didn't see any evidence of violent assaults on police officers in portland, yet I gave you an example of a protestor assaulting a police officer with a hammer and instead of addressing it, you resorted to projecting a false narrative of ad-hominem and assumptions of my world view which are actually incorrect.

The funny thing about human biases is they actually effect us all, including you, and thank you so much for proving this. Its made my argument here easy.

Hopefully you take some time to "stop and reflect" how cognitive dissonance can corrupt your own world view when your presented with evidence that goes against it.

There were 30 riots declared by police in Portland alone between May and November (and many more since then). They have a detailed breakdown of riots, fires, projectiles thrown , arrests, ect.

https://www.portlandoregon.gov/police/article/765145

Lot of riots got "declared" here in Seattle too, usually after the cops rushed a stationary peaceful group, and many breakdowns of projectiles and aggression by protestors were publicized by police. But a huge amount of it turned out to be fabricated, exaggerated, or embellished.

These were not fabricated events in Portland. In fact the mayor restricted what the police could do and how far things had to escalate before the police could do anything. Lasers, fireworks, fires, bricks...not much was off limits to the rioters every single night for months. You can claim the group was stationary and peaceful...but there were agitators mixed in and causing problems. There are tons of videos showing the violent tactics being used by rioters...but usually the only ones to make the MSM are when the police responded. Antifa...yes they exist...were well organized and restricted journalists from documenting everything unless they wanted them to. Even the local news reporters were harassed and assaulted by them.

There were also instances found where the agitators turned out to be agents provocateurs.

Source? I have not seen any confirmed incidents of agent provocateurs. The news would have went batshit crazy if such a thing was actually confirmed.

A crazy city council member claimed fires were started by cops in Portland...without evidence and despite contrary evidence showing them being started by the protestors/rioters.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/07/29/umbrella-ma...

This is probably the most popular example, but there's plenty of YouTube videos showing people popping up at places to tear down window barricades, smash them and run. They aren't there to protest. They're there to stir shit up and exploit human psychology.

You see the bias inherent in trusting the police on this issue though, right? It's in their best interests to declare any protest against them a riot because it excuses more violent actions on their parts.

There were more than 120 days of protests detailed in the above link, only about 25% of which were classified as riots. There were live streams from these protests and riots every night, many of which include numerous incidents of explosives being hurled at police and fired being lit. Its not an issue of trust - the hundreds of archived videos containing thousands of hours of live footage of these many protests and riots is easily available to anyone who wants to examine the proof with their own eyes. This isn't an issue of ideology, its a matter of documented history and objective reality. One can argue about whether the riots were justified or not, but not over whether they happened - they did.

Portland doesn't sound like a very nice place.

The push to change how the city responds to violence came after dozens of people vandalized businesses on New Year’s Eve, spray-painting buildings and breaking windows. At least three people were arrested and police declared the event a riot.

https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2021/01/mayor-ted-wheele...

Wheeler was five minutes into a dinner at Cafe Nell with a friend when a small crowd began yelling obscenities at him and soon pushed their way into the outdoor tented area where he was seated, according to Jim Middaugh, the mayor’s communications director, who was briefed by the mayor on the incident.

https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2021/01/mayor-ted-wheele...

It was quite nice the last time I visited, but that was pre-covid and pre-george floyd.

How about that one day protest at the capitol?

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