Hacker News Reader

Comment by jjoonathan | Hacker News Reader

On one hand we have hooligans using a crowd as cover to get away with property damage.

On the other we have hooligans organized for the express purpose of overturning the results of a democratic election.

In the case of BLM, the crimes don't reflect on the movement's overall purpose. Nobody expects property damage to be a vehicle for police reform -- it's an argument for more police presence, if anything. In the case of the capitol riots, not only are the crimes worse (storming the capitol >> property damage), but the criminal acts absolutely do reflect on the movement's agenda. Intimidating congress is a plausible vehicle for obtaining the votes they needed that day to overturn the election. Trump's pre-riot speech emphasized that this was the goal. These factors increase the culpability of platforms and leadership in the capitol riots as compared to BLM.

View on HN

What would you call the Capital Hill Autonomous Zone if not an attempt at insurrection? Come on, can we have some intellectual honesty here? Both situations sucked, the people involved sucked, their reasoning sucked and they should all go to jail so that sane people can get back to their lives in peace. We are being forced into building absurd logical houses of cards just so we do not concede an inch to the other side. What childish madness.

+1000000 on this. It's all stupid and bad, and we need to stop looking for reasons to excuse it, regardless who is doing it, when or why.

Equating a bunch of dumb activists taking over six city blocks to an attempt to overturn the election of POTUS is "intellectual honesty"?

Look, I'll agree that everyone involved with both CHAZ and the Capitol Riots needs to go to jail. That includes Donald Trump, though. He was the one trying an end-run around the US electoral process in order to hold on to power for four more years.

Who is "equating"? They are different but both bad. No reason to excuse either of them in any way. No need to decide which one is worth prosecuting and which one isn't.

> Who is "equating"?

You are, in your post upthread.

Having things in common is not the same thing as "equating"

> What would you call the Capital Hill Autonomous Zone if not an attempt at insurrection?

CHAZ: An occupation. They weren't killing anyone. They weren't trying to kill people. They literally setup a community garden.

Capitol Hill attack: An insurrection. It was clearly a violent rebellion against the government of the US, with people actively working to kill the VPOTUS and members of the government.

I can easily see the differences. So can many others.

> What childish madness.

It's childish madness to treat the two as the same.

In fact there were two shootings within a week in “CHAZ”, and one of the victims died.

Neither of which were the goals of CHAZ, both were related to gangs that happened to be there.

Context matters. One group had specific goals, none of which involved killing. The other group specifically was calling out to kill someone.

So it’s OK that someone died, because your political framework is aligned with some ethereal goal of CHOP. Based on the definitions stated in this thread, you support terrorism.

It's possible to support CHOP's intentions as non-terroristic and also think that the deaths are not OK. I personally don't support CHOP but I think the deaths were caused more by negligence than malice: they didn't intend for violence and death, but they eventually lost control of their cop-free paradise. Some would argue that was inevitable and that's what made the whole thing a stupid idea in the first place.

CHOP started as a bunch of protestors who saw the police make the terrible strategic decision to withdraw from their own precinct building and said "hey, let's declare that this area is self-governing to make a political statement about how police presence isn't improving things." And it initially really was peaceful enough to walk your kids through to look at all the hippie positivity. The chaos and violence came about after the "autonomy" went on way too long and opportunists (anarchists and wannabe vigilantes) moved in.

Everything would have worked out a lot better if the CHOP folks yelled "you're retreating? This is our neighborhood now! Rah, rah, rah!" and then a day or two later the cops said "very funny, you made your point, but we are coming back and you better get the fuck out of the way or get your heads beaten in" and that was the end of it.

It is NOT OK that someone died. However people die all the time in American cities because of gun violence. With your logic schools are bad actually because people die in them, so are cities, jails, etc. I’m not saying it is a good thing, I’m saying it happens.

That's exactly right. The amount of mental gymnastics people do to excuse the thing they agree with but not the one they disagree with is staggering.

This has been the left’s rhetoric for eons. They always excuse their actions because of their ”noble” goals. Same regarding policy - its the stated goal that matters, not the end results and real-world consequences of their policies.

Having a convicted terrorist as a director of their beloved BLM movement means nothing. Lofty ideals matter.

Invading a city block means nothing. Lofty ideals matter.

If you don’t think the people who did CHOP and Capitol are equally dangerous to society, you’re wilfully turning a blind eye.

> This has been the left’s rhetoric for eons.

Except it hasn't been. You just don't want to listen to what people are actually saying because it's easier to argue against a strawman.

FWIW lots of people on the left do the same thing. So I guess you're in good company?

I’m always willing to listen to a factual counterargument but you’re not presenting one.

Most folks that I know in Seattle didn't think that CHOP/CHAZ was a good thing, and one of their leaders Raz Simone was heavily criticized for being... well, dumb to put it lightly.

It's okay to criticize both things here. CHOP/CHAZ was clearly wrong, as is throwing a molotov at a police officer. No question about that. The capitol was wrong as well.

If CHAZ was so clearly wrong, then why was the democratic city council of Seattle so reluctant to do something about it for so long?

We want to pretend that this is all Trump’s fault- but we’re unable to recognize that it’s Trump who is a symptom of a systemic failure of logic and reason.

> If CHAZ was so clearly wrong, then why was the democratic city council of Seattle so reluctant to do something about it for so long?

It wasn't "clearly" wrong initially; just weird and novel. It was a nice break from SPD's regular violence against protesters.

Why didn't the city's electeds attempt to move back in sooner? Because something about gassing their own citizens was politically unpopular for some reason. Note that this was summer, most Seattlites don't have air conditioning, and teargas spreads in the air. People I knew on Cap hill were coughing despite having all their windows closed (and sweltering).

If we're being binary, yes, both situations sucked. For some reason, most arguments I see regarding this fail to even see the slightest shade of gray.

I, for one, believe that taking over a city block and declaring it an autonomous zone is significantly less concerning than attempting to stop the presidential election -- arguably the single most important piece of our democracy -- from happening, calling for the death of the vice president while building gallows, and potentially looking for other politicians to kill.

Yeah, CHAZ was wrong and stupid. Yeah, the people who did it should get some kind of punishment. So should the people who destroyed private property during the riots, that's not cool.

But it seems pretty clear to me that the storming of the capital is so much worse than that as it is a clear attempt to undermine our democracy. I believe the response should reflect that.

I don't understand the need to rank violent events. Outrage against these violent events isn't a zero sum game that requires us to pick and choose between them.

Vandalism, trespassing, arson, assault, and so on can and should be prosecuted because they are crimes. Full stop. The ideological motivation of the perpetrators should be irrelevant with respect to prosecuting the crimes.

I do realize that the impact and repercussions of the events is certainly a point for debate, but that seems orthogonal to the immediate and critical goal of keeping the peace.

It's not about "ranking events" or some nonsense, it's about making sure everything that should be prosecuted gets prosecuted. The right desperately wants to focus on

> Vandalism, trespassing, arson, assault

, which BLM and the Capitol Riots had in common, to distract from the attempt to overturn the election of the President of the United States of America, which they did not have in common.

All of it should be prosecuted. Both the parts they had in common and the parts they did not.

From my perspective as someone outside the US, I don't have an emotional dog in this fight. That said, the Capitol raid was the one thing that made me stop joking around for a bit in the entire Trump era because I genuinely believed a coup was not only possible but probably underway given the parameters. In the end it turned out to just a bunch of disorganized wannabes but the context was still genuinely worrying especially with reports of the police standing down to let the mob in, even if we cast aside the shrill theatrics that followed in the media.

In comparison, the BLM unrest seemed like it would predictably peter out fairly quickly without much in the way of concrete changes, and that's exactly what happened. At no point did I expected some radical uncertainty in the future as a result.

> it turned out to just a bunch of disorganized wannabes

... who were trying to get an election overturned at the behest of POTUS. Motive matters, even if they were too disorganized to stand a chance.

Unlike the Capitol Hill issue, the ChaZ people actually had guns, and shooting deaths there (and not shootings by cops).

>Nobody expects property damage to be a vehicle for police reform

Yet hundreds of cities are in the process of reevaluating how they allocate police and social service resources.

In light of that it'll be interesting to see what comes out of the capital mess.

Honestly? Probably nothing, not to their advantage anyway. The blm peaceful protests /riots had the backing and mandate of their mainstream. From what I've seen of the fight wrong media /power centers, this does not. The capitol hill protests /riots have drawn immediate flak not just from the left aligned media, but even their own side.

On the one hand, we have a large crowd of protesters you personally agree with, some of whom turned violent and whom you can surgically disavow. On the other hand, we have a large crowd of protesters you personally disagree with and treat as a monolith.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com