And after pipe bombs had been found outside the national headquarters of both the RNC & DNC.
I disagree. History is continuous and doesn’t occur in a vacuum. It’s disingenuous to try to frame it in such way that the only legitimate way to have a discussion is by examining one discrete event.
If people already agree with the point you are trying to make, what is the relevance of criticizing their past disagreement on the same point in other contexts?
~Max
I live in an area where we had BLM protestors and violence, including a pretty long term occupation of an area not too far from where I live (a 20 minute drive on a rare good day).
There were days that we had to be careful not to go to certain areas at certain times in my own town because there was violence going on.
Do I condemn that? Fuck yes. I also separate the protesters and the opportunistic criminals who used protests as a cover.
I also don’t lump everyone who voted for or otherwise supported Trump in with the terrorists who tried to kill American democracy today, but I hope those guys get hit HARD with the full force of the law. I am disappointed in anyone dumb enough to fall for Trump and angry at anyone who cheers his worst traits. But I also think those people in the violence today are a different breed.
I suspect most people on this board aren’t too far off from how I feel about this stuff in general.
Because it is not a general agreement. How is that a difficult concept?
It is not a general discussion, and you aren’t making a general argument, so why would you need a general agreement?
~Max
It is general. Pretending that it is not is highly misleading. These actions, the motivations, and responses do not act in a mythical vacuum. When folks are inconsistent and hypocritical with their messaging what is actually communicated? The contrast to how the media and left treated the political violence of the summer to the event of today is a feature of living in a world where the past is remembered.
I don’t even see most folks here learning from this sequence because a large number of the folks actually believe violence or mob action is good as long as it is employed for the right virtuous cause. So no, there is no general agreement which is highly unfortunate. Robespierre is not a role model for rational nor virtuous governance.
Really funny to hear about historical continuity from the guy whose historical analysis always seems to cut in right after leftists do something worth condemning, and nothing worth mentioning ever happened right before that.
There’s the problem.
I’m looking at a specific topic, here’s a link for you: Trumpsters in the US Capitol building
The topic has a narrow focus, per the rules of P&E. It is about today’s events on Capitol Hill. It is not a debate about whether mob action is good or bad or violent or peaceful in general. If we are agreed, I will proceed to your post,
The discussion had a narrow focus on today’s events, per P&E rules, and I assume your posts do too. You didn’t actually point out JohnM’s hypocrisy (I can’t see any hypocrisy here). You made an argument going from the general to the specific,
- You are against all mob violence, and today’s storming of the Capitol is mob violence, so you are against today’s storming of the Capitol
In my opinion the general debate would have been off-topic, but the specific argument was on-topic. Now here in this Pit thread, you’re trying to tell me that you were making a general argument and my understanding of you is highly flawed.
Well, what did I get wrong? How is pointing out hypocrisy of other members in other contexts in any way related to your main argument that mob violence in this specific instance is wrong?
~Max
Psalm 109. Might light a candle and say this one in church.
We are literally called ‘bleeding heart liberals’ for the sin of wanting Universal health insurance, people to be treated equally, and a cleaner society, and these people who hate us are now destroying the fabric of America precisely because of our desire to be good. To improve the lives of others.
The man who wrote lines 2-5 above knows exactly what it feels like for a person to have hateful and mendacious leaders bringing harm and misery via some peoples hate of others… this hatred based upon the goodness of others.
And in verse 6, he identifies what happened with these Godless people - they gathered, mesmerized by a man supported by Satan, the ancient manifestation of evil. Psychotics. Bad people.
What you, Trump, and your ilk have done to this country deserve all the Biblical prayers and psalms of lamentation we can serve upon MAGA, Octopus.
Nobody here is saying, or has said in the past, that violence, rioting and looting by left-wing protestors is okay or should be encouraged. You are making that up in a desperate attempt to project your own hypocrisy onto others.
Another false equivalence you’re unsuccessfully trying to get away with involves ignoring major discrepancies in rational reality in protest causes. Even if we don’t support occasional rioting and violence occurring in mostly peaceful protests against, e.g., racist police brutality and glorification of racist pro-slavery ideology, we can at least recognize that police brutality and glorification of racist ideology actually exist and are bad things.
Your fellow Trump voters, on the other hand, are engaging in a violent terrorist insurrection over allegations of electoral malfeasance that are completely fictional. Trump did not win a “landslide victory”, or any kind of victory, last November. There were not huge numbers, or even tiny numbers, of falsified votes. There was no kind of conspiracy to “steal” the election from Trump. That, unlike this country’s all-too-real tragic history of neoConfederate racist oppression, is a bunch of complete and utter bullshit that Trump peddled to feed his sorry ego and milk contributions from his enraged gullible supporters.
You Trumpists are not only terrorists and hypocrites with no actual respect for the law and order you claim to revere so much, you’re also ignorant dupes who can’t even tell the difference between a real-life societal problem and a huckster’s made-up egotistical fantasy. It would almost be funny if it weren’t so contemptible.
Because if you are going to disagree with political violence and mob violence it carries much more weight if you are consistently against it and not for it sometimes and against it at others.
Religious nuttery is irrelevant.
That’s ridiculous. Some Trump voters are lawless. But, unfortunately, lawlessness is becoming more frequent with regards to politics and ideology. If you are against such things it would be intellectually honest to agree with others who actually promote such things instead of mocking them when it’s your side behaving illegally and embarrassingly.
Now all that said, of course the events of today aren’t proper. And I have consistently have said as much. 2022, 2024, 2026, 2028 will have more elections and more ideological confrontations. Where will you and your cohort stand with regards to law and order and condemnation of mob violence when, without doubt, factions aligned with your politics engage in such activity? Will you consistently condemn that violence or will it be ‘understandable’?
And there it is, the complete and willful distortion of a nuanced position.
(Still waiting for a cite that multiple cities were burned down last year . . . not that I’m holding my breath.)
What’s nuanced about 100 million dollars of damage to cities across the nation? What’s nuanced about looting and arson? Seriously, excusing racists protests because it advances your agenda is not nuanced. It’s abhorrent.
Sorry, crowmanyclouds, I just really dislike mob rule. I am embarrassed by the ridiculous events of today and I’d like to see people who disagree be able to disagree without being assaulted, silenced, canceled, or otherwise viciously ‘consequenced.’
I hope Biden gets a fair shake at governance for the next 4 years without a ridiculous so-called resistance emerging. And hopefully, normalcy can resume.
Unfortunately, we have serious cleavage planes in our populace now. These cleavage planes are obvious and will be exploited by our strategic competitors who realize we still live in a world of competing nations.
Annnd that’s why you voted to re-elect Trump!
And, as you keep trying to ignore or elide, they are lawless in service to an entirely delusional non-cause. It’s not merely that they don’t give a rat’s ass about the law, they simply don’t give a rat’s ass about reality itself.
Trump didn’t win the election. Nobody “stole” the election from Trump. Lawless Trumpists are cranking themselves up into acts of outright violent insurrection on behalf of a pack of egotistical lies that Trump is clinging to in order to boost his perceived “ratings”. That’s how far removed they are from reality.
Same place we’ve always stood: we don’t approve of or encourage mob violence, rioting or looting, by anybody.
Your inability to recognize that elementary fact is just another example of how far dissociated the Trumpist right has become from factual reality. Your media has been repeating to you over and over that Democrats want to destroy law and order, liberals have no respect for the rule of law, etc., and you no longer have (if you ever did have) the critical thinking skills to perceive the falsehood of those claims. You cling to them because they provide you with a fig leaf for your defensive “bothsidesism”, not because they have any basis in fact.
The two aren’t mutually exclusive: it’s entirely possible and consistent to understand a violent act while also condemning it.
Your failure to realize that is another example of the manipulated degradation of your critical thinking skills. If you can be persuaded or brainwashed into mistakenly believing that anybody who expresses understanding of a lawless act is ipso facto condoning or supporting that act, then you can just smugly retreat into dismissing them as “hypocrites” and can avoid confronting your own hypocrisy.
Maybe we should call them octopus tears.
Look, I understand the anger and frustration that led to the protests. I don’t understand that looting shoes and TVs solves racial problems or problems with law enforcement.
I also don’t understand all the virtue signalling that says it’s ok to gather in vast crowds in a pandemic that’s killing 100s of thousands of people if not millions as long as the cause is claimed to be just. Consistency and honesty are not too much to ask.
At this point, it would be nice if the left could shed the progressives and radical anarchists and the right could shed the Kraken conspiracy loons and the religious fundamentalist and a nice rational party could be formed that governed competently, without corruption, and based on scientific fact. Unfortunately, that’s not good for TV.