So according to NPR and other news sources, there was a/multiple riots on 12th Street near a security checkpoint during the inauguration event.
As soberly as possible (as I know this can become a heated topic quite quickly), can people please explain the justification for rioting or why rioting isn’t justifiable? The other thread on privilege worked out pretty great, so hopefully this one will, too. Rioting in this case involves some or all of a group of people engaging in destructive acts against person and/or property.
Not justfiable. It’s harmful, not only to the poor innocent shlub who just got his car tagged, but to the very ideologies they’re rioting in favor of. It creates a backlash among moderate and good people.
A) Crowds often make criminals feel invincible, a sort of “they can’t catch us all” mentality. They hide in crowds hoping the sheer numbers will allow them to get away with looting and destruction, even though the majority of the crowd is peaceful.
Ever heard of rebellion? People who are desperate get violent. Rich, powerful people and organizations nearly always have the upper hand in any situation, but get a few tens of thousands of angry people together and there’s very little anyone can do to stop them, short of calling in troops. It’s pretty tempting way for the poor and disadvantaged to gain a little temporary control over their own lives, by becoming out of control for a short time.
Not necessarily a justification, but people are still going to be people whether you can justify their behavior or not. Anyway, people managed to justify the American Revolution and slave revolts just fine, so it isn’t like violence by crowds is never justifiable. You just have to win the fight first.
Destruction of property, same as being angry at home and putting your fist through the wall, a form of venting, very human, not sure what can be done. Harming others, is something we should strive to overcome.
Didn’t see anyone linking to actual rioting, and wasn’t sure what scale we were talking about here, so found this on CNN.
Looks pretty stupid to me. I’m sure that Starbucks, in particular, was at fault for Trump’s election. :rolleyes: Definitely no justification for this, though it’s not that surprising. There is a hell of a lot of anger over Trump being elected, and it’s anger he’s only fueled more with his stupid tweets and such. I guess the folks who are rioting don’t get that they are doing more harm than good and that it actually helps Trump when they do stupid shit like this. That all said, it looks like it’s not that wide spread…at least I’m not seeing a lot of reports from places other than this. There is a big women’s rally in Albuquerque tomorrow from what I understand, and most likely other places too, so I guess we shall see if cooler and wiser heads prevail. Really what we need is not folks who are going to riot, but fucking vote next time.
Yes they do, you bourgeois something or other. There’s an example right in the fucking OP. Interpreting a riot, any riot as first and foremost an infringement on property rights is silly, classist and intellectually insulting.
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I suspect rioting is rarely justified, tho protest often would be. The line between the two might be fine.
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Absent rioting, you guys wouldn’t have a country. And, fair’s fair, neither would I. Not all riots are “justified” (by whom ?) but there are some, even many cases in which rioting/revolting/revolutioning is not only justified - it’s the only sane course of action.
Riots are a step down from terrorism. In both cases you’re using violence to intimidate people into some kind of action. Riots just typically involve more people and have more property damage proportionate to bodily injury.
That’s for a riot which has a goal other than “steal and vandalize in the protection of a crowd”.
There’s the simple pissed off people in a group can do dumb stuff they didn’t and wouldn’t have planned in advance. There are people that actually make a more considered decision and plan in advance though. What’s their justification.
Allow me to quote from the US Military Joint Publication 3-24 (Counterinsurgency)
That’s in line with publications we used during one of the annual civil disturbance exercises I conducted in the National Guard before 9-11, IIRC in 2000. The order for the training mission included superficially modified documents that came directly from the web sites of anarchist groups that did not adhere to non-violence and participated in the 1999 WTO rioting in Seattle. Prompting over reactions was a pretty common theme for why to riot. They described how to do it, including trying to incite otherwise peaceful but upset demonstrators to participate. They had tips to try and get security forces to over react in the heat of the moment. They had specific tips for trying to manage information flow the media to paint a picture of “clear overreaction” for any use of force. They IMO were basically what on the Army side we called doctrinal manuals.
Now the government side tries to manage that too. I was training against an fictional opponent that basically operated in terms of one of the big threats for a reason. It’s not a clear riot = winning popular support. Sometimes the rioters advance their cause; sometimes they hurt it.
Forgot I was going to address this one too. Starbucks is a large, multinational corporation. For some of the usual suspects when it comes to inciting riot that makes Starbucks evil. They protested Trump AND got to smash a store of one of the corporate overlords. It’s kind of a win-win.
I looked at footage at the New York Times site here: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/20/us/politics/inauguration-protests.html It looked to me from the footage that there was some small group who came dressed in black (completely, i.e., so you couldn’t see who they were), at least one carrying an anarchist flag, who did this. My guess is that those folks would have done pretty much the same thing if Clinton had been elected … I don’t think anarchists tend to like anybody.
They do not represent the vast majority of protesters who came to protest peacefully and were not dressed in a way to purposely conceal their identity.
You could consider the Boston Tea Party to be a riot. It led almost directly to the Revolutionary War.
However, although that’s how history happened it’s a big stretch to suggest that independence wouldn’t have happened without it. Mainly it pushed England to clamp down tightly enough that the colonists decided to rebel. I’m sure it would have happened anyway, just through a different course of events.