The protests are specifically about abuse of authority by police; there’s legitimate reason to be wary.

Last I checked protests don't involve destruction of property, arson, and murder.

I think this claim lost any validity long, long ago.

Last I checked, law enforcement didn’t involve kneeing people to death on the ground, abusing power, and so on.

As long as you want to paint all protesters as rioters, then to be consistent you have to put all of the police into the same bucket as well.

No, you don't because while there is widespread acceptance that law enforcement abused power, there is no such acceptance that the rioters have

So you are suggested that the police get a pass because we already accept that some are bad but protesters shouldn’t because some people don’t realize that rioters like to hang out and cause mayhem at protests?

Nobody is suggesting this.

No sane person can look at the riots and say this is protest it stopped being that long ago.

It stopped being that the moment it turned into riots.

Those still participating are complicit at the very least and I would hazard a guess are well fucking aware of what they're doing.

I should clarify, I am well aware there are still ongoing peaceful protests.

Those are not an issue, and nobody on this side is confusing them or labelling them as rioters.

If you want to see what biased but relatively fair coverage of this, go watch tim pool on youtube. There is a bit of exaggeration but by and large what he speaks is mostly pretty solid reasoning.

The extreme left has taken over this issue and is destroying our chances at finally removing trump. And I'm pissed about this, because the issues these riots started over are real, and need resolution, but these riots don't result in this outcome.

They result in more people falling down the right side of things.

> No sane person can look at the riots and say this is protest it stopped being that long ago.

Plenty of us sane people can still see the protests going on, the actual riots are not that common but are covered disproportionately by the press (but especially by FoxNews who is making out Portland and Seattle as apocalyptic hellscapes). I assume you are either in Portland and just not paying attention or you are getting all your information from the media.

I am not painting all protestors as rioters.

I am saying what we have here is not protest. Its rioting.

I don't know what law enforcement have to do with this.

Protests are when you peaceably assemble to air your grievances.

Riots are when people assemble and commit crimes. Especially felony crimes like arson, destruction of property, etc.

These are riots.

As someone mentioned above, some people are protesting peacefully while others are committing crimes and rioting. The concern is that police, and now federal agents, aren't acting in good faith and aren't interested in distinguishing between the two. It's possible to be concerned about abuse of power by law enforcement - which has been rampantly on display these past few weeks - without supporting anarchist attempting to set fire to buildings.

If we could know for sure the police weren't going to abuse their authority, there would have been neither protests nor riots.

Is it infeasible that rioters aren’t simply colocating with protesters to take advantage of the chaos like they have always?

The implication is the police are after the protestors rather than rioters, which is not observed.

I think that's plenty observed actually. When you look at who's been shot, beaten, and gassed it's largely protesters, not people rioting. Although it's easy for police to make the claim that it's rioters, since they seem to declare every protest a riot.

The cops are nominally after evidence on arson and gun theft. It could be legit, it could be just an excuse. The fact that we can't trust them not to use the data for other purposes once they have it is very much part of the reason these protests exist.

The cops are just looking for evidence of felony crimes, not all your notes to your mom and coworkers – but if you were reluctant to hand over your email credentials, would it seem fair to characterize you as complicit in covering up for felony crimes?

The judge granted them recordings taken by professional equipment in specific area in specific time range, not mom notes.

Sorry, I didn’t mean my analogy to be a wholesale dismissal of the subpoena or its justification. I meant to address what seemed like circular reasoning in your reply to this thread.

The thread started out with someone arguing that the "protests" are actually "riots". Someone else replied by pointing out "because there's riots and protests", which are not the same thing.

So then you replied with, "The cops are after evidence on arson and gun theft, not protests, as the headline says." – which I took (perhaps mistakenly) as an argument that the media's footage should not be considered as innocuous "protest footage", because the cops believe that it contains evidence of crimes.

But that seems like begging the question? Ignoring the whole "innocent until proven guilty" concept (two suspects have been arrested and charged, but not tried), it seems problematic to argue that the media should handover its riot footage on the basis that the police believe it contains evidence of riotous activity.

Just as it would be problematic to characterize someone's personal email account as being non-innocuous, on the basis of what the police assert they might find if they do a few keyword searches of it.

> would it seem fair to characterize you as complicit in covering up for felony crimes?

The way this part was written in context was hard to parse for me - on first read it seemed that you were arguing that it would be fair to say that you were complicit. This reply shows that you intended this in a more hyperbolic way, or in such a way that you would mock-suggest that “surely this would not be fair,” which is obvious when I already know your meaning, but didn’t seem clear to me on first read.

Yeah I agree with you. I had a muddled analogy and likely muddled line of reasoning

Good talk though