That's not to say the issues aren't important; of course they are. But this site has a particular scope and repetitive flamewars aren't in it.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Please see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25086595. 40+ comments in a thread like this is beyond excessive.
I'm a fairly liberal person, but it doesn't take an inhuman amount of mental gymnastics to look at riots, anti-police sentiment, etc, and see a coordinated hostile agenda. I am lucky that I get to talk to both hardcore right and hardcore left people regularly, and they both tend to follow logical interpretations to inevitably polarizing and unhealthy conclusions. Both are not living in current reality, they are projecting their beliefs about the other side's agenda based on what they see on the news, and saying "I don't want to live in that world".
We should regard "perceived intent by the other side" as most important, and there's no way that dishonest actors could weaponise that? No risk of concern trolling, double standards or phoney outrage?
Are you not paying any attention at all to modern politics?
"What am I supposed to think about the intent of the other side when they're trying to get a legitimate election result overturned to support their preferred presidential candidate" indeed?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm not disagreeing with you, I respect your views and feelings and the importance of the issues. But HN's mandate is curious, thoughtful conversation about topics of intellectual interest. When the thread gets reaches this degree of fiery political minutiae, it has left that far behind. In fact it's at the far end of the solution space from ontopicness.
Anyway, we're not shifting the goalposts to the leaders, we're talking about the people, which is the subject of the article. The people of the left were completely down with the faithless electorate concept, whoopie!
And somehow you missed this point. Which leads me to a question: why? Perhaps you didn't hear about it. Perhaps you forgot it. Maybe you brushed it aside. Or maybe you recalled it and decided it wasn't worth mentioning. Each of these are mechanisms through which people are steered.
You accuse the far right of doing something that the far left was doing just four years ago, and still you have thought yourself objective, but it doesn't work.
Equating that with what's going on now does not seem like an argument made in good faith.
And partly because they don't count as real Americans in popular rhetoric and are getting increasingly ressentful about that.
Well, I certainly wasn't, and I contest that this belief was widespread within the left, but without evidence one way or another we're not going to resolve this aspect of the disagreement. What I do know is that no significant number of people with political positions and political power used that power to throw the election results into doubt, as Mitch McConnell and GOP congresspeople are now doing.
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/307536-obama-urged-cli...
You really can't bothside this.
You should think the same way about this as you do about the "russia hacked the election" cries about how the 2016 election was illegitimate.
Russian interference however in the 2016 election is well documented: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20....
The impeachment vote could have been easily avoided if Trump had come out and denounced Russian meddling and let the investigators do their jobs.
Be patient and let the process play out in a legitimate way.
There will be some on the right that will never be convinced that this election was legitimate, but this pacifies the more reasonable people on the right. Trying to kick the Republicans while they are down , chastising them them for using legal means to fight the outcome of the election, or engaging in grievance politics just further reinforces the perception that the left isn't operating in good faith.
Remember once all of this is over we still have to live with these people.
You're getting this backwards. The legal means are not there to fight the outcome of the election, they are there to make sure every vote is counted properly. This is a subtle but important difference: nobody denies that there may be minor and insignificant improprieties in this election, as there are whenever a country of 300 million people votes. What is being denied is that there was whole-scale interference with the election system. I'm fairly confident that they will not be able to convince a court that there was, but that doesn't make it ok that they are filing lawsuits on no evidence. People being upset about an election outcome is no reason to ignore the reality of this situation.
I agree and so do the courts which is why this problem will likely solve itself if you just let it play out.
The kind of pacification you call about is not something Trump or republican party awarded to anyone last 4 years. They enjoyed to trigger libtards. There was no patience I could detect.
What you suggest does not work, because it demands one side to follow norms that other side does not have to follow.
Give them their time and then we can all move on.
No, I don't think this and never said anything like that. I believe the right ultimately poses the greater danger in this context. What I am saying is it's very obvious what Trump wants to do: he wants to build and support a narrative that this election is illegitimate. He wants to do it through stoking resentment against the left and center and suggesting systemic bias. We resist this by calmly saying that we as a nation are committed to fair elections, and we agree that we need to investigate any cases of impropriety that he can find in courts which are independent (and if anything are largely friendly towards his party).
If he fails to discover any issues, we say we cooperated fairly / openly, he failed to produce evidence of impropriety, this suggests the process was fair, and now we can move on. What we don't do is scream that he's wasting our time, that Republicans are assholes, that they're trying to undermine democracy, and that this whole process is bullshit. If we do, it allows Trump to say "SEE?! I told you they are biased against us! What are they trying to hide??? Why are they so impatient?!" It hands him the ammunition to build the narrative that there has been a conspiracy. If there was no conspiracy, why is the left so impatient and hostile? Why are they trying to subvert the process? Politics isn't just about facts it's about feelings and opinions. At the end of the day we want Republicans to accept the results willingly, and in my opinion that's best served by being calm and patient in our dealings with them rather than by being angry or impatient. This is a lesson the left generally fails to grasp: screaming at people and calling them assholes is not a particularly effective way to get them to agree with you.
The most effective thing we can do is allow Trump et al to burn themselves out.
The thing is, most Republicans already accept the result. And I'm not saying the whole process is bullshit! Nobody is saying that. It is pretty bad that we can have an election with the popular vote won by five million and counting and have the result disputed, but that's mostly orthogonal to this situation.
Once this all plays out, and it will in the near future, then we can determine the "legitimate election result", per the Electoral College.
Should Biden continue to prevail, I'm not expecting any significant unrest. Unhappiness, yes, but that is normal.
There are allegations by enormously unscrupulous people which have as yet been completely debunked by the courts and labeled by government officials as misinformation attempts: https://apnews.com/article/top-officials-elections-most-secu...
This was a very partisian election, in which half the country was not going to be happy with the result. I don't see a smooth acceptance of the outcome regardless of how it comes out.
What are your beliefs for?
This is a conflation. Trying to be rational is valuable independent of what message you have. Messaging is secondary. When messaging becomes primary, the truth suffers, and freedom dies. I'd rather be self-satisfied and correct than highly influential and wrong. The latter is far more dangerous.
Residents and businesses owners are currently suing the city for abandoning the neighborhood’s police station, providing porta-potties to the armed occupiers, and ceding control of this area to the violent mob for roughly a month.
edit: Downvoted for relevant, if uncomfortable factual statements on HN? I thought we were better than this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Hill_Autonomous_Zone
https://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2020/07/seattle-times-rep...
I am friends with people who lived close by and visited the CHAZ/CHOP, and I watched live-streams from the CHAZ nearly 24/7 for the entire span of its existence. It was a lawless area patrolled by gun wielding far-left activists who routinely harassed journalists, ripped phones out of streamers’ hands to delete footage of the “security team’s” deadly mistakes, assaulted visitors of the wrong political stripe, and ultimately were responsible for the shooting deaths of several people. While the atmosphere was more “street festival” during the day, at least for a while, at night and as the occupation wore on it swiftly devolved into violent anarchy.
Remember Raz Simone, the local rapper who showed up on the first night with an AK-47? Remember how he handed out rifles to seemingly random untrained people from the trunk of a car? Remember how his crew assaulted and pistol-whipped a graffiti tagger on the very first night of CHAZ/CHOP, on a Facebook Live stream, saying “we are the police now?” Many similar incidents.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/seattle-autonomous-zone-leaders-w...
https://youtube.com/watch?v=q5bA-iUPvqI&t=1m27s
Lorenzo Anderson was shot inside CHOP (though not by the “security team”), and died after amateur CHOP medics and confused city EMS flubbed his medevac. EMS couldn’t get to him quickly since the shooting scene wasn’t able to be secured.
https://www.kuow.org/stories/seattle-police-and-fire-confusi...
Let's break down what actually happened.
1. After weeks of protests, police intimidation, beatings, and frequent gassing of the entire street (much to the delight of people living there, who were unable to breathe inside their own apartments), including a right wing chap driving a car through a crowd, and shooting someone trying to pull him out of his vehicle, the police leave the east precinct, based on an FBI claim that it will be burnt down.
2. The protest moves into the blocks around it, and starts protecting the precinct.
3. The precinct does not burn down.
4. The protest moves elsewhere, and a block party starts.
5. An idiot called Raz, and his boys start providing 'security'. Nobody asked them for it. People who ran the protest didn't ask for it. People living in the area didn't ask for it. Smells like a gang moving into a power vaccumm to me.
6. Homeless folks move into the park area of CHAZ. The area gets a bit rough at night, but is still a block party during the day.
7. Someone in the homeless encampment gets killed in the early hours of the morning, presumably over drugs, but who knows.
8. A teenager steals a car and takes it on a joyride through the pedestrian areas of the CHAZ. (Remember all the car attacks against protest areas over the past few weeks in both Seattle, and the rest of the country? Not a smart move.)
9. Some unknown person kills him and injures his friend.
10. The police move back in to an unburnt district. They then set up a multi-block checkpoint, that demanded all entrants into the former CHAZ to show their ID to be allowed entrance. (When we were under the thrall of Warlord Raz, only drivers had to show ID at his checkpoint.)
Driver Dawit Kelete (who is black, and not politically affiliated) was high on pills when he plowed through BLM protestors occupying a section of the freeway in the middle of the night. Tragically, one protestor died and another was seriously injured.
Most “car attacks” this summer have turned out to be simply reckless or confused drivers caught in the middle of unplanned, unannounced, often heavily-armed and aggressive street protests. Armed protestors have shot or shot at several such drivers, such as in Provo, UT and Aurora, CO.
https://www.deseret.com/utah/2020/6/30/21308526/gunman-shot-...
https://www.denverpost.com/2020/08/03/man-charged-murder-sho...
By my reckoning, the actual count of “car attacks” this summer where a politically-motivated driver rammed a BLM/antifa protest can be counted on one hand. There has been a greater number of unprovoked attacks on drivers by protestors. This is the product of extreme paranoia among armed protestors, amplified by social media.
The driver 'accidentally' turned, with speed, off an arterial, into the protest street, and despite having clear visibility of hundreds of people in his line of travel, kept driving, with people scattering out of his way.
He stopped when he hit a blockade, shot at one person who tried to open his car door, waved his gun around (With extra magazines jungle-taped together), and ran through the crowd directly into the police line. So much for being lost and confused, he seemed to know exactly where he was.
He was either planning a mass shooting, and lost his nerve at the last second, or was trying his damned hardest to provoke an attack on himself, presumably so he could respond with violence.
For an exercise - you try driving your car into a line of right wing militants protesting (or into a police line), and then shoot one of them. I doubt you will succeed in running to a line of safety, and I doubt their press will describe you as lost and confused.
Unless you directly witnessed these events (which few people did, even amongst Seattleites), then you're getting your information second-hand just like everyone else.
>The charges say Kelete told jail officials that he was withdrawing from the narcotic Percocet and that he struggled with an “untreated addiction.” Washington State Patrol accident investigators found “several implements commonly used to smoke illegal substances” and a substance “that appears similar to crystal methamphetamine” in the car, according to the charges.
I hadn’t read about the field sobriety test (so thank you for providing that information!), only the drugs in the car and his opioid addiction. I don’t know whether a field sobriety test would detect that type of intoxication.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/seattle-man-...
I live here. I've spent weeks going to sleep to the sound of police grenades going off. I've been to CHAZ. I've watched, in bafflement, for weeks, at how news coverage - particularly national, but also local has painted an entirely different picture from what I've seen with my own two eyes.
The events he cites have taken place - but because of the superficial level of knowledge he has of the situation, he is omitting vital context.
I will absolutely gatekeep on this. Everyone's entitled to an opinion, but it's quite clear that _iyig has no first-hand knowledge, and only superficial second-hand knowledge of what he's talking about.
At least, that's my most charitable interpretation of the situation.
So you blocked the police out of a whole neighborhood of a few square blocks, and a gang moving into the power vacuum is a surprise? Come on!
It was completely unexpected. And it will be completely unexpected the next time, and the next time, and the next time...
And because they ran out of gas.
Contrast the SPD's behavior to how the Bellevue police department handled BLM protests. The police chief met with the protest organizers, treated everyone involved with respect, set some ground rules, and did not start a dozen unprovoked attacks on the public.
When all you have is a warrior cop, every problem looks like an insurgency to be put down. The SPD has an incredibly antagonistic attitude towards the public, and is institutionally incapable of de-escalating. It also seems to not actually be subject to any form of democratic oversight - as city council, despite passing many, many resolutions, is unable to reign them in.
I have a feeling you know this.
Short clips from several of the vantage points (skip to roughly 1:40 - warning, disturbing):
The last I heard Antonio Mays murder was an active investigation with no arrests made: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/everybody-down-wha...
If it's an open and shut case and the shooter is clearly identifiable why is that? Is the Seattle Police in on this conspiracy?
I of course assumed you meant the other kid because the murderer was actually, yknow, detained and charged so their identity is obviously known.
Once again, I'm sure you actually know all of this.
Video taken in the aftermath captures people discussing how they will collect and hide the evidence. Seattle Police found and questioned the woman who filmed that video, but she told them she didn't know anything: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/woman-releas...
This kind of talk is quite small.
Here is a protestor describing in vivid detail the killing of Antonio Mays Jr. by CHOP security, minutes after it happened while his blood is still wet on the street. The video was clipped from a stream recorded by Omari Salisbury, an independent reporter who lives and works on Capitol Hill. His coverage was some of the most immediately on-the-scene (warning - disturbing):
https://youtube.com/watch?v=q5bA-iUPvqI&t=1m27s
You’re right that witnesses aren’t talking. This is part and parcel with the “didn’t see shit, don’t know shit” mantra of BLM/antifa protestors. As another user linked, there is video of protestors intentionally destroying the crime scene. Due to this lack of cooperation, Antonio Mays’ family may never receive justice.
they call that feeling "paranoia"
In Portland, an anti-fascist protestor shot a man (rightly or wrongly). Anti-fascists can and do show up with weapons. It is not a false equivalence to say so.
Please don't create accounts to break the site rules with; it eventually gets your main account banned as well.
This is not how the justice system works in America, just so you know. The system you describe is horrifying.
Its no secret that the mentally ill, badly damaged and socially disadvantaged have historially flocked to extreme campaigns -> on either side <- of this inflamed debate
Peace as espoused by various religions, becomes a powerful antidote as a social message -- I support that messege, personally
(Here is a reminder video:)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vr3LrRUfJsY
I am all for BLM protests in general, but the looting only provokes more extreme responses from the right. I also blame the police- they rather confront peaceful protesters than go after actual thugs. Having a class of people redlined into ghettos who have no stake in the wealthier parts of society is the root of this, but what to do about it?
edit: Downvoted for relevant, if uncomfortable factual statements on HN? I thought we were better than this.
https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2020/08/aaron-jay-daniel...
https://denver.cbslocal.com/2020/10/16/lee-keltner-wife-want...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_David_Dorn
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/everybody-down-wha...
> But while the White House beat the drum for a crackdown on a leaderless movement on the left, law enforcement offices across the country were sharing detailed reports of far-right extremists seeking to attack the protesters and police during the country’s historic demonstrations, a trove of newly leaked documents reveals.
According to what I saw and interpreted, it was mostly right influence attempting to escalate the situation to "hurt the left".
Saying "fake spin" is not going to convince me otherwise. I'd prefer statistics though.
( Belgian, so not in the US)
In the age of agent provocateurs[0], it is hard to really know the truth even if you are present at the scene. There is only so much time in a day.
>There’s no evidence that the suspects arrested in connection with a plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer are antifa activists.
>Before his arrest, one of the suspects attended a Black Lives Matter protest. Another suspect criticized the movement.
>State and federal documents make no mention of antifa or Black Lives Matter. Rather, they reference an anti-government militia group.
>Michigan’s attorney general has said white supremacist and anti-government groups acted “in concert based on a shared extreme ideology.”
They're not [1][2]?
[1] -- https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/aug/08/wearea...
[2] -- https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/oct/29/key-finding...
I'm not denying that the left has ever used extreme violence in the US. The Weather Underground is the most famous example. I will however argue that those days are over for the left, with the vast majority of leftists being nonviolent and pacifists, and a small few committed to armed defense, but not offense.