To follow up on caconym's comment, FBI has confirmed that more than a dozen explosive devices were found at the Capitol after the siege, including pipe bombs left in front of the DNC offices.[1]

5 people died. 50 officers were wounded, some seriously enough that they are still in the hospital.

Multiple protestors had zip ties and other means of restraint on them, knives, and guns, and on their social media profiles were promoting violence against legislators.

This wasn't protesting. It was terrorism. And these terrorist attacks were organized and coordinated on Parler and other social media.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/capitol-rio...

I hear you - I really do. Violence in any form cannot be condoned, especially death.

One thing I don't see mentioned is scale of death vs. scale of demonstration. There was a relatively small number of people in Washington, and in one day, much damage was done. 5 killed, O(100) injured, and the capitol overrun.

The demonstrations this past summer were on another level. It's estimated that 20 million [0] people were involved. Yes there was violence and people acting in bad faith. But as a percentage of total protests it is _far_ less. I believe this says something about the intent of both demonstrations.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Lives_Matter

I've been trying to say this wherever the comparison is made. I haven't done the math, but in terms of fatalities per participant-day I think Wednesdays' events are probably at least two orders of magnitude more deadly than the "BLM protests" taken as a whole.

Literally none of the deaths in the article cited were related to the protests, they simply occurred while the BLM protests were going on elsewhere.

The article is in fact explicit on that point.

False - "In Louisville, Kentucky, early Monday, a man was shot dead during a protest against the death of Breonna Taylor." in the article.

> Police officers and National Guardsmen were shot at while trying to clear an area during a curfew, Louisville Police Chief Steve Conrad said. The man, since identified as 53-year-old David McAtee, was killed when they returned fire. One witness told the Associated Press that the group of people was unrelated to the protests.

There’s no Antifa platform to be banned and BLM violent speech, if any, is cenored as well. BLM is a movement not a faction. And whatever I saw posted with the hashtag BLM were videos of police deadly violence towards balcks and it hurt me to watch these too as a non-black American. It hurts me that some are indifferent.

I am not idiotically following democratic ideology and am willingly letting anyone get their shot, i’ll listen all sides sides. The problem with these radical people is that they are not making much sense, they seem confused and alienated. If you ask them what they want you don’t get a well shaped idea. Banning them from the table doesn’t seem like a good idea, but what’s the alternative, start believing the parallel reality the live in? It is contagious and dangerous, I lost some elders in my family to this nonesense, it is absolutely saddening and we have to do something about it. Otherwise a large part of humanity is going mad, do we want that? What is your soluion to stopping this mess? Be honest, do you not think at all that Trump stoked chaos during his reign?

I’d like for all of us to take one month off electronic information and start taking informaion directly from our own small envitonment and tune in with nature whenever possible. A break like that would reset things in part. The other part is that we have to put a hand and build the future however we want

Were those killed mostly protesters, law enforcement or non-participants?

It makes a fairly big difference surely? It's odd that nobody seems to mention that aspect when they bring this up.

> None of the people killed were involved in the protests. The shootings simply happened while protests were occurring elsewhere.

Objectively false - you didn't read the article again. It says "In Louisville, Kentucky, early Monday, a man was shot dead during a protest against the death of Breonna Taylor." right in the middle.

Other HN commenters who are acting in good faith: I invite you to click the article and C-f for that text. Yes, not all of the deaths were at the protests - my apologies for not reading carefully - but the claim that none of them are is factually incorrect.

> puppet

You've been continually resorting to ad-hominems and content-less fallacies, labels, and accusations. This is anti-intellectual.

You need to read the entire paragraph. The shooting occurred while the protest was going on elsewhere in the city.

You are not acting in good faith by deliberating leaving out the most important part of the paragraph, or the article, which repeatedly points out that none of the actual shootings were related to the protests.

When you say "these terrorist attacks", do you have a concrete definition in mind? Or are you just expressing outrage and disgust?

Because right now, people accused of terrorism can be held in Guantanamo without habeas corpus. They are also subject to inclusion on government "kill lists"[1] with no opportunity for judicial review. The executive branch is claiming powers it has not had since the time of absolute monarchy. We should carefully consider any proposal to expand the meaning of the word "terrorism".

I'm outraged too, but I think these criminals should be afforded full due process rights. At both the investigatory stage and the trial stage.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/legal-issues/us-invokes...

Technically speaking, it would be domestic terrorism. As citizens they should be afforded due process rights.

One could argue "terrorists" as you're defining re Gitmo should as well, but that's a different topic.

No, domestic terrorists are treated as criminals if they are citizens or permanent residents because they have Constitutional rights. If convicted, they go to the Supermax in Colorado.

Non-state foreign terrorists are held at Guantanamo.

If a group of muslims rushed a barricade and put pipe bombs outside Republican offices in the Capitol because they disagreed with the outcome of a political election, what would you call this action?

Please don't insinuate that I think people should be treated differently based on their religious affiliations.

I think that due process rights of despicable people should be protected precisely because I want them to be available to disfavored affinity groups like religious minorities, labor movements, and pacifists.

> Please

This is not an action.

What do you mean, here? I didn’t follow.

I asked for the name of an action and he referred to it as 'please'

But the thing with these sweeping generalizations of "them" as being violent and damaging is - who gets to define what is violent and damaging?

Glenn Greenwald, who I respect a lot and was instrumental in breaking the mass surveillance in US by intelligence agencies recently spoke about these very issue:

" My insistence that we look at the other side of the ledger — the costs and dangers not only from such attacks but also the “solutions” implemented in the name of the stopping them — did not come from indifference towards those deaths or a naive views of those responsible for them. It was instead driven by my simultaneous recognition of the dangers from rights-eroding, authoritarian reactions imposed by the state, particularly in the immediate aftermath of a traumatic event. "

and then this:

"

It has long been clear that, in the post-Trump era, media outlets looking to keep viewers hooked, and government officials looking to increase their power, will do everything possible to center and inflate the threat posed by right-wing factions. I’ve said this more times than I can count over the last year at least.

Like all inflated threats, this one has a kernel of truth. As is true of every faction, there are right-wing activists filled with rage and who are willing to do violence. Some of them are dangerous (just as some Muslims in the post-9/11 era, and some Antifa nihilists, were and are genuinely violent and dangerous). But as was true of the Cold War and the War on Terror and so many other crisis-spurred reactions, the other side of the ledger — the draconian state powers clearly being planned and urged and prepared in the name of stopping them — carry its own extremely formidable dangers.

Refusing to consider those dangers for fear of standing accused of downplaying the threat is the most common tactic authoritarian advocates of state power use. Less than twenty-four hours after the Capitol breach, one sees this tactic being wielded with great flamboyance and potency, and it is sure to continue long after January 20. "

I’m not talking about government suppression of speech. I’m talking about society itself rejecting a certain kind of speech, by the actions of private citizens and organizations, and generally having an awareness of the fact that two sides of an issue are not always equally right.

We have to do our best. The fact that it’s a hard problem to solve without going too far doesn’t give us license to throw up our hands, cast off from reality, and inhabit a dreamland where there is no difference between a truth and a falsehood.

Yeah shame and shun anyone that won’t take responsibility for their actions.

> who gets to define what is violent and damaging?

"They" are literally the ones attacking and threatening the seat of American government. This isn't a thought experiment at this point.

After the Capitol attack, it is clearly no longer inflated. It has boiled over.

How do you decide which of the violent and/or damaging speeches to deplatform?

I see nothing done except “use tribalism to decide.”

> I see nothing done except “use tribalism to decide.”

I disagree. You don't need tribalism, for instance, to see that somebody spreading lies and conspiracy theories in a transparent attempt to undermine confidence in our elections is going to do an immense amount of damage to the institutions of our democracy if he isn't muzzled.

We have to remember that truth is real, that people can act in good faith, and simply do the best we can. Perfect is the enemy of good enough.

Who decides what counts as lies and conspiracy theory? What if they decide spreading the attitude that “all cops are bastards” or the notion that police shooting events are mostly motivated by bigotry a conspiracy theory that leads to additional violence and start banning tangential speech?

Lots of lies can't easily be proven false, but many can, as long as we agree on some really basic principles.

For instance, if you tell me that two plus two equals five, I can count out two sets of two coins, then put them all together, count them again, and see that the answer is 4. So in that case I will be confident in calling you a liar.

You could, of course, say I'm wrong.

And you actually could be wrong.

Have you defined the term “two”? You didn’t here.

“But everybody knows what ‘two’ is! You’re being facetious.”

No, not really. Most of the ranting here comes from

1. not precisely defining, and agreeing to, the terms that are being used in discussion, or

2. misinterpreting, intentionally or not, how others are using a term (so easy because the term was not defined properly by the poster in the first place)...

This provides the opportunity to reincarnate a long-neglected topic of study, closely connected to San Francisco, known as General Semantics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_semantics

If this “discussion” occurred among US intellectuals 70 years ago, someone would have already made my observation about defining terms.

A basic tenet: If nobody is defining and gaining an acceptance by others of the terms used in a discussion, you will get intellectually nowhere in your discussion and you will come to no agreement...or...each of you will think an agreement means something different. Dead waste of photons...

Soviet communists hated the idea at the time. “How can you rile up the masses if they objectively and rationally discussed things” seemed to be the concern. Ironic, because if the German people had used the basic techniques in the Nazi 1930s, there would have been 50% more young Russian men alive in the 1950s. Which is why it was so popular among the young intellectuals in the US after WWII who really didn’t want another war.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42573948?seq=1

It is particularly appropriate for a Bay Area group since one of the leading proponents was S.I. Hayakawa who was President of San Francisco State University and former US Senator for California. His book, Language in Thought and Action, was a popular explanation of General Semantics for normal people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_in_Thought_and_Action

It was a Book-of-the-Month club selection.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_the_Month

Sold a million copies and was his ticket to politics. An easy and pleasant read even today.

If you pursue General Semantics further, skip the esoterica by the founder Korzybski. It is sort of Eselen-culty without any nudity, so, what’s the point?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esalen_Institute

Exactly what we're doing now. Democracy. The people vote with their wallet.

The mega-corporations that herd people together and use their people herd to sell ad slots are not part of a democracy.

Public outrage is what these companies are responding to. If they didn't think the majority of their users wanted this, they wouldn't do it. For example, you don't see Parler banning the domestic terrorists organizing on the platform, do you?

So Hamilton, not Jefferson.

OP writes:

> We just assume we're right.

And you follow up by proving just how right he is. First you dehumanize your political opponents--"If a rabid cougar gets loose..."--then you tell us what we need to do--"we take whatever measures we have to to get rid of it for the greater good of society."

And you claim it's the other side's speech that "is violent and damaging"?

P.S. At the time of this reply, it's not the current POTUS calling a sitting US Senator a "Goebbels". Care to guess where this is going?

The point of the cougar analogy is not to dehumanize anybody. It is to demonstrate that sometimes problems exist (problems as in configurations of reality that can be articulated as bad), and that doing nothing is often not the solution that will yield the greatest good in a utilitarian sense.

I'm sorry if that wasn't clear.

I'm curious, though—would you just let the cougar do its thing? Like, if that literally happened, and you were the guy at animal control who got the call?

I reject your analogy on it's face as a banal attempt to justify incivility and barbarism towards those in which we disagree.

The person who posted is still active on Twitter - https://www.deccanherald.com/sites/dh/files/styles/article_d...

Double standard much?

Kathy Griffin lost her job at CNN and faced a lot criticism from all walks of life at that time. So it wasn't like she didn't face consequences at that time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathy_Griffin#Depiction_of_Don...

What makes the legal route legitimate is a negotiation in society. If the legal route is rescinded, then, the courts will be considered illegitimate. Perhaps that's right. But, that's also how revolutions start.

The legal system is certainly a flawed creation of man, but it isn't a magic wand. I'd go so far as to say that most legal systems, extant and otherwise, won't (absent corruption) serve as a vehicle for you to do literally whatever you want. I'm not a lawyer, but I get a strong impression that the Trump campaign's attempts to have the election results invalidated or reversed in various jurisdictions were in that vein, and literally laughable.

I agree that revolutions are real, that many have happened in the past, and presumably more will in the future.

Reducing your fellow countrymen to an animal analogy is exactly the kind of dehumanization that has become commonplace in popular discourse. It's not enough that you disagree with them, they must be put down like some rabid beast.

We're on a path with this kind of thinking. If history is any guide, it doesn't end well.

I'm not reducing anyone to anything. Addressed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25695775

> They are being deplatformed because their speech is violent and damaging—in many cases it’s literal incitement to violence.

"in defense of looting"

And while I'm at it - why isn't China being deplatformed?

They literally just posted on their embassy twitter account saying they fixed minority women who were "baby-making machines."

One can only guess they mean sterilization.

It's obvious who's allowed to be inhumane and who isn't.

https://abcnews.go.com/International/chinese-embassy-tweet-u...

I can read quite clearly between the lines of your comment, but I’m still having trouble finding where in my comment I said that users calling for violence on social media should be exempt from sanctions if they’re left-leaning.

Also, beware the false equivalence between smashing a store window and stealing some crap vs. actually attacking a human being. They will use the word "violence" to describe both, rather than get into a definition war with them, just keep the distinction clear.

You mean like this: https://www.cleveland19.com/story/32814897/men-chant-black-l...

Yes, that is what I am talking about. That is actual violence.

I really do not think that most willing to smash a bunch of windows would hesitate to attack you if you stand between them and said windows.

That's a strange view to hold. For most people there's a significant cognitive difference between being willing to destroy objects and being willing to attack people.

Not once they're part of a mob there isn't.

Don't engage with the trolls!

It's a bad faith argument you're arguing against, which I'm sure you see, just want to call it out.

Thanks for calling me a troll rather than engaging with my arguments, really mature of you.

Sure let me engage then.

Why should anyone engage with your arguments when they are easily debunked both on principle, and with evidence widely available online? Why should anyone engage with your arguments when they are made in bad faith?

More to the point, can you demonstrate that you aren't trolling?

We are not talking simply about destroying objects but about a specific act of vandalism that often happens during rioting.

Attacking a human being, smashing a window, and attacking a human being in order to smash the window behind him are three very different things.

I never claimed otherwise.

> I really do not think that most willing to smash a bunch of windows would hesitate to attack you if you stand between them and said windows.

Unless I misunderstood it this statement implies that a window smashing person would as well attack another humane being. It's not true. These acts are different, require different motivations and a different mentality/personality traits to follow through.

> Unless I misunderstood this statement implies that a window smashing person would as well attack another humane being

...if you attempt to stop them from smashing said window it is likely, yes. This happened a few times in USA in the past few months.

The acts are obviously different, if they were the same we would not have this discussion.

We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines, repeated flamewar, and using HN primarily [1] for political and ideological battle. Those things aren't allowed here because they destroy what the site is for, which is curious, thoughtful conversation. To protect the site, we therefore have to ban accounts that do them—especially that primarily do them.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

> That's a strange view to hold.

Have you ever seen Antifa in action?

Here is a curated selection of the logical failures in your two line comment:

* saying that economic circumstances are "oppressive," then trying to draw this to "violence"

* a claim that if a thief steals all of your stuff, you "starve" -- please give an example of one person who "starved" because BLM looters stole their stuff

* implying that being in a situation where you are "starving" is the same as actually being violently attacked, i.e. shot, stabbed, bludgeoned, etc.

>>* a claim that if a thief steals all of your stuff, you "starve" -- please give an example of one person who "starved" because BLM looters stole their stuff

You are 100% sure that nobody who lost a job because his place of work was destroyed in riots is not starving? Not everybody is so privileged to have enough savings to support himself after loosing a job.

Of course I'm not 100% sure of that, but there is a long sequence of events between smashing a window and getting to that outcome, unlike bashing a guy's face in with a crowbar where the consequence is guaranteed within milliseconds. The two acts are not equal and attempts to equate them are either idiotic or in bad faith.

Once upon a time in Germany there was a special night, it was called "Crystal Night"[1]. It got it's name because of all the glass from the smashed windows lying on the ground. There were some people arguing that it was violence, but some said that those people were either idiotic or arguing in bad faith.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristallnacht

Kristallnacht was a pogrom in which people specifically targeted Jews with the full backing of the state.

Surely the more apt analogy is the systemic violence our state inflicts on Black people, rather than the protests that arose in response to it.

No, mask wearing people (supported by a large part of the political elite) destroying property of a specific social-economic class is the more apt analogy today in the USA.

Those people were met with state violence, so no it’s not.

Ever heard the term "anarcho-tyranny" ?

I'd have gone with the hundreds of Jews murdered that night and subsequent tens of thousands sent to concentration camps in the aftermath as the important violence there, honestly.

You are right, some people just fail to see that the broken windows were just the beginning and what followed was even more vile. The mental gymnastics some people do to downplay violence only because it might look bad for their side is astonishing. The value of a human life for them is nothing more than a sacrificial pawn on their ideological chessboard.

No, but think of the property that was destroyed!

> we take whatever measures we have to to get rid of it for the greater good of society

Justifying around the "greater good" is so obviously fraught and subjective.

And since the workers in tech are overwhelmingly liberal, they will undoubtedly bias policies of mass communication platforms to disallow opposition.

Oddly enough people so concerned with minority representation will steam-roll minorities when they make blind "greater good" majoritarianism the norm.

And nowadays the definition of "harm" has been trivialized so far that really practically anything is a target.

> One can only guess they mean sterilization.

Only if you read it in the least charitable way possible and in the context of unverified claims from fringe figures like Adrian Zenz. It's a bad tweet, but the literal reading is that due to "emancipation" they are no longer only "baby making machines". Not even CCP propagandists are clumsy enough to admit to forced sterilization in a public forum.

It’s not uncharitable to state there’s ethnic cleansing occurring in China and the state has codified race supremacy.

Don't forget about Saudi Arabia!

Their "Crown Prince" assassinates a dissident journalist by placing a plastic bag over his head to suffocate him while his fiance waits outside the embassy in her car.

And leaders like president Rafael Reif at MIT invite this brutal dictator onto the MIT campus in order to thank him for his donation to the Media Lab in a photo op covered by the newspapers, presumably as a form of reputation laundering and because Rafael Reif cares about human rights about as much as he cares about the sexual abuse of 12 year-old girls.

Why is the Crown Prince's violence "more legitimate" than folks who perhaps mistakenly think the election was stolen from them and feel the need to break a few windows in order to protest the ballot count?

> They are being deplatformed because their speech is violent and damaging—in many cases it’s literal incitement to violence.

I challenge you to provide any concrete evidence for this claim - in particular, that (1) the majority of their speech specifically consists of calls to violence (not just "violent" because that term has been twisted recently to mean a wide range of things that a certain political party disagrees with) (2) that the behavior of the tens of millions of people in this political party are at all correlated with the several hundred people who stormed the capitol and (3) that this was significantly worse than the Antifa and BLM riots that we had throughout the entirety of 2020.

Please remove the blinkers. Dozens of murderous world leaders that regularly espouse violence are still on Twitter but Trump is eliminated.

BLM leaders who explicitly called for violence, arson and looting were never "fact-checked". Not until they started openly talking about murdering whites.

Face it - this is because the Twitter CEO actively dislikes Trump and has little to do with any sort of violent speech.

Cite even one example of a BLM leader explicitly (or even implicitly) calling for violence, arson, and looting.

Go ahead, I'll wait. You won't find anyone, because it didn't happen.

OTOH, the Proud Boys did explicitly call for violence, arson, and looting during the BLM rights, and their leader admitted as much in a live television interview.

What ? There are dozens of such videos. Do your own research please. This stuff never make it to NYT/CNBC/Liberal media btw.

https://twitter.com/MarinaMedvin/status/1299930096472657920

https://nypost.com/2020/06/25/blm-leader-if-change-doesnt-ha...

https://therightscoop.com/portland-black-lives-matter-leader...

Regarding whites should be "wiped out" https://www.dailywire.com/news/blm-leader-says-whites-sub-hu...

Black Lives Matter leader justifies rioting in interview with Tomi Lahren: https://www.foxnews.com/media/black-lives-matter-president-r...

“When the fires were burning, and people were chanting, I just felt liberated for a brief moment, and I felt for one of the only times in my life that the government had no control over me," said Newsome.

Now replace Newsome by a Trump supporter. Suddenly it needs "suppression".

For record, I am no neo-nazi extremist. I am coloured btw.

Did not downvote you. But your reply just fascinates me. How do you even compare "burning down the system" as a metaphor for voting ? Do you even truly recognise your own bias here where Trumps tweets are taken as a "incitement to violence" whereas any statement made by a BLM leader is played down as peaceful ?

What is being made up here precisely ? Here is another BLM protester https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/blm-protester-caught...

Ridiculously justifying Looting as "Reparations" https://nypost.com/2020/08/13/blm-organizer-who-called-looti... (This even came up in the Chicago Tribune btw not just your "neo-nazi-news")

How much more evidence will you need ?

Please read my comment again and see that I did not suggest any defense of Twitter's not banning people who are not Trump. Less of blinkers and more of blindfold, I guess.

Why is this so hard for people?

70 people died because of the BLM riots and they are not getting deplatformed.

> 70 people died because of the BLM riots and they are not getting deplatformed.

Who is the "they" that should be deplatformed for the actions you describe? Were there particular BLM organizers / leaders that were calling for destruction of property, violence against people, and the overthrowing of legally elected governments?

Certainly there were folks that took advantage of the crowds to do nefarious things, and I don't doubt some actual BLM folks committed acts.

There were also documented false flag operations against BLM:

* https://www.wsls.com/news/virginia/2020/07/27/police-richmon...

But were the BLM demonstrations purposefully organized to do these things?

I would like to see a source on this.

Wasn't there an insurrection involved in the American Revolution?

And just think, we celebrate that one every July 4!

Sometimes working toward "the greater good of society" requires violence.

Therefore the real issue here is not the violence but rather the "misinformation" ... both in the form of dubious claims about election fraud as well as the attempt by powerful technology elites to silence the misinformed by de-platforming them instead of "federating" the flow of information through technologies like Mastodon that respect their users' freedom.

This is a great point that is not made often enough. The logical conclusion is that the de-platformed actors get mad enough that they start lashing out in criminal ways, doing stuff that gets them locked up or killed, or otherwise "de-platformed" in real life. There's some short term pain, but ultimately society has a net win.

Convince me I'm wrong...

It’s so easy to think of “societal net gain” when you are on the winning side.

However, when you are on the receiving end of “societal net gain,” it is a much tougher pill to swallow.

In other words, personal sacrifice by choice is laudable; mandatory personal sacrifice is the opposite.

The expression has never been “What’s good for the gander is good for the goose”

I feel the real underlying issue is economic disparity. When breads and circuses stop, you will see riots. It gets worse when media has a hard time getting eye balls unless they can show outrage.

Remember your post when things don't end up going down the path you think you've expertly designed for your preferred outcome. When you ask "why is this happening?", know that you were part of the reason why things ended up the way they end up.