ref: https://media.defense.gov/2021/Jan/08/2002562063/-1/-1/1/PLA...
Let say we have the worst case scenario where a bunch of criminals successfully enter the capital building and occupy it. Is the best response to send the army, or as many police units as needed to apprehend the criminals and put them in jail?
By sending the army what we are saying is that there existed a creditable scenario that the people attacking could have taken control of the US government and ruled over the nation.
The National Guard is not the Army, it's a dual-purpose force that is both a reserve for the Army and a reserve for civil authorities during emergencies including civil disorder.
> By sending the army what we are saying is that there existed a creditable scenario that the people attacking could have taken control of the US government and ruled over the nation.
No, even if we were talking about the Army proper, an existential threat to the government is not the criteria under the Insurrection Act for their use to disperse insurgents.
The militia, armed forces, or both may be used (among other scenarios authorized in law) against “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy” which “opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws”. 10 USC Sec 253.
History is full of examples and dead bodies where the military has been used against its own people who oppose or obstruct the execution of law. It many countries it also follows a period of regret and new laws in order to prevent something similar to ever happen again. Just because the government has a law that gives them authorization to send the military in order to secure a building, it doesn't mean it is a good idea.
Would the military trained personnel have done a better job during the capital attack than the police trained one?
The Guard is a force whose missions include support for Civil authorities during disturbances, and it's training, equipment, organizations, planning, etc. reflect that.
And, quite arguably, that are better than, and trained better than the police for, dealing with large scale civil unrest.
https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-elections-racial-in...
https://www.ideastream.org/news/what-national-guard-training...
The fact that you have to reach back that far, given all the more recent problems with conventional police, seems to illustrate my point.
[0]https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/hidd...
The GOP has been doing a large scale equivalent of swinging nunchucks around in public. The problem isn't that sometimes it swings around the wrong way and whacks someone they didn't intend to whack. Well, no, it is, of course that's a problem. But the more fundamental problem is that they're recklessly swinging an unpredictable weapon in public in an effort to be intimidating in the first place. And the problem is that people who didn't feel personally threatened by this behavior just sat there and came up with sorry excuses to try and rationalize it. This is deeply antisocial comportment that should have no place in the top echelons of civil society.
Had every BLM protest been as violent and unhinged as the capitol protests, we would have had thousands of deaths.
This is not true. Here is one example of a retired St. Louis Police captain/current (at the time) police chief of Moline Acres being killed.
https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/retired...
There are other examples as well.
> Had every BLM protest been as violent and unhinged as the capitol protests,
Aside from the single police officer, all the deaths seem to have been protestors. At least two were killed by police - one was shot by the police, and the other was pushed off a balcony.
It is the case that between two and three dozen people were killed during the BLM protests and associated actions like the autonomous zone, with nearly all of them, judging by the articles I have found, being victims of the protestors rather than protestors themselves.
Also, not to diminish the death. But he was not a police officer. He was retired and doing security work for a friend.
In a single medium-sized event, Wednesday's riot got 5 people killed. One of them was a policeman, and at least three of them were due to violence. So in terms of fatalities per participant-day, Wednesday's event was probably at least two orders of magnitude more violent than the "BLM protests" taken as a whole.
I think that's a significant difference, and one that exposes this sort of whataboutism as false equivalency (in addition to the other issues with whataboutism).
I know this country has memory holed the negative actions of BLM, but they have a lot of law enforcement blood on their hands.
In a similar vein, I’m not blaming the people who stormed the Capitol on Wednesday for previous right-wing attacks, including on LEOs e.g. the boog boi murders earlier last year.
Consequently, the media mislabeling of the reign of terror campaign this summer doesn’t legitimize destroying communities because a few people were pissed off and corporations attempted to add an air of legitimacy to it.
I watched a bunch of people chant at a door on Wednesday, a couple windows were broken, a guy in viking shit flexed on a chair, an unarmed woman was shot climbing through a window, and my feed is filled with hyperbolic morons screaming sedition and traitors.
I’m over it.
> Consequently, the media mislabeling of the reign of terror campaign this summer doesn’t legitimize destroying communities because a few people were pissed off and corporations attended to add an air of legitimacy to it.
Engaging with any subjective representation of the protests I am talking about is outside the scope of what I'm willing to discuss—for those who've been subjected to it, I can't compete with the right-wing media's firehose of disinformation. My point about fatalities per participant-day stands as a metric of the violence during last summer's protests compared to the riot last Wednesday, and you can take it or leave it.
on my part i think my initial comment was poorly constructed as this was the main point i wanted to communicate.
Ask yourself that question, why the reaction to this event?
I'm not going to ban you right now because you posted better comments several months ago, but please don't do this. Instead, if you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
Do you seriously actually believe this is a balanced representation of the events we're talking about? A simple yes or no, please.
And the goal of the BLM demonstration was not violence, whereas that was the goal of at least some (if not many) of the MAGA folks. Quite a few folks walking around with zip ties and more than one noose as well.
Going back to July 27, 2020, Trump tweeted:
> Anarchists, Agitators or Protestors who vandalize or damage our Federal Courthouse in Portland, or any Federal Buildings in any of our Cities or States, will be prosecuted under our recently re-enacted Statues & Monuments Act. MINIMUM TEN YEARS IN PRISON. Don’t do it! @DHSgov
* https://www.cbs17.com/news/national-news/trump-tweet-threate...
* https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/12878776213808373...
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-kamala-harris-l...
> "I know there are protests still happening in major cities across the United States, I'm just not seeing the reporting on it that I had for the first few weeks," Colbert said.
> "That's right," Harris replied. "But they're not gonna stop. They're not gonna stop, and this is a movement, I'm telling you."
* https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/09/01/fac...
See also Biden on violence:
* https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/01/07/fac...
Meanwhile, the rioters at the US Capital:
> “This is not America,” a woman said to a small group, her voice shaking. She was crying, hysterical. “They’re shooting at us. They’re supposed to shoot BLM, but they’re shooting the patriots.”
* https://archive.is/tZVFs (paywall)
* https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/capitol-trump-ins...
Maybe that wasn't the goal, as it also wasn't the goal of most of the Trump protestors. But there was nevertheless plenty of violence.
Just seven months ago, dozens of Secret Service agents were hospitalized after being attacked by BLM protestors attempting to storm the White House.
https://www.newsmax.com/us/white-house-secret-service/2020/0...
Recent events have really, really opened my eyes as to how the media covers events that it supports versus events it does not support.
People were talking about storming Congress months ago:
> “Will you and several hundred more go with me to DC and fight our way into the Congress and arrest every Democrat who has participated in the coup?” Holland posted on Friday. “We may have to shoot and kill many of the Communist BLM and ANTIFA Democrat foot soldiers to accomplish this!!!”
* https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/11/11/cops-n11.html
> One of Lang Holland’s posts reflected Donald Trump’s baseless allegations that the presidential election he lost to Joe Biden was stolen, and said: “Death to all Marxist Democrats.”
> Holland, who led the police department in Marshall, Arkansas, also wrote “take no prisoners” and “leave no survivors”.
* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/09/local-arkans...
> In a popular thread referencing a Trump tweet promoting the debunked conspiracy theory of election fraud, one user asked, "what if Congress ignores the evidence?"
> "Storm the Capitol," was a popular reply.
> Five days later, on January 6, as pro-Trump militia proceeded to do exactly that, the mood on thedonald.win switched to jubilation and outright defiance of police, with thousands joining "watching party" message threads.
> "This is what Trump told us to do!" a top post in one of these threads read.
* https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2021-01-08/us-capitol-st...
verifiable voting
I think literally anyone on this site could invent a more reliable and common-sense approach to voting.
This is all just fallout from a fallible system that has little trust.
But I think you'd taking the results too far. You'd have to hack into hundreds or thousands of machines within a single state to change its votes. Worse, you have to do this in a way that looks plausible. You're talking about a major conspiracy that would have to take place. And if Russia is going to change votes why wouldn't China, Israel, or others? So they would have to all organize together so they don't undo one another's work. And that would have to happen without us (NSA, FBI, CIA) finding out. You're talking about a conspiracy that would be very difficult to pull off and require high amounts of organization.
Hacking a computer is easy. Hacking a thousand computers in a room full of people that are worried about their computers being hacked? Different story.
The problem with verifiable voting is that it has to break one the properties of American democracy, the secret ballot, or else it doesn't really work. As a voter, I want to see that a) it was recorded that I voted, and b) what my vote was. In the case of invented voter fraud, both A and B need to be possible, but making both of those possible mean it's possible to show who I voted for. Who I voted for is a secret, and is one of the central tenants to American democracy. I can talk about supporting candidate A in public and vote for candidate B in private and a lot of properties follow from that.
The challenge isn't technical, it's a social problem, and technical measures won't solve social problems.
This problem might have a technical solution though. First, each voter generates a private key and publishes the corresponding public key. Then implement a homomorphic vector addition, everybody submits their vote as an encrypted vector, and then you somehow add the vectors together homomorphically, i.e. the addition can be done without decrypting them first.
You need some kind of way to prove that each vector corresponds to a legal vote (i.e. increases the vote total of at most one candidate by at most one vote.) Then you need some way to decrypt the encrypted vector sum using some amalgamation of everybody's public keys, but without allowing to decrypt subtotals for particular subsets.
You can publish all the encrypted votes received and the decrypting amalgamation, so anyone with the capability to download and process a large data set. Anyone can check that every vote was cryptographically approved by a distinct pre-registered voter and the votes were totaled honestly.
If we assume an upper bound of 1 billion voters, each 1 kb of encrypted vector size adds 1 TB to the raw vote data. Based on existing "clever" cryptosystems that do similar things (e.g. ZK-snarks), it's reasonable to guess we won't need more than 100 kb per encrypted vector. So an entire 1-billion-voter election could be processed by a small storage cluster with 100 TB, you can't verify it on your laptop, but the technically inclined could verify the vote themselves for probably somewhere around $1,000 - $20,000 of hardware and sysadmin time.
I don't know if there's existing crypto math to do this, but I'm pretty sure it at least hasn't been proven impossible.
The kind of crypto primitives needed for this kind of system might be found someday.
If you are a member of a violent gang or are too racist to police justly you are too dangerous to employ as a cop. Not looking for and removing these people is intentionally turning a blind eye to the extreme danger they present to people in their communities.
Is this a joke?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Curtain#Fall_of_the_Iron_...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
[0]https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/hidd...
When I looked back through your account history trying to find examples of using the site as intended, rather than political flamewar, I ran across https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25626137 instead. That's not a political flamewar comment, but it still breaks the site guidelines badly. I've banned this account until we get some indication that you want to use HN as intended. If you do, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us some reason to believe it.
I have had plenty of interesting debates on here; when it comes to politics however, HN has a certain bias and an ideological blind spot. The narrative that the left is censoring everybody while you have Republican legislators passing this[1] is laughable, yet the narrative persists because it's not being challenged.
I do try to see the other side[2] when I think it makes sense. Playing victim of the left while a right-wing mob just stormed the Capitol is not one of these times, sorry.
The cynic in me thinks this is what YC wants; it promotes the sort of thinking on which VC thrives. I have little reason to believe otherwise. There's few people on HN challenging these narratives and now there's even fewer.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-BDS_laws#Anti-BDS_laws_in...
I didn't consider your ideological preference when banning you. It would be the same if you were arguing for the opposite side, so no, I don't see any irony—the logic seems boringly straightforward. Sometimes I don't even know what ideological preference an account has—it turns out if you do something often enough, you can train yourself to mask out those bits.
Claims of "bias and ideological blind spot" about HN are legion, but they're wildly contradictory. The people you disagree with make just as impassioned claims about how overrun HN is with bias in favor of your side. I could give you so, so many links...
I totally get how a cynic would trace this back to YC's business interests, and there actually is a chain that connects HN moderation to that, but it's different than the one you imagine. Here's how we actually think about this: the way to maximize HN's value to YC is to maximize how interesting it is to the community [1]. I know it might be hard to believe, but it's that simple. It's a rare treat to get to work on a problem where you literally only need to optimize for one thing and you know what it is [2].
The neat thing is that you can imagine this motivation to be as sinister and greedy and evil as you like, and it's still awesome. If YC owns the leading place on the internet for good hackers to gratify their intellectual curiosity...that is crazy valuable [3]. Why would we manipulate HN for any other purpose? That would be stupid—it would lose us the good will of the community, which is the entire thing. Whichever way you slice this problem, YC's interests are aligned with keeping this community happy. It's a fortunate historical accident that we ended up in this position, and personally I feel grateful for that (because it allows me to do this job without much conflict of interest) and am pretty fierce about protecting it.
The things we ban accounts for—like snark, flamewar, attacking other users, ideological and political battle—are what causes a forum like HN to get less intellectually interesting. That's why we don't want flamewars. It's not a moral or an ethical point. It's just that flamewars are boring. They feel like they aren't boring, for a while, but that's an illusion—it confuses high-activation with curiosity, and in reality those two are mutually exclusive. Once the anger and trauma have vented themselves, there's nothing left, and people are left feeling bitter and disconnected from each other—hardly a condition in which to playfully explore the world.
I don't mean to imply that the things you care about and are fighting for don't matter. They do matter, and that's true of the others as well. But this is an optimization problem. Our job is to keep HN interesting. Scorched earth is not interesting [4]. Therefore we have to ban accounts that take this place in that direction.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[3] I'm not saying HN is good at it—I wish it were better. The point is that the niche is so valuable that anything else YC might do to try to squeeze value out of it would be dumb. Also, it's all relative: if the rest of the internet descends into flames and HN can manage to remain interesting, its value grows. We're basically in an outrun-the-bear joke.
[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Appeal to white supremacists to attempt to build a winning coalition has been a core GOP strategy for more than a half century; that part of the right-wing that isn't itself white supremacist relies on support from white supremacists to advance their agenda. (To be fair, that was true of the Democratic Party instead of the GOP from the founding until the 1960s, but for a couple of breaches between the extreme racists and the rest of the party that were usually healed in short order. White supremacy has always been a powerful enough force in America that it's always been a significant influence on at least one major party.)
Why on earth would we not try to detect and remove these people from law enforcement agencies?
As for law enforcement involvement in the terrorist attack on the capitol, there are plenty of videos. Law enforcement agencies around the country have also disclosed that some of their officers were involved, which seems like an odd thing to fabricate.
So yes. We know that.
There's a pretty big gulf between a relatively abstract set of political and economic opinions, and an ideology that views some groups of people as sub-human and inherently criminal, and specifically seeks to disenfranchise them. One can quite reasonably make the case that individuals who hold opinions along those lines are temperamentally incapable of protecting and serving their community. Their whole community.
The Chicago Public Library had a gallery documenting victims of torture by the Chicago Police Department. Plenty of photographs, making it quite clear that it was almost exclusively a thing that White cops did to Black and Latinx citizens. It's hard to see how we as a society can hope to eliminate state-committed atrocities like that if we're not even willing to weed the ideology that produces them out of the paramilitary wings of our local governments.
Speaking on a more macro scale, the movement that produced that protest and this insurrection is so transparently rooted in racism, with roots going back at least as far as the Southern Strategy, that we're now to the point that trying to apologize for them is, at the absolute best, an act of petty denialism.
They killed hundreds of millions of people. You could be raped of tortured at any time.
It is not white supremacist. It is anyone with power.
Right now in the US, the antifa movement is as violent or more violent than anyone else. Certainly the Guardian is not an unbiased source.
https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-01-07/dc-riots-c...
Which doesn't mention anything about Mayor Bowser refusing offers of assistance - only the Capitol Police. Indeed, it cites her asking for assistance on December 31st in preparation.
This isn't a new phenomenon either. This has been documented [0] time and time again [1].
[0] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/fbi-white-supremacists-i...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/27/white-suprem...