Breaking 1-06-21: MAGA terrorist attack on Capitol

D&D used to have more of these discussions between people "in [their] own words"

Some people are lazy and are uncomfortable with grey issues.

 

It's hard to scroll past when they are so long and plentiful.

He is also using a lot of disinformation and straight up falsehoods and you responding to them gives them merit.

Nothing about what he is doing is actually intellectual it's just throwing stuff at the wall and has dissolved into a battle of how many words can I use to make me look smart.

What's really irritating is this is happening in multiple threads.

I understand you enjoy this stuff but at some point it detracts from the actual thread, especially when you are arguing the same points over and over.

 

In most places you can shoot and kill people breaking in and entering your house. As I don't own a gun, that is not a reasonable option for me.

Does this apply to all gatherings, or only this particular one?

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. I read his speech. I read his tweet in which he said the Capitol Police are on our side, they are not the enemy. I read his tweet when he told them to go home. I didn't see any tweets about hanging Mike Pence or kidnapping Nancy Pelosi.

 

Sorry if I'm making the thread less readable for you. Didn't realize that was a requirement.

This is a debate and discussion forum and I've been having some very long and involved debates with StupidMoniker. While I disagree and think his arguments are strained and in some cases specious I don't see him outright lying or bringing in a lot of misinformation. In fact when he's been shown to be incorrect on something he's corrected himself. In the George Floyd thread his arguments and evidence don't appear to be misinformation as they match what the defense is bringing up in court.

I admit I get enjoyment out of this. I wouldn't be here if I didn't. As I said in some of the my responses to other posters too often it seems like posters are unwilling or incapable of articulating and arguing their points of view. Posters either look for echo chamber confirmation of views or hide behind op-eds and expect you to accept them as appeals to authority. It feels good to have a poster willing to present their own arguments and go to great lengths to articulate them. It helps me to sharpen my own arguments.

 

Not as far as I know. They were chanting things like shame on you.

That was in initial reporting. It was later revealed by Blake himself that he had the knife in his hand, dropped it while fighting with the officer, then picked it up again.

No, I am not. I am asking him to look at a woman a few feet away and make a determination whether this individual person currently represents an imminent threat of great bodily injury or death to him or someone else. It has to be imminent and it has to be GBI or death. That requires no information about her prior actions, how many barricades she has crossed, what her astrological sign is, or anything else. It requires looking at her. Is she holding a weapon? Is she attacking someone? Is she making threatening statements? Is she wearing the uniform of an enemy military? Are there visible explosives strapped onto her? At that point he knows she is trespassing and that some portion of the other trespassers have been fighting with Capitol Police.

No. I am saying she could easily have been arrested instead of shot.

I don't know who has the authority to say what the official definition is. The Department of Defense uses the term non-lethal weapons. Is that official?

So there is no evidence that she was out to murder Mike Pence, there was no evidence that she assaulted a LEO, but I am the one relying on conjecture?

I have already said I don't have the evidence needed to even charge him, let alone convict him. My question is why is his identity secret and why is no information being released about the investigation of the shooting?

Look only at facts. What facts support the conclusion that Ashley Babbitt in particular was an imminent threat of death or great bodily injury to the officer who shot her or another person.

I only brought it up as a counterpoint to the Oklahoma representative? Senator? the Republican guy who said that shooting Ashley Babbitt saved lives. I don't think the statements of the members of congress about that day carry much weight with me, specifically because of the more outlandish claims made. It was a point that was weakened when I learned he was not a Democrat, because it is the Dems on this issue that are more hysterical. It is ultimately a minor point that grew into a large tangent.

 

Look I know I might have come on strong initially but yeah it's common decency to not derail a thread because you are enjoying a personal back and forth.

SM has claimed that the person shot was not doing anything reckless and that the officer had no reason to shoot. He also has claimed time and time again the rioters had no weapons is that not misinformation.

I am not trying to be a dick but I did not know the D&D was for sharpening arguments or conducting a mock trial, is that your purpose?

It seems that you could create a seperate thread for that and let this thread continue to have new information coming out.

At 1st I was very into the back and forth but once you keep reading the same arguments rehashed it gets tedious.

And now we are arguing about the Blake shooting in this thread?

Anyway it's really not my place to judge what you can enjoy I just think your enjoyment should not overshadow the thread, I will just deal with it.

 

This is the state of the republican party. Promoting an armed insurrection attack on the nation's capital where law enforcement died. Note that it is being held on a trump property. And that matt gaetz is scheduled to be a key note speaker.



Surprised this photograph didn't get included in their display...

 

Yeah, he waited a really long time to do that. He would have called in support to stop this if they hadn't been his fan club of angry white men believing his BS, and storming the Capitol at his request. He told these guys who beat cops and chanted to hang Mike Pence he loved them! That is disturbing and disgusting. He did that because he knew they supported him, and he incited them with his propaganda and lies. His reaction would have been far different if they had been Muslims, Black, or Asians, doing this at the Capitol if he was the one inside, and they were screaming Hang Donald Trump.

 

Except at the time he was shot he didn't have the knife in his hand so the LEO made a split second decision. Besides that there are several other cases of LEO shooting unarmed suspects and not even being tried.

You've heard the saying, "you're judged by the company you keep." In this case she was already with a group of people storming the Capitol who had already been assaulting LEO and deep inside the Capitol. The LEO wasn't doing apprehension he was guarding. You're asking for him to risk making an arrest in a situation that he doesn't control.

Much of LE defines it as "Less than Lethal" but leaving aside the what it is called it is a fact that many have been injured by it and there is correlation that some have died from it.

It's repetition but again she had already breached several lines of defense and was with a group that had already assaulted LEO. Whether she herself had done those things or actually intended to kill Pence her intention to breach the Capitol was a fact and as part of the group that did so violently showed that at the minimum she supported such violence.

I don't know for sure but to speculate his identity is being kept secret because there might be threats against his safety.

And again she was already engaged in threatening behavior but being there in the first place. She is already tacitly and practically agreeing to violence that she is there breaking the law with a group that is using violence by being there. To use the liquor store example again if I went with some people to rob a liquor store. They attacked a security guard in the process of going in but I just went with them to get some liquor. I would still be considered a threat to anyone else in the store and also an accessory to the assault that took place even if I didn't physically harm anyone.

Yes tangential and not relevant.

 

The title of this forum is "Debate and Discussion."

I get it you're annoyed but not sure why it's so hard to just scroll past. I do it all the time.

 

It's hard to scroll pass when post are so long as it is and it takes multiple pages to find anything new.

And now the other thread has died off except for the 2 of you and this thread is talking about something else.

There is a Blake thread.

Anyway I am done on this topic do what you feel.

 

You are judged socially by the company you keep. You don't become an imminent threat of death or great bodily injury by the company you keep. If that were the case, there would be no such thing as non-combatants. Officers serving as guards make arrests all the time of people that go where they are not supposed to. When someone runs on the court/field at a game, the cop that is guarding the court/field arrests them, they don't shoot them because they are doing guarding not apprehension.

Okay? So it can officially be called either non-lethal or less than lethal.

Was she? How many lines of defense did she cross? Was the group that she was with at that window one that had assaulted LEOs? Does the guy who shot her have any information to that effect? It seems like you are making an argument that the capitol was essentially a free fire zone because some of the rioters were fighting with Capitol police.

Do you not think there were threats against Darren Wilson's safety? Derek Chauvin's?

Absolutely not. If you walked into a liquor store at the same time as two other people, and you went an grabbed a 12 pack while the other two were beating up a security guard with clubs and a cop showed up, the cop can't just shoot you. You are not a threat. Not even if all three of you were chanting "Kill rent-a-cops". The cop could shoot the guys beating the guard with clubs, if they were still doing it, because they are an imminent threat of death/GBI to the guard.

 

A hat tip to StupidMoniker and his determination in switching this thread from an assessment of the horror of January 6 to normalizing a woman trying to crawl crazed-zombie-like through a window and ignoring officer commands.

Since some people like to dig up George Floyd's past actions and events, let's look at the nice, strolling woman who was merely curious about touring, um, through a glass window.

https://www.latimes.com/california/waagzwg9gso-123
Seems perfectly rational in her interest in touring the Capitol, at least to me.

To be clear, I do not think she deserved to die. Her death should be investigated like those of the officers. But we have to look at the full documentation of that demented day, not some sugar-coated, peaceful stroll version that the Conservative media would like to feed viewers. It was full on ****ed up, no matter who we blame.

 

I believe this is an unfair characterization of what @StupidMoniker is doing in this thread as well as a mischaracterization of his likely motives ("determination" language etc)

 

I don't like starting new threads if my post will fit in an existing one. That was always the etiquette on message boards back in the day, wasn't it?

She sure seems like she doesn't like illegal immigration.

 

Here's hoping that the FBI is going after the conspirators as well as their Congressional allies who planned to overthrow the US government. The government should use the same tactics they used to combat the mafia and what they did to disrupt the Klan back in post Reconstruction.

 

this suggests that there were members of Congress "who planned to overthrow the US government." surely that is not what you are suggesting?

 

Would you consider Trump's Georgia phone call suggesting they find the necessary votes to allow him to "win" Georgia an attempt to change the valid and legally certified results in an effort to change the election to his favor?

 

Okay. I'm not sure what "fair" would be in D&D or on the internet. I think the following would be fair: His efforts resonate with recent concerted and parallel efforts of conservative commentators and politicians to downplay and normalize Jan. 6 events as some sort of low-key or standard political protest. Having taken in data from dozens of sources across the spectrum, including many reporters and people from both parties who experienced the riot first-hand... I'll just strongly disagree with those reframings and related "both sides" false equivalencies.

Maybe less fair, but definitely more personal: I find that spin dangerous to our civil society and democracy. I find it historically resonant enough that it warrants my typing strongly against it. I don't seek to be rude, but I do seek to be direct about things like this. That's my two cents. We would do well to agree on certain strong signals of reality, such as a self-obsessed liar creating a false narrative of election theft, leading to a dangerous riot at the nation's Capitol, interrupting the processing of a national election in which the liar had been a candidate.

None of us really know one another's motives, but consistent patterns emerge over longer periods of time and through multiple threads. Maybe @StupidMoniker seeks only to make sure we're accurate about the extent to which the mob was armed, for instance, and seeks a real investigation into the death of the one protestor. (Not sure that analysis holds water in the total of thread evidence, but anyway, I share those two concerns at least.) I see them as less dire than my primary concern relating to the riot being a possible dress rehearsal for worse behavior to come, from whatever faction. Cheers.

 

a few thoughts in response

I think that just because his words "resonate" with you in this way does not necessarily mean that this is what he is in fact actually doing. Your interpretation of that resonance has at least in principle a nonzero chance of being idiosyncratic or even wrong--and I believe your impression of "resonance" is an unfair interpretation . . . that was my objection in the first place.

again, you are now constructing a criticism of @StupidMoniker based on your associating your interpretation of what he saying with something someone else is saying.

I read him simply as pointing out the asymmetry in responses to two different kinds of riots: the Capitol riot and the George Floyd-related protest riots from last summer. His point is that if any protester/rioter had been shot and killed during a George Floyd-related riot, we would be experiencing that death in quite a different way (as a society) than we are experiencing the death of the woman who was shot in the U.S. Capitol.

all this is fine--and I actually agree with you. but this is all largely irrelevant to the question of what @StupidMoniker is arguing when he draws our attention to the asymmetry in response to a police killing in the Capitol riot versus a hypothetical police killing in any other kind of riot.

fair points about motivation. but here's my 2 cents about my guess about @StupidMoniker 's possible motivation:

Philosophers often argue for positions that they themselves do not actually hold. This is part of the job description of being a philosopher. Similarly, lawyers will examine arguments on both sides of a case: and in the process of doing so, they try to create the strongest possible arguments that they can imagine each side offering in any given case.

I believe this is (at least in part) what @StupidMoniker is doing. The fact that folks here misinterpret what he's doing says more about them than about him (and I assume @StupidMoniker is male, apologies SM if you are female).