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Capitol Attack Was Months in the Making on Facebook

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Re: Capitol Attack Was Months in the Making on Facebook

#561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On one hand we have hooligans using a crowd as cover to get away with property damage. On the other we have hooligans organized for the express purpose of overturning the results of a democratic election. In the case of BLM, the crimes don't reflect on the movement's overall purpose. Nobody expects property damage to be a vehicle for police reform -- it's an argument for more police presence, if anything. In the case…

>Nobody expects property damage to be a vehicle for police reform Yet hundreds of cities are in the process of reevaluating how they allocate police and social service resources. In light of that it'll be interesting to see what comes out of the capital mess.

Honestly? Probably nothing, not to their advantage anyway. The blm peaceful protests /riots had the backing and mandate of their mainstream. From what I've seen of the fight wrong media /power centers, this does not. The capitol hill protests /riots have drawn immediate flak not just from the left aligned media, but even their own side.

Re: Capitol Attack Was Months in the Making on Facebook

#562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rush to call the storming of the capitol terrorism is really misplaced. By adopting words like "terrorism" you're paving the way for an overreaching response from lawmakers and law enforcement -- something that will likely end up being used against a cause you might support, like BLM. Firstly, nobody was terrorized. No, this wasn't "our 9/11." I doubt it'll even be a topic of conversation in a few years, just lik…

Millions of Americans watched the Capitol insurrection play out live on tv. That has an impact on the national psyche that's very similar to a terrorist attack. People aren't going to forget about it because we all witnessed it together. It's going to be the defining event of trump's presidency, whether you think that's fair or not

You honestly think that THE defining event of Trump's presidency is going to be the Capitol riot? You don't think it's the bungled response to coronavirus that landed us all locked up in our houses for over a year, the assassination of an Iranian leader on another sovereign's soil, the trade war with China, the tax reform bill he pushed through, the Mueller probe, the BLM protests, the "stolen" SCOTUS seats, or any number of other things he did?

You think the defining moment of his presidency is something that he only tangentially had a hand in that resulted in a couple arrests and a stolen podium?

That's a hot take.

Re: Capitol Attack Was Months in the Making on Facebook

#563
post #538
post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I missed the part where BLM advocated overthrowing democracy. At worst they advocated to defund police and held obnoxious signs. And despite the right wing narrative, the people carrying signs and doing sit ins were not the ones rioting and looting, but rather getting their ass beat by police.

What do you call CHAZ? Wasn’t it fully supported by BLM and a literal sedition zone against the democratically elected government?

> What do you call CHAZ?

The popular view of it, especially on the Right? A fiction deliberately constructed by right-wing media (notably Fox News) and the Trump Administration.

> Wasn’t it fully supported by BLM

BLM isn’t a single, unified organization, so “fully supported by BLM” isn’t a meaningful phrase. The protests which spawned what was briefly called (by unknown persons) CHAZ before being renamed the Capitol Hill Organized Protest specifically to emphatically repudiate the implication of seditious intent were organized in part by activists identifying with the BLM movement.

> and a literal sedition zone against the democratically elected government?

Nope. Fairly good discussion here: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/15/dont-liste...

Re: Capitol Attack Was Months in the Making on Facebook

#564
post #538
post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I missed the part where BLM advocated overthrowing democracy. At worst they advocated to defund police and held obnoxious signs. And despite the right wing narrative, the people carrying signs and doing sit ins were not the ones rioting and looting, but rather getting their ass beat by police.

What do you call CHAZ? Wasn’t it fully supported by BLM and a literal sedition zone against the democratically elected government?

You mean that thing[1]

> The zone was a self-organized space, without official leadership. Protesters united behind three main demands:

> 1. cut Seattle's $409 million police budget by 50 percent,

> 2. shift funding to community programs and services in historically black communities, and

> 3. ensure that protesters would not be charged with crimes.

Is that what you meant?

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

Re: Capitol Attack Was Months in the Making on Facebook

#565
post #526

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> If you expand the definition of terrorism to such an absurd degree (anybody who may need grief counseling) you're diluting actual terrorism. > The Pulse nightclub is what real terrorism looks like. And the Christchurch shootings. And 9/11. > The storming of the capitol was not at all similar. Interesting. What makes 9/11 a terror attack that doesn't similarly make the Capitol Insurrection one? Because they both lef…

Well, for one, almost 3000 people died in the September 11th attacks. Kind of an important point.

I don't really see how the number of people killed makes a difference in whether an attack is terrorism. An attack can result in zero casualties and still be terror (depending on some definitions. Others require at least one death)

Re: Capitol Attack Was Months in the Making on Facebook

#566

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What are the verifiable facts again? Do you have alternative statistics because they're actually on the FBI website and contradict everything you're saying. The riots were most likely political AstroTurf before an election via amplification of convenient (and unfortunate/terrible) imagery to turn out voters. I hate to be stone cold but that's my understanding of what unfolded. We witnessed something similar in 2015.

I should add a caveat around "the BLM movement is about." One of its problems (like many progressive movements) is everyone has a different idea what it is about, and the mainstream media does not help with that in the slightest. So, the original idea there is police in the United States are killing black people for stupid reasons, which is true . There are no statistics to worry about for that one and there don't ne…

I'll join you on beating that drum. Statistics are the key skill for making policy decisions. One that the vast majority of the population, educated or not, fail to grasp.

Re: Capitol Attack Was Months in the Making on Facebook

#567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know what’s also chilling? Major tech platforms choosing to publish, amplify, and normalize: white supremacy, antisemitism, serious calls to violently overthrow democracy, conspiracies about the deep state cabal of satan-worshiping pedophiles, the health benefits of drinking bleach, denial of well understood scientific facts, etc. These things are fine for the town square, since people have free speech, but nobod…

Honest question, what are you referring to when in regards to published/public content? All of these topics you've mentioned are and always have been far away from trending ('amplified', 'normalized') pages. You can't go anywhere on these sites and see these topics without searching for them, and when you do the hashtags are either immediately taken over by the rest of the users on the site or taken off of trending d…

I’m going by what the article said: “Facebook spent the past year allowing election conspiracies and far-right militia activity to proliferate on its platform, laying the groundwork for the broader radicalization that fueled the Capitol insurrection in the first place.”

Facebook exercises editorial control (moderation) of what user-provided content is published on its site. Therefore if something is there, it’s because their moderation system allowed it to be there. I don’t use Facebook myself so I can’t provide a first-hand example, but it’s increasingly being reported that this content spreads virally through these platforms’ recommendation rabbit-holes and through promotion by end users.

Re: Capitol Attack Was Months in the Making on Facebook

#568
post #513
post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think they had an incentive to prevent it? The President was the one encouraging the insurrection!

By explicitly telling people to “be peaceful“?

In the context, the "be peaceful" is a dog whistle that screams "war and rioting", because it was padded with hundreds of "stole the election", "unfair", "fraud" and what not.

God. I thought people on HN were reasonable. Even here you have idiots who take one single word out of a barrage of lies and disinformation (for months on end, encouraging violence) and hold it as some sort of beacon of morality and proof of innocence.

It is people like you for whom those words are interspersed within speeches, so that you stay by the sidelines when holocausts and coups happen.

Grow up.

Re: Capitol Attack Was Months in the Making on Facebook

#569

>The Capitol Attack Where was this rhetoric when Antifa and BLM burned and looted for months with the blessings of all corporations and the mainstream media? Surely the Capitol Hill has an insurance policy? Or does that moronic point only apply to the common folk? Susan Rosenberg literally bombed the Capitol in 1983 and now serves as vice chair of the board of directors of Thousand Currents, a " non-profit foundation…

Thank you for the first legitimate critique of the Black Lives Matter organization that I've seen. I don't think it invalidates all of the points of the platform of BLM, but it does make me question the sanity and legitimacy of the organization's leadership.

Maybe this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wt95ct2gISA

Re: Capitol Attack Was Months in the Making on Facebook

#570
post #419
post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the protesters have said they expected the police to be largely on their side. I suspect that when things got violent both the armed rioters and police realised that guns would just end up in a blood bath on both sides, and the first person to shoot on either side would probably end up dead pretty quickly.

I suspect the police weren't shooting because they realized how overwhelmed they were. I've seen a couple of videos where they had drawn their guns and prepared to fire but they were simply surrounded.

Crowds would have dispersed pretty quickly if the cops started shooting
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