Colin Kaepernick protested very peacefully and people were irate. The vice president went out of his way to just to walk out of a game. Let's stop with the "I'd be ok if it was a peaceful protest" nonsense. The protests in LA were peaceful until the military showed up. It was intentionally escalated because they know people will believe anything they see on TV. The burning cars didn't happen until after the military started a war.
The vice president was. And the head of the military said he should be physically assaulted. The same people calling for "peaceful protests" actively hated people for doing it. The calls are hollow. You know this, and you know what point I was making.
You are naive to think police can’t turn a peaceful protest into a TV photo op for Fox News.
And, it’s also naive to think that all the protesters are on the same side. Instigators are from either no side and the other side.
During the George Floyd protests I was walking home and witnessed agitators turn a peaceful protest violent within minutes. There were at most 10 of them out of a crowd of 500. When I got home, the news described the protest as being a violent one.
You and a lot of people here need to look more critically at what you are seeing online and in the news.
It’s a major vulnerability, but I think a valid solution would be for there to be an organization that wears uniforms and has a strict no-violence policy to perform peaceful protests.
That way when agitators show up they can be seen as visually different and distinct.
You should talk to the anti-protest side then because they will discourage any protest. Usually they criticize the size of the protest as a few people. They then will tell you that their cause is dumb because only a few people were there. Or they blocked traffic for a few hours, so their cause is dumb. There are plenty of people that care if people protest. There are people that hate the right to assembly so much they make laws about needing a protest permit...
I have zero problem with protests. You can protest literally anything, that you don't like Trump's haircut, or that Santa didn't bring you good presents last winter.
As soon as your protest interferes with other people, like blocking a road, it's no longer a protest, it's a riot.
Let's not blame the victims here. LA had it's problems but it wasn't a warzone until militarized police showed up. All it takes for a protest to become a riot is one cop firing into the crowd, and that could be caused because of a trigger happy cop, or a single person throwing a rock at the police line.
Oh yeah, it's totally the police that forced the poor democrats to burn cars, to throw bricks, to break in and loot stores. What a believable narrative.
If you honestly believe that 100% of the people burning cars, throwing bricks, and looting stores are Democrats you aren't living in reality. That's not even a remotely believable narrative.
Democrats? Democrats??? Like Karen Bass and Gavin Newsom are out there burning cars. Come on, man. These things are done by impulsive opportunists, not as some kind of political strategy. They happen during sports celebrations, regularly, all over the world.
Yes, democrats. You seem to confused by some basic logic. Protesters and rioters are democrats (in this case). Doesn't mean that all democrats are protesting or rioting. I can't believe I have to explain this.
No, I'm objecting to what I view as a quite extreme reductionism. If the way you interpret events like the protests in LA is first to classify all people as "Democrat", "Republican", and "Other", you greatly impoverish your view of things.
No, I think you're just frustrated that I'm correct, that your side is engaged in violence, again, so you're trying to distance yourself from it, and so you make up all this nonsense.
they were peacefully protesting, then the cops showed up and escalated the situation. Then there were small amounts of disorder. Then the media does what it does, the rightwing media goes for hyperbole (it's a third word situation, the city is on fire, etc) the leftwing parrots what the cops say 'riots' (two waymos on fire is not a riot, it's a protest with agitators, arrest the agitators, no collection of thousands of people with their blood up is ever going to be perfect. How many fights outside of any stadium after any football game). Then it has spiraled from there. Deploying active duty military into a US city to quell 'riots' won't do anything but get people killed.
During CHAZ/CHOP in seattle, I lived across town, if I didn't watch the news I wouldn't have known anything was happening. My GF lived within two blocks of the 'zone', it didn't effect her one bit. In fact it was a bit of a party atmosphere in the area with all the painting of street murals and all. Eventually some kids decided to agitate the situation by stealing a car (i think that's what the final determination was) and tear assing all over (like literally off roading into the park in and around occupied tents). This riled up the 2nd amendment types who declared themselves the CHOP/CHAZ police and they shot the kids. It was tragic and it sullied the whole situation.
To watch the national news you would have thought that all of seattle was on literal fire and there were roving gangs all over the city. Don't trust the broadcast media narrative of these situations.
How many Waymos can be burned before the protests become riots. I agree that 1 burning Waymo is probably not worthy of a national guard deployment, but unsure above that
There's really only 2 sides to the issue. You either accept mostly peaceful protests with some violence, whatever the cause may be, and trust local law enforcement and civilians to self-regulate. Or you are support authoritarianism and demand the federal government deploy the military against American citizens the first time someone throws a rock at a car.
I reject this framing and I welcome Federal agents, Federalized Guard units, and the USMC into LA and California at large to clear out all illegal immigrants.
I would support them doing this with 100% peaceful protests and even with no protests at all.
The protesters are not a homogenous bunch, even if most of them are peaceful, there will always be rabble rousers and thugs wanting to take advantage of minor chaos to cause major chaos. Gross generalizations are then common (look, there was a rabble rousers, so they are all rabble rousers!) magnified by deceptive media techniques (show just the rabble rousers, and replay that same clip 50 times today to give the impression that this is more violent than it really is, hey, where is our photoshop person?).
The effect then is to inflame outrage on both sides, and now we are basically headed to BLM 2.0. Trump seems to have actually planned this out well (use the military to stoke outrage, and a protest in one LA neighborhood becomes a nationwide riot so he has an excuse to cancel the midterms?).
You aren't arguing in good faith, so what's the point? You are using logical fallacies along with a good dose of ad hominem, which has no place on HN, or in intelligent discourse. Yes, the president talks like you also, but no, that still doesn't make it right.
Please stop this style of commenting. You've been posting inflammatory comments in this thread for nearly two days. It's not what HN is for and it destroys what HN is for.
You've recently complained in another thread that HN is biased against the ideological position you represent. This is not how we moderate HN. We actively want the HN audience and discussions to represent the full ideological spectrum and for HN to be a uniquely good place for people of different ideological perspectives to discuss difficult topics and learn from each other. But that can't happen when people comment in this inflammatory style.
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But you dodged my question. You had said a single car on fire was enough to shut down a protest. So then answer the question: how do you know who set the car on fire?
From my perspective, all it would take to manipulate you would be for a cop or agitator to set a car on fire and broadcast the picture blaming protestors.
So then what happens, in your preferred world? It would seem like if you got your way, that would be the end of the first amendment. Anytime anyone stands up to protest, police can just set a single car on fire, and based on your statement, you would want the protest to end at that point. Correct me if I'm wrong, but how does the first amendment survive in your utopia? Or is it not meant to?
It's barely any damage. Most of the clips I've seen circulating aren't even from these protests - they're from BLM years ago and people are just recycling them and hoping nobody would notice. And, well... nobody notices. So.
I'm not lying - it's very overblown because of course it is. I have friends in LA right now. They're mostly just outside listening to music and dancing.
Obviously, such a narrative is very boring. So we don't see it. In reality, though, the damage is quite small. Similar to BLM in the past, in which almost all protests saw no damage at all.
And, elephant in the room - there's a 0% chance that the fucking marines are going to de-escalate anything. You think Trump wants less violence, less destruction? No, he wants MORE of it.
Yeah, we all know how violent lefties are. They're djaying right now, the horror!
> It's not the police that started it.
Sure, but the police escalated it because that's all they know what to do.
The worst thing to do for a protest is send in the police. Because they're going to antagonize people, shoot rubber bullets, throw tear gas, and then suddenly you're on the news.
During the BLM protests there was footage out the wazoo of people literally sitting there or just walking and then having rubber bullets shot at them. Sometimes while they were actually on their knees.
I'm not who you are replying to, but some people believe a portion of Anne Frank's diary was a forgery. Apparently, the type of pen used in portions of it wasn't even created until after she died.
I am unsure as to the accuracy of such claims. Some people have been thrown in jail in Europe for making these claims.
You seem to suggest the answer to my question there is that people just don’t like Trump. But can you really not distinguish the tactics they deployed, and how Trump’s tactics of maximum force might lead to greater resistance? When people are pushed they’re going to push back.
You (intentionally?) forgot to include the acts of violence that kicked all of this off: the government abducting, arresting, and deporting our neighbors. There were, and are, many other options available to the government that would not have lead to this escalation & violence.
Its like in France, 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants get pissed off due to their better-studying peers driving bmw around while they work a kebab shop (or their football team loses), so they torch 1000 cars and shops in suburbs.
You get attacked? You either attack back, disperse or do something similar. You don't start attacking other people's lives just to vent off being pissed off.
I didn't claim that it did. I think it's important to recognize the complete chain of escalation here by acknowledging those who performed the first violent acts. Without that first violence, none of this happens.
You're the one making claims that the only possible response to this problem was to send armed military personnel to a US city to arrest some people hanging outside a Home Depot or whatever. Please back up your assertion with evidence.
That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that enforcing immigration law entails apprehending and deporting illegal aliens. The troops weren't deployed until after the rioting started.
Obama deported people at a higher rate than even Trump is now, and no riots happened. Can you articulate what the difference is between how Obama and Trump operated, and use that to explain why Obama didn't trigger riots while Trump did?
> Obama deported people at a higher rate than even Trump is now, and no riots happened.
It isn’t a spontaneous riot; it’s a coordinated attempt to ‘resist’ the administration, with elected Democrats and blue-aligned media constantly fanning the flames. We saw the same playbook five years ago.
Hmm... as someone who lives in LA... I think your news stream is polluted. There were maybe 100 bad actors. Responding to people in military gear vanishing day labourers and fruit sellers and seamstresses. Bringing in 10,000 National Guard and 1,000 Marines is not an appropriate response.
50 people raiding a Nike store in LA isn't even beyond local news lol... you can find hundreds of videos online of this happening on a regular basis for the past decade.
If local police are unable or unwilling to protect federal agents doing their jobs, bringing in the military is absolutely the right decision. These rioters used hammers to destroy concrete bollards, pelted federal agents with the fragments, and faced no resistance from the LAPD while doing it.
Somewhere in the 19 million people in the Southland, a car is burnt in anger or celebration every weekend. Lakers parades are famously family unfriendly.
Businesses are robbed daily and violently.
I mean, there was a huge deal about the trains for a while [0] and nothing happened with the LAPD+ for a long time let alone the USMC.
LAPD+ cops are assaulted every week with God knows what.
That's what 19 million people are like. That mass of people sees a lot of low-probability events, by pure math.
Honestly, what's going on is that Donny watches Fox a lot. Fox is a media business, if it bleeds, it leads. Fox also is reeling from the Dominion lawsuits and two competitors barking up their tree. They have to push for ratings. Donny doesn't know this, he just sees what everyone else is seeing on Fox.
Hence this whole autopen thing that no one else outside of the Fox bubble has a clue about.
Donny sees the story, rants about it in front of confused cameras, then Fox has to double down on it and Donny rants again. It's a oroboros of bad research and news junkies.
So with these LA riots (blink and there's another), you get Fox seeing if it bleeds, it leads. Then Donny fritzes on it, then he's sending in the USMC without food or water, because, duh. Then they report on that, and he'll be sending in a whole regiment (5000 marines) by the end of the week, then a battalion (1200 marines, because these words have no meaning to him).
Look, there is no plan with Donny, he's just reacting to whatever he last experienced. It is super clear from all the evidence about the very leaky administration that they are just reacting to things as they come at them. Again, there is no plan. And yes, that is somehow worse than some conspiracy to make the US an autocracy.
EDIT: I want to extend this idea about Donny having mashed potato brains a bit further. SInce the whole admin is just reacting to things by overexertion, that means that anyone trying to counter them (and that's like nearly everyone else on Earth) has it made in the shade. You let them swing, then just keep up the pressure after every blow. They crack, we've already seen this in the trade stuff (TACO), in the Greenland/Panama/Canada thing, in the signalgate thing, in the Kilmar thing, etc. All you have to do is just not let go of it. They get bored of it, because Fox's viewers get bored of it, so Fox switches the programming, and so the admin does too. They declare victory, and walk away.
You're right on the money here. One could argue that much of our current administrative "direction" is coming from either a combination of Project 2025 and whatever the current programming is on Fox News.
The project 2025 stuff is pretty much all they have to go on. Literally, they are looking any plan whatsoever, and this was the 'whatsoever'.
If you want to steer the next admin, go grab the $20/mo Claude subscription, work with it for about a month, and make 'Project 2027' out of it. Make sure to me all macho about it too, the more silver screen and 1980s bicep movie images, the better. Use lots of quotes that mean mostly nothing, but sound good. Really, most boomer FB pages are already there. Copy the project 2025 boilerplate formatting.
Then, look, these guys are just like bulls with rings in their nose. They'll google about for about 30 seconds and just go on the first hit there. Make sure your project 2027 is the first hit for the SEO words you think they'll use.
You can put pretty much whatever you want in that. Why? Because no one else is doing this. If you are willing to put up with the smell, you can make a lot of change for the post-midterms admin. These guys are morons, yes, but above that, they are lazy
