@freemo Hm, so that's pretty much the same slight-threat interpretation as I had, makes sense.

And I think we still disagree what constitutes aggressive/threatening behaviour (and maybe still a bit about facts, considering the policeman being beaten with the flag(?)pole?), but I guess this is kind of beside the point for this discussion.

@timorl

This is the first time you refered to it as threatening/aggressive behavior rather than violence. That is a big difference in my eyes. There is a huge chasm between being physically violent towards a human being vs breaking a window, one I will call violence, the other I would agree is aggressive and even threatening, but isnt violence.

There is also the matter of considering who strikes a human first in an encounter of mutual violence to determine who is in the right in my mind.

So take the example of the police officer being beaten by the flagpole.. had he at any point earlier int he day beaten people in the crowd with his baton? Every single incident i saw where a police officer was even threatened (such as the one running through the halls as people chassed him while he periodically stopped to beat them a little with his baton)... in every case it can be seen the police officer initiating the violence by beating them with their baton or similar, and only after that (and usually repeated examples of that) did the crowd respond with any level of violence.

Even then those examples are very rare, in one case we have the officer who died who was reported and admitted to be actively beating the crowd with his baton before finally being struck, and in the other case with the flagpole, which we dont have video evidence to know, but seems possible he was doing the exact same thing.

Only other physical violence of any kind I know of from the events were explicitly non-lethal but also in like kind. For example they were being actively tear/pepper gassed by police and one protestor responded by pepper spraying the police in return.

REgardless overall it appears far more violence was done on them then they did in return, as is evidence by the death toll being almost exclusively trump supporters.

@freemo I still think they were violent, I would say trying to enter a building by brute force with people standing in your way is necessarily violent. They weren't violent only when they were not being opposed. The fact that they were aggressive/threatening follows from both the violence and the (explicit or implicit) threats.

Also, I saw you linked an article claiming that Twitter blocked the "Hang Mike Pence" hashtag -- do you happen to know if "We want Pence" was trending at the same time? This seems like relevant evidence as to what was being chanted, if we have the data.

@timorl depends on how they do it.. breaking a window isnt violence against a person, someone standing in your way and you simply walking past them anyway (pushing through them) also isnt violence...

Now if someone stands in your way and you beat them with a stick till they move, then that IS violence.

Ironically the only one (for the most part) being anyone with sticks were the cops.

I would say that they "physically overpowered" the cops, I would also say that a small number of people (the ones breaking glass) were "destructive of property"... but violence towards an individual is not something that is guaranteed as a matter of course simply by walking into a building you arent allowed or walking through a line of people standing in your way, particularly when no one actually struck a cop to do it

@freemo Differentiating "physically overpowered" and deliberately walking into someone from violence seems wrong to me. You think these are things to which one cannot respond with violence? In particular this principle applied to the former seems like it would put people initiating "phisical overpowering" at a very advantegeous position, while the victim of that overpowering in a dangerous one. And applied to the latter, especially in the case of crowds, it would make any kind of crowd control impossible.

And I think we might have gotten to the crux of our disagreement, strangely. I think the above paragraph pretty well explains why I think the whole debacle was so dangerous. The insurrectionists were trying to put themselves in positions in which they were physically advantaged over congresspeople through the fact that there were many of them (a whole mob in a room). I think that preventing angry entities (whether people or mobs) from ending up in positions in which their possible victims can no longer protect themselves even through violence, can be done using violence. I mentioned this once as a basic principle of policing in most modern countries, but this is also a general rule -- if a person is forcing themselves on another person I wouldnt wait for them to throw the first punch before attempting to stop them, and I would consider the latter person already a victim of violence.

@timorl In my view if i were walking down the street and you happened to be standing in my way and I said "move" and you didnt, and i walked through you, causing you to stumble to the side unharmed, then no that isnt violence, violence implies you have been harmed in some way. If you were to respond to taht by taking a baton and bashing me over the head then I would say you were the one initiating violence.

> . And applied to the latter, especially in the case of crowds, it would make any kind of crowd control impossible.

non violent crowd control is not just possible, its far more effective., you have pepper sprays, physical barriers, sound weapons, and a host of non-violent tools that are far far more effective than physical beatings.

Keep in mind I did say someone being pushed aside, such as a cop in this case is inappropriate, and wrong.. but it isnt violence.

Ultimately its about escalation, it is absolutely unacceptable to respond to one act with another significantly more violent act.. you do not repond to someone pushing through you by beating them over the head with a stick as they did, you do not shoot them to death when unarmed and havent struck anyone, as they did, etc.

We even uphold this principle in our own laws (though sadly as of late cops are above the law), it is the law of proportionality, you are allowed to defend yourself but only with similar force as that which you are threatened. so for example shooting an unarmed non violent protest dead for bashing in a window, however wrong that may be, is not proportional and makes YOU the bad guy, not them.

@freemo Then we clearly have a very different model of what constitutes violence, or rather when violence might be an appropriate response. (Whether you think a specific action is violence is just semantics, but the response criterion is crucial.) I believe in situations in which someone with more resources is doing things which lowers my chances of defending myself from unfairness I can respond disproportionately to their actions. Agh, I think I am a bit too tired to explain this properly with examples, because it's a delicate thing and definitely needs to be carefully defined to work. And my laptop batterry is running out, aaaa, see you tomorrow (written after the below obviously lol)

And I agree that escalations are not good in general, and better ways of crowd control exist. Unfortunately the policemen seemed to be extremely underprepared for what happened, and couldn't have employed less violent and more appropriate measures because of that. That's also why I was stressing multiple times that an investigation into why they were so underprepared is crucial -- were they better prepared, almost surely fewer people would have died.

@freemo And to express my thoughts a bit more clearly here too:

I wanted to write a very long post about general philosophy and sociology of law here, but I think it's a bit much for a toot (even with my love for creating walls of text). So the very short version is – we, as humanity, have worked very hard to figure out when escalations of violence (treated as a spectrum not a binary thing it this case; maybe aggression would be a better word? I hope you know what I mean) are a good thing to allow within a society. At this point it's relatively clear that in most cases it's much better to deescalate rather than escalate, but there are several relatively obvious exceptions. The clearest one is probably theft – it seems generally agreed upon that someone attempting to steal something can be stopped through violence, at least of the restraining kind. With pure proportional response, the only option would be to be allowed to steal something back, but a society in which such payback-stealing would be the only recourse for theft victims would not be a nice one to live in. And that's without even going into problems around the value of stolen items, and how it differs between the people involved.

Oh, and in most modern societies one of the roles of police is to handle all the cases where escalation was deemed appropriate, to prevent visious circles of escalation. Just a sidenote to avoid some confusion that might have appeared here.

To get closer to the problem at hand and clarify what my general positions on escalations in this case is, let me give an example. Say someone is trying to push through me while I'm standing in the door to my house. If that person is not stronger than me, I can just prevent them from entering by standing my ground, and this is the ideal situation – no escalation. If they are much weaker than me, I can even let them in to possibly deescalate and then figure out how to get them out later, possibly with use of some violence if necessary, but hopefully without much conflict at all. But if they are much stronger than me, then preventing them from entering becomes much more important – after they entered I (and additionally people present in my house) would be in an even worse position to do anything about that person. In such a case I would say escalating violence might be the correct course of action, depending on the difference in strength and the expected intentions of the pushing person – if I don't escalate now, the next time I could escalate I would not only be in a worse position, but also the person might already have done some damage. If that person already expressed anger at the people in my house, I would most likely feel justified in using violence to prevent them from entering. If they issued direct threats towards the people in my house the case is so clear cut it can probably be used to teach the art of jewelery making.

I would say the Capitol situation is pretty analogous at the very least to the anger case, up to the threat case, depending on what exactly they were chanting. The mob was big enough that it was stronger than the police, and so violent response was justified. It would _not_ have been justified if police presence was adequate, since this would have been analogous to the situation where I can just stand my ground, which is again why I am stressing why the investigation into _why_ the police presence was so low is so important.