Yes. They tried to destroy the Capitol and capture elected officials. If you don't arrest them now then there will just be even more violent MAGA riots in the immediate future.
You’re not going to deter the die hards. You absolutely will deter the “normies” with mortgages and retirement accounts to lose (I’d say their families acceptance, but they don’t seem to care much about that).
No one is suggesting you arrest those who stayed outside. You arrest however many you can find who blew past doors/security or took stuff. Probably 500.
At the next Trump rally of 100k everyone will know not to break the law. It is pretty simple.
I think it's reasonable that people who were involved in actual violence or theft should face consequences.
When you say it's pretty simple, others are calling for everyone on the Capitol grounds to be arrested. Technically they were breaking the law by trespassing.
I've got an idea, you take people with unapproved ideologies or from communities that tend to have these people and put them in reeducation facilities. Because this is all expensive to do, they will need to work as well.
Sarcasm aside, we are moving quickly to a straight up authoritarian apparatus of state sanctioned discourse enforced by a handful of corporations. This will be used against _anything_ that challenges those in power or goes against the approved narrative. For those cheering this on, realize this will applied to you in one form or another with no recourse. Here are a few scenarios off the top of my head: being a pacifist or home schooling advocate, posting on social media something tacky like "Prominent figure X is a fat idiot", or personal medical decisions having a direct impact on your ability to: travel, access jobs, housing and financial systems.
I've marched in support of BLM. Protest is necessary, and for it to be effective it generally has to make folks uncomfortable on some level and that may include a level of civil disobedience. It's not supposed to be all fun and sunshine, particularly if you are the adversary of those protesting.
I'm diametrically opposed to Trump and his supporters on a lot of issues, but I recognize that a functional society needs to accept their right to protest as well. They should be able to have their marches just like we have ours.
However, the stated goals and actions of many of those in last week's march and rioting are explicitly violent and seditious. Many of the protestors were heavily armed. They killed a policeman.
Do you really want a bunch of very angry people to
effectively be pushed into a corner, demonized by
society and so on?
I understand what you're saying: by pushing individuals into a corner, we may make them more desperate and feed into the overall "persecution" complex that motivates their movement as a whole. I think that's true.
On the other side of things, if we do nothing we legitimize their extremist views? Those extremist views become the new normal, or at least most the goalposts for the range of views considered normal.
Admittedly, it's a "damned if you do, damned if you don't situation."
But this isn't about denying their views or their right to protest. It's about targeting specific criminal actions that we don't want my side, their side, or any side to do.
Not sure why your comment was at the bottom of the page; it seems like one of the more thoughtful responses.
I have to admit my gut feeling on governments using facial recognition at scale to round up its citizens feels like something you'd find under an authoritarian regime, reminds me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14643433
I think it's important to try to frame an opinion on tech like this from a well-informed viewpoint, striving to lend appropriate weight to the latest incidents while avoiding the temptation for tunnel vision to fixate on immediate goals to the exclusion of broader, long-term consequences.
I agree acts that crossed too far past the line of civil disobedience ought to be held to account.
I just hope our collective response doesn't erode the willingness of people of good conscience to take a stand when they see their institutions behave in a legitimately unsanctionable manner.
I think some of the same (100% valid and necessary) questions might have been raised in the past about identification cards, fingerprints, handwriting analysis, etc.
I think the bottom line is how the tech is employed.
Are we tracking ordinary citizens en masse, for some potential future use? Are we tracking folks just because they're dissenting/protesting? We would probably all agree those uses are bad. Very bad.
I'm not terribly worried about using them to identify specific criminal targets. Put another way, how absurd would it be for us to have perfectly clear video of people committing specific criminal acts, and not use the available technology to identify them?
On a related note, the (lack of) opsec displayed by the Capitol rioters is... really something. These people were happily mugging for the cameras, sans masks. I'm not sure if it was stupidity or entitlement. The easy and snarky answer would be "stupidity" but there were clearly intelligent folk among them or at least people that should know to cover their tracks better: lawyers, military and police officers.
I think there was a rather stunning sense of entitlement there: a lot of these folks honestly cannot believe they're being charged with crimes. As if they expected to be greeted as liberators!
God help us if and when they sharpen up their tactics. The sickening feeling in my stomach tells me that this was a hell of a practice run.
The problem with this is that it doesn't end with parler and similar. It ends with a new bill being passed where the ability to make communication platforms of anything is effectively stripped from any small person from making. It will be delegated solely to big corporations with government approval.
Really do you want the government to do something similar to the "night of the long knives" like what happened in Germany? Think about what type of message that is sending and what type of society you want to live in.
I find it very hard to believe that people get the impression that Trump was the fascist when you are over here advocating for a fascist method of silencing opposition groups.
I am a conservative and right now in the community there is talks of using high-anonymity tools like TOR to go completely underground. We're trying to educate everyone on how to use these tools as quickly as possible.
Law enforcement/FBI have never been good at stopping terrorist attacks. The only ones they stop are the ones where the attacker is being stupid obvious like openly talking about it online. Most of the time they let them go through because "they need to build a case".
I didn't say get rid of it. How about requiring a warning label on these shows? I mean the lawyers for Jones and Carlson have already argued they aren't meant to be taken seriously. I think a label run on their shows would be enough.
"Our store is only accepting Bitcoin, Ethereum and Monero as payment methods"
Could spearhead the shift to decentralized cryptocurrencies.