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Why are we still calling riots “protests?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHb3xVqxcp8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHb3xVqxcp8

fareesh 6y ago
Same reason illegal aliens were called asylum seekers and immigrants - propaganda and politics. It becomes easier to influence the public towards supporting something when you can reframe it as a moral problem. We saw this in the 1990s under Bush I when they did the whole "babies thrown out from incubators" lie that garnered support for the first Gulf war. We saw it again with the "tubes for WMDs" in the second Iraq war.
- sacred_numbers 6y ago
  You could also say it's the same reason asylum seekers and immigrants are called illegal aliens. It's still politics, just in a different direction. Framing something as a moral problem is not necessarily bad; it just has to be a real moral problem that justifies the proposed solution. The problem with the Iraq war was that the government lied about the problem so that they could justify a bad solution.
  - fareesh 6y ago
    There is an objective difference between the terms. By mislabelling something, it is an outright falsehood, just like the lies about the Iraq war.
colejohnson66 6y ago
Because there’s riots and protests. They’re not one and the same.
- jojobas 6y ago
  The cops are after evidence on arson and gun theft, not protests, as the headline says.
  - hairofadog 6y ago
    The protests are specifically about abuse of authority by police; there’s legitimate reason to be wary.
    - CRASCH 6y ago
      Protests are when you peaceably assemble to air your grievances. Riots are when people assemble and commit crimes. Especially felony crimes like arson, destruction of property, etc. These are riots.
      - seanmcdirmid 6y ago
        Is it infeasible that rioters aren’t simply colocating with protesters to take advantage of the chaos like they have always?
        jojobas 6y ago
        The implication is the police are after the protestors rather than rioters, which is not observed.
        SauciestGNU 6y ago
        I think that's plenty observed actually. When you look at who's been shot, beaten, and gassed it's largely protesters, not people rioting. Although it's easy for police to make the claim that it's rioters, since they seem to declare every protest a riot.
      - hairofadog 6y ago
        As someone mentioned above, some people are protesting peacefully while others are committing crimes and rioting. The concern is that police, and now federal agents, aren't acting in good faith and aren't interested in distinguishing between the two. It's possible to be concerned about abuse of power by law enforcement - which has been rampantly on display these past few weeks - without supporting anarchist attempting to set fire to buildings. If we could know for sure the police weren't going to abuse their authority, there would have been neither protests nor riots.
- mola 6y ago
  Well the distinction usually depends on the observer. In Israel we have a palamentary system as opposed to a presidential one. PM netanyahu, which is about to be under criminal trial, is trying to pass a law where he will have basically the authority to make any decree without the authorization of the parliament. Making him the defacto.president, minus checks and balances. Naturally large scale protests are taking place. Israel protests are usually very tame, no looting and practically no violence,atleast when to what you see in French or the US. The most violent things protesters did was sitting on the road (which was blocked by police) in front of the PM residence. This did not stop media controlled by Netanyahu to pump the notion that these protesters are all rioters and anarchists. While a lot of them are yound middle class educated family people, Led by 60-70 yo without any political aspiration. So when the person being protested against calls the protesters rioters, I tend to take it with a grain of salt.
  - orwin 6y ago
    > practically no violence,atleast when to what you see in French or the US. To be frank, i don't know about the US, but violence in French protest used to be well-contained and limited to a few buildings (often a mcdonald, a bank or two and sometime a Tesla, nothing an assurance wouldn't cover, and free time for a dozen employee during the repairs) until recently when lawkeeping doctrine were changed to avoid making our government looking like they lost. Violence from protesters used to be limited to black blocks, and black blocks are organized and carefull, attached to symbols. You could predict which batiment could be targeted ahaed of time, take preventive mesure for those batiments. They never put fire in commercial building if there were occupied appartement nearby. Then, because of a macdonald destruction that looked bad on a camera (despite looking really, really good for anybody aware of what lawkeeping really is about: 3 minor injuries, 90 BB arrested for a quarter of a million of property damage), police were asked to start protecting batiment. That made mobile brigade and CRS immobile and unable to follow and limit property destruction, so a minister door was fractured. Easy solution, just had more police. even if the ones we add are not trained in lawkeeping at all and are used to anti-drugs operation and are a bit trigger-happy. And also, change the doctrine, instead of letting black blocks destroying property to scare protesters off and nest BB more easely, meet them earlier. If "normals" protester don't want to be hurt, they shouldn't be near these black blocks! We are two deaths, three hands, around twenty eyes, battered poicemen and a dropping confidence in the police after those "clever" decisions. Violence call for violence, and now the protester are really violent. Their rights.
disabled 6y ago
Because “riots”, “mobs”, and “chaos” are racially charged words that are used in lieu of the proper terminology—protests. See: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/10/protest-black-lives-matter-police-activism https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/10/protes... Also, Jason Stanley’s book, “How Fascism Works” also has a write up on this usage of language too.
- ThA0x2 6y ago
  >Because “riots”, “mobs”, and “chaos” are racially charged words that are used in lieu of the proper terminology If "riots", "mobs", and "chaos" are considered "racially charged" to you, then you may need to see a mental health professional since you're experiencing delusions that are extremely divergent from reality. Portland Police have on multiple occasions in the past few weeks legally declared these riots as... Riots: https://mobile.twitter.com/PortlandPolice/status/1286202408201154560 https://mobile.twitter.com/PortlandPolice/status/12862024082...
  - disabled 6y ago
    This is from Jason Stanley’s book, “How Fascism Works”: Politicians who describe whole categories of persons as “criminals” are imputing to them permanent character traits that are frightening to most people, while simultaneously positioning themselves as our protectors. Such language undermines the democratic process of reasonable decision making, replacing it with fear. Another salient example in the U.S. context is the use of the term “riot” to describe political protests. In the United States in the 1960s, the civil rights movement included black political protests in urban areas against police brutality (most famously in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles and the Harlem district of Manhattan). These protests were regularly described in the media as “riots.” As James Baldwin wrote at the time about the media description of these protests, “when white men rise up against oppression, they are heroes: when black men rise, they have reverted to their native savagery. The uprising in the Warsaw ghetto was not described as a riot, nor were the participants maligned as hoodlums: the boys and girls in Watts and Harlem are thoroughly aware of this.” 2 Such misrepresentations allowed Richard Nixon to run for office in 1968 on a “law and order” platform. Nixon’s administration is generally viewed as laying the groundwork for the subsequent mass incarceration of black American citizens. In 2015, widespread protests by largely black crowds against police brutality occurred in Baltimore after the killing of Freddie Gray by police. In an article for Linguistic Pulse in April 2015, Nic Subtirelu compared different media outlets’ use of “protest” versus “riot” to describe the Baltimore protests. Subtirelu found that Fox News, the United States’ far-right media outlet, used “riot” in its coverage of the Baltimore unrest with more than twice the frequency of its use of “protest.” CNN, by contrast, used “riot” with only slightly more frequency than “protest,” and MSNBC used “protest” with only slightly more frequency than “riot” in its coverage of the unrest in Baltimore. 3 The misrepresentation of political protests as riots was a factor in the election campaign of Donald Trump, whose campaign had strong echoes of Nixon’s. Nixon, however, campaigned at a time of rising rates of violent crime. Trump’s successful “law and order” campaign took place under the conditions of some of the lowest rates of violent crime in recorded U.S. history. Discussion that uses terms like “criminal” to encompass both those who commit multiple homicides for pleasure and those who commit traffic violations, or “riot” to describe a political protest, changes attitudes and shapes policy. A good example of what can result when language that criminalizes an entire group of people distorts debate and leads to unreasonable outcomes is the mass incarceration of American citizens of African descent.
ianleeclark 6y ago
You'd be absolutely livid if you found out how your ancestors earned the right to a weekend and a 40 hour work week.
- anonmidniteshpr 6y ago
  I'm trying to recall an incident (19th or 20th c.) where a mine or a factory hired strikebreaker snipers to climb into towers and shoot down into the strikers.
  - mola 6y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_View_Massacre https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_View_Massacre https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thibodaux_massacre https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thibodaux_massacre https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morewood_massacre https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morewood_massacre And the list goes on...
- clarkmoody 6y ago
  The only reason we have days off is because of productivity gains due to investment in capital goods. If we can wean ourselves off of a debt-based economy, then we might be able to whittle that workweek down even further. We seem to have stalled right around 1971 when dollar convertibility was suspended.
  - ianleeclark 6y ago
    The reason you have days off is due to decades of labor agitation. Productivity has continued to climb even after the 70s.
  - johnny22 6y ago
    Where did you get the idea that is how it happened? That claim is not backed up by history at all.
  - mola 6y ago
    Lots of factual claims, no support included. Learn some history.

fareesh 6y ago

Same reason illegal aliens were called asylum seekers and immigrants - propaganda and politics. It becomes easier to influence the public towards supporting something when you can reframe it as a moral problem. We saw this in the 1990s under Bush I when they did the whole "babies thrown out from incubators" lie that garnered support for the first Gulf war. We saw it again with the "tubes for WMDs" in the second Iraq war.

sacred_numbers 6y ago
You could also say it's the same reason asylum seekers and immigrants are called illegal aliens. It's still politics, just in a different direction. Framing something as a moral problem is not necessarily bad; it just has to be a real moral problem that justifies the proposed solution. The problem with the Iraq war was that the government lied about the problem so that they could justify a bad solution.
- fareesh 6y ago
  There is an objective difference between the terms. By mislabelling something, it is an outright falsehood, just like the lies about the Iraq war.

colejohnson66 6y ago

Because there’s riots and protests. They’re not one and the same.

jojobas 6y ago
The cops are after evidence on arson and gun theft, not protests, as the headline says.
- hairofadog 6y ago
  The protests are specifically about abuse of authority by police; there’s legitimate reason to be wary.
  - CRASCH 6y ago
    Protests are when you peaceably assemble to air your grievances. Riots are when people assemble and commit crimes. Especially felony crimes like arson, destruction of property, etc. These are riots.
    - seanmcdirmid 6y ago
      Is it infeasible that rioters aren’t simply colocating with protesters to take advantage of the chaos like they have always?
      - jojobas 6y ago
        The implication is the police are after the protestors rather than rioters, which is not observed.
        SauciestGNU 6y ago
        I think that's plenty observed actually. When you look at who's been shot, beaten, and gassed it's largely protesters, not people rioting. Although it's easy for police to make the claim that it's rioters, since they seem to declare every protest a riot.
    - hairofadog 6y ago
      As someone mentioned above, some people are protesting peacefully while others are committing crimes and rioting. The concern is that police, and now federal agents, aren't acting in good faith and aren't interested in distinguishing between the two. It's possible to be concerned about abuse of power by law enforcement - which has been rampantly on display these past few weeks - without supporting anarchist attempting to set fire to buildings. If we could know for sure the police weren't going to abuse their authority, there would have been neither protests nor riots.
mola 6y ago
Well the distinction usually depends on the observer. In Israel we have a palamentary system as opposed to a presidential one. PM netanyahu, which is about to be under criminal trial, is trying to pass a law where he will have basically the authority to make any decree without the authorization of the parliament. Making him the defacto.president, minus checks and balances. Naturally large scale protests are taking place. Israel protests are usually very tame, no looting and practically no violence,atleast when to what you see in French or the US. The most violent things protesters did was sitting on the road (which was blocked by police) in front of the PM residence. This did not stop media controlled by Netanyahu to pump the notion that these protesters are all rioters and anarchists. While a lot of them are yound middle class educated family people, Led by 60-70 yo without any political aspiration. So when the person being protested against calls the protesters rioters, I tend to take it with a grain of salt.
- orwin 6y ago
  > practically no violence,atleast when to what you see in French or the US. To be frank, i don't know about the US, but violence in French protest used to be well-contained and limited to a few buildings (often a mcdonald, a bank or two and sometime a Tesla, nothing an assurance wouldn't cover, and free time for a dozen employee during the repairs) until recently when lawkeeping doctrine were changed to avoid making our government looking like they lost. Violence from protesters used to be limited to black blocks, and black blocks are organized and carefull, attached to symbols. You could predict which batiment could be targeted ahaed of time, take preventive mesure for those batiments. They never put fire in commercial building if there were occupied appartement nearby. Then, because of a macdonald destruction that looked bad on a camera (despite looking really, really good for anybody aware of what lawkeeping really is about: 3 minor injuries, 90 BB arrested for a quarter of a million of property damage), police were asked to start protecting batiment. That made mobile brigade and CRS immobile and unable to follow and limit property destruction, so a minister door was fractured. Easy solution, just had more police. even if the ones we add are not trained in lawkeeping at all and are used to anti-drugs operation and are a bit trigger-happy. And also, change the doctrine, instead of letting black blocks destroying property to scare protesters off and nest BB more easely, meet them earlier. If "normals" protester don't want to be hurt, they shouldn't be near these black blocks! We are two deaths, three hands, around twenty eyes, battered poicemen and a dropping confidence in the police after those "clever" decisions. Violence call for violence, and now the protester are really violent. Their rights.

disabled 6y ago

Because “riots”, “mobs”, and “chaos” are racially charged words that are used in lieu of the proper terminology—protests. See: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/10/protest-black-lives-matter-police-activism https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/10/protes... Also, Jason Stanley’s book, “How Fascism Works” also has a write up on this usage of language too.

ThA0x2 6y ago
>Because “riots”, “mobs”, and “chaos” are racially charged words that are used in lieu of the proper terminology If "riots", "mobs", and "chaos" are considered "racially charged" to you, then you may need to see a mental health professional since you're experiencing delusions that are extremely divergent from reality. Portland Police have on multiple occasions in the past few weeks legally declared these riots as... Riots: https://mobile.twitter.com/PortlandPolice/status/1286202408201154560 https://mobile.twitter.com/PortlandPolice/status/12862024082...
- disabled 6y ago
  This is from Jason Stanley’s book, “How Fascism Works”: Politicians who describe whole categories of persons as “criminals” are imputing to them permanent character traits that are frightening to most people, while simultaneously positioning themselves as our protectors. Such language undermines the democratic process of reasonable decision making, replacing it with fear. Another salient example in the U.S. context is the use of the term “riot” to describe political protests. In the United States in the 1960s, the civil rights movement included black political protests in urban areas against police brutality (most famously in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles and the Harlem district of Manhattan). These protests were regularly described in the media as “riots.” As James Baldwin wrote at the time about the media description of these protests, “when white men rise up against oppression, they are heroes: when black men rise, they have reverted to their native savagery. The uprising in the Warsaw ghetto was not described as a riot, nor were the participants maligned as hoodlums: the boys and girls in Watts and Harlem are thoroughly aware of this.” 2 Such misrepresentations allowed Richard Nixon to run for office in 1968 on a “law and order” platform. Nixon’s administration is generally viewed as laying the groundwork for the subsequent mass incarceration of black American citizens. In 2015, widespread protests by largely black crowds against police brutality occurred in Baltimore after the killing of Freddie Gray by police. In an article for Linguistic Pulse in April 2015, Nic Subtirelu compared different media outlets’ use of “protest” versus “riot” to describe the Baltimore protests. Subtirelu found that Fox News, the United States’ far-right media outlet, used “riot” in its coverage of the Baltimore unrest with more than twice the frequency of its use of “protest.” CNN, by contrast, used “riot” with only slightly more frequency than “protest,” and MSNBC used “protest” with only slightly more frequency than “riot” in its coverage of the unrest in Baltimore. 3 The misrepresentation of political protests as riots was a factor in the election campaign of Donald Trump, whose campaign had strong echoes of Nixon’s. Nixon, however, campaigned at a time of rising rates of violent crime. Trump’s successful “law and order” campaign took place under the conditions of some of the lowest rates of violent crime in recorded U.S. history. Discussion that uses terms like “criminal” to encompass both those who commit multiple homicides for pleasure and those who commit traffic violations, or “riot” to describe a political protest, changes attitudes and shapes policy. A good example of what can result when language that criminalizes an entire group of people distorts debate and leads to unreasonable outcomes is the mass incarceration of American citizens of African descent.

ianleeclark 6y ago

You'd be absolutely livid if you found out how your ancestors earned the right to a weekend and a 40 hour work week.

anonmidniteshpr 6y ago
I'm trying to recall an incident (19th or 20th c.) where a mine or a factory hired strikebreaker snipers to climb into towers and shoot down into the strikers.
- mola 6y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_View_Massacre https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_View_Massacre https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thibodaux_massacre https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thibodaux_massacre https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morewood_massacre https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morewood_massacre And the list goes on...
clarkmoody 6y ago
The only reason we have days off is because of productivity gains due to investment in capital goods. If we can wean ourselves off of a debt-based economy, then we might be able to whittle that workweek down even further. We seem to have stalled right around 1971 when dollar convertibility was suspended.
- ianleeclark 6y ago
  The reason you have days off is due to decades of labor agitation. Productivity has continued to climb even after the 70s.
- johnny22 6y ago
  Where did you get the idea that is how it happened? That claim is not backed up by history at all.
- mola 6y ago
  Lots of factual claims, no support included. Learn some history.