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> with the express purpose of overturning the legal election results. I guess the answer is... calm down? A few hundred (even heavily armed) people do not stan

by csomar 6y ago

> with the express purpose of overturning the legal election results. I guess the answer is... calm down? A few hundred (even heavily armed) people do not stand a chance changing the results of the election, or almost anything in the US. The event was for show. Although, unfortunately, one of them died. But it should remain that way and there is no reason to escalate further. (I guess we already have precedents of how escalation usually lead to innocent deaths).

nerdponx 6y ago
You don't get it. It was for show, but the police allowed it to go way too far. Not to mention, where was all the surveillance power of the NSA to provide advance warning? The disturbing part of what happened yesterday was not that a bunch of assholes formed a mob to disrupt Congress. The disturbing part is that they were obviously allowed to do so.
- techdragon 6y ago
  The NSA is officially not supposed to be spying on the citizens of the USA. That’s the FBI’s job technically... as the USA has no dedicated domestic intelligence agency. There are a number of agencies with limited domestic intelligence roles tasks with specific kinds of intelligence work such as the intelligence branches of the US Treasury, the Department of Energy, and the Coast Guard... but there’s no USA agency equivalent of the United Kingdom’s MI5. To extend the comparison, the CIA is roughly the USA’a MI6 and the NSA is very roughly equivalent to the GCHQ but not exactly as the NSA are not meant to spy domestically while the GCHQ don’t have that explicit limitation.
  - Lendal 6y ago
    They didn't need to spy. They already knew and didn't care. The president held a speech in the morning, addressing his supporters who had traveled from all over the country to come to Washington. He told the crowd to storm the Capitol over the loudspeaker, and that he would lead them in doing so. He didn't. Instead he returned to the White House. But the crowd did what they were told anyway. (People do that a lot these days. They do what they're told.)
  - nerdponx 6y ago
    Regardless of what it officially is and is not supposed to do, the NSA and not the FBI is the organization that developed programs like PRISM. The point is that the US federal government has a huge intelligence organization, with a huge amount of resources invested in dragnet data collection and surveillance on anyone and everyone. The specific 3-letter organization that is technically supposed to be looking at and taking action based on that data isn't that relevant.
refurb 6y ago
That’s my take. A lot of smoke but no fire. The chance of these people actually overthrowing the change in presidency is pretty much 0%. It’s over let’s move on.
- TomSwirly 6y ago
  "A mob overtook the capitol, four people died, the police did nothing and let them go, let's move on"? Literally shaking my head. I just can't fathom how this is so unremarkable to you.
  - refurb 6y ago
    3 people died not at the capital building. Why are you including them?
    - tartoran 6y ago
      Are those 3 people not related in any way to this incident? As far as I can tell the 4 deaths were directly related to the protest. The one person in the US Capitol was shot and was pronounced dead later on. Does it make a difference that not all 4 were shot in the same place?
- bigbluedots 6y ago
  There needs to be some consequences here. Maybe it was just for show, and turned out harmless, whatever. Regardless, the people who participated in this, and those who incited them, should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Otherwise this sort of thing will happen again, and next time it may not be so harmless.
  - eplanit 6y ago
    Were you this outraged during 2020 with all the BLM riots? Suddenly all the pearl-clutching... amazing.
    - 6y ago
tsimionescu 6y ago
What would have happened if they had pushed into the room? What would have happened if they had had firearms on them? What if they had been able to grab just a few congressmen at gun point? Sure, I'm not proposing to escalate and it's wonderful that it is over with no real effects. But the security handling was atrocious, and the results would have been much worse if the mob were only slightly more organized and intent on bloodshed. I'm not claiming that they would have succeeded to actually install Donald Trump for a second term. But I do believe that they could have forced a mock result to eb proclaimed on the senate floor, creating a much larger problem for the future and giving much more power to their narrative. Also, note that the quote from me was supposed to reinforce the idea that there were compelling reasons for the police to take their presence as a serious threat. These weren't protesters chanting to save the whales, they were protesters asking for the election to be overturned (even if I agree with you that they had no real chance of achieving this goal).
- phs318u 6y ago
  > it is over with no real effects I admit to being a little shocked at the glibness of this statement. As a non-USian, I see a profound shock among other thoughtful non-USians that it has come to this. Regardless of political affiliation, I believe most honest, ordinary non-USians have held in high regard the robustness of the American democratic system and its resilience to the wholesale corruption that plagues many other countries. The democratic ideal, and America as exemplar, has always been held in lofty regard. However, I’m more certain than ever that this ideal has now been firmly relegated to a historical oddity. A 200 year blip in the record of human governance, with a forthcoming return to mean. Watching this slow motion disaster unfold has mad me very, very sad.
  - pjc50 6y ago
    I'm not so much shocked as tired. This is like 9/11 with a four year warning of the planes arriving and being able to watch them on Flightradar, towing a huge sign saying "we're going to crash this baby into the Pentagon". And nobody doing anything about it because that would mean that "both sides" weren't in fact equal. Pleasantly surprised that the death toll was only four, of which only one was shot; much better than the regular death toll of single mass shooter incidents.
TomSwirly 6y ago
> I guess the answer is... calm down? Rioters inflamed by years of Trump's gross lies storm the Capitol, demanding to overturn the results of the election, four die, and your response is, "Calm down"?
- TigeriusKirk 6y ago
  What's the alternative? Escalate and inflame emotions even more? What good would come of that? The right thing to do here is to break the feedback loop and take some energy out of the system.
  - PeterisP 6y ago
    One consideration here is that lack of consequences enables escalation - if it turns out that this disruption is not prosecuted and punished, then (as their core reasons for doing so have not changed) they are going to be emboldened and repeat similar acts with more force. Breaking the loop requires a deterrent, not only verbal "we will not stand for this".
mannykannot 6y ago
> A few hundred (even heavily armed) people do not stand a chance changing the results of the election, or almost anything in the US. This is not the issue here. It is not even that the outgoing president very deliberately provoked the attack, as well as a much wider opposition to the democratic process. The biggest problem is that the president was actively supported, in his provocation, by more than a few US senators, along with elected officials of several states (some of whom are plausible presidential candidates themselves.) There is little doubt that if any of the extra-legal or simply bogus attempts to overthrow the election had succeeded, these senators, and most likely the republican party as a whole, would have been happy to go along with that act, in what would, in reality, have been a coup d'état. Even if the supreme court put a stop to it - which is not a certainty - much damage would have been done.
- kritiko 6y ago
  >There is little doubt that if any of the extra-legal or simply bogus attempts to overthrow the election had succeeded, these senators, and most likely the republican party as a whole, would have been happy to go along with that act, in what would, in reality, have been a coup d'état. You could describe the 2000 election as a successful bogus attempt to overthrow an election. Has America already had a coup d'etat?
  - wan23 6y ago
    In 2000 it was unclear who actually won because the Florida vote count was very close. No one was alleging that one side or the other was cheating, and everyone was in agreement that whoever got the most votes should be president. Also, Al Gore, as the outgoing Vice President, presided over the same certification proceeding that Trump and his followers disrupted yesterday. In January 2001, that proceeding went without a hitch even though the loser of the election was in charge of it.
enumjorge 6y ago
No offense, but I don’t think you understand the gravity of what happened. The fact that a mob of people, attempted to overturn the results of an election, is in itself a pretty serious event. That they were unlikely to succeed doesn’t cancel out the fact that they could have easily started a shootout with Congress people inside, that law enforcement seemed so unprepared to deal with a situation that had been telegraphed for so long, that as the article points out this has serious infosec implications, and that the sitting president of the US helped instigate an attempted coup.
unethical_ban 6y ago
It is symbolic, but I have particularly little sympathy for their stunt. It wasn't a protest of a bill, or a protest for a particular legislative action. It was a protest against the election of the President itself - against all evidence, all facts, and all testimony from just about every official except the President, who egged this on. I didn't want to see heads rolling, but I was shocked at how delicately they were handled - cops even let them through barricades. Contrast this with left-wing protesters and their treatment by cops, and you see a much different picture, of people walking or sitting down getting pepper sprayed, or 70-something men getting shoved to the ground in a public square by a team of armored officers. There are a number of reasons to be angry at this stunt, and a number of conclusions to draw from it. First thing is first, if we had any kind of collective conscience, Trump would be impeached today.

by csomar 6y ago

nerdponx 6y ago

You don't get it. It was for show, but the police allowed it to go way too far. Not to mention, where was all the surveillance power of the NSA to provide advance warning? The disturbing part of what happened yesterday was not that a bunch of assholes formed a mob to disrupt Congress. The disturbing part is that they were obviously allowed to do so.

techdragon 6y ago
The NSA is officially not supposed to be spying on the citizens of the USA. That’s the FBI’s job technically... as the USA has no dedicated domestic intelligence agency. There are a number of agencies with limited domestic intelligence roles tasks with specific kinds of intelligence work such as the intelligence branches of the US Treasury, the Department of Energy, and the Coast Guard... but there’s no USA agency equivalent of the United Kingdom’s MI5. To extend the comparison, the CIA is roughly the USA’a MI6 and the NSA is very roughly equivalent to the GCHQ but not exactly as the NSA are not meant to spy domestically while the GCHQ don’t have that explicit limitation.
- Lendal 6y ago
  They didn't need to spy. They already knew and didn't care. The president held a speech in the morning, addressing his supporters who had traveled from all over the country to come to Washington. He told the crowd to storm the Capitol over the loudspeaker, and that he would lead them in doing so. He didn't. Instead he returned to the White House. But the crowd did what they were told anyway. (People do that a lot these days. They do what they're told.)
- nerdponx 6y ago
  Regardless of what it officially is and is not supposed to do, the NSA and not the FBI is the organization that developed programs like PRISM. The point is that the US federal government has a huge intelligence organization, with a huge amount of resources invested in dragnet data collection and surveillance on anyone and everyone. The specific 3-letter organization that is technically supposed to be looking at and taking action based on that data isn't that relevant.

refurb 6y ago

That’s my take. A lot of smoke but no fire. The chance of these people actually overthrowing the change in presidency is pretty much 0%. It’s over let’s move on.

TomSwirly 6y ago
"A mob overtook the capitol, four people died, the police did nothing and let them go, let's move on"? Literally shaking my head. I just can't fathom how this is so unremarkable to you.
- refurb 6y ago
  3 people died not at the capital building. Why are you including them?
  - tartoran 6y ago
    Are those 3 people not related in any way to this incident? As far as I can tell the 4 deaths were directly related to the protest. The one person in the US Capitol was shot and was pronounced dead later on. Does it make a difference that not all 4 were shot in the same place?
bigbluedots 6y ago
There needs to be some consequences here. Maybe it was just for show, and turned out harmless, whatever. Regardless, the people who participated in this, and those who incited them, should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Otherwise this sort of thing will happen again, and next time it may not be so harmless.
- eplanit 6y ago
  Were you this outraged during 2020 with all the BLM riots? Suddenly all the pearl-clutching... amazing.
  - 6y ago

tsimionescu 6y ago

What would have happened if they had pushed into the room? What would have happened if they had had firearms on them? What if they had been able to grab just a few congressmen at gun point? Sure, I'm not proposing to escalate and it's wonderful that it is over with no real effects. But the security handling was atrocious, and the results would have been much worse if the mob were only slightly more organized and intent on bloodshed. I'm not claiming that they would have succeeded to actually install Donald Trump for a second term. But I do believe that they could have forced a mock result to eb proclaimed on the senate floor, creating a much larger problem for the future and giving much more power to their narrative. Also, note that the quote from me was supposed to reinforce the idea that there were compelling reasons for the police to take their presence as a serious threat. These weren't protesters chanting to save the whales, they were protesters asking for the election to be overturned (even if I agree with you that they had no real chance of achieving this goal).

phs318u 6y ago
> it is over with no real effects I admit to being a little shocked at the glibness of this statement. As a non-USian, I see a profound shock among other thoughtful non-USians that it has come to this. Regardless of political affiliation, I believe most honest, ordinary non-USians have held in high regard the robustness of the American democratic system and its resilience to the wholesale corruption that plagues many other countries. The democratic ideal, and America as exemplar, has always been held in lofty regard. However, I’m more certain than ever that this ideal has now been firmly relegated to a historical oddity. A 200 year blip in the record of human governance, with a forthcoming return to mean. Watching this slow motion disaster unfold has mad me very, very sad.
- pjc50 6y ago
  I'm not so much shocked as tired. This is like 9/11 with a four year warning of the planes arriving and being able to watch them on Flightradar, towing a huge sign saying "we're going to crash this baby into the Pentagon". And nobody doing anything about it because that would mean that "both sides" weren't in fact equal. Pleasantly surprised that the death toll was only four, of which only one was shot; much better than the regular death toll of single mass shooter incidents.

TomSwirly 6y ago

> I guess the answer is... calm down? Rioters inflamed by years of Trump's gross lies storm the Capitol, demanding to overturn the results of the election, four die, and your response is, "Calm down"?

TigeriusKirk 6y ago
What's the alternative? Escalate and inflame emotions even more? What good would come of that? The right thing to do here is to break the feedback loop and take some energy out of the system.
- PeterisP 6y ago
  One consideration here is that lack of consequences enables escalation - if it turns out that this disruption is not prosecuted and punished, then (as their core reasons for doing so have not changed) they are going to be emboldened and repeat similar acts with more force. Breaking the loop requires a deterrent, not only verbal "we will not stand for this".

mannykannot 6y ago

> A few hundred (even heavily armed) people do not stand a chance changing the results of the election, or almost anything in the US. This is not the issue here. It is not even that the outgoing president very deliberately provoked the attack, as well as a much wider opposition to the democratic process. The biggest problem is that the president was actively supported, in his provocation, by more than a few US senators, along with elected officials of several states (some of whom are plausible presidential candidates themselves.) There is little doubt that if any of the extra-legal or simply bogus attempts to overthrow the election had succeeded, these senators, and most likely the republican party as a whole, would have been happy to go along with that act, in what would, in reality, have been a coup d'état. Even if the supreme court put a stop to it - which is not a certainty - much damage would have been done.

kritiko 6y ago
>There is little doubt that if any of the extra-legal or simply bogus attempts to overthrow the election had succeeded, these senators, and most likely the republican party as a whole, would have been happy to go along with that act, in what would, in reality, have been a coup d'état. You could describe the 2000 election as a successful bogus attempt to overthrow an election. Has America already had a coup d'etat?
- wan23 6y ago
  In 2000 it was unclear who actually won because the Florida vote count was very close. No one was alleging that one side or the other was cheating, and everyone was in agreement that whoever got the most votes should be president. Also, Al Gore, as the outgoing Vice President, presided over the same certification proceeding that Trump and his followers disrupted yesterday. In January 2001, that proceeding went without a hitch even though the loser of the election was in charge of it.

enumjorge 6y ago

No offense, but I don’t think you understand the gravity of what happened. The fact that a mob of people, attempted to overturn the results of an election, is in itself a pretty serious event. That they were unlikely to succeed doesn’t cancel out the fact that they could have easily started a shootout with Congress people inside, that law enforcement seemed so unprepared to deal with a situation that had been telegraphed for so long, that as the article points out this has serious infosec implications, and that the sitting president of the US helped instigate an attempted coup.

unethical_ban 6y ago

It is symbolic, but I have particularly little sympathy for their stunt. It wasn't a protest of a bill, or a protest for a particular legislative action. It was a protest against the election of the President itself - against all evidence, all facts, and all testimony from just about every official except the President, who egged this on. I didn't want to see heads rolling, but I was shocked at how delicately they were handled - cops even let them through barricades. Contrast this with left-wing protesters and their treatment by cops, and you see a much different picture, of people walking or sitting down getting pepper sprayed, or 70-something men getting shoved to the ground in a public square by a team of armored officers. There are a number of reasons to be angry at this stunt, and a number of conclusions to draw from it. First thing is first, if we had any kind of collective conscience, Trump would be impeached today.