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Not sure what media you watch but before I went to bed, I watched Portland livestreams of very violent "protests". These went on every night for weeks and I wa
by chrissnell 6y ago
Not sure what media you watch but before I went to bed, I watched Portland livestreams of very violent "protests". These went on every night for weeks and I watched people throw Molotov cocktails and shoot mortars at law enforcement. Call it what you want, but this shit was happening for over 100 nights in a row.
- newnamenewface 6y agoMortars or fireworks? That said, I agree that there were certainly protests that consistently became violent at night time for the span of at least weeks, maybe months.
- ndiscussion 6y agoWhat's the difference when it blows up in your face? Throwing explosives in urban centers is unacceptable and violent.
- catlifeonmars 6y agoMortars are a hell of a lot more lethal any consumer firework. So, yes there is a difference. Mortars also need to be used at range (100s of meters to kilometers) to be effective. I highly doubt mortars were in use.
- dragonwriter 6y ago> Mortars are a hell of a lot more lethal any consumer firework. Well, some mortars are. Other mortars are consumer fireworks.
- CydeWeys 6y agoIt's almost like, in the interest of clarity, we should use specific, non-overly-broad words that can't be misinterpreted. The use of the word "mortar" here is clearly causing problems, so how about "aerial firework" and "combat mortar"?
- ndiscussion 6y agoGood point, I wasn't thinking of actual military mortars. But I think "mortar" often means consumer firework in modern parlance.
- vcxy 6y agoI think there might be a lot of people here (my self included) that literally didn't know that about fireworks in modern parlance. It's because talking about fireworks just doesn't ever come up in my life. But I think "mortar" is commonly known as a military kind of weapon even if you know nothing about fireworks.
- catlifeonmars 6y agoI was unaware of that terminology applied to fireworks. Good to know!
- tclancy 6y agoWhat's the difference between mortars and fireworks? Damage. Suggesting people were dropping a plate, siting a mortar and undermining a building is a much stronger image than "Some bro threw an M-80 near some stuff." I am not downplaying the violence as I wasn't there, just pointing out the difference.
- TheRealSteel 6y agoYou don't like people being violent towards other people? That bothers you huh? Hmmmm, maybe the protests are effectively proving their point then.
- wavefunction 6y agoWell US Army mortars tend to be 60-107mm in calibre and designed for anti-infantry use while fireworks are generally designed for aesthetic effects. There is certainly some overlap in the capability of fireworks and mortars to render damage to individuals and groups but this is generally a very limited shared range of effect, with mortars being explicitly designed to kill or incapacitate human targets.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dragonwriter 6y ago> Mortars or fireworks? “Mortars” and “fireworks” are overlapping categories. https://fireworks.com/products/aerial/reloadable-mortars https://fireworks.com/products/aerial/reloadable-mortars
- jacobolus 6y agoWhen someone says "I watched people throw Molotov cocktails and shoot mortars at law enforcement", the obvious implication is that we are talking about the type of military hardware pictured and described at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortar_(weapon) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortar_(weapon) being used to intentionally injure or kill a group of people, not a toy version intended for making a celebratory burst of color being launched against the side of a building. There was at least one molotov cocktail captured on camera in September landing in the street between a group of protestors and a line of cops, though it is not clear whether anyone was injured by it.
- dragonwriter 6y ago> When someone says “I watched people throw Molotov cocktails and shoot mortars at law enforcement”, the obvious implication is that we are talking about the type of military hardware pictured and described at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortar_(weapon) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortar_(weapon) being used to intentionally injure or kill a group of people, not a toy version intended for making a celebratory burst of color being launched against the side of a building. I…disagree. If I heard “small arms and mortars”, I’d think of the military weapon. (Or “rockets and mortars”, without other context.) If I hear “molotov cocktails and mortars”, though, I’d think of either the fireworks or some improvised device, but not miltary hardware unless there was some other contextual indication favoring the latter. While its obviously not impossible for a group to both be using Molotov cocktails and have access to military heavy weapons, that’s not really, to me, the normal association.
- venatiodecorus 6y agowell aren't you one special little snowflake
- jacobolus 6y agoHere's the best summary I have seen of what happened in Portland last year (at least, up through July): https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2020/07/20/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-battle-of-portland/ https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2020/07/20/what-you... There was definitely some vandalism involved (and e.g. people shooting fireworks at the wall of a fortified building), but federal authorities were incredibly disingenuous in their descriptions of events and justifications of escalation. Most of the dangerous violence was police-on-protestor.
- generalizations 6y agoThat site leans left-wing. I wouldn't consider them necessarily a good source. You might as well quote Fox news on a right-wing event. https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/bellingcat/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/bellingcat/
- wtfiswiththis 6y agoTrying to compare Bellingcat, which publishes things like investigations into the downing of MH17, to Fox News. That is terrible. Fox News has entertainment departments, fought in court to have Tucker Carlson lie to his followers with impunity. They republished incitement to ramming attacks. Bellingcat.. They just do investigations. If you want to try to break things down into black and white left vs right, at least try to do it with comparable organizations. Or even better, try to refute the substance of the article instead of going to a media bias site to see how you feel they land on the political spectrum. Even the site you linked has them listed as "left-center" with "high factual reporting." How is this grounds to outright dismiss them? The slightest degree of "leftness" makes you want to exclude sources? Do you have any factual reason to be doing this, or is this your personal bias towards right wing content forcing you to seek means to exclude information you don't like the looks of?
- devindotcom 6y agoHonestly, that comparison is very disingenuous just from the information on the site you just linked: Fox News: "Overall, we rate Fox News strongly Right-Biased due to editorial positions and story selection that favors the right. We also rate them Mixed factually and borderline Questionable based on poor sourcing and the spreading of conspiracy theories that later must be retracted after being widely shared." Bellingcat: "we rate Bellingcat Left-Center biased based on story selection and positions that moderately favor the left. We also rate them High for factual reporting due to proper sourcing and a clean fact check record." These are vastly, vastly different forms and scales of "bias." They are nearly incomparable.
- addicted 6y agoViolent protests that did not lead to the death of a single police officer. I mean, how violent could they have been. My personal experience (not as a participant, but rather someone who observed a few protests from a distance) was that they were peaceful until the cops would engage with the protestors to impose the curfews that many cities had established. And then the violence was largely 1 sided.
- fpgaminer 6y ago> Violent protests that did not lead to the death of a single police officer. I did some quick fact checking, just for my own peace of mind. I view the George Floyd protests as overall peaceful, but it's good to question one's understanding. So for what it's worth Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd_protests_in_Portland,_Oregon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd_protests_in_Portl...) lists one casualty. I'm guessing that was the August 29th event, which wasn't a police officer. So yeah, seems you're right, and that's an important fact to keep in mind. 7 months of protests with only one dead, in an area people keep arguing is the worst of the BLM protests.
- panny 6y ago>Violent protests that did not lead to the death of a single police officer. Nice way to move the goalposts. How many people were killed in the protest? Aaron Danielson was ambushed and murdered by antifa Michael Reinoehl in Portland. >I mean, how violent could they have been. The "protestors" were using blinding laser weapons against the police. That's not even permitted in war, there's a 109 nation treaty against blinding laser weapons. Anyway, there's a 22GB torrent of riot videos out there now if you need a memory refresher. The largest file in the torrent is 6.2 GB of Portland videos. Portland was months and months of violent riots and murders.
- lupire 6y agoThose months and months did less damage than 1 day in the Capitol.
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- alkonaut 6y ago> and shoot mortars Mortars? Are you sure about that? What kind? Edit: Oh "fireworks mortars". Ffs. Just say fireworks.
- asguy 6y agoThey were professional fireworks. They were exploding at street and building level multiple times last year. The most recent was downtown on New Years.
- CydeWeys 6y agoMan if you think that's bad, you should've seen what many neighborhoods in major cities were like every night for a solid month leading up to July 4th last year. Aerial fireworks everywhere. There were even some structure fires as a result. Not protest-related, mind you. Just idiocy-related.
- asguy 6y agoI don't think you understand the severity of what antifa was doing in downtown Portland.
- coffeemaniac 6y agoThere were a handful of events like what you describe, but the violence was overwhelmingly inflicted upon protesters by police. This came in the form of physical violence, aiming projectiles at protesters' heads, and of course the various chemical weaponry that was used in such quantities that it appeared on NASA weather satellites. They were police riots.
- drunkpotato 6y agoYou see what you want to see. Classic confirmation bias. I watched the livestreams, and most of the time it was a lot of running and massive amounts of tear gas, and occasionally police brutally escalating violence against those protesting police violence. I think it's rather telling that you describe fireworks as mortars to try to make them sound more threatening. I haven't seen any videos where a BLM protestor beats a fallen cop with an American flag, or kills a cop. Both of which happened during the violent far-right insurrection on January 6. I have seen many more credible stories about data and studies showing that violence from far-right extremism is a much more dangerous current problem than far-left extremism. I will continue to call last year's protests what they were, remarkably peaceful world-wide protests against police brutality and for police reform. And I will call the Jan 6 event what it was, a deliberately stoked violent insurrection against the US government in an attempt to overturn the results of a democratic election, on the basis of nothing but lies and grievance. We should strive to accurately describe things as they are.
- leetcrew 6y agoI agree it's misleading here, but people (in my area at least) commonly refer to the big professional-tier fireworks as "mortars".
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- subsubzero 6y ago.