2 ms·

By this logic I could gather 10 friends from the pub, go to a government building, break a few windows, say we want to overthrow the government, then go home an

By this logic I could gather 10 friends from the pub, go to a government building, break a few windows, say we want to overthrow the government, then go home and call it an attempted coup. Really though, that's never been successful and calling it an attempt is being extremely generous. It's like saying writing a Tweet is an attempt at writing a novel.

dragonwriter 5y ago
> By this logic I could gather 10 friends from the pub, go to a government building, break a few windows, say we want to overthrow the government, then go home and call it an attempted coup. Well, sure, and if that's really what you wanted to do, that would be a (very badly) attempted coup. On the other hand, if you had a much larger group of “friends”, including high officials of the federal executive branch, federal legislators, state legislators, and others in and out of government, and instead of going from a pub and breaking a few government windows you coordinated on a scheme to substitute alternative electoral votes for the certified ones from several states relying on an abuse of office by the presiding officer of the joint session counting the electoral votes to effect that, when the regular presiding officer publicly rebuffed the effort gathered a few thousand people including multiple organized armed groups to violently assault the Capitol, erecting a gallows and calling for the hanging of recalcitrant presiding officer, having members and legislative staff escape only moments ahead of the mob (and those moments in part because one breakthrough of barricades was stopped by deadly force), delay deployment of National Guard forces to respond to the attack,... Well, then you’ve got, while in the actual case still unsuccessful, a lot more credible coup attempt.

2 ms·

By this logic I could gather 10 friends from the pub, go to a government building, break a few windows, say we want to overthrow the government, then go home an

by Mikeb85 5y ago

dragonwriter 5y ago
> By this logic I could gather 10 friends from the pub, go to a government building, break a few windows, say we want to overthrow the government, then go home and call it an attempted coup. Well, sure, and if that's really what you wanted to do, that would be a (very badly) attempted coup. On the other hand, if you had a much larger group of “friends”, including high officials of the federal executive branch, federal legislators, state legislators, and others in and out of government, and instead of going from a pub and breaking a few government windows you coordinated on a scheme to substitute alternative electoral votes for the certified ones from several states relying on an abuse of office by the presiding officer of the joint session counting the electoral votes to effect that, when the regular presiding officer publicly rebuffed the effort gathered a few thousand people including multiple organized armed groups to violently assault the Capitol, erecting a gallows and calling for the hanging of recalcitrant presiding officer, having members and legislative staff escape only moments ahead of the mob (and those moments in part because one breakthrough of barricades was stopped by deadly force), delay deployment of National Guard forces to respond to the attack,... Well, then you’ve got, while in the actual case still unsuccessful, a lot more credible coup attempt.