[ben_w]

It’s not about what we like, it’s not about “Adults who can handle contrasting opinions”, it’s about a literal mob of armed people who broke into a government building while it was in the process of certifying the results of an election that the armed mob believed was stolen because of videos they watched and believed.

I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but there is a story behind that analogy — it isn’t bubblebath that hides medieval infants in a washtub’s waste water.

[core-questions]

Pretty sure the mob wasn't armed; you can't go around armed in DC. The property damage was minimal, especially compared to the BLM riots of last summer; did you post vociferously about how misinformation started those?

[ben_w]

"""Five of the arrests were related to guns and two were for illegal possession of other weapons, including metal knuckles and a blackjack-like weapon."""

"""Police Chief Robert J. Contee says two pipe bombs and a cooler with Molotov cocktails were also found near Capitol grounds."""

- https://www.fox5dc.com/news/over-50-people-arrested-14-offic...

Normally I consider Fox to be right-wing.

> did you post vociferously about how misinformation started those?

My argument would apply to all riots caused by disinformation regardless of if I recognise the disinformation as false rather than true.

As it happens, I believe those riots were triggered by people who believe their lives do not matter to the police on the basis of personal experience. You believe I am wrong about that? Sure, ok, now tell me: why does being wrong about that change my argument that misinformation can cause real harm? You consider the BLM riots to be a bigger event, and that it was based on untruths, so tell me: on what basis does your claim mean that I should stop being concerned about mobs being goaded into action by lies?

You don’t need to convince me I’m wrong about the BLM movement to do that.

[core-questions]

Thank you for the information about the armed people. Certainly I don't support anything like that - but then, I'm Canadian, I don't support people being armed in general.

> The same argument would apply to all riots caused by disinformation regardless of if I recognise the disinformation as false rather than true.

You make a fair point about the misinformation from a purely argument-logic standpoint (both classes of events being spurred on by some amount of misinformation).

The greater gestalt of my argument is that it's asinine to consider any side of the mainstream media in the USA to somehow not be a biased source of misinformation, malicious and deliberate or otherwise. You can pick your side, Fox or MSNBC or anything else, and get the bias you "prefer", but no matter what you're getting bias, denial of reality when it's inconvenient for the narrative, and propaganda designed to spur you into particular thoughts and actions. If you're going to get mad about it for this event, if you're a principled person, you should have been mad about it for prior events too, even if the results don't run in favour of your own priors.

We can fight about the particulars of the situation, or work together to understand how we're being manipulated into arguing about particulars instead of looking at who's manipulating us, how, why, and in what overall direction.