[lolinder]

These moral equivalencies have to stop. The US didn't declare anti-war protests to be illegal and arrest 7000+ protesters in the course of the first week of the war in Iraq. The US didn't shut down independent media outlets that were opposed to the war. The US didn't block (nascent) web platforms that hosted anti-war discussion.

The US media is often a propaganda arm of the government. The Russian government tries to ensure their propaganda is all you see. There's a massive difference.

[waffleiron]

Plenty of anti Iraq war protesters got arrested

Just one of many examples:

https://www.chicagotribune.com/politics/chi-city-offers-62-m...

[glenstein]

Parent commenter made the point about "arrest[ing] 7000+ protesters in the course of the first week of the war" and your purported equivalence to that is that "plenty" were arrested.

There's a failure of vision, a failure to understand differences in scale that is driving these false equivalences, that then leads to a bunch of equivocation about whether the unlike comparisons can be similar. I think the original point stands and this remains a false equivalence.

[waffleiron]

> and your purported equivalence to that is that "plenty" were arrested.

800 illegally arrested in a single city, on a single day after the invasion. San Francisco had 2,200 protest arrests in the two days. [1]

https://www.baltimoresun.com/bal-te.iraq29mar29-story.html

[lolinder]

For others who want more context for the SF arrests like I did: https://www.salon.com/2003/03/20/protest_16/

> The biggest antiwar eruption in the U.S. took place in San Francisco, where protesters had vowed to shut down the city, and the police reported making more arrests than any time during the past two decades. The protests began during the morning rush hour, when activists used duct tape for purposes that Tom Ridge at the Office of Homeland Security would never recommend: blocking the intersection at Battery and Columbus, while handing out stickers that said "No War in My Name."

> During the morning rush hour, the city's Financial District was shut down by human blockades that stretched from the Embarcadero to Van Ness Avenue, stopping cars and bus traffic for hours and provoking a wave of arrests.

> By 4:30 p.m., several thousand protesters began sitting down at the busy intersection of Fifth and Market, where police began carting off dozens of them to a MUNI bus that had been commandeered as a paddy wagon.

[lolinder]

I'm not condoning those arrests, but their scope is nothing like what we're seeing in Russia, and that news article is about the arrested being paid damages because the arrests were illegal. Even then, all involved were released the next day.

The scope of the arrests in Russia is much wider (as a percentage of those protesting and in raw numbers), and they're legal.

[waffleiron]

They were illegal as mass arrest, there were plenty of other people who got legally arrested protesting the Iraq war (and were not released the next day).

I know the scope is different, but it is also good to keep in mind that bad things don't only happen in Russia.

edit: s/mass protest/mass arrest

[lolinder]

> They were illegal as mass protest

Do you have a source for this? The only instances of arrests I can find are things like the above (illegal arrests) or people who trespassed on private property and were arrested for that. Meanwhile I can find plenty of stories of perfectly legal thousands-strong protests, which sounds like "mass protest" to me.

> I know the scope is different, but it is also good to keep in mind that bad things don't only happen in Russia.

Yes, but it depends on the purpose of placing that emphasis. "Even in a democracy we must be vigilant" is one thing. "We shouldn't condemn Russia for their human rights abuses because we're no different" is a very different message, and one that is manifestly false.

[waffleiron]

Ah! Apologies, I'll edit my post, I meant mass arrest

[lolinder]

Ah, that makes way more sense! Thanks.

[glenstein]

>I know the scope is different, but

This is the hinge on which false equivalences turn. The scope is different, they shouldn't be compared, and being able to correctly grasp and differentiate different scales of moral offense shouldn't be interpreted as "I guess they don't know bad stuff happens elsewhere." Those comparisons do more to obfuscate than clarify.

[waffleiron]

>The scope is different, they shouldn't be compared

Then nothing can ever be compared, there is always going to be differences between situations. Even just cultural differences between Russia and the US.

[megous]

Do you have a similar article where some Russian city is proposing financial settlements for arrests of protersters from anti-war demonstrations 8 years ago?

[DoItToMe81]

Bush also extensively used "free speech zones" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone) to cordon off and split up protests so that they would not be seen or reach a wider audience.

[waffleiron]

> The US didn't shut down independent media outlets that were opposed to the war.

Only 3% of media coverage was anti-war, they didn't need to.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_coverage_of_the_Iraq_War...

[lolinder]

This is the study that that number comes from: https://fair.org/extra/amplifying-officials-squelching-disse...

That study says only 3% of individuals who were interviewed on the 6 studied channels were opposed to the war. They only studied coverage across 6 mainstream media outlets:

> The news programs studied were ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer Reports, Fox’s Special Report with Brit Hume, and PBS’s NewsHour With Jim Lehrer.

This doesn't tell me anything about the state of independent news outlets at the time.

[waffleiron]

Do independent news outlets really matter if the vast majority of people get their news for ABC / CBS / NBC / CCN / Fox /PBS?

Again, I agree that the US acted in a different way than Russia does right now, but the situation itself is also different. The US did not need to take the actions Russia has to take, because the majority of people in the US where pro-war during the invasion, with only 17% strongly opposing the illegal war [1].

[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/8038/seventytwo-percent-america...

[lolinder]

Your "only 3%" comment was replying to my argument that to compare Russia's suppression of all opposing speech to the US's voluntary support from the mainstream media is patently absurd. That the US had overwhelming voluntary support from its people isn't proof that I'm wrong, it's exactly my point.

[glenstein]

Public opposition grew despite media narratives and there were ways to clamp down on domestic opposition that U.S. wouldn't entertain that Russia would. So these comparisons miss the forest for the trees.

[ipaddr]

Canada did.