[coeneedell]

Really difficult to argue that “both sides are equally to blame for the bad discourse” when one side had a mob of terrorists storm the capitol (then pardoned all of them) and the other side held up tiny signs during a speech.

[naasking]

Or instead of making a bad faith comparison of partisan violence, you could compare it to the George Floyd protests which injured over 700 police officers and killed over 20 people.

[xerox13ster]

And in which case did the party leader stand up and incite the mob before they went on their war path?

If we’re going to compare January 6 to the George Floyd riots, one was explicitly political, and the other one was fed up populace.

One started with a rally intended to gas the mob up in hopes of securing the capital for their fuhrer. The other was started as the result of the outright murder of an individual by a state actor.

One was essentially organized by the Republican Party leader, and the other was an impromptu display of discontent.

[Auracle]

There were quite a few Democrats that encouraged the protests that turned into riots during the George Floyd stuff.

That's literally exactly the same as Trump. He encouraged a protest, but literally told them to peacefully protest, just as many of those Democrats did.

[xerox13ster]

And for how many of them were the protests formed around the Democrat politician?

How many Democrats: got up on stage for a rally for themselves then -> told the attendees to go and “peacefully protest” then -> the protestors went and turned into a riot?

How many of the George Floyd protesters were chanting to hang a public official? With the intent of dismantling democracy?

These are not the same.

[Larrikin]

Now go one step further and discuss what both sides were protesting.

[naasking]

There was no evidence supporting the narrative for either riot. The idea that black people are disproportionately killed by police is not supported by the data, unless you think a single murder justified all of those riots and the deaths.

[Larrikin]

Why make up lies on the internet?

[naasking]

It's not a lie, you've been sold a lie about what the statistics mean. Police shootings are proportional to "encounters with violent criminals", regardless of race [2]. Black people are overrepresented in police shootings because they are overrepresented in the criminal population, eg. 49% of known murderers are black, despite comprising only 13% of the population [1], and other violent offenses track this disparity. There is simply no convincing evidence that a large percentage of shootings are racially motivated once controlling for violent encounters.

Some try to argue that black people are overrepresented in the criminal population because of over policing, but it simply does not follow that this would cause almost 50% of murderers to be black. It would require a lot of special pleading to explain the evidence, eg. ok, maybe most murderers are black but most other encounters with police are racially motivated, and/or police would have to be letting upwards of 10,000 white murderers go to reach demographic parity with black offenders. These epicycles are stupid, you need to let go of this left dogma that vehemently believes that all groups are necessarily the same and only oppression drives observable differences in outcomes. Whatever the ultimate source of the group differences, police action broadly following the distribution of criminality with no racial component is best supported by the facts (there are always individual exceptions of course).

Proper statistical arguments like this debunked claims that the 2020 election was rigged, so as I said, unless you think Floyd's murder by itself justified the protests and the riots and the ensuing death, injuries and destruction, then neither set of protests/riots were justified. But it's interesting that only one of these false narratives is amplified as true and is culturally taboo to question.

[1] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

[2] https://fryer.scholars.harvard.edu/publications/empirical-an...

[throw10920]

Thank you for bringing the receipts! I really appreciate it when people spend some of their time to debunk political lies.