Comment by ori_b
6 years ago
Bringing the military in on stopping it is crossing the Rubicon. In as literal a sense as you can get without living in Italy. Regardless of feelings on the current situation, the idea of getting the military involved should be extremely unsettling to anyone living in a democracy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Rubicon
For a more contemporary quote from battlestar galactica:
Adama: There's a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people.
In 1992 the military was used to put an end to the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles.
There is a spectrum between peaceful protesting and violent insurrection. Burning down police stations, murdering police officers, and stealing rifles from police vehicles is very, very far down the line to violent insurrection. In retrospect I don’t think we were quite there, but we were getting close to it. And ultimately, one of the purposes of the military is to protect our republic from violent insurrection.
Which is closer to violent insurrection: responding to police violence by attacking symbols of the police, or bringing an armed group into a statehouse with the express intent of intimidating lawmakers?
Keep in mind when answering that in most cases, escalations to violence by protests were in response to unnecessary escalating by police forces. We have to evaluate so called bad actors in the context of the response to them.
Are you confident that armed statehouse protests wouldn't have devolved to violence if met with teargas and rubber bullets? Are you confident that police protests would have had similar levels of violence if not pushed towards it by police?
> Which is closer to violent insurrection: responding to police violence by attacking symbols of the police, or bringing an armed group into a statehouse with the express intent of intimidating lawmakers?
By “attacking symbols of the state”, you’re referring to burning down police stations and stealing police rifles from patrol vehicles. Those aren’t “symbols”, they are actual facilities and equipment. In the Seattle incident with the rifles, one of the rioters even opened fire on an abandoned patrol vehicle.
So yes, I would say stealing weapons from a public agency and opening fire with those weapons is much closer to “insurrection” than peacefully carrying your own weapons. For that matter, so do the killings of David Dorn and especially Dave Patrick Underwood.
> Keep in mind when answering that in most cases, escalations to violence by protests were in response to unnecessary escalating by police forces.
It’s clear that your biases are leading you to a very specific judgment of what happened and who is to blame, to the point that you’re bending over backwards to make excuses for arson and murder. To name a more recent incident, the police were not in any way responsible for the act of burning down a Wendy’s in Atlanta; certainly not to the same degree as the extremists who actually burned it down.
But that all distracts from the point. I find your views absurd and morally disgusting, but I would never dream of trying to stop you from expressing them. If you were an elected official who represented the interests and attitudes of some broad group of constituents, I would find value in hearing what you had to say even if I found it reprehensible.
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> In 1992 the military was used to put an end to the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles.
Yes, we've been wrong more than once.
How do you feel about Eisenhower federalizing the Arkansas National Guard to enforce school desegregation?
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