Comment by armada651
1 year ago
I find this very odd, that people think there's such a clear distinction. I never called a riot a "peaceful display of dissent", but even a peaceful protest has small incidents of violence. If you declare a protest a riot at the first sign of a violent protestor, then it's impossible to hold a peaceful protest.
There's no point in splitting hairs, I'm not talking about somebody walking on the red light or spitting on the pavement once during the protest. We witnessed plenty "mostly peaceful" protests that resulted in billions of damage and people dying, and literally everybody who paid any attention at all for the last 10 years knows what I am talking about. Pretending like it's impossible to see whether there's a massive violent riot or a "first sign" is extremely disingenuous - everybody can see it, because in real violent riots it's massive and widespread. It's just some people prefer to pretend it's impossible to see for ideological reasons to provide plausible deniability because people happening to be violent are ideologically aligned with them. It's very possible to hold a peaceful protest - don't set a courthouse (or even better, any house or anything at all) on fire, don't smash store windows, don't break windshields of the cars, don't burn the cars, don't loot stores, don't beat up people, don't hit them with bike locks, skateboards, or any other implements, don't bear-spray them, obviously don't beat up the police, and so on, and so forth. It's the advice that everybody should know by the time they join elementary school. It's not some kind of quantum theory level complexity. Everybody knows it.