Politics aside, is this potentially one of the most comprehensive multi-vantage-point training video datasets available today? I cannot imagine another that contains such a multitude of 1) videos shooters, 2) positions, 3) actual humans and 4) temporal start/end times.
I would imagine so, great multiangle dataset w crowd sourced labels. Grim, but I do look forward to the meeting of all those videos and a "matterport" style reconstruction. I assume the Nytimes is paying some studio to do this right now.
Now imagine letting lose SfM and tracking algorithms on this video dataset and reconstructing full temporal 3D model of the event ala Enemy of the State (1998). Add in some of [1] and we could reconstruct full Cyberpunk 2077 Braindance.
Five times and no comments on anything. I wonder why such a trove isn't worthy of discussion?
I suspect because if people watched those videos, they'd come away with a very different perspective. Pretty much all you see is people standing around waving signs and chanting -- literally textbook non-violent protesting. Once you see them enter the Capital, you still don't see waves of violence and destruction. There are a couple-dozen aggressive/violent people at most (and those people should definitely be arrested and charged).
In contrast, I've seen hundreds of videos of other riots throughout the year where you get hundreds of videos of the violence (along with the videos of people getting chased down and beaten up for violating the "no cameras rule" because they don't want to be filmed doing horrible things. Most of those didn't have large groups just standing around waving signs and chanting -- almost everyone was involved in the violence and destruction. There was an interesting article I read that the riots this year caused more property damage than any in US history by property insurance claims. That's not including people hurt/killed, all the property damages under 10-20k per building where it costs more to file than to pay out of pocket, vehicles totaled, government buildings ruined (that the people's taxes have to pay to repair), etc.
As I said before, I have zero tolerance for the violent people at the Capital. I also have zero tolerance for those beating up and hospitalizing thousands (probably tens of thousands) throughout the summer. This is in stark contrast to most news organizations and even prominent politicians who stated that the massive violent protest was a necessary and acceptable idea while then decrying the couple dozen violent protestors at the Capital as the basest kind of evil when all of it was evil political violence and was all wrong.
I agree. For days I thought perhaps hundreds had been protesting. I was blown away to hear it was thousands, and immediately realized that the media was latching onto perhaps dozens of bad apples, so to speak.
I think it’s plain to see that most Americans don’t want to murder politicians. The Republican voters who feel disenfranchised aren’t all sharpening their axes right now.
I think it’s insane what happened. It just isn’t representative of republicans.
Not sure what to do with that. I’m Canadian so I suppose it doesn’t matter much. I only see what the media gives me and I don’t personally know a lot of Americans, let alone republicans.
There were more than what I'd call dozens, there's already been over 100 arrests and it's early in the investigation. Also basing this on the videos I've seen. There were hallways full of people packed behind barriers, streams of people going by different locations, etc.
I wouldn't say violence of this sort is representative of Republicans, but Republicans are too accepting of the extremists that this event grew out of. One of them is the leader of their party.
You're right, it was more than dozens. I think my mental model is something like:
- Dozens of severely bad actors - many of which actually did intend abduction or murder. These people are terrifying.
- Hundreds of bad actors. People attempting to subvert democracy which, despite sounding alarmist or cheesy without proper context (You need to see the videos to understand, I think) is also very scary. These people will hurt you for their political cause.
- Thousands of people convinced that their political system, their democracy, isn't serving them. This is alright with me - I think they were convinced by the bad/severely bad actors, and I believe this happens on all political spectrums. I know many "left leaning" folks with arguably insane ideas about politics and society in general, so this isn't a republican disorder. I don't resent them or even myself for coming to unreasonable conclusions and I believe they're actually trying to improve their situation in the way they know how. Being wrong in and of itself isn't a crime, I suppose. Protesting on bad information is unfortunate, but not criminal.
I have sympathy for all of these people. Things seem pretty awful for them right now, whether it should or not. It all seems very self-inflicted. Regardless, it seems a lot of manipulation has been involved. It's very cult-like. Power hungry folks have recruited disenfranchised individuals to serve their agendas. It's really sad.
The rest of the republican voters will be a mix of these groups, but I suspect they've come to terms with the election despite disappointment. They don't want to zip tie anyone in congress or illegally overturn the election.
The bad actors really should experience consequences. They are a rot that contaminates the people around them. Whether they intend that or not, have good intentions or not, they have become so unreasonable and dangerous that they need to be contained at the least. I believe that includes Donald Trump most of all.
The FBI only lists around 30 people wanted on anything more serious than unlawful entry, violent entry, trespassing, or similar. They weren't even charged with rioting because (as these videos show), wandering around gawking at the Capitol building isn't rioting by any reasonable definition. That wandering also doesn't play well with the idea that they intended violence against the legislature.
Yes, they should probably be charged with something, but the punishment should fit the crime and I doubt most of those people will have anything super serious happen (even if the Judge is trying to send a message).
EDIT: as it seems unclear, these are people WANTED for crimes NOT people actually charged (that number is lower).
> The FBI only lists around 30 people wanted on anything more serious than unlawful entry, violent entry, trespassing, or similar.
That number is increasing daily. The easy charges come first, because the evidence needed to make them withstand a probable cause hearing is trivial.
> They weren't even charged with rioting because
...For the people (those charged only in D.C. Superior Court) for whom more serious charges weren't already clearly available, the unlawful entry charge is open and shut for arrest and extra charges while investigation continues as to the full set of charges each should face doesn't actually do anything. Also, riot in the D.C. code isn't a more serious offense than unlawful entry on public property.
While for those already charged in US District Court for US Code offenses, most of which are felonies, the D.C. Code misdemeanor for rioting is an irrelevancy.
Storming parliament is fundamentally different from walking down some street with signs.
That's true even if the same amount of violence somehow happens at those events.
Which it didn't: These people had functioning gallows, yelled "kill Mike Pence", actually beat a police officer to death, managed to trample four of their own to death, brought zip-ties to take hostages, etc.
You should look at the actual charges for the things you mention.
ZERO charges of rioting. ZERO charges of attempted kidnapping. ZERO charges of insurrection. ZERO charges related to congress-people in any way, shape or form.
Zip-tie guy (the retired Lt. Col) and other zip-tie guy: entering a restricted building, violent entry, and disorderly conduct. NOTHING about your kidnapping claims.
Likewise, Viking Dude, West Virginia Rep, confederate flag guy, Auschwitz guy Olympic Gold Medalist, and around 60 others: entering a restricted building, violent entry, and disorderly conduct. Sometimes restricted building charge is swapped for obstruction, picketing in the Capitol, trespassing, or dropped completely
Molotov guy: 16 DC unregistered weapon violations, 2 federal violations (probably Molotovs), but he wasn't actually in the Capitol as far as I can tell, so any mention of those completely lacks intent.
Other big weapon guy: Making threats and unlicensed weapons, but again, not actually charged for being near the Capitol.
Guy sitting in Pelosi's desk, fur coat guy, and podium guy: violent entry, disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds, and theft of public money, property or records.
Police officers: not sure about charges, but claim the DC police let them in which would probably mean nothing sticks.
Another guy got a curfew and unlawful entry for standing in a parking lot. Got to pump up the numbers somehow.
Now, we DO have 1 murderer (killed police officer with fire extinguisher). We have around 18 people wanted for "assault" (which includes simply shoving an officer -- serious, but nothing unusual during protests). We have 7 other people wanted for a police beating that ARE serious.
Finally, we have a seemingly unrelated pipe bomber who was likely using the event for cover. He/She (unlike everyone at the Capitol) made sure to cover their face and targeted the DNC/RNC headquarters rather than being involved in the "stop the steal" protest.
That's at MOST 30 people who did anything more than wandering around the capitol. Notice also that they didn't even try to charge with rioting. That's three orders of magnitude LESS than a single percent of all protesters.
Meanwhile, Antifa was blowing up firework cannonballs in the faces of police in Oregon for MONTHS at a FEDERAL courthouse. They called to kill all kinds of people -- including the president and vice president. There's videos of them doing stuff like lying in wait with hammers until police tried to go through the door. They tried to block police inside a precinct and burn it down. They beat scores of police to a bloody pulp. I don't care how you try to paint it, that was a way worse event both by the percent of protesters involved in violence and by the raw numbers of hospitalizations, permanently disabled or dead people at their hands.
As to trampling, it's sad, but people have gotten trampled to death at all kinds of events and it doesn't really indicate very much. For example, in 2019, 3 people got trampled to death in a St. Patrick's Day line. Around 150 people got trampled to death in 2020, and that's just the ones recorded on Wikipedia. This isn't a good argument for anything and might have happened anyway.
I hold that all 30 of those people at the Capitol should be found, arrested, and charged. I don't agree that a couple hundred thousand other people should be tarred and feathered along with them. I especially dislike the hypocrisy that the worst political violence in the US since the Civil War should be labelled as perfectly acceptable just because you agree with their end goal because the end does NOT justify those means.
> ZERO charges of rioting. ZERO charges of attempted kidnapping. ZERO charges of insurrection. ZERO charges related to congress-people in any way, shape or form.
The initial charges in any event like this are whatever is easiest to get to withstand a probable cause hearing. Serious charges that aren't immediately, trivially clear from the circumstances of arrest take more time (especially in the Federal system, where serious charges require indictment or the defense agreeing to proceed by information, which usually only happens with a plea bargain.)
Also, the District Court-charged unlawful entry on restricted building or grounds charges (which sound superficially similar to the D.C. Superior Court-charged unlawful entry on public property charges) are, actually, much more serious offenses about the more limited zones designated for the security of the President, Vice President, President-elect, VP-elect, and other Secret Service protectees.
> That’s at MOST 30 people
No, it’s AT LEAST 26 people, not AT MOST 30. There’s no upper bound provided by the currently identified perpetrators of violent acts.
> Most of those didn't have large groups just standing around waving signs and chanting -- almost everyone was involved in the violence and destruction
This is demonstrably false, and you should retract it.
Second, it is qualitatively different to riot and break into one of our main bodies of government and threaten the lives of anyone (even if it was just a select few out of the larger whole) during an important part of the process of our peaceful transition of power. To simply equate this rioting to this summer's protests (and yes riots) and say "it's all wrong" is to almost miss the point entirely about what the impact, the risks, and the response to these two things should be.
And while I would broadly agree that most of the content collected here is of angry, mostly harmless (and willfully misinformed) constituents asking for their voice to be heard, what I also saw was:
* Largely unanimous support for attacking the police, breaking and entering into the Capitol, people cheering and laughing at everyone trespassing, breaking barricades. Definitely no signs of disapproval or concern for the police, the Congress, public property, or even the optics of the situation.
There were of course a couple of instances of "don't hurt the cops" but they were completely outnumbered by the "this is OUR HOUSE"/1776 crowd.
* If you just watch the last 2 hours of video - when the National Guard arrived, pushed people out of the building, then off the Capitol, out of the Mall, and so on - the videos turned extremely angry, negative, "f*k the police", "traitors!" etc it is absolutely clear that the only reason you have such a positive vibe about the first half of the videos is because there was such little resistance to their actions during the first half.
If there had been armed National Guard presence there from the outset, this would've been much uglier, without the "waving flags and chanting" you see.
There were 100-200,000 people. Less than 100 were wanted for entering the capitol. Less than 30 of those got charged with more than some variant of unlawful entering. NONE got charged with the stuff people have been talking about (I go into the details in another post on this thread).
Even with the National Guard and the anger at being disrupted, they still left and the violence didn't hold a candle to most protests (You should look up videos of the Antifa attacks on the Federal Government in Oregon or any of the other large protests over last summer and you'll see what I'm talking about).
> Less than 30 of those got charged with more than some variant of unlawful entering.
You say “got charged” as if we were at the point where either a criminal grand jury would have completed its work indicting on any but the most readily-apparent-from-circumstances felonies or defendants would have completed plea bargaining (which is typically the only time they would waive indictment.)
We’ve only just started to see the first of the follow-on charges after the ones that are trivially established by the circumstances of arrest or video evidence, such as the conspiracy charges against a grop of Oath Keepers.
I mean, just as a basic counterpoint, there are way more than 100 people inside the Capitol in these videos; and hundreds more trespassed at least onto the Capitol steps.
Heck, you can see way more than 100 people pushing against Daniel Hodges and his team, the guard in the infamous "crushing" video
They are all committing assault. Of course most of them aren't wanted or charged or ever will be. But they are certainly not a small number.
And to blithely suggest the people standing 200 or 500 or even 1,000 feet away from them cheering them on wouldn't have gladly pushed on that officer as well ... based on the videos here, you're clearly wrong.
Also, over 100 people have already been arrested in connection with the attack, virtually all of them people who were detained or identified from video within the Capitol. And, per the FBI, there are more than 300 current active investigations, and that number is increasing. The “less than 100 wanted” simply doesn’t map in any reasonable way to reality.
> As I said before, I have zero tolerance for the violent people at the Capital.
As you spend your entire comment denying the huge amount of violence that happened that day. Man you are really sold on ignoring any of the violence that happened that day, aren't you?
There are a great many more videos of violence happening that day, but really you only need one video of insurrections, in the capitol building after they broke in, fighting as a mob against an out-numbered group of frantic police officers, to conclude the event was violent. You can't have a group of people nearby or inside the capitol building literally beat a police officer to death and "undo" said violence by having a lot of people outside the building standing around outside innocently shouting, "Hang Mike Pence!"
Also, although it seemed like everybody posted every video they took that day, that probably isn't true. It's reasonable to believe that these people had some inhibition from posting videos in which their side obviously looked bad, which would bias the corpus of videos to be that much more "friendly" to the insurrectionists.
Watch the video "12:16 p.m. • Around D.C." and you can clearly see content-aware deep fake filling of crowds to increase the appearance of their magnitude. The so-called
"Parler dataset" is completely useless as anything but a curiosity with respect to examining the nature of emerging digital ground-truth and perception metrics. Nothing contained in it is verifiable, and in my opinion it would be wise to be very skeptical of anything you encounter regarding it.
Of all the arguments to be had, this seems the weakest. 75M people voted for Trump. Of those, almost 80% believe the election was stolen. According to Politico, there's still 10% (higher by some other polls) of Democrats who also believe the election was not legitimate.
Getting just 1% of them (the serious believers) to show up would be around 700,000 people. Most claims are under half that number. That's not a lot when considering true believers who think it's their last chance to save America.
Are you arguing that because there are hypothetically a million mobilizable supporters of Trump that the image doesn’t clearly contain deep fake crowd size expansion? Refer to the image. It is as clear as day.
In this case there is clear evidence that tampering of images and video of the event has taken place. If you look at the video and many of the still images from Getty of Jan. 6th you can clearly see content-aware crowd filling alteration. This evidence does not in any way necessarily imply the existence of a grand conspiracy, nor am I making any claim supporting anything of that nature.
Doesn't exactly look worthy of losing our collective freedom of speech and right to assemble over. A stark contrast over the story being pushed in the media.
Yet this event will be used as a scapegoat to push those very things in the near future.
Just know that any laws passed or precedents set will be used first on the "radical right", will undoubtedly be used on the anti-vax and conspiracy crowd but will eventually be used on the anti-war left, and then simply "dissidents".
If you haven't realized it yet, the wheels are turning to silence unapproved narratives forever. The media campaign just screams the phrase "manufacturing consent".
So it's not the people that participated in an seditious attack on the capital and the most cherished democratic process, the democratic choosing of the US president that are the problem here? They built gallows outside the capital, they screamed "hang Mike Pence" because he didn't literally attempt to end American democracy for them.
It's still "those other people who want to take our freedumbs away" that are the problem?
This feels a lot like the group of people whose first reaction to when a school gets massacred by yet another school shooting is, "My Second Amendment is going to be under attack now, this sucks!"
Exactly, that's how this works. They take all of our freedoms away while you cheer them on.
You know, this isn't the first time it's happened. People aren't just pulling this out of thin air. There's a very long history of these things playing out that way, time after time. We are currently in an era, since 2001, where every time the government or corporations decide to do something to "protect" us, they end up pushing us further into serfdom.
What I don't understand is how people still don't know their history, and think this time it's somehow different.
> What I don't understand is how people still don't know their history, and think this time it's somehow different.
Yes, let's talk about history. Let's see, was there another case study in history where you have a failed coup attempt spurred on by a egotistical leader whose shtick was to scapegoat sections of the population and play "us vs them" politics? How did that turn out?
If you're going to make claims as serious as attempting a coup, you'd better have evidence.
NOBODY was charged with rioting, let alone sedition or insurrection. Less than 30 in a crowd of a couple hundred thousand got charged with anything more serious than some variant of unlawful entry (and only about 100 people are wanted at all).
If such charges could be reasonably made, don't you think they would make them? The prosecutor isn't an idiot. He/She knows that no reasonable jury will convict on those charges. It would even be a great political win if they could get them to stick, but it's so far out of reach that they won't take on the loss and resulting publicity.
It's far easier for the media to make claims than to substantiate them. I'd guess that there's a serious risk of several big media companies being sued.
I'm using the same standard of evidence as those that claim the election was "stolen", "rigged", "totally rigged election I won bigger than the biggest winner of all time".
If you want to clamor for higher standards of evidence, start with them.
Also the mob's purpose was to disrupt the electoral process and to coerce Pence to subvert the will of the American people. The evidence is plastered all over the internet in the many videos posted by said insurrectionists.
Insurrection: a violent uprising against an authority or government.
Let's see 5 people dead(check, violent).
Attempting to destroy democracy in American by attempting to nullify the vote of the people (check, definitely an uprising against the government).
Edit: And... conspiracy charges just filed: https://www.wsj.com/articles/first-conspiracy-charges-filed-.... Be real, there are going to be many charges related to this event, it's a common practice to use a limited set of charges to begin the arrest and prosecution process and filling in more charges as the investigations progresses.
You do realize that riot in the D.C. code is a (trivially—180 days vs. 6 months—but still) less serious offense than the minimum offense charged for anyone who entered the capitol, “Unlawful entry on public property”, right?
And that initial charges are often whatever is easiest to get to withstand a probable cause hearing based on the conditions of arrest, and “unlawful entry” is pretty easy to pin on anyone caught in, or videotaped in, the Capitol building during the event. Like, open-and-shut.
> (and only about 100 people are wanted at all).
As of two days ago, 116 had been charged (74 in US District Court, 42 in D.C. Superior Court) and more than 300 were being investigated.
> If such charges could be reasonably made, don’t you think they would make them?
No, I wouldn’t expect indictments or plea bargains for any but the most trivially-apparent offenses to be announced right away, because they both take time to present to a grand jury (or to negotiate with the defense to get an agreement to proceed without indictment), and because they tip the hand to others under investigation and risk destruction of evidence.
> The prosecutor isn’t an idiot.
Correct, which is why when they have an easy charge to arrest on, they don’t see the need to tip their hand on much else prematurely, and there is nothing easier than the unlawful entry charges.
I dont understand how you arent seeing the present. Parlar is back up and you are still whining about private organizations excercizing their right to not assemble with non protected classes. Now if you have an anti trust problem with these companies, I think you would be hitting on more important protections of liberties.
Are you using your energy to protest against Florida silencing that data scientist? That is direct government censorship of life protecting information and government accountability. Why us that not as important than treating Parlar with extraodinary privileges that we dont provide to any other outlet? It makes me think these free speech arguments are made in less than good faith.
I'm afraid I see it differently. After years of carefully watching the media, I've realized that they do not have the citizen's best interests at heart. Whatever they're pushing, I'm intensely suspicious of.
Here's an interesting thought experiment for you to conduct:
What if these incidiary figures committing violence, egging on fellow protestors and erecting guillotines at the Capitol were actually bad actors with a nefarious agenda.
The crazier the crowd looks, the easier it is to ram through legislation that curtails the right to dissent. Personally I find it completely believable and considering the events of the last couple years, likely.
Unfortunately it's not exactly spelled out for you like that. Can you imagine though?
As seen on a hypothetical NBC Nightly News broadcast: "The government is using its influence over corporate media to shape public opinion in an effort to remove constitutionally protected rights like free speech and the right to assemble.. Now is the time to protest if you want to have any chance at keeping them"
That would never happen. Efforts like this much more hidden and shrouded in secrecy. Out of necessity... They don't want protesting.
The theft of your most sacred rights will not be broadcasted to you before it happens. All of a sudden you'll wake up one day, and they'll be gone. Unless you resist of course.
> The theft of your most sacred rights will not be broadcasted to you before it happens.
I’ve seen plenty of people actively working to suppress voting rights, free speech and other free expression rights, due process rights, the right to keep and bear arms, and other rights I and/or many others view as “sacred” who openly broadcast the restrictions they want to impose on those rights and the claimed justifications for them.
Of course, if you want to argue against an occult conspiracy against rights, that’s fine, too, but its better if you provide some reason other than “If it did, you wouldn’t see it” to believe that occult conspiracy exists.
44 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 106 ms ] thread[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.04826.pdf VoiceFilter: Targeted Voice Separation by Speaker-Conditioned Spectrogram Masking
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=propublica.org
Regardless, Id like to see this with other events as well, even casual events.
I suspect because if people watched those videos, they'd come away with a very different perspective. Pretty much all you see is people standing around waving signs and chanting -- literally textbook non-violent protesting. Once you see them enter the Capital, you still don't see waves of violence and destruction. There are a couple-dozen aggressive/violent people at most (and those people should definitely be arrested and charged).
In contrast, I've seen hundreds of videos of other riots throughout the year where you get hundreds of videos of the violence (along with the videos of people getting chased down and beaten up for violating the "no cameras rule" because they don't want to be filmed doing horrible things. Most of those didn't have large groups just standing around waving signs and chanting -- almost everyone was involved in the violence and destruction. There was an interesting article I read that the riots this year caused more property damage than any in US history by property insurance claims. That's not including people hurt/killed, all the property damages under 10-20k per building where it costs more to file than to pay out of pocket, vehicles totaled, government buildings ruined (that the people's taxes have to pay to repair), etc.
As I said before, I have zero tolerance for the violent people at the Capital. I also have zero tolerance for those beating up and hospitalizing thousands (probably tens of thousands) throughout the summer. This is in stark contrast to most news organizations and even prominent politicians who stated that the massive violent protest was a necessary and acceptable idea while then decrying the couple dozen violent protestors at the Capital as the basest kind of evil when all of it was evil political violence and was all wrong.
I think it’s plain to see that most Americans don’t want to murder politicians. The Republican voters who feel disenfranchised aren’t all sharpening their axes right now.
I think it’s insane what happened. It just isn’t representative of republicans.
Not sure what to do with that. I’m Canadian so I suppose it doesn’t matter much. I only see what the media gives me and I don’t personally know a lot of Americans, let alone republicans.
I wouldn't say violence of this sort is representative of Republicans, but Republicans are too accepting of the extremists that this event grew out of. One of them is the leader of their party.
- Dozens of severely bad actors - many of which actually did intend abduction or murder. These people are terrifying.
- Hundreds of bad actors. People attempting to subvert democracy which, despite sounding alarmist or cheesy without proper context (You need to see the videos to understand, I think) is also very scary. These people will hurt you for their political cause.
- Thousands of people convinced that their political system, their democracy, isn't serving them. This is alright with me - I think they were convinced by the bad/severely bad actors, and I believe this happens on all political spectrums. I know many "left leaning" folks with arguably insane ideas about politics and society in general, so this isn't a republican disorder. I don't resent them or even myself for coming to unreasonable conclusions and I believe they're actually trying to improve their situation in the way they know how. Being wrong in and of itself isn't a crime, I suppose. Protesting on bad information is unfortunate, but not criminal.
I have sympathy for all of these people. Things seem pretty awful for them right now, whether it should or not. It all seems very self-inflicted. Regardless, it seems a lot of manipulation has been involved. It's very cult-like. Power hungry folks have recruited disenfranchised individuals to serve their agendas. It's really sad.
The rest of the republican voters will be a mix of these groups, but I suspect they've come to terms with the election despite disappointment. They don't want to zip tie anyone in congress or illegally overturn the election.
The bad actors really should experience consequences. They are a rot that contaminates the people around them. Whether they intend that or not, have good intentions or not, they have become so unreasonable and dangerous that they need to be contained at the least. I believe that includes Donald Trump most of all.
Yes, they should probably be charged with something, but the punishment should fit the crime and I doubt most of those people will have anything super serious happen (even if the Judge is trying to send a message).
EDIT: as it seems unclear, these are people WANTED for crimes NOT people actually charged (that number is lower).
That number is increasing daily. The easy charges come first, because the evidence needed to make them withstand a probable cause hearing is trivial.
> They weren't even charged with rioting because
...For the people (those charged only in D.C. Superior Court) for whom more serious charges weren't already clearly available, the unlawful entry charge is open and shut for arrest and extra charges while investigation continues as to the full set of charges each should face doesn't actually do anything. Also, riot in the D.C. code isn't a more serious offense than unlawful entry on public property.
While for those already charged in US District Court for US Code offenses, most of which are felonies, the D.C. Code misdemeanor for rioting is an irrelevancy.
That's true even if the same amount of violence somehow happens at those events.
Which it didn't: These people had functioning gallows, yelled "kill Mike Pence", actually beat a police officer to death, managed to trample four of their own to death, brought zip-ties to take hostages, etc.
And you consider that peaceful?
ZERO charges of rioting. ZERO charges of attempted kidnapping. ZERO charges of insurrection. ZERO charges related to congress-people in any way, shape or form.
Zip-tie guy (the retired Lt. Col) and other zip-tie guy: entering a restricted building, violent entry, and disorderly conduct. NOTHING about your kidnapping claims.
Likewise, Viking Dude, West Virginia Rep, confederate flag guy, Auschwitz guy Olympic Gold Medalist, and around 60 others: entering a restricted building, violent entry, and disorderly conduct. Sometimes restricted building charge is swapped for obstruction, picketing in the Capitol, trespassing, or dropped completely
Molotov guy: 16 DC unregistered weapon violations, 2 federal violations (probably Molotovs), but he wasn't actually in the Capitol as far as I can tell, so any mention of those completely lacks intent.
Other big weapon guy: Making threats and unlicensed weapons, but again, not actually charged for being near the Capitol.
Guy sitting in Pelosi's desk, fur coat guy, and podium guy: violent entry, disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds, and theft of public money, property or records.
Police officers: not sure about charges, but claim the DC police let them in which would probably mean nothing sticks.
Another guy got a curfew and unlawful entry for standing in a parking lot. Got to pump up the numbers somehow.
Now, we DO have 1 murderer (killed police officer with fire extinguisher). We have around 18 people wanted for "assault" (which includes simply shoving an officer -- serious, but nothing unusual during protests). We have 7 other people wanted for a police beating that ARE serious.
Finally, we have a seemingly unrelated pipe bomber who was likely using the event for cover. He/She (unlike everyone at the Capitol) made sure to cover their face and targeted the DNC/RNC headquarters rather than being involved in the "stop the steal" protest.
That's at MOST 30 people who did anything more than wandering around the capitol. Notice also that they didn't even try to charge with rioting. That's three orders of magnitude LESS than a single percent of all protesters.
Meanwhile, Antifa was blowing up firework cannonballs in the faces of police in Oregon for MONTHS at a FEDERAL courthouse. They called to kill all kinds of people -- including the president and vice president. There's videos of them doing stuff like lying in wait with hammers until police tried to go through the door. They tried to block police inside a precinct and burn it down. They beat scores of police to a bloody pulp. I don't care how you try to paint it, that was a way worse event both by the percent of protesters involved in violence and by the raw numbers of hospitalizations, permanently disabled or dead people at their hands.
As to trampling, it's sad, but people have gotten trampled to death at all kinds of events and it doesn't really indicate very much. For example, in 2019, 3 people got trampled to death in a St. Patrick's Day line. Around 150 people got trampled to death in 2020, and that's just the ones recorded on Wikipedia. This isn't a good argument for anything and might have happened anyway.
I hold that all 30 of those people at the Capitol should be found, arrested, and charged. I don't agree that a couple hundred thousand other people should be tarred and feathered along with them. I especially dislike the hypocrisy that the worst political violence in the US since the Civil War should be labelled as perfectly acceptable just because you agree with their end goal because the end does NOT justify those means.
The initial charges in any event like this are whatever is easiest to get to withstand a probable cause hearing. Serious charges that aren't immediately, trivially clear from the circumstances of arrest take more time (especially in the Federal system, where serious charges require indictment or the defense agreeing to proceed by information, which usually only happens with a plea bargain.)
Also, the District Court-charged unlawful entry on restricted building or grounds charges (which sound superficially similar to the D.C. Superior Court-charged unlawful entry on public property charges) are, actually, much more serious offenses about the more limited zones designated for the security of the President, Vice President, President-elect, VP-elect, and other Secret Service protectees.
> That’s at MOST 30 people
No, it’s AT LEAST 26 people, not AT MOST 30. There’s no upper bound provided by the currently identified perpetrators of violent acts.
This is demonstrably false, and you should retract it.
Second, it is qualitatively different to riot and break into one of our main bodies of government and threaten the lives of anyone (even if it was just a select few out of the larger whole) during an important part of the process of our peaceful transition of power. To simply equate this rioting to this summer's protests (and yes riots) and say "it's all wrong" is to almost miss the point entirely about what the impact, the risks, and the response to these two things should be.
And while I would broadly agree that most of the content collected here is of angry, mostly harmless (and willfully misinformed) constituents asking for their voice to be heard, what I also saw was:
* Largely unanimous support for attacking the police, breaking and entering into the Capitol, people cheering and laughing at everyone trespassing, breaking barricades. Definitely no signs of disapproval or concern for the police, the Congress, public property, or even the optics of the situation.
There were of course a couple of instances of "don't hurt the cops" but they were completely outnumbered by the "this is OUR HOUSE"/1776 crowd.
* If you just watch the last 2 hours of video - when the National Guard arrived, pushed people out of the building, then off the Capitol, out of the Mall, and so on - the videos turned extremely angry, negative, "f*k the police", "traitors!" etc it is absolutely clear that the only reason you have such a positive vibe about the first half of the videos is because there was such little resistance to their actions during the first half.
If there had been armed National Guard presence there from the outset, this would've been much uglier, without the "waving flags and chanting" you see.
Even with the National Guard and the anger at being disrupted, they still left and the violence didn't hold a candle to most protests (You should look up videos of the Antifa attacks on the Federal Government in Oregon or any of the other large protests over last summer and you'll see what I'm talking about).
You say “got charged” as if we were at the point where either a criminal grand jury would have completed its work indicting on any but the most readily-apparent-from-circumstances felonies or defendants would have completed plea bargaining (which is typically the only time they would waive indictment.)
We’ve only just started to see the first of the follow-on charges after the ones that are trivially established by the circumstances of arrest or video evidence, such as the conspiracy charges against a grop of Oath Keepers.
Heck, you can see way more than 100 people pushing against Daniel Hodges and his team, the guard in the infamous "crushing" video
https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/national/video-shows-dc...
They are all committing assault. Of course most of them aren't wanted or charged or ever will be. But they are certainly not a small number.
And to blithely suggest the people standing 200 or 500 or even 1,000 feet away from them cheering them on wouldn't have gladly pushed on that officer as well ... based on the videos here, you're clearly wrong.
As you spend your entire comment denying the huge amount of violence that happened that day. Man you are really sold on ignoring any of the violence that happened that day, aren't you?
https://d2hxwnssq7ss7g.cloudfront.net/x2GqSN2kAGY3_cvt.mp4
There are a great many more videos of violence happening that day, but really you only need one video of insurrections, in the capitol building after they broke in, fighting as a mob against an out-numbered group of frantic police officers, to conclude the event was violent. You can't have a group of people nearby or inside the capitol building literally beat a police officer to death and "undo" said violence by having a lot of people outside the building standing around outside innocently shouting, "Hang Mike Pence!"
Also, although it seemed like everybody posted every video they took that day, that probably isn't true. It's reasonable to believe that these people had some inhibition from posting videos in which their side obviously looked bad, which would bias the corpus of videos to be that much more "friendly" to the insurrectionists.
It's not clear to me, could you elaborate?
Getting just 1% of them (the serious believers) to show up would be around 700,000 people. Most claims are under half that number. That's not a lot when considering true believers who think it's their last chance to save America.
Yet this event will be used as a scapegoat to push those very things in the near future.
Just know that any laws passed or precedents set will be used first on the "radical right", will undoubtedly be used on the anti-vax and conspiracy crowd but will eventually be used on the anti-war left, and then simply "dissidents".
If you haven't realized it yet, the wheels are turning to silence unapproved narratives forever. The media campaign just screams the phrase "manufacturing consent".
It's still "those other people who want to take our freedumbs away" that are the problem?
This feels a lot like the group of people whose first reaction to when a school gets massacred by yet another school shooting is, "My Second Amendment is going to be under attack now, this sucks!"
You know, this isn't the first time it's happened. People aren't just pulling this out of thin air. There's a very long history of these things playing out that way, time after time. We are currently in an era, since 2001, where every time the government or corporations decide to do something to "protect" us, they end up pushing us further into serfdom.
What I don't understand is how people still don't know their history, and think this time it's somehow different.
Yes, let's talk about history. Let's see, was there another case study in history where you have a failed coup attempt spurred on by a egotistical leader whose shtick was to scapegoat sections of the population and play "us vs them" politics? How did that turn out?
NOBODY was charged with rioting, let alone sedition or insurrection. Less than 30 in a crowd of a couple hundred thousand got charged with anything more serious than some variant of unlawful entry (and only about 100 people are wanted at all).
If such charges could be reasonably made, don't you think they would make them? The prosecutor isn't an idiot. He/She knows that no reasonable jury will convict on those charges. It would even be a great political win if they could get them to stick, but it's so far out of reach that they won't take on the loss and resulting publicity.
It's far easier for the media to make claims than to substantiate them. I'd guess that there's a serious risk of several big media companies being sued.
If you want to clamor for higher standards of evidence, start with them.
Also the mob's purpose was to disrupt the electoral process and to coerce Pence to subvert the will of the American people. The evidence is plastered all over the internet in the many videos posted by said insurrectionists.
Insurrection: a violent uprising against an authority or government.
Let's see 5 people dead(check, violent).
Attempting to destroy democracy in American by attempting to nullify the vote of the people (check, definitely an uprising against the government).
Edit: And... conspiracy charges just filed: https://www.wsj.com/articles/first-conspiracy-charges-filed-.... Be real, there are going to be many charges related to this event, it's a common practice to use a limited set of charges to begin the arrest and prosecution process and filling in more charges as the investigations progresses.
You do realize that riot in the D.C. code is a (trivially—180 days vs. 6 months—but still) less serious offense than the minimum offense charged for anyone who entered the capitol, “Unlawful entry on public property”, right?
And that initial charges are often whatever is easiest to get to withstand a probable cause hearing based on the conditions of arrest, and “unlawful entry” is pretty easy to pin on anyone caught in, or videotaped in, the Capitol building during the event. Like, open-and-shut.
> (and only about 100 people are wanted at all).
As of two days ago, 116 had been charged (74 in US District Court, 42 in D.C. Superior Court) and more than 300 were being investigated.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/fbi-releases-photos-sus...
> If such charges could be reasonably made, don’t you think they would make them?
No, I wouldn’t expect indictments or plea bargains for any but the most trivially-apparent offenses to be announced right away, because they both take time to present to a grand jury (or to negotiate with the defense to get an agreement to proceed without indictment), and because they tip the hand to others under investigation and risk destruction of evidence.
> The prosecutor isn’t an idiot.
Correct, which is why when they have an easy charge to arrest on, they don’t see the need to tip their hand on much else prematurely, and there is nothing easier than the unlawful entry charges.
Are you using your energy to protest against Florida silencing that data scientist? That is direct government censorship of life protecting information and government accountability. Why us that not as important than treating Parlar with extraodinary privileges that we dont provide to any other outlet? It makes me think these free speech arguments are made in less than good faith.
Here's an interesting thought experiment for you to conduct:
What if these incidiary figures committing violence, egging on fellow protestors and erecting guillotines at the Capitol were actually bad actors with a nefarious agenda.
The crazier the crowd looks, the easier it is to ram through legislation that curtails the right to dissent. Personally I find it completely believable and considering the events of the last couple years, likely.
No one has suggested it is, so I’m not sure why you are beating that strawman.
As seen on a hypothetical NBC Nightly News broadcast: "The government is using its influence over corporate media to shape public opinion in an effort to remove constitutionally protected rights like free speech and the right to assemble.. Now is the time to protest if you want to have any chance at keeping them"
That would never happen. Efforts like this much more hidden and shrouded in secrecy. Out of necessity... They don't want protesting.
The theft of your most sacred rights will not be broadcasted to you before it happens. All of a sudden you'll wake up one day, and they'll be gone. Unless you resist of course.
I’ve seen plenty of people actively working to suppress voting rights, free speech and other free expression rights, due process rights, the right to keep and bear arms, and other rights I and/or many others view as “sacred” who openly broadcast the restrictions they want to impose on those rights and the claimed justifications for them.
Of course, if you want to argue against an occult conspiracy against rights, that’s fine, too, but its better if you provide some reason other than “If it did, you wouldn’t see it” to believe that occult conspiracy exists.