The Protest Thread

[verb_to_trust]

Who could have predicted that fucking around on a highway would cause something like that to happen?

[Bi_3]

Highways often exhibit problematic behavior

[simple schoolboy]

Huh. They are staying behind the fence this time.

[blueviper]

Huh. They are staying behind the fence this time.

So are they there to continue their protest against the mayor or is this a new protest against the lawyer couple?

[Bi_3]

https://www.cbs46.com/news/shooting-lea ... 8.amp.html

a car exited the interstate and was subsequently stopped by armed protesters near the intersection of University Ave. and Pryor Rd. Authorities told CBS46 that's when gunfire was exchanged and the child was shot.

A car attacked by protesters? Surely that doesn’t happen

[Mickey]

https://www.cbs46.com/news/shooting-lea ... 8.amp.html

a car exited the interstate and was subsequently stopped by armed protesters near the intersection of University Ave. and Pryor Rd. Authorities told CBS46 that's when gunfire was exchanged and the child was shot.

A car attacked by protesters? Surely that doesn’t happen

The fun thing about digital news--the article has already been updated and no longer says protestors.

[Mickey]

It's a good time to revisit an earlier question though, as you seem dead-set on making two points here: one, that these protests are extraordinarily violent towards innocent civilians; and two, that they express some kind of existential threat to US liberalism. As I've said repeatedly, in this thread and others, for both of these claims you're going to have to show that what you're seeing is not a fringe bullshit, online chatter, random occurrences, and so forth.

So leaving aside the fact that the young girl's shooting is no longer being associated with the protests (I checked multiple local news websites and not a single one describes the armed men as "protestors,--of course this could change as more evidence comes out but for now it seems best to move on from this specific example), you might be interested to know that a recent study about the protests estimated that there have been at least 4700 different events in which, collectively, 15 to 26 million people participated.

The link is here.

Just for those of us keeping score at home, that would mean you'd need 50 discrete instances of violence on innocent bystanders to even get a 1% figure, if we're judging each event as its own instance. But given how large and heterogeneous these protests are, it would probably make more sense, or it would be more persuasive, to argue based on total number of violent actors/radicals relative to overall group size in order to show that there really is a threat, either to bystanders or certain cherished ideals. So your magic number there would be anywhere from 150000 to 260000.

[The Argonaut]

Are you holding the protestors to a different standard than the police? The police only murder about a thousand people every year, but interact with people millions of times. Are violent police just a fringe of an otherwise good group of people? Is it just a few bad apples?

[verb_to_trust]

Saying police murder 1,000 people a year isn't accurate. That is the rough total of fatal shootings per year, many of which are you know... justified.

[Mickey]

Are you holding the protestors to a different standard than the police? The police only murder about a thousand people every year, but interact with people millions of times. Are violent police just a fringe of an otherwise good group of people? Is it just a few bad apples?

No.

[verb_to_trust]

Are you holding the protestors to a different standard than the police? The police only murder about a thousand people every year, but interact with people millions of times. Are violent police just a fringe of an otherwise good group of people? Is it just a few bad apples?

No.

Yes

[Mickey]

Oh well in that case.

[verb_to_trust]

Now we're moving the goalposts. Awesome.

Edit: you deleted

[McParadigm]

Why....why wouldn’t you hold authorized, trained and armed law enforcement to a higher standard than everyday citizens?

[The Argonaut]

Protestors vs Police. This is the level of nuance that I can understand

[Mickey]

Leaving aside, of course, the fact that it would be entirely reasonable to hold a loose aggregate of entirely unregulated people from varying backgrounds and with diverse motives to a different standard than a publicly-funded employment group subject to standardized training and their own set of legal boundaries.

[verb_to_trust]

Why....why wouldn’t you hold authorized, trained and armed law enforcement to a higher standard than everyday citizens?

99.999 percent of interactions being safe is actually a higher standard, bud

[verb_to_trust]

Leaving aside, of course, the fact that it would be entirely reasonable to hold a loose aggregate of entirely unregulated people from varying backgrounds and with diverse motives to a different standard than a publicly-funded employment group subject to standardized training and their own set of legal boundaries.

Just run them over

[The Argonaut]

verb, I was being facetious. Don't jump on this bandwagon for real

[verb_to_trust]

The Seattle utopia lasted what, two weeks before murders shut it down?