A few thoughts about January 6, 2021
- Thread starter ObsidianJones
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If they censor Twitter, and Reddit I will go underground to the dark web. The corporate shills at the establishment will never convince me to embrace the corporate status quo.
Imbeciles.
Eight Months After The Capitol Riots, Thousands Of Hours Of Surveillance Footage Remain Secret
There are 14,000 hours of surveillance footage from the Capitol riots. Most of it isn’t public, and the government is fighting to keep it that way.
www.buzzfeednews.com
Cases against 17 people charged in Jan. 6 Capitol riot on hold after lawyer goes missing
An associate told a judge John M. Pierce was in a car accident, then told another judge Pierce was on a ventilator, hospitalized with COVID-19.
Capitol riot defender reportedly has Covid, bringing cases to a standstill, DOJ says
A prominent lawyer has not been appearing at recent court hearings on behalf of some of his nearly 20 US Capitol riot clients after reportedly becoming ill with Covid-19, the Department of Justice said in court filings in multiple cases on Monday.
www.cnn.com
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You know, I've never taken the whole "civil war" thing seriously. I've always thought it was just some stupid survivalist assholes on one side making a lot of stupid remarks that were then getting blown out of proportion by the left.
In the last few months I have become increasingly concerned by just how many people seem to actually be completely insane in the US, and how many people who I thought would be normal actually support that insanity.
I own a few guns. I have never bought my guns explicitly with the intention or protecting myself. I bought them because I enjoy shooting and practicing as a sport. I am currently really glad that I have a bunch of guns and a bunch of ammo, and that I know how to use them. I still don't think Civil War 2 Electric Boogaloo is on the table yet, but people seem to really be trying to "yes and" each other into it.
In the last few months I have become increasingly concerned by just how many people seem to actually be completely insane in the US, and how many people who I thought would be normal actually support that insanity.
I own a few guns. I have never bought my guns explicitly with the intention or protecting myself. I bought them because I enjoy shooting and practicing as a sport. I am currently really glad that I have a bunch of guns and a bunch of ammo, and that I know how to use them. I still don't think Civil War 2 Electric Boogaloo is on the table yet, but people seem to really be trying to "yes and" each other into it.
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If i lived in the US right now, i'd own a gun or would be actively looking for one or two. The djinn is out of the bottle anyway.
I still refuse to own a gun because of my struggles with major depression. The last thing I want is an easy route to suicide in the house.
That said, I can tell who is a responsible gun owner and who isn't by their reaction to the above information. Responsible people say, "That's reasonable. I understand where you're coming from." Irresponsible people say literally anything else.
Marjorie is, I fear, one of those people who has absolutely no ability to discern the difference between tribal loyalty and ideological principles. She would institute a totalitarian government in the name of "freedom", because to her freedom means nothing more whatever she and hers say it does.
I touched on this in response to 'Bartholomew'. The scope of Reuter's statement is incredibly narrow and doesn't actually speak to what you and he are taking it to mean. Simply put, the statement in question speaks to lack of overarching organization and formal delegation rather than lack of criminality. Generously, the context might be assumed to mean lack of communications indicating premeditation (making it more a crime of passion), but contextual clues (and knowledge of the cases) show that even that's broader than the article could accurately intend, as we do have such communications for some of the subgroups within the rioters.But I just posted a couple of vids showing there was no conspiracy that has been found. And...
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Exclusive: FBI finds scant evidence U.S. Capitol attack was coordinated - sources
The FBI has found scant evidence that the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was the result of an organized plot to overturn the presidential election result, according to four current and former law enforcement officials.www.reuters.com
More to the point, conspiracy in the context of that headline is neither being used the legal sense (side note: several dozen of the rioters have in fact been charged with conspiracy, as even the same article notes) nor even a practically useful informal sense, but instead whether or not it included planning and delegation done on a grand scale before the riot. This is to say, whether or not the riots and charges of conspiracy were part of some organized and formalized "broader plot", or "grand scheme with Roger Stone and Alex Jones" as the article puts it.
This makes the article somewhat misleading, especially as it neglects to mention the charges and enhancements that are being applied, never mind the fact that various subgroups within the crowd (eg, the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers) did in fact have communications discussing how they intended to use the event to "turn the normies loose" with the goal of riling them up and inciting them to - in their own words - "burn the city to ash"), and the more academic point that a lack of coordination speaks more to lack of competence than lack of criminality or common goal. Not all serious criminal behavior is premeditated, after all.
Back to the point, however, 'conspiracy' in the context of the headline is about as narrow as saying "Chemical analysis showed no botulinum toxin in the Jonestown Kool-Aid", and the interpretation you're drawing from it would be equivalent to "Chemical analysis found no substantive poison in the Jonestown Kool-Aid" (for context, the Kool-Aid used cyanide), which is well beyond the scope of the statement.
It has always been virtually impossible to find a completely unbiased source. That is simply the nature of relaying information. It's an unfortunate truth of the world, but it is something that can be mitigated by understanding what that means in a real sense and consequentially doing a deeper dive than simply reading one or two ideologically aligned sources. Moreover, that no source is bias free does not mean that all sources are anywhere near equivalent.
For these discussions, there are two main axes that we have to judge each source on: reliability (aka factual accuracy) and partisanship (spin), and a given source can average anywhere on either axis. This is to say that the movie review philosophy of 'find a source that fits your likes/dislikes' does not apply here. Whatever the bias is, you try to identify and correct for, regardless of your personal philosophy. And if the source has low reliability then, as a matter of definition, you shouldn't trust it. It doesn't matter if you consider yourself ideologically aligned with them or not, any given reader should be going through this with every story from every source they reference.
As a baseline example, let's assume you're looking up some presidential speech, and look at how it's reported on Fox and CNN. How do these reports differ? Now, to be clear, this is not a matter of trying to figure out which source is superior. This is an exercise in identifying and accounting for source bias and being able to recognize it on either side of the aisle. You're looking for how each source tries to influence your interpretation of that event, via omission, weasel words/loaded language, opining, etc. The better you are at recognizing and excising those things, the more accurately the remainder reflects what we see in the primary source (in this example, the transcript and/or video record).
For illustrative purposes, let's invent a story. "In a terrifying twist today, Billy Bob called for the destruction of democracy by nominating the terrifying hellion that is Mittens the Kitten as his choice for supreme leader of this great nation". Now, most everything in that sentence is editorial fluff, value judgements of the writer projected onto the event. An active reader recognizes this and reads past it. They understand that when you remove the author's biases and loaded language the objective story is simply "Billy Bob nominated Mittens the Kitten for office". That's something that is easily corroborated both by primary sources and any reliable outlet reporting on the event. Regardless of whether they try to spin it as "a triumph for the people", "proof that we are living in the darkest timeline", or simply "sad, but not unexpected", the sources will agree that Billy nominated Mittens.
My criticism is that you evidently have not been applying those principles. If anything, your arguments and citations imply that you're actually gravitating towards extremely partisan sources that assume the purpose of journalism is to campaign for their political party. I believe you cited Front Page Magazine and Ann Coulter - of all people - earlier in this thread. The former is an outright propaganda rag (actually managing to be both further right and less reliable than the likes of OAN, the Epoch Times, and even PragerU, which is no small feat), and the latter is more a provocateur and ideologue than a source of news, with little regard for accuracy or journalistic professionalism, as the National Review can attest (and mind you, NR treats their own right bias as a mark of pride).
I am not criticizing that you did not find a bias-free source. What I criticize is that you seem to be so far down the rabbit hole that you've functionally lost your frame of reference regarding reliable sources, much less accounting for a given outlet's deficiencies. That you're citing outlets like Front Page Mag and Ann Coulter - both of which have a well earned reputation for both their very strong bias and low reliability - as if you expected anyone to view those as credible sources is, frankly, concerning. More concerning, however, is the way you've been jumping from one misguided what-if to another (first based in a misunderstanding of legal impossibility and then in a misunderstanding of entrapment) out of an equally misguided hope that you could find some explanation that would exculpate the rioters, something you have been quite overt about. Instead of deriving a conclusion based on the evidence, you made little secret of how you were positing hypothetical scenarios in the hope that they would provide a justification for a conclusion you'd already decided on. Even worse, the follow up conversations showed that you were not just failing to do your due diligence on the subject, but had severely compromised your ability to do so.
This was most recently seen in the aforementioned misunderstanding of entrapment, where we saw you quote a snippet of the definition on the page you cited, and apparently missed the fact that the same page specifically contradicted that same interpretation you were insisting on hardly a paragraph later. Not to mince words, that's "even Darwin admitted the eye could not have evolved" levels of research failure, and does not speak well to your ability to reach an informed opinion on this subject. Rather, it strongly suggests the opposite, as by all appearances you literally stopped reading as soon as you saw a line that you thought confirmed the angle you'd been arguing and as consequence didn't bother to get a full understanding of the very topic you were discussing.
An important component of research is accounting for both your own bias and those of your sources and, to be perfectly blunt, you seem to be having issues with both. You want to believe that this was some "massive overreaction" and so you're turning to extremely partisan sources that want to appeal to the rioters and their sympathizers because they're 'on the right', and the right is their audience. And in the process you're conveniently forgetting about the barricades the police erected to keep them out, the flashbangs used to try and repel them, and even the charges against them, instead insisting on such an impossibly rosy interpretation - based in the characterization of events as described by partisan sources instead of the events themselves - that the rioters might as well have been an accosted tour group to hear you describe it. But we have the video footage of that event, and it is not compatible with that interpretation.
Remember, I'm making these arguments in an environment of increasing fascism, where big government colludes with big technology to snuff dissent, while promoting fake narratives about a capital cop being murdered by the trespassers, which didn't happen. Or that they caught someone using a lego model of the capital to help plan the riot, which ends up being that they found said model, unopened and un assembled and more.
You write of "trusted sources". Those used to be the New York Times, or ABC, NBC, CBS news. They aren't anymore.
That while prosecutors release real rioters, ignore insurrectionists seizing and holding entire segments of communities, that silly shaman that, to my knowledge has no history of serious criminal behavior and may be found to be guilty of maybe trespass, has been held without bail for over 1/2 a year.
These are not normal times.
Yes, I just heard read that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R) threatened to use the power of government to crush any telecommunications company that assisted the Congressional investigation into the January 6th riot by handing over logs of the rioters' online chatter.
Fascism indeed.
To an extent they are not as trustworthy as they once were, perhaps. The issue is that they are - on balance - still better than nearly all of the alternatives.
This is the fundamental problem with the assault on the mainstream media. People spend a great deal of time attacking them, whilst patronising media that has substantially lower standards. That is itself to some degree a reflection of what Asita was pointing out, that people's ability to usefully assess objectivity is poor. It's partly also that they just want to read stuff that confirms what they already believe instead of challenges it. One way or another, pressurising the better end of the media whilst rewarding the lower is completely counterproductive to achieve an end of better quality media.
See, this is exactly what I'm talking about. As a point of fact, I wrote nothing of the sort. I make reference to reliability a few times - which is to say their track record with regards to factual accuracy, but my thrust was that you should not trust any source uncritically and, rather, that you needed to always be an active reader in order to account for bias (both your own and the author's) and cross reference the claims of an outlet against other outlets and the primary sources whenever you can. If I were to sum up the gist, it would be that an article from a given outlet should be treated with the same skepticism as a Wikipedia page; it's best used as a starting point to identify other sources to look into, but you absolutely should read the original sources to get a full picture. To bring this back to the topic at hand, for all that you've been looking to how conservative outlets have been characterizing the storming of the Capitol, have you actually taken the time to check the audio and video of the event? Quick snippet:
Though as an aside, I'm obliged to point out that the sources you're dismissing here are both significantly less biased and significantly more reliable than the sources of FrontPage Mag and Ann Coulter that you referenced earlier. Which again, is what I was talking about when I said that you'd lost your frame of reference. Yes, CNN, the New York Times, ABC, NBC, and CBS skew left, and that needs to be accounted for when reading their content. But ABC and NBC are roughly on par with the Wall Street Journal, CNN with Fox Business, the New York Times with Fox News Sunday, and CBS with CNBC. Front Page Mag could generously be considered about on par with the Palmer Report (very, very biased, very very low reliability).
There's a video I like about "How to Do Research". Contextually, it focuses on researching ancient history - mythology in this case - but the basic principle remains the same across the board. It gets particularly relevant to this conversation about three minutes in when it starts talking about accounting for bias in sources and contextualizing your sources' viewpoints to honestly evaluate their credibility rather than just trying to confirm what you already believe. If you've got about ten minutes, I'd recommend giving it a watch.
They're capitalist left. That isn't an oxymoron in any way. Think outside the communist box for 6 seconds.
They aren't even that, though. They'll publish the most egregious bullshit disparaging social democratic programs and concern trolling over the budget.
I think what I like about the alt sources is that there are things I think the "silent majority" has always known, but gotten short shrift in the MSM. Those ideas (immigration, border control, crime and social control issues, sexuality etc.) get a hearing in those other areas.
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I think the MSM you reference skew less Left (do they give a fair hearing to ideas like unearned income, what labor unions really need, egalitarian access to job skills and more) but international corporatism. They're owned by a handful of such interests.
Will review your linked video ASAP.
The footage you show definitely shows people engaged in what I'd call a riot. I ask people to be careful with their language. Calling this an insurrection IMHO, cheapens the term when compared with what happened just recently in Afghanistan. Those people were armed to the teeth with centralized planning and a course of action meant to take over the country, which they did. The trespassers? Those that did enter the capital mostly milled around and went home.