Although I fail to see the value in drawing a line between an ER visit and losing your business or home. All of those suck for different reasons, and usually rise to stories one tells for a long time.
Though I dislike the way the ... less property oriented amongst the citizenry phrase it, there is *some* truth to "it's just stuff". (And I say this as someone who *really* loves his stuff, and has quite a collection of it.) Now, the difference is I'm not saying it to *excuse* the property damage, but I think there is a useful distinction to be made between the two, mostly because if two things have significantly different presentation, chances are good that the solution to them is different as well.
That said, having this scale in its current form is better than having no scale at all. I criticize not to destroy, but to improve. :D
To be blunt, I think that speaks to a problem with the scale, not Chuck's objection to the scale.
I agree that the property damage needs to be factored in, but I'm not sure "violence" is the correct heading for the column, particularly when we're talking about events that involve injuries and deaths.
"Intensity"? "Mostly Peacefulness"? (Ok, that one's probably too sarcastic to be useful.) Even "Financial Violence" would make it seem less like it's trying to overshadow the real physical violence that occurred.
So according to your methodology, if you get a campaign of say 1,000 demonstrations involving each 1 million protestors who are all 100% peaceful (no deaths, no arrests, no damage), that's "worse" than a single protest where 3,000 people are killed. Bizarre.
Are we seriously contemplating a billion person protest campaign?
That seems sufficiently unprecedented that I would be willing to concede the metric does not apply accurately in those conditions. Is this argumentum ad absurdum?
I like this numerical analysis of the protests, but the inclusion of the January 6th Insurrection sheds light on where it falls short. I don't think anyone considers the human and monetary damage by the January 6th rioters to be anywhere near the conglomeration of Floyd protests, but the direct attack on the seat of one branch of the federal government (with tacit and possibly outright support by another branch) is where the true impact lies...and will have lasting domestic and international repercussions for generations. I think that's what Kamala Harris was referring to...a quasi-military attack on a powerful societal institution, not generalized burning, maiming, and looting. How do you quantify that?
I definitely think that the left holds that building much more sacred than the right does at this point, so the impact of the attack would be similar to if a bunch of leftists did that to a church.
But I also think that if Trump had won, there absolutely *would* have been a similar attack staged on the Capitol building by the left. I don't think anyone who paid attention to everything that happened during 2020 could possibly think otherwise.
Not sure I agree about the church analogy, unless there was single unifying house of worship like, say, St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, however your point is taken. But was the attack directed on the sacredness of the building, or an attempt to derail the process going on therein? It was clearly the latter, but the former probably created a more visceral reaction. Historians won't discuss the broken windows in the gallery but rather the physical attempt to prevent the election from being certified...and that's where the focus should lie.
Since the choice to attack the Capitol was due to mass delusion of a stolen election, and was a last ditch effort to prevent the transfer of the office, I'm not sure things would've played out the same way. Unless there was a similar dispute about whether Biden had won, I don't think protesters would have attacked the Capitol Building. Maybe the White House, or even Mar a Lago...something connected and important to Trump and his administration. But more than likely it would've just been widespread sustained riots in major urban metros. More like Floyd than January 6.
I can't imagine that anyone on the left actually thinks that some guy with a buffalo hat could seize control of the free world by finding the secret Darksaber in Pelosi's podium. If it worked that way then Russia could take control of the entire country with a spec ops team.
LOL now I want to photoshop an image of Pelosi holding the Darksaber in a Kylo Ren stance.
I don't think anyone on the left thinks that either. Drastically delaying the process or scaring/convincing Pence to not perform his senatorial duties would have been enough to throw the whole thing into disarray. All they wanted was to chip away at the process with the potential to drive in a wedge. It might have been enough to at least have a chance at changing the outcome.
"attempt to derail the process going on therein" - In that, the riot was quite successful. The challenge by several states was ended and the debate stopped. The public did not hear their representatives reasons for questioning electoral validity. All future official investigations were squashed.
The process of affirming the electoral vote continued after a delay. The rioters were never able to stop the process.
And the rioters enabled a new impeachment effort followed by an investigation into themselves to bury how the riot happened (temporarily). Many questions remain about what professional instigators were doing to excite the crowd, the use of flash bangs into a crowd with no ability to disperse, the failure of security.
The public did not hear their representatives' reasons that day because that time had passed...January 6 was just the end of the process. The riots delayed the proceedings but not to the extent as to prevent them from moving forward or swaying Pence's actions.
I hate to say it but no investigation into disputed elections occurred because sufficient evidence was never presented...not even to this day a year and half later.
They were there to affirm the electoral vote. There were challenges to those votes that were not heard in public. The merit of those challenges was suppressed.
Smoke is still arriving, particularly from True the Vote and 2000 mules. Some investigators have discovered phantom voters that still need canvassing to understand. We really have created doubts about our voting systems that need impartial resolution. The press is loath to report on much of the activity; we have little sunlight on what they doubters are doing.
I only wish that the efforts to create open systems voting had been more fruitful over the last 20 years. The proprietary systems have many holes and allow corruption at many levels in the contracting and operation. Manipulating SQL databases is trivial without a blockchain to secure them. We do need those open source efforts to deliver.
The time to challenge electoral vote was at the state level...anything other than that was just circus. In the end it's highly unlikely there was enough abuse, if any, to have moved the needle in any appreciable way towards Trump.
Totally agree about open sourcing everything. It's a travesty it wasn't designed that way from the start. We should absolutely keep fighting to make the technology and processes as transparent as possible.
The election integrity protestors were unarmed; and for the most part were freely admitted to the Capitol by the guards. We've all seen the videos.
Let's be honest: the January 6 election integrity protest, a nothingburger in itself, is the Biden junta's own Reichstag Fire. It's was a distraction from the junta's brazen coup, and an excuse to persecute those ordinary Americans who spoke out against it.
"Biden junta" that's giving way more credit to his administration than is deserved. I really don't think it's apt to call it a Reichstag Fire...he had already won power at that point and was just crossing t's and dotting i's. It wasn't an attempt to seize power like the intention of the Reichstag Fire. The rioters acted on their own volition...just as if civil unrest occurred had Trump won. But reality is that he did not, the rioters took action, and are now facing consequences for breaking the law.
All these comments make me think about automobile accidents. Fender benders can result in thousands of dollars of damage, but one person getting sent to the emergency room for even a small injury can outweigh the price of a car. I don't even want to think about a crippling injury.
It would be really interesting to see where the 'headscarf' protests going on it Iran right now would land on the Floyd scale. Are they a nothing-burger or something major?
Here’s something from the washingtonpost, that at least has a few numbers, on this and earlier uprisings in Iran. But the estimates for this uprising come from ‘human rights group Hrana’ so, who knows what their agenda is or who is funding them. But, anyway, Hrana’s claim is 400 dead, 18,000 arrested in this uprising. Sounds like this uprising, so far, is on the same level of magnitude as the uprisings there in 2017 and 2019 — the washingtonpost article says “thousands revolted against economic grievances and government mismanagement, and authorities killed hundreds in the resulting crackdown”
So, with our sparse data, I’d say we are looking at somewhere between 1 (14,000 arrested vs 18,000 arrested) and 5 (20 deaths vs 100 deaths) Mostly Peaceful Summers of 2020?
I don't think the number of demonstrations should be included as a measure of violence. Having many demonstrations tells you nothing of the violence of those demonstrations. I think the same applies to the number of protestors. Perhaps I have misunderstood, but it seems in the calculation a larger number of either protestors or demonstrations would give you a larger MPS20 score which I think is misleading. What makes sense is the ratio of protestors or demonstrations to violence i.e. millions of protestors with relatively small property damage is better than thousands of protestors with similar property damage.
Oh I see, that makes sense. So what you created was a fun method to compare the civil unrest of any event to the specifics of the George Floyd protests. This is not an attempt to quantity civil unrest in general, since it has been tuned to the George Floyd incident specifics.
I kind of think the violence score should be based on the number of deaths and the number of people sent to the ER, not on amount of property damage.
That could lead to a lot of cases with tremendous property damage and a violence score of zero.
Figure out a score for property damage?
Although I fail to see the value in drawing a line between an ER visit and losing your business or home. All of those suck for different reasons, and usually rise to stories one tells for a long time.
Though I dislike the way the ... less property oriented amongst the citizenry phrase it, there is *some* truth to "it's just stuff". (And I say this as someone who *really* loves his stuff, and has quite a collection of it.) Now, the difference is I'm not saying it to *excuse* the property damage, but I think there is a useful distinction to be made between the two, mostly because if two things have significantly different presentation, chances are good that the solution to them is different as well.
That said, having this scale in its current form is better than having no scale at all. I criticize not to destroy, but to improve. :D
Why, then, is property targeted so consistently, if it is indeed, only "just stuff"?
The "protesters" target the "stuff" because they know it hurts.
Oh, agreed. Destroying "stuff" is metasyntactally equivalent to destroying the time required to create it.
Yes, it could, but violence and destruction are fundamentally different. Calling one the other is deceptive.
To be blunt, I think that speaks to a problem with the scale, not Chuck's objection to the scale.
I agree that the property damage needs to be factored in, but I'm not sure "violence" is the correct heading for the column, particularly when we're talking about events that involve injuries and deaths.
"Intensity"? "Mostly Peacefulness"? (Ok, that one's probably too sarcastic to be useful.) Even "Financial Violence" would make it seem less like it's trying to overshadow the real physical violence that occurred.
I dunno. Just a thought. :)
Take a page from insurance? Call it what it is: property damage. Injury and death falls under bodily injury.
That... would, indeed, seem to be the fairly obvious reasonable choice here. :D
Why not both?
Again, the VCDL Lobby Day was in 2020.
Yeah you're right, I'll fix that.
Of course these protests weren’t as violent as ‘20, there isn’t a Republican in the White House to get rid of.
I’ve seen some nutty radicals on SM complaining about how the organizers for the Dobbs decision demonstrations were stressing to keep them peaceful.
The orders have obviously been given. Democrat politicians are pigs in sh*t right now with all the donations rolling in.
So according to your methodology, if you get a campaign of say 1,000 demonstrations involving each 1 million protestors who are all 100% peaceful (no deaths, no arrests, no damage), that's "worse" than a single protest where 3,000 people are killed. Bizarre.
One billion protesters (triple the entire population of the USA) would indeed be more "civil unrest" than a single protest with 3000 people killed.
Are we seriously contemplating a billion person protest campaign?
That seems sufficiently unprecedented that I would be willing to concede the metric does not apply accurately in those conditions. Is this argumentum ad absurdum?
In what world could those things actually happen like that?
I like this numerical analysis of the protests, but the inclusion of the January 6th Insurrection sheds light on where it falls short. I don't think anyone considers the human and monetary damage by the January 6th rioters to be anywhere near the conglomeration of Floyd protests, but the direct attack on the seat of one branch of the federal government (with tacit and possibly outright support by another branch) is where the true impact lies...and will have lasting domestic and international repercussions for generations. I think that's what Kamala Harris was referring to...a quasi-military attack on a powerful societal institution, not generalized burning, maiming, and looting. How do you quantify that?
I definitely think that the left holds that building much more sacred than the right does at this point, so the impact of the attack would be similar to if a bunch of leftists did that to a church.
But I also think that if Trump had won, there absolutely *would* have been a similar attack staged on the Capitol building by the left. I don't think anyone who paid attention to everything that happened during 2020 could possibly think otherwise.
Not sure I agree about the church analogy, unless there was single unifying house of worship like, say, St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, however your point is taken. But was the attack directed on the sacredness of the building, or an attempt to derail the process going on therein? It was clearly the latter, but the former probably created a more visceral reaction. Historians won't discuss the broken windows in the gallery but rather the physical attempt to prevent the election from being certified...and that's where the focus should lie.
Since the choice to attack the Capitol was due to mass delusion of a stolen election, and was a last ditch effort to prevent the transfer of the office, I'm not sure things would've played out the same way. Unless there was a similar dispute about whether Biden had won, I don't think protesters would have attacked the Capitol Building. Maybe the White House, or even Mar a Lago...something connected and important to Trump and his administration. But more than likely it would've just been widespread sustained riots in major urban metros. More like Floyd than January 6.
I can't imagine that anyone on the left actually thinks that some guy with a buffalo hat could seize control of the free world by finding the secret Darksaber in Pelosi's podium. If it worked that way then Russia could take control of the entire country with a spec ops team.
LOL now I want to photoshop an image of Pelosi holding the Darksaber in a Kylo Ren stance.
I don't think anyone on the left thinks that either. Drastically delaying the process or scaring/convincing Pence to not perform his senatorial duties would have been enough to throw the whole thing into disarray. All they wanted was to chip away at the process with the potential to drive in a wedge. It might have been enough to at least have a chance at changing the outcome.
"attempt to derail the process going on therein" - In that, the riot was quite successful. The challenge by several states was ended and the debate stopped. The public did not hear their representatives reasons for questioning electoral validity. All future official investigations were squashed.
The process of affirming the electoral vote continued after a delay. The rioters were never able to stop the process.
And the rioters enabled a new impeachment effort followed by an investigation into themselves to bury how the riot happened (temporarily). Many questions remain about what professional instigators were doing to excite the crowd, the use of flash bangs into a crowd with no ability to disperse, the failure of security.
The public did not hear their representatives' reasons that day because that time had passed...January 6 was just the end of the process. The riots delayed the proceedings but not to the extent as to prevent them from moving forward or swaying Pence's actions.
I hate to say it but no investigation into disputed elections occurred because sufficient evidence was never presented...not even to this day a year and half later.
They were there to affirm the electoral vote. There were challenges to those votes that were not heard in public. The merit of those challenges was suppressed.
Smoke is still arriving, particularly from True the Vote and 2000 mules. Some investigators have discovered phantom voters that still need canvassing to understand. We really have created doubts about our voting systems that need impartial resolution. The press is loath to report on much of the activity; we have little sunlight on what they doubters are doing.
I only wish that the efforts to create open systems voting had been more fruitful over the last 20 years. The proprietary systems have many holes and allow corruption at many levels in the contracting and operation. Manipulating SQL databases is trivial without a blockchain to secure them. We do need those open source efforts to deliver.
The time to challenge electoral vote was at the state level...anything other than that was just circus. In the end it's highly unlikely there was enough abuse, if any, to have moved the needle in any appreciable way towards Trump.
Totally agree about open sourcing everything. It's a travesty it wasn't designed that way from the start. We should absolutely keep fighting to make the technology and processes as transparent as possible.
"Quasi-military attack"? Surely you jest.
The election integrity protestors were unarmed; and for the most part were freely admitted to the Capitol by the guards. We've all seen the videos.
Let's be honest: the January 6 election integrity protest, a nothingburger in itself, is the Biden junta's own Reichstag Fire. It's was a distraction from the junta's brazen coup, and an excuse to persecute those ordinary Americans who spoke out against it.
"Biden junta" that's giving way more credit to his administration than is deserved. I really don't think it's apt to call it a Reichstag Fire...he had already won power at that point and was just crossing t's and dotting i's. It wasn't an attempt to seize power like the intention of the Reichstag Fire. The rioters acted on their own volition...just as if civil unrest occurred had Trump won. But reality is that he did not, the rioters took action, and are now facing consequences for breaking the law.
Not necessarily informative of your discussion, but this might deserve a repost:
https://hwfo.substack.com/p/stop-calling-it-a-coup
All these comments make me think about automobile accidents. Fender benders can result in thousands of dollars of damage, but one person getting sent to the emergency room for even a small injury can outweigh the price of a car. I don't even want to think about a crippling injury.
I'd love to see someone plug in the late 1960s. The Watts riots, weather underground, symbionese liberation army, kent state, Jim Jones, and all that.
It would be really interesting to see where the 'headscarf' protests going on it Iran right now would land on the Floyd scale. Are they a nothing-burger or something major?
I don't think we have accurate enough media on the ground out there to get the numbers right. LMK if you can find something you think is reliable.
Same for China the past few days. There's no way to tell what's going on in the walled gardens.
Here’s something from the washingtonpost, that at least has a few numbers, on this and earlier uprisings in Iran. But the estimates for this uprising come from ‘human rights group Hrana’ so, who knows what their agenda is or who is funding them. But, anyway, Hrana’s claim is 400 dead, 18,000 arrested in this uprising. Sounds like this uprising, so far, is on the same level of magnitude as the uprisings there in 2017 and 2019 — the washingtonpost article says “thousands revolted against economic grievances and government mismanagement, and authorities killed hundreds in the resulting crackdown”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/12/01/iran-protest-impasse-regime-movement-crackdown/
So, with our sparse data, I’d say we are looking at somewhere between 1 (14,000 arrested vs 18,000 arrested) and 5 (20 deaths vs 100 deaths) Mostly Peaceful Summers of 2020?
Best fit graph this and it looks like a power law distribution. Probably a standard Pareto.
I don't think the number of demonstrations should be included as a measure of violence. Having many demonstrations tells you nothing of the violence of those demonstrations. I think the same applies to the number of protestors. Perhaps I have misunderstood, but it seems in the calculation a larger number of either protestors or demonstrations would give you a larger MPS20 score which I think is misleading. What makes sense is the ratio of protestors or demonstrations to violence i.e. millions of protestors with relatively small property damage is better than thousands of protestors with similar property damage.
It's a measure of civil unrest, violence is only part of that measure.
Oh I see, that makes sense. So what you created was a fun method to compare the civil unrest of any event to the specifics of the George Floyd protests. This is not an attempt to quantity civil unrest in general, since it has been tuned to the George Floyd incident specifics.
I don't even consider myself a conservative, quite honestly.
I'm not anything anymore other than just a raw nihilist who's pro gun.
https://hwfo.substack.com/p/guns-and-protofascism