If he gets away, he gets away

This seems like the crux. A good way to get at this underlying issue, without the same heat and uncertainty of hand-to-hand conflict, is car chases. Some jurisdictions (many? most?) have policies to not pursue if it will put people in danger (it's dangerous for the pursuing cops, too). So, as a matter of policy, it seems the police are open to a cost-benefit analysis that concludes it's better to let someone guilty get away. The trick, I think, is convincing them that this can also apply to interpersonal disobedience. I'd be interested in the argument against this kind of discretion, and particularly interested to see if there's something that convinces me that it's not mostly about not wanting to appear personally weak.

The detail about the probably armed insurrectionist with the bunch of zip ties is especially chilling and shows the evil intent of this mob.

There were at least a couple of guys with zip ties.

Policing relies on everybody accepting that a handful of guys in uniforms get to be in charge of dispensing violence, and that they will target "bad guys" They don't have the numbers nor (in the US) the weaponry without everyone buying into that. If you don't accept that the guys in the uniforms can keep you out of the Capitol they probably can't because it turns out those little barricades aren't bolted down and twenty to one is good odds.

Obviously, I can see the case for discretion (this infraction isn't worth the effort) but I have no idea how you teach that discretion. The car chase example isn't discretion but policy.

Defending the capitol building against a mob insurrection seems properly a function of the armed forces, who have the tactics, training, and discipline. Granted they were unavailable due to reasons, but flatly, they should have been.

The Capitol Police were outnumbered and chose not to escalate to deadly force generally which is debatably correct but why in the world was the area not thick with tear gas as soon as the mob began to breach the barricades? The cops never hesitate to overdeploy that generally non-lethal weapon against other crowds they want to disperse.

I mean, I can think of some rules of thumb -- asking questions like "is it realistically likely that allowing this disobedience will cause death or severe injury to anyone," and saying that if the answer is no, it's categorically wrong to use deadly force or the threat of it to compel obedience. It's confused by the fact that the police seem to have built up a culture of irrational fearfulness -- they killed Philando Castile because being politely informed that he was in possession of a legal gun scared the cop he was talking to so badly that the cop started shooting. I don't know how you stamp out that culture of irrational terror as justification for irrational violence, but in the absence of that culture this seems like a set of judgments that's not unreasonable to expect people to make.

This was a leadership failure. The Capitol Police could have been deployed to successfully repel a riotous assault like we saw (much tighter perimeter around the building, full riot gear, more cops) but they were not.

Thanks for posting this, I've been working through the same questions.

The car chase example is precisely why I'm worried about officer's ability to make threat assessments on the fly in a situation with perceived danger. I was looking that up recently and found, for example, that the LAPD instituted the policy that officers weren't allowed to shoot at moving cars after this incident

After a string of controversial cases, the final straw for Bratton was the death of Devin Brown, an unarmed African American 13-year-old, who had stolen a Toyota Camry in February 2005. Devin was shot eight times by officer Steven Garcia when he reversed the car toward officers. Investigators found he was travelling at 1 mph.

His chief defence is the principle of "looming", a psychological phenomenon that occurs when an object travels head-on towards an individual at speed. This results in a perception that the object is increasing exponentially in size, making the person feel it is moving faster toward them than it really is.

"The targeted officer may falsely sense that he or she has no time to leap clear, and start shooting instead," said a 2013 article co-authored by Lewinski, adding witnesses who observed an incident from the side would not experience looming and might accuse an officer of lying.

That said, the riot at the capitol seems like a case in which it would be possible to have clear guidelines about use of force which would have supported firing on the people assaulting the capitol. I wouldn't feel badly if that had happened.

On the third hand, I remember the discussion, after 9/11 about treating terrorism as a law enforcement problem, rather than a military problem. It's clear that the CPPD make a number of errors on Wednesday, but what matters for me is what happens next. If, over the next couple of months, there's some sort of public accounting of the CPPD decision making and some transparency about what they should have done better and ALSO if the rioters are identified from photos, arrested and prosecuted, I'd feel fairly good about the whole thing. If everyone just throws up their hands and says, "what can you do, sometimes mistakes happen" then I'd feel pissed.

I can feel sympathy for the cops that it sucks to have your poor job performance become a public controversy and news story but I still feel like it's appropriate to demand some honest, public, assessment of the events.

The thing about the car chase example is that cops *like* car chases. It's fun, it's exciting, it's why they became cops! So if you leave it up to their judgement they're going to err on the side of more car chases. An awful lot of cops feel the same way about beating up democrats, but not republicans.

I mean, I can think of some rules of thumb -- asking questions like "is it realistically likely that allowing this disobedience will cause death or severe injury to anyone," and saying that if the answer is no, it's categorically wrong to use deadly force or the threat of it to compel obedience. It's confused by the fact that the police seem to have built up a culture of irrational fearfulness -- they killed Philando Castile because being politely informed that he was in possession of a legal gun scared the cop he was talking to so badly that the cop started shooting. I don't know how you stamp out that culture of irrational terror as justification for irrational violence, but in the absence of that culture this seems like a set of judgments that's not unreasonable to expect people to make.

John Holbo had a recent twitted thread about people making analogies between the BLM protests this summer and the capitol riot, and ultimately says this:

Now: citizens' rights to protest and speak and so forth are not to be gauged up or down depending on whether the citizens are sane and good or crazy and bad. You are allowed to protest the good on behalf of the bad. You are allowed to think crazy things and say them.

So long as you are coloring within the lines of peaceful protest and lawful speech we treat all that as 'equal', rightly. In a formal, procedural sense. But I don't think we need to also treat all civil disobedience as equal.

Being a social justice warrior is just better than being a pro-tyranny activist. Once you step outside 'the law is the law', it matters whether you are fighting 'for change' to make the law MORE just or LESS just.

Obviously people will disagree about that. But my point is: you can't bracket it out. You can't judge the justifiability of civilly disobedient protest actions without judging the actual justice of its aims - not just whatever the protesters think.

To some extent, that's how I feel about use of deadly force by the police. We anticipate that the police will have to use deadly force in some cases, but I'm not comfortable saying that it should be judged on purely procedural grounds (were the police operating within the allowed policy of the department) I feel like there has to be some judgement about, "were their goals in using deadly force sufficient to justify it?" That's challenging because it's inevitably a subject assessment. You or I may disagree about whether a situation justifies it, but I also don't think, parallel to what Holbo is saying, that you can just sidestep that question.

There are a couple of different strands here that need to be teased out. The right comparison here is not the Ferguson killing (which I think you're unfairly characterizing, but that's another issue.) It's not Sean Bell (which I don't know about, but doesn't seem to involve police reaction to concerted action by a violent group.)

The correct comparison is the police behavior in the Ferguson protests and similar events.

There was a lot of damage in Minneapolis in the George Floyd protests. Innocent people's lives and livelihoods were hurt. The police, in theory at least, had every right to unleash violence to protect those people. As you note, there's an even stronger argument in favor of police violence at the Capitol, the seat of government.

So there's a legit argument differentiating the level of violence appropriate for Floyd-type protests and the Capitol riots. I don't buy it, though. The Capitol mob was a dog chasing a car. If they'd caught it, they would have had no idea what to do with it. Their presence in the Capitol was certainly less of a threat to democracy than Trump's presence in the White House. As a result of police restraint, democracy is safer than it would be if more rioters had been killed. I'd go so far as to say that democracy is safer today than it was on Monday. (Without making the argument that US democracy is at all safe.)

You actually nod to an argument I find more persuasive in favor of more state violence in DC and less in Minneapolis: Those fuckers on Tuesday needed shooting. I'm in favor of Nazi-punching. They are bad people pursuing aims that are intolerable in a democracy, regardless of the target of their attack. The protesters in Minneapolis were, in the broad sense, correct. They should be treated as gently as possible.

But no, at the end of the day I'm a procedural liberal. You can't have the cops on the street making decisions about who deserves shooting. Those decisions have to be based on the best judgments about how to maintain the rule of law.

An overwhelming show of force should have been made prior to the riot -- and most likely, no shooting would have been necessary. But once the government decided not to do that, the cops on the scene did (roughly) the right thing.

Well they're going to get a do-over in 12 days so we'll see if they've learned anything.
Trump formally announced he's not going which means he's not at risk of any uncontrolled violence, just like how he said he was going to the Capitol with his mob and then scurried away.

I understand that, once the Capitol Police lost control of the building, it wasn't safe for officers to try to arrest people. What I don't understand is why, once the combined police forces had re-established control of the building, they didn't begin arresting the rioters that were still present.

If they'd caught it, they would have had no idea what to do with it. True of many of the rioters, the ones posing for selfies or that idiot who stole Pelosi's mail. But not true of a fair number of them, some of who were carrying zip ties and appeared to be armed.

Well, know pretty much nothing about policing, but the Capitol invasion looks more like a failure of intelligence and command / control, rather than day to day policing ethics? They just don't seem to have realised that this crowd was coming their way.

Oh hey now look at that

[In 1999], the tedium of an Armenian parliamentary question-and-answer session was shattered by shouts and the rattle of gunfire.

Five heavily armed gunmen burst into the chamber, spraying a hail of bullets that left Prime Minister Vazgen Sargsian, parliament speaker Karen Demirchian, and several other leading politicians dead.

RFE/RL correspondent Ruzanna Khachatrian was among the journalists covering parliament that day and her report from the scene captured the unfolding horror.

"A group of young men opened fire on the prime minister and the deputies. We're now hiding under the benches and the firing is still going on," she reported. "The gunmen are shouting that if anyone comes near the parliament building, they will be shot. The firing is coming from the security services office.

"One of the wounded deputies has been carried out. The leader of the gunmen is shouting about how the government has been 'sucking the blood of the people.' "

Could well have been our outcome two days ago.

https://www.rferl.org/a/Ten_Years_Later_Deadly_Shooting_In_Armenian_Parliament_Still_Echoes/1862158.html

My perception is that much violence over the summer was initiated by the police. Many cops feel like they can just walk up to peaceful protesters and start pepper spraying and so on. But I think many people in the USA might never have heard of the concept of a "police riot".

Right. Generalizing about the BLM protests is complicated because they took place over a period of months nationwide. But a great deal of the police violence directed at BLM was directed at peaceable crowds that weren't demonstrating any immediate violent intent.

And of course, how do you tell a peaceful crowd from a violent crowd in the moment? Reading the social media posts beforehand about how they're planning to hang the Vice President and noting that the crowd in front of you has actually erected a gallows would be one way, but it can be a hard call.

I've been thinking that they were stupid because what did they think the outcome would be? Nothing would stop Biden winning, the Electoral votes were already cast. Even if they got to Pence he doesn't have the authority to do anything despite Trump telling them otherwise. Most extreme I though was they prevent the count from happening and Pelosi becomes President on the 20th if no winner is certified.
Now I think there were at least some in the crowd who would have actually killed enough Democrats that the Republican objections to the swing states would have been sustained and Trump would have actually won. There is zero doubt in my mind that the 130 House Republicans, Hawley, and Cruz would have said that it's very sad that our colleagues across the aisle are dead but the rules are the rules and we have the votes. Maybe there are enough Senate Republicans who would have rejected it based on the 92-7 vote, but if the power was within their reach I wouldn't bet on them not taking it.

I think one fantasy outcome would have been to threaten Pence into announcing that he had rejected the bad electoral college votes and in the absence of those votes, Trump had won. He didn't have the authority to do that, but he could have been made to say it. And then what happens next depends on what Trump does and the courts do and Biden does and the military does.

I've been thinking that they were stupid because what did they think the outcome would be? Nothing would stop Biden winning, the Electoral votes were already cast. Even if they got to Pence he doesn't have the authority to do anything despite Trump telling them otherwise.

I think the most coherent thought they had is that they would be the catalyst - that once they had made the first move, thousands or tens of thousands of "loyal" troops or ICE or other paramilitaries would be next, take command DC at large, and force Congress to "accept the will of the people", e.g., damn the Constitution and the certified state votes and declare Trump the victor.

In the truest tradition of Wilmington.

I cannot help feeling that many if not all of these problems would have been avoided if the Capitol had THICK DOORS WHICH COULD BE SECURELY BARRED. These cosplayers did not have battering rams.

A dark outcome: insurrectionists murder enough Congressfolk until they force the electoral college certification outcome they want, wait for the pardons from the grateful president, the crimes having being committed on federal jurisdiction.

Obviously we're coloring welllll outside the normal rule of law boundaries in this eventuality, but you can see how it appears to be an airtight plan.

The Q fringe genuinely expected some kind of supernatural, apocalyptic intervention. They didn't know what it would be and they weren't really bothered. I don't know about the other factions of the mob.

of course if ajay's suggestion is taken up, there will be attempts to 3D print Grond for the next time.

21.2/25 is roughly what I had been worried about. It's not really supposed to be the case that controlling both houses of Congress also lets you choose who won the Presidential election, but it seems like that door may have been opened.

24: Such skill is found among the dwarves under the mountain.

They did also come through windows.

Also, as many people have noted the capitol is not a heavily secured building. For example: https://twitter.com/ezraklein/status/1346900387442294787

At least Tommy Lasorda didn't live to see this.

The whole situation is so weird. It was like 1/3 of a well-executed coup, only they executed the most difficult third and completely failed to do the other two thirds. The hard part is getting the a big enough mob on side and set them in one direction risking their lives for the cause. He had random people flying in from around the country to do this! CEOs and lawyers!

In comparison, I'll bet building a private force of Trump/Republican loyal paramilitaries or other LE forces out of elements of the MANY federal armed forces (secret service, federal prison guards, ATF, on and on and on) is the far easier task. How many would you need? As few as 500? 1,000? I don't know. Whatever it is, it's well within the realm of possibility. It's a population filled with people desperate for authoritarianism. I'll bet recruitment wouldn't be that difficult.

I have to believe the plan was based on a true, pure, shining belief in Trump's heart that he did actually win the election and if only he delays and interrupts the process with enough random thrashing around, eventually it'll fall into his lap. Everyone will recognize the truth he knows. And that didn't happen. And so actually following through on the coup didn't seem necessary to him because in his heart he really truly already has won. And so when that didn't happen he fell into a sulk and told everyone to go home.

Maybe we've encountered the limits of pure charismatic legitimacy. We're lucky he's not a guy with enough patience to plan anything out more than a few days ahead.

26: One structural advantage that we have is that our opponents have a poor grip on how stuff works.

But what I'm hearing from a lot of smart liberals echoes some of the stuff we get from the Dumb Right. Guns are not a panacea, and their use is more complicated than their advocates appreciate. We saw some arguments here that the mob's goals were well-served by their resort to violence on Wednesday. Is anyone still prepared to endorse that argument?

It was like 1/3 of a well-executed coup

It was like 2% of a coup and .02% of a well-executed coup.

It was clearly a coup.

Majority Whip Clyburn asserts the insurrectionists targeted his unmarked private office, not his marked public office: https://twitter.com/carlquintanilla/status/1347584903324594177?s=20

The circumstantial evidence that something really bad was planned to occur under the cover of the chaos continues to mount.

I won't be sure if this attack was successful or not for its organizers for six months or so. Was it successful enough that it'll help them recruit a bigger, more dangerous crowd for the next event? How big is the percentage of police officers that support these sorts of attacks, and is this event making it grow or shrink? Questions like that seem relevant to whether this was a good or a bad day for the terrorist right, and the answers aren't obvious to me.

Yes, and there are many witnesses reporting people deliberately seeking to kill Pence.

Since Congress can expel members with a 2/3 vote technically the coup could work any time. You remove enough opposition so the remaining ones vote to expel the other side. Then impeach the President and VP if they're the other party and your Speaker takes over.
If God forbid Republicans ever won a 2/3 majority it wouldn't even take an insurrection, they could just do it under the rules. I'm surprised some of the gerrymandered state legislatures haven't gone there yet- PA started down the road by refusing to seat a Dem in an election they were contesting even though the state Supreme Court already ruled for the Dem.

33: What you heard, from me and others, was that if there were not serious legal and political consequences for inciting and participating in this insurrection, it would be a devastating outcome. The weight of evidence is trending towards that concern being misplaced, but please don't overstate the case.

For the Nazis, isn't the goal just to destroy US democracy and bring on the Race War? Probably not so interested in the Constitutional mechanism by which they could keep Trump in office.

Worth reading: https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-attempted-coup-federal-law-enforcement-capitol-police-2021-1

34:

Well yeah. 1/3 of the textbook definition of a well-executed coup. Not that this is the right lesson to learn from this event, but I'm just thinking about the world of possibilities that opens up once the legislature is overrun. Remove Biden & Harris from DC for their own safety? Secure them in an undisclosed location? Do the same with Congressional leadership? Seize emergency powers right then? The sky's the limit! So weird that none of it happened.

34:

Well yeah. 1/3 of the textbook definition of a well-executed coup. Not that this is the right lesson to learn from this event, but I'm just thinking about the world of possibilities that opens up once the legislature is overrun. Remove Biden & Harris from DC for their own safety? Secure them in an undisclosed location? Do the same with Congressional leadership? Seize emergency powers right then? The sky's the limit! So weird that none of it happened.

41. dq suggested a really promising looking book, Bring The War Home to understand better what such groups actually can do and what theyu want. I'm definitely planning to read it soon, group discussion maybe?

Well yeah. 1/3 of the textbook definition of a well-executed coup.

I actually understood what you meant. I was just being a dick.

46- the other thread is the place for that.

The Capitol is different than almost any other situation. The information security breach alone is a huge national security threat.

I realize I'm off-topic for this thread on this point but... I just keep marvelling at how... monumental this event was and how the outcome is so, so weird.

I'm grasping for the idea here, but add this to any historical coup: a mob of between 5-10 thousand hotheaded true believers occuping the centre of state power in the middle of the goddamn day as legislators are supposed to be conducting the fundamnetal business of the nation.

The Soviet Union might have survived if something like this happened in 1991! Hugo Chavez would have been president of Venezuela in 1992. No need to cross the Rubicon, just have the plebs storm the Senate. I'm just randomly picking examples. But you see what I mean.

The information security breach alone is a huge national security threat.

This is the same bit of cognitive dissonance I keep bumping my head against here. Does anybody remember who has been president the last four years? Do we think it's likely that, in the data security sphere, this is the most important fuckup in, oh, the last week?

Sure. Yes. It's terrible stuff. But I never got accustomed to the daily grind of this president's malfeasance. And I've got my fingers metaphorically crossed for the next 12 days and beyond.

I definitely got a happy nazi vibe from some guys I saw at the convenience store this morning. "Did you hear about what happened Wednesday night?"

Not good.

David Brooks has a column in the NYT headlined This Is When The Fever Breaks.

The thrust of his argument:

The shock of this atrocity is bound to have a sobering effect. I'm among those who think this is an inflection point, a step back from madness.

I don't know when I have ever been so quickly and convincingly proved wrong. The only way I can think of that I would have been more convincingly refuted is if Thomas Friedman had written this.

Wow, that's rough.

apocalyptic thinking, the "spark" that loghts the race war conflagration, was (has been for decades, is now) the goal of the core & they're currently enjoying a recruitment bonanza.

the dudes with the zip ties merit suuuper close scrutiny, but if we all get side tracked into "but what could their immediate goal have been within the current constitutional framework? tgat couldn't work, pence doesn't have that power!" or "flanking on the left with 60 more cops was clearly required!" we are going to go down the drain & fast.

what was and is driving the vast majority of participants is a deeply rooted cultural phenomenon involving beliefs re white racial superiority, apocalyptic thinking (including reification of martyrs like the woman shot, vicki weaver, etc.), betrayal of the true cause demonstrating it's righteousness (so trump's about turn, if sustained, won't take the air out), and pervasive militarization of our entire society ever amplified by forever and ever wars (including private domestic gun ownership, a huuuuuuge barrier to effective everyday policing that doesn't carry an unacceptable risk of sudden death-maiming).

52: I mean, stopped clocks and all, but... yeah. Oof.

I get the same dissonance whenever I see Bill Kristol (!) saying something intelligent and reasonable. There's this gut check moment of, hang on, did I really think this issue through because if _we're_ on the same side...

So many people misusing the term "inflection point".

If I could wave a wand and change one thing about American society, there'd be a looooong list of contenders, but eliminating the normalization of routinely carrying weapons in public would be on the list.

what was and is driving the vast majority of participants is a deeply rooted cultural phenomenon involving beliefs re white racial superiority, apocalyptic thinking (including reification of martyrs like the woman shot, vicki weaver, etc.), betrayal of the true cause demonstrating it's righteousness (so trump's about turn, if sustained, won't take the air out), and pervasive militarization of our entire society ever amplified by forever and ever wars (including private domestic gun ownership, a huuuuuuge barrier to effective everyday policing that doesn't carry an unacceptable risk of sudden death-maiming).

I've put Bringing The War Home on hold at the library, but it will be a little while.

I'm curious, in broad terms, what you think is the best way to address those "deeply rooted cultural phenomenon"? I think there's value in naming them; I think anti-racism is in a stronger position in US politics in 2021 than it has been, but still limited in political power.

One reason why there's more conversation about, "what should the Capitol Police have done differently" than "what are the deep roots of this" is that it's a more immediately tractable discussion.

At least Dick Morris will continue to be wrong*.

Was prompted to look up if he had said anything. Did not find anything directly about the riot but there was this:
"I think he could use a vacation," Morris added. "I think he's going through stages of grief and depression, which includes anger, and I don't think he's doing himself any good by that. I think he's had an incredible record as president. He's done amazing things. And he should rest on those laurels, and begin to position himself for 2024.

*Sadly, his prediction of Trump winning in 2016 was not wrong. His prediction had buoyed my hopes. (And of course he was prett far off in the margin of victory).

58: some ideas -

security apparatus from top to bottom needs to be held to a rigorously high standard in apprehending & prosecuting the participants in this event & numerous others to guard against creating publicity & martyr narratives. the slow unglamorous grind is what's needed, i'd put the postal service inspectors in charge (seriously, i'd recruit from them and create specialist teams from top to bottom with a culture of pride in boring bland implacability).

our national discussion of overseas wars needs to explicitly include the toll they exact on our domestic lives.

I'm curious, in broad terms, what you think is the best way to address those "deeply rooted cultural phenomenon"?

60's right, but my first thought was about that woman who got herself killed, as described in Barry's link in 225/232 in More of the Same. Apparently she was an Obama voter. I've generally written off alleged Obama-to-Trump voters as a statistical blip, Russian bots, or an illusion created by different groups being mobilized (i.e. it's it's not Obama-to-Trump voters, it's Obama-voters-to-nonvoters and different nonvoters-to-Trump-voters), but maybe I shouldn't have. Populism got hijacked by a fascist in 2016. I think reclaiming populism with something like the New Deal would be better than demonizing or marginalizing it. I have no idea if that's possible, though.

On the other hand, I don't want to read too much into one random nut just because she's one of the ones who got killed. She was clearly unreachable by 2017 and the people with Confederate and Nazi paraphernalia clearly aren't Obama-to-Trump voters in meaningful ways.

security apparatus from top to bottom needs to be held to a rigorously high standard in apprehending & prosecuting the participants in this event & numerous others to guard against creating publicity & martyr narratives. the slow unglamorous grind is what's needed

I agree completely, and that's what I was thinking of when I wrote 8.4.

but maybe I shouldn't have

It's a real thing, but the implications of that have been misunderstood. People have interpreted this as, "see, this shows how a slice of Trump voters aren't motivated by racism."

Fact is, Obama got a bit of the racist vote. I don't think you can win in the US without it.

The US ought to have the same number of words for "racism" as the apochryphal Eskimos do for "snow." There's a kind of racism that was okay with Obama being president, but held him responsible for the "excessses" of Black Lives Matter.

Obama got the racists who wanted to be able to say they weren't racist because look they voted for a black man and now he's president so racism is over.

Not just. He got the racists who decided other polices are more important to them then their racism. Trump's success was because he got all the racists convinced racism was all that matters.

Also Obama got votes from racists who didn't yet realize how salient their racism could become if it were properly stoked. People are malleable.

The whole of public opinion back when I was in graduate school was all about campaigns activating ideas, not changing them.

Belew weighs in.

From the history of this movement and open-source intelligence, we know that this week was a salvo in a continuing battle. "Insurrection" is the right word, because we should understand this as one battle in a larger war -- that's how the militants will view it. In extremist spaces online, activists view this as a victory: They stormed the Capitol, breached the building, made legislators cower and delayed the certification of a free election. It was successful as a show of force, and they will be emboldened to do more. And we know from "The Turner Diaries" and from the real violence carried out in its image that what comes next will be mass casualty attacks. This is the same movement that delivered our nation's largest mass-casualty event between Pearl Harbor and 9/11 -- and the 168 killed and hundreds injured in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing represent only part of the casualties we have endured at the hands of white extremists.

Anyone picking up the book should be forewarned that revisiting the OKC bombing is not at all fun.

24. There is a long tradition of legislatures neglecting their own security through lack of imagination.. In 1605 it occurred to nobody that any problem could arise from convening Parliament in a room over a cellar into which people could, without being observed, introduce large quantities of high explosive.

Elective legislatures should be reminded of this regularly.

Would it help if they had an event every year where they burned the perpetrator in effigy?

Heebie - unrelated to this, I sent you an e-mail.

71: I saw it on my phone! I'm on a loaner work computer, so I haven't logged into my gmail account. But I'll respond tonight from a real computer.

Parliament in a room over a cellar into which people could, without being observed, introduce large quantities of high explosive.

Sorry I have to be pedantic here but black powder is a low explosive.

Fact check: True.

Never put an actual high explosive into your OG muzzleloader. It could blow up. This includes modern smokeless powder.

The guy who put his feet up on Pelosi's desk was arrested. It's probably irrational, but I hate that guy more than any of the other rioters. Just the level of total entitlement it takes to break into the Speaker of the House's office, and allow yourself to be photographed sitting at her desk with your feet up is infuriating to me. I hope they drop a 30 ton weight on him.

I wonder if that was the reaction that Repubs had to the picture of Obama with his feet up on the Oval Office desk.

It was the highest explosive available at the time. I assume.

76: I waver between hating that guy or zip tie dude the most. Zip tie dude is the guy I really want to see arrested.

76: I waver between hating that guy or zip tie dude the most. Zip tie dude is the guy I really want to see arrested.

Noose guy was concerning.

If he gets away, he gets away

This seems like the crux.

It's only the crux if you think the bulk of police shootings are suspects attempting to escape, and that's not the case.

I mean, I can think of some rules of thumb -- asking questions like "is it realistically likely that allowing this disobedience will cause death or severe injury to anyone," and saying that if the answer is no, it's categorically wrong to use deadly force or the threat of it to compel obedience.

Your rule of thumb has been the law for 35 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee_v._Garner

81: "I was in reasonable fear for my safety and fired my weapon in accordance with my training."

In the battle between prosecutorial discretion and QI against Garner, we know which one wins in practice.

I agree zip tie guy needs to have a long conversation in a small room.

50: they don't keep highly classified information lying around in random Senate offices. It lives in SCIFs in the basement, which the insurgents didn't get to.

they plausibly could have maintained control over the situation by escalating to deadly force more readily.

Let's not be too ingenuous here. The Capitol police and their colleagues in the security forces around DC have a HUGE amount of experience dealing with demonstrations -- totally peaceful, legal demos; big peaceful civil disobedience actions; and the really big protests that have several militant components. Rarely, if ever, has it been necessary for them to escalate to deadly force, just so they could oppress some hippies. In most of the really big actions over the past 20 years, it's been pretty obvious that the DC security forces go into the day with the intention of making mass arrests. They know exactly which intersections they're going to use to kettle people, which jail they're taking them to, what charges they're going to illegitimately file*, etc. It was just as clear on Weds. that they had NO plans to arrest ANYONE connected to the fascist rally. Clearly, the intention right from the start was to have the Nazis terrorize DC, with a few token arrests, and a lot of fat overtime checks for all the security forces involved. And that plan was carried to fruition perfectly.

If you wanna talk about MPLS in May, it should be pretty obvious to any intelligent observer that the police & nat'l guard were actively in support of the looting & burning. As far as I've seen, not a single person has been arrested for arson for any building except the police station. Moreover, there were dozens of reports of cars full of white yahoos driving around with no license plates. Yet somehow, despite all the security forces deployed, it doesn't seem like anyone actually got pulled over. It's clear that the MPD's strategy, right from the point where the 3rd Precinct was surrounded, was to let things devolve into as much chaos as possible so they could come in and bust heads with abandon. Which plan was, again, carried to fruition perfectly.

*When I was arrested in Chi in 2003 at the big anti-war demo, the cops already had booking sheets pre-filled out with charges and photocopied, so they only had to write in people's names and birthdates and addresses. So, basically they perjured themselves, as there was no way that anyone in that station house had seen anyone who was arrested doing any of the crimes they were charged with.

84 is an extremely cogent assessment.

Looks like zip tie guy may already be close to being identified.

Also, I am not sure why I find this video of the insurrectionists chilling in a fucking Marriott lobby or whatever after a long day of seditious conspiracy so anger-inducing but my blood is boiling.

I will admit that I was wrong in predicting there would be paltry efforts to identify and arrest people after the fact - though it could still be just enough to get the press I'm seeing.

They NYer ID'd one of the zip tie guys. Retired air force officer. People who know him say he was recently redpilled. He claims he just picked up the zip ties and was going to give them to a cop.

I wonder if the guy with the Auschwitz shirt will be more creative.

88 confirms my prejudice that the USAF is the most wingnut branch. I think I saw the ID partially credited to Ronan Farrow.

It was actually the guy on Twitter who Farrow mentions who got the ID (and passed it tonthe FBI), but Twitter has mis-ID'd enough people that I didn't pass it on. There's also a pretty convincing twitter-ID of the other guy photographed with zip ties, but we'll see (he's just some dude).

Officer I just found those drugs lying in the street and I picked them up to turn them in to the police and keep kids safe.

91: Sorry, the tweet I saw implied Farrow did some confirmation/fact-checking rather than write the story. I hadn't read the NYer article.

They figured out the other, creepier guy, too. Thank goodness so many of these fascists don't like wearing masks, or this would be harder to do.

Also, robocalls from an arm Republican AG group calling to march on the Capitol to stop the steal. I am sure nothing will come of it, but god these assholes are horrifying. I do like that corporate donors are asking for (and receiving) refunds.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/republican-ags-group-sent-robocalls-urging-march-capitol-n1253581

I wonder if Pence and Trump have spoken since. I'm guessing not.

Trump tried to get a mob to kill Pence.

Yes. That's why I brought it up; it would be a very awkward conversation.

The only people in the building Trump would have been sad about if they had died would have been Jim Jordan, Mo Brooks or Devin Nunes. And only a little sad at that.

Maybe the Secret Service won't let Pence near Trump.

Oh and I guess Tuberville whom Trump had a 10-minute conversation with (on Mike Lee's phone) while the Senators were sheltering. (This was before Rudy called yet another senator thinking it was Tuberville and asking him to object to 10 states to buy a day.

I'm not sure all of what the President did and didn't do has really permeated the public consciousness yet (and of course is not really known).

99: I'm going to crow once more about the success of my think like a Trump Republican project. (Because ego self-care is important in these thin times.)

Me from the NYE thread (The Future is Tonight).

5: A very 2020 thing: Dread that trump is coming back to the White House instead of attending the Mar-a-Lago new year's Eve party. If doing something means that much to this fucker it must be really bad.

31: Would-be dictator Donald Trump returns to capital city leading to a growing sense of unease among citizens of Covid-ravaged United States.

Semi off-topic but some images for our times:

1) Panthera pardus has a meal.

2) Orwell interpreted.

85: Trump tried to get a mob to kill Pence.

Excuse me, do you mean the January 6, 2021 1st Amendment Protests?

33: Come the hell on; obviously this was not successful in terms of keeping Trump in office, and it almost certainly could never have been successful at that, but I would bet dollars to donuts that this is a huge propaganda victory in recruiting more Kekistan cosplayers for violent direct action. I don't think "Biden gets inaugurated and we have a significant ratcheting up of political violence over the next four years" counts as a win.

The 1st Amendment Protests label by DoD is in interesting contrast to the whocouldaknowed from the chief of the Capitol Police, which said they were ready for 1st Amendment Protests but not for this sort of thing that was not such an action.

102: Dude, we won. The fascist movement is being smashed right before our eyes. Many of the most aggressive actors are going to prison. They are being cut off from social media. The maniacs looking for violence will be only more excited, but their institutional enablers have had to run and hide. The Biden administration would have been stymied about cracking down as violating the right-wing's god-given right to free speech, but now, the Biden administration can just say they are rounding up the people responsible for an assault on the democracy itself. This is a disaster for the Republicans, and the Republicans know it.

It's a good thing there isn't an important, public event in the next couple of weeks that will be much more exposed and harder to protect than a vote taking place inside a building.

They aren't being cut-off from social media because of what they've done previously. They're being cut-off from social media because Twitter doesn't want to go down in history as the RTLM of the Americans.

104: It's possible that we gained more than we lost, and maybe in some strategic sense we are winning, but stating that we won significantly overstates the case.

Among the tells for me is going to be how the police and their civilian oversight respond to the inescapable evidence of white supremacist paramilitaries in their ranks. The early evidence on that front is not particularly good, what with police unions issuing statements expressing sympathy for the insurrectionists and Biden calling for, surprise surprise, new legislation to crack down on domestic terrorists (more police! what could possibly go wrong!).

But hey, I thought the Democrats were most likely to sweep this whole unpleasantness under the rug, and I'm over the moon to be, thus far, pretty wrong about that.

I do worry that there will be violence at the Inauguration. They're already planning for it on Parler -- the Million Militia March. But we are now in "If you come at the king, you best not miss" territory. Either they seize control of the government on the 20th, or they get smashed.

I also cannot view a scene like this in Frankfort, KY days after the US Capitol insurrection and believe that we won is an accurate description of the current state of civil politics and public safety.

I can't imagine how you can possibly spin "crack down on domestic terrorists" as a bad thing. It's clearly code for right-wing crazies. Biden already called the rioters "domestic terrorists". He nominated the man who prosecuted McVeigh, for Christ's sake. What is he supposed to do, advocate addressing right-wing maniacs (who seem to be overwhelmingly upper-middle class) by sending out social workers?

Either they seize control of the government on the 20th, or they get smashed.

Right. That's terrifying.

111.1 should have had italics. Anyway, my point is there's no way to describe this as "won" in the past tense.

The PA legislature is still refusing a seat a Democratic senator and if the current PA legislature is in office in 2024 with a Republican governor, I don't see any way to the state's electoral college votes to go the Democratic candidate regardless of how many votes are cast for a Democrat.

110: We need zero new police powers or funding. We just need to use those that they have correctly.

What am I afraid of? New legislation that pours money into the police forces that exacerbates the broad problem.

I'm still riding a a wave of cheer from the election results, but there's clearly 15% to 30*% of Americans who absolutely fucked in the head and I'll probably never live to see the end of the problem.

* Wide range because differing people can define "fucked in the head" differently.

Objectively, the situation is quite bad. By my lifetime standards I'm as pessimistic about the future as I've ever been. And yet somehow by the standards of the commetariat I am the optimist. Maybe we haven't won, but we are winning. This day was always going to come. The right went full fash over the course of the Trump era. Given that, they were always going to make their move -- they just made it too soon.

I didn't have the heart to participate in the prediction thread. Thinking about the future led me to a dark place. Back then, I felt the way Moby and gensym do now.

I wish, though, that I had predicted the following:

*An Article of Impeachment will be drawn up focusing on Trump's refusal to concede the election -- a refusal that will suddenly be widely seen as seditious.
*The Raffensberger call will be an element of that Article of Impeachment, which will have a serious chance of being adopted by the House and a very small, but real, chance of resulting in conviction in the Senate. People will legitimate speculate that Trump could become the first president to be impeached twice.
*At least one Republican senator will publicly call for Trump's immediate resignation before his term expires. (And of course, it goes without saying that Pelosi and Schumer will publicly call for his resignation or removal.)
*At least two Cabinet members will resign, citing their opposition to Trump's actions in refusing to concede the election.
*Trump will be kicked off Twitter permanently, and from Facebook at least until his term is over.
*Trump will publicly accept the transition of power to Biden, and will televise an address to the nation excoriating demonstrators seeking his continuance in office. Looking contrite and cowed, he will promise a smooth, orderly and seamless transition of power.
*After Georgia elects Ossoff and Warnock by slim margins, Perdue and Loeffler will publicly accept that result. Neither will allege fraud and Loeffler will drop her objection to Biden's election. (Perdue's opinion on the presidential election won't matter, because he will be out of the Senate.)

Things that give me hope:

The WV legislator getting arrested-- his grandmother is AWESOME: https://twitter.com/sarahcpr/status/1347638974270087171

The family of the Trump supporter who was trampled by the crowd (starts about 3 minutes in): https://www.cbs46.com/news/kennesaw-woman-among-people-who-died-at-d-c-riot/article_1a7950a8-5112-11eb-bbe7-37a8f7f03703.html

116: Moby and gensym provide yet another example of good news. Because of this week's events, a lot of people are waking up to the dangers posed by rightwing fanaticism.

Cold water woke some people to the dangers posed by the Titanic sinking, but I don't think anybody who stayed sleeping that long did much good.

Sorry about the bad link above but hopefully this one will work:
https://www.wsaz.com/2021/01/08/wva-delegate-facing-charges-following-chaos-at-us-capitol/

117: Trump will publicly accept the transition of power to Biden, and will televise an address to the nation excoriating demonstrators seeking his continuance in office. Looking contrite and cowed, he will promise a smooth, orderly and seamless transition of power.

Lindsay Graham could not have described that more aptly.

102
I don't think "Biden gets inaugurated and we have a significant ratcheting up of political violence over the next four years" counts as a win.

I don't think it counts as a loss either. It's been the most likely course of events since that Saturday in November when Pennsylvania was called, if not earlier.

It's too early to say how the fascist movement will fare over the next 1/5/10 years. That being said Wednesday could easily have gone worse. If they had taken hostages, who knows what would have happened. If they had killed 1 Senator or 11 Congressmen, it would have swung control of the Senate or House.

As always I have a media criticism twist despite their near-universal revulsion.

But in fact rather than continuing to dwell on that revulsion I wish they would just do some straight goddamn journalism* that you might expect in circumstances like these.

My thoughts are somewhat similar to those in this post by emptywheel (so read that if you want the coherent non-typo version). We all know that Trump is not like other politicians/Presidents and you need to cover him differently but do things like pepper the WH with specific questions around what is the WH doing to insure the inauguration is safe, address the shortcomings in security, what is Mike Pence's current role, are he and Trump unified in their approach etc, etc. Of course all they wlll get will be insane lies or more likely stonewalling but then that is the story. Talk about that aggressively and headline it appropriately. It's not a big difference from what they are doing, but I think it is something they have been bad at for much of the Trump presidency**. Just go into it as you would with a normal responsible organization and then reort the results even if crazed or non-responsive---sort of a "show" rather than "tell."

*More of this may be happening than I know but it is not coming through in the coverage I see.

**An example that burned me up at the time (and ever since): Late in the Trump campaign put out a laughable list of people who "debunked" Trump's multiple sexual assaults. Of course nothing was directly responsive and one was a clearly fabulist tale from a known British loon. It was briefly derided by leftie media and media critics, but it never got much traction and then he won and so clearly his voters "didn't care." Fast for ward the year or so to the Me Too stuff with Franken etc.; a few organizations used that bring up Trump's issues. Little was made of it, but one outfit (Buzzfeed maybe, not a major player) asked for what supported Huckabee Sanders' claim that everything was debunked. They released what was essentially the same list, only with the name (but not the story) of the British loon removed. And that was that. The next step clearly was to point out that they obviously did not have any material debunking the claims. And when they stonewalled that to lead with it relentlessly as they would have with any other politician or public figure***. But then other stuff happened, so "bed gf nails" I guess.

***No to always belabor, but see for instance Clinton, H. and emails.

123.last: Almost more likely they would have killed Pence of a "squish" R senator.

116 Or too late. They did need for Trump to "win" the election somehow, and they were altogether too passive in letting it become too clear to everyone outside the cult that Biden won. Or, if he couldn't win -- and the polling, while ultimately inaccurate, should have given them pause on this -- they needed to have their chaos before the election. That Trump was so obvious in telegraphing moves was a great help -- they've really picked (or been saddled with) the wrong leader for their movement. He has the right instincts, but lacks the self-discipline, and the minimal self-reflection of anyone who's actually going to be successful, long term, in anything.

From a short trip down the rabbit hole, the Q people are all aflutter over the notion that the movement of the national guard and/or military to protect the inauguration is cover for a pro-Trump coup. I'm with Walt, I think, that this danger has very likely passed.

On the PA senate, it seems to me that maybe the governor could just announce that he's going to veto every single bill, because the senate is not lawfully constituted. The Republican majority isn't veto-proof, right? The problem with this, of course, is that Republican voters are idiots, and think that no government is the best government.

121: That fucker resigned just now. Which is cheering as far as it goes.

I'm glad he resigned. What cheered me that his grandmother clearly blamed Trump for the riot-- and the local press in WV aired her quote.
Similarly the family of the Georgia woman who was trampled to death unequivocally blamed Trump-- again, in local red state media.

Oops, re: GA now blue state media. Also cheering.

112: Canonically it's 27%.

If Trump is impeached, will everybody who bought the inauguration swag with '46' on it get new stuff with '47'?

Lindsay Graham could not have described that more aptly.

Exactly!! I should have been excplicit:

*After being threatened by Lindsey Graham with Senate conviction, Trump will publicly accept the transition of power to Biden, and will televise an address to the nation excoriating demonstrators seeking his continuance in office. Looking contrite and cowed, he will promise a smooth, orderly and seamless transition of power.

The gall of the Republican leaders of the PA Senate seating the loser, despite the Pennsylvania Supreme Court's ruling, is galling. It's their version of Pence declaring Trump the winner.

Don't panic me. They haven't seated the loser yet.

No one has manners anymore. Hi, lily! You probably don't want the fruit basket.

The fruit isn't fresh anymore because nobody goes to the store.

Thanks for the welcome-- and the fruit basket warning!

Hi Lily! Just fyi, include your email address only if you want -- comments go through fine without one (unlike on a lot of mid-00s platforms).

Right. Keep your real name secret.

I cannot believe that Trump's cowedness / outward inactivity will last his term. This is a pattern we've seen so many times: he gets badgered or scared or manipulated or who knows what into sullenly reading a statement with apologetic implications off the teleprompter, then a few days later he forgets he backed down and comes back worse.

I assume the goal of all of the threats of 25th amendment or impeachment are to keep him cowed until the 20th. If that doesn't work (and I bet it won't) hopefully the deplatforming will slow him down.

Has anyone heard how the bad guys are coordinating, now that Parler has been shut down? I'm surprised that the tech platforms cooperated to kill Parler. I wonder if that means even worse revelations are around the corner about what was happening there.

Is he actually cowed? Or just literally muzzled and unable to figure out what platform to use?

I guess it was never really relevant before that there's no Section 230 safe harbor for publishing seditious conspiracy.

Eugene Goodman.

Cold water woke some people to the dangers posed by the Titanic sinking, but I don't think anybody who stayed sleeping that long did much good.

The ranking surviving officer was asleep when it happened. Not only that, he had already been asleep during the collision for a couple other lost vessels. Not only *that*, the sinking of the Titanic was probably only the second or third most exciting thing to happen to him, and that's if you include the court cases afterwards. (Lightoller by name. There's a sprightly biography but not, I think, a movie.)

There might be a natty metaphor for the ship of state, etc., but it isn't coming to me.

That's why analogies are banned, I guess.

I'm confused by who is playing the part of Kate Winslett in Wednesday's events. Is the podium the pretty blue diamond?

Tears of gratitude and relief, thinking of Eugene Goodman.

I shouldn't be evaluating heroism esthetically, but I do like a clever hero. I would much rather Goodman's quick-thinking decoying the mob away from the open Senate chamber than some alternative, equally heroic but dumber, cop trying to stand in their way and getting overrun.

Right? Get this man a shield.

The Trump people are on video using some kind of club to beat an officer who is defenseless, knocked down face-first. Being overrun was a very big risk that day.

The question seems to be why US administrations at local and regional level chose to establish gendarmeries rather than policing aspiring to the Peelian principles as the Australians and Canadians did. It seems inconsistent with most of the rest of American national ideology.

152: Where the Canadians had mounties, we had rootin' tootin' sheriffs with a posse comitatus. Plus racism being so much more systemic in the US. I don't think the Canadians had anything equivalent to our slave catchers; if the Aussies did they didn't have it to the same degree.

Reading further back in the thread, "Eugene Goodman" is such a novel protagonist name. I think we're supposed to think he's a good guy. (Kidding aside, it was amazing to watch initially, but once people explained what he was doing, I was in awe.)

The role of sheriff (shire reeve - clerk of the county), who was empowered to call out the posse comitatus (power of the county) went back in England to at least the 12th entury. But most of the Anglosphere modernised their law enforcement in the early 19th century.