It is extremely silly to believe that the January 6th rioters came close to deposing the government. Even if they had somehow taken all of Congress hostage, the military would have gone to the capitol and crushed them.
Real coups are complex operations which are planned in advance and carried out by military officers, not a crowd of rowdy goofballs.
What are the chances that this particular group of rioters could have killed Pence? He refused to leave, but he had an armored vehicle to shelter in. His guards were well-trained men with machine guns.
What is your source that SS agents had machine guns ready to defend Pence? Why do you think Pence and SS agents would win a battle of attrition when they're camping out in their armored car vs 1000s of people swarming them?
The Secret Service has automatic weapons. That fact is generally known. The January 6 crowd was not going to launch repeated human wave attacks over piles of corpses. I don’t condone what happened; I think it was bad. But I object to pretending it was more serious than it was. It was a demonstration that turned into a riot that got out of control.
I’m curious what coup experts think? I lean toward the goofy Day of Larping by painkiller addicts take as well, with zero buy-in from the military (which I’d think necessary!), but curious about a more formal comparative coup politics.
Of course you say this without dedicating any time to attempting to understand the history of coups, or to even glance at the Jan 6 violent crime convictions.
You seem to have not even read those Wikipedia pages. They are full of examples of coups done by the military, or acts of the legislature to increase executive power. If you can actually find one example where a mob of unarmed non-military people carried out a coup I would like to see it.
They were involved in a criminal conspiracy that resulted in the death of one of their own. Copilot says "under U.S. law, if someone is involved in a criminal conspiracy that results in the death of one of their own, it can be considered murder. According to 18 U.S. Code § 1117, if two or more persons conspire to commit murder and one or more of them performs any overt act to effect the object of the conspiracy (e.g. breaking in and shouting "Hang Mike Pence!" - my edit), each conspirator can be punished by imprisonment for any term of years or for life". In a normal world that would include the prime instigator.
Unfortunately, whatever you (or I) may think, they'll all be pardoned and released on or soon after Jan 20th so it's just hot air.
Politics is insurrection continued by other means.
After their release the Proud Boys etc will see themselves as above the law, so that's not going to end well.
Similarly all the Republican senators will know that their prospects are limited if they don't side with Trump, but that even if they do, they could so easily end up on the wrong side of him with a mob chanting their name.
Not sure what you mean by this. But if you are referring to Ashli Babbitt, you can't count her death as resulting from the mob, let alone blame the mob for her death. She was murdered by a Capitol Police officer, and the only reason he was not charged is because of the ludicrously high bar to charge a cop with anything in the US. See the DOJ's statement here (https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/department-justice-closes-investigation-death-ashli-babbitt).
With respect, Isaac, I have guarded my share of government facilities while I was in the military, and I was trained in the standard way: Shout, show, shove, shoot.
Now, maybe the rules are different for Capitol police? But Babbitt was an Air Force veteran—I have to think she would know that crawling through a broken window towards men with guns guarding a government facility will likely result in your death.
Murdered is a strong term. While I think the Bulldog vastly exaggerates the actual likelihood of success of the J6 endeavor, she was at the time engaged in criminal conduct. As a general matter, I think it’s good for police to shoot people in the act of committing crimes. If the Capital Police had simply opened fire on the people trying to break in, I wouldn’t have objected.
Where I disagree is in the claim that harsh punishment after the fact is useful or desirable. Particularly since leftist rioters are so often coddled.
I don't think likelihood of success matters. If you broke into a bank and attempted to open the safe by trying random numbers do you think you'd get a reduced sentence cos you stood almost zero chance of success?
If I stand outside the bank and pray that the money will be transferred to me by magic, I’m not guilty of a crime at all. If I break into the bank, wander around, and don’t actually look for money, I’m guilty of a lesser crime. Likelihood of success does indeed matter in criminal law.
I think rioters who assault cops should be treated harshly. If we treat these rioters harshly, can we then agree that, for example, Antifa rioters who attack an ICE office get treated harshly?
Yes you're right about the legal position: if a police officer kills a member of an armed gang during a robbery, the gang are not held responsible for that death.
But if you put armed police inside a government building and tell them to guard it, then when people break in you can hardly be surprised that they get shot.
It's easy to sit at home and criticise but the officer would only have had a vague idea of what was going on, maybe he'd heard chants of "Hang Mike Pence", he must have been terrified. That's why the police are given latitude. Obviously with hindsight they should have trained for this situation - maybe they did and that was his training. Why give him a loaded gun if he isn't to use it?
What an incredibly absurd argument. We don’t convict people, or sentence them, on the basis of what could have happened but only on what did. This is the very definition of fascism.
Elderly election protesters have already been punished far out of proportion to what they actually did but simply due to the Democrats’ desire to terrify their enemies through their abuse of the court system.
Most J6 protesters should be granted full pardons and the politicized judiciary that prosecuted them under the Biden regime investigated by Congressional committees.
I have to disagree, that's not how our justice system works. We punish conspiracy to commit murder and attempted murder way less harshly than actual murder. There's a reason for that.
Persecutions for attempted crime is a tool used by liberals and fascists alike. You wouldn't stop brushing your teeth because fascists also use toothbrushes.
Of course we convict and sentence people on the basis of what could have happened. For every crime X, there is also a crime of attempted X and conspiracy to commit X. That is criminal law 101. There also whole crimes that we have created because of what could happen. What is DUI, if not the crime of "you could have killed someone"? There is nothing fascist about that.
No, you are wrong. A drink driver is not convicted on the chance they would kill someone. It's against the law to drink and drive. In fact drinking is not against the law and driving is not against the law. So you can not convict one for combining and assume they will kill someone. Just like walking into Federal building is not against the law. They made up Jan6th and force fed a crime was committed, claiming what could have happened. It's literally the same tool with everything narrated from the Federal governed and people in mass eat it right up.
Why do you think it is against the law to drink and drive? It's not because we have an inherent aesthetic or moral dislike of combining drinking and driving. It's not because we object to the consequences if you get lucky and don't kill anyone. It's specifically because you might kill someone.
I don't think anyone is saying we should make up a new law after the fact and convict people of it. We all know there is an ex post facto clause in the constitution, and I don't read Bentham's Bulldog or anyone else here as arguing that we should violate it. The thesis he is arguing for, as I understand it, is this. Within the statutory law that already exists, there is enormous discretion in terms of what laws (including attempt and conspiracy) that J6 rioters might be charged with violating, and enormous discretion in what sentences might be imposed under those laws. And Bentham's Bulldog thinks that within that wide range of discretion, prosecutors and judges should choose harsh charges and harsh sentences.
It sounds like you Bentham's Bulldog also have some factual disagreements about what actually happened at the capitol on January 6, 2021. That's why we present evidence to juries, to resolve those kinds of factual disagreements.
I agree with that. We often consider likely or probable consequences. If I go downtown and start shooting a gun at random, I can be punished even if I only hit concrete walls.
Where I think Bulldog is wrong in his assessment of likely consequences. If you run J6 a hundred times, in about 90 of them the Speaker of the House pre-deploys the National Guard and nothing happens. In maybe eight or so what happens is what did happen -- government officials shelter while intruders mill about. In one or two, the intruders get close to actual government officials and armed guards start shooting. A few of the intruders are killed and the rest run away. The likelihood or a human wave attack over dead bodies is effectively zero. The chances they’d get close to killing Pence are even closer to zero.
Edward Luttwak’s first book was on how to stage a coup. Trump didn’t read any of it.
No, but she could have asked for it before J6. And on that day it took the head of the Capital Police an inordinate amount of time to request assistance. It really was incredible incompetence.
She could have asked for it, sure. Who would have decided whether it was done? Oh, right, Donald Trump, the guy who made J6 happen in the first place. He didn't tell people to go home after Ashli Babbitt got shot - why exactly would you assume he would post the National Guard?
"“Pentagon leadership prioritized concerns of optics over their duty to protect lives,” said Chairman Loudermilk. “President Trump met with senior Pentagon leaders and directed them to make sure any events on January 6, 2021 were safe."
Mark Milley: The President just says, ‘Hey, look at this. There’s going to be a large amount of protesters here on the 6th, make sure that you have sufficient National Guard or Soldiers to make sure it’s a safe event.’”
Chris Miller: “The President commented that they were going to need 10,000 troops the following day...I interpreted it as
a bit of presidential banter or President Trump banter that you all are familiar with, and in no way, shape, or form did I interpret that as an order or direction.”
Trump asked for it, admitted by anti-Trumper Milley and Miller themselves.
Once an actual request was made by the head of the Capitol Police, it was granted and the National Guard came. It just took forever. Trump didn’t do anything to stop it, or to subvert them to his side. This would have required advance planning, which he isn’t big on. When called, the Governor of Virginia also agreed to send the Virginia National Guard. And both the Attorney General and the head of the FBI said they would have sent armed agents if they had been asked to do so. The head of the Capitol Police really was incompetent, and he really did fail to request help.
"We don't convict people, or sentence them, on the basis of what could have happened but only on what did."
Completely false. There are tons of crimes with "attempted" in the name. J6 was an attempted coup and an attempt to carry out massive political violence against the people certifying the election. That's much worse than attempted murder, and the people who did it should be punished worse than attempted murderers.
If you don't punish coup attempts unless they actually *succeed*, then that's equivalent to just not punishing coup attempts. After all, you won't be able to punish them if they succeed. There will be nothing to deter coup attempts if would-be insurrectionists know that they'll either succeed and avoid punishment, or fail and not be punished because their actions supposedly didn't lead to anything bad.
"That is the very definition of fascism."
Come on. I know the term "fascism" gets thrown around a lot, but surely you know that this has nothing to do with fascism whatsoever. Punishing people for attempted crimes is done in every country in the world and is far from the definition of fascism.
And it's rather ironic that you complain about unambiguous criminals being punished in a way you think is too harsh, calling it fascism and political persecution, and then immediately turn around and call for the judiciary who sentenced them to be prosecuted for doing their jobs, despite not having committed any crimes, and to be investigated by Congress in what would clearly be a politically-motivated stunt. If you actually think the prosecution of J6ers was unjust, the least you can do is be consistent and not try to unjustly prosecute your own political opponents. Your words make it clear that your opposition to the J6ers' punishments is partisan, not principled.
Also:
"Elderly election protestors"? They're not all elders. And they're not just "protestors". You're just trying to drum up sympathy for them by portraying them as too old to handle the punishments. But the law is blind to age. And being elderly actually means that their punishments may not be as bad for them. E.g., if someone gets a life sentence, that's less bad for them if they've already lived most of their life than if they're young.
Democrats are not trying to "terrify political opponents" by prosecuting the J6ers. You'll notice that many Republicans also support the prosecutions, and that the Democrats only prosecuted people who unambiguously committed a crime. You'll also notice that Democrats who commit crimes are prosecuted too (Remember Menendez?). What they're actually trying to do is terrify would-be insurrectionists so that a coup attempt doesn't happen again. Which is a good thing. That's the point of the justice system - to terrify criminals into not committing crime.
What virtually all of the J6 defendants were guilty of was, at most, trespassing or minor vandalism. Dozens were let into the capital by guards, taking selfies as they walked through, and some, like the clown in the Viking hat, were accompanied around the building by armed guards. To claim they were part of a "coup" or an "attempted" insurrection is simply absurd and simply swallowing Democrat propaganda wholesale..
They were there to prevent Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election. Using illegitimate means to prevent the rightful leader from taking over and instead have an illegitimate ruler hold power in their place is by definition a coup.
...After the Capitol was breached in multiple places with 100s of people pouring in from all sides. Are you also going to say that the officers walking backwards in circles down the hallways as a crowd control tactic were leading them in? Police officers aren't ordered to fight till their last breath in mobs of people, because if they do get stripped of their riot shields, pepper spray, and guns, and get trampled or beaten to death, many of which did happen to officers that day.
"Chansley, who pleaded guilty to a felony charge of obstructing an official proceeding, was among the first rioters to enter the building. He has acknowledged using a bullhorn to rile up the mob, offering thanks in a prayer while in the Senate for having the chance to get rid of traitors and scratching out a threatening note to Vice President Mike Pence saying, “It’s Only A Matter of Time. Justice Is Coming!”"
As I said in my last comment to you, you are clueless. Democrat propaganda is infinitely more truthful than whatever it is you're consuming.
If a drunkard says he's going to steal the nuclear armaments of the USA and jaywalks off to do so before getting arrested, he is absolutely not judged on hobo nuclear armageddon could have happened had he succeeded.
If the drunkard actually managed to infiltrate a nuclear launch site and forced people to evacuate all the missiles from it to prevent them from being launched, I imagine he would be punished very severely, and rightfully so.
Now we get into the nuance of the case. If, for example, it was shown that nuclear launch site personnel opened the doors for him as a major prank to make him think he could do it it's vastly different from him bypassing the keycode locks on the base under his own ability.
I don't think it's that different. He would still be severely punished in that case - it's just that the personnel who opened the door would be punished as well.
Interestingly we are seeing what the courts decide with the entrapment appeal made by the Whitmer kidnapping case. I think it's ongoing but if the courts accept it we are on the road to the drunkard being let off easy because the responsibility of opening the doors belongs to the prankster guards and any external easing of access falls upon the easer, not the easee.
>There are tons of crimes with "attempted" in the name.
Yes: and we punish them very differently than we do crimes that were successfully caried out. The reason for that is that we don't sentence people based on what they could have done, but what they did: if they only attempted, we punish them less than if they succeeded.
Not at all: if what you *did* was *attempt* to murder someone then we don't punish you for *murder* we punish you for *attempted murder*, which is punished less than murder.
That doesn't change the conclusion. Attempted murder is punished less severely than successful murder, but the punishment is still severe. Likewise, and attempted coup may be less serious than a successful coup, but it should still be punished severely.
As long as you agree it should be punished less severely than a successful coup, we agree. In Benthem's post he argues they should be punished severely because "If all left-wing congresspeople were decapitated all at once, that would have been an unprecedented threat to Democracy" which seems to me to be calling for a harsher punishment than they otherwise would have received for rioting, breaking and entering, and obstructing Congress.
Well, they *should* be punished more harshly than just what they would get for rioting, breaking and entering, and obstructing Congress, because they did more than just that. The tried to prevent the transfer of power to the duly elected president to keep a ruler in charge who would have been illegitimate. And some of them also wanted to murder Congresspeople and the VP. Thus, they should be punished for the attempted coup in addition to their other crimes. This is consistent with being punished less severely with what they would get if they had literally decapitated all left-wing Congresspeople, while still being punished severely.
I'm glad you should agree with me that they should be punished for what they did (which includes what they attempted) and not for what they didn't do (or attempt).
> Sentences for attempted murder can range from a 3-year custodial sentence to life imprisonment. The likely sentence an individual would receive for conviction of attempted murder varies on the culpability of the accused individual and the harm caused to the complainant. For example, the court is likely to consider the extent of planning carried out by the individual in relation to the attempt. A Judge is also likely to consider the amount of harm caused to the complainant, either physical or psychological or both.
That's a weird definition of fascism that I have never heard before. Do you have a dictionary to point to, or alternatively, select examples of previous uses of the term in common parlance?
Actually, the core of the US criminal code is "intent" and what the perpetrator intended to happen. It's the reason why "attempted murder" is still a felonious crime even if a murder wasn't committed. There's no doubt that many of the J6ers "intended" to carry out a coup and depose the government.
In fact, 99% of those prosecuted had no such intent... and there is ZERO evidence that they had such intent. Anyone who thinks Mr. Viking Horns was attempting a "coup" has been brainwashed by four years of non-stop Democrat and media propaganda (same thing, actually). Most J6 defendants committed simple trespassing. Perhaps two dozen were guilty of rioting and vandalism.
It was literally called the "Stop the steal" rally. "Stop the steal" means "prevent Joe Biden from becoming President," which would have been a coup if successful. It's actually insane how you people can reverse reality.
Attempted murder is a crime. Vandalism and trespassing are not attempted murder -- and to try to make them out to be is a corruption of the judicial process.
Similarly, Donald Trump paid off a porn star for her silence (which is not illegal), so the corrupt judiciary tried to charge him with falsifying business records... but that inconveniently has a statue of limitations time limit.
So the same corrupt officials prosecuted him for "election interference." When the Democrats prattle on about "lawfare," it's classic projection: they are terrified that the same corrupt lawfare practices they themselves engaged in will be used against them.
>Donald Trump paid off a porn star for her silence (which is not illegal),
He used campaign funds to shut a pornstar up because he thought it would ruin his election chances. As Trump himself says, this was a blatant case of "ELECTION INTERFERENCE!!!!"
This is false. In fact, Trump’s lawyer paid the porn star from his own funds and then reimbursed himself from Trump’s private funds but categorized it incorrectly as a business expense, which it was not. The Trump-hating New York D.A. Alvin Bragg nevertheless concocted a novel theory that this was “election interference” rather than simply falsifying business records, which is a misdemeanor and not prosecutable due to the statue of limitations.
>Elderly election protesters have already been punished far out of proportion
Which ones? I guarantee you won't list a single one because you have no evidence on your side, only rhetoric. The feds even admit to being far too lenient on the protestors - https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/reports/25-011.pdf "The D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office generally has not charged those individuals whose only crime on January 6, 2021 was to enter the restricted grounds surrounding the Capitol, which has resulted in the Office declining to charge hundreds of individuals."
>the Democrats’ desire to terrify their enemies through their abuse of the court system.
You seem to be clueless about the very basics of the court system so I'm not sure why you think your opinion on it is respectable.
>politicized judiciary that prosecuted them under the Biden regime
Following from my latest comment, courts don't prosecute people, and when people are prosecuted they need to be convicted by a jury. You are clueless on the workings of the judiciary as well as the separation of powers.
>investigated by Congressional committees.
Republicans already have the power to form subcommittees to investigate people they don't like. They did this with the Biden Impeachment Inquiry, which resulted in 0 indictments, 0 charges, and a failure to recommend any impeachment articles. Also, you obviously don't know this, but Congress has no Constitutional role in convicting people of criminal charges. They can only recommend charges to prosecutors, which if you think the entire court system is corrupted by Democrats, will be pointless.
Koopa, could you try to be a bit nicer! While you're clearly a smart guy, many of your comments are mean spirited, and not conducive to the friendly atmosphere I wish to cultivate.
To Trump supporting conservatives - no, I'm consciously always in attack mode against them, although feel free to delete my comments/ban me in any case.
Attempted Murder (and Attempted <various other things>) are crimes so you're wrong. People ARE punished for what might have happened had they succeeded in their endeavours.
Attempted murder is, in fact, a crime, because it is a specific act with a specific intent. What the Democrats tried to claim was that protesters who trespassed COULD have engaged in an attempted coup if only they had (a) weapons and (b) an actual plan. They had neither. We don't prosecute vandals because someone MIGHT have been inspired by their graffiti and MIGHT have then gone on to commit murder.
Excuse me, what exactly is the very definition of fascism? I thought the definition was something like "palingenetic ultranationalist militarism". Now the definition of fascism is high sentences for crimes?
There isn't much evidence that severity of punishment has significant deterrence effect compared to certainty of punishment (see eg David Roodman's meta-analyses*), and crazy people who bought in into an election was stolen narrative seems among the archetypal examples of people who I would not expect to respond rationally to incentives.
I think your argument is correct iff I buy the premise that extremely severe penalties actually have significant deterrence effect, but I do not, at least for this sort of crime.
*I think my synthesis position between the available empirical evidence and the strong prior that rational actors ought to respond to incentives is believing that extremely severe penalties are more appropriate for white collar crime and other relatively rational crimes like pre-meditated murder, than most other crimes.
Every 'immigration sanctuary' locale is insurrectionist. Do you support 'extremely severe penalties' for the authors and administrators of 'sanctuaries'?
Making up new definitions for words is how words acquire new scopes of meaning. It's a perfectly natural and normal process. And in this case, I'm also right. If you defy the federal government and deny the federal government the ability to enforce federal law, that's 'insurrection'.
By any reasonable - versus partisan - definition of 'insurrection', 'sanctuary' locales are engaged in insurrection.
Like most people, you deny the logic of your position as soon as it impinges on your side's ability to act with impunity.
I simply disagree with your new definition. Under your definition, both people who obstructed and opposed vaccine mandates and people who obstructed and opposed deportation mandates are insurrectionists.
But the standard definition of insurrection is an attempt to topple a government, usually by force, and I do think that is meaningfully different from just resisting or obstructing federal law enforcement. Is anyone who has ever cheated a bit on their taxes an insurrectionist? The widening of your definition is a bit hard for me to swallow.
When Arkansans defied the federal government's attempt to integrate the public schools and Eisenhower sent down the National Guard to force integration a gun-point, was Eisenhower justified in using military means to force conformity with federal law or not?
If he was, then so would the US government be justified in using military means to force sanctuary cities to conform to federal immigration law.
If he was not, the desegregation in Arkansas in the 1950s was a criminal act by the federal government.
The 'standard definition' of anything solely exists to reaffirm the interests of the ruling regime.
Any resistance is insurrection on the installment plan.
I think there's an obvious mismatch between your assessment of "what could have happened" and reality. Saying that Jan 6 was almost a "successful insurrection" is like saying that a toddler coming for you with a butcher knife almost killed you just because they managed to inflict a small cut before being disarmed. I do think that what the rioters did was bad and deserves punishment, but it also matters whether people are deliberately committing evil with full agency at hand versus acting out of passion and/or delusions. And the law takes this account when punishing people as well.
For example--let's say you see a person and mistakenly believe, for whatever reason that the person is in the middle of committing a mass shooting. You run them over with your car in order to stop the rampage, killing them. However, after the fact you learn that actually nothing of the sort was going on, no one was in danger, and you just killed a guy for nothing. You're still going to face punishment for this, but your sentence will be lighter than if you randomly ran a guy over just for fun. Likewise, the law does impose different sentences based on what actually happened versus "what could have." If you assault someone and they don't die, you aren't going to be given the punishment for murder because theoretically they "could have died," if things somehow went differently in an alternate timeline.
Anyways, that's really all besides the main point I wanted to make. I find it best to model politics as war by other means--this makes political violence and crimes different from "normal crimes" in the same way that war is different from other forms of violence. In war, there is a serious case for showing grace to one's enemies once victory has been achieved. If you offer them a place in the new order, they have reason to buy into it along with you. If you opt instead to simply continue hurting them as much as possible, you incentivize them to re-start the conflict at an opportune moment. An easy historical example is the common belief that the sanctions imposed on Germany after WWI contributed to the eventual outbreak of WW2.
Harsh treatment of conquered enemies only really makes sense if you're going to take it all the way. The Maori got away with brutalizing the Moriori because when they were done, there were no Moriori left to hold a grudge about it after the fact. But in politics, this obviously isn't an option. Just straight up killing your political opposition would, by definition, take us out of the realm of politics and into the realm of war outright (as opposed to war by other means).
I'd argue this is in fact what makes liberal societies relatively stable, the fact that no matter what happens in politics, ultimately no one really gets punished for any of it. Just like in direct warfare, harsh treatment of enemies incentivizes escalation. If we use the logic of this article to lock up J6ers and throw away the key, I'd demand the same treatment of all BLM rioters, and I'm sure most on my side would as well. This is the sort of cycle by which we can easily imagine politics escalating into actual war at a certain point.
On the flipside, the fact that Donald Trump was actually allowed to run for President again and even win the election has completely defused the tensions that led up to J6. If Trump had been somehow barred from running again, as the author and many other libs seem to have wanted, the risk of further political instability would *obviously* be way, way higher right now.
People generally should not be punished for what could have happened in the worst scenario. When criminals rob a bank, we do not punish them for mass murder even though they *could* have killed everyone in the bank in the course of robbing it. When someone attempts to murder someone we do not punish them as harshly as if they succeed. And when someone drives drunk we do not punish them as if they plowed their card into a crowd of preschoolers, even though that *could* have happened.
The rioters on 1/6 were rioters and should be punished as rioters: for trespassing, for breaking things, for disorderly conduct, and for assaulting police officers. The fact that they could have killed Congresspeople is not sufficient: we need to believe that they would have been likely to. We don't know what would have happened if Congress was still there when they broke in. It is more plausible that the rioters would have simply yelled at their representatives than that they would murder the Vice President. There was no plan to murder the Vice President, no intent to do so, and no opportunity to do so. They didn't even set the place on fire, which is more than I can say for most rioting mobs. https://apnews.com/article/2e7f5b2a93025df5b4343fc14184842c
What matters is not just what could have happened, but intent. You don't punish a robber as if they had murdered everyone in the bank unless there's evidence that they were trying to do that. In the case of the J6 rioters, it's unambiguous that they were trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election, thus committing a coup to keep Trump in power. And it's also unambiguous that some of them wanted to kill members of Congress. Punishing them only as rioters would be a huge understatement of the severity of their crime.
>In the case of the J6 rioters, it's unambiguous that they were trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election, thus committing a coup to keep Trump in power.
It is not unambiguous at all. You might as well say that it is unambiguous that participants in the George Floyd riots were trying to overturn a racist social order through violent revolution. Most of those people were just mad about racism. Most of the J6 rioters were mad about the election. I very much doubt even a majority of those participating in the J6 riots did so because they believed they would be able to overturn the results of the election. I image most of them were just mad and wanted to be heard, same as most political rioters. Somewhere else in the comments someone claimed that a rioter who shouted "Hang Mike Pence!" was guilty of conspiracy to commit murder. You might as well say that BLM rioters shouting "F* the police!" were guilty of conspiracy to commit sexual assault.
"Hang Mike Pence" is clearly not comparable to "Fuck the Police," since "fuck" is regularly used as an explosive with no connection to literal serial assault, while "hang" is not. Now, I agree that regardless, we shouldn't assume that the rioters literally wanted to murder Mike Pence just because they shouted that. But they also constructed a gallows, and some people had zip ties to kidnap members of Congress, and they broke into the building where the people they were threatening were working. That all makes it much more serious than a simple chant.
And the explicit reason why they were all there was to convince Congress to overturn the results of the 2020 election. You can't argue that they were "just mad" and weren't actually trying to change the result. They wanted the results to be overturned, and they broke into the building and even the room where those results were being certified in an attempt to force Congress to do what they wanted.
Protesters in Portland have constructed guillotines multiple times, but I would be opposed to charging them with conspiracy to commit murder because of it. Even if they were shouting "Kill all cops!" right next to it. Also, the gallows were erected way before the rally occurred, having been set up by people unknown around 6:30 that morning. For some reason the capitol police did not tear the illegal structure down, and the FBI has been unable to identify the people who put it up. The rioters chanting "Hang Mike Pence" were hundreds of yards away from it, and as far as we can tell were not involved in setting it up.
>And the explicit reason why they were all there was to convince Congress to overturn the results of the 2020 election. You can't argue that they were "just mad" and weren't actually trying to change the result.
Those two things are the same thing: they were mad at Congress, they wanted to convince Congress to overturn the results. That's not the same thing as wanting to kill members of congress or even kidnap members of congress. When protestors want Congress to repeal a law, are they guilty of attempting a coup? What if they somehow ended up in the capital building and wandered around without hurting anybody? Is it a coup now? I don't think so. That's a riot, trespassing, and obstructing Congress.
Repealing a law isn't the same thing as illegally overturning the presidential election. If the protestors just wanted Congress to repeal a law, they would not have attempted a coup, though breaking into the Capitol to intimidate Congress into doing so would still be an act of terrorism. That would make it worse than just regular rioting and trespassing. It would also make it worse than obstructing Congress by some means that doesn't involve intimidation.
But the fact that the protestors did all of this with the goal not just of getting a law repealed, but of illegally overturning an election, effectively ending democracy in the U.S., makes it way worse than even that situation.
Also, the whole "those two things are the same thing" is kind of the point - you're downplaying what the J6ers did by saying they were "just angry," which ignores the fact that what they did in their anger was a coup attempt.
>Repealing a law isn't the same thing as illegally overturning the presidential election.
No, but it is the same thing as legally overturning a fraudulent election: which is what the rioters thought was the case. People wanting a law repealed also shouldn't break into capitol buildings, but if they do they're not trying to do a coup, and they're not terrorists, they're trying to be heard and influence the political process. In other words, they're rioting protestors and should be charged as such. Intent matters, and I see no evidence that the J6 rioters intended to make Congress "illegally overturn" the election (because they thought the election was illegal, so overturning it would be the right thing to do legally speaking). I certainly don't think anybody went in there with the goal of "effectively ending democracy".
They should be punished for trespassing and obstructing and all the rest, and if you want to throw terrorism in there I could see an argument for it (though generally rioting protesters don't get called terrorists, even when they're trying to intimidate elected officials into doing something). But punish them for what they did and for what they attempted, not for what they didn't do or attempt to do.
More serious comment. Suppose you have very high evidence that someone is trying to break into your house through your window to kill you. However, it turns out that it is your child trying to crawl in through the window because you accidentally locked them out. Suppose you just *barely* miss their head. You almost did something really, really bad. But it seems that, given your evidence, you did exactly what you were supposed to do: protect your family from (who you thought was) an aggressive intruder. It seems you shouldn’t be punished at all, or only very slightly.
Go to the J6 rioters. I think many of them had high evidence of election interference then (eg we’ve never had a sitting president encourage it this much, and if you couple that with high profile media outlets parroting him all the time, I could see many people believing it was in fact stolen). If they succeeded, they could’ve done something very bad indeed.
I’m wondering: does anything about the first case illuminate the second? Do we get a different conclusion from you?
I’m undecided, personally. I think the upshot turns on just how plausible it was at that moment in time to think the election was stolen for a subgroup of voters.
I support the castle doctrine but shooting someone before you can see their head seems crazy to me, and I would definitely expect a punishment for doing that.
Being delusional is a weak defense for storming the Capitol - you can still establish mens rea and I think it's been pretty easily established in most prosecutions since the defendants are on camera saying it would be a revolution, 1776, and were fighting the police. It would be harder to establish if Trump brainwashed them into believing there were no more laws, or given them a super strong hallucinogenic so they could no longer comprehend their actions. Just being lied to about an election result isn't enough of an epistemic shakeup that it magically becomes uncriminal to overturn the results of an election, and it seems to me like most of the defendants were happy to admit that's what they were doing, which is blatantly illegal.
Maybe security in general should experience severe penalties every time they are found to be irresponsible. It sounds like North Korea would need like 100 soldiers to take over the white house given the current state of security.
The unfortunate problem here is that you have to live in the country with a large number of these types of people in perpetuity. As a matter of practicality, it is necessary to defuse the MAGA movement’s persecution complex and hostility to mainstream institutions. This is also a very unique and contingent set of circumstances, so by being lenient, the justice system isn’t really incentivising more coup attempts. Again, in theory I agree, but in practice this would provoke a vicious spiral of animosity between MAGA and the mainstream which would only exacerbate the kinds of institutional crises that you want to prevent.
Victim culture is here to stay. MAGA isn't going to change course. The majority of Republicans still believe the 2020 election was stolen after Trump lost 60+ lawsuits challenging the results, Giuliani and Powel admit to lying in their defamation cases, Fox News and Newsmax admit to lying in their defamation cases, fraudulent electors are being prosecuted in every state and some have even already been convicted, etc.
Or compare the classified documents cases. Biden and Pence comply with their respective investigations and don't get charged, meanwhile Trump denies he has them, shows them to visitors at Mar A Lago, and directs people to hide them from the FBI. The result is that MAGA thinks it's lawfare against Trump.
As long as there is a perceived gap between how extreme MAGA thinks they're getting prosecuted and how little they really are getting prosecuted, Democrats should be (legally) shrinking that gap. They already suffer bad pr for it, so they should be going ham rather than slow rolling the prosecutions like Merrick Garland, unless MAGA chooses to course correct, which they have shown no signs of doing.
I don’t totally disagree. But MAGA is not some immovable constant in politics. It’s a product of circumstances, cultural factors, material conditions etc. It can grow more powerful and it can lose power, and similarly attitudes and values within the movement can fluctuate. The plight of the J6ers was a major driving force of the conservative movement during the early Biden term, and if you think MAGA wouldn’t have noticed harsher penalties because their perception of the situation was already radically inflated, you’re dead wrong. Imo you’re also wrong if you think further antagonising MAGA would garner no meaningful reaction. We’ve seen many times over the years that these people are capable of insanely antisocial acts, Jan 6th itself being the icing on the cake. Imo the best course of action when there are pivotal symbolic tradeoffs like this one is to defuse tensions as much as is reasonable (not suggesting they get community service or anything like that lol)
“The most important deterrence comes from deterring the most important things” - I agree with your thesis, but this statement needs work. When you say “important” here, I think you use it to mean important in the first instance and “potential for bad” in the second. While this makes sense, it’s clunky.
I temporarily no longer have access with a printer which was how I caught many of my spelling and grammar errors. I still use chat gpt and read over the essays but I sometimes miss stuff.
Am not agreeing. These were just stupid people doing stupid things, and as you note, suckers for the stolen election narrative. I don't think they were all that vicious. And somehow I don't think people are going to repeat the act, I suppose if I thought so I'd be more in favor of the deterrent argument.
I do think anybody attempting to broach important govt building ought to face strong deterrence and the security precautions were a joke as we know.
A lot of criminals, including murderers are stupid people doing stupid things. Suckers for the life that they imagine they might achieve. I still think they ought be punished.
It is extremely silly to believe that the January 6th rioters came close to deposing the government. Even if they had somehow taken all of Congress hostage, the military would have gone to the capitol and crushed them.
Real coups are complex operations which are planned in advance and carried out by military officers, not a crowd of rowdy goofballs.
What happens when they kill Mike Pence and Trump started claiming that Joe Biden's victory can't be certified?
What are the chances that this particular group of rioters could have killed Pence? He refused to leave, but he had an armored vehicle to shelter in. His guards were well-trained men with machine guns.
What is your source that SS agents had machine guns ready to defend Pence? Why do you think Pence and SS agents would win a battle of attrition when they're camping out in their armored car vs 1000s of people swarming them?
The Secret Service has automatic weapons. That fact is generally known. The January 6 crowd was not going to launch repeated human wave attacks over piles of corpses. I don’t condone what happened; I think it was bad. But I object to pretending it was more serious than it was. It was a demonstration that turned into a riot that got out of control.
Then the military would have crushed them obviously. General Milley was standing by, ready to intervene.
Milley is an asshat.
Agreed. But he's an asshat whose troops would have crushed a couple hundred unarmed rioters.
Crushed whom? Trump? Are you comprehending the scenario I'm laying out?
Crushed the 200 or so unarmed rioters. You are living in your own imagination.
He can crush them as much as he wishes, after Pence is dead their job is already done. Trump has a pretext to remain in power.
Yeah, the military and the media would never allow that to happen. You're delusional.
J6 Apologists can never answer this question in a meaningful way. They think everything would've magically have been fine.
I’m curious what coup experts think? I lean toward the goofy Day of Larping by painkiller addicts take as well, with zero buy-in from the military (which I’d think necessary!), but curious about a more formal comparative coup politics.
Of course you say this without dedicating any time to attempting to understand the history of coups, or to even glance at the Jan 6 violent crime convictions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_coup
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-coup
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Venezuelan_constitutional_crisis
https://apnews.com/article/capitol-siege-florida-virginia-conspiracy-government-and-politics-6ac80882e8cf61af36be6c46252ac24c
You seem to have not even read those Wikipedia pages. They are full of examples of coups done by the military, or acts of the legislature to increase executive power. If you can actually find one example where a mob of unarmed non-military people carried out a coup I would like to see it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Sri_Lankan_political_crisis
https://apnews.com/article/sri-lanka-election-economy-wickremesinghe-imf-protests-e197eaf330758f2f35ece447a3f2739c
They were involved in a criminal conspiracy that resulted in the death of one of their own. Copilot says "under U.S. law, if someone is involved in a criminal conspiracy that results in the death of one of their own, it can be considered murder. According to 18 U.S. Code § 1117, if two or more persons conspire to commit murder and one or more of them performs any overt act to effect the object of the conspiracy (e.g. breaking in and shouting "Hang Mike Pence!" - my edit), each conspirator can be punished by imprisonment for any term of years or for life". In a normal world that would include the prime instigator.
Unfortunately, whatever you (or I) may think, they'll all be pardoned and released on or soon after Jan 20th so it's just hot air.
Politics is insurrection continued by other means.
After their release the Proud Boys etc will see themselves as above the law, so that's not going to end well.
Similarly all the Republican senators will know that their prospects are limited if they don't side with Trump, but that even if they do, they could so easily end up on the wrong side of him with a mob chanting their name.
Interesting times...
Not sure what you mean by this. But if you are referring to Ashli Babbitt, you can't count her death as resulting from the mob, let alone blame the mob for her death. She was murdered by a Capitol Police officer, and the only reason he was not charged is because of the ludicrously high bar to charge a cop with anything in the US. See the DOJ's statement here (https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/department-justice-closes-investigation-death-ashli-babbitt).
With respect, Isaac, I have guarded my share of government facilities while I was in the military, and I was trained in the standard way: Shout, show, shove, shoot.
Now, maybe the rules are different for Capitol police? But Babbitt was an Air Force veteran—I have to think she would know that crawling through a broken window towards men with guns guarding a government facility will likely result in your death.
Murdered is a strong term. While I think the Bulldog vastly exaggerates the actual likelihood of success of the J6 endeavor, she was at the time engaged in criminal conduct. As a general matter, I think it’s good for police to shoot people in the act of committing crimes. If the Capital Police had simply opened fire on the people trying to break in, I wouldn’t have objected.
Where I disagree is in the claim that harsh punishment after the fact is useful or desirable. Particularly since leftist rioters are so often coddled.
I don't think likelihood of success matters. If you broke into a bank and attempted to open the safe by trying random numbers do you think you'd get a reduced sentence cos you stood almost zero chance of success?
If I stand outside the bank and pray that the money will be transferred to me by magic, I’m not guilty of a crime at all. If I break into the bank, wander around, and don’t actually look for money, I’m guilty of a lesser crime. Likelihood of success does indeed matter in criminal law.
I think rioters who assault cops should be treated harshly. If we treat these rioters harshly, can we then agree that, for example, Antifa rioters who attack an ICE office get treated harshly?
Being English I had to google Antifa and ICE office. But yes, rioting is an offence whatever. Ethics is a different question.
Terrorists or freedom fighters?
The old unanswerable question: would it have been acceptable/ethical to assassinate Hitler, and if so at what point did it become so?
Yes you're right about the legal position: if a police officer kills a member of an armed gang during a robbery, the gang are not held responsible for that death.
But if you put armed police inside a government building and tell them to guard it, then when people break in you can hardly be surprised that they get shot.
It's easy to sit at home and criticise but the officer would only have had a vague idea of what was going on, maybe he'd heard chants of "Hang Mike Pence", he must have been terrified. That's why the police are given latitude. Obviously with hindsight they should have trained for this situation - maybe they did and that was his training. Why give him a loaded gun if he isn't to use it?
What an incredibly absurd argument. We don’t convict people, or sentence them, on the basis of what could have happened but only on what did. This is the very definition of fascism.
Elderly election protesters have already been punished far out of proportion to what they actually did but simply due to the Democrats’ desire to terrify their enemies through their abuse of the court system.
Most J6 protesters should be granted full pardons and the politicized judiciary that prosecuted them under the Biden regime investigated by Congressional committees.
But part of what determines the severity of what a person did do is what could have happened as a result of it.
I have to disagree, that's not how our justice system works. We punish conspiracy to commit murder and attempted murder way less harshly than actual murder. There's a reason for that.
No, wrong.
“We don’t convict people, or sentence them, on the basis of what could have happened but only on what did.”
I think that this is not the definition of fascism.
But it is a tool of said, fascists. That's his point
Persecutions for attempted crime is a tool used by liberals and fascists alike. You wouldn't stop brushing your teeth because fascists also use toothbrushes.
Whoa tiger, don't start correlating cats with water, now.
Of course we convict and sentence people on the basis of what could have happened. For every crime X, there is also a crime of attempted X and conspiracy to commit X. That is criminal law 101. There also whole crimes that we have created because of what could happen. What is DUI, if not the crime of "you could have killed someone"? There is nothing fascist about that.
No, you are wrong. A drink driver is not convicted on the chance they would kill someone. It's against the law to drink and drive. In fact drinking is not against the law and driving is not against the law. So you can not convict one for combining and assume they will kill someone. Just like walking into Federal building is not against the law. They made up Jan6th and force fed a crime was committed, claiming what could have happened. It's literally the same tool with everything narrated from the Federal governed and people in mass eat it right up.
Why do you think it is against the law to drink and drive? It's not because we have an inherent aesthetic or moral dislike of combining drinking and driving. It's not because we object to the consequences if you get lucky and don't kill anyone. It's specifically because you might kill someone.
I don't think anyone is saying we should make up a new law after the fact and convict people of it. We all know there is an ex post facto clause in the constitution, and I don't read Bentham's Bulldog or anyone else here as arguing that we should violate it. The thesis he is arguing for, as I understand it, is this. Within the statutory law that already exists, there is enormous discretion in terms of what laws (including attempt and conspiracy) that J6 rioters might be charged with violating, and enormous discretion in what sentences might be imposed under those laws. And Bentham's Bulldog thinks that within that wide range of discretion, prosecutors and judges should choose harsh charges and harsh sentences.
It sounds like you Bentham's Bulldog also have some factual disagreements about what actually happened at the capitol on January 6, 2021. That's why we present evidence to juries, to resolve those kinds of factual disagreements.
https://www.arthurpressmanlaw.com/reckless-driving-vs-reckless-endangerment-whats-the-difference/
I agree with that. We often consider likely or probable consequences. If I go downtown and start shooting a gun at random, I can be punished even if I only hit concrete walls.
Where I think Bulldog is wrong in his assessment of likely consequences. If you run J6 a hundred times, in about 90 of them the Speaker of the House pre-deploys the National Guard and nothing happens. In maybe eight or so what happens is what did happen -- government officials shelter while intruders mill about. In one or two, the intruders get close to actual government officials and armed guards start shooting. A few of the intruders are killed and the rest run away. The likelihood or a human wave attack over dead bodies is effectively zero. The chances they’d get close to killing Pence are even closer to zero.
Edward Luttwak’s first book was on how to stage a coup. Trump didn’t read any of it.
> If you run J6 a hundred times, in about 90 of them the Speaker of the House pre-deploys the National Guard and nothing happens.
The Speaker of the House does not have control of the National Guard.
No, but she could have asked for it before J6. And on that day it took the head of the Capital Police an inordinate amount of time to request assistance. It really was incredible incompetence.
She could have asked for it, sure. Who would have decided whether it was done? Oh, right, Donald Trump, the guy who made J6 happen in the first place. He didn't tell people to go home after Ashli Babbitt got shot - why exactly would you assume he would post the National Guard?
"“Pentagon leadership prioritized concerns of optics over their duty to protect lives,” said Chairman Loudermilk. “President Trump met with senior Pentagon leaders and directed them to make sure any events on January 6, 2021 were safe."
Mark Milley: The President just says, ‘Hey, look at this. There’s going to be a large amount of protesters here on the 6th, make sure that you have sufficient National Guard or Soldiers to make sure it’s a safe event.’”
Chris Miller: “The President commented that they were going to need 10,000 troops the following day...I interpreted it as
a bit of presidential banter or President Trump banter that you all are familiar with, and in no way, shape, or form did I interpret that as an order or direction.”
Trump asked for it, admitted by anti-Trumper Milley and Miller themselves.
Once an actual request was made by the head of the Capitol Police, it was granted and the National Guard came. It just took forever. Trump didn’t do anything to stop it, or to subvert them to his side. This would have required advance planning, which he isn’t big on. When called, the Governor of Virginia also agreed to send the Virginia National Guard. And both the Attorney General and the head of the FBI said they would have sent armed agents if they had been asked to do so. The head of the Capitol Police really was incompetent, and he really did fail to request help.
"We don't convict people, or sentence them, on the basis of what could have happened but only on what did."
Completely false. There are tons of crimes with "attempted" in the name. J6 was an attempted coup and an attempt to carry out massive political violence against the people certifying the election. That's much worse than attempted murder, and the people who did it should be punished worse than attempted murderers.
If you don't punish coup attempts unless they actually *succeed*, then that's equivalent to just not punishing coup attempts. After all, you won't be able to punish them if they succeed. There will be nothing to deter coup attempts if would-be insurrectionists know that they'll either succeed and avoid punishment, or fail and not be punished because their actions supposedly didn't lead to anything bad.
"That is the very definition of fascism."
Come on. I know the term "fascism" gets thrown around a lot, but surely you know that this has nothing to do with fascism whatsoever. Punishing people for attempted crimes is done in every country in the world and is far from the definition of fascism.
And it's rather ironic that you complain about unambiguous criminals being punished in a way you think is too harsh, calling it fascism and political persecution, and then immediately turn around and call for the judiciary who sentenced them to be prosecuted for doing their jobs, despite not having committed any crimes, and to be investigated by Congress in what would clearly be a politically-motivated stunt. If you actually think the prosecution of J6ers was unjust, the least you can do is be consistent and not try to unjustly prosecute your own political opponents. Your words make it clear that your opposition to the J6ers' punishments is partisan, not principled.
Also:
"Elderly election protestors"? They're not all elders. And they're not just "protestors". You're just trying to drum up sympathy for them by portraying them as too old to handle the punishments. But the law is blind to age. And being elderly actually means that their punishments may not be as bad for them. E.g., if someone gets a life sentence, that's less bad for them if they've already lived most of their life than if they're young.
Democrats are not trying to "terrify political opponents" by prosecuting the J6ers. You'll notice that many Republicans also support the prosecutions, and that the Democrats only prosecuted people who unambiguously committed a crime. You'll also notice that Democrats who commit crimes are prosecuted too (Remember Menendez?). What they're actually trying to do is terrify would-be insurrectionists so that a coup attempt doesn't happen again. Which is a good thing. That's the point of the justice system - to terrify criminals into not committing crime.
What virtually all of the J6 defendants were guilty of was, at most, trespassing or minor vandalism. Dozens were let into the capital by guards, taking selfies as they walked through, and some, like the clown in the Viking hat, were accompanied around the building by armed guards. To claim they were part of a "coup" or an "attempted" insurrection is simply absurd and simply swallowing Democrat propaganda wholesale..
They were there to prevent Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election. Using illegitimate means to prevent the rightful leader from taking over and instead have an illegitimate ruler hold power in their place is by definition a coup.
>Dozens were let into the capital by guards
...After the Capitol was breached in multiple places with 100s of people pouring in from all sides. Are you also going to say that the officers walking backwards in circles down the hallways as a crowd control tactic were leading them in? Police officers aren't ordered to fight till their last breath in mobs of people, because if they do get stripped of their riot shields, pepper spray, and guns, and get trampled or beaten to death, many of which did happen to officers that day.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jan-6-capitol-rioter-crushed-officer-with-shield-prison-sentence/
https://apnews.com/article/capitol-riot-trump-election-guilty-new-york-87a1ab7a515eb38d77ed828f558308c5
>some, like the clown in the Viking hat, were accompanied around the building by armed guards
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/jan-6-rioter-known-as-qanon-shaman-sentenced-to-41-months
"Chansley, who pleaded guilty to a felony charge of obstructing an official proceeding, was among the first rioters to enter the building. He has acknowledged using a bullhorn to rile up the mob, offering thanks in a prayer while in the Senate for having the chance to get rid of traitors and scratching out a threatening note to Vice President Mike Pence saying, “It’s Only A Matter of Time. Justice Is Coming!”"
As I said in my last comment to you, you are clueless. Democrat propaganda is infinitely more truthful than whatever it is you're consuming.
The police could have fired on the people trying to breach the doors. They didn’t have to just use shields and batons.
If a drunkard says he's going to steal the nuclear armaments of the USA and jaywalks off to do so before getting arrested, he is absolutely not judged on hobo nuclear armageddon could have happened had he succeeded.
If the drunkard actually managed to infiltrate a nuclear launch site and forced people to evacuate all the missiles from it to prevent them from being launched, I imagine he would be punished very severely, and rightfully so.
Now we get into the nuance of the case. If, for example, it was shown that nuclear launch site personnel opened the doors for him as a major prank to make him think he could do it it's vastly different from him bypassing the keycode locks on the base under his own ability.
I don't think it's that different. He would still be severely punished in that case - it's just that the personnel who opened the door would be punished as well.
Interestingly we are seeing what the courts decide with the entrapment appeal made by the Whitmer kidnapping case. I think it's ongoing but if the courts accept it we are on the road to the drunkard being let off easy because the responsibility of opening the doors belongs to the prankster guards and any external easing of access falls upon the easer, not the easee.
>There are tons of crimes with "attempted" in the name.
Yes: and we punish them very differently than we do crimes that were successfully caried out. The reason for that is that we don't sentence people based on what they could have done, but what they did: if they only attempted, we punish them less than if they succeeded.
>we don't sentence people based on what they could have done, but what they did:
>if they only attempted, we punish them less than if they succeeded.
These two sentences contradict each other.
Not at all: if what you *did* was *attempt* to murder someone then we don't punish you for *murder* we punish you for *attempted murder*, which is punished less than murder.
That doesn't change the conclusion. Attempted murder is punished less severely than successful murder, but the punishment is still severe. Likewise, and attempted coup may be less serious than a successful coup, but it should still be punished severely.
As long as you agree it should be punished less severely than a successful coup, we agree. In Benthem's post he argues they should be punished severely because "If all left-wing congresspeople were decapitated all at once, that would have been an unprecedented threat to Democracy" which seems to me to be calling for a harsher punishment than they otherwise would have received for rioting, breaking and entering, and obstructing Congress.
Well, they *should* be punished more harshly than just what they would get for rioting, breaking and entering, and obstructing Congress, because they did more than just that. The tried to prevent the transfer of power to the duly elected president to keep a ruler in charge who would have been illegitimate. And some of them also wanted to murder Congresspeople and the VP. Thus, they should be punished for the attempted coup in addition to their other crimes. This is consistent with being punished less severely with what they would get if they had literally decapitated all left-wing Congresspeople, while still being punished severely.
I'm glad you should agree with me that they should be punished for what they did (which includes what they attempted) and not for what they didn't do (or attempt).
If I shoot someone and they survived I am still punished severely. For something that *could* have caused death
But you are punished far less than if they had died.
> Sentences for attempted murder can range from a 3-year custodial sentence to life imprisonment. The likely sentence an individual would receive for conviction of attempted murder varies on the culpability of the accused individual and the harm caused to the complainant. For example, the court is likely to consider the extent of planning carried out by the individual in relation to the attempt. A Judge is also likely to consider the amount of harm caused to the complainant, either physical or psychological or both.
https://www.oblaw.co.uk/attempted-murder/
I am okay with applying this rubric to J6ers
I'm okay with that too: and that rubric isn't "What's the worst thing that they *could* have done." It's "How bad was the thing they did?"
That's a weird definition of fascism that I have never heard before. Do you have a dictionary to point to, or alternatively, select examples of previous uses of the term in common parlance?
Actually, the core of the US criminal code is "intent" and what the perpetrator intended to happen. It's the reason why "attempted murder" is still a felonious crime even if a murder wasn't committed. There's no doubt that many of the J6ers "intended" to carry out a coup and depose the government.
In fact, 99% of those prosecuted had no such intent... and there is ZERO evidence that they had such intent. Anyone who thinks Mr. Viking Horns was attempting a "coup" has been brainwashed by four years of non-stop Democrat and media propaganda (same thing, actually). Most J6 defendants committed simple trespassing. Perhaps two dozen were guilty of rioting and vandalism.
It was literally called the "Stop the steal" rally. "Stop the steal" means "prevent Joe Biden from becoming President," which would have been a coup if successful. It's actually insane how you people can reverse reality.
So you think Ryan Wesley Routh should go free? Or is it just the criminals whose aims you agree with? (That's a much better definition of Fascism!)
Attempted murder is a crime. Vandalism and trespassing are not attempted murder -- and to try to make them out to be is a corruption of the judicial process.
Similarly, Donald Trump paid off a porn star for her silence (which is not illegal), so the corrupt judiciary tried to charge him with falsifying business records... but that inconveniently has a statue of limitations time limit.
So the same corrupt officials prosecuted him for "election interference." When the Democrats prattle on about "lawfare," it's classic projection: they are terrified that the same corrupt lawfare practices they themselves engaged in will be used against them.
>Donald Trump paid off a porn star for her silence (which is not illegal),
He used campaign funds to shut a pornstar up because he thought it would ruin his election chances. As Trump himself says, this was a blatant case of "ELECTION INTERFERENCE!!!!"
This is false. In fact, Trump’s lawyer paid the porn star from his own funds and then reimbursed himself from Trump’s private funds but categorized it incorrectly as a business expense, which it was not. The Trump-hating New York D.A. Alvin Bragg nevertheless concocted a novel theory that this was “election interference” rather than simply falsifying business records, which is a misdemeanor and not prosecutable due to the statue of limitations.
>We don’t convict people, or sentence them, on the basis of what could have happened but only on what did.
Supremely retarded statement.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/aggravating_factor
>Elderly election protesters have already been punished far out of proportion
Which ones? I guarantee you won't list a single one because you have no evidence on your side, only rhetoric. The feds even admit to being far too lenient on the protestors - https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/reports/25-011.pdf "The D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office generally has not charged those individuals whose only crime on January 6, 2021 was to enter the restricted grounds surrounding the Capitol, which has resulted in the Office declining to charge hundreds of individuals."
>the Democrats’ desire to terrify their enemies through their abuse of the court system.
You seem to be clueless about the very basics of the court system so I'm not sure why you think your opinion on it is respectable.
>politicized judiciary that prosecuted them under the Biden regime
Following from my latest comment, courts don't prosecute people, and when people are prosecuted they need to be convicted by a jury. You are clueless on the workings of the judiciary as well as the separation of powers.
>investigated by Congressional committees.
Republicans already have the power to form subcommittees to investigate people they don't like. They did this with the Biden Impeachment Inquiry, which resulted in 0 indictments, 0 charges, and a failure to recommend any impeachment articles. Also, you obviously don't know this, but Congress has no Constitutional role in convicting people of criminal charges. They can only recommend charges to prosecutors, which if you think the entire court system is corrupted by Democrats, will be pointless.
Koopa, could you try to be a bit nicer! While you're clearly a smart guy, many of your comments are mean spirited, and not conducive to the friendly atmosphere I wish to cultivate.
To Trump supporting conservatives - no, I'm consciously always in attack mode against them, although feel free to delete my comments/ban me in any case.
Attempted Murder (and Attempted <various other things>) are crimes so you're wrong. People ARE punished for what might have happened had they succeeded in their endeavours.
Attempted murder is, in fact, a crime, because it is a specific act with a specific intent. What the Democrats tried to claim was that protesters who trespassed COULD have engaged in an attempted coup if only they had (a) weapons and (b) an actual plan. They had neither. We don't prosecute vandals because someone MIGHT have been inspired by their graffiti and MIGHT have then gone on to commit murder.
a) https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/texas-man-convicted-carrying-firearm-capitol-grounds-during-jan-6-capitol-breach
b) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1776_Returns
There's more armed convictions but I'm too lazy to track them down/find an aggregator.
Excuse me, what exactly is the very definition of fascism? I thought the definition was something like "palingenetic ultranationalist militarism". Now the definition of fascism is high sentences for crimes?
There isn't much evidence that severity of punishment has significant deterrence effect compared to certainty of punishment (see eg David Roodman's meta-analyses*), and crazy people who bought in into an election was stolen narrative seems among the archetypal examples of people who I would not expect to respond rationally to incentives.
I think your argument is correct iff I buy the premise that extremely severe penalties actually have significant deterrence effect, but I do not, at least for this sort of crime.
*I think my synthesis position between the available empirical evidence and the strong prior that rational actors ought to respond to incentives is believing that extremely severe penalties are more appropriate for white collar crime and other relatively rational crimes like pre-meditated murder, than most other crimes.
Every 'immigration sanctuary' locale is insurrectionist. Do you support 'extremely severe penalties' for the authors and administrators of 'sanctuaries'?
your argument makes sense, as long as you're willing to make up new definitions for words!
Making up new definitions for words is how words acquire new scopes of meaning. It's a perfectly natural and normal process. And in this case, I'm also right. If you defy the federal government and deny the federal government the ability to enforce federal law, that's 'insurrection'.
By any reasonable - versus partisan - definition of 'insurrection', 'sanctuary' locales are engaged in insurrection.
Like most people, you deny the logic of your position as soon as it impinges on your side's ability to act with impunity.
I simply disagree with your new definition. Under your definition, both people who obstructed and opposed vaccine mandates and people who obstructed and opposed deportation mandates are insurrectionists.
But the standard definition of insurrection is an attempt to topple a government, usually by force, and I do think that is meaningfully different from just resisting or obstructing federal law enforcement. Is anyone who has ever cheated a bit on their taxes an insurrectionist? The widening of your definition is a bit hard for me to swallow.
When Arkansans defied the federal government's attempt to integrate the public schools and Eisenhower sent down the National Guard to force integration a gun-point, was Eisenhower justified in using military means to force conformity with federal law or not?
If he was, then so would the US government be justified in using military means to force sanctuary cities to conform to federal immigration law.
If he was not, the desegregation in Arkansas in the 1950s was a criminal act by the federal government.
The 'standard definition' of anything solely exists to reaffirm the interests of the ruling regime.
Any resistance is insurrection on the installment plan.
I think there's an obvious mismatch between your assessment of "what could have happened" and reality. Saying that Jan 6 was almost a "successful insurrection" is like saying that a toddler coming for you with a butcher knife almost killed you just because they managed to inflict a small cut before being disarmed. I do think that what the rioters did was bad and deserves punishment, but it also matters whether people are deliberately committing evil with full agency at hand versus acting out of passion and/or delusions. And the law takes this account when punishing people as well.
For example--let's say you see a person and mistakenly believe, for whatever reason that the person is in the middle of committing a mass shooting. You run them over with your car in order to stop the rampage, killing them. However, after the fact you learn that actually nothing of the sort was going on, no one was in danger, and you just killed a guy for nothing. You're still going to face punishment for this, but your sentence will be lighter than if you randomly ran a guy over just for fun. Likewise, the law does impose different sentences based on what actually happened versus "what could have." If you assault someone and they don't die, you aren't going to be given the punishment for murder because theoretically they "could have died," if things somehow went differently in an alternate timeline.
Anyways, that's really all besides the main point I wanted to make. I find it best to model politics as war by other means--this makes political violence and crimes different from "normal crimes" in the same way that war is different from other forms of violence. In war, there is a serious case for showing grace to one's enemies once victory has been achieved. If you offer them a place in the new order, they have reason to buy into it along with you. If you opt instead to simply continue hurting them as much as possible, you incentivize them to re-start the conflict at an opportune moment. An easy historical example is the common belief that the sanctions imposed on Germany after WWI contributed to the eventual outbreak of WW2.
Harsh treatment of conquered enemies only really makes sense if you're going to take it all the way. The Maori got away with brutalizing the Moriori because when they were done, there were no Moriori left to hold a grudge about it after the fact. But in politics, this obviously isn't an option. Just straight up killing your political opposition would, by definition, take us out of the realm of politics and into the realm of war outright (as opposed to war by other means).
I'd argue this is in fact what makes liberal societies relatively stable, the fact that no matter what happens in politics, ultimately no one really gets punished for any of it. Just like in direct warfare, harsh treatment of enemies incentivizes escalation. If we use the logic of this article to lock up J6ers and throw away the key, I'd demand the same treatment of all BLM rioters, and I'm sure most on my side would as well. This is the sort of cycle by which we can easily imagine politics escalating into actual war at a certain point.
On the flipside, the fact that Donald Trump was actually allowed to run for President again and even win the election has completely defused the tensions that led up to J6. If Trump had been somehow barred from running again, as the author and many other libs seem to have wanted, the risk of further political instability would *obviously* be way, way higher right now.
People generally should not be punished for what could have happened in the worst scenario. When criminals rob a bank, we do not punish them for mass murder even though they *could* have killed everyone in the bank in the course of robbing it. When someone attempts to murder someone we do not punish them as harshly as if they succeed. And when someone drives drunk we do not punish them as if they plowed their card into a crowd of preschoolers, even though that *could* have happened.
The rioters on 1/6 were rioters and should be punished as rioters: for trespassing, for breaking things, for disorderly conduct, and for assaulting police officers. The fact that they could have killed Congresspeople is not sufficient: we need to believe that they would have been likely to. We don't know what would have happened if Congress was still there when they broke in. It is more plausible that the rioters would have simply yelled at their representatives than that they would murder the Vice President. There was no plan to murder the Vice President, no intent to do so, and no opportunity to do so. They didn't even set the place on fire, which is more than I can say for most rioting mobs. https://apnews.com/article/2e7f5b2a93025df5b4343fc14184842c
What matters is not just what could have happened, but intent. You don't punish a robber as if they had murdered everyone in the bank unless there's evidence that they were trying to do that. In the case of the J6 rioters, it's unambiguous that they were trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election, thus committing a coup to keep Trump in power. And it's also unambiguous that some of them wanted to kill members of Congress. Punishing them only as rioters would be a huge understatement of the severity of their crime.
>In the case of the J6 rioters, it's unambiguous that they were trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election, thus committing a coup to keep Trump in power.
It is not unambiguous at all. You might as well say that it is unambiguous that participants in the George Floyd riots were trying to overturn a racist social order through violent revolution. Most of those people were just mad about racism. Most of the J6 rioters were mad about the election. I very much doubt even a majority of those participating in the J6 riots did so because they believed they would be able to overturn the results of the election. I image most of them were just mad and wanted to be heard, same as most political rioters. Somewhere else in the comments someone claimed that a rioter who shouted "Hang Mike Pence!" was guilty of conspiracy to commit murder. You might as well say that BLM rioters shouting "F* the police!" were guilty of conspiracy to commit sexual assault.
"Hang Mike Pence" is clearly not comparable to "Fuck the Police," since "fuck" is regularly used as an explosive with no connection to literal serial assault, while "hang" is not. Now, I agree that regardless, we shouldn't assume that the rioters literally wanted to murder Mike Pence just because they shouted that. But they also constructed a gallows, and some people had zip ties to kidnap members of Congress, and they broke into the building where the people they were threatening were working. That all makes it much more serious than a simple chant.
And the explicit reason why they were all there was to convince Congress to overturn the results of the 2020 election. You can't argue that they were "just mad" and weren't actually trying to change the result. They wanted the results to be overturned, and they broke into the building and even the room where those results were being certified in an attempt to force Congress to do what they wanted.
>But they also constructed a gallows,
Protesters in Portland have constructed guillotines multiple times, but I would be opposed to charging them with conspiracy to commit murder because of it. Even if they were shouting "Kill all cops!" right next to it. Also, the gallows were erected way before the rally occurred, having been set up by people unknown around 6:30 that morning. For some reason the capitol police did not tear the illegal structure down, and the FBI has been unable to identify the people who put it up. The rioters chanting "Hang Mike Pence" were hundreds of yards away from it, and as far as we can tell were not involved in setting it up.
>And the explicit reason why they were all there was to convince Congress to overturn the results of the 2020 election. You can't argue that they were "just mad" and weren't actually trying to change the result.
Those two things are the same thing: they were mad at Congress, they wanted to convince Congress to overturn the results. That's not the same thing as wanting to kill members of congress or even kidnap members of congress. When protestors want Congress to repeal a law, are they guilty of attempting a coup? What if they somehow ended up in the capital building and wandered around without hurting anybody? Is it a coup now? I don't think so. That's a riot, trespassing, and obstructing Congress.
Repealing a law isn't the same thing as illegally overturning the presidential election. If the protestors just wanted Congress to repeal a law, they would not have attempted a coup, though breaking into the Capitol to intimidate Congress into doing so would still be an act of terrorism. That would make it worse than just regular rioting and trespassing. It would also make it worse than obstructing Congress by some means that doesn't involve intimidation.
But the fact that the protestors did all of this with the goal not just of getting a law repealed, but of illegally overturning an election, effectively ending democracy in the U.S., makes it way worse than even that situation.
Also, the whole "those two things are the same thing" is kind of the point - you're downplaying what the J6ers did by saying they were "just angry," which ignores the fact that what they did in their anger was a coup attempt.
>Repealing a law isn't the same thing as illegally overturning the presidential election.
No, but it is the same thing as legally overturning a fraudulent election: which is what the rioters thought was the case. People wanting a law repealed also shouldn't break into capitol buildings, but if they do they're not trying to do a coup, and they're not terrorists, they're trying to be heard and influence the political process. In other words, they're rioting protestors and should be charged as such. Intent matters, and I see no evidence that the J6 rioters intended to make Congress "illegally overturn" the election (because they thought the election was illegal, so overturning it would be the right thing to do legally speaking). I certainly don't think anybody went in there with the goal of "effectively ending democracy".
They should be punished for trespassing and obstructing and all the rest, and if you want to throw terrorism in there I could see an argument for it (though generally rioting protesters don't get called terrorists, even when they're trying to intimidate elected officials into doing something). But punish them for what they did and for what they attempted, not for what they didn't do or attempt to do.
More serious comment. Suppose you have very high evidence that someone is trying to break into your house through your window to kill you. However, it turns out that it is your child trying to crawl in through the window because you accidentally locked them out. Suppose you just *barely* miss their head. You almost did something really, really bad. But it seems that, given your evidence, you did exactly what you were supposed to do: protect your family from (who you thought was) an aggressive intruder. It seems you shouldn’t be punished at all, or only very slightly.
Go to the J6 rioters. I think many of them had high evidence of election interference then (eg we’ve never had a sitting president encourage it this much, and if you couple that with high profile media outlets parroting him all the time, I could see many people believing it was in fact stolen). If they succeeded, they could’ve done something very bad indeed.
I’m wondering: does anything about the first case illuminate the second? Do we get a different conclusion from you?
I’m undecided, personally. I think the upshot turns on just how plausible it was at that moment in time to think the election was stolen for a subgroup of voters.
I support the castle doctrine but shooting someone before you can see their head seems crazy to me, and I would definitely expect a punishment for doing that.
Being delusional is a weak defense for storming the Capitol - you can still establish mens rea and I think it's been pretty easily established in most prosecutions since the defendants are on camera saying it would be a revolution, 1776, and were fighting the police. It would be harder to establish if Trump brainwashed them into believing there were no more laws, or given them a super strong hallucinogenic so they could no longer comprehend their actions. Just being lied to about an election result isn't enough of an epistemic shakeup that it magically becomes uncriminal to overturn the results of an election, and it seems to me like most of the defendants were happy to admit that's what they were doing, which is blatantly illegal.
Maybe security in general should experience severe penalties every time they are found to be irresponsible. It sounds like North Korea would need like 100 soldiers to take over the white house given the current state of security.
Typo: " taking things back by forth" should be "force"
The unfortunate problem here is that you have to live in the country with a large number of these types of people in perpetuity. As a matter of practicality, it is necessary to defuse the MAGA movement’s persecution complex and hostility to mainstream institutions. This is also a very unique and contingent set of circumstances, so by being lenient, the justice system isn’t really incentivising more coup attempts. Again, in theory I agree, but in practice this would provoke a vicious spiral of animosity between MAGA and the mainstream which would only exacerbate the kinds of institutional crises that you want to prevent.
Victim culture is here to stay. MAGA isn't going to change course. The majority of Republicans still believe the 2020 election was stolen after Trump lost 60+ lawsuits challenging the results, Giuliani and Powel admit to lying in their defamation cases, Fox News and Newsmax admit to lying in their defamation cases, fraudulent electors are being prosecuted in every state and some have even already been convicted, etc.
Or compare the classified documents cases. Biden and Pence comply with their respective investigations and don't get charged, meanwhile Trump denies he has them, shows them to visitors at Mar A Lago, and directs people to hide them from the FBI. The result is that MAGA thinks it's lawfare against Trump.
As long as there is a perceived gap between how extreme MAGA thinks they're getting prosecuted and how little they really are getting prosecuted, Democrats should be (legally) shrinking that gap. They already suffer bad pr for it, so they should be going ham rather than slow rolling the prosecutions like Merrick Garland, unless MAGA chooses to course correct, which they have shown no signs of doing.
I don’t totally disagree. But MAGA is not some immovable constant in politics. It’s a product of circumstances, cultural factors, material conditions etc. It can grow more powerful and it can lose power, and similarly attitudes and values within the movement can fluctuate. The plight of the J6ers was a major driving force of the conservative movement during the early Biden term, and if you think MAGA wouldn’t have noticed harsher penalties because their perception of the situation was already radically inflated, you’re dead wrong. Imo you’re also wrong if you think further antagonising MAGA would garner no meaningful reaction. We’ve seen many times over the years that these people are capable of insanely antisocial acts, Jan 6th itself being the icing on the cake. Imo the best course of action when there are pivotal symbolic tradeoffs like this one is to defuse tensions as much as is reasonable (not suggesting they get community service or anything like that lol)
“The most important deterrence comes from deterring the most important things” - I agree with your thesis, but this statement needs work. When you say “important” here, I think you use it to mean important in the first instance and “potential for bad” in the second. While this makes sense, it’s clunky.
So when is Cheney going to jail?
>taking things back by forth
do you dictate your texts to a dumb blonde secretary nowadays?
I temporarily no longer have access with a printer which was how I caught many of my spelling and grammar errors. I still use chat gpt and read over the essays but I sometimes miss stuff.
you mean, you no longer have access *to* a printer? ha.
It appears you are clearly not up to speed with Tim Pool’s peer-reviewed publications on this issue…
Am not agreeing. These were just stupid people doing stupid things, and as you note, suckers for the stolen election narrative. I don't think they were all that vicious. And somehow I don't think people are going to repeat the act, I suppose if I thought so I'd be more in favor of the deterrent argument.
I do think anybody attempting to broach important govt building ought to face strong deterrence and the security precautions were a joke as we know.
A lot of criminals, including murderers are stupid people doing stupid things. Suckers for the life that they imagine they might achieve. I still think they ought be punished.