We aren't talking about BLM at all right now, we are talking about Jan 6th. If you want to include BLM then we can first talk about how cops took photos with the people who broke into the capitol while they beat and maced BLM protestors for far lesser infractions. If you actually watched BLM footage and compared it to Jan 6th then the difference is stark, officers going out of their way in most cases to not fight back against the people storming the capitol or just holding the line whereas during BLM protests they took any slight as a reason to unleash tear gas, start attacking, and start making arrests.
Secondly "insurrection" is only really used (in my experience and from what I've seen in history) when talking about actual attempts to overthrow said authority. Even calls for defunding the police don't meet this bar. Even burning a police building in MN doesn't really meet that bar for me, no one thought burning 1 station was going to overthrow the police. On the other hand the people on Jan 6th marched in large part to stop the certification of the election, chanted to hang the VP because he wouldn't refuse to certify, and openly talked about killing/hanging member of congress. There is a very clear difference between protesting a provably systematically racist system and attempting to overturn the votes of the majority of Americans based on a lie.
I'm sorry but I don't for a second believe you asked that question in good faith.
This explains it to me, but is why I disagree with the insurrection label. If armed people really wanted to "kill/hang" politicians and marched into the capitol with the intent to overthrow the government, I (and imo most people) would assume they'd use their weapons/be way more aggressive. You don't go for an insurrection, weapon in hand, and the worse that can be seen is someone having a selfie in Kamala's (?) office/people getting stomped. IMO if you can argue whether someone died from that protest, then it wasn't an insurrection, or else there would be no doubt about it.
Tldr; as far as I've seen there was not enough violence to show that they were going for an insurrection. At most it's a protest that escalated (as a lot of protests do, see BLM), which doesn't warrant the outrage it's getting.
What about X is a perfectly valid question when you’re trying to characterize the category of an event; you’re talking about a group of events.
It’s invalid when your point is simply “Y is bad and should be stopped”; because you’re talking about only one element.
It’s not /my/ definition, it’s the dictionary’s…
And this isn’t about what protests I believe in, but let’s dig into that just a bit. Are you really trying to equate a protests/riots against systematic racism, for gay rights, or against racism/assassination of MLK JR with a riot based on lie? I’m sorry but I’m not interested in debating those on level ground.
I think I’ve been very clear that I’m not equating anything to anything. It may be a useful exercise to review what was written as-is, without assigning arbitrary assumptions to underly it.
Your definition of an uprising equates all of these things together, even if you didn’t intend it, because your definition is ridiculously vague.
Essentially, you’ve gone into the deep-end of no-true-Scotsman — a protest constitutes a violent uprising, if a policeman is injured, and heads of state are verbally threatened, and if and only if that protest is the Capitol Hill protest (so as to exclude all other protests that do not meet the prior criteria).
If you exclude that last clause, it’s hard not to find a protest constituting an uprising. Not because I’m being overly pedantic, but because five dead at a protest is a fairly mundane protest, and fighting with the police is basically a requirement of any protest, as is calling for the deaths of everyone in charge, as far as US protests go.
MLK and Ghandi are famous because they avoided it — because avoiding violence at a protest is abnormal; you expect fights with the police (or whatever relevant authority) at any protest… it’s basically tablestakes (because someone always starts something, with enough of a crowd). That such violence occurs does not immediately elevate it to the level of “uprising”, because then you would have no protests/riots anywhere — just uprisings.
