No, shooting. I don’t think it was a meaningfully different rate than other weeks in Capitol Hill, but firefighters failing to render first aid certainly didn’t help that one kid who was dying a couple hundred yards from a fire station. (The crowd wouldn’t let a police car through, and it turns out the firefighters wouldn’t approach until the police were there and said it was safe).
Well, that's the official story given by the police. According to the protest medics who treated the shooting victim on the scene, the cops took so much time getting ready to respond - and this was independently verified by a local journalist, using hospital intake records and police scanner timestamps - that the medics gave up on the ambulance and drove the man to the ER themselves. When the police finally showed up, they were in fact told to leave, but it was not out of some political objection to emergency services: they were simply far too late to be of any use to someone who was already in the hospital at that point.
(I live just up the street from the police station at the center of the whole thing, so I paid close attention to all this stuff while it was happening.)
> firefighters failing to render first aid certainly didn’t help that one kid who was dying a couple hundred yards from a fire station
Still not terrorism. Left-wing militias are a problem in some parts of the world. They aren’t in America.
Our domestic terrorism comes almost exclusively from radical Islam and right-wing nutjobs. (Who, somewhat hilariously, see eye to eye on more than they realise.)
I suspect you're classifying the Trump assassins as right-wing nutjobs though (they weren't Islamists), which dilutes the position somewhat. What does right-wing even mean to you if it covers people trying to gun Trump down?
> What does right-wing even mean to you if it covers people trying to gun Trump down?
Is your impression that “right-wing” should designate a hive mind within which there is no conflict?
Because that's not what right-wing (or left-wing) has ever meant. The political universe isn't divided into two teams that conflict with each other but lack internal conflict.
Alternatively, I guess you might accept divisions within the Right but think that the term right-wing is defined in terms of proximity to Trump's cult of personality, but, no, while Trump is a right-wing figure (or perhaps an opportunist leveraging a right-wing base) loyalty to Trump is not what defines someone as being ”right-wing”. In either case, being violently opposed to Trump is not inconsistent with being right-wing.
My impression is that "right" and "left" wing are fairly vague terms that don't really mean much.
But in this case jumpcrisscross is identifying political violence as an almost exclusively religious (technically muslim which seems a bit off to me, but whatever) or right-wing phenomenon - presumably including political violence against leftists and rightists as perpetrated under the banner of the right wing (although note in another comment he has clarified his position somewhat). If leftists declaring autonomy and militantly seizing a chunk of Seattle isn't terrorism to him then there are some interesting meaning-of-words questions to resolve here - like what he think "right wing" means. It might be that political violence is by definition right-wing to him.
Extremism isn't something that has been accepted as a right-wing position, historically speaking. The right wingers - like everyone - prefer to enact policy from government. Anti-government vigilantism is one of those highly ineffective strategies that nobody really lays claim to.
> ...some small business owners were intimidated by demonstrators with baseball bats, asked to pledge loyalty to the movement and choose between CHOP and the police...
Call me old school, but it sounds like there were threats of violence for political purposes. I'm not sure how an armed and ideological group can seize an area and block the police for any interesting length of time without being a terrorist group. If not political purposes, why are they doing it? If not violence, why do they need guns (there were a few shootings) and how are they holding the police off?
And you aren't really addressing the point I was challenging you on - how are you identifying 'right wing' and 'left-wing' here?
> it sounds like there were threats of violence for political purposes. I'm not sure how an armed and ideological group can seize an area and block the police for any interesting length of time without being a terrorist group.
Then every bridge protest, any strike that gets contentious and/or gang activity is terrorism. They’re not. What you describe is an attempt to consolidate power; not sow terror.
The definition of terrorism is famously ambiguous. But if we expand its definition to include Seattle then must also include armed marches and counter-protests. That still leaves us with a domestic terrorism problem that is overly concentrated amidst right-wing extremists.
> how are you identifying 'right wing' and 'left-wing' here?
Broadly, by partisan orientation. More loosely: by authoritarian and individualist manifestos versus collectivist and anti-capitalist ones. The closest we’ve had to left-wing terrorism since the ecoterrorism era is Luigi, and that’s partly because he’s almost impossible to fit on a one-dimensional metric.
you have an interesting ability to ignore things you complain about coming from your own party. did you already forget about the BLM riots? how much damage was caused there? what about antifa?
as an independent i have a different perspective, the left are the violent ones and consistently push us towards a civil war with their bigotry and inability to stop attempting forced “progress”.
Are you sure you’re responding to the right comment?
If you meant to respond to me, and not roenxi, nobody is forgetting the riots. They were a menace. But they weren’t terrorism and wouldn’t respond to antiterrorism tactics; they’re mass lawlessness. Same as Seattle. The solution is enforcing the laws on the books against flagrant rulebreakinh. That doesn’t work for terrorists.
Haha, yeah you are a real independent all right. I swear I've never heard anyone say that and then follow it with something in their own voice, it's f*cling hilarious to me - I've never met an independent, just idiots tbh.
For the record, and this is true for all humans, speaking words that you've INDEPENDENTLY thought of and come up with all on your own - they leave your mouth differently than words you've heard another say and now your just repeating... it's instantly and immediately identifiable - it's like an advertisement came on, totally different tone, incantation and inflection.
His views aren’t particularly clear, but the would-be Trump assassin does seem to have been a right-wing nutjob. I don’t see why being a right-wing nutjob would require being a Trump supporter, it just happens that most of them are at the moment.
it’s interesting to me the tactics the left employs to make themselves feel better. the entire nation near about said they dislike the lefts policies and yet some still act confused and resort to childish tactics to resolve their inner conflict.
> suspect you're classifying the Trump assassins as right-wing nutjobs
No. Of course we've had left-wing terrorism. It's just not been as prevalent, organised or present as the right-wing form. (And I'm aware of zero currently-operating left-wing militias anyone considers a threat in America.)
There were 5 shootings resulting in 3 deaths over a period of 9 days (20-29 June). CHAZ/CHOP existed for a period of 23 days (8 June - 1 July). There were 33 homicides in the entire city of Seattle in 2019. No matter how you slice it, there was definitely an increase in the murder rate around the protests, potentially much higher.
And a piece with the increase in homicides, Mayor Durkan reported that SPD had received a 525% increase in reported crimes in the area when compared to the previous June. Obviously not all of the crime was committed by protestors, but the protestors were the ones that drove out the police presence and the city tolerated the situation created by the protestors for nearly a month. Regardless of whether the situation is best described as domestic terrorism or not, it's clear that public officials were willing to tolerate violence enabled by left wing protestors "letting off steam" too.
