• Cethin@lemmy.zip
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      1 year ago

      Wtf dude. Are you serious? First of all, no it didn’t. They never targeted people, even when things got bad. They targeted buildings at worst.

      Second, “terrorism” isn’t the issue. Cops use “terrorism.” Terrorism is just when methods normally reserved for the state are used by other groups. It’s what they’re trying to accomplish that matters. If they’re trying to enforce their fundamentalist religious ideals, it’s bad. If they’re trying to promote something most people would call good, then it’s good.

      The American Revolutionaries aren’t called terrorists. They’re usually called “patriots” or “freedom fighters” because they won. Most people think all actions taken were good, because they were working towards something we generally see as good. Terrorism is just a set of tools the establishment wants to reserve for itself.

      • oldbaldgrumpy@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        You are wrong. I don’t need a 3 paragraph narrative to make my point. If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it’s a duck.

        • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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          1 year ago

          If only saying like that actually made them true. Oh, I wish I lived in your simplistic world…

          You don’t need three paragraphs to make your point. You’d likely need far more. Refusing to actually defend your position informs me more that you haven’t thought about it enough to defend it though. You’ve heard someone else say they’re terrorists and took their word on it without considering why that would be true or not.

            • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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              1 year ago

              Most of the protests nothing happened. Frequently, cops targeted them and antagonize them. Sometimes cops infiltrated them and acted as agent provocateur to get people to commit these acts (there is video evidence of this).

              Regardless, it doesn’t undermine anything. Any sufficiently large group will have these things happen even without provocation. It doesn’t change the fact that there are fundamental issues that still haven’t been addressed.

              Calling every group you don’t like terrorists doesn’t tell you anything. In the civil rights era, MLK’s peaceful protests were frequently called riots because people who benefitted from the status quo didn’t like them. Meanwhile police were beating them, shooting them with fire-hoses (or worse), and doing whatever they could to them and they weren’t called terrorists because they are the state.

              Terrorism is a loaded word intended to draw an emotional response. It doesn’t give any information on the morality or legitimacy of a group. Discuss their actions and their goals if you like. The word terrorism is mostly useless.

    • TheSanSabaSongbird@lemdro.id
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      1 year ago

      Riots are not terrorism. Terrorism is a specific type of tactic used by organized groups to wage asymmetric warfare against a state actor whereas rioting is a spontaneous type of crowd violence that can be motivated by a number of different factors from sports to politics to religion or racism/ethnic tension.

      You want to blur the distinction between the two because like terrorism BLM scares you and is therefore “bad,” but that’s not a good reason to throw away what is in fact a meaningful difference.

      If you need more evidence that rioting and terrorism are not the same thing, you need only look at the fact that law enforcement takes very different approaches in how it seeks to prevent rioting vs terrorism. Were they essentially somehow the same thing, this would not be the case.