It was an attempt to overthrow American democracy (and murder people along the way). The rioters might see themselves as patriotic revolutionaries, but they are violent criminals following delusional ideas.
Daryth, I think your heart is in the right place. You sound like a good person behind all the politics. But if you have obviously gone far down the rabbit hole these last few months or so. You are getting your information from dubious sources and apparently surrounding yourself with radicals - some of them liars, psychotics and potential murderers.
Please, please, please take some time to distcance yourself from the self-radicalization slope. Take a deep breath, maybe talk to some people in real life who you might disagree with but whom you trust. Maybe take a break from politics for a while and reconnect with old friends. I don't know. Just, you know, let in some fresh air and relax for a bit. Maybe reconsider ... maybe not. But take good care of yourself, because self-radicalization is a dangerous thing and it can seriously harm good people once they get into its claws!
It was not, it was a protest to contest the fraudulent election. If you were in their shoes, you would be protesting too. They had every right to protest. The founding fathers were considered terrorists at one time as well. Don't forget that 74m people voted for Trump. You cannot convince them somehow Biden was more popular than Obama, or any other president before him. Biden was a bet against Trump, not a "good" vote. Hell, even some Democrats think the election was stolen. You should really be worrying about how our "Democracy" is under attack with how some states are using easily hacked voting machines, and being accessed or counted outside of the USA. A lot of patterns in other countries of banana republics, was just seen in our most recent presidential election. A LOT of people around the world saw it too, and have even said things about the fact that it looks fraudulent. But continue to believe the media, as they slowly steal away all of your freedoms. But that's okay, they haven't come for you yet.
I appreciate you trying to reach out to me, but like. You are trying to do it from a position of moral authority. If you actually cared to reconcile and bridge the gap. Maybe not try to patronize me, or belittle my intelligence? I believe what I do, because I have a LOT of life experience. I have taken "Breaks" and have stepped aside for years. In fact, I was so disenfranchised with society, that i only started paying attention in 2016. Because finally someone had represented hope to me. I am not a radical, because I don't view people in black and white. I know your heart is in the right place, just like everyone else is here. In my honest opinion, we are all being played by rich elites who bombard us with disinformation. They want us to fight each other, and to divide us. If you truly wished for peace and understanding, you would aim for the middle ground. Not domination. Quit thinking of people like me as your "enemy", because that is what the real bad guys want. We are honestly no different, just our methods are different. We should seek compromise and understanding, not zero tolerance and chastisement. I get it though, we are also human. It is our natural inclination to take sides. It is natural to think in black and white. It is easier to tear down your foes, than it is to form a relationship. But this pattern is exactly why humanity is bound to repeat its mistakes. If you view me as down a rabbit hole, you are in a bunker. You don't seek to understand me, or the people on capitol hill at all. If you do, you are lying to yourself. What difference was there between the BLM riots, who wished to rebel against state mandated oppression of minorities, and the capitol hill protesters who wished to rebel against a fraudulent election? There is no difference. These "sides" are make belief. Its always been the people against the government. We should drop labels, and seek to understand each other.
I try every day to improve my understanding of people, society, and how to reconcile with people who disagree with me. I do not think any of you are truly bad, just a product of the system designed to set us against each other. Which is why I have always expressed desire to get to know you guys outside of politics. I don't get what is so difficult about doing so. Very few of you guys post outside of politics. Why?
Can I be crazy enough to say that I agree with two messages, even though not totally?
If we start to think about it, on a real full skeptical philosophy in the face of a "normal" middle-class world citizen who doesn't really decide much, we could say that there is a possibility, even tiny, that many things we are told to are actually very systematized lies. However, on the other side, there is also a possibility that the things we are told to are true and that it is the conspiracy side who is forging the lies. And reality should be an hybrid of both.
Basically, we can never ever truly know, as regular people, if the votes on our city, states or nation elections were ever truly ever properly and honestly counted, regardless of electronic or paper. Any of you were there on every section and on all of them? No, we don't. o, in a completely skeptical view that doubts everything, we still have all these small possibilities. But at the same time we can't tell for sure that the count wasn't rigged, and I speak of any kind of count actually, we can't say with sureness that it was rigged either. Not without proper evidence. So, there is still the possibility on the other side that Trump is forging lies and he never ever experience a rig/cheat on the elections - he just had his ambitions frustrated.
I partially learned that with Jung. A person with real skepticism philosophy doubts both sides; When one side fully trust one side, while completely doubts another one, it is called overcompensated doubt, so the classic example are the flat earthers who doubts everything NASA says, while completely trusting what a random flat earther you tuber says blindly and religiously.
But at the same time, we can't truly ever act on doubt on everything. We are forced to either trust or leave, live a very lonely live to avoid the lies and even still we are forced into society trust. That is why, independent of the system, if the country is full of corruption and lies, the system pretty much doesn't matter anymore, neither the ideology. It is like a computer software is told the computer have one kind of hardware while it doesn't, it will break or severely limited no matter how good the software written is. If our society is corrupt, we are going to face lack of trust and we are going to have to be cheated eventually even to live. This is one of the reasons I distrust the "divine intelligent design" so much, I wish as humans we could easily discern what is true and what is not, or that we were 'programmed' to not to lie (there is still the guilt feeling thing which seems to not work in some or a lot of people), but we don't. We are forced to trust and that is why being trustable, in a sense of telling the truth not on a sense that you won't procrastinate a task, is supremely important. This is partially the living hell here for me, because if you guys live on a river of lies, I live on an ocean of lies.
"My experience" thing is problematic and I don't like it because we are likely to live bubbles in way or another; If people you know are a lot of Trumpists, you can't imply that a lot of people over the country are Trumpists unless you guarantee that your process was truly random and if it has many different classes, locations, categories to say so, which we can't do it alone.
In my weight of probabilities, the chances that Trump is lying are higher than he is telling the truth. The arguments that he is a psychopath (there is no psychopath test for any politician place or CEO, and there are some good bunch of them) are strong, and americans here can link and explain it way better than me. He is way more likely to be lied at. Second, this speech where Big Corporations are all taking over the government and Trump is gonna free us sounds... weird, because as far as I know Trump was one of them for decades and rigorously, he still is. Is Trump neolib? Your post makes me appear so, because as I had covered, the "fact" that neoliberalism will give you freedom is completely false, and I had plenty of arguments on the proper thread (search is broken, it is probably burried somewhere already) that did show that, so, no, destroying the state won't free you, corporations will instead take the role of the state directly for a while (even though [MENTION=4347]Virtual ghost[/MENTION] have strong arguments that that won't last long and won't be global wide).
Although I really bash the "ultimate truth of my own experience", I can tell how my perception clashes with yours: I am a victim of both Narcissists and Neolibs, both actually, even though I don't like to enter in personal details how. It upsets me to the point of me wanting to commit suicide. The far right that I know here did lie on whatsapp that COVID have not ever existed (but after some months they had to admit it did) but was a forge of the media to destroy the Bolsonaro government - fabricated psychopathic lie. I receive lies that I no longer bother to read, videos that were fake (I know it because I do sometimes randomly read and search about one or another - and because I used to read all of them until 2017). The last things I remember was a judge that was a judge in more than a 100 countries, a person fruitpicking hospitals saying nobody was there and COVID was fake, and these are just the conservative lies - there is still the neolib ones where they do many neolib reforms so there will be lots of employment while the more they advance, nothing ever moves on the employment sector and the life conditions of those who are employed get worse. This is just one of their lies.
So, yeah, not trusting the general media is reasonable, but dropping them entirely to trust only what Trump and his troop says is not only as unreasonable at, but might be even worse. And, just as I had said weeks ago, the problem with the conservatives is that if you are a Ne-dom, have no doubt about this, they will come for you eventually (or, rather, they are very likely to come for you eventually). Conservatives has conservatives customs, so forget using your head to do your own thing and for trying new things when even the way you eat have a "right way" that sometimes is even stupid, when they show up with religions things that can't be questioned (they silent you then says 'there is nothing contradicting my claims' but if you do you are going to pay for sure) forget questioning them, if whatsapp says is true, then, dude, it is true, and be ready to see the evilness of China being used to justify any evilness of their sort, because just because someone's is fighting China that means that the person is a moralistic and good person, and if the person is not, then that person is evil, and the shit goes on further than that already, and this became a rant, but you get it. But yeah, some famous people can pick their hair as they want, publicly like anime but that is okay because "they just pretend to like these things to get to a further public, of course they don't truly like them". These conservatives are dogmatic in a Te fashion (forget doubt, "here is the truth as the Bible says it, and Bolsonaro is the hero saviour if he doesn't win election on 2022 it is because the elections are rigged, and if he wins, then they are not rigged") and they will come for your Ne as they suppressed mine already, and the experience sucks. That is what I was trying to warn about them, but this time I am being more directly, and even talking about this is painfully.