Citing "violence," Facebook officially has banned anarchist and anti-fascist content, alongside QAnon

boing
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First off, property damage isn’t violence. Buildings can be rebuilt. People can’t be resurrected. Even when the wounds of physical violence heal, the psychological scars remain.

Again, with just baseless accusations, with little to no evidence to back it up. OK, sure dude.

But what percentage of those videos are pulled from other times, other places? I mean, Fox News has been caught pulling shit from the Ukrainian revolution and saying it was from Portland. And the nuttier right wing sites are even worse. So just googling for examples is worthless unless you take the time to evaluate the source. Even the Oregonian, Portland’s home-town newspaper, had to retract some stories for false attribution in their own town.

OK, and this is where I stopped reading. They were not invited, and they failed to protect anything. I kindly invite you to stop embarrassing yourself.

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@Fabio

“Average Americans like me are not worried about the police taking our snacks. We’re worried about our shops being burned down and we don’t see police doing that.”

"This is the kind of situation many normal American voters like me are worried about: my car get surrounded at a protest. "

A thoughtful person might wonder what it was like to fear getting shot or choked or beaten to death by police at a random traffic stop every single time they get into a car, ever . They might be worried about those being killed in their own shops after being mistaken for a criminal by racist police.

If you had the ability for such empathy, a lot of your questions about the current political climate might be answered. You don’t seem to, however. To read these words in the context of what these protests are about is sickening.

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Wondering if sabotage is violence under this policy.

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cops never do anything wrong, and if they do it certainly isn’t widespread

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Obviously?

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I think the cop apologia on this topic is entering Narcissist’s Prayer territory

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Did you look at that Twitter thread on police violence that I posted? I’ll say it again: that documents nearly nine hundred incidents of violence at protests by police caught on camera. In many (most?) of those, they assaulted more than one person, sometimes many more.

So if most violence wasn’t perpetrated by police, then literally thousands of people must have been assaulted by protestors.

Where’s the evidence for that?

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Common sense should tell anyone that events like these protests will automatically attract opportunists looking to smash anything they can, and grab anything valuable that’s within reach, and said common sense should also tell anyone that it’s very, very easy to shout slogans and wear items that would appear to show that said opportunists are ‘anarchists’ or ‘Antifa’; after all, who can tell the difference? I consider myself ‘Antifa’, any reasonable person should be against fascism and open racism, doesn’t for one second mean that I want to find the nearest BLM protest and start lobbing bricks through some unfortunate shop owners window and leg it with my ill-gotten gains!
I’d happily lob something unpleasant through The Don’s office window, mind.

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You hold a low opinion of “average Americans” like yourself. As another person whom the police generally see as someone they work for (as opposed to someone they work against), I’m still not going to be so quick as you to brush off their engaging in petty theft (or grand theft like civil forfeiture or straight-out theft protected by “qualified immunity”).

One of the core problems of guard labour is that your thugs-for-hire – private or public – always have the potential to turn their main force on you if you let them get accustomed to using gratuitously it on others in large and small ways. Serious people who understand and even support the concept of the state’s “monopoly on violence” also know that it’s not necessarily a license for police to engage in theft and thuggery.

And before you roll out the “a few bad apples” excuse, keep in mind the part about them spoiling the entire barrel. Which is one of the factors that’s prompted the BLM protests in the first place.

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But it can be.

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It certainly is for Facebook, which brings us full circle to these bans. How and when one includes it under the term in these circumstances betrays one’s true priorities. It’s natural that Zuckerberg, being a white-presenting billionaire with lots of investments, would falsely equate a white supremacist stochastic terrorist running his vehicle through a crowd with attention-seeking entryists at a left-wing protest smashing the window of a bank.

I’m the first to say that the anarkiddie throwing bricks through a Starbucks window or spray painting their “edgy” logo on walls are supremely ineffective and counter-productive forms of protest, but I’ll still make the distinction between those acts and hurting or killing another human being (as alt-right and white supremacist activists are wont to do). Facebook, in contrast, seems to be equating property damage with assault against people, and banning any group that (truly or falsely) promotes either in the course of a protest.

On a related note, one of the organisations banned by Facebook (CrimethInc) produces the stickers that are now being used in this clever way (which our hand-wringers will no doubt see mainly as “property damage”):

[h/t to Cory]

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The average American does not have a shop.

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I’m not aware of anyone being injured at the Boston tea party. Are you, once again, equating destruction of property with violence against individuals?

ETA: Of course, this has already been mentioned a few times up above.

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I can think of a few reasons:

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It seems like a lot of the answers to me are, “property damage isn’t violence.” Which, if that’s correct, yeah, the protests have been pretty much non-violent. Except someone here saying, “don’t drive through protest areas or you might get hurt, but it’s peaceful!” which makes little sense on its own terms.

As for the question, is property damage violence? First, trivial property damage, like graffiti, isn’t violence.

But setting a building on fire? The thing is, obviously anyone who owns that has a high chance of defending the property. Maybe that’s wrong and we should have a formal procedure like this:

“Sir, please vacate your property right now. We’re going to loot it and burn it but we want to do it peacefully so you’ll need to leave. I hope you have good insurance.”

But that’s not how human beings work. Insurance is helpful but generally doesn’t fix things 100%. It fixes things like 50% to 80% usually, from what I’ve seen, which leaves people with huge losses they may not be able to fully recover from. Second, humans have an instinct to defend property. And finally, it’s obvious that burning down buildings is an implied threat to human beings.

The IRA used to do this thing of planting a massive bomb in some public building, and then they would phone the police with a special code word and the police would get the place evacuated immediately and then the bomb would destroy the place. Nice of them to avoid killing people, and it’s just property damage, but is that really non-violent? Some guy (white, son of a sheriff’s deputy) burned three black churches in Louisiana down in March 2019. They were unoccupied and no one was hurt. I can’t possibly accept that as non-violent! Maybe you can but I can’t! Just recently in Portland, the Jewish synagogue there was set on fire twice, second time was burned down. No one was inside and no one was hurt, but can that possibly be viewed as non-violent? I can’t accept that. Maybe you can but I can’t and probably many Americans can’t.

“No one was hurt and insurance will cover it” is one of the justifications / excuses I’m hearing frequently these days and it sounds like a very hollow excuse to me.

Again, I’m not considering minor stuff like graffiti or a broken window to be violence, I’m talking about serious things like stores being trashed and set on fire and so on.

As for cops and petty theft: actually that’s right on, they should behave at a higher standard than everyone else. It’s quite unacceptable to do that, but is it something I’m afraid of? No. Is my car getting surrounded and attacked something I’m afraid of? Yes.

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It bears repeating when it comes to false equivalencies;

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don’t drive through crowds of pedestrians because you might hurt them

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Come see the violence inherent in the system. Help, help, I’m being repressed!

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This is your original statement:

and this appears what’s left of it:

That is not the same, ist it? You don’t know, but you blame BLM and Antifa.

“People like you” are not in danger to become victims of violence that comes from BLM or Antifa activists.

If you feel threatened, I find it pretty obvious what “people like you” should to: support the BLM cause, and support defunding the police, so that they no longer kill black people for the fun of it and get away with all kinds of shitty behaviour. The protest will stop, and you can feel safe again.

Edit: finished sentence

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