>Correct, I was comparing the violence in general. This is different than your original claim that I was comparing BLM property damage to the Capitol Hill murder.

I guess I simply don't like the "in general" part as it inherently equates the two. Like I said, I believe there is a fundamental difference between violence against property and violence against people and categorizing them all as "violence" sets up a false equivalency.

>I'm thinking of incidents like Michael Forest Reinoehl (Antifa). He murdered a right-wing activist and was very explicit that he did it because he believed the right-wing was a threat to Black lives. In any case, we're not going to learn much by looking at the outlier instances of violence; in both cases there are much more uniform trends of lesser degrees of violence spanning from trespassing to property damage to assault. All I'm asking (indeed, all anyone is asking) is that we hold BLM rioters to the same standard as MAGA rioters, BLM assailants to the same standard as MAGA assailants, etc.

That was a violent confrontation that happened because armed alt-right counter protesters showed up to the BLM protests to start some shit. We have no clear picture of how the confrontation started, in part because Reinoehl was also killed by police under suspicious circumstances. The same type of confrontation happened with Kyle Rittenhouse except it was people on opposite sides that ended up dead. If we are going to blame BLM for Reinoehl than it only seems fair to start a tally of extreme right violence that includes Rittenhouse and runs through the riots in DC. That extreme right violence would have a much higher body count.

>The murder is an outlier, you can't conclude on the basis of this single event that the broader group is uniformly more dangerous. I don't know what value there is in even trying to compare how dangerous either group is; what's important is that we're holding violence to the same standard and not glorifying some violence and condemning others on political grounds.

I am not just basing it on the single murder. I am basing it on the video I have seen of how people behaved at the scene. I have not seen that type of mob violence at an BLM protest. That Reinoehl example was a single person getting in a confrontation. That is fundamentally different than the type of collective behavior seen here[1]. The former is an individual that is acting independently of the crowd. The latter is numerous members of the crowd joining together to take a cop to the ground and beat him. I am much more comfortable drawing large scale conclusions about the group based off the second example.

>What? How do you get there? There were tons of assaults recorded on camera during the BLM protests going back to probably 2014 including many unprovoked assaults. In ~2016 one guy went on a killing spree, explicitly targeting white police officers (and as I recall, WaPo or someone released a sympathetic portrait article rationalizing the mass murder). I don't have tremendous sympathy for MAGA folks, but there's half a decade of clips of people getting the shit beat out of them for wearing a MAGA hat in the wrong place, virtually none of which featured prominently in the media.

Once again you are expanding the scope of of what we are considering as BLM violence to basically any extreme left violence and once again I think the violence from the extreme right exceeds violence from the extreme left for basically any time period you want to choose.

>Again, this isn't about which group is more violent, it's about consistency. Even if MAGA folks are more violent, it doesn't justify us completely letting BLM violence off scot free. If you (universal) failed to condemn years of BLM violence, you have very little credibility to demand justice for an afternoon of MAGA violence.

I can't argue against that on principle. However there are numerous parts of this that have lacked consistency. This starts with the preparation for the various protests and how the people in the capital were allowed to leave the scene while numerous peaceful BLM protests ended with police kettling and mass arresting protestors. It also includes how people on the right respond specifically to the violence directed at police. Could you imagine the outrage in right wing circles if the protesters in Portland mobbed police, literally beat one with an American flag like in that previously linked video, and beat another to death with a fire extinguisher? If we are going to ask for consistency, lets be consistent in asking for it.

[1] - https://twitter.com/CalebJHull/status/1348334770103660553