So, anyone here in Portland?

[GethN7]

if they were were peaceful protests Hazard i would agree with you, but when they NIGHTLY turn into riots trying to burn a federal courthouse then they are not protests and should be treated as what they are riots. But i again point out that this is an old problem in Portland. maybe i need to dig up the videos to prove my point. i really dislike when you make me work for no real benefit as the lot of you will not believe it or turn a blind eye and make excuses.

I would appreciate that, because nothing that you've said here has been reported in the news on this side of the border.

An unfortunate side-effect of most American news media being thinly-veiled propaganda pushers who have carried water for the rioters and attempted to whitewash them at every opportunity. Try hunting down livestreams of what's been going on social media not under MSM control, and you get to see a far uglier picture.

And is the crux of the problem. There is a signal to noise imbalance of riots outweighing protest, but the media, many of which have political axes to grind and are not trying very hard to hide it, have been trying to pull what Leslie Nielsen did in The Naked Gun movies and pretending everything is fine when things are burning down in the background.

Now, I want to come out and say I support the right of PEACABLE protest, COVID or not. If you want to risk yourself to protest, go for it as far as I'm concerned if it's that important to make yourself heard. However, these are the things I've seen (and this is just a few examples) on the non-cooked and slanted media that really horrified me.

1. People in places like that brief commune in Seattle actually killed each other with even less regard for the due process than cops. They even tried to destroy evidence.
2. Portland courthouse has been subjected to multiple arson attempts and people trying to rip down fences with power tools set up to protect the buildings from rioters. Like them or not, federal buildings are the domain of the federal government, and their agents have every right and duty to protect them, and when people are throwing firebombs and using power tools to destroy barriers meant to protect said buildings, your excuse of being protestors runs out and you are just straight up committing terrorism.
3. A lot of people are whining and crying about federal overreach and how police are brutalizing people. If you take a look at the non-propaganda, it's quite the reverse. Police and federal agents are showing absurd amounts of restraint while the criminals trying to hurt them are doing their best to goad the cops and federal people into hitting them with live rounds. The terrorists want martyrs, and the reason while tons of dead bodies are not stacked in the streets by cops and federal agents is because it's obvious the people trying to goad them to want the bloodshed to justify what they are doing. They are getting denied the satisfaction, and that's why, when you see the non-censored footage, my sympathy lies with the cops and feds, not the people begging for their own murder to play the martyr.
4. Let's drop the gauntlet on the table: The riots would have been stopped much sooner had they not had political support from certain people in power to keep going so they could use the civil disorder to win political advantage. Now, if you divorce yourself from any political bias for anyone and ask yourself who wants the riots to stop and who has been egging them on, the answer is pretty clear who stands to profit from continued civil disorder.