Re: discussing the Jan 6th insurrection and trying to decide whether or not it was terrorism.
Like Chomsky, I'm going to use the US definition of terrorism: violence or the threat of violence against civilians for the purpose of changing political views.
When you blow up the WTC becuase you don't like U.S. foreign policy, you're killing civilians to change politics -> terrorism
When you blow up the USS Cole for the same reason -> act of war (those aren't civilans)
I don't know that attacking the Capitol with the recorded, stated intent to "Hang Mike Pence", capture others with plastic handcuffs and execute/ransom them, is precisely terrorism. Do top politicians count as "civilians" in the sense we mean it? It's more accurately insurrection and/or an act of war.
Note that it gets you on the same No-Fly List, though.
As for BLM. That's a protest movement. Is it violent? Violence was involved but it's always a question of who started it. Was it using violence, explicitly, for the purpose of effecting political change? In the same way that the Jan 6th insurrection planned to hang Mike Pence? Not really. There's the vague connection between, "Hey, if you'd stop murdering black people over a bag of skittles, maybe we won't burn down so many department stores." But the movement doesn't use that in some kind of manifesto, published on the Internet, like the insurrectionists do.
My reaction to BLM is, "It's unforunate that violence is involved, but the primary issue is centuries of mistreating African Americans."
My reaction to the Capitol insurrection is, "These people are a bunch of white supremacists who are clearly misinformed, willfully and aggressively ignorant, and were allowed to do horribly violent things that anyone in the BLM movement would have been murdered for before they even got into the Capitol building."
I can't see equating them. The BLM people are factually correct about mistreatment. The Trump supporters are factually incorrect and wave racist symbols around. Pretending that we can divide or equate them by assigning/not-assigning them the label "terrorist" is probably missing a lot of facts in order to assign labels.
Labels, I've been reliably told, are the opposite of understanding.
My purpose is understanding (that and making sure white supremacists and other assholes don't use this forum for their views.)
Toque.