788967F7-C0F5-4095-B48C
Universally Unique!
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User ID: 682
On the general principle: Is your claim that anytime a LEO crosses in front of or behind a vehicle with a suspect in the driver's seat they are throwing away any legitimate interest in not being ran-over? That if the suspect decides to flee, it may be unfortunate that they had to drive over an officer to do so, but that that's fundamentally the officer's fault and not a charge the suspect should face? No one seems to want to describe themselves as believing in a right-to-flee or arrest-only-after-fair-combat but it's really hard for me to make sense of this impulse otherwise.
Let's disregard the vehicle for a moment and say cops are arresting someone in their home. They position themselves in the front, where they announce themselves, but also have an officer in the back. My understanding is that if the suspect barrels through the cop in the back door that this is both an assault the suspect will be charged with and grounds for the officer to use any reasonable force to defend himself and subdue the suspect. This remains true even though we know suspects sometimes flee and that this tactic creates a heightened risk for a violent encounter between a fleeing suspect and the police.
If the suspect is running at the cop with a shotgun, the cop has a reasonable fear for his life and has every right to shoot the suspect to end that threat. Perhaps the suspect just liked holding the shotgun casually in his home (exercising his strongly-protected second amendment rights!) or was worried that some rival gang were pretending to be police or whatever and had no desire to shoot true cops. These circumstances have no bearing on whether the officer had a reasonable belief of the threat nor the legality or morality of his subsequent actions.
I get that Garner has no force if a cop can hold a gun to his own head and say, "If you don't surrender, the shame from failure to apprehend you shall drive me to suicide, consequently I have a legitimate fear for my life and can now use deadly force." But happening to be in front of a parked car is... absolutely not like that. There are lots of legitimate investigatory and safety reasons an officer might want to be in front of the vehicle, and even more reasons to briefly cross the front or back of the vehicle to navigate from one side to another. And being around a parked vehicle is not (barring freak circumstances) dangerous until the driver takes a positive action to, at best, recklessly endanger the officer. Actions that the driver, very notably, has no right to take.
Police agencies advise officers to avoid loitering in front of vehicles because suspects sometimes take illegal, positive actions that gravely endanger the officer. These policies in no way, legally or morally, transfer responsibility of the suspect's actions to the officer or undermine his right to defend himself from violence. To say otherwise is textbook victim blaming.
In this specific case: While the general principle is very clear and backed by extensive caselaw, the facts of this particular incident are even more damning. (A few videos for anyone who wants to check my description.)
The agent is fully clear — several feet off to the right — of the front of the SUV when Good began to flee. She puts the car into reverse with the wheel pointed left. One second into her felony fleeing, she has repositioned the car so that it is dead-on the officer. She continues to turn in reverse, until the officer is at the center-left of the front of the car. In two seconds, he went from being in a completely normal position to the side and front of the vehicle, in no particular danger from her pulling straight forward, to being directly in her strike path, as a result of her illegal actions.
Two seconds into the commissioning of this crime, she kicks the car into drive with wheels turned still slightly left and then straight forward, directly at the officer, appears to gun the accelerator but thankfully loses traction.
The tires, for about half a second, slip in place. The vehicle is pointed directly at Ross. Without the ice on the road, it seems far more likely than not to me that Good would have completely ran him over at this moment. She continues to turn the wheels to the right, though Ross, as a result of Good's crimes, cannot see her tires at this point, only the movement of her hands on the steering wheel.
She gains traction. The vehicle begins to take off with the tires turned somewhat-but-not-at-all-fully to the right. She clips into the officer, who only after being struck with the left front of her SUV, four seconds after it began to move, fires through the windshield, and continues to fire as she begins to turn more fully away from Ross. It's unclear to me to what extent he was able to jump out of the way vs. being literally thrown by the force of the car smashing into him—look at his foot movement around the first shot.
The time from the car beginning to move to the last shot being fired is literally 5 seconds. There was no way for him to jump out of the path of the vehicle—the direction he would have needed to dive toward changed from the start of the encounter to when he was struck a couple of seconds later.
I simply do not believe a reasonable observer could look at these facts and conclude that he had baited her into a justification for deadly force or that his right to self defense should be in any way diminished by his actions.
788967F7-C0F5-4095-B48C
Universally Unique!
10mo ago
Apologies, looking at this in context, I think I probably came off as cranky at you, but I actually think you did a fine job presenting the plaintiff's arguments & broader issues. Your top-level was fine and good. However, I am disappointed with the several subthreads where an expansive reading of the malicious implications and innuendo in the plaintiff's arguments are uncritically credited when they seemed, to me, both so obviously in-credible and, as it happens, trivially-verified to be untrue.
4 year olds to BDSM, when – at least in the examples provided – that's simply not happening.
There is no 'BDSM bondage' that I could find in Pride Puppy, but there is a "drag queen" in a word search exercise at the end of the book and clearly a couple illustrated in the pages. They also arbitrarily slot (drag) queen under 'Q' instead of 'D', because they didn't have enough Q's.
Sure, this statement is true. But for people not super into the anti-LGBT stuff, it's a lot less incendiary! To extremify a bit more, if Little Bobby Tables is being fitted for his harness and pup mask in kindergarten, essentially every parent would throw unlimited support behind whoever promises to make that stop. But if he's told that there are guys like his dad, except instead of having a wife, they have a husband, and some of his classmates might have two dads... yeah, some of regulars here think that's a justification for unlimited violence against civilization, but a large majority of the country disagrees.
We are having those conversations right here in this thread!
Parts of the thread are fine (or at least aren't doing the thing I'm complaining about). Agreed.
There is a reasonable association from the introduction of "lace", "leather", and drag queens -- concepts that we adults are familiar with and associate with sex -- to queer identity and ideology. Then either from or to sexual identity and sexual orientation. To suggest these are isolated concepts unrelated to sexuality stretches my credulity.
Were I somehow put in charge of designing Pride Puppy's word search, I certainly would have avoided including 'leather' to try and prevent this sort of "Re: Re: Re: Re: FWD: Re: Biden forces schools to let furry kids use kitty litter!" urban legend from circulating on X. But at the same time, if I had to name 300 distinct objects / attributes in that story, yeah, 'leather' and 'underwear' probably make the list—there's really not that many things to choose.
Given the context, which really is about as anodyne and wholesome as possible, this sort of free-association guilt-by-implication argument is the same school of media criticism that spent the last twenty years detailing how each and every piece of media was racist, misogynistic, and otherwise problematic, just with different in- and out-groups. "Woke right" is an annoying snarl term, but at the same time, I can't help but think this really is just conservative Anita Sarkeesian.
To suggest these are isolated concepts unrelated to sexuality stretches my credulity.
This seems like the classic equivocation on the word 'sexuality.' A man mentioning his wife is just talking like a perfectly ordinary person, a man mentioning his husband is "making things about sexuality/sex/politics." Obviously Pride is related to 'sexuality' and what people wear to Pride is an expression of 'sexuality' but this meaning of the word has not all that much do with sex, per se, (though some stuff at Pride definitely is and of course no minimally-qualified parent is taking his child to Folsom) and is no more child inappropriate than a teacher wearing her engagement ring. Nor a man wearing a suit, even though that's a huge fetish. Or a teacher appearing pregnant in front of her students, even though it's very literally the fruits of her sex life.
The taboo around keeping kids and 'sex' separate serves a vital social role of establishing easily-adjudicated bright-lines to protect them from pedophiles. This is right and good. But teaching kids that Pride is a fun social event (while certainly a sort of political propaganda) doesn't transgress it except in the minds of folks who throw sex acts and the existence of LGBT people in the same mental bucket. The average 90's Animaniacs or 2010's Adventure Time episode had far more sexual content and real, intended innuendo than the examples on display. It was just (mostly) straight.
These are children's stories. Most have fairly normal lessons in some way, but nearly all are in the setting of LGBTQ+ acceptance.
The broader complaint that this is indoctrinating kids into LGBT acceptance is... basically true! But like, when people like the indoctrination, they just call it 'socialization' (or "Niceness and Civilization," as the case may be) and pretending gay people don't exist, aren't a normal part of society, or are inherently 'adult content' that's not a normal part of kid-friendly public life is, from my vantage, a far less neutral option than teaching kids what most of society broadly accepts. Again, if folks want to debate that, I do think it's fair game. But the groomer narrative is, broadly speaking, transparent malicious lies, and we should aspire for better discourse.
As many on this forum would agree: inculcating western values and defending western culture against folks from other cultures is essential for the continuation of western civilization. The disagreement is about what those values are.
For example, one book tasks three- and four-year-olds to search for images from a word list that includes “intersex flag,” “drag queen,” “underwear,” “leather,” and the name of a celebrated LGBTQ activist and sex worker.
The Justices had read the books in question.
Both Gorsuch and our resident kinetic-action-advocators are claiming that Pride Puppy is exposing young children to leather fetishism. This would be outrageous if true. But, uh, did anyone posting in this thread bother to check if it is?
The wordlist has 300+ words on it, ranging from 'alligator' and 'apple' to 'zebra print' and 'zipper.' While I don't doubt that the depraved adult minds here are capable of imagining sexualized depictions of the 'carrot' or 'cucumber,' the book depicts a family making a salad.
Likewise, while it's easy to imagine situations where 'leather' or 'underwear' are shown inappropriately, it is also easy to imagine pretty innocuous situations. For example, leather sofas and jackets are common furniture and clothing, respectively. Kids universally learn about underwear in the nonsexual context of potty training and personal hygiene, and comic book heroes have been drawn as-if wearing briefs over their pants for longer than anyone in this thread has been alive. The Captain Underpants series is a 20 year old media empire with more than 50 million book sales in the US and major feature film adaptations.
I have no doubt that some vegans are offended by the former, and I can imagine some schoolmarm disapproving of Captain Underpants specifically or maybe even all comics generally. Nevertheless, the hyper-hyper-majority of parents, regardless of religion or sexual mores, have no problem with any of the above. So, is Pride Puppy's depiction of leather and underwear a bunch of puppy-players, leather daddies, and dudes in jocks, or is it people wearing leather and undies in ways that would be perfectly appropriate for a Halloween costume at an event with kids present?
In a shocking twist of events, a 40 year old children's book publishing house did not decide it was a good idea to teach 4 year olds about puppy play. Instead, the only depictions of 'leather' are a lesbian in a motorcycle jacket waving at a dog and people wearing leather shoes. The only depiction of 'underwear' is a gay guy wearing green briefs over his blue leggings, with all the sexual energy of Aquaman. If you'd like to evaluate for yourself: the content in question.
If one's actual objections are "don't normalize Pride marches," "don't normalize homosexuality," "don't normalize trans," etc. it's possible to have a discussion on the merits of those issues. But it's tremendously dishonest to cloak one's actual objection to the former with trumped-up talk of introducing 4 year olds to BDSM, when – at least in the examples provided – that's simply not happening.
'Nutpicking' isn't exactly the peak of good rhetoric, but I hope we can hold ourselves to the standard of, at the very least, finding real nuts to pick. This is an internet forum, after all! We needn't act like Supreme Court Justices – we can do 2 minutes worth of basic fact checking.
If we assume a fixed fact pattern for the encounter, yeah, it makes sense that prior encounters the officers weren't aware of can't change whether or not their reaction was justified. Of course, his being a ICU nurse or whatever is also irrelevant from that standpoint.
However, it seems like in a lot of situations like this, what the facts of the matter were (and which are important) is at least a little ambiguous. Our interpretation of events is colored by the purported character of the parties involved and the narratives at play. Was he a trained nurse trying to help a woman in need or an armed, repeated belligerent trying to 'micro intifada' a fellow insurrectionist and subsequently resist arrest?
There's also a broader question: much of the left's rhetorical framing around police violence is "it could happen to you & your loved ones." But, in point of fact, neither I nor any of my loved ones have made a hobby of harassing police. If violence is only dolled out to folks engaged in blatantly lawless actions or even just those ambiguously-right-at-the-boundary-of-protected protest, then I have absolutely nothing to fear from law enforcement, since I have never deliberately impeded the lawful discharge of their duties and, absent an open civil war or blatantly genocidal actions, can not imagine I'd ever do so.
The framing in that last paragraph is really important to understand the 'auth' reaction to a lot of this. If there are bright-line rules that serve a legitimate state interest, that are easy to know and be on the right side of, that rarely harm anyone but repeated, anti-social malfeasors... well, empathy is a limited resource — both psychologically and especially in terms of informing policy — and there are many who are more deserving.
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