Bingbong
21d ago
The sort of autist that posts on the the Motte tends to actually hold to principles somewhat instead of broad tribe identification.
Bingbong
21d ago
Yeah. If you do sufficient obstructionism it will inherently generate iffy media moments, and eventually one will slot into the right media environment and be questionable enough to potentially derail the whole project. Any good uses of violence by ICE will be immediately subsumed in the media but anything remotely controversial will be easy to keep magnifying and repeating.
Bingbong
21d ago
I think there's two separate things when it comes to 'good shoot'. There's 'was the shot legal/complying with regulations' and 'were the optics of the shoot bad'. A lot of people on the Left aren't really trying to have the first conversation since they operate purely on optics lines instead of 'will this clear in the court of law', which is what is so galling about them being totally fine about Babbitt whilst they're acting like Good was flat-out murder
Bingbong
21d ago
I think if 1/6 had been a left-wing riot, the response to this would be "breaking a window shouldn't be a death sentence!" and the left would memorialize the incident as "Ashli Babbitt - murdered by the government over a broken window," and would totally ignore every single other piece of important context around the incident. We are seeing this phenomenon happen right now with the ICE shooting in Minneapolis.
Yeah this is the point to me. I'm not arguing that Babbitt was an illegal shooting, but typically the way the leftwing litigates shootings is more vibe-based than giving a single shit about whether the shooting was legal in the current structure. The Good Shooting I believe a decent amount of people just focus on how bad the optics are and either aren't going to care or will have long moved on by the time that the police officer is absolved. The optics on Babbitt were bad enough (Unarmed woman posing zero threat getting gunned down on camera) that her Portland equivalent would be a gigantic national martyr.
Bingbong
22d ago
Yeah 80% of the posts are fine but some feel like they're verging on straight up trolling.
Bingbong
22d ago
As far as I'm aware her partner's angle on the actual escape attempt hasn't been released. One of the earlier clips was from somebody to the direct left of the partner who seemed to be 'legal observing' in the same way.
Bingbong
22d ago
The driver’s wife is not passively observing but actively shouting at the agents (this should undermine the idea that the driver and her wife were somehow neutral people accidentally caught up in everything)
I feel like this particular line of argumentation was only held by the most deliberately unaware and misinformed on the issue. Like at the very least why was the wife walking around outside of the vehicle with her camera out if this was a completely random uninvolved set of people.
Bingbong
23d ago
I think it wasn't a great shoot (especially for general optics), but also the officer was in a position where it's reasonable for him to say he perceived mortal danger (which was most likely contributed to by his earlier vehicular incident) which justifies the shot. But if people are going to make a policy of borderline-legal obstructionism of ICE at every turn that's inherently going to increase the surface area for incidents like this to occur
Bingbong
23d ago
You can enforce immigration, you can own the libs, you cannot do both at once as effectively as focusing on one.
Doesn't the whole sanctuary city thing indicate that even if you're trying to enforce the most milquetoast sort of stuff in this arena a decent amount of the country will just say 'No fuck you' and jam up the gears deliberately? Especially considering the Sanctuary City movement started in the 1980s and is almost 50 years old so you can't even say it's responsive to Republicans or Trump.
I do also think the clumsy visibility of ICE is intentional for two reasons. Firstly, it means that the Republican base feels that 'something is being done' to a degree that it hasn't in recent history since a plethora of headlines are generated. Secondly, it does a lot to change the tone of immigration and IMO has probably been part of why fresh incursions are very low.
Bingbong
23d ago
It's good police policy not to stand in front of cars but also clearly a crime to actually try to run them over. Same way that saying 'officers should seek cover in a firefight' doesn't equate to 'shooting an officer outside of cover should be less penalized since it's easier'
Bingbong
23d ago
Right Wingers who aren't even under any clear criminal investigation frequently get debanked by Paypal and whatnot just off vibes. Meanwhile one can be an active obstructionist of the right tribe and essentially do whatever they like without pissing off the payment processing overlords.
Bingbong
23d ago
Long story short
My dad was a military electrician driving around the Independent Southern part of a European country famous for its north-south religious divide, as a member of the military forces of their Eastern neighbor. Said Eastern Neighbor had somewhat-condoned listening posts inside the Southern country, and my dad was essentially maintaining those driving around in an unmarked van.
One night he stops in at one concealed in a rural barn and stays for the night, then wakes up at 2AM since he needs to go to the toilet. He leaves the barn and goes into the nearby woods to shit, and in the meantime a small group of locals come up on the guys inside the barn and have them at gunpoint. My dad sneaks back from the woods, grabs the nearest weapon (which was the hunting rifle of the commanding officer of the listening post and filled with hollow point rounds) and then opens fire on the locals after they open fire on the guys inside the barn. He ends up being the only survivor, and once the military police descended on the situation it turned into a huge clusterfuck.
My dad was accused of opening fire/shooting the locals in the back (despite the fact that they clearly fired on the guys inside the post since they're also dead), and of breaking the Geneva Convention due to using hollowpoint rounds (since he'd literally just grabbed the nearest weapon which wasn't his/loaded by him) plus there's a ton of ugly diplomacy around the location and status of this particular incident since it's not inside the country in which this particular police action was supposed to be taking place. He then spends a month or two getting grilled, before eventually being discharged on goodish terms and the court martial not sticking but there was an attempt.
Bingbong
24d ago
Vast majority of military and police members are never gonna have a real livefire incident, and lots of weird edgecases happen.
My dad almost got Court Martialed for breaking ROE 50 years ago for reasons that were partially not his fault but also just kind of messy fog of war.
Bingbong
24d ago
I don't necessarily think Babbitt was a bad shoot, but I do think if the exact same sequence of events played out in Portland with an unarmed Blue triber that she would be literally a gigantic national martyr with multiple movies released of her life due to how shitty the optics were. End of the day I respect that you can draw a line in a place like the Capitol and say 'anybody who crosses this is shot', even if it's inconsistent with how the January 6 unlicensed tour group was otherwise treated, but the reaction to her killing from Democrats when, if the situation were reversed, there would be an endless howl, is silly.
Bingbong
24d ago
Yeah if the officer literally threw himself under a moving vehicle you could argue he'd escalated, but the entire point of the issue was that the woman was conspicuously stopped.
Bingbong
24d ago
Yeah I think it's reasonable department policy to suggest police don't stand in front of cars to reduce their chance of getting run over but on the other hand that doesn't mean attempting to run them over isn't a crime and massive escalation of a scenario.
Bingbong
24d ago
I think Ashli Babbitt's the easiest case to equivocate to this one and was a substantially worse shoot than this.
Bingbong
24d ago
I think people vastly overrate how long the public actually follows and imbibes new information about these cases. I'm still seeing stuff positing Tyler Robinson was right-wing since 'his parents voted Republican' at which point a lot of people just stopped following the case or updating the information in their minds.
Bingbong
24d ago
Is the important point of the law here what her actual intent was (especially since it's now impractical to ask her) or what her perceived intent by the shooter was? I think both her and the shooter were probably panicking as is the norm in high-stress situations, but there was enough for the shooter to reasonably believe that he was under threat.
Bingbong
24d ago
Yeah but ask those 'observers' how they feel about people protesting abortion clinics and they'd flip their tune instantaneously.
Bingbong
24d ago
I think she was trying to run more than run him over, but also hammering the accelerator with a guy in front of you makes it a reasonable take from the guy in front of you you want to run him over.
Bingbong
24d ago
Potentially she should have not put her foot on said accelerator and complied with the requests?
Bingbong
25d ago
A lot of it depends on how you go about it. There are some bookies in the world that are faster to converge on a correct/less-wrong price than others, so if a bookmaker sees you're consistently betting times when their prices are 'stale' they will generally kick you out in short order. Which is known as steam chasing since you're essentially arbitraging a faster market move into a slow participant.
Some people (though this is exceedingly rare) can straight up win against the final, most-efficient pricing and they tend to get longer tenures before getting kicked off since it's harder to distinguish that from somebody who's just getting lucky. In either case you'll generally get kicked off before winning any crazy amount of money, and exchanges/prediction markets have historically introduced Premium Charges as well to cull the most-winningest accounts in order to dissuade 100% ROI strategies like insider trading and courtsiding.
Bingbong
25d ago
Exactly. I've worked extensively in the industry and made a fair amount of money betting lifetime. Me being able to occasionally find some money bilking operators doesn't really change the fact that the whole thing is built on a gigantic amount of owning essentially defenseless idiots who'd be far better off if they had no exposure to betting.
Even the long-term prognosis for savvy sharp bettors isn't necessarily that rosey. I've seen plenty of cases where somebody started out fine Years 1, 2 and then eventually ran out of edge. Which is especially brutal if they've elected to go full time gambling since then you've got essentially nothing productive on your resume after you've run down your roll. The massive expansion of gambling is a huge social tragedy.
Do I get to participate in the latter's subsidies?
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