Dean
Flairless
Variously accused of being a hilarious insufferable reactionary post-modernist fascist neo-conservative neo-liberal conservative classical liberal critical theorist Nazi Zionist imperialist hypernationalist warmongering isolationist Jewish-Polish-Slavic-Anglo race-traitor masculine-feminine bitch-man idiosyncratic party-line Fox News boomer. No one yet has guessed a scholar, or multiple people. Add to our list of pejoratives today!
User ID: 430
Dean
Flairless
25d ago
Kyle Rittenhouse was the guy who decided it would be a good idea to open carry at a protest, as if that would help anything. The results were predictable.
The results, and the protest, and the chase that led to his self defense, were also not situations he created, let alone went out of his ways to create.
I'd agree to be less contemptuous if I saw anyone take their own side to task in this area.
Then you haven't looked well enough, possibly because you are contemptuously looking down on people you are actually at the same level as.
Note that you will not hear the right say this about Kyle Rittenhouse
You really want to start your list with the kid who was running away from the people who chased, and who didn't shoot first, and who didn't create the situation of the fiery but mostly peaceful protests in general that led to escalation?
Not a particularly good list in general, but that one in particular is a weak foot to start off on if you intend to leave off with contempt. However low you think the MAGA-right is, you are at eye level.
Dean
Flairless
25d ago
Minneapolis has clearly become a clusterfuck with no real win condition for the ICE side.
Law enforcement in general has no real win condition. As long as there are profit, personal, or partisan reasons to commit crimes, there is no point where it is 'done.'
However, there is a fail condition for law enforcement, and that is to stop enforcing laws at heckler, and violent, veto.
You 'answered' by trying to ignore the premise of the question- evidence that doesn't actually support or deny a conclusion- and then tried to insist you need to know ahead of time, at which point you transitioned to questioning future prediction. This is a deliberate inversion of the framing of something known into something not known, in order to insert your deflection of a question of future prediction.
Future prediction is not needed when you already have reviewed evidence to determine what it does or does not support. Removing evidence that neither supports or refutes an outcome is not bias towards one outcome, because it supports neither outcome.
Yours was a transparent dodge, for a transparent purpose of giving a non-answer after earlier concessions that you didn't want to answer the question. First the evasion you denied you were avoiding, before you conceded you weren't answering but insisted it was because it was a leading question, and now this attempt to change the question.
Thank you for the public demonstration. At this point I suspect anyone knows what your answer in that dark alley would be, however incriminating it might be for you. Feel free to take your last word and zinger if you'd like.
Dean
Flairless
25d ago
Yes, they have an agenda. But I couldn't find the detentions and arrests bar chart anywhere else.
The availability bias is truly a wonder, and an easy tool to exploit.
Cause aside, 7 deaths in 15 days is anomalously high and warrants explanation.
Sure. But also questions. Among which- what would have been the death rate in 2023 had the Biden Administration surged ICE differently? After all, a core premise of your critique is the (in)competence. Incompetence requires a baseline of competence, which in turn requires a baseline of 'acceptable' failures across an institution.
And also- what would the death rate in January 2026 have been had the Obama and Biden administrations not taken their benign neglect for over a decade? Had they changed policy, would the downstream factors of January 2026 been possible?
But also- 115 compared to what base number? Not only what is the base numbers in January 2026 versus 2023, so that you can have some % comparison, but also what is the 'acceptable' number of deaths in general?
And this is if we concede 'cause aside.' Someone might- quite reasonably- believe that cause must not be put aside. It matters quite a bit for discussions of competence if deaths in ICE detention are because ICE beats the detainees to death, or if the prisoners kill eachother, or if they die because of heart attacks but previous administrations didn't have such figures because they were ideologically opposed to deporting people at risk for heart attacks when stressed.
That's usually how it goes. The dirt is usually unearthed by those who want to bring you down. Back during the excesses of the work movement, opposing statistics required swimming through doomer incel sewers. Just because they wanted to radicalize me into giving up didn't mean their numbers were wrong.
Ah, but numbers are wrong. Quite commonly. Especially numbers provided for the primary purpose of propaganda- and especially numbers presented to prime emotions. As they say, lies, damn lies, and statistics.
Dean
Flairless
25d ago
b) "Don't talk about it until you have sufficient information to reach a conclusion" at best thought-terminating and at worst bad faith. You could indefinitely not talk about anything you choose forever, I'm not going to listen to people who tell me to not to think about and discuss things.
Fortunately I am not telling you to not think about or discuss things.
Your paraphrase is this-
"Don't talk about it until you have sufficient information to reach a conclusion"
And my position is this-
Refrain from judgement until you have sufficient information to reach a sound conclusion.
Do you recognize that the the later is not only not the former, but is itself a justification to talk and seek information to reach a sound conclusion?
c) New information could come to light 5 or 10 (or 500) years from now, take the recent example we found out of the Chinese officer who refused to march on the Tiananmen protestors in the 1980s. I'll discuss with what current information I have and continue to update it as I get more information.
Discussion was not what was being discouraged.
You continue to evade a foundational question, this time by trying to smuggle a change to the premise of the question in order to answer the question with a question, and leave with the final jab. So you were predicted on two of the three, so you shall be. Toro indeed.
That said, you have made a mistake in your attempted retort. A question that makes you look bad if you give a particular answer it is not necessarily a leading question. Some answers just reveal flaws the respondent would rather obfuscate. However, there is nothing wrong with disagreeing with first principles.
Do you disagree with the principle that if evidence doesn't actually support or deny a conclusion, it should not be used to support or deny a conclusion?
Dean
Flairless
25d ago
Either way, ICE's operation isn't particularly effective either. The number of convicted criminals being detained has remained unchanged.
...you did catch at least a half dozen of the ways that link was trying to manipulate the reader, no?
Like, there are way more than a half dozen techniques being used. A common one was making a big deal of % increases without giving base numbers, or whether % increases they don't like correspond to % increases in things they don't care to admit. The 'Annual Deaths in ICE Custody' chart takes the deaths in the first half of January- without establishing any cause of death or even alleging they were a result of ICE mistreatment- and then multiplies them by the time for the rest of year to claim 122 'projected deaths' for 2026.
It's also notably including in the 2025 death count the migrant detainees killed by anti-ICE people trying to shoot ICE.
I particularly liked how the 'Systemic Accountability Failure' accepts "billions of dollars in claims" against ICE as the baseline (invented by people opposed to ICE no less) for which 'less than $1 million in settlement' is the systemic accountability failure in question to make the reader upset... and then goes on to blame / concede that acts of congress, longstanding judicial policy, and the sovereign immunity of the state. Only not in that order, of course, because sovereign immunity is the scary boo word, and the New Deal law passed by the Democratic Party and regularly used over the last half-century is to be last-noted and without such context.
The sort of people who will be moved by that website are not the sort of people whose opinions would be changed if and where ICE behaved particularly differently. That is an advocacy/propaganda website, and there will always be propaganda to make anything come across as a travesty. The only thing that would change the position of the people so easily moved by such blatant propaganda is if they didn't get propagandized.
This, in turn, would require the propagandists in question to not see a need to generate the propaganda. Which would primarily be if ICE wasn't doing deportations, as opposed to if ICE was doing deportations differently.
Dean
Flairless
25d ago
You do seem pretty insistent on avoiding a rather foundational question that should do the opposite of stir an emotional response. Speaking clearly, this is likely because you recognize that answer it directly will either make your first attempt to ignore it in favor of passing judgement come off as bad faith, less than competent, or both.
But since I will keep asking the question until you answer, or until you get tired of trying to avoid it while also trying for last word / parting jab...
Do you disagree with the principle that if evidence doesn't actually support or deny a conclusion, it should not be used to support or deny a conclusion?
You are neglecting the principal agent problem. 'The left' is not a unitary entity to learn, or judge success for failure.
A lot of people got very rich from BLM and associated advocacy funding. A lot of agitators got experience, social credibility, or organizational relationships and boosts to their careers in the party-NGO patronage complex. That BLM-unrest harmed the Democratic Party, or even 'killed wokeness' outside of the democrat political machines, does not mean that those inside the political machines felt it was a failure. Survivor bias alone, mixed with the bromides of 'lived experience,' gives a basis for many to go 'it worked well enough for me / here.' It's not like there's ever a shortage of socialist-adjacent politicians arguing this time will be different.
'The liberal establishment' is in the midst of a party civil war only barely papered over by Trump as a unifying antagonist. That civil war is because of a lack of consensus on what went wrong, or what is wrong.
Dean
Flairless
26d ago
Oh, hey, you seem to have tried to dodge the original question. Again. What a surprise- who could have seen that coming? You even took more time to avoid answer it than it would have taken to answer. I do appreciate the commitment to the 'I'm not avoiding' evasion, though that sort of Marvel-esque irony is a bit dated.
Thankfully though, you did take the bait for brevity and answered the others. Let others make of them what they will, while we can move on to the question you may still try to evade.
Do you disagree with the principle that if evidence doesn't actually support or deny a conclusion, it should not be used to support or deny a conclusion?
Dean
Flairless
26d ago
Are you non-tribal, non-partisan enough to judge the actions of your in-group as they affect the out-group?
Sure.
Do you consistently fall to one side of each scissor event?
Nope.
Are you competent enough to speak on any of this, let alone judge my competence?
Aye.
Are you anymore competent in engaging in discussion around ideas than you are in waging the cultural war?
Indeed.
Now, that's four answers for you, and so I do believe you still owe four answers in turn. However, I'll settle for the first one you avoided. If you need more time, I'll refrain from any more responses so you don't feel a need to hurry and deflect. Take your time.
Do you disagree with the principle that if evidence doesn't actually support or deny a conclusion, it should not be used to support or deny a conclusion?
Dean
Flairless
26d ago
Video evidence is unclear at best, leaning towards "does not have a weapon". Audio evidence indicates that a shot was fired before the arrestee was shot, but the origin is unclear. As such, currently my opinion is "ICE fucked up big time".
And basing your judgement on unclear video evidence, with potentially contradictory evidence, when you yourself note the gaps, it is what you are receiving a raised eyebrow for.
Given that I attempted to analyze the evidence presented and form an opinion of it based on the videos, I find your statement kind of rude;
And I find ignoring the conclusions of one's own analysis, such as how the cited evidence does not support a conclusion is but carrying on as if it did, also rude. Rude towards the persons who will be accused of murder regardless of what clearer evidence might show, but also rude towards other readers trying to come to conclusions.
Maybe we should form a rude club.
I suppose next time I should just say "lol ICE obviously evil" and leave it at that.
If you want, but that too would be rude.
Dean
Flairless
26d ago
Well, yes, what else can one do?
Refrain from judgement until you have sufficient information to reach a sound conclusion. If you can identify key variables that would radically change your conclusion, start there.
This is all the more important in an information environment known to be contested by people who want to shape your first impression and conclusions regardless of ultimate accuracy.
"Here's my impressions from the video, here's an important question it leaves unanswered, here's the sort of evidence that would change my mind" is perfectly reasonable and I have no idea why you seem determined to describe it so uncharitably.
Because the 'key evidence' in question isn't evidence to change a mind, but to justify the conclusion one way or another in the first place.
There is a term for making a conclusion before you have the evidence for it, and it is 'assuming the conclusion.' This is a bad practice because it triggers fallacies and psychological biases that lead people to interpret later information in ways that confirm the first judgement..
It's more thoughtfulness than you'll see from the vast majority of people on social media.
That is a bar low enough to trip over.
I have a really hard time with considering shooting a man being restrained, kneeling, in the back regardless of evidence of having a gun or not, to be a good, defensive shoot.
Is your difficulty in considering potential factors supposed to invalidate the relevance of factors you did not consider but which may apply to the validity of the shoot?
I expect competence from Agents of the State, and this is not it.
Are you competent enough in the particulars of Agents of the State to judge competence?
I think much like a felony murder, an agent of the state acting in such a way that is negligent, and leads to the death of someone should be charged with manslaughter.
Are you any more competent in judging manslaughter than you are in judging competence?
Dean
Flairless
26d ago
I'm not sure what part of this you think is defensible.
The question isn't my thought, but Zephyr's thought- which notes major gaps in the evidence ('it isn't possible to tell if he drew a weapon,' the 1:00 mark which is compatible with a defensible shoot) that undercuts its value as evidence to form an opinion off of.
Do you disagree with the principle that if evidence doesn't actually support or deny a conclusion, it should not be used to support or deny a conclusion?
Besides the summary part, which is a matter of time not indicated here, and execution brings implications not yet established.
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