If he could have stepped out of the way of the car without shooting, is he morally (not legally) obligated to?
The officer's action is like dropping a gun where a pedestrian might flee, so that if the pedestrian flees, the officer can say "for all I know the pedestrian could have been trying to get the gun" and shoot the pedestrian. It's a form of taking himself hostage so that he can shoot in "self-defense". Morally, he should not take himself hostage in this manner.
Is it reasonable to expect him to recognize the danger has passed and to stop shooting in the fraction of a second this transpired and her car turned away?
I would say it is reasonable to expect him to recognize when the danger has passed, because he was the one who made it difficult to recognize the danger in the first place. He shouldn't make it difficult and then expect anyone to give him slack because it's difficult.
And again, yes this does apply when the protestor is the one deliberately standing in front of the car.
Jiro
1d ago
Never allow police to stand in front of a vehicle. I have no idea what the discussion on this would look like. If standing in front of a vehicle is helpful in determining whether a driver is reaching for a weapon, then this would be a complicated determination.
The police didn't do scientific studies to determine whether standing in front of a vehicle is useful for that purpose. They just say it, and everyone believes them. Given how the police like to game the system by giving undisprovable, bogus, explanations for why they do things (sure, they searched the car because they smelled marijuana), I don't grant much charity to the claim that standing in front of a vehicle is necessary.
I wouldn't say never stand in front of a vehicle. But I would say that if they do, they've deliberately escalated the lethality of the situation by putting themselves in harm's way and as such, the standard for them using lethal force should be made stricter. (And I don't believe that shooting the driver is likely to prevent being hit by the car anyway.) If you think the police should be able to shoot people for fleeing, make a law that says the police can shoot people for fleeing. Without such a law, the police shouldn't turn fleeing into a lethal confrontation just so they can shoot anyway.
And yes, this does apply to other people who block vehicles to put themselves in danger from the driver. The most prominent examples being, ironically, protestors who do so. Hurting such a protestor in the process of getting away from them should be treated leniently.
Jiro
1d ago
Just because they can't convert every situation into assault on an officer doesn't mean that they can't do it at all.
Jiro
1d ago
The problem is that the police can convert actual fleeing into threats to the police through their own actions, and then use the threat to justify killing the suspect. Police love to game the system.
Jiro
1d ago
It's more like if "stealing" had taken on a particular jargony meaning a few decades earlier, and you had further developed a concept called "black stealing", and then people unfamiliar with that history incorrectly and almost exclusively used it to refer to shoplifting by black people instead.
If this is what happens, it would be entirely predictable that "black stealing" would come to be interpreted that way, even if it's "incorrect". Jargon phrases whose straightforward meaning is something hostile will predictably result in a motte and bailey between the jargon meaning and the straightforward meaning, especially by hostile people.
Jiro
2d ago
If I coined the term "black stealing" for shoplifting, nobody would be satisfied with my claim that it isn't talking about all black people.
Jiro
2d ago
I don't think it counts as an epicycle to point out "actually, she isn't complaining about being sexualized".
Jiro
3d ago
95% accurate is pretty horrible. In a country of 348 million that means you have over 17 million people improperly classified.
Jiro
3d ago
The UN has unofficially defined indigenous people in a gerrymandered way that excludes the English.
Jiro
4d ago
There's a difference between "can't prove" and "could not possibly change your mind about". There's also a difference between "can't prove" and "could not possibly take a stance on". It's not possible to participate in reasonable debate which depends on something you can't change your mind on or can't take a stance on.
Jiro
4d ago
If he isn't allowed to say it in a public forum, then he shouldn't be arguing the subject in a public forum, right? Not being able to say the things your argument depends on is toxic to open debate.
Jiro
5d ago
His foreign policy with respect to Ukraine and Israel seemed very naive. Though a Harris administration would probably have been worse on Israel.
Jiro
6d ago
It's the flip side of paying women to have children--if paying women for children is good because it creates incentives for them to have more children, hiring women is bad because it creates incentives for them to have fewer children. So employers who hire women should have to pay to make up for the bad incentives.
Jiro
6d ago
By that reasoning, employers who employ women are free riding because they don't have to pay for the harm to society from discouraging women from staying home and having children. So there should be a special tax on anyone who employs women so that when hiring women they have to pay the cost of that harm (and the receipts of this tax should be given to women who stay at home with children).
i suspect you would oppose this plan.
Jiro
7d ago
The fact that the pension is sitting in the bank account of someone other than the recipient is just a paperwork issue. It should be treated the same as if it was sitting in the bank account of the recipient. Taking it is equivalent to taxing the old on savings. You may wish to tax the old on savings anyway, but admit that that's what you're doing.
Jiro
7d ago
To freestyle a lighter measure example off the dome, this could involve requiring filing parties to attend a humiliation ritual wherein they are browbeaten with every stat and fact known to mankind about how bad divorce is for children, and they must affirm personally and publicly: "yes, I am a complete piece of human shit, afflict all of these maladies on to my own flesh and blood for my own selfish gain".
Would you limit this to true facts and stats, or would you include false ones as well?
(If you limit it to true ones, you will have a problem because many "true" facts will be false as applied, unless you're getting down to insane levels of detail like "for people in your particular socioeconomic situation, in your specific state with your specific jobs..." And you probably won't have good statistics for those anyway. Of course, you could decide you don't care about truth when you do this, which has its own problems.)
Jiro
7d ago
If something straightforwardly helps your opponent and harms you, any claims that it does the opposite are likely to be concern trolling or motivated reasoning.
Refusing to punish bad things done by a Muslim who was in an anti-Western group, on the basis of human rights, straightforwardly helps the left. Yes, it may hurt more than it helps because of backlash; that's not impossible. But I'd heavily doubt it, because it's too easy as a biased human to come up with wishful thinking and think "well, maybe my opponent isn't really winning" when he obviously is.
Jiro
9d ago
abolish affirmative action in colleges and mandate that states allow individuals to carry guns
Neither of these have worked. Everyone who might be affected just refuses to obey the ruling and nothing happens to them. The others are left-wing causes so they didn't face this problem.
Jiro
9d ago
but the reality is no one that matters cares about his entire existence
Then what's the point of posting about him?
Jiro
9d ago
What's your threshold for absolute fortune? How many multiples of the money you put in?
We can start with "whatever anon_ thought it meant when he said that we could get an absolute fortune".
What separates the real world from the fake world?
If I ask you "did this actually happen", and you said "no" (truthfully), then it is not real.
Jiro
9d ago
It depends on what the processes are.
If the processes are "this set of criteria means sanction, and this set of criteria means AAQC, and the criteria are defined such that no post can meet both sets at the same time", then they are working.
If the processes are "find a list of mod sanctioned posts, and explicitly exclude them from the candidates for AAQC", the processes are not working. If the criteria for AAQC were fair and applied fairly, you wouldn't need to explicltly exclude them.
Jiro
10d ago
If mod sanctions and AAQCs are done in a sensible manner, it should not be possible for a post to get both. If it is, that implies that one of the two processes has failed. The solution is to fix the process, not to arbitrarily separate them.
Jiro
10d ago
You are not going to get low risk and absolute fortune at the same time for anything in the real world.
Yes, it's true that an off-ramp to escalation could be gamed by protestors. But it seems to me that the situation is already being gamed by the police (or ICE in this case), and that isn't good either, especially since the police can game things that protestors can't.
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