Markass
5hr ago
I value anonymity enough that I'm not going to give out my credit card information, tying my account to my real life identity, just to remove ads. That information is begging to be leaked in a data breach anyway.
Markass
5hr ago
All that's left after you remove those are hobbies or charity, like TheMotte or Wikipedia, which probably can't exist without the infrastructure built by the advertising-funded products anyway.
What about Kiwi Farms? As far as I'm aware it is funded entirely by donations and Null maintains his own infrastructure.
Markass
22hr ago
I believe that speakers can choose whichever pronoun they want to use to refer to anyone. You can call this something like pronoun anarchy. I emphasize that they are already able to, not just that they should, because there's really no good way to enforce using preferred pronouns. You can butt in and say "use these pronouns" but there's no way you can actually force someone to say those pronouns.
This applies to the ones who want to affirm trans people too. I'm not saying you can't call Dylan a her. If you want to, go right ahead. You have that liberty, just as I have the liberty to call him a he.
Markass
1d ago
Because it's extremely hard to apply a logically consistent standard to both deaths that results in justifying CK's but not RG's.
Let's try one. How about the self-defense law of the United States? Well, CK's would obviously be unjustified because he was not an imminent threat to anybody. Meanwhile, people are debating the merits of RG's under self-defense so someone could make a plausible argument that hers was unjustified.
Then how about we say the decedent should have made better decisions? Call this the Better Decisions standard. That is, CK's was justified because (some argue) he held inflammatory beliefs about minorities like trans people and/or a belief that the Second Amendment is necessary, and holding such beliefs is a poor decision. Well, that justifies RG's as well since she also made many bad decisions (e.g. deliberately antagonizing ICE) that resulted in her death, so Better Decisions isn't going to work either.
Absent a standard that can apply to both cases this way, what is one to make of someone who mixes standards? Let's say they apply Better Decisions to CK's but self-defense law to RG's (and say that RG's was not justified under self-defense). I could address their arguments about CK's and RG's deaths separately, but I think a more efficient way to address both arguments is to just ask why they don't apply the Better Decisions standard to RG's as well. After all, I think it's best to apply consistent standards everywhere unless you have a very good reason not to, as doing so shows that you are impartial and unbiased. Is there an important difference between them that I'm not aware of?
Of course, besides the fact that CK was red tribe and RG was blue tribe, but in the assumption of good faith we assume that one wouldn't justify CK's death merely for being on Team Red.
Markass
4d ago
That's a convenient story, but it's not really true. People started owning cars and moving to suburbs well before cities had crime and homelessness problems. (Certainly though cities having those problems doesn't make them appealing places to move to.) The truth is that it's just nice to live in a place where you have lots of space and have a mode of transportation that's quick, convenient, point-to-point and on-demand, and a lot of people have chosen to live that way. If you don't want to, then there are plenty of American cities you can move to where you can get by without a car.
You're right. It was a bad example. The point is that it is possible in principle to use what can be a deadly weapon in a way that isn't a threat of severe bodily harm. Comparison to guns are bad because guns are specifically for killing people. If someone pulls out a gun on a police officer or uses it in any way to attack him, that can reasonably be interpreted as as threat on his life.
A car is nothing like that. 99.99% of the time it is not being used a weapon.
A gun is not being used as a deadly weapon when it is shot at the range.
I can agree that deadly weapons are only deadly weapons when they are deadly. But that circles back to StableOutshoot's original point, which is that the car here is a deadly weapon being used in assault. If the car was stationary, for example, then it's not a deadly weapon. It doesn't matter that 99.99% of the time it wasn't used as a deadly weapon, if we're in the 0.01% scenario where it is in fact a deadly weapon.
If you're arguing that it was a deadly weapon but there was no threat to bodily harm, that just sounds like an incoherent, confused statement. Either it's a deadly weapon or it isn't, and if it is a deadly weapon, then that implies that it is a threat of bodily harm. So either it's both a deadly weapon and a threat of bodily harm, or neither. We don't go around calling everything in the world a deadly weapon just because it could be used as one.
He has the prior that virtually all cars are used for transportation, not killing.
This is the sort of argument that makes sense when considering which traffic policies to implement, not in a life-or-death self-defense scenario. It also just doesn't matter. He has the prior that someone driving at him means he's about to be seriously injured or die.
He has the fact that she was not exhibiting any threatening behaviour towards him.
Doesn't matter. Many non-compliant criminals have become deadly threats to officers despite showing no aggression or threatening behavior.
He has the fact that she was turning the car away from him and that he was clear of the car by the time he shot. He has the fact that he should have been aware that she did not know where he was going to position himself once she had stopped reversing and that the initial direction of her car was intended to facilitate her escape, not to hit him.
No, he doesn't have any of those things. You're only saying those with hindsight and with assuming humans have faster reaction times than they actually do.
The only piece of information that he had to support the idea that she was trying to kill him
No, he doesn't have to think that she was trying to kill him. No officer has ever been required to argue that someone was trying to kill them, though it certainly doesn't hurt their self-defense claim. They just have to argue that someone was an imminent deadly threat. Intentions do not matter here.
When a robber pulls a gun on you, you have the prior that most robbers only use guns as intimidation tools. But you are not required to be able to justify the idea that he is trying to kill you. You are allowed to just shoot him.
It does, because it dramatically reduces the risk.
The risk of falling under the wheels and getting crushed? Slow speed only reduces that risk if the driver is going to put their foot on the brake and stop, and the ICE officer has no way of knowing that she is going to do that. In fact, she was actually accelerating quickly and only moved little or not much at all because of the ice.
Someone walking down the sidwalk might have a bomb hidden inside his jacket. That doesn't justify killing him.
If he's fleeing or escaping, then it justifies shooting to stop him from fleeing since he is a deadly threat to others, per Tennessee v. Garner.
By standing in front of the vehicle, and by pulling out his gun.
He pulled out his gun because she was an immediate deadly threat to him. And I fail to see how standing in front of the vehicle unjustifiably escalates the situation. She does not have the right to flee, after all.
If there is so much uncertainty about whether that initial movement forward was an attempt on his life, then it's much wiser to wait a moment and confirm that
No, it's not. That is a very bad tactical mistake. Thankfully, the law does not force you to wait in order to be sure that you have legal standing to defend yourself from a first attempt on your life.
You don't have to wait until you have the benefit of hindsight, but you do have to be conservative and only shoot when the threat rises to sufficient level and you do have to wait until the threat is immediate.
This is just bad advice or easily misinterpreted. "Waiting" here implies that you know that there is a deadly threat but... you just can't do anything about it yet? Did you ever think through how a self-defender would actually perceive a situation as it unfolds? Either they see a deadly threat or they don't. If they do see a deadly threat, they are allowed to use deadly force as quickly as possible, until it is no longer a threat. There's no scenario in which the self-defender would think to wait just in case it's not a deadly threat. If a self-defender does wait, it's only for tactical reasons (e.g. waiting for the robber with the gun to turn his head away, so they can draw their own gun before the robber has a chance to realize they've done so).
You also have to take other options to get out of harms way if they are available to you.
Based on what? Officers have no duty to retreat, and even in states with such a duty to retreat for private citizens, you're only required to retreat if it can be done in complete safety.
Markass
5d ago
Shooting her wasn't necessary in preventing the offence because it cannot have prevented the offence.
It says "resisting or preventing" an offense, not just preventing an offense. Do you agree that he was at least resisting the offense?
I've watched the video many times
This is the problem right here. You get to watch it as many times as you want, while he can only go through the situation one time. If he was able to replay the situation exactly as it played out, I'm sure he could have made decisions that didn't involve shooting her. But it's like, well, have you ever played video games? Have you ever made all the right decisions in the game on the first try? No, you don't. You die in the game a lot and only beat the game after several attempts at playing the exact same situations over and over again. But of course, real life is not a video game, and when someone's life is on the line it's justified for them to use deadly force in response to an imminent deadly threat, even if you can make an argument that they didn't have to (because you can always make that argument for every scenario under the sun).
I think he had lots of time to process the situation
Obviously he had enough time, because he was able to draw his gun and use it. If she had an instant kill-death laser controlled by her brain, or something, even the fastest draw in the West wouldn't be able to stop her. But no, I don't think that's what you mean. I think you're saying that he had lots of time to process the situation and choose a decision that didn't involve shooting her (or shooting her less), which I think is flat-out incorrect.
Markass
5d ago
The argument is that if it isn't reasonable even to think it might have stopped the threat, then his self-defence claim falls apart.
Again, there is no law that says that it must be reasonable to think that your response would have stopped the threat. A guy is pointing a gun at you, and you throw a coffee mug at him. You can throw your phone. You can throw your pen, or call him obscenities, or kick dirt at him. All of those things are legally justified, because once you are faced with an imminent deadly threat, basically everything is allowed (besides things that could cause harm to innocent people), up to and including your own deadly force.
Now obviously, it is not reasonable to think that you throwing a coffee mug had any chance of stopping him, and in no universe could a coffee mug have come even close to ending the threat. So does that mean that your self-defense claim falls apart if you throw the coffee mug, and you could be charged with assault? That doesn't make sense to me.
it was reasonable for him to put himself in front of a moving car
So I want to focus on a different point, which is that you seem to be assuming that the officer knew or should have known that she was going to move her car in that way, justifying your argument that he could have simply just stepped out of the way. This is an argument that can only be made with perfect 20/20 hindsight. And we do not judge use of force with hindsight, ever. It is extraordinarily difficult to predict, in the moment, which path a vehicle is going to take. I can agree that (just to give an extreme example) if a car is normally driving down the street in a straight line, it would be dumb for an officer to jump out in front of it and expect the driver to stop. But that's not what happened here. The car was stationary, then moved backwards and that's when the officer walked in front of it. Is that a bad tactical decision? Probably. But it would be unreasonable to expect him to know that she's now going to go forward, especially given that this all happened so quickly. In general, drivers who are non-compliant are very unpredictable and can easily maneuver their vehicles in whichever direction they want. If you view things with hindsight, you can always make an argument that the officers could have avoided "putting themselves in harm's way".
Markass
5d ago
Then I would question why they don't judge both deaths by the same standard.
The lack of reasonableness in her decisions does not make his decisions more reasonable.
It has nothing to do with whether her decisions were reasonable, unless you are seriously arguing that she was the one who was defending herself (in which case I would disagree). His decisions were reasonable on their own.
I think a good parallel case to bring up where the shooter's decision was unreasonable despite the decedent also making unreasonable decisions -- just to show you that I'm not making a distinction without a difference -- is the shooting of Ashli Babbitt. It was unreasonable of her to be a part of J6, and it was unreasonable of her to climb through a shattered window (yes, even if she passed officers who made no effort to stop her), but that doesn't mean the officer who shot her was reasonable to do so, since there is no reasonable argument that she posed an imminent deadly threat to him.
So yes, just because someone is making unreasonable decisions does not necessarily mean that you are allowed to shoot them. It depends on what those unreasonable decisions are. Every case of justified self-defense I can think of has involved someone making an unreasonable decision, but those decisions are usually on the level of "charged at an officer with a knife" rather than "fought the officer with fists to resist arrest", even though both are unreasonable decisions.
He needs to show that she intended to run him over.
No, he doesn't. He needs to show that the threat was imminent. Had the vehicle been completely stationary for the entirety of the interaction, there would be no argument in the universe that she was an imminent threat. But she moved the car, and in such a way that he was in its path.
Intentions don't really matter here. If a robber points a gun at you, most of the time they are not intending to pull the trigger, and are merely using it as intimidation. However, you are still allowed to shoot him. You do not have to prove that he was intending on shooting you.
Given that in the vast majority of situations where someone is driving towards you, they're not trying to kill you
Again, doesn't matter. In the vast majority of situations where a robber pulls a gun on you, they're also not trying to kill you. That doesn't mean you're not allowed to pull out your own gun and shoot them.
Markass
9d ago
His actions make me think he actually wasn't in fear for his life, because shooting the driver didn't change anything about the momentum of the car.
That is irrelevant. Let's say a bad guy has his gun pointed at you, and you pull out your own gun (this is called drawing from the drop). Is that likely to change anything about the bad guy? No (you are highly likely to get shot and die). Does that mean you weren't in fear of your own life? Obviously you still were.
Markass
9d ago
While it may feel good to play enlightened centrist and do some both sides’ing, there is a major area where Babbitt differed from Good: Babbitt posed no imminent threat to the officer who shot.
That is the consistent principle.
Also this post. (I'm willing to move discussion to either thread to not fragment the conversation further.)
Markass
11d ago
How exactly do you expect the cop to defend himself non-lethally? Tasers and 40mm shotguns fail all the time to stop people who are charging at a cop. Do you expect him to just run away?
Markass
11d ago
ICE agents can't be prosecuted by the state for things that happened in the course of their duties, but they can still be prosecuted at the federal level.
Markass
11d ago
The first is that shooting her could not have reasonably been expected to stop the car.
Doesn't matter. It may be a bad idea tactically, but it does not lose him his legal or moral right to self-defense. You can draw your gun when a bad guy has his gun trained on you, and I would consider that unlikely to stop the threat, but that doesn't mean you're not defending yourself.
And if I understand the law correctly, each shot has to be justified on its own.
Each shot is justified by the same reasons as the first one is justified because humans do not make decisions that quickly. We are talking about a time frame of 1 second. See my other reply here.
Markass
11d ago
That might have been the intent, but it was unreasonable because it could not have stopped the threat.
Reasonableness applies to whether it was reasonable to believe that she was a deadly threat at that particular moment, and it is applied to whether the response was proportional (e.g. you cannot shoot someone who merely pepper-sprayed you), but at no point has it ever been applied to whether it could have stopped the threat. Even in a gun-on-gun situation it is not guaranteed that a gun will stop the threat. See my other reply here.
As for the rest, we are talking about a time frame of 1 second and humans are not expected to make perfect split-second decisions in such a short time frame. See my other reply here.
Markass
11d ago
"Not trying to injure him" and "had no idea he was there" does not comport. If I'm in the driver's seat of a car and there is a pedestrian in my blind spot, and I move the car such that I would hit them, but I don't know that they are there, do you think it matters that I wasn't trying to injure them? I think an analogous situation is if I am firing a gun with my eyes closed, or pointing the gun in a direction I can't see.
Why is he to blame for information he didn't know (that she didn't want to injure him), while she doesn't take any blame for information she didn't know (that he was standing there)? Especially when she was clearly being commanded to get out of the car.
As for the rest of your analysis, we are talking about a time frame of 1 second and humans are not expected to make perfect split-second decisions in such a short amount of time. See my reply here.
I can entertain such an argument if made but I don't see any possibility of me being able to accept an argument that supports Charlie Kirk's killing but not Renee's. Noticing that someone supports CK's death but not the other is a heuristic for detecting bad arguments.
Markass
11d ago
On what grounds do you assert this? He shot to stop the threat. Once the threat was over, he stopped shooting. If he for example had waited a bit and then fired (unjustified) shots later, it would be a clear indicator of murderous intent, but that's not what happened. Once deadly force is authorized, you are allowed to keep using it until the threat has passed. Whatever consequences result from your use of force is not something to care about in the moment (although police are trained to render first aid once the suspect is in custody).
Markass
11d ago
The law doesn't hold use of force to the standard of "it has to actually stop the threat." A good guy drawing his gun on a bad guy has no guarantee of being able to stop the bad guy, but we still recognize that the good guy has the legal and moral right to draw his gun. Is it a bad idea tactically? Maybe (e.g. drawing from the drop), but that doesn't mean the good guy loses the claim to self-defense if he does end up doing it.
Regarding who caused what, when the ICE agent stands near her car, he's standing off to the side and it's not at all clear that he's initially in the path of the vehicle were it to start moving forward. Only when she starts moving the car and turns the wheels does he end up being in the way. Again, this all happened in the span of a second so it's hard to see how he exactly was the instigator of the situation. The best thing for her to have done would have been to sit still and not move the car at all, because suspects do not have the right to flee from police.
""""Cops""""
Why the excessive levels of quotation? ICE are legitimate law enforcement with the authorities and abilities of any law enforcement agency.
Markass
11d ago
We are talking about a time frame of 1 second. It takes a certain amount of time for a human to take inputs from all of their senses, process it, make a decision, and then use their muscles to act out that decision. That loop does not happen instantly and it takes more time than the split seconds that elapse between firing rounds from a gun. This is why it's reasonable for a self-defender to fire more rounds from their gun even after the point you can identify, with the benefit of hindsight and the comfort of your computer screen, that they don't need to fire any more rounds. What would be unreasonable for example is if he waited 30 seconds and then fired more rounds without clear justification, but that is not what happened here.
Juries reject self defense all the time.
They tend not to if they recognize that people aren't superhumans who react to changing stimuli lightning-quick in less than 1 second.
Markass
11d ago
People leaving a city does not fix the dysfunction and chaos resulting from the city refusing to work with ICE.
The police aren't "forbidden"
the people don't want him to spend resources on this nonsense
That's still just forbidding the police from cooperating with ICE. A distinction without a difference.
Markass
11d ago
A court order to prevent deportation does not mean that you are in the country legally. When Kilmar Abrego Garcia entered the country in 2012, he did so illegally. The court order to return him to the US was only over due process concerns. It does not mean that some judge magically granted him citizenship and he is now in the country legally.
I'm not sure by what stretch of the imagination you assert that Neiyerver Adrian Leon Rengel was "invited into the country" for an immigration hearing. What he actually did was use the CBP One app to schedule an appointment at a port of entry about an asylum claim. Presumably he made some plausible claim to asylum that was later found to be false, because DHS asserts that he entered the country illegally.
I was about to say this. Seriously, don't threaten me with a good time. Many of the ills wrought by the Internet are because everyone is on it now, especially children. Kids have no reason to be online, and when they are they are easy targets for groomers, and that results in several poorly-thought-out government-led policy initiatives that are a headache for everyone (e.g. the UK "Online Safety Act"). But is it possible to go back to the early web? I don't know.
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