StableOutshoot
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User ID: 2253
StableOutshoot
1mo ago
The current atrocity going around X is that a mob stormed a church because the pastor had the same name as one of the higher-ups at ICE. They are not the same person.
Storming a church is a federal crime under the FACE act, a law passed in the mid-90s to protect abortion clinics from right wing activists, but which also protects religious services. If the disruption is forcible (as this was), it's a felony.
So to recap, these people are all catching felonies because they didn't bother to double check that the guy they were looking for didn't have the same name as somebody else.
Among the people in the group which stormed the church was Don Lemon, who was following them around to document their exploits.
Don Lemon getting sent to PMITA prison for breaking a law signed by Bill Clinton to protect abortion clinics wasn't on my 2026 bingo card but I'll take it.
The worst thing the mobs you described did was mildly irritate people for periods lasting up to five minutes
I have grown convinced in the last couple of weeks that one of the defining characteristics of being on the left is a total lack of a theory of mind.
Mildly irritated? I can think of a few ways that I would feel if I were surrounded by a mob directing hostilities at me, and I don't think "mildly irritated" would describe any of them. "Legitimately fearing for my personal safety" would probably be a much better description. That seems to be not only a reasonable thing to feel in that situation, but also, the actual intent of the people engaging in this behavior.
As a resident of the Minneapolis area these sorts of scenes are the reason I will not go into Minneapolis for the foreseeable future, simply because I would feel absolutely justified in drawing a firearm to defend myself, but the "jury of my peers" would consist entirely of people like you who apparently think that I'm only supposed to be "mildly irritated" that a group of angry people have surrounded me.
StableOutshoot
1mo ago
A car is nothing like that. 99.99% of the time it is not being used a weapon.
Sure, but 99.99% of the time, a screwdriver is not a weapon, but when somebody raised one over their head at me and I drew a firearm to defend myself, I received exactly zero legal scrutiny about my decision to do so. It's actually not all that ambiguous that something has become a weapon, so don't pretend that it is.
That isn't the only information available to him blah blah blah blah
My dude, my guy, my person. He was literally impacted by the vehicle and would have needed to jump out of the way to avoid being hit. The trajectory of the vehicle went directly through where he was standing. The car was accelerated in his direction. The position of his body and her vehicle were coincident. When you are struck by a vehicle you have been exposed to death or great bodily harm. Cars are normally not weapons? Doesn't matter, this car is impacting his body. The wheels are turned in some direction or another? Doesn't matter, it didn't steer the car away from his body. She didn't have intent? Okay, her lack of intentional control of her vehicle caused it to impact his body. There is no way you can slice this where she has not committed an offense which has exposed this officer to death or great bodily harm.
By standing in front of the vehicle, and by pulling out his gun.
He didn't pull out his gun until the car was already accelerating toward him. Try again.
StableOutshoot
1mo ago
A deadly weapon can be used in a way that isn't deadly. If I hit you on the leg with a gun with moderate force, that is not a threat of severe bodily harm.
If you draw a firearm in the presence of a police officer you won't have the opportunity to use it as a club against him before he fills you with holes, and no jury on the planet would convict him. It's impossible to use a gun as a club against someone without first passing through a condition in which they would have reasonable cause to believe you might shoot them with it. Which seems a bit relevant here - All notions that Good's car did not pose a deadly threat are based on hindsight. The only information available to the officer at that moment was the fact that a car was accelerating toward him. There is zero legal obligation for him to wait until he has the benefit of hindsight to decide whether to shoot!
If the car was not going very fast
It does not matter how fast the car is moving, because you can fall under the wheel and be crushed no matter how fast or slow it's moving.
If the cop unreasonably escalated the situation and put himself in harms way, then he can't claim self-defence even if there was an imminent threat of severe bodily harm.
Okay, so, how exactly did the cop in question escalate the situation, especially unreasonably? He is just walking around the car and filming it. He doesn't say a word. Folks are saying his colleague escalated the situation by aggressively approaching the vehicle, but how does that weigh on the guilt of the shooter? It's absurd to suggest that you can violently escalate anything just by standing somewhere without saying anything.
any reasonable person would intuitively understand isn't going to work
Maybe it won't immediately stop the car, but it will prevent them from backing up and trying again. Again, with the benefit of hindsight we know she didn't intend to do that, but also again, you're not required to wait until you have the benefit of hindsight to deal with a threat you perceive in the moment.
The other theory at play is that it is legal for a police officer to shoot a fleeing felon if they reasonably believe their flight poses a danger to the community. This substack post goes over this theory in great detail, with many, many citations from case law, many of which are 9-0 or 8-1 supreme court decisions.
StableOutshoot
1mo ago
What do we make of the fact that this guy has a Filipina wife?
It's a clue that this whole thing about deporting immigrants who don't obey immigration laws is not about racism, as alleged, but rather about ensuring that immigrants obey immigration laws.
StableOutshoot
1mo ago
"Please walk away"
I am predicting that "I don't hate you" is gonna become a common right wing troll against leftists in the same way.
StableOutshoot
1mo ago
It's always hilarious to me when the political faction that justifies so many of their positions and behavior with the word "empathy" cannot imagine why, for example, someone might have unkind words to say about the person who just put them in a life-threatening situation.
StableOutshoot
1mo ago
I know it seems confusing, but you're actually not allowed to hit a police officer with your car. There's like, a ton of court cases about people hitting police officers with their cars and the people who did that didn't win any of them. Hope this helps.
StableOutshoot
1mo ago
from your perspective her actions leading up to this video are illegitimate
My dude, her actions leading up to this video are crimes punishable by up to a year in federal prison.
that happened when the agent started swearing at her and trying to open her car door. I think this behavior is counter-productive for any reasonable goal
Arresting lawbreakers is actually a pretty reasonable goal for a law enforcement officer, actually, and I would expect any productive approach to doing this to involve physically apprehending the suspect.
indicates someone that does not have the appropriate temperament to be in law enforcement.
I'm pretty sure that willingness to physically apprehend someone you intend to arrest is exactly the temperament that is required for a job that involves arresting people. Meanwhile, accelerating your vehicle directly into a police officer in response to someone trying to arrest you indicates that you do not have the appropriate temperament to be spending your free time deliberately antagonizing law enforcement.
StableOutshoot
1mo ago
It's beautiful. Almost makes the cost of RAM worth it.
StableOutshoot
1mo ago
Surely you understand that the only two options are not "they are just there by coincidence" and "they are waiting to murder you"?
Sure, the option that I would believe in that situation would be "they are there for the purpose of committing the crime of obstructing law enforcement," and I would approach the situation with that in mind, and you admit this:
The couple were obviously there to document, protest and/or obstruct ICE activities.
Notably, obstruction being a federal crime which, being federal law enforcement, they have the authority to make arrests for.
nobody would have been hurt if the agent had made the slightest attempt to act like a responsible authority figure and deescalate the situation
I really don't know how to get through to you the very simple fact that law enforcement has zero obligation to be kind to lawbreakers, and in fact, being unkind to lawbreakers is their explicit role in society, and if you do not wish law enforcement to be unkind to you, it is very easy to not commit crimes. How have you managed to reach adulthood without understanding this?
or if he had given her a chance to follow his orders in order to arrest her.
She did have an opportunity to follow orders and comply peacefully with her arrest. She used that opportunity to shift her car into drive and accelerate into a police officer. Did you watch the video?
StableOutshoot
1mo ago
I think the hard part will be finding the artist willing to do it. Sounds like a job for (ugh) AI.
StableOutshoot
1mo ago
So after a year in which there have been 66 vehicle ramming attacks against ICE agents, you don't think it's reasonable to believe that the hostile activist who has been following you around all morning and is now parked sideways across the street in front of you, is more likely than not to be intending to use their vehicle to disrupt your convoy?
Exactly what is it reasonable to believe about the intentions of the hostile activist who has been following you around all morning and has now parked her car sideways across the street in front of you?
Let me lay it out more clearly.
You are an ICE agent. You are in a city whose governor and mayor have stirred up resentment against your lawful activities, in which activists have been organizing to oppose you.
A woman and her wife have been following you all morning, antagonizing you as you go about your work.
Later, as you drive down a street, you come across these women, with their car parked sideways across the street. You recognize them as people you have been having hostile interactions with all morning.
There have been 66 vehicle ramming attacks against ice agents in the past year.
Given the facts above, what is it reasonable for you to believe in this moment?
I do not believe it is possible for someone whose brain has not been swiss-cheesed by ideological capture to answer "actually I think it's most likely that she has totally legal reasons to be doing that which have nothing to do with me." If that's your answer you are an NPC, you have no theory of mind or independent opinions of your own.
Sounds like you agree then that she was not barricading the road, merely that she could decide to barricade the road.
A person manning a barricade can decide to allow passage through the barricade without it ceasing to be a barricade. Please do not argue semantics.
The idea that the police force that is currently being protested by the person who has parked her car across the road, in the context of a nationwide spree of activists using their cars to disrupt ICE operations, can reasonably expect that she intends to behave cooperatively as they pass, is absurd. They absolutely should not expect that she intends to cooperate in their passage.
left-wing protestors are not generally violent agitators just waiting for an opportunity to murder federal officials.
True, but they do have the explicitly stated goal of obstructing and interfering with law enforcement operations. There have been numerous car ramming attacks by left wing activists all over the country. It's pretty reasonable to treat the left wing activist sitting in her car sideways in the road in front of you as very likely intending to add to that number.
Even if they decide against all reasonable evidence that they can't just drive by safely, there are many options that do not involve immediately saying "get out of the fucking car" and then trying to tear the door open.
Police are under no obligation, legal or otherwise, to be nice to lawbreakers. Being treated unkindly by the police is a completely predictable consequence of breaking the law, and if you want them to treat you kindly you can simply not do that.
StableOutshoot
1mo ago
But then you're arguing the politics surrounding the events, not whether there was actually a difference in how the state responded to someone acting against it.
From what I have read and heard, "Because what the J6ers were doing is bad" is the overt, explicit justification among the left for the way they have been treated. It really is just political for them, and not based in any respect for principles.
StableOutshoot
1mo ago
Renee Good had been, I don't know, a Christian at an abortion protest or something?
Not OP, but I'm trying to think of what would actually be an analogous situation for Renee Bad[1] at an abortion clinic protest. There's not a lot of overtly disruptive things she could do in front of an abortion clinic that wouldn't be straightforward grounds for arrest, and I think the overall right generally has enough respect for the law and property rights to understand that even if they don't like that abortion is legal, that it's a matter for the legislators and the courts, not for Renee Bad to roll up and do a direct action.
[1] As in, the mirror universe right wing version of Renee Good. This is a pun and I don't intend it to imply that it's evil to be right wing. I think it's quite okay to be right wing. It's just a pun please don't hurt me.
StableOutshoot
1mo 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.
I say this not to suggest that Babbitt was a bad shoot, but to point out that the facts of the case simply don't matter all that much as far as politics are concerned. Folks have no problem lying to themselves and everyone else in order to create a good martyr as necessary to their cause.
StableOutshoot
1mo ago
Factors at play:
- The blues burned up a lot of political capital, literally, in 2020, so normies are simply less inclined to side with them
- Summer 2020 can be blamed to a large extent on cabin fever, and the fact that viral content on social media, controlled fairly overtly at the time by the blue tribe, pretty much constituted our shared reality. People in 2026 have lives outside of their screens in a way that people in summer 2020 didn't, X is now controlled by the red tribe, blue alternatives to X have nearly no mainstream penetration (i.e. are pretty much just blue siloes), and most people under 40 have quit Facebook.
- The canonization of floyd came from a video that omitted the context of his resisting arrest and the drugs he swallowed at the beginning of his police encounter, and focused only on the use of force against him. For the events of the ICE shooting, the context is a lot more apparent and makes it much more clear that she largely brought her death upon herself. It's a lot harder for someone with no particular dog in the fight to look at the video and think it's an unreasonable use of force, than the original video of floyd that led one to believe that the police officer was choking him to death for no reason.
StableOutshoot
1mo ago
I feel like Jan 6 was a cargo cult of the 2020 summer of love. It felt to me like a bunch of people spent summer 2020 watching leftists burn shit down with few-to-no legal or political consequences, and all attempts to stop them turning into political victories, and those people thought "hey I can do that too" without realizing that those outcomes did not come from the burning shit down, they came from the political infrastructure that the blues have spent a century constructing or institutionally capturing. It takes a lot of effort and solidarity to turn intentionally criminal and anti-social behavior into political victories, that the reds simply have not done.
I don't think the hearts of the reds are truly in it for the defense of Babbitt. At the very least, they are less successful at convincing me that they are deluded about the situation, as the blues are about their own various martyrs. It comes across as a cargo cult to me, trying to copy the blue's performative outrage over the consequences of their own actions, but without understanding the true underlying demonstration of solidarity that is the actual point of it. The blues understand and perform actual solidarity in ways that the reds don't, and part of that is by saying "we will defend literally anything you do in service of the cause, and do our best to ensure that you face the minimum possible consequences for doing it, and that anyone who interferes with you faces the maximum possible consequences, and all of the above are regardless of what laws, rules, or social customs you violate while doing so." This is basically a fundamentally left wing form of operating that the right cannot copy without not being the right anymore.
The attempts at outrage over Babbitt, at the end of the day, come across to me just as a plea: "Look, we all know that if capitol police had shot an unarmed woman at, say, the Kavanaugh protests, you guys would have gone apeshit," to which the response is "yes, thank you for noticing."
StableOutshoot
1mo ago
I also have a hard time believing that the complaining about the consequences is a genuine act of surprise. It comes across as performative, mostly likely because it literally is a performance, for the phone in your hand or the people reading your comments. It's an act that allows them to tell each other stories about how their cause is so righteous that the evil enemies want to attack them for being a part of it.
The people who do these things are creatures of Conflict Theory, and their thoughts cannot be explained in the language of Mistake Theory that is mandatory in The Motte. They have no particular adherence to principles or truth, these are restrictions that Mistake Theorists adopt, which Conflict Theorists have no particular use for because they tend to prevent you from doing whatever is necessary to win. The principle at work is "the Other Team did a Bad Thing to Our Team, which makes Other Team Bad and Our Team Good, which therefore justifies everything that Our Team will now do in response, which will not be Bad because Our Team are the ones doing it to the Bad Other Team."
The goal this entire time has been to engineer conditions in which it would be inevitable that Other Team would eventually do something Bad to Our Team. That's the point of blue tribe politicians urging their own constituents to resist, and activist organizations encouraging disruptions of ICE operations. Any idiot can see that what happened in Minneapolis is the inevitable result of everyone, everywhere, actively agitating to make the environment around ICE operations as chaotic and hostile as possible. And any idiot can see that all it would have taken to prevent it would be simply not committing to making the environment around ICE operations as chaotic and hostile as possible. But that would mean losing, and we can't have that!
I simply can't get worked up about this situation to the extent that everybody else wants me to. I can't be outraged or saddened at something that everyone clearly wanted to happen. All I can really do is cling to my commitment to principles, truth, and the rule of law.
StableOutshoot
1mo ago
I think some conservatives are sort of coming around to the idea that the unconditional solidarity on the left is a serious strength, and so they need to adopt something like that too in order to keep up. But it's difficult to maintain the same energy because it conflicts so deeply with what conservatism fundamentally is, so the hagiography of Babbitt just comes across as a cargo cult of the left's more successful hagiographies of their own martyrs. It doesn't really work without the True Belief that Your Side is so morally righteous that it is exempt from the law.
StableOutshoot
1mo ago
Yes, and people could also choose not to drive around in masks, tactical gear, and unmarked cars to intimidate people in a city that the president perceives as inhabited by his enemies.
This is a long and roundabout way of saying "enforce immigration law," which is not only legal, but is literally the thing that the current president promised to do before he was elected in a landslide. If it's your honest belief that the government has no business enforcing its own laws immediately following an election in which the populace voted overwhelmingly for the government to do more enforcement of those very laws, I'm really not sure what you think the point of democracy is.
she tries to wave the ICE truck by
She is not a police officer and has no authority to direct traffic, and the convoy has no obligation to trust that she will allow them all to pass without, for example, obstructing just the back half of the convoy to split the convoy in half. If you do not understand why giving a hostile bystander the opportunity to split your convoy in half is bad tactics, you do not have sufficient insight to converse meaningfully on this issue.
StableOutshoot
1mo ago
the rise of a political Somali elite such as AOC.
Correction: Ilhan Omar, not AOC. Both members of "the squad," so forgivable to mix up.
It is nevertheless federal law.
It seems likely to me that that part of the law hasn't been used before simply because people up to now have largely had the decency to not storm churches as a form of protest. If this action is not prosecuted I don't see how this does not escalate into a tit-for-tat storming of mosques and such.
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