Stellula
1d ago
We’re splitting hairs here. You’re right plausible would also work, but I think what I was saying was clear.
Stellula
2d ago
Did I say probable?
Reasonable is the correct word here. Crazy gangstalking conspiracies are possible, body doubles and crisis actors are possible, but these are both unreasonable.
Considering that the officer's state of mind was being effected by his previous encounter with a protestor and their car is both possible and reasonable.
Stellula
2d ago
In Minnesota in January the roads are covered with ice, which is very slippery. Watch the wheels of the car when the tires are turned to the left, the tires move, but the car stays stationary. That's because she is on ice. She is trying to move the car forward, but failing because she isn't getting enough traction between the tires and the ice.
Stellula
2d ago
After a day of reading and watching videos of the woman killed in Minneapolis yesterday, here are some thoughts:
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This iceman was hit by a different car previously.
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The woman was cosplaying resistance fighter, not really realizing how dangerous what she was doing actually was.
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It is unambiguous given the videos that she did try to hit the officer with her car, but just barely, and seems to have backed off immediately when her tires slipped on the ice.
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it seems reasonable to me that the iceman was looking for retribution for the previous car strike, and she gave it to him.
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Shooting her would have had no effect on his safety, even if she had gotten traction. They were at “point blank” range.
All in all I think everybody here is a victim of the current evil in our society. A woman in a gay relationship with a recently deceased husband, in a new city, is being fed a constant stream of propaganda. I can imagine the state of mind if this person, and it isn’t pleasant.
She decided to try and help, which is good, but was essentially a pawn, or unknowing martyr for political power struggles I doubt she understood. A comparison could be a child soldier/suicide bomber.
The iceman: I expect better than this. Unlike the woman, acting on pure propaganda fueled adrenaline, he is supposed to train for this. He also interacts with these people daily. He should be thinking rationally here, and the rational move is to just get out of the way, not walk in front of the car of a neurotic woman screaming at you. He is legally, technically in the clear, but this was immoral. Hes basically exploiting a series of laws and norms to allow him to “innocently” kill a woman as a form of retribution. This is akin in my mind to entrapment of some form. The iceman sets up a series of traps, and just waits for an untrained, trigger, fight or flight woman to fall into one of them. He shouldn’t be setting traps, he should by building golden off-ramps to de-escalate.
Unfortunately the same which gripped both the woman and the shooter is gripping everybody forming an opinion online around this. nyTimes put out am [absurd] “forensic analysis” and determined she was trying to escape, which will never be questioned by the blue tribe ever. We will forever live in the reality where an iceman killed a woman in cold blood on Jan 7th 2026 in Minneapolis.
I don’t think this will metastasize into Floyd 2.0, mostly because the woman was white, but also because of the weather. We’ll see how this weekend plays out though.
A final question: will the shooter be charged with a state crime in Minnesota and will he be able to avoid that charge? Could we run into a Chauvin type situation here?
Stellula
3d ago
Watch this video:
https://x.com/sarahiscensored/status/2009022817019572408
At the 0:06 mark, her wheels are pointed to the LEFT at the officer, and you see them spin out on the ice, because she hit the gas.
Just watch the video. It’s understandable to be mistaken with so much info flying around, but this fact is pretty cut and dry.
Stellula
3d ago
Police do not have a “duty to flee”.
Secondly: she turned the tires of her car TOWARDS the cop and if not for the ice that prevented her from getting traction, would have run right over him. He was actively being attacked. The analog here would be; she pointed a gun at him and pulled the trigger, but it jammed.
Stellula
3d ago
Minnesota doesn’t get to decide to take all of the benefits of membership in the United States and then just blatantly ignore our laws. They doubly don’t get to do that after facilitating the theft of billions of dollars in federal aid.
Stellula
3d ago
I disagree. Watch the wheels, which are spinning out on the ice. When she tires to accelerate, she’s pointed right at the cop.
Stellula
3d ago
Why are women doing this? Do they have some sense of invincibility?
It's that they don't understand how dangerous the game they're playing is. People see a lot of youtube videos and tik toks and stuff and they feel empowered to act out their revolutionary fantasies.
Stellula
3d ago
The sense that I get from Walz is that he's basically a patsy for powerful democrats. He should absolutely not be a national figure, and that type of attention can be intoxicating. A (potentially) dangerous mix.
I hope nobody is egging him on.
Stellula
3d ago
If you watch the slow motion videos of the vehicle, yeah she did try to run into them. She turned her wheels towards them, then started accelerating.
https://x.com/SarahisCensored/status/2009022817019572408
She only turned after she hit the cop.
Stellula
3d ago
None of this matters. The legal justifications don't matter. People are not swayed by logic or law.
Stellula
3d ago
Don't forget about the Mark Kelly video from a few months ago reminding soldiers that they should think hard about what orders they follow because they need to personally decide if they're legal or not.
Stellula
3d ago
This puts a lot of new protesting innovations into question though.
Is the driver of a car justified in trying to run over a person standing in their way if they feel threatened?
“I’ll block you and if you drive into me I’ll retaliate violently and be justified” has been a leftist protest/escalation tactic since at least 2020, probably longer.
I think you're right about this. I'm trying to think of what 10 minutes of "play" with my kids would look like and I'm not sure. I don't think a 2-4 year old could hold 10 straight minutes of interest in a single game of play.
We'll play hide and seek a lot, but the kids version of this is having my wife and I "hide" in the exact same place over and over while they find us. It is really fun, and they laugh and laugh while we do it, but I don't think bouts of this last much longer than 10 minutes or so.
Reading to them takes longer than that for sure, but is that the same as playing? I think we just spend about 45 minutes reading all the kids favorite stories to them before bedtime.
I'll spend a lot of time with them "playing" outside, but that's usually just me supervising them while they play with each other, interspersed with a few minutes at a time where they show me something interesting or the climax of a pretend play that they're doing "Dad come and see our bunny house! [pile of sticks]" etc. Or if they "help" me cook dinner it's a few minutes of them watching me cook something before they get distracted and want to do something else.
Thinking about this some more and we do go on a lot of really long bike rides where it takes up most of the day, but thinking that through it's a lot of short stops at a lot of places. 10 minutes at coffee, 20 minutes at the park, 10 minutes at the grocery store, etc. etc.
I think this person is just way overanalyzing themselves.
Stellula
9d ago
Okay. It Vivek converts to Mennonism, stops using the internet, moves to a farm, and gets rid of his car, I think people would take the conversion seriously.
Stellula
10d ago
Evangelicals are hated by elites, and they generally hate elites in return.
This is just demonstrably not true. How many members of the current President's cabinet are evangelicals? One of the primary debates happening around our politics right now is funding for Israel, which is something almost entirely pushed by evangelical protestants.
I think that there tend to me bore Catholic intellectuals (like members of the Supreme Court); I think that's where the cleave happens.
Stellula
10d ago
Not many! How many at your local parish are reading those? How many even follow the Church's teaching on contraception or abortion?
A lot. These people are Doctors of the Church. Protestants have this idea of "sola scriptura", or that the only thing that matters is The Bible, but Catholics just...don't. We treat our religion as a legitimate academic and philosophical pursuit, and so stuff like that is a frequent point of reference. If you want more contemporaries to listen to: listen to any of the Bishop Robert Barron interviews and see how long he can go without referencing things like this.
Stellula
10d ago
What’s the point here? If Reddit claimed itself as a Christian church, there would be more Redditors than Catholics too. They could say that posting on Reddit is “attending church”, that being a Reddit moderator is being a “pastor”, claim each subreddit as a denomination even!
The point here is about how seriously a conversion by Vivek would be taken. Vivek attending a mega church every week would move the needle either 0 or negatively.
Stellula
10d ago
Great, now like I’ve asked multiple times: link me to a contemporary Protestant apologist who you think has done a good job in a debate with a Catholic, please?
Here’s one: https://youtube.com/live/kn7qdPSHSJk
I guess you could just say that Protestants don’t really do debates or think about their claims academically, which I would agree with.
I do think this guy did a pretty good job, but again I think that he’s on kindof an impossible mission here. Protestant claims, especially claims like “sola scriptura” don’t even stand up to basic middle school level scrutiny.
Btw, to make my point you don’t even have to be Catholic! If Vivek converted to Orthodoxy, that would still be more meaningful than Protestantism, or even Mormonism! Mormons are serious, make serious contemporary attempts at apologetics (which I do think fail pretty quickly), and genuinely seem to be serious about what they’re saying.
Protestants just…don’t. It doesn’t even seem like they’re trying anymore. Protestants aren’t generally appealing to people intellectually, that’s why it’s coffee shops and laser projectors and carnival rides in the parking lot.
Protestants can claim everyone else from his era
This is now just now true Scotsman. How many of the people are your local mega church are reading or talking about or thinking about or even know who Saint Augustine is? Are a lot of them reading The Summa do you suppose? I can think of a Protestant friend in “seminary” right now and how he reacted when I asked him about this, and I’m going to tell you the answer is no. No, finding one example of one person at one “seminary” who referenced this one time does not matter to the general point I’m making here.
I asked another person here who hasn't responded either: can you link me to some examples of what you mean when you say "serious" protestants?
I can point you to...like Pope Benedict, who wrote books such as Introduction to Christianity, obvious people like Saint Augustine or Thomas Acquinas, or even just normie youtubers like Trent Horne. If somebody asked me "show me who the serious Catholics are" it would be them.
Who are the equivalent protestant "fathers"? CS Lewis is one, but who are other "serious" protestant philosophers, or contemporary apologists? Is the Anglican lady who just became their Archbishop putting out any meaningful intellectual work? Or is Sean Rowe? Is Tracey Malone contributing anything meaningful to the discourse? Or Mariann Edgar Budde? I know she did a real scathing sermon about Trump last year at the national prayer breakfast, but are people reading "How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith" and getting some important theology insight from it?
These are the leaders of various protestant churches. Which one is the most academically serious or would you think of as a good representation of what you mean when you think of "serious" protestants?
I have to be honest, this seems like you, personally, have a disdain for Protestantism's decentralization and comparative lack of ritual.
This is a colorful way of saying: "you have experienced a lot of protestants and have formed an opinion on their beliefs and activities" which...is just how anybody could form any opinion about anything in the world? What is even the point of saying this? "Gee it sure seems like you think stuff"?
Stellula
11d ago
Link it. Is there a good formal debate I could watch that you think represents a good example of “academic” Protestantism?
Also what’s the strawman here, exactly? If Vivek started a new Protestant church tomorrow, who has the authority to say it’s fake?
Stellula
12d ago
I think the most depressing part is knowing that your TOTAL lifetime tax liability is around $1M.
These people stole the LIFETIME tax output of around 10,000 people.
Taxes are a huge burden on people. They’re one of the major things our politics are decided on. If I don’t pay these, or even if I mess them up, I’ll go to jail. CPAs are an entire, large, industry.
We’re all paying these things, and 10,000 peoples lifetime of burden to the government just gets robbed.
I pay taxes (a LOT of taxes), I obey the laws, drive the speed limit etc. and then I turn on the internet and see stuff like this, people just openly robbing stores and filming themselves do it, see violent criminals released into my neighborhood etc.
Kindof hard to stomach honestly.
What I mean is that Protestants are not intellectually serious, and that most of the claims keeping people in their church don’t stand up to basic scrutiny.
“The Church is hiding the Bible from you they don’t want you to read it only WE have the true words of God!” was a convincing argument when it wasn’t easy to find out that this is just very literally not true.
As far as conversation to Protestantism being unserious: not only could I become a Protestant tomorrow if I wanted to, I could become a Protestant pastor, and so could Vivek.
Vivek Could announce tomorrow that he is starting a church, could call it a “Christian” church, and go around trying to convince people in Ohio that he’s a very serious Christian of some kind.
But this would all take 5 minutes, and be meaningless.
If he wanted to become Catholic, there’s a process to it, he’d need to get his marriage convalidated, baptize his kids, etc. If he wanted to become a priest (to contrast this with the seriousness of becoming a Protestant pastor), it would take him around a decade of philosophy and theology classes, he’d need to leave his family, etc. (Although I'm not sure The Church would take
That’s the point I’m making. It Vivek went through OCIA, got confirmed, convalidated his marriage, went to mass at least weekly, and baptized his kids, I think people would see it as more likely to be genuine.
If he showed up at some mega church or revivalist thing a few times and bought a Bible, I think it would read as performative.
I think the chance that this changes anybody's perception is 0. Scrolling X I see equal right wing gloating over how right they (we) were and left wing gloating about how right they were. Both sides think this video confirms what they already thought.
Here's a bisky post demonstrating what I mean: https://bsky.app/profile/jsweetli.bsky.social/post/3mbz3zjxzpk2t
Here's another example from X: https://x.com/dpakman/status/2009704541793747294
David Pakman must know what he's doing here, right? He's not stupid. My theory of mind for these people is that they genuinely know they're being duplicitous, but they see that as a greater good.
Just a vibes comment: there is something very strange to me about her female partner. The aggression, telling her to "drive drive", the body language, etc....it just gets my hackles up a bit.
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