The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
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User ID: 174
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1hr ago
But it isn't (and you don't). The judicial system understands that these laws are only supposed to be used against the right, so they refused to even approve charges against Lemon.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
3hr ago
That alone isn't sufficient: the actual decisions he made, damaging an ICE vehicle lightly and needlessly stepping between an ICE officer and a woman said officer was pepperspraying for blocking their vehicle, are not particularly "evil" taken by themselves.
Again, too much charity. By several orders of magnitude.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
3hr ago
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
3hr ago
And this is why FCFromSSC is right; there is no way for this situation to be resolved other than violence, and lots of it. Talking won't work; it is just met with violence, and considered justified.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
3hr ago
The Overton window of Western democracy is quite narrow and acting like your ideological opponents are literally grand evil is not productive in the long-term.
It has worked for the left.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
3hr ago
I don't know why Trump wants lower rates. That seems stupid given that he just won an election due to high inflation.
Perhaps he does not believe that lowering rates causes higher inflation. I don't either. Anyway, the jobs situation is pretty dire at the moment (job growth is ~0) and that's the other half of the misery index.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4hr ago
The problem with Kirk's politics is that to make room for more men like Charlie Kirk, you need fewer men like Donald Trump.
No, there was plenty of room for men like Kirk, until men who opposed Donald Trump shot him dead.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4hr ago
Not exactly, but kinda? How much weeping, how many top level posts about how "Everything Is Not Fine" do you see for LEOs that got killed? Everybody sees it as part of their job.
Except Brian Sicknick. It's all who/whom.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4hr ago
Pretti was a bad man because he was an insurrectionist communist and because he made it his life's work to >> obstruct lawfully empowered federal law enforcement officials.
As much as I'm rather on "your side" in the big picture of the culture war, this is a terribly shortsighted and intellectually stifling judgement passed upon a person solely due to 2 videos of their very recent behaviour - and behaviour Pretti himself certainly saw as morally directed, no matter how wrong or deluded he was. We can ridicule and deconstruct the Left's misguided beliefs all the way down to the Rousseauian bedrock it builds itself on, it won't change the fact that people contain more complexity and ingrained incentive systems than their stated ideological affinity.
None of us can directly tell what evil lurks in the hearts of men; we can only judge actions and make inferences from them. I don't know about "communist", but the evidence certainly shows that Pretti was engaged in direct action against federal law enforcement on multiple occasions. Pretti certainly saw himself as morally directed, but so does a spree killer who acts because the voice of God told him so -- that the voice was a real one on a Signal chat in this case makes it worse, not better.
Or, stated another way, you're being far too charitable.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4hr ago
The "death penalty" thing is just always stupid in these situations. It logically devolves into anarchy in, actually, very few steps.
It's not stupid as a tactic, for those who think that lethal self-defense should never be permitted.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4hr ago
The world is full of such judges. And when they run into someone whose bad behavior was through error that the person regrets, they'll consider that person insincere and throw the book at them.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
16hr ago
But I'm still of the impression that the administration wants all of us to believe they are acting in an untethered way.
Someone wants you to believe that. It's not the administration. It's the people posting (and in some cases staging) these videos. It's the people making up atrocity stories.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
16hr ago
Right, so if someone attempts an assault with a deadly weapon in such a a way that if the crime was completed and if it resulted in death, would be a lesser degree of murder than capital murder, they wouldn't deserve to die if the would-be victim defended himself lethally and the defender should themselves be considered a murderer.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
16hr ago
The bodycam vid would be released already if it was that juicy.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
17hr ago
The (non-)uniforms, the masks, the limited training, the recruiting efforts for people of a specific ideology, the mass deployments, feel like qualitatively different things to me. Perhaps paramilitary is not a useful word here but that's what I'm talking about.
Words have meanings. Using them just to indicate something bad that you have in your head is not useful.
On the court stuff, I am sure the administration is of the opinion that they are indeed following the laws; that will get worked out in court (the Supreme Court if necessary) and has no real bearing on what ICE is doing on the ground in Minneapolis.
Intimidation does not require that you have been directly affected. The reason they are in Minneapolis in such quantities is because the president resents Tim Walz and Minnesota in general, and because of a news story about fraud that has little relation to illegal immigration.
Again, words have meanings. Even if ICE was sent to Minnesota because the president resents Tim Walz, that does not mean they were sent there to intimidate him.
Sending thousands of masked agents to roam around a city and stop people based on their race is absolutely a new thing.
Fortunately, this isn't actually happening; it's just a lie.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
17hr ago
· Edited 17hr ago
When I wrote that, I was thinking specifically about the Mexican-American teenager who was working at Target when ICE or CBP tackled him and dragged him out of the store in cuffs. Evidently he was repeatedly shouting that he was an American citizen. They ignored that, threw him in a van and drove off. They quickly figured out that he was in fact a citizen, but not before they beat the shit out of him and dumped him bleeding and crying in a Walmart parking lot a mile from where they picked him up. Evidently the person who found him posted a video of the boy shivering and weeping in the parking lot. I did not see that video, but I did see a clip from the video where he was led from the store.
You can find a clip of the arrest. It seems to be a fairly professional arrest. No clip of any beating. No clip of him bleeding in a Walmart parking lot a mile away (or 8 miles away, as that tweet claims). The same clip shows SOMEONE crying later who might be the same guy, it's not clear where, and the clip avoids showing his face clearly, and doesn't show bleeding either. You can find another clip showing why he was arrested, though; the ICE agent was entering the store and Garcia ran in and tried to physically prevent him. He wasn't arrested because he was brown or because they thought he was an illegal alien; he was arrested because he deliberately interfered with their work.
There's tons of stuff like this -- atrocity stories where the key events are not actually backed up by the videos.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
17hr ago
That they're ineffectively violent does not make them not violent.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
17hr ago
That's not a stretch at all.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
23hr ago
And the result of following that advice was letting the mean girls run everything.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
23hr ago
But everything I've seen about what's actually happening on the ground is about (1) arresting really bad people that they were going to arrest anyway without a surge of personnel or budget and (2) treating random brown/yellow people with over-the-top cruelty and viciousness with the specific intent of horrifying and spurring to action the soccer moms and VA nurses.
Which random brown/yellow people are being treated with over-the-top cruelty and viciousness? The closest I've seen there was the arrest of the one Hmong guy, who refused to identify himself and who they thought was a different really bad Hmong guy they were trying to arrest. They arrested him in the cold when he had only boxer shorts and a robe on, I think -- this is cruel but it's not "over-the-top" cruelty, arrests that aren't pre-arranged surrenders are almost always "come as you are". He was released the same day, I believe.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
23hr ago
From Pretti's perspective, what he was doing was tantamount to wearing a miniskirt into a 1%er biker bar and dancing on the tables. It was past just "risky" and well into "inviting trouble". That he got into it through error rather than malice on the part of the "bikers" is a flaw in the analogy, certainly.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
These people are successfully suppressing right-wing discourse by harassing family members. Whether they literally have a tail and horns, that's evil.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
In Minneapolis, what I see is an administration sending in an unaccountable paramilitary force to intimidate its political opposition and frog-boil the country into authoritarianism.
This sentence is full of sound and fury signifying nothing. "Paramilitary force" here is just used as a snarl term; pretty much all uniformed law enforcement, except that which is part of the military, consists "paramilitary forces". ICE is not "unaccountable"; they have a defined chain of command (goes along with being paramilitary), and are additionally accountable at least to Federal courts. ICE does not appear to be confronting the administration's political opposition -- just the opposite, the opposition is confronting them -- so intimidation seems quite unlikely. And enforcing immigration law is an established thing; if it's authoritarianism it isn't NEW authoritarianism so there's no frogs being boiled here.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
I don't actually know that Good had no habit of confrontation. But it doesn't matter, because it was her error (trying to flee through Ross), not the agent's error, that got her killed.
The result of this is a police state.
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