WandererintheWilderness
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User ID: 3496
WandererintheWilderness
5hr ago
but law enforcement has never behaved kindly and civilly towards the ordinary people they are arresting
Well, they ought to. It would reduce social tensions considerably.
WandererintheWilderness
6hr ago
I think it's just copycats, to be honest. It's a vicious cycle, the more high-profile assassinations (or attempted assassinations) there are, the more crazies will decide to try and get their own moment in the limelight.
The problem with that is that "ICE agents are doing an important job" is itself a political statement. "ICE should be abolished" is a legitimate political opinion, and it entails that ICE agents are not in fact doing an important job but actively doing harm in the world. Believing this is not incompatible with acknowledging that they are, individually, human beings with rights and dignity, or that a civil society requires letting them act as the law permits them to do; but leftists are understandably wary of endorsing the kind of statement you propose, because it's very easy for them to smuggle in a surrender on the underlying political disagreements that define Left vs Right in the first place.
A closer analogy, perhaps, would be the bitter pill that pro-lifers have to swallow viz. abortion doctors. It should by all rights be incumbent upon Democrats to be as gracious regarding ICE agents as pro-lifers are regarding abortion providers. But notably this still allows pro-lifers to call abortion doctors murderers, and that is as it should be; you really, really shouldn't outlaw calling abortion murder on the grounds that it might incite acts of violence. Yet, increasingly, it seems that the Right wants the Left to do just that for ICE agents, and that's just not going to fly. That's just asking your political opponents to stop disagreeing with you about the actual politics.
WandererintheWilderness
6hr ago
Of course it's not meant as an idea "helpful to their mission". What it's meant as, I argue, is a compromise - or at any rate an attempt at deescalation. Democratic lawmakers do not want ICE to succeed, but neither do they want civil war; unmasked, non-anonymous ICE agents would be a step away from the "Stormtroopers vs rebels" status quo and back towards a more stable situation.
WandererintheWilderness
6hr ago
as well as efforts to compel such identification through law.
This is a way of addressing the problem. If ICE stopped being masked goons who look like they came straight out of a bad YA dystopia movie, and became normal accountable government officials who behave kindly and civilly, I think this would reduce the violent sentiments against them tremendously. Don't turn your guys into Stormtroopers if you don't want people to start fancying themselves Jedi rebels.
(I'm not saying the Left's "thinking everyone is a Nazi" problem is unilaterally the Right's fault or anything. But in practical terms, that problem is not going to go away until the Right stops leaning into it.)
Yes, certainly those are all good rational reasons not to act this way. But I think it's only to be expected that random people, upon being wrongfully arrested, will behave irrationally. It's a pretty upsetting, out-of-distribution crisis to suddenly have foisted upon oneself without warning. Even a normally-rational person might lash out in a counterproductive way - and most people aren't very rational to begin with.
This being basic human psychology, police guidelines should account for this. Cops should be taught to ignore meaningless non-physical threats and irritations of that kind. If the guy isn't trying to make a run for it or otherwise physically resist arrest, let him talk, remain stone-faced, carry on with procedure. Demanding one-on-one submission should not be the way.
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
Again I think there is a huge of difference between just calling someone "sir", and the specific phrase "yes sir". One is polite, the latter is subservient.
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
I'm not saying it's a useful thing to say, but it's a harmless thing to say. So long as they're cooperating, let people be sulky when they're arrested, it shouldn't be cause for escalation - if only because this could be an innocent person who's getting ineffectually crabby, and there's nothing wrong about being ineffectually crabby at a wrongful arrest.
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
I subscribe to the philosophy that the process is the punishment.
It shouldn't be, since the process also affects the innocent, unlike the actual sentence.
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
Never heard this. If someone I worked for told me "yes sir" I'd wonder what kind of mind games they were playing and how quickly I was about to be fired. Regional difference, maybe? Class?
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
It's still preferable to default to an attitude of helpful cooperation
Yes, but there's a difference between cooperation and utter submission. Some cops will be dissatisfied with the former and demand the latter, even when there's no logical cause for it. ("Come this way." "Very well, but you're making a mistake and you're going to regr-" "YES SIR." "Excuse me?" "Say YES SIR and DO AS I SAY. I don't want to hear another word or you're gonna get it.")
Far fewer cops than the media suppose are inclined to random acts of murder, but many like to lord over their power at a petty, schoolyard-bully level, without any practical necessity. I find it very plausible that lots of escalations of this kind are the fault of the cop for trying to "act tough" when measured, reasonable conversation was on the table before they started barking demands.
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
"Sir" is one thing, but you'd only say "Yes sir" to someone in a position of authority over you. Which, of course, cops are, but it's not just civility to a stranger. If a stranger with no authority tells me "Walk this way", and I'm inclined to do as he says, but don't want to acknowledge him as a superior, the formal thing to say is more like "Very well". "Yes sir" is what you say to a teacher or a CO.
WandererintheWilderness
2d ago
Having been made unwelcome or outright banned from virtually every hobby space I enjoyed since I was a wee child in the 80s by pure dint of being conservative
Yes, but the Left is universalist. It wishes to push forward a prescriptive vision of Being A Decent Person™ which should apply globally. @Skibboleth was making the point that this is different from the Conservative focus on defining Americanness.
WandererintheWilderness
2d ago
that real fascism isn’t imminent (which, if it were true, would justify resistance, partisan violence)
That seems non-trivial. It's certainly the assumption of many on the left, but that needn't mean it actually logically follows. Very plausibly, you still shouldn't do assassinations even if American fascism is a very direct threat - for all sorts of reasons from the practical to the ethical.
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
Blues make accusations against Reds like this all the time, re: spree killings. We're unwilling to do what's needed to stop the killings, ie banning guns, so we want killings, or at minimum bear full responsibility for them
I think this is wrong too. The "Reds want killings" conclusion at any rate. Reds accept killings as a trade-off, because they care about other things more; just as the Blues accepted rioting as a trade-off, because they cared about their ability to protest more. Neither side actually "wants" the bad side-effects of the policies they pursue, not as ends unto themselves. Flattening cases of "wanted a policy which entailed negative side effects XYZ" into the much-worse-sounding "wanted XYZ" pollutes political discourse on both sides, and I hate it.
Well, of course not. I just think it's viewed as a hallmark of Red culture - something that Reds teach their children and Blues don't - such that in a world that operated entirely on Blue norms, it would be vanishingly unlikely that a mentally unstable 22-year-old would have both access to a gun and training to use it. This doesn't seem crazy to me. Using that as an excuse to unilaterally blame the Red Tribe for a murder clearly sparked by lefty political motivations, that's obviously always going to be a massive stretch. But "if Red Tribe cultural norms had not been prevalent in Robinson's home environment, this wouldn't have happened" is a believable case, so it was the best steelman I could come up with for the offending joke.
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
As I understand it, the substance of the joke is "although Republicans claim to be very concerned about Kirk's death, this is just political posturing and in private, even Trump himself doesn't give a damn". The crack about Trumpists being desperate to prove that Robinson was a leftist is straightforwardly part of the setup half of that sentence, the scene-setting with which Trump's supposedly comical lack of concern will provide a laugh-inducing clash. This didn't require that particular misleading statement about the Right's response to the murder - it could have been anything - but setting the truth of the claim aside I do think it has an obvious place within the telling of the overall joke. It's not load-bearing, but it isn't a non sequitur.
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
I think that depends on how you define "intentionally". Certainly some activists emphasize the "unconscious" angle, but as your second quote block shows, the idea is still that the microaggression is stemming from genuinely-if-perhaps-subconsciously-held prejudices. I don't think a genuinely coincidentally aggravating turn of phrase would properly count as a microaggression even by the more expansive definition Wikipedia puts forward, although, of course, this is a hard thing to prove, perhaps by design.
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
Hatred is a clear and necessary requirement to understand what's going on in key elements of the Israeli military and society
While I think it's trivially true that there's a lot of Palestinian hatred going around in Israel, I don't agree that it's a "necessary requirement" for what we observe. The Israeli forces could conceivably have decided to engage in this sort of savagery as a calculated 'terrorist' tactic intended to break their enemies' spirits and force a surrender. Even a completely dispassionate army could come up with that strategy, though actual hatred among the soldiery is unquestionably helpful in ensuring it is implemented.
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
As I said further down this thread, because they perceived the police as a dangerous bad-faith actor which would suppress the protests altogether (violent or otherwise) if given half a chance; therefore anything in public discourse which might give them an excuse to intervene, right or wrong, had to be silenced.
There is just a step difference between permitting Holocaust denialism and permitting massive multibillion dollar mayhem.
I think there's a deep difference of gut-level instincts between the tribes here. Someone left-wing will quite naturally think that permitting Holocaust denialism would be much worse than permitting arbitrary thuggish looting and mayhem, because the former is the first stepping stone on a road that leads potentially to dictatorship and genocide, while the second (they perceive) is only ever going to be a marginal problem, not an existential threat to civilization.
But when you get to night after night attempted to siege a federal courthouse it’s just too far removed from a concern about protest.
Well, I don't know that they'd see the besieged courthouse as falling under the "rioting", or indeed, that I do. That seems to be a different matter. By "riots" I would refer to the random, apolitical, anarchic mayhem using the broad context of the protests as an excuse to run amok and pillage from random businesses. The arson, the theft, the intimidation and extortion of random homeowners. This was clearly not the motivation behind laying siege to the courthouse, which was obviously a targeted political act. Perhaps the tactic is too aggressive to fall under permissible civil protest, perhaps it tips over into revolutionary violence; but that's an issue of degree, not of kind.
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
It’s also far from obvious why the things he was acting on (eg dating a trans dude) influenced him significantly less than growing up red. He clearly had turned his back on that upbringing.
Again, he used a gun. It may be difficult for me to get across to a genuine Red Triber how alien that is to a Blue worldview. Anyone admitting to remotely knowing how to operate such a thing in primarily Blue company would be viewed with noticeable suspicion; it's one of the strongest outgroup/ingroup markers out there. Hence when other Blue Tribers hear "A murdered B using a rifle", they know that at the very least, the murder only occurred because a thing of the other tribe was permitted to exist where A could get it.
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
See my steelman here: it can be argued Robinson was "one of [MAGA's] own" in an essential and relevant sense, even if he was an apostate who had taken on Blue values, and that a version of Robinson who believed much the same things but had not been raised in a Red environment would not have wound up a murderer.
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
Well, he seems to have meant that he supported using privately-owned firearms, which a proper Blue would consider utterly unthinkable. Therefore he is an ideological hybrid at most.
This is not an entirely sincere argument, but something of that shape seems to be a genuinely viable steelman for the claim that the "the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them". From a certain point of view, you only get someone like Robinson by layering leftist beliefs on top of a Red Tribe substrate which has access to, and the ability to use, guns; had he not been raised in a Red Tribe milieu Robinson would have been unable to kill, even if he was willing; therefore his being Red by birth is ultimately more relevant to why he wound up a murderer than his being Blue by indoctrination.
The "accountable" is only part of it. The main part of it, as I said, is that the masked look (and ICE's overall vibe) is clearly meant to be threatening, and we would like the government to cool it with the scary goons immediately. If it was just a matter of protecting agents' identities there would be many ways for them to present themselves that didn't make them look like video game mooks. Unfortunately, Trump thinks having scary-looking Stormtroopers looks badass.
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