Part of what bothers me about the Good case particularly is that there's nothing stopping a delayed legal punishment.
The part where she hit the officer with her SUV.
Edit: To clarify, it is reasonable for ICE to arrest her for being an obstacle to them carrying out their primary mission in the area. (And I'm not being cute with "being an obstacle" - she was literally using her vehicle as an obstacle). As part of that arrest, it is reasonable for them to demand that she get out of her vehicle. Her choice was to attempt to flee the situation, which still wasn't the reason she got shot. She got shot because part of her fleeing meant that she drove into an ICE agent, who now has reasonable cause to fear that she attempted to end his life.
Zephyr
17d ago
Also, citizens should not have to cower in their homes if there's an immigration enforcement officer in their neighborhood.
They don't have to do that.
Said citizens should also not have to fear using their right to free speech to express their opinions to federal officers, whom we are supporting with our tax dollars.
They're allowed to do that too.
What they aren't allowed to do is obstruct ICE officers, then flee arrest in such a way that the ICE officer has reason to fear for their life (by, say, accelerating an SUV into them).
Zephyr
17d ago
The thing is, if people had been reacting on this basis I think they'd actually have had a point; they didn't.
They reacted solely as "Poilievre is conservative, Trump is conservative, obviously Poilievre is going to immediately capitulate and sell Canada to Trump!!!" (Nevermind that Poilievre almost immediately denounced the tariffs, and numerous conservatives stated that "Canada is not for sale").
Zephyr
18d ago
I can think of a few examples of how better resource optimization can make things less good.
- There used to be a lot more friction around moving people around; someone who is a top 0.01% engineer might not have ended up with Google or NVIDIA or whatever due to not being as keenly aware of their level of skills. As such, you tended to get more talented people in more diverse spaces (as opposed to concentrating them all into 1 or 2 big companies). By the inverse token, people tend to be a lot more interchangeable in jobs themselves, as anyone better will have gone to a better paying position, so you are necessarily stuck with a bunch of people who are approximately the same level.
- I'd argue that there is less room for disruptors too; for example, card and tabletop games (like, say, Magic the Gathering), or even early PC games (like, say, Starcraft) did not have as much penetration as to what the "best" choices were at any time. A very popular thing amongst CCGs currently is the presence of the "netdeck" - as in, someone who buys the exact deck that the pros buy, then plays exactly that. In ye olden days, it was much more likely to find someone who had simply been playing games in a different circuit than the pros were, and had completely different tactics and builds.
Overall, very good post.
Zephyr
18d ago
It’s not so much a loophole as a central rule of the site. As a rule, we should treat people with viewpoints that are not our own as arguing in good faith, and (in the event that there are factual disagreements) we should treat them as coming from a reasonable place.
So for example, if someone were to say that the women in question did not know that they were ICE, and instead thought they were random thugs, we address it by providing evidence that the women did know.
One reason that it is a loophole is that someone who is not arguing in good faith can make up more stuff than even the entire community can rebut. Most people, when they are presented with facts that go against their arguments, but who do not wish to change their mind, evolve their arguments - in the case of the above, for example, someone would stop arguing that they didn’t know the people were ICE, and instead argue that the instructions were unclear, or that running did not deserve death in this case. However, a determined troll will instead just go and continue making the same arguments in another spot.
There was a very determined individual named Darwin a while back who was infamous for doing this - one of the moderators here (I believe Amadan) eventually called him on it and told him that if he kept ignoring what people were responding with he’d be treated as a troll, and darwin quietly slunk away. I encourage you to look up the exchange if you’re interested - it’s a good example of the loophole while also illustrating that the mods are aware of the issue, but can’t really address it until it becomes egregious. (And of course, as we’re more right than left winged, there is a delicate act of balancing responses - someone who posts a left wing take will get a lot of replies that rebut it, and simply doesn’t have the resources to reply to all of them per se, so there needs to be some space for honest mistakes)
Zephyr
18d ago
I'm actually fairly confident of the same thing - I've been fairly confident since the beginning that she wanted to speed off dramatically, and the cop she struck shot at her because he was struck by her vehicle. Lethal force was not warranted in hindsight, but of course he didn't know that at the time.
Zephyr
18d ago
I'm going to argue against this because I think it's a good shoot, but I don't want Opt-out's position representing mine.
It is reasonable to believe that someone who is obstructing lawful actions (as in, ICE) should be placed under arrest. It is also reasonable to have to use lethal force against someone resisting arrest (not in all circumstances, but in circumstances where they will be hurting others, or where they is reasonable cause to believe that they will hurt others).
I believe that if someone is going to ignore the cops' orders to get out of the vehicle, then drive into a cop afterwards, a reasonable and predictable consequence of this is that they end up shot. I believe that ICE had the right to be there, as immigration and border enforcement is a federal affair. Given that ICE is not receiving on the ground assistance from state police, I believe the best strategy they can do is arrest people who are in directly in the way. In this case, it ended in tragedy; the fault lies with the woman who had numerous off ramps to stop this situation, but chose to pursue it to the bitter, predictable end.
tl;dr - Murdering dissidents is bad, no one should aspire to that. Arresting people who are directly in the way of lawful action is good. Some percentage of arrests will end up in deaths, which is bad, but can't be avoided without preventing arrests from working at all.
Zephyr
18d ago
That's not quite true - the administration is hoping to make it obvious that ICE can and will catch you if you're in the states illegally. They're hoping to set up an environment that feels unwelcoming for illegal immigrants, which means that they need to raid blue states as well.
It is probably to the administration's benefit if they capture people behaving badly, but not their purpose; you can trivially prove this by thinking about what happens if the resistance to their actions disappears.
If the blue states stop protesting ICE, ICE is still going to be arresting illegal immigrants. If ICE stops arresting illegal immigrants, then the protestors will stop protesting ICE (presumably; there is a chance that they simply swap to anti-Trump protests, but I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt). As a result, we can intuit that ICE is opposing illegal immigrants, while the protestors are opposing ICE.
Zephyr
18d ago
There really isn't - I think you underestimate the amount of TDS there is outside of the US. Seriously, we went from "liberal party may fit inside a minivan" to "a few seats shy of a majority" based not even on the CPC being seen as pro-Trump, but being seen as insufficiently anti-Trump.
If it helps, even Trump believes that he caused the LPC to win.
Zephyr
18d ago
One thing I don't think you've considered is that a lot of right wingers are actually fairly willing to accept immigration; their sticking point is that it has to be of individuals who help the country.
So as a general rule, I'd consider all of the following to be places where immigration shouldn't be used:
- When the immigration is used to keep costs down or drive profit up for business owners (so bringing in minimum wage workers when there is a lot of unemployment amongst low skilled workers is net negative).
- When there is a shortage in resources that immigration will make worse (for example, if you have an 72 hour wait to be seen in emergency, or house prices are going to the moon, you shouldn't bring in immigrants unless they are directly related to alleviating those issues).
- When the cost of the immigrant is greater than the benefit we receive from them (for example, someone who commits crimes, or someone who requires welfare).
A lot of right wingers have decided "no more immigration" because they believe (and I believe too) that the blue tribe isn't going to respect any of the above. In Canada, our left-wing appointed judges explicitly look at whether a criminal conviction would impact someone's immigration claims, and assign lower penalties if they would. The dreamers reform in the US was explicitly predicated on the ideal that immigration law would be enforced in exchange for amnesty for existing illegal immigrants. There have been numerous allegations that Walz and other senior members of Minnesota's government knew about the Somali fraud, but didn't do anything about it.
If you want the right wing to accept immigration, then you need to be willing to make the following sacrifices:
- Kick out illegal immigrants.
- Kick out criminal immigrants.
- Kick out net negative immigrants (as in, those that consume more services than they produce).
- Credibly commit to keeping these standards, going forward.
Another thing that doesn't help is the hypocrisy inherent in a lot of the left-wing positions. Most recently with Biden, but with Obama too, there was an opportunity for the left to reform the immigration laws in the way they want. Instead, they chose to just not enforce the rules. If they thought their position was defensible, they'd push to change the laws to reflect what they actually want to do. The fact that they didn't implies to me either that they don't actually believe that the position they're taking is popular enough to win an election, or that they prefer to keep the leverage they have over the illegal immigrants (so they can force them to work for less under threat of deportation). Both are indefensible, from my perspective - the government is elected to do the will of their constituents, so doing something that couldn't win an election should be strictly off the table. And of course, the other position is no better than slavery.
Zephyr
19d ago
Yes, sorry, that should've been written more as independent clauses.
A better way to phrase it would be something like: When you are protesting, especially when you are breaking laws, you should expect to be arrested for it; if you are annoying or otherwise not supported by the majority, this goes doubly.
Zephyr
20d ago
I don't think this actually matters; her character doesn't determine whether it was a good shoot, what matters is whether the situation is one in which self defense an officer shooting an individual was permissible.
To be clear, I think it's obviously met here, even if all of the following are granted (and I don't necessarily agree they all were):
- The ICE officer was in front of the car deliberately, in an attempt to detain the individual in question.
- The woman was attempting to flee from the situation, not hit the officer.
Even given all that, the death of the woman is a tragedy - a tragedy of her own making, but still a tragedy. Baying for the blood of your enemies is something that reflects a poor character, and is corrosive to your soul. Them calling for your blood is a reflection of how horrible they are - don't justify it by being the monster they want.
Zephyr
21d ago
Did you watch the first video link? Specifically, the first few seconds have:
- A pickup truck with blue and red lights flashing in it.
- Someone saying "get the fuck out of our neighborhood".
- Two individuals coming out of the truck, one of whom says "get out of the car" twice, then "get out of the fucking car".
So unless the video is a fake, she was not being told to leave, and I think it is reasonable to assume (based on #1 and #2) that these individuals were at minimum police of some form, and probably known to be ICE.
I'll take that trade-off; even if you disagree with the authority of the government, disobeying an armed individual and taking actions that make you look like a threat can result in death, so both people FAFO.
I'd appreciate it if the other half of the deal also came through (as in, given the January 6th individuals were charged with assault and interference with officers, I'd appreciate it if the people obstructing ICE were charged with the same). Or alternatively, that both groups are pardoned.
Edit, to clarify a bit:
I'm of the opinion that although you have the right to protest, your right ends where others begin - so gluing yourself to the highway, impeding officers by blocking their cars in, blowing up cop cars, and assaulting individuals all are things that you can and should be arrested for. This is a good thing - if people agree with your position, there will be outcry against your arrest. Part of the reason that the civil rights movement worked was that the police were put in a position where they had to arrest people for things that are hard to consider a crime - things like being black in a whites-only diner, or sitting in the wrong spot on the bus. But an important point here is for the protest to work, the government needs to arrest you for breaking the law, and most people can't agree that the actions you took deserved you being arrested.
The "Just Stop Oil" protestors who keep attempting to deface works of art should expect that they'll be serving jailtime for their actions - because the act of protest is the act of committing crimes in an attempt to prove the laws unjust. Acting surprised when you are protesting in an annoying and illegal way for a cause that the majority does not support gets you arrested is just not examining how protests actually change things.
I am very frustrated by the number of protestors who seem to not have any understanding of how this works; if the government simply reacts to your protest by doing what you wanted, then it wasn't your protest that did it - it's what they wanted to do anyways.
Zephyr
21d ago
Also, if a cop feel that is a threat, they should already be brandishing your weapon before they see the suspect drawing his, they are not a cowboy in the Old West who needs to rely on his ability to draw faster than his opponent so that he can claim self defense.
Not to address anything else in your post, but I will say that a lot of people, especially blue-tribers, claim that brandishing a weapon is an automatic escalation (see all the accusations of how Rittenhouse was provoking people by being armed).
Zephyr
21d ago
I think there may be too much of an inferential gap here on what you are seeing versus what I am seeing - your description of the situation does not at all reflect what I can see in it.
There's also pursuing legal changes that would make it vastly harder to employ illegal immigrants.
I would agree that this should also be done, to hopefully end this on a non-sour note.
Zephyr
21d ago
So you know how it's popular on Instagram to post about how women are taught to "never let them take you to another location, piss yourself, etc." to avoid sexual assault, and men don't have an equivalent of that? This is that equivalent.
Zephyr
22d ago
I read a joke once that every war is started by the defender; if they'd just rolled over and let the attacker take what they want, then there wouldn't have been a war (in case it wasn't clear, I'm agreeing with you).
Zephyr
22d ago
This is the slippery slope I mentioned, where "we require certain authority to do our job" becomes "we can do whatever we claim is necessary." ICE has a specific job that doesn't really them to send out masked goons like this.
Okay, so what would you suggest instead? ICE's goal is to remove illegal aliens from the US. The people involved are unwilling to listen to the government saying "you need to leave now" - or they'd have left. Short of physically apprehending them, what would you suggest doing to remove said illegal aliens?
If people have evidence of this, they should present it.
The first video has the car physically in their way; ICE tells the woman to "[get] Out of the car" twice, then says "Get out of the fucking car" once. Another woman screams "Nooooo!!!" as the first car begins to back up, then accelerates forwards amidst other cries of "Noooo!!!". I think the evidence that the car is impeding ICE officers is that the first video shows the car impeding ICE officers.
Zephyr
22d ago
Which of the following would you disagree with?
- This woman used her vehicle to impede ICE officers.
- It is legal for the federal government to enforce immigration and borders.
From my perspective, if both are true, then innocent is not an accurate description of this person.
Zephyr
22d ago
Intent does matter, which is why it matters whether it's someone who has the legal right to keep me there versus someone who does not. If two large men with guns come to my (home) door and ask to "have a chat," I'd be justified in stabbing them to escape if they're randos, but not if they're cops.
Zephyr
22d ago
As far as I'm aware, entrapment has a much more narrow scope that I think you believe it does. Entrapment is meant to encompass actions where the police convince someone to do a crime when they would otherwise not. For example:
- Masked men show up to your house and take your spouse hostage, and threaten to shoot her unless you rob a bank - if the masked men are undercover cops, this is a very straightforward example of entrapment.
- You walk by a store, and see something you very much want in the window, but continue by. An undercover officer asks you why you don't get it, and you go back and steal the item - definitely not entrapment, as the officer did not suggest the illegal activity, even though you wouldn't have committed the crime without the suggestion (I believe in some jurisdictions it wouldn't be entrapment even if the officer had suggested it - usually the standard for entrapment is that the officer put an unfair amount of effort into convincing you).
- You join a club to complain about how badly your state is run, and part of the grousing is people wishing death on your governor. If the undercover cops are the sole individuals responsible for planning an assassination attempt against said governor, it's entrapment - however, if someone else was actually planning to assassinate the governor, and they merely assisted them, then it isn't.
Presenting an opportunity to do a crime is definitely not entrapment; otherwise, hitting someone crossing the street would not be a crime (as they presented you with the opportunity to commit vehicular assault).
Zephyr
22d ago
Just because they don't block your car doesn't mean you got away scot-free. They can follow you, block roads, use spike strips or PIT maneuvers to make you lose control in a way that's unlikely to be lethal, and so on.
Sorry if I misunderstand, but isn't this just high-speed chases again?
Zephyr
22d ago
Sorry, I was exaggerating for comical effect.
Here's a bit more elaboration on what happened:
- Christina Freeland was the former finance minister of Canada (if you aren't familiar with Canadian governmental practices, that means she was serving as an elected MP in our house).
- She acted as finance minister during the tenure of Trudeau, and resigned after being asked to present a budget that he tabled.
- When Trudeau resigned, there was an election where she was elected again, but this time she's in Carney's government.
- She was appointed to a role that is basically "Special Envoy to the Ukraine."
- She accepted an unpaid offer to go work with Ukraine as a financial advisor to Ukraine in December last year (word on the street is saying it was on the 22nd).
- She told Carney on the 24th.
- Canada gave a $2.5B loan guarantee program to Ukraine on the 27th.
- She initially did not announce that she was resigning from her MP position, but only did so under pressure.
- There is supposed to be a 2 year "cooling off" period between being an MP who administers a file, and taking on a position in that industry. X link from a former ethics minister Conflict of interest act Canada.
Basically, I was calling it a "defection" as Freeland has always been a bit of a Ukraine activist in government, and was working directly with Ukraine (as a Canadian MP, which she still is today) when she decided to swap over. It's fairly blatantly a conflict of interest, but I figured very few people would care to know all the details.
Now, try driving the truck through the front of the building and see what the reaction is.
The SUV here is dangerous when it is being pointed at a human being; hell, if she'd had a rifle in her passenger seat when she did this, I'd still argue that the SUV is the greater threat.
If he had a reasonable belief that she either intended to run him over or did not give a fuck about killing him, I will concede that he was entitled to self-defense in an unlikely attempt to stop her. Self-defense standards do not require someone to be a mind reader, nor do they require that the other person has an intent to kill. It is permissible to shoot someone who is high out of their mind, but pointing a gun at a crowd, even if he is unable to comprehend how dangerous the gun is at the moment. It is also reasonable to shoot someone who yells out in anger "I'm going to fucking kill you!" and reaches towards what appears to be a concealed weapon (even if they aren't actually armed, and were simply going to whip out their dick or some such nonsense).
Just for fun, go stand in front of a parked SUV - and take a look at what you could see of the "driver". You'll notice that it is basically only the head, especially on a smaller driver (like, say, a woman).
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