magic9mushroom
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User ID: 1103
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
26d ago
· Edited 26d ago
I agree with you for the moment, but let's ironman this.
Thuggery loses when there are still neutrals (who might join the other side) and when things haven't just slid into complete civil war. If the lines are drawn, and battle's joined, then there is about to be a lot less of a public, and he who's better at thuggery is he who gets to decide which half of the public is sending postal votes from Hell.
There are a significant fraction in the USA, on both sides, who think this can no longer be salvaged, that "now we're all sons of bitches" and what's left is just to kill the other tribe before they can kill you. Some of those people post on this forum! I'm not one of them in the strict sense... but, well, much of that's not due to being an optimist, but just an equal-opportunity pessimist who thinks the point's likely to be made moot by the Blue Tribe dying in nuclear fire or everyone dying in AI apocalypse. "They are already on a course for self-destruction; they do not need help from us. We need to redress our wounds, help our people, rebuild our cities..."
The PR implications for the Democratic Party are not relevant if the Democratic Party is dead or crippled beyond repair three years from now. In boring times, things like that are unthinkable and the assumption that they won't happen is invisible. It's becoming visible, and thinkable. I'm not saying send me to Bayes' Hell if it doesn't happen, and I'm certainly not encouraging thuggery, but the people who are are trying to play a wholly-different game than "win free and fair elections by being better than the other guy".
magic9mushroom
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27d ago
The adjective "reasonable" as applied to a conclusion is often (though not always) exclusive of other conclusions also being considered reasonable; definite vs. indefinite article helps, but there wasn't an article here. TitaniumButterfly was objecting to the idea that your hypothesis was the reasonable conclusion.
"Plausible" would be a synonym for the sense you intended without the ambiguity.
magic9mushroom
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27d ago
If people don't want to live in our city, they can leave and go to a city and/or state with policies they agree with. That's why states' rights is such a good system.
The lack of internal hard borders is a major part of the draw of federation in the first place, and the USA's Constitution is broadly set up to prevent them (states are not allowed to refuse entry to citizens of other states). At the point where you're proposing bringing in internal hard borders, you're in practice talking about dissolving the USA along partisan lines (and possibly annexing the blue chunk to Canada, so that it's contiguous again). This is a colourable position, and one @FCfromSSC has been spruiking here for a while, but it's a rather-big ask; I would remind you of what happened the last time a chunk of the USA decided to secede.
magic9mushroom
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27d ago
· Edited 27d ago
Being charitable, I'm guessing you have a legitimate confusion as to what "necessary" means.
No, I was just reading the word "whatever" literally. If you would escape if not shot dead, "whatever amount of force is necessary [...] to get you in handcuffs and into custody" is by construction "shoot you, and then handcuff the corpse".
I was reading that sentence as speaking normatively, as it was responding to a pair of normative statements*; you seem to be reading it descriptively. Normatively, it's objectionably bloodthirsty, which is why (as you say) it's descriptively false in most (all?) of the Western world (for the record, I'm Australian).
The word "whatever" is a very strong word, and frequently produces overbroad statements if used without qualification (a relevant qualification in this case would have been "sublethal"). It appears that @StableOutshoot did not intend to say what he said, and he has implicitly retracted it, resolving the issue.
*Notably, one of these was "fleeing police shouldn't be a death sentence"; hence, the escape scenario was already under discussion and I assumed he meant to address it.
magic9mushroom
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28d ago
And then an explicit recommendation against due process. Huh.
No? I said that capture (for trial) is better than death, and it's usually feasible.
No one is making this argument. Not even implicitly. This is strawman and conflation dialed up to 10.
StableOutlook made a very sweeping statement that we seem to agree was not literally true in all cases. I pulled him up on it. You don't want me to point out where there need to be asterisks, add the asterisks, or even an IOU for asterisks like "(mostly)", yourself.
magic9mushroom
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28d ago
Pretending that she was shot for merely escaping is also peak strawman.
I did no such thing. You made a broad statement that covered much-less-defensible cases, and I pulled you up on overbreadth (which I even called "slight"), while clarifying that serious injury of a policeman warrants deadly force.
magic9mushroom
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28d ago
· Edited 28d ago
When the police decide to arrest you, they are now allowed to use whatever amount of force is necessary (but not more) to get you in handcuffs and into custody.
I think this is a slight overreach. Let's take the time I ran from police IRL.
A week prior, I'd tried to kill myself with a knife. I got chucked in the looney bin, because that's what you do when someone's interrupted in a suicide attempt. I stopped being suicidal within days, but this meant I had another problem i.e. the fact that the looney bin had terrible security, and one of the other patients kept talking about how he was going to murder all the staff. I complained about the awful security, got brushed off, and successfully escaped all the way back to the house where I lived. 24 hours later, the police showed up, intending to return me; I ran, but was unable to outrun them and gave up. (After they hauled me all the way back - which was over 100km - I got released after 2 hours, because I pointed out to the psychiatrist that if I were still suicidal I'd had plenty of opportunity in the 24 hours I'd been loose; you'd think they'd have realised that without having to drag me all the way back there, but apparently boxes needed to be ticked or something.)
So, okay. Take that situation and make me a better runner, so that I could outrun the police. Is it warranted for the police to shoot me?
I'd say no, because there's literally nothing plausibly gained by doing so. I hadn't committed any crimes, or posed any threat to anyone besides myself - and shooting me would of course have put my life in much greater jeopardy than letting me escape. Assuming I was considered a suicide risk (leaving aside the reasonableness of that determination), I'd say the outcomes should be preferred in the order capture > escape > death, not capture > death > escape.
I think this extends up into some of the more minor crimes. If someone parks in a 2-hour parking zone for 3 hours, and drives away in a normal, non-dangerous fashion when an on-foot policeman approaches, I think it's not good for the policeman to pull out a gun and shoot him. Parking violations are not very serious, and the expense in money and lives of shooting the criminal (notably including innocents, because shooting the driver of a moving vehicle typically results in a crash) far exceeds the benefit of preventing him from possibly escaping justice, or even the deterrence value of getting X amount of other people to not park longer than permitted.
Certainly, for serious crimes like murder or even robbery, there's enough of a problem with a successful escape that the outcome preference should be capture > death > escape. And of course, the death or serious injury of a policeman or innocent ranks below any of these. But yeah, I'd call this sentence a bit stronger than warranted.
EDIT: Realised this was non-obvious, so: I was running into a public forest, hence "follow in car until exhausted" wouldn't have worked.
I think I agree with all of that except part of #2 (civil war in the USA is non-negligible, and nuclear war is highly significant; both of those are still definitely worse than the present situation even for the "winner", though) and maybe your assessment of the amount of these people (we might be using "significant" to mean different things; I think it's probably single-digit percent of Americans that are on Team Thug although a lot less have the initiative/courage to actually go out and do thuggery).
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