quiet_NaN
4d ago
You can’t profile this woman as the average member of the general class of women, because she belongs to a very small class of people trying to illegally impede the law. I imagine those who go out of their way to impede ICE have a much higher risk of carrying a weapon.
I think that your concept of "lawbreaker woman", which includes Ulrike Meinhof, Bonnie Parker and Renee Good, does not really carve reality at its joints.
While Good was engaged in illegal activity intended to impede ICE, it is notable that her planned way of impeding them was non-violent. Anyone willing to murder a few ICE agents in the process of impeding their progress would not waste their time on non-violent resistance. Anyone planning at shooting ICE will likely not engineer a situation where their car is surrounded by ICE agents as a starting point.
I will grant you that there is a tiny probability that contrary to tribal (and gender) cultural norms, she was a gun enthusiast and a crack shot, and had also stupidly taken her pistol along 'for self defense' on her non-violent resistance, and would in a panic try to shoot her way out of getting arrested.
But realistically, the probability of her starting to shoot was still lower than for a 20yo white dude at a routine traffic stop.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
I was not not saying that I did not understand it, or I thought it was bad. Obviously we allow cops to use violence which would land civilians in jail. Someone has to execute the arrest warrants, after all.
I am also fine with them getting a bit more leniency when claiming self-defense (which was what I was going for here specifically, and where cops are not intrinsically privileged over civilians as a matter of law, afaik). In particular, we can generally skip the question what poor life choices on your part may have led to you having to wield deadly force to defend your own life -- dealing with people who might be unstable or violent (so the rest of us won't have to) is their job.
On the other hand, I would also hold them to a higher standard than civilians (in pretty much the same way you would hold a physician rendering first aid to a higher standard). "I panicked, and just acted on autopilot, and was not even aware that the aggressor had long been incapacitated and the need for self-defense was over" for example is an excuse I would be much more likely to buy from a civilian.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
That is exactly my understanding of what "use their body to block a vehicle's path" means.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
So you are saying that by exempting enforcement against undocumented/illegal migrants working in the hotel, gastronomy and agricultural sectors, Trump is in fact ruining the future of the US?
quiet_NaN
5d ago
It is worse that just an authoritarian inclination, Trump is full-on Simulacrum level four. A complete denial of the idea that words are pointers to concept-space and could be used to describe reality. His administration is not lying as such, because lying happens when you communicate at level 2 with the intend to being mistaken for level 1, and only the most gullible 5% would still entertain the possibility that any sound he makes might be related to physical reality.
As Zvi says:
Level 4: Manipulation and Intuition. Occasionally a strategic attempt to manipulate Level 3 dynamics. More centrally and commonly, a combination of intuitive attempts to manipulate associational dynamics and vibes, and adaptation executions that have abandoned any logic and all links to the underlying physical reality.
When he says "they are eating the cats and dogs", that sounds to the untrained ear like an implicit claim that beings called "cats" exist, but it is in fact no such thing. It is just his brain running on autopilot generating plausible sounds for the purpose of getting elected president, without a coherent world view he wants to sell his viewers. Just like a LLM hallucinating citations without even realizing that there is a difference between existing citations and hallucinated ones.
Noem was simply trying to express "bad person". 'Narcoterrorist' would have been an unlikely word to appear outside an Latin American context. 'Antifa terror cell' would have been plausible. 'Domestic terrorist' is a bit bland, but get's the vibe across.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
Having seen the videos, I will say the following:
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Shooting her was utterly ineffective at saving the agent's life, because it did not stop her car from going forward.
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It appears that there was more than one agent around. My understanding is that police tactics generally involve teamwork. There is no reason that one agent should be tasked with blocking her escape path, watching out for weapons etc.
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I think that you will be hard-pressed to find a demographic less likely to shoot a person than middle-aged urban white women. 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.
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Standing in the pathway of a suspect's car to impede their escape is plain stupid. This is the reason why for example the CBP has explicit rules which say "don't do that".
I see the events as a tragic tale of two fuckwits. Fuckwit A decided to play #LaResistance by using her car to impede ICE in an unlawful manner, then panicked when it became apparent that she would get arrested for he trouble, and in her panic recklessly endangered an ICE agent.
Fuckwit B, having previously been hit by a car driven by another suspect in the line of duty, decided it would be a great idea to again stand in the path of a suspect's car, thereby turning any escape attempt into an assault with a deadly weapon. Rather than brandishing his weapon and making his threat explicit, he waited for her to move the car forward. At that point, he drew his gun and shot her, an act which would not have saved him if she had aimed for him. By the time he fired his shots, he was already out of danger.
If one fuckwit kills another while both are engaging in fuckwittery, it is customary to charge the surviving one with manslaughter. If A had killed B by ramming him with her car, we definitely should be charging her (and her defense would try to make the point that only an idiot would stand in the path of a panicking suspect). Here, B's defense will make the valid point that only an idiot will panic and try to recklessly escape when about to be arrested for a petty crime.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
The shot seems clearly more justified than the Babbitt shot.
Despite multiple warnings not to proceed,[7] Babbitt attempted to climb through a shattered window beside a barricaded door into the Speaker's Lobby, at which point she was shot in the shoulder[8] by a United States Capitol Police (USCP) officer.
Now, granted, this might be a uncharitable summary, WP is unlikely to be very sympathetic to J6 rioters.
I think that the difference of Babbitt and Good was that it was apparent that the former was in the middle of a breaking and entering mission. She was not climbing through that window because she was panicking and trying to flee, she was clearly looking for trouble.
Sure, it would have been better if a squad of cops in riot gear were in that hallway so they could stop the rioters with less than lethal methods. Or if they had stopped them well outside any federal buildings, for that matter. And if you want to argue that someone intended for that fuckup to happen, I have little to argue against that.
But I thought if anyone would be sympathetic towards a stand your ground approach, it would be Republicans.
I will not argue that Good was innocent. She had likely violated traffic rules with the intent to frustrate ICE's objectives. But from the way she steered her car, as well as her demographic group, it seems very likely that what she was thinking was not "finally a chance to kill one of these Gestapo fucks" but rather "oh my god, they are arresting me, Trump will send me to an El Salvador megaprison, I am about to get disappeared".
Which is delusional when in fact she would have gotten away with a fine and community service, but it is not an intrinsically aggressive delusion -- unlike thinking that you are meant to stop the steal, for example.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
The difference between a guy standing in the door and a guy standing in front of a car is that the guy in the door has a good chance of physically stopping a suspect.
Without going all principle of a double effect on you, it seems to me that there is a clear distinction between an action which does something beneficial (physically reducing the risk of a suspect escaping) alongside with something undesirable (increasing the risk of a physical confrontation) and an action which mostly does something undesirable (turning any escape attempt into an assault with a deadly weapon, which can then be answered in kind).
Some Culture Warrior has dug out rules for the CBP:
[...] Further, agents should not place themselves in the path of a moving vehicle or use their body to block a vehicle's path.
[...] Agents should continue, whenever possible, to avoid placing themselves in positions where they have no alternative to using deadly force.
Now, I will grant you that ICE is a sister agency of CBP, so these rules do not apply to them. If they did apply, I think that the case would be rather clear cut: a fuckwit deliberately engineered a situation in which he could use deadly force while claiming self-defense when agency policy told him explicitly not to do that. Not so different from a cop who decides to carry a bottle of nitroglycerin on patrol so he is justified in shooting any teen who assaults him.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
The difference between a guy standing in the door and a guy standing in front of a car is that the guy in the door has a good chance of physically stopping a suspect.
Without going all principle of a double effect on you, it seems to me that there is a clear distinction between an action which does something beneficial (physically reducing the risk of a suspect escaping) alongside with something undesirable (increasing the risk of a physical confrontation) and an action which mostly does something undesirable (turning any escape attempt into an assault with a deadly weapon, which can then be answered in kind).
Some Culture Warrior has dug out rules for the CBP:
[...] Further, agents should not place themselves in the path of a moving vehicle or use their body to block a vehicle's path.
[...] Agents should continue, whenever possible, to avoid placing themselves in positions where they have no alternative to using deadly force.
Now, I will grant you that ICE is a sister agency of CBP, so these rules do not apply to them. If they did apply, I think that the case would be rather clear cut: a fuckwit deliberately engineered a situation in which he could use deadly force while claiming self-defense when agency policy told him explicitly not to do that. Not so different from a cop who decides to carry a bottle of nitroglycerin on patrol so he is justified in shooting any teen who assaults him.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
Ok, I will grant you that she was very likely trying to obstruct immigration enforcement and they had probable cause to detain her.
I would still argue that standing in the way of her car was a bad call to make.
There are certainly cases when I would want cops to risk their own lives and the lives of a suspect rather than letting them escape, for example if they are dealing with a mass shooter, where any failure to detain them will likely lead to more people being killed.
However, the driver of this car does not seem to be such a case. They had her license plate, they had her on bodycam footage, there is no reason to suspect that she was planning any terror attacks. "If she panics and drives away, we will just charge her with reckless driving and refusal to comply with a lawful order on top of the obstruction charge, it is not like she will escape to Argentina to escape justice."
quiet_NaN
6d ago
That situation is different, because if you stand in the way of a car while unloading groceries, your intend is clearly not to force the driver to either stay put or escalate to deadly force. Also, it is very rare for bananas to trigger a flight response, while being faced with police arrest will trigger such a response in a small fraction of the population (and possibly a larger faction of the part of the population likely to be arrested) where suspects will risk their lives trying to escape even if they are not currently wanted for a capital crime. It is stupid, but people are predictably stupid in that way.
I would argue that intent matters. Consider the opposite situation. A police vehicle tries to pursue a suspect, but it hampered (1) by an innocent bystander crossing the road who does not realize what is going on or (2) by an activist who is placing themselves in harms way to coerce the cops to stop the pursuit. While I would want the police to try to avoid killing the person in their way in either case, I would cut them a lot more slack for grazing the activist. Placing yourself (and others) in mortal danger to coerce a behavior from others seems straightforward bad. If the coercion was also unlawful (e.g. the activist doing the blocking), I won't cry to much if they break their leg in the process.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
But there is often a limit to the ability to claim self-defense when you deliberately engineered a situation for the purpose of being forced to resort to self-defense. Standing in front of a suspect's vehicle seems to fit the bill just fine. You are not physically impeding them from driving away.
If you give legal privileges to a conduct, you will see more of it. Standing in front of the car of a suspect to prevent them from escaping is reckless and will often lead to someone getting harmed. So it is logical to set the incentives so that cops will employ safer conduct instead.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
There was a longer video I saw that showed a few minutes beforehand. There were dozens of people on foot "observing" the ICE agents, where "observing" is some dishonest libtard euphemism for "screaming insults and hostility like psychotic banshees in a way that absolutely and obviously made the situation more tense, stressful and dangerous for everyone involved."
Frankly, I do not give a fuck. Civilians on the sidewalk being assholes is normal even for regular police ops. The ICE people earn a 100k$/year of taxpayer money, the 'libtards' on the sidewalk do not. You will forgive me for holding the people with the government paychecks and badges to higher standards than the others.
The protestors should all be tried as accessories.
Are you suggesting that they were committing a felony, so that they are guilty of felony murder?
Hm, MN seems to have a rather broad felony murder law](https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/cite/609.19):
Subd. 2. Unintentional murders. Whoever does either of the following is guilty of unintentional murder in the second degree and may be sentenced to imprisonment for not more than 40 years: (1) causes the death of a human being, without intent to effect the death of any person, while committing or attempting to commit a felony offense other than criminal sexual conduct in the first or second degree with force or violence or a drive-by shooting; or
With felony being very broadly defined:
Subd. 2. Felony. "Felony" means a crime for which a sentence of imprisonment for one year or more may be imposed.
The trade-off is that you only get 2nd degree murder, which does not have a minimum mandatory sentence. So what felony do you think the people yelling at ICE from the sidewalk might be found guilty off?
quiet_NaN
6d ago
I do not think that this is at all incompatible with Gillitrut's point.
Unprovoked escalation by any side is bad. If a cop has the option to either park a stroller in front of a suspects car or place his own car there for the purpose of impeding an escape, then it seems reasonable to require them to use their car, which will mean that the suspect will be less likely to escalate to deadly violence if they try to escape. (If it is fine to use a suspects unwillingness to endanger innocents to detain them, then SWAT forces should be wearing babies instead of kevlar vests.)
Some jurisdiction have a concept of self-defense being limited if the actor specifically provoked the self-defense situation. Placing a human in front of a car, or handcuffing yourself to the car for that matter, will do very little to impede the movement of the car. It is purely meant to create a situation where you will be able to claim self-defense or file additional charges.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
The purpose of ICE is to enforce immigration law. While it could be the case that detaining a citizen in a car was required to enforce immigration law, this is an extraordinary claim that would require extraordinary evidence.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
Angle 2
Apparently, Elon thinks that video might be to disturbing to watch without an account, and I don't really want to ask grok to turn all the participants into nude 13yo's.
Does someone have another link to a different source which is less nanny-state than X?
quiet_NaN
6d ago
Many will pretend not to understand, or pretend that it is implausible, hence making discourse impossible. I am not going to argue with them. Instead, we are simply going to call on the Trump administration and red states to protect this officer from Minnesota's deranged courts.
Are you sure the motte is the correct site for you, then? You might have a better chance to reach the Trump administration on X or Truth Social, I think.
Also, I am not sure what standing Trump has to interfere with state law being applied. Are you suggesting that he sends the Delta force to extradite the shooter?
If you visit a jurisdiction, you are placing yourself in the tender cares of its justice system, however biased it might be. This is one reason why I would avoid visiting Iran -- Sharia law is not really my kink.
Juries have their own regional biases. I would assume that in the 1950s South, a white guy killing a black guy would have a higher probability of being acquitted for reasons of self defense, all things being equal, than vice versa. My advice to a black guy in the 50s would be to not be in the South and try his best to keep his nose clean if he has to be there. This is not a great solution, but what is the alternative? Not letting Texas hold murder trials until 1980?
Sympathies vary vastly between groups. Violence which is seen as self-defense nine times out of ten when enacted by a cop might be seen as a felony nine times out of ten when enacted against a cop (try "I thought the cop was going to run me over, so obviously I shot him").
Unluckily for the shooter, ICE is about as popular in blue areas as a black guy accused of murdering a white man in the '50s South. To be fair, he knew that when he signed on. The reason that Trump pays ICE high salaries and a big signing bonus is that it is common knowledge that half of the country considers them his brownshirts. If he gets convicted for a shooting for which a jury would have ruled self-defense when committed by a local cop, that is just an occupational hazard.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
There is a value to letting previous decisions stand. For example, if Congress impeached the president every time his popularity sank below 50% of the voters, that would badly affect the stability of the political system.
There is a difference between saying "given today's policies, we would not let you publish that article" and actually retracting an article. The central example of an article being retracted would be due to fraud or plagiarism: someone having deliberately deceived the reviewers about their results or originality is enough to overturn the status quo.
Now, if it appears that he had broken explicit rules of conduct which existed at the time he published, e.g. not appointing a reviewer despite protocol calling for a reviewer, that would be grounds for retraction.
Unfortunately, we do not know that.
A notice has now been added to the online article stating: “Elsevier’s research integrity and publishing ethics team, with guidance from an impartial field expert, acting in the role of an independent publishing ethics advisor, conducted an investigation and determined that the article should be retracted.
Given that we do not get the report of that team, that parses to me as "secret evidence was enough to convince the star chamber of his guilt".
I think it would be ok to keep their report secret if at the end both parties agreed on the retraction, not every piece of dirty laundry needs to be aired in public. But given that the validity of the retraction is under dispute, it hardly seems like Lucey could object if they published everything.
In general, one could debate how much power the owner of a journal should have to enforce retractions of articles. Suppose a political activist billionaire bought Elsevier, and proceeded to retract articles matching some pattern (perhaps articles without minority co-authors, or articles authored by Jews, or which argued for/against anthropogenic climate change). Or perhaps ether theory proponents could buy Wiley-VCH and retract Einstein's Annalen der Physik papers on relativity.
Of course, this would not change the scientific consensus about Einstein one bit. After all, the power of a retraction comes from the fact that scientists and appointment committees treat them as real, but they do that because most retractions are solid, not because they are sworn to do so.
--
I also think that undeclared conflicts of interest and quid pro quo understandings in scientific publishing are likely very common. Most scientific fields are rather narrow, there are perhaps a dozen professors in your niche, not tens of thousands. Editing a journal or reviewing articles is (generally unpaid) work taken up by academics, and while I am sure that some of them have the best interests of their field in mind, these are also good positions to gatekeep and increase your own standing. "That manuscript is okay except that it is missing a citation of an essential publication" seems like a fairly easy way to boost citations of your own articles, after all. When people say that science advances one funeral at a time, I think that gatekeepers refusing to publish anything which contradicts their own pet theory are a big part of that.
While it is clear that the dysfunctionality inherent in the system should not excuse any particular dysfunctionality cultivated on top of that, I do not have a great solution to the underlying problem.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
I think we can separate this into two different questions:
(1) Should prediction markets allow insider trading?
(2) Should people with secret military insider information disclose that information for profit?
The value a prediction market provides is in the odds, banning insider trading would defeat that purpose. In this case, the prediction market providing an accurate image is strongly negatively correlated with the US military achieving its objective.
Two parties having different alignments is not that unusual, it would be the same for journalism and the military, for example. If a reporter is publishing secret military information they learned, they are doing their job. If a soldier is leaking such information to reporters, they are breaking their oath.
The way I would spin this is "a person with insider knowledge was endangering an operation which cost north of 100M$ and the lives of US troops to make a measly half million for themselves". (I am not sure of the timeline there, it is plausible that the bet happened after the capture but before it was announced. Sadly, the BBC seems not to be aware of either the concepts of time zones or hyperlinks (e.g. to the relevant polymarket page).)
While I personally would have liked it if the US operation would have failed as miserably as Putin's attempt to capture the Ukraine government at the start of his special military operation, preferentially with dead and captured US troops (because that is the language the electorate understands, sadly), I imagine the PoV of the US military is different.
In a functioning state, finding the leak would be a top priority. Even if the bet was made after the capture, condoning it would lead to situations where different insiders are competing, which would eventually lead to leaking of military relevant information. I would also predict that the perp was not a career officer, but a political insider. As such, I imagine little will be attempted to find the source.
I am still holding a faint hope that the insider trading will happen again before Trump attacks Columbia, and will lead to my preferred outcome.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
I strongly agree with your point of view. The point of science is to increase our understanding of the world, so it is not a zero sum competition to assign status.
Of course, there exists also what Feynman calls cargo cult science. People who occupy fields which make pretenses of scientific rigor but are actually just bullshitting may very well feel that all the application of statistics etc is just performative.
Being a scientist means leading mankind down the path towards truth, typically zero to one baby steps at a time. Falsifying data -- to decide that you would rather make larger steps than walk in the right direction -- is the ultimate defection from that mission. The professor who fucks his students or the doctor who experiments on PoWs may be worse human beings, but the falsifier of data is the worse scientist.
Nobody is forced to compete in a field which makes any pretenses of scientific rigor. If you don't like statistics, publish on art history. But if you use the language of science in your publications while falsifying your data, you should be expelled and disgraced and spend the rest of your days in some menial job where you can do no further harm.
A similar nonchalance is sometimes seen in defense of academics whose ghostwriters copy paste their thesis from other publications. After all, a lot of people did some cheating in school, and can't see what the big deal is. But to the (debatable) degree that an academic title means anything, it means that you sat down on your own ass and wrote your thesis. Take that away, and there is literally nothing left, and we might as well allow parents to christen their infants 'PhD' instead of 'Kevin' or 'Mary'.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
Children are generally not very interesting before the age of ten. Maybe it's my Extreme Male Brain, but women can take care of em before then.
Personally, I would beg to differ. I will grant you that below an age of one, kids are effectively extremely needy pets without the brain power to set them apart from most other mammals. There are certainly people whose dream job it would be to take care of cute crying babies, but it would not be mine.
But I guess that at an age of two or three, kids far surpass other mammals in intelligence. I think a lot of people enjoy watching a human level intelligence in the making, just like some car enthusiasts would also enjoy toolgifs of cars being assembled, rather than going "ew, that thing is not even self-propelling yet, call me when it is ready for the autobahn".
For example, reading the (paywalled) posts by Scott Alexander on the development of his twins, it is apparent that he takes great joy from observing their development. Personally, I have two nephews (aged 7 and 5). I will confess that when they were very small, I was not interacting with them much -- holding a baby is not something which would bring me much joy, I would probably mostly be worrying about holding it wrong and injuring it or something. But from the point where I can communicate with them, I've had a lot of fun interacting with them, playing games and the like. Young kids have a whole world to discover, and I find their joy in discovering new things infectious.
For people aged 10 or 15, I guess the quality of the interactions would depend on shared interests. If there are shared interests (say math), then one can have a blast ("and this is how we know that sqrt(2) is not a fraction"). If there are no shared interests (e.g. "STEM is boring, I only care about rap music", given that I do not know anything about rap), then these interactions will probably be as painful as interactions between adults who do not share any interests.
But I will totally grant you that this is all very subjective.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
So the mother of his kids is effectively a single parent then? If she knew what she signed up for beforehand, and decided that him bringing home a big paycheck is enough, then I do not see a victim. She should probably get the kids some male role models who are willing to spend any amount of time, but if we say it is not immoral for a single woman to conceive a child from a sperm donation, then I see no reason to call what they are doing immoral either.
Of course, it is not the kind of relationship I would wish for, personally. If the guy just wants offspring, he could become a sperm donor instead.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
These military power-holders don't need to become a puppet of the US to get what they want, just to stop being an enemy of the US.
What exactly has VZ done to be called an enemy of the US? The nationalization of their oil industry (in 1973)? Having a socialist dictator in the Americas? Or are you referring to Trump's claims that Maduro is using fentanyl as a 'weapon of mass destruction' in the US?
Also, it seems to me that Trump's understanding of agreements is that there is always one party which gets fucked over by them, and therefore he only agrees to deals which fuck over the other party. I seriously doubt that he is going back to the 50-50 sharing of profits from before the nationalization.
And while I have no doubt that the military leaders in charge are corrupt as fuck and will do whatever benefits them personally, in my experience militaries also generally foster thoughts of nationalism and independence. If VZ bends over backwards the moment Trump sends in a few helicopters, their citizens might start to ask questions about the purpose of having a military.
So standard police procedures are to stand in front of a car, relying on your quickdraw skills to be able to shoot the driver if she starts to accelerate towards you before get run over (which would empirically not prevent you from getting run over -- if she had aimed for him as he had aimed for her, then he would be lucky to be in a wheelchair)? Do you have any citation to back that up?
I have already quoted the CBP guidelines about "do not block the path of a vehicle with your body" elsewhere in this discussion. I see this as clear evidence that the shooters behavior is not "standard police protocols". If you want to argue that for ICE it is, please provide evidence.
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