shakenvac
5d ago
the fact you didn't know the first shot went through the windshield proving he was in front of the vehicle
I did know that.
and so your motte position was 'sure, sure, maybe the first shot was fine, but what about the 2nd and 3rd shot .33 seconds later which went 6 inches to the right through the side window'
This is the straw man of my position, yes.
shakenvac
5d ago
There is no point arguing with you about nitpicks that aren't even relevant to this case. So reducing what you have said to just the relevant parts:
no, he will not have a problem making the defense that 3 shots over 1 second which started in front of the car when he was struck by the accelerating car are also justified
Ok, why?
a fleeing felon who just committed aggravated assault with a deadly weapon which she was still driving is an imminent deadly threat to others
A jury would have to be convinced that this was a reasonable belief in this specific circumstance. If I were a juror, you could perhaps convince me of this, but it wouldn't be easy.
he got hit by the car so he was, in fact, not able to retreat in complete safety
OMG is he ok?
less facetiously, once he was alongside the vehicle, and had successfully retreated, and was no longer in danger, he continued to fire. These shots will require justification. Like, I'm not even arguing the first shot right now. I'm willing to accept, for the sake of argument, that that was legitimate. But you don't get to shoot someone because you have been hit - that isn't how self defense works. It's about imminent threats, not threats that have passed. the Drejka case is a good example of this.
the standard is the jury must have zero reasonable doubt the above is wrong
Juries reject self defense all the time.
shakenvac
6d ago
No one is required to shoot once and wait a few seconds to see what happened.
It’s not about ‘wait and see’, it’s about the fact that he is no longer in front of the vehicle.
I just find it interesting as you're discovering what really happened the different facts don't seem to affect your opinion
To what are you referring?
shakenvac
6d ago
one, it can be threat of death or serious/great bodily injury
Technically yes, in practice this is the same thing.
two, it is not a requirement the threat can only be stopped with deadly force
I believe this is incorrect; you may not use lethal force to stop a threat if it is obvious a non lethal force would suffice.
Although neither of these points seem relevant to this specific example. The problem the shooter will have, is that the moment he is alongside the car there is no longer any threat of any kind of injury to himself, yet he keeps firing. This will not be impossible to overcome but his defence would have their work cut out for them.
they could not retreat from an accelerating vehicle a few feet away from them in complete safety,
This is somewhat undermined by the fact that he actually did retreat in complete safety.
a person in that cop's circumstance could have both a subjective and objectively reasonable belief he's about to be run over
For the front shot, sure. That’s a plausible defence. Once the cop is alongside the car, however, the idea that he would be afraid of “slipping on the ice” or being “dragged under the vehicle” and that the only remedy to that threat is to keep firing shots into the driver is weak as hell. Good luck convincing a jury that a reasonable person would feel the same way. No, if he ever does find himself in court over this, the best bet to defend against those shots would be either ‘defence of others’ or ‘heat of the moment’, neither of which is great. I sure as shit wouldn’t want to be facing down a jury in his shoes.
shakenvac
6d ago
Not really. The standard is reasonable belief of an imminent deadly threat which can only be stopped through deadly force.
The most obvious way in which this was violated is - where was the imminent threat when the shots went through the side window?
shakenvac
6d ago
Not an intentional characterization. The first shot indeed went through the front window. It's the subsequent shots that I think will be very difficult to justify as self defense. I know that there is a norm that cops 'mag dump' into suspects, which they then justify with the phrase 'I fired until the threat was eliminated' - which is the legal standard.
Problem is, that justification makes sense if you're talking about a guy who just pulled a gun or charged at you. It makes way less sense if the threat was a car, and you've just dodged out of the way of that car to the extent that subsequent shots then go through the side window. What is the justification for those subsequent shots? The shooter was no longer in danger. I really think those are going to be a major issue for the shooter, legally.
shakenvac
6d ago
If you stand in front of a car with the intent of blocking them in, and then shoot the driver when he tries to pull out anyway, that's almost always murder.
shakenvac
6d ago
Walking across a crosswalk is totally different to deliberately blocking a car that you know is trying to get away. The intents aren't at all similar.
shakenvac
6d ago
nobody has a right to flee from the police.
Correct, but irrelevant.
the driver would still be alive if she had made any of dozens of decisions leading up to that moment any differently
Correct, but irrelevant.
The only relevant question is 'did the shooter satisfy the conditions for self defence?' this seems very marginal. The fact alone that the officer fired through a side window while not in imminent danger is going to make things extremely difficult for him if this ever goes to court.
shakenvac
5mo ago
Starmer is fully lawyer-brained. he is not mentally capable of ignoring a court.
shakenvac
6mo ago
Seems like preventing a regional power that hates your guts from getting nuclear weapons is probably worth a dozen bunker busters.
I accept your nit, but barring any massive unforseen consequence (e.g. common early onset alzheimers) I don't think it changes the calculus much. If you told me I had to be a trans woman, I would choose to be a pre-pubescent transitioner ten times out of ten.
shakenvac
7mo ago
What you are saying is true, but incomplete. If someone were certain to transition, it is unarguably true that it is better for them to begin pre-puberty and be in the puberty blockers -> transition pipeline. But the important word there is if.
That is because, if someone can be happy in the body they were born in, it is also unarguably true that they be so, rather than transition at any age. Your second trans friend is certainly in a better position than your first, but even so, she has had major, irreversible chemical intervention and surgery, which has left her infertile, and unable to participate in traditional family formation. She will be on medication for the rest of her life. and, of course, even as a trans woman who passes well, she will still be subject to social stigma in some form or another for being trans. Her marriage pool, for example, will be tiny.
So the real question is: what proportion of those who transition as children would have -if prevented- either transitioned later or lived a miserable life as their birth sex? That's a counterfactual, so we can't know for sure. But, if that number is lower than 90% (so 10% would have been satisfied to live as their birth sex) , then that's a false positive rate that is probably not justifiable. However, desistance studies indicate that number could be as low as 20%. I think it plausible that there are psychological interventions that could bring that number into the low single digit percentages.
How would you feel if there were a 4 in 5 chance that your trans friend could have lived happily as a normal man?
shakenvac
7mo ago
This is a good take. I think the logical extension is that you shouldn't go looking for this kind of activity, but when it becomes known out you should come down on it fairly hard. The norm that this kind of thing is creepy and gross is valuable to me and if people are going to make deep fakes of others the very least they should do is treat it like a dirty secret.
shakenvac
7mo ago
How many barricaded doors must the police retreat behind before they are justified in opening fire? I think pretty much every armed conservative would have lit up a left-wing Ashli Babbitt if they found themselves in an analogous situation.
Ashli Babbitt did not deserve to die, in the sense that the punishment did not fit the crime. But that is true of most people killed in police / self defense shootings.
shakenvac
8mo ago
Option B mostly.
I think of evils as having three axes of severity - harm, intent, and depravity. The Holocaust was worse than the Holodomor on all three axes.
The Holodomor was a half-deliberate half-targeted famine which killed 4 million. The Holocaust was an extremely deliberate and concerted effort to wipe out a particular type of person using the tools and efficiencies of the industrial revolution and the entire apparatus of the modern state, which killed 6 million
To bring it down to a more individual level, being murdered by a serial killer is worse than being murdered in a store robbery, which is worse than catching a stray bullet in a gang fight, which is worse than being mown down by a negligent driver, which is worse than dying of a preventable disease, which is worse than dying of an incurable disease. I find this pretty intuitive and I think most people would agree.
shakenvac
9mo ago
Would you have been advocating for peace with Japan on December 8 1941? Is a military campaign which resulted in the deaths of half a million Japanese civilians a sane answer to a surprise attack which killed 2,500 sailors?
video footage alone is actually not super good evidence.
Well, yes, it often isn't super good evidence. They are few in number and invariably low quality. This is strange; as the number of cameras on the planet increased exponentially, you would expect the number of video captures of any given real phenomenon to increase exponentially, and statistically you would expect some of those captures to be high quality, but this does not happen. The fact that this does not happen is strong evidence against such phenomenon being real. Bigfoot is an excellent example of this.
On the subject of UFOs, both here and in your other comments you are fudging definitions pretty hard in order to conflate unlike things.
UFOs - meaning flying objects that are unidentified - certainly exist.
UFOs - meaning specifically tic-tac shaped objects which hang out in the middle of nowhere and appear to perform incredible maneuvers - plausibly exist.
UFOs - meaning specifically tic-tac shaped objects which hang out in the middle of nowhere and actually do perform incredible maneuvers - probably do not exist, but I would place low probability on some weak versions of this being true. The fact that these tic-tacs apparently like to hang out in the middle of nowhere where the only thing likely to stumble across them are fighter jets provides a convenient out to the 'why so little footage from 2010 onward?' question.
Flying Saucers - meaning alien spaceships that abduct folk from Arkansas and anally probe them and/or take them on whistle stop tours of the solar system - certainly do not exist, for the same reason that Bigfoot does not exist. The XKCD comic uses the term 'Flying Saucer' not 'UFO'. I expect this is deliberate.
Finally, neither Bigfoot nor UFOs nor Flying Saucers are 'miraculous' things in the sense that the OP used the term - meaning divine or diabolical phenomenon.
shakenvac
9mo ago
so you end up having to rely on witnesses.
But never video footage.
Eucharistic miracles for which there are consistent findings that the material being examined is human heart tissue
You're talking about literal transubstantiation? hang on, how do they know it's human heart tissue if they can't sequence the DNA? what does it even mean to not be able to sequence the DNA? Like, the machine broke?
Hoaxes are a known source of Christian relics. Apparently there are over 30 holy nails in various european curches and cathederals today! there were probably enough holy nails and pieces of the true cross floating around 15th century europe to fill a warehouse.
shakenvac
9mo ago
The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them
If there was even one example of an honest-to-god miracle for which uncontrovertable evidence existed, that alone would be sufficient to prove God (or, at least, the supernatural). Of course, such evidence does not exist.
shakenvac
9mo ago
No, all you really have to believe is that the markets are more rational than Donald Trump, which is not a hard sell.
How much payload could subs deliver versus other approaches?
A lot. Say, 6 submarines times 20 missiles a sub times 8 re-entry vehicles a missile = nearly a thousand nukes. Not enough to totally cripple Russia in a first strike, but if your theory is that all you need to do is kill the leadership then more than enough to do that.
Do they still launch if all of the leadership are vaporized in the first 5-10 minutes though?
5-10 minutes should be sufficient. But if for some reason it wasn't then regardless the answer is still yes.
Who gives that order?
The dead hand. Fully automated second strike command system probably based on detecting nuclear explosions on Russian soil from orbit.
Does the order come in the 20 subsequent minutes it takes to vaporize the rest of their stuff?
Probably. But even if not, don't underestimate the survivability of this stuff. Don't overestimate the destructive power of nukes. Military hardware needs to be hit directly or it will likely survive. Those mobile ICBMs are gonna be hard to find. Part of the reason for the insane overbuild of the cold war by both sides was 'we only need a small percentage of this stuff to survive a first strike to totally obliterate the enemy'. Nukes miss, they fizzle, they burn up in orbit due to manufacturing defects, they fail to launch, they fail in flight, they are mis-targeted due to faulty Intel. And you don't know in advance which sites you will fail to destroy so you have to shoot and look. It's like a game of whack a mole with 5000 moles, and if you miss one you get your brains blown out. For these reasons and more, the US never really believed it could pull off an unanswered first strike.
shakenvac
9mo ago
NATO does not, currently, have any nukes 'forward positioned'. If they wanted to do so, then placing nukes in the Baltic states would be the obvious first port of call, as they are just as close to Russian cities as Ukrainian nukes would be. But why bother moving the nukes when you can already achieve the same with subs? Boomer subs have been capable of operating within the Baltic and Barents sea for a very long time, with flight times to Moscow in the five minute range.
Additionally, this is a problem that Russia - or at least the USSR - was keenly aware of and had already solved. They knew that Moscow could be annihilated with, worst case, only five minutes warning and built their strategic deterrence accordingly. Their ICBM fields are located deep in the interior, each silo spaced far from the others and hardened against anything but a nuclear direct hit. They also have mobile ICBMs which can be ordered to drive around randomly and be safe from a first strike that way. The dead hand system could launch a second strike with zero human input.
In other words, Ukraine joining NATO would not have changed the MAD calculus for Russia, and the Soviet Union was aware of their position and built a robust retaliatory and second strike capability.
shakenvac
10mo ago
If you have evidence of generally respectable and mainstream figures or media outlets making this claim, I'd love to see it.
Likewise, if you have any evidence of 'generally respectable and mainstream figures or media outlets' making claims that "Trump is plotting genocide/ethnic cleansing, any day now, just you wait and see".
Fair enough, anyone who claimed that Trump was literally a Hitler 2.0 hell bent on a new holocaust went too far. Anyone who stopped short of that, including those who merely accused him of being a 'danger to democracy' has, I think, been vindicated. There were plenty of contemporaneous articles which evaluated Trump as a menace without descending into hysteria.
Last time I checked, genocide and imperialist conquest were very different things, and being guilty of one does not make one guilty of the other.
but being guilty of either makes Trump an extremely dangerous man and a massive asshole. 'Ha! you thought he was a wannabe mass murderer, but in fact he is just a wannabe imperialist and warmonger'. Wow, great point. This is definitely where the nexus of the conversation should be.
I don't like Donald Trump, I've never voted for him or supported his presidential campaigns in any way
Fair enough. Though I will say that I am surprised to hear that how much ink you have spilled defending him and denigrating his opponents, and how strong your reaction was to my original post.
There is no relationship between these two cases.
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