nomenym
1d ago
I eagerly await the day I see the headline "3 killed by male wearing pants".
nomenym
1d ago
The "female in a dress" line was perfect. I can see that really catching on.
nomenym
1d ago
The actual sleeping around wasn't the trigger. That was mostly just a minor scandal that a few people were embroiled in. What kicked off Gamergate was the unified response--the circling of the wagons--that all the established videogame websites and forums engaged in. People were getting banned and punished for even mildly critical takes as all the institutions suddenly acted like a hivemind to attack and ostracize dissenters. As that happened, more and more people piled in to see what was going on and quickly found themselves branded as sexist, misogynist, and probably racist too for some reason.
It was a pattern that would go onto be repeated in many online and offline communities. The sudden imposition of extreme left-wing idpol ideology that would split fanbases, denominations, supporters, hobbyists, and everything else, with all the established mainstream institutions and power centers neatly lining up on one side, and often against the majority.
My greatest regret is not having more kids before finding out that we couldn't.
One of the things that is difficult to understand is that having kids is like a second puberty, because it fundamentally changes your motivations and interests. Ask a pre-pubescent boy what he thinks about girls and he'll give a very different answer than he would a few years later. But puberty isn't optional; it just happens (until recently!). For most of human history, kids also just happened eventually. We don't have properly calibrated motivations for things that are just supposed to happen eventually anyway. It's essentially the same reason we don't feel "hungry" for vitamin D: not going outside in the sun was simply not an option for our ancestors, and so there is no well-calibrated mechanism to motivate that behavior. Sex drive worked well enough until we solved that "problem".
Only when it's a skew that affects groups they care about.
They aren't optimizing for explanatory power but for political power; they still earnestly believe everything they say. Accusing them of inconsistency is like accusing a tiger of not fighting fair--it's just a misunderstanding of what you are dealing with. They are not playing the "game" of mutual pursuit of truth by rational discussion, and so they are not bound by the rules of that game. When they appeal to those rules in an argument, it is merely for a strategic advantage. They do not apply those rules because they believe in them, but because you do.
nomenym
7d ago
If it was a bad shoot only if the shooter had precognition, it was a good shoot.
If the officer could reload a previous save game and redo that event knowing what he does now, I'm pretty sure he wouldn't shoot. It may have been a justified shoot in the moment, but that doesn't mean it was a good shoot in a more general sense. Perhaps on a better day, or maybe if the same officer hadn't been dragged by a car recently, then he would not have shot. I don't think he could honestly answer the question "if you could do it over again, would you do the same?" with an unqualified "yes", though he may be advised to do so for legal reasons.
Unless this is matched by a program to crack down hard on left-wing agitators and terrorists who would use this information to target and intimidate officers and their families, then it is merely a strategy for the left to empower its own masked paramilitary groups to contest policing authority. They don't want to abolish policing or borders; they just want to be the police and decide which borders are enforced.
nomenym
7d ago
Vigilante is closer to the right meaning, though in this case it's not so much trying to take the law into your own hands than it is trying to take the law out of the police's hands.
nomenym
7d ago
Naziphobia is a very serious problem. Everywhere is 1930s Germany, everyone is Hitler, and everything is genocide, but they've just learned to hide it. But the smart and educated have been warned, and they know just how to root out the hidden Nazis. Anyone who does anything that might be what a Nazi would do if they were pretending not to be a Nazi must be exposed as a Nazi, and fortunately we have "experts on fascism" (presumably much like our "experts on misogyny" and "experts on whiteness") who can hear the secret dog whistles that Nazis use to communicate. They must be rooted out an expelled from society, because even the smallest Nazi presence will irresistibly grow and take over if left unchecked.
nomenym
9d ago
I presume they're even more bad luck in current year than they've ever been.
nomenym
13d ago
Few people are truly bad people, but there are a lot of people who are bad at being good people.
nomenym
13d ago
It works when you have allied media organizations and friendly local authorities. It's literally in the Antifa playbook. The goal is to exploit the right to protest to pursue low level paramilitary activity. They're very good at it, and they've established the norm so much that regular left-wingers often now seem confused when their protesters get arrested for intimidation, vandalism, or even violence. They've gotten away with so much that it has moved from an expectation to an entitlement.
Occasionally right-wing protesters try the same tactics only to discover that it doesn't work for them.
nomenym
14d ago
Frankly, my wife is too right-wing for this place. She'd think ya'll are a bunch of pussy liberals.
nomenym
14d ago
He was in the process of being restrained, but he was not actually restrained. If he had a gun, which he did for the majority of the altercation, then he could have drawn it.
If you didn't know he had been disarmed and you had mistaken reason to believe he was/had drawing/drawn a weapon, then yes you can shoot in self-defense. Shooting him in the back is irrelevant, because once you decide he is an imminent threat, you don't wait for him to turnaround and get the first shot. You shoot and you keep shooting to decisively eliminate the threat. Self-defense has to do with the perceived threat. You are in no real danger if someone draws a replica gun on you and threatens to shoot, but you can still act in self-defense if you don't know that it's a replica. The question is how reasonable was the perception of threat, and that is unfortunately a kind of squishy concept where law enforcement is usually given the benefit of the doubt.
For me, the Pretti shooting is an edge-case, even moreso than the Good shooting. I think the officer who shot first needs to be reprimanded in some fashion, but exactly how depends on details that cannot be gleaned from the videos. Firstly, it has to do with how much danger the officer thought he was in at that moment, not whether his evaluation of the danger was correct. Secondly, presuming his evaluation of the danger was incorrect, does that error rise to the level of criminal negligence? These questions are not easily answered by watching the videos.
nomenym
14d ago
My brother posted some weird screed on Facebook about how handsome Pretti was compared to the ICE agent who shot him, how healthy Pretti looked, how educated Pretti was compared to the typical ICE agent. Basically implying it was dysgenic to shoot Pretti, except I think eugenics is still considered a no-no. I seriously tried to puzzle out if my brother was in the closet despite having a string of serious girlfriends.
He was likely looking at the AI altered photo circulating that made Pretti look significantly more attractive than he did in the original, so I guess the person who made those doctored images achieved their goal with at least your brother.
In the case of ICE, it seems apparent that we haven't done this work. It is not currently minimising risk nearly as well as it could.
Right, and the absolutely lowest hanging fruit is the cooperation of local authorities and law enforcement. In fact, this alone would likely be enough to satisfy your concerns, since the majority of controversial ICE incidents are occurring in jurisdictions that are not cooperating. Not only are they not cooperating, but local authorities have been encouraging and allegedly even coordinating the chaos. Perhaps ICE still need better training, but that is a longer-term project that is likely to only produce marginal improvements to performance, and it does not necessarily mean they should stop what they're doing. (I suspect higher quality recruits would be better than more training, but that presents other challenges. I suspect the left would heap shame upon any highly competent people who decided to join ICE, because they don't want immigration enforcement to be done better).
Our willingness to tolerate mistakes in law enforcement is proportional to the extent of the criminal problem they are responding to. Personally, I am fine with relaxing standards to address the illegal immigration problem. The "Biden wave" was enormous, and it came after decades of lax enforcement. Making a dent in that problem means acting swiftly, and unfortunately that comes with trade-offs. Up to a point, a per capita increase in mistaken detentions, deportations, or deaths is an acceptable outcome, albeit one that is not welcome. The blame here must land squarely on the people who created the mess in the first place.
Of course, if you don't think illegal immigration is a big problem, or perhaps not a problem at all, then any enforcement is a net negative and no increase in mistakes is acceptable. That is an entirely consistent position.
nomenym
14d ago
By definition it was an extrajudicial summary execution, as it was a killing that was not sanctioned by the court and he was killed without the benefit of a free and fair trial. He was killed while restrained by multiple government agents.
In other words, not an execution in the way any ordinary person uses that term.
This is just an attempt to spin a narrative to defend the in-group. Government agents killing people in "panicked split-second decisions" does not make it not an execution and does not engender the levels of competency that should/is required by agents of the state. If ICE agents cannot act competently in high stress split second situations then they shouldn't have guns and the power to exercise the state's monopoly on violence.
Then the state should not have a monopoly on violence. There is really no good evidence that ICE or CPB are particularly incompetent compared to other law enforcement agencies, because they are almost unique in being subjected to a very well organized protest and obstruction operation with the tacit (or perhaps even explicit) support of local authorities. Normally, they lean on local law enforcement for help in these kind of situations, but that help has been denied until recently. No matter how well-trained people are, there will always be mistakes, and the number of mistakes will increase in proportion to the number of risky and dangerous situations. This is an isolated demand for competence.
If we applied this logic to the Babbitt shooting, then we should also be disarming and standing down the U.S. Capitol Police. Babbitt was unarmed and, though acting aggressively and belligerently, she was not an immediate deadly threat. She should not have been shot for much the same reason that Pretti should not have been shot. However, with all the chaos and danger of the Jan 6th riots, it was likely that someone somewhere would get shot. For that reason, I don't have much sympathy for Babbitt. Although Lt. Bryd should not have shot, she also bears a lot of responsibility for putting him in a difficult situation. We could just demand more competence from Byrd and hold him entirely responsible, but that only incentivizes more reckless behavior by people like Babbitt.
Unfortunately, I suspect that is the ulterior motive behind these argument. If you can demand infinite competence from law enforcement, if the officer is always held 100% to blame for every bad shoot, then you can exploit that to further your agenda. It creates more incentive for these "protest" groups to insert themselves into dangerous situations to get what they want, because they will never even be held even a little bit accountable should an officer make a mistake. Of course, the alternative where we hold people like Pretti 100% at fault is also unworkable, because it gives too much power to officers that can and will be abused.
nomenym
14d ago
Okay, presume we've done that already, but some people still get in accidents and die. How do you feel about the repeat drunk driver who dies in a car wreck that wasn't their fault (or at least mostly not their fault)?
Pretti should not have been shot. He was disarmed and not a serious threat at that moment. Unfortunately, it was a highly chaotic situation with protesters doing their best to cause stress and confusion. Pretti was disarmed just a moment before he was shot, and it is unlikely the other officers present knew he had been disarmed. It's quite possible one of the officers called out something like "I've got his gun", but in all the chaos another heard "he's got a gun!"
It was not an execution. It was a panicked split-second decision that proved fatally mistaken. Shooting him multiple times in quick succession is actually evidence of this, since your goal is to quickly and decisively end the threat. You don't shoot once and then wait to see if he can still shoot back before resuming fire, because that's just a good way of getting more people killed. Executions are more deliberate and conservative with ammo.
The video evidence of prior days indicates that Pretti was repeatedly inserting himself into dangerous situations with police while armed. He was indisputably obstructing, not just exercising his first amendment rights. He was intentionally creating circumstances that would give officers a legitimate fear for their life and heighten the chances of one of those officers making a fatal mistake. If you keep playing Russian roulette, you will eventually end up with a bullet in the head.
While the new videos don't change the narrow question of whether the officer should have shot at that moment, it does a lot to change the whole narrative around the shooting and how much blame should be apportioned to the victim himself
How do we feel about repeat drunk drivers who get killed in car wrecks that were someone else's fault?
Restraining them from what? Were they unrestrained until they decided to go to Minnesota? Are they unrestrained in Mississippi where by most accounts they are going about their business without much incident? Where they have been unimpeded they don't seem to need much restraining. I have seen little convincing evidence that ICE has been operating particularly egregiously. There are many stories, but many are misleading when you look into the details. Some mistakes are inevitable, and the problem they are trying to put a dent in is very very big. If they didn't make some mistakes, then I'd know they weren't trying.
I don't like having federal agents out there asking people for their papers; I don't like the idea of having ICE run massive enforcement operations in American cities. I don't like any of it, and I am suspicious of all federal authority. I really would prefer a world where none of this was necessary. I probably would enjoy the company of the vigilantes more than the ICE agents. This is all a clusterfuck at least 30 years in the making, but we are where we are, and the Great Immigration Enforcement Defection cannot go unanswered, and it sucks. It risks major civil conflict that could, in the worst case scenario, spiral into the destruction of the entire union, but that risk is still better than the alternative.
Frankly, I am not sure ICE or the administration has anything to gain by admitting mistakes much less apologizing, because I don't think that would earn them any good faith or leniency. Both sides immediately stake out maximally extreme interpretations of events to see what they can get away with. When push back occurs, both sides quietly shift their arguments but never acknowledge changing their mind about anything. They're essentially bartering, trying to get the best "deal" that serves their interests and goals. Conceding ground on anything just gives your enemy an advantage. Reality is negotiable and truth is for dorks. The right has been learning from the left.
It's amusing, then, that homophobia appears to be more heritable than homosexuality.
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