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Culture War nexuses
This isn't exactly some thought-out post, more just a culture war observation. Every now and then there happens an event that feels like a CW "nexus" where it is the intersection of like five different hot topics in one moment. I had this thought while walking yesterday and wondered if someone else had any other examples. Here's two of mine:
A couple of weeks ago in Toronto a group of Indian immigrants, presumably in a gang of some sort, robbed a government-owned liquor store. They pulled a knife on an off-duty cop there. When they left, they were pursued by the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) and regional cops. In a rented van the thieves went the wrong way down the 401, the busiest highway in the world; the OPP stopped pursuit and told the regional cops to do the same, but they continued to follow. The getaway van hit a car going the opposite way. The other car's inhabitants was also a family of Indian immigrants: new parents, a baby, and their newly-arrived grandparents (via family reunification presumably). The getaway driver, the grandparents, and the baby were killed. The getaway driver was out on bail on weapon's charges, had a suspended license, and was under court order not to drive.
If you've been paying attention to any political issues in Canada you can see how this neatly ties together a bunch of hot topics into one incident. I have another:
In late 2022 a cement mixer in Berlin hit a female cyclist. The driver got out of his truck to check on the cyclist and was stabbed by a mentally ill homeless refugee. An ambulance arrived to transport the critically injured woman to the hospital, but on the way was stopped by climate protestors who had glued themselves to the road. The cyclist died but the truck driver survived.
I sort of remember when the Berlin incident was discussed here. It seems that it was not going to be culture war fodder at all without the climate protestors added to the mix. I can imagine the local rightist opposition, to the meagre extent it even exists, would have still tried to turn it into a scandal, but which leftist is going to question the victim status of an almost murdered trucker who wanted to assist a female cyclist (so presumably a leftist voter/sympathizer) after accidentally running her over, warm feelings toward both the homeless and refugees notwithstanding?
To the extent that the flames of the culture war were being fanned in this case, I reckon 95% of it was due to the climate protestors doubling down in characteristic fashion, and explaining, with their usual mix of complete cynicism and complete idealism, that of course public protests entail negative consequences stemming from the disruption of traffic, dumbass!
That's a great way of putting it. My least favorite arguments I've had with the woke are the ones in which my opponent argues in this way as an attempt to excuse their worst aspects, like "every movement bends the truth, it doesn't make social justice bad just because we lie, too" or "so what if the woke encourages nosy busybodies and wokescolds? The conservatives do it, too". I've never known how to argue back other than just insisting that they should be better than stooping to low techniques then making excuses.
It's like when Greta Thunberg appeared in the media.
A [Quasi-normie leftist activist climate warrior soyboy]: OMG LOOK AT THIS STUNNING AND BRAVE YOUNG LADY! SO FIERCE! SHE'S NOT AFRAID TO STAND IN FRONT OF THE MIC AND MAKE HERSELF HEARD! YOU GO GRRL! STICK IT TO THE SYSTEM!
B [Average normie NPC griller]: "But dude, wait, it says in this article here that some handler wrote the speech for her, it was all pre-planned, rehearsed beforehand..."
A: WELL DUH, DUMBASS! WHAT DID YOU EXPECT?! IT'S COMPLETELY NORMAL FOR A PUBLIC FIGURE TO HAVE HER STAFF PREPARE SPEECHES FOR HER, AND REHEARSE THEM AND CAREFULLY PREPARE FOR THEM! IT'S ALL ABOUT YOUR IMAGE AND MAKING AN IMPRESSION! EVERYBODY DOES IT LIKE THIS! THAT'S HOW IT GOES EVERYWHERE!
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This looks similar to arguments I've had with myself as someone who used to be "woke" before the term was popularized ("social justice warrior" was the common term back then), and hashing out the argument was one of the many factors that got me to abandon the ideology.
On lies, it took very little thinking to recognize that lying is a habit that one can get into that's very difficult to turn on and off at will, especially since it's often difficult even to recognize when one is lying. This goes even more for lies that one tells oneself, which is by far the most common kind of lie and the most difficult lie to avoid telling even under the best circumstances and with the purest of intentions. It's also difficult to recognize which ideology is better than others if your beliefs are based on lies; as such, if I want what's best for the world rather than merely my team winning, then that means choosing the best ideology on the basis of an honest assessment of the facts and truth. But if I make it a habit to lie to others for the sake of convenience, then it'd be easy for me to unintentionally lie to myself for the sake of convenience, e.g. I could lie to myself that this ideology that happens to be popular among my peers and happens to give me social status for overtly supporting also happens to be the best or most correct ideology - what a convenient universe for me this is, that these characteristics happen to coincide in this one ideology! It also raises questions about how I was won over to the ideology, and whether those were based on lies that other follower of the ideology decided was convenient to tell to me for the sake of recruiting another follower - questions that can only be answered by taking a brutally honest look at the actual underlying reality, and that brutal honesty only comes about by making honesty a habit, which obviously includes doing so towards one's ideological opponents.
Unfortunately, I don't see this as being possible when a third party is involved, because the ideology is so hardened against external (and internal as well) scrutiny that only scrutiny that comes from an internal desire to get things right can survive long enough to actually have any effect. I think there are right wing parallels, such as some Christians dismissing some arguments as literally satanic, or Islam allowing for dishonesty towards non-Muslims as a way to win them over, but these are explicitly faith-based religions where the followers openly acknowledge that the reason they chose their team is faith. This is contrast to modern progressive idpol, whose followers claim to genuinely believe that they figured out the correct (or, at least more correct than the others) ideology through non-faith-based means. Genuinely believing this while also intentionally corrupting one's ability to discern lies from truth - and more generally abiding by the intentional corrupting of this ability in the followers of this ideology - seems like cognitive dissonance. Which, again, just doesn't seem possible to penetrate as a third party. Without the genuine will to actually figure out what the best ideology is for the world, most people will be happy enough to lie to themselves that the ideology they like also happens to be the one that is the best one for the world. Again, not lying to oneself that way is hard enough even under the best circumstances and with the purest of intentions.
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I think there's a simpler option here. If you get popped with an illegal weapon on you (and you haven't somehow victimized a Canadian in the process), just instant deportation. Why put them in prison? Just kick them out of the country, done.
Maybe there’s a problem with repatriation? I don’t actually know if countries have to accept criminals if they’re originally citizens.
When I was a young SWO on deployment to the Horn of Africa for anti-piracy operations, we regularly came upon skiffs in open waters with a dozen Somalis crammed on. We'd drive our big warship close, then our VBSS team would take a RHIB over to see what they were doing. They always had one or two fishing poles and a few rotten fish aboard, having jettisoned their weapons as soon as they saw our big warship approaching. "We're fishermen" they'd tell us through a translator, in open ocean on a 12-foot boat with 20 men onboard. Well, one day one group of Somalis decided that they were not going to jettison their weapons, and instead opened fire on one of the ships in our ARG. They launched at least one RPG and somehow completely missed the giant, boxy, unmoving ship that was right next to them. The VBSS team shot them until they surrendered. We zip tied the Somalis, brought them onboard, and gave them a fair bit of medical care (and not just for the holes we'd seen fit to add to a few of them). So now we had these Somalis onboard, locked in our medical spaces (because while the US Navy apparently takes inspiration from jails when designing their berthing, they don't actually make any of those rooms secure for holding criminals). This was back when the US didn't recognize Somalia as a country, so our State Department was having the darndest time figuring out what to do with these guys. We drove around for a week, maybe more, before a deal was brokered to give them to Yemen. They were dropped off and (according to the scuttlebutt) promptly executed.
This was almost 20 years ago, and I still think about it regularly. Should it have gone different, from the moment the Somalis surrendered? Would have been a lot cheaper and easier to have just shot them all there and sunk their skiff, with the same outcome. But that's morally wrong, and not in keeping with the rules of war. We shouldn't've given them to Somalia; they're not a real country (still aren't, IMO) and they government would most likely use the pirates' lives to extort bribes from whatever warlords or families they could, and then free or execute them (flip a coin). We shouldn't've put them into an American jail or Gitmo because they weren't worth it.
The conclusion I keep reaching is that the Somalis (and, to bring it back to the point at hand, immigrant criminals) are a time when "don't flip the switch in the trolley problem" is the best answer. We can know that the "justice" they'll face in their homeland (or Yemen) will probably be unjust, but it's not us doing it and that absolves us of some of the moral responsibility - enough to make it the least shitty of a bunch of shitty choices. We remove them from our control and return them to a place where a government will claim jurisdiction over them, and if that government doesn't afford all the legal protections that we do for our citizens, well... that's on their government. And I know there would be extreme cases when we shouldn't give them over to the other government, like shipping our Jews off to the Nazis or our Lienz Cossacks to the Soviets (oops). But those seem like the extreme cases. As a rule, I think "make the other country deal with their citizens" is the right answer. Our State Department has the power to make every country on Earth do that, assuming we have the political willpower. I worked closely with the State Department later in my career, and there is no doubt in my mind that they're capable of brokering that deal. If the US is ever told by another country that they won't take possession of their citizens who have committed crimes in the US, it is only because the US State Department has decided against spending the effort/money to convince the other country.
I mean, to put the greatest possible stress on this policy... returning escaped German Jews to Nazi Germany: moral? I mean, sure you have to say that "actually, the Holocaust is morally wrong --" but then you get into hot water along the lines of - well, is killing pirates morally wrong? If yes, what's the difference? If no, why not do it yourself? I guess one would have to say that killing criminals is wrong, but it's the sort of wrong that states may disagree about, as opposed to genociding innocents?
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Why is executing pirates unjust?
Se my other comment for specifics on this particular incident, but in that sentence I was trying to speak more generally about how another country's court would rule compared to the US courts. I was thinking of things like death penalties for non-capital crimes, lack of due process, punishment for political or religious crimes, etc.
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Wait, what? Summary execution is what you do to pirates; that's been universally true for centuries!
I'm not saying that the piracy example necessarily extends to other crimes (usually no), but piracy is the worst example possible for this case, because of the very very long history of it being first on the list of scenarios justifying summary execution.
You raise good points (here and below), and I'm sorry I glossed over that part. I tried not to let the real story get too much in the way of the one I was telling, but I forgot that this is the sort of forum where I can't get away with that.
This occurred back in 2005-2006: hunting Somali pirates before hunting Somali pirates was cool. Our ARG was initially deployed for OPLAT (oil platform) Defense over by the Gulf of Oman, but there were a few hijackings and we were redirected to the East coast of Somalia. Back then Somali piracy was in its infancy, and the world hadn't really reacted. International Maritime Law on piracy wasn't prepared for their tactics, and our JAG plus his more senior lawyer bosses ashore gave us some pretty shitty conclusions about what we could and couldn't do legally. We couldn't do anything to the skiffs while they were just driving around because as much as we knew they were pirates, the JAGs didn't believe the USA could prove it. They always claimed they were fishermen. After a hijacking, it was a civil issue between the ship owners and the pirates. We were only able to actually treat them like pirates if we caught them in the act of piracy, which of course we never did because, see ref A, we were a big warship that could be seen from 15 nautical miles away. Anyways, we had at least 1 large maritime vessel hijacked while we were in the area, and we couldn't do anything about it other than watch. I heard that got the ball rolling on actually updating the international laws (or, perhaps, the US Military's creative interpretation of those laws) so the US could actually do something about the pirates, but I never did much followup to check because I was never out on anti-piracy operations again. The Navy did send me back to the Horn of Africa for other stuff (such a shitty part of the world), but that's completely unrelated.
So who we caught, according to our JAG, was not a group of pirates. They were a group of fishermen who fired small arms and an RPG at a US Naval Vessel. Maybe I was wrong to mention "rules of war" since they weren't uniformed combatants, but we don't kill people who have surrendered and don't pose any more threat to us. After lots (lots) of training on the lawful use of deadly force, my gut tells me that shooting them all and sinking their skiff after they threw down their weapons would have gotten everyone a court martial. I can't cite which specific way they'd be charged, though. It's been too long, and at the time I was a lowly JO who wasn't privy to the actual JAG opinions or conversations about it.
Captains get a lot of leeway in judicial decisions on their ships, but they are generally smart enough to listen to their JAG, and JAG said no keelhauling. So the fishermen/pirates got about 10 days of excellent medical care, good food, comfortable beds, (relative to Somalia) and then were promptly executed by Yemen.
Indeed, I don't doubt that your general understanding of the situation was on point; I just wanted to clarify that the rules you were following were immediately based in the UCMJ and the relevant ROEs for your situation, not the international treaties and conventions concerning actions in war.
I think this is an important distinction because I've found that many people think the Convention-based laws of war are vastly more restrictive than they actually are, and this sometimes undermines the persuasive authority of those agreements. In actual fact, they are much more modest and practical documents that drew a great deal from the brutal lessons taught in the World Wars.
Relatedly, I think a lot of people don't understand just how much more constraining the UCMJ and many ROEs are compared to the international Conventions, in terms of permissible actions by members of the US armed forces. US military discipline is due nearly entirely to internal controls, and those controls could be relaxed a great deal before running afoul of those international agreements. I'd prefer it if we didn't need to explore that space, but it is available.
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I think it's a good idea not to execute surrendering combants because otherwise they'd be incentivized to keep fighting until their last breath. I'd be happy to see all pirates executed, but you have to consider the incentives involved. Similar to how if a terrorist holds an innocent hostage and demands a $10k ransom, even if you very much think the hostage's life is worth $10k, you might want to "not negotiate with terrorists" because the terrorist will just keep taking hostages as long as you pay for hostages.
I should probably clarify my argument; what you're offering here is policy reasons against the summary execution of pirates--which is fair enough, but not completely on point to my objection.
@ares claimed that summarily executing the pirates would have been 1) morally wrong, and 2) not in keeping with the rules of war. These are two distinct claims.
In response to 1), I am pointing out that summary execution of pirates was historically a universal practice. That doesn't make it right--slavery was also universally practiced, and also wrong--but you need to show your work in dismissing it. Your own arguments about incentives would be relevant to a consequentialist moral analysis, but not to other systems. Even in a consequentialist frame, @ares makes several good points about the thorny issues of how to handle pirates otherwise.
In response to 2), the laws of war, expressed in documents like the Geneva or Hague Conventions, don't apply. Pirates are by tradition "outlaw," and may be exterminated wherever found, in time of peace or war alike. They are by definition non-state actors, as distinct from privateers, who have an official state patron (generally via a letter of marque and reprisal) but are not a part of that state's uniformed military.
Executing pirates may well be contrary to US military policy, expressed through the UCMJ and various theater rules of engagement, but those judgments should not be confused with unsupported moral claims or general appeals to "the rules of war."
I'd agree to all that.
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A warship almost certainly had the ability to sink their crappy wooden boat before they could surrender.
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Generally agreed. We certainly have the ability. I assume there is some sort of treaty with each (functional) country. It’s devilishly hard to search, though.
Good story, by the way.
Thanks. A military career is good for, if nothing else, giving you a good story or two to tell.
Hard to search if you want to get it right. I can imagine a State Department convincing some Central or South American country to accept all immigrant criminals of uncertain Hispanic nationality in exchange for a few hundred million dollars of "humanitarian aid", or whatever euphemism we want to use. "Oh, my dear illegal immigrant rapist, you refuse to tell us your citizenship? Off to an El Salvadorian jail, then." A State Department (under the Executive branch, remember) that is not doing this must think it's not worth doing. I've had this thought in the back of my mind during all the politicking on immigration.
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We don't have any obligation to keep them from being executed by their home country under other circumstances. Requiring that we keep them from being executed if they commit crimes against us is Copenhagen ethics.
I don't disagree with you, but I feel like you're glossing over the parts that make this a complicated issue. Extradition treaties are complex, and don't exist between all countries. In many cases I'm glad that the more-free West can be a sanctuary for political "criminals" from the East. If Yeonmi Park jay walks, I don't want her sent back to North Korea to be executed, and I'd go so far as to say that yes, we do have an obligation to not send her back. But if she murdered someone in a State without the death penalty, should we put her in jail for life? What if it's reckless homicide? Or a refuge whose political persecution is less clear? I don't know where the lines should be drawn, and would love a good mistake-theory discussion about it. What we seem to get from the US government, though, is conflict-theory soundbites arguing for all-or-nothing solutions.
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They’re sometimes bound to do so by treaty, but they frequently don’t IIRC. Nobody actually wants criminals hanging around their country, after all. I think there’s been cases of the US paying big bucks to convince various foreignstans to accept their own citizens back.
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If he was driving an Uber, he wasn't collecting benefits, he was working. Does Uber collect payroll taxes?
No, their drivers are all considered independent contractors. A driver's supposed to pay the payroll taxes himself when he files income taxes.
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If you emigrate to a country at the age of (say) 61, you are almost certainly going to be a net drain on that country's resources for far longer than you will be a positive contributor, even if you work for a few years.
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Mass immigration as a policy rests on a tripod of supporting interests: 1. disinterested economics and demographic realism (or academic dogma posing as such); 2. ethnic hate of/guilt by native populations combined with charity towards foreign populations; and 3. high-middle-low factionalism to gain votes/a client class for the current ruling elite.
In different parts of the online right, it's fashionable to speculate that one of these is the "true" reason, and the others merely a facade or pablum for useful idiots. In reality, the technocratic center-left is not a monolithic. Each leg is true reason for different parts of the governing coalition. The current policy is a negotiation between their interests, and its "illogic" is an illusion born of your assuming a primary motivation.
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Family reunification in Canada requires that the sponsor vouches that they can financially support the sponsored immigrant and that they will not need to ask for social assistance for 3 years. They check that the sponsor is in good enough financial health to support them. If they do ask for social assistance, the government can ask the sponsor to reimburse it.
I mean, it's not perfect, but it's not like no one though of this problem.
This is all sensible, except:
3 is wildly low. If I had to make up a number I'd go for at least as long as it would take for them to qualify for citizenship. I'd start around 15 years.
That's for a spouse, the situation I'm familiar with. I checked again, and for parents and grandparents, the sponsor vouches for 20 years (except in Quebec where it's 10 years).
The number would be 3 years then. The requirement to qualify is being a permanent resident and having lived in Canada for 3 years in the last 5 years.
Okay. 3 years to be eligible for permanent residency and then Google says 5 more to be further eligible for citizenship. So 8 years from stepping foot in Canada to possibly getting citizenship.
I would have gone with 8 then. But they went with the time to permanent residency.
No, how long before you get permanent residency is dependent on what pathway you're using. My wife visited as a tourist before we started the permanent residency process, but she never actually lived here officially until she got it. Technically you don't even need to have been in Canada. You're eligible for citizenship 3 years after having started living in Canada, and once you are a permanent resident. So you could even count, for instance, years spent as a temporary resident with a student or work visa before you got permanent residency.
https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/canadian-citizenship/become-canadian-citizen.html
I see. That's not quite what Google told me, but Google is only approximately accurate.
So that means someone could become a Canadian citizen with a grand total of 3 years in Canada. Which sounds really, really low. It's five years in the US after attaining permanent residency. Which is also rather low in my opinion.
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I would guess there's a lot more sponsored immigrants that are/will be economically productive (spouses and children) than there are elderly sponsored immigrants, making it not worth writing an exception around, especially when there's a pretty compelling compassionate reason to allow the relatively few cases.
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Unfortunately, I think this runs into the same sort of issues that the foreign student process does.
For anyone who isn't aware, Canada requires that foreign students demonstrate that they have enough money to support themselves for the time that they enrolled. It sounds like a good plan, but:
My concern with the grandparents is that "supporting" their grandparents does not actually reflect all the services that they consume (healthcare, primarily), and even if it did, the government isn't going to do anything about it.
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This is about Canada, not the US.
Disclaimer: I've used family reunification sponsorship to help my wife move to live with me here. But she's not elderly, she's from a western country and she will contribute to society.
But anyway. I don't think it needs to be steelmanned: it's pretty obviously a nice thing to allow people to move in to live with their family. I think it's up to the other side to demonstrate that we cannot afford it.
I'm not saying that they cannot make that case. Chain migration exists. But I would be more in favor of slowing chain migration at the source, taking it as a granted that an economic migrant is likely a beachhead for a larger group, and thus being (A LOT) more selective in allowing them in. This, rather than disallowing family reunification, which has a clearer case of being a pro-social, pro-human justification for immigration.
*EDIT: Though I guess I'm open to some changes to family reunification. I'd be open to increase the delay between immigration and being able to sponsor. I think now it's 5 years from the moment you become a permanent resident. Maybe 10 years after becoming citizen? Long enough that anyone planning on chain migration will probably look somewhere else, unless they have extreme patience. I don't know how the pathways for immigration are for an extended family group, maybe these need to be developped/improved so a prospective immigrant and all the family he wants to bring to Canada can all attempt to immigrate together, so they can't then complain that it's inhumane and evil that we won't allow all the cousins to move in with them after we accepted one of them.
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When protestors started using the roads, I came up with the idea of making roads (outside of crosswalks) open range cars. Meaning you can do what you want but if a car hits you not only is the car not liable for any damage done to you are liable for the damage any damage you do to the car. That remains true even if the car speeds up or aims for you. The car has a priority right to use the road, and other users must yield to that right or bear the consequences.
And people say the U.S. is too car-centric!
This would be a terrible policy. People already burn their cars for insurance fraud. This adds an obvious incentive to cause personal injuries while you’re at it.
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This seems like it would have horrendous unintended consequences, in a way ‘the police beat morons who decide to glue themselves to the street and haul them off’ doesn’t. It also seems no more likely:
If only the police were actually beating morons who decide to glue themselves to the street.
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To keep such a system fair, you would also need a lot more crosswalks perhaps one every 50 meters in dense cities. As others have implied, you would have to sacrifice one lane per side plus change for parking so that drivers can get out of their car without stepping out onto the death zone. Or you just make parking on the side of the road illegal.
I think the result would be rather hellish for drivers.
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That seems like a lot of side effects for something that doesn't happen that often.
Places with no cross walks? Places with no sidewalks so people have to walk on the road? Places where people have obstructed the sidewalk by parking on it? The fact people have to get out of cars onto the road when parking or when getting into their car?
Not to mention how it allows you to murder someone just by waiting nearby until they walk into the road to get into their car. Shoulda yielded to me! I was in a car, he wasn't! Sure he was about to get into a car, but he wasn't actually in one! Yeah I aimed for him, waited for him and accelerated to 80mph but so what?
Just like now they drivers would have to look before opening their door. Pedestrians would still be allowed to use roads, in all the ways they currently do (even protesting) they just bear all the liability if they get hit outside of a cross walk.
But if I do look, open my door step out and you deliberately speed up to hit me, I still take the liability seems entirely unworkable.
Because now, we have legalized tit for tat, you hit me, if I survive I wait outside your house and wait for you to try and get into your car and hit you.
Its entirely unworkable.
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Agreed. I think culpability should be assigned on a case by case basis. Someone jumps off a highway bridge in front of a moving truck, you can hardly blame the truck for not going slow enough so that it could come to a stop within a meter. Someone went 50km/h in a 30km/h zone and runs over some kid? Whole different story.
That…isn’t that how it already works? It’s definitely true for speeding and vehicular manslaughter sentencing. I don’t really want to spend my afternoon looking for overpass suicides, but I would not expect the truck to be blamed in that scenario, either.
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That takes a sort of good thing and goes too far and makes it a bad thing. I jaywalk all the time. Usually with the flow of traffic which makes things way more efficient (pedestrians crossing opportunistically means you don’t need 40 seconds of pausing the road for them to cross).
Your idea would make it legal for the car to speed up and kill me while driving outside of the flow of traffic conditions. Also would provide no zone of safety if I make a mistake. This applies to cars too. If I accidentally pull out in front of you it’s better you brake than have a right to ram my car.
More broadly this applies to all sorts of things. If someone in a business deal has their lawyer make a mistake in the other sides favor is it better to bankrupt the guy or adjust the contract. Maybe for the other side it’s even more profitable to burn the guy but for society as a whole it’s better to adjust and continue with the deal providing a good/service for society. In business deals like this if you always chose short term gain it would mean all deals needs more lawyers for longer contracts detailing every possibility and more eyes to catch mistakes. But lawyers overall are a negative sum game as they costs money and produce nothing.
Of course in many ways these protestors who glue themselves are shitting on the commons. We won’t run them over because saving ourselves 2 hours isn’t worth killing them just like it’s not worth killing a pedestrian who fell into the street when you could have just breaks. Yes the pedestrian is an annoyance to you and costs you 10 seconds and the pedestrian is in the wrong but the commons are that everyone is sometimes partially in the wrong and inflicting maximize damage on them for a small gain to yourself doesn’t benefit the whole of society.
For the protestors though you could argue running one over when they are costing 300k people one hour or like 13k days gets close to being net efficient.
Car collisions would remain case by case. Only pedestrians would be liable by default.
That’s just an example. You are still proposing something radical to deal with protestors blocking roads that would apply to a pedestrian tripping and falling into the street. Just legalizing murder for a death that could be avoided.
There is a much simpler solution. Give the protestors 5 year jail sentences.
And since no one with power is even willing to hand out 5 year jail sentences, how is it remotely possible that a bill allowing drivers to hit pedestrians would ever be passed? The reason the protestors get away with it is that the powers that be are generally sympathetic to, if not outright supportive of, the protestors and their cause. The minute an anti-immigrant group tried the same tactic, the police and courts would magically stiffen their resolve and start handing out the lengthiest sentences permitted by law. It’s all “who, whom.”
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So you're free to kill jaywalkers like you're in the purge? I see a lot wrong with this view. Any deviation from lawful norms should not be death. How about if a kid wanders into a neighborhood road after a ball? Free to run him down on purpose?
"I'm going to run over children and make the families pay me for the privilege!" seems like a bad platform to run for office on.
We're all in this life together. I only live every day because some asshole doesn't decide to cross the center line on my commute and kill us both at a combined speed of 120 mph. We live by the grace of others. Always.
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Shiri's Swiss Army knife.
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Some comedians were complaining about how the world is impossible to parody nowadays, but this is taking it to a whole new level. I mean... I can keep adding layers, but it's not going to push it from "real news" to satire...
The beats of these two stories are basically structured like bad late-night TV jokes. Like you can imagine Jay Leno saying "Hey folks, you heard this story about the Indian getaway driver?"
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