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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7845 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 19, 2025

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I'm pretty late to the party on discussing the Ashli Babbitt shooting, but I now get my chance, because the Trump administration is going to pay $5 million to her family. (Archived link.)

I once discussed January 6th with a conservative in real life, and his stance was that the Ashli Babbitt shooting was an example of police brutality. He said that she was issued no warnings at all before being shot, and she wasn't directly threatening anyone's life. Taking a look at the footage, I don't know how she would have been warned at a volume that she could hear, and any of the police with rifles would have been jeopardizing their own safety and the safety of the other officers to lower their rifles and physically restrain her. I think the barricaded door and the cops with guns trained on the entrance should have been enough to signal that breaking through would be a bad idea. Given all these circumstances, I think that awarding $5 million to her family is a stupid thing to do. Add it to the pile of other conflict-theory-esque actions that make this presidency a seriously mixed bag for me. regrettable. Sometimes settlements are the cheapest thing for suits.

Ashli Babbit is a national martyr with several movies about her if she's left-identifying and the exact same sequence of events happens. I don't think the shoot was necessarily unjustified but the optics were poor.

Apologies for what seems even to me an asinine comment but I think 'left-identifying' would be a helpful hyphen in this sentence.

Yes, I was like "left identifying what, and why did she in particular need to identify it?" until I read it a second time.

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