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Notes -
Two National Guardsman shot in DC.
Situation is still developing... conflicting reports about deaths. Trump has already requested 500 more guardsmen to be deployed in the capital. I'm afraid that any commentary on my part will be pure speculation: I'll edit this OP as more information comes to light. Apologies for the shortness of this initial post.
I would expect ICE to be shot at, especially during active operations: but the National Guard? They're literally doing nothing but stand around. They're dads and uncles pulling overtime shifts away from their real jobs, not stormtroopers. I'm highly suspecting some sort of mental illness or dumb radicalization, but I'll refrain on coming to conclusions for now.
Edit 1: Suspect has been identified as Rahmanullah Lakanwal, a Afghan national evacuated back in 2021.
Edit 2: Speculatively, a linkedin profile of the same name seems to point him as being connected to a bunch of American NGOs. I'm always skeptical of these - the world is big enough for strangers to have the same names - but the face on the profile seems to match the suspect.
Or perhaps I don't have an eye for Afghans, and they all look the same to me.
Afghan national
We now have a new addition to the list embarrassingly wrong Scott Alexander quotes:
These guys were our friends in a war zone so they must make for great neighbors.
Whilst I understand the fuzzy feels of helping those who help you, one would have preferred a sort of quarantine zone or special village for the empires mercenaries.
That being said, I think it's harsh to call Scott embarrassingly wrong based on these events in specific and that quote in particular. For starters, I'm not sure it's fair to assume any hardline position on small scale Afghani immigration based on the quote. He's talking about something else, no?.
But assuming he is, the awful performance of Afghani immigrants in Europe is a fact. So one could perhaps call him naïve on the topic of Afghani 'assimilation' if he can't imagine a reason to be against importing a fair number of them.
Afghan immigrants in Europe are mostly refugees who used the people-trafficker network to arrive overland. It is conventional wisdom in Frontex that various hostile countries, including Russia and Belarus, are intentionally facilitating refugee transit in order to destabilise the EU.
That is a differently selected group than people flown out of Afghanistan because they convinced US authorities that they were collaborators at risk of Taliban reprisal, and expecting different outcomes as a result isn't foolish. I don't know enough about the behaviour of Afghan immigrants in the US to know to what extent you are getting better results than us. One guy turning out to be a disorganised Islamist killer is weak Bayesian evidence that you are not, of course.
I mean Afghanis who speak english well enough to pose as translators are a very selected group.
They only have to speak Pashto better than Americans and to speak English better than other locals. That's two bars that are not very hard to clear.
They could very well turn out to be useful. I have a couple friends who are Middle Eastern (Iraqi-) Americans that I’ve known since childhood. They once told me they laughed pretty hard when they watched Zero Dark Thirty and asked why the scenes had Pakistanis speaking Arabic. It’s one of the ways Americans don’t understand other cultures.
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If the 'translators' shoot at police / guardsman does it matter if they're doing it for Islamic reasons and / or mental health reasons?
There was bodcam footage of the one from earlier im the year. https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/northern-virginia/fairfax-police-release-body-cam-video-of-police-shooting-in-greenbriar/3921110/
No - of course it doesn't. I don't even think it is always a distinction with a difference - given the total ineffectiveness of disorganised political violence I assume anyone engaging in it is batshit until proven otherwise.
I was wondering if your Afghan refugees (who are weakly selected) behave better than European Afghan refugees (who are not selected at all) - the point I was making is that you really need statistics to settle this question rather than dualling anecdotes.
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