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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   32698 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026

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On the purely linguistic side of the Minneapolis shooting (which looks as a totally intentional assassination by ICE to me) and the media reports on it. Does anyone, like me, feel puzzled from the naturalness and ease that media use when they talk about (the unjustly and brutally killed) Renee Good's "wife"? It's the same strange feeling I get when I read the online discussions on the PLURIBUS tv series and the first episode in which the female protagonist's "wife" is killed. What I find strange is the absolute nonchalance that is used in media to describe the partner of a woman as her "wife". The grumpy conservative in me would like to say: "No, no, no! She is a partner. She is a significant other. She is a lover. She is everything but she isn't a "wife". The word "wife" has a very different meaning!". Of course this is a tiny minority position: I understand that the zeitgeist, today, has completely normalized the use of the word "wife" to describe a woman who is sentimentally joined with another woman. But still I find a sense of uneasiness when I hear such uses of the "wife" word...

  • -39

This feels close enough to trolling and one of your few previous posts was also trolling. And this gives off alt account vibes. Permaban, unless other mods care to speak on your behalf.

It's clearly trolling IMO. Obvious enough that people shouldn't be replying to it.

The gay marriage debate was always built around forcing society to give gay unions as much respect and reverence as regular marriage. It's stolen valour. If they want those unions to be respected then they should prove it through example that they are serious partnerships meant to last for life. They know about the instability and promiscuity rife in gay relationships and the big question marks hanging over child rearing by gay parents, but want you to ignore all that because there are laws telling you to do so. You're meant to pretend its the same as an institution with more than 4000 years of history behind it.

Edit: Should make it clear I'm all for equal legal rights in gay unions. I'm just against calling it marriage.

I think this is a mistake. Marriage is about conferring status to a couple who will copulate. It should only happen in the context of a serious relationship but the primary thing is child rearing.

Giving the same status to people who a priori cannot procreate ignores the telos of marriage and lowers the status of procreation.

Well, that's the point that social conservatives want to resist, no?

(I am deliberately making no further comment on the OP and definitely no comment on ICE or immigration. I am mainly just refreshed to have a good old-fashioned debate about marriage and sexuality, as if it were the early 2010s again.)

Obviously the point of using wife/wife or husband/husband language by default, and of getting everybody to use the word 'marriage' to include registered same-sex couples by default, is to cement the idea that these are the same as traditional marriage. The endgame of the movement for same-sex marriage was the idea that same-sex couples are, as much as is possible, literally the same as opposite-sex couples, and therefore should be treated the same way - in law, yes, but also in language and in social recognition. I can't begrudge a progressive for holding that position, but at the same time, I don't think you can begrudge a social conservative taking the opposite position.

A social conservative, given their position on marriage, has an entirely understandable desire to clearly disambiguate same-sex relationships (even vowed, legally-recognised same-sex relationships) from marriage. The government can say "we call these same-sex partnerships marriage", but the social conservative position is that the government is simply wrong. The government can pass a law calling a deer a horse, but that doesn't make it so; marriage is no different. The conservative would then feel a moral obligation to stick to using language that they understand to be truthful. It's no different to somebody here stubbornly referring to Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner as 'he', no matter what Jenner's official papers say.

Tongue in cheekly, I'm not taking gay marriage seriously until your wife takes the kids and starts milking you for a percentage of your salary.

OP is talking about a lesbian relationship. Lesbian relationships tend to be monogamous and serious. They report lower infidelity rates than straight marriages and have a predisposition towards commitment.

By your standard, why shouldn't lesbian relationships qualify for marriage status ?

Because marriage is between a man and a woman straight up. Happy for them to have equal legal protection.

Don't they also have staggeringly high rates of domestic abuse? Though it wouldn't shock me if that were just an artifact of women being more likely to report domestic abuse and thereby the two-women relationship being more likely to report it.

I thought that this was an artifact of how the survey supposedly finding this was conducted, ie. they asked about domestic general in general, during a woman's lifetime, and then this was represented as abuse within current relationship, ignoring cases where women turn towards exclusively dating women in part because they've been with so many abusive men in the past.

Even wiki seems to suggest that experience of intimate partner violence goes gay men (26%) < straight men (29%) < straight women (35%) < bisexual men (37%) < lesbians (43%) < bisexual women (61%).

That's an odd, relatively unintuitive result, to me. Men are usually established to be more physically violent than women, which would suggest that relationships with men in them ought to be the most violent. It sounds like, though, male-male relationships are the least violent, and female-female the most. The gap between straight women and straight men is perhaps attributable to men being more violent, but then what's going on with lesbians?

Part of it may be that women are just more likely to report violence, yes. Another may be different patterns in forming relationships - as the commenter one post up notes, lesbians are the demographic most likely to commit to a relationship early, whereas gay men are the slowest. Perhaps lesbians are therefore more likely to get into a foolish or inadvisable relationship, run on to the rocks, and end up facing violence? Sexual culture more generally may play a role - you might expect more promiscuous groups to encounter more violence, but that's counter-intuitive with gay men, by reputation the most promiscuous group, encountering the least. And something very disturbing seems to be happening with bisexual women.

Different types of violence may count differently - my understanding is that while men are more likely to be physically violent, women are usually more likely to be emotionally abusive, so if emotional or lifestyle abuse counts as violence on that study, that might be raising the figure? However, the wiki page I linked says 43.8% of lesbians reported "physical violence, stalking, or rape", and even with only two-thirds of that being exclusively female perpetrators, that's still pretty bad. Even if we consider the possibility that lesbians who have dated men are victims of male-originated violence at disproportionately high rates, female-on-lesbian violence is still unusually high.

I don't have enough to state a conclusion here, and I'm naturally somewhat skeptical of the way Wikipedia frames these results. So I'll just say that I don't know what's going on with sexual orientation and domestic violence. These figures are striking enough that it sure looks like orientation is a factor, but it's nothing so clear as "men/women/straights/gays are more violent".

I worked as a bouncer through college and for a few years afterwards. I took a lot of shifts at the nearby LGBT+ night club as the pay was better and it was not any worse than anywhere else, though the dangers were...different. I made a lot of friends there too. I can't help with stats on this stuff at all, but I can share the sort-of popular, tribal understanding of these things from within part of the community. Its well understood within the LGB community that lesbians are hitters. They were also the most likely to attack the bar staff by a wide margin. In fact I'm pretty confident that all of the people we had to call the police on were lesbians, they were definitely all women, some could have been bi. On the subject of bisexuals, they are often looked down upon by the Ls and Gs. I'm talking about people who actually experience genuine attraction to both sexes that they have acted on and continue to pursue, not self ID bisexuals who are straight in practice. They are seen as unreliable, undependable sex-addicts who lie constantly. Some parts of the community have significant anti-bisexual bias to the point of not allowing them in some clubs/events at all.

That's an odd, relatively unintuitive result, to me. Men are usually established to be more physically violent than women, which would suggest that relationships with men in them ought to be the most violent. It sounds like, though, male-male relationships are the least violent, and female-female the most. The gap between straight women and straight men is perhaps attributable to men being more violent, but then what's going on with lesbians?

I'd argue against this theory of men being more violent than women. They are more damaging if they are violent and they are less prone to injuries if assaulted by women, but it does not mean that women are not violent. You know, the how can she slap effect, when man using self defense is still the first one to be neutralized. You can easily show this on stats where men are not in the picture. For instance when it comes to abuse of children in their care, then mothers are far more abusive than fathers and the disparity is even larger if they are not biological parent of the child. The same goes when it comes to abuse of patients by nurses and many other cases when women can safely inflict physical abuse without risk of being confronted by men, including extreme ones like female Nazi concentration camp guards like Irma Grese, the Hyena of Auschwitz. So of course if they try the usual slapping and violent outburst shenanigans in same sex relationship, it does not fly as well especially as both of them can act as weak victims in front of the police.

In general, I think that women are actually much more callous and not at all the exemplars of fairer gender as they are portraited to be in women are wonderful reality distortion. If by any chance women could overpower men in violent confrontation, I think that they would be far, far more vicious and uncaring toward them.

Also, men who do have the most capacity to inflict damaging violence - taller, stronger, richer (easier to get away with it) - are ironically the most desired. "Short king" is still a backhanded "compliment". The evolutionary desire for superior genetics offset the fear of potential violence, I suppose.

For instance when it comes to abuse of children in their care, then mothers are far more abusive than fathers and the disparity is even larger if they are not biological parent of the child.

Those appear to be absolute figures - isn't an alternative explanation that single mothers are simply much more common than single fathers? Statista for 2024 gives us 15,720,000 single mother households versus 7,214,000 single father.

So if we have 189,635 cases of an abusive mother, and 125,493 with an abusive father, then that works out to 1.2% of single mother households being abusive, and 1.7% of single father households. That would seem to track with the stereotype of men being more violent.

I agree with you that we have to be careful of the women-are-wonderful effect here, and women have a tremendous capacity for violence and cruelty, but this particular figure doesn't seem to show that women are worse.

Where did you find information that this data is only about single parent households? In fact there is even better data in there, where women are more abusive compared to men if they are non-parent in the household by factor of almost 6.

I agree with you that we have to be careful of the women-are-wonderful effect here, and women have a tremendous capacity for violence and cruelty, but this particular figure doesn't seem to show that women are worse.

Women are way worse and my claim is that their violence is vastly underreported. We see these things only in extreme cases with violence against children and of course in same-sex relationships where there is no bias against men.

See my sibling comment.

Wikipedia is difficult in these topics as there are homophobic people wanting to slam dunk on the outgroup and homophilic sweeping inconvenient truths under the carpet.

I think we might have to thank men and their inability to respond in kind to psychological manipulation. Consider the following interaction:

  • Wife: "Honey, could you vacuum the house, please?"
  • Husband: "Sure, no problem, I'll get round to it before lunch"
  • Wife: starts vacuuming passively-aggressively

There are two likely outcomes:

  • Husband A: grabs the vacuum aggressively "Jesus fucking Christ, Janice! I've told you I would get round to it before lunch! You know I hate this passive-aggressive bullshit! Just say 'right now' next time, I'm not asking you to explain the whole day's schedule to me, but I'm not a fucking mind-reader!"
  • Husband B: "Huh, I guess she didn't need my help after all"

No abuse whatsoever.

  • Wife 1: "Honey, could you vacuum the house, please?"
  • Wife 2: "Sure, no problem, I'll get round to it before lunch"
  • Wife 1: starts vacuuming passively-aggressively
  • Wife 2: thinking "You think you can manipulate me this easily, huh? You think two can't play this game?" "Oh, honey, I am so sorry! Please let me do it! You should do less chores, you've been so tired lately you even washed my white Pima cotton t-shirt with your latest Temu 'haul'. No-no, it's okay, you know I love you, sweetheart, and nothing can change that"
  • Wife 1: thinking "Seriously? First you refuse to help me and then you start acting like a petty bitch? I'll have to teach you a lesson"

Bam, a cycle of psychological abuse.

I looked years ago into the studies, but the data is pretty bad. Alcoholism is also the main driver, so I would say there is a big class difference which can be more important. A below average working class couple who binge drink will use violence as conflict resolution more often, regardless if they are homo or hetero.

And while Gay men report lower rates of domestic abuse, there are many kitchen-psychology explanations for that:

  • Does “Mutual assured destruction” lower the value of violence? Is there a difference between twinks and bears?
  • Or do Gay men have non-jealous/non-monogamous and chill relationship norms which lowers conflict potential?
  • Or as men dislike seeing themselves as “victimized” and abused do gay domestic abuse victims just suffer in silence?

See here for a discussion: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskGayMen/comments/1dfkn7z/gay_men_in_relationships_have_the_lowest_rates_of/

Anecdotally, I’ve known many gay men who were and are in abusive relationships, especially in relationships with large age gaps. I find that in a lot of relationships involving a young man and older man, the younger man is often physically, emotionally, sexually, and/or financially abused. It happens far more frequently than anyone would like to admit.

And in lesbian relationships higher rate of reporting could be because butch women internalized toxic masculinity. Or the violence rate could be higher but less dangerous and more low key (like disrespecting shoving, instead of beating up into the hospital). Or is it just an artifact of self reporting and women “exaggerating” small slights?

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6113571/#B108

Moscati (2016) ..” The sample comprised 102 lesbian women, mostly Italian (88.2%). Participants answered a questionnaire containing 29 multiple-choice questions. In over one case out of five (20.6% of the total), the interviewee admitted to be afraid of her partner coming back home. Further, 41.2% of women occasionally hid something from their partners because they were afraid of their reactions. In addition, 14.7% of lesbian women declared that they were always afraid of their partners. Almost half of the interviewees identified the damage resulting from a couple fight as psychological; physical damage was reported by 5.9% of the interviewees (Arcilesbica, 2011).

Imagine a fifth of all relationships of your friends being build on fear! These numbers are so high though that I am sceptical.

Could be, but also women are statistically higher incidence of cluster B disorders and if you have two women in a relationship you stack that chance. Not sure if significant enough to account for that.

Ok, if we think ICE is going around calculatedly murdering people- why this one? AFAICT she was one protestor among many. There are many like it, this is the one unfortunate enough to drive her car directly at an ICE agent while being yelled at to stop.

Obviously, this partner isn't her wife; she has a husband, who she ditched out of ideologically induced mental illness. But getting mad over terminology is... well not exactly the most concerning part of this story, or even in the top ten.

Obviously, this partner isn't her wife; she has a husband

One report stated she had a husband, then they divorced (father of her first two kids), a second husband who died (father of her third kid, the one she was allegedly dropping off to school before the protest) and this current partner/wife.

Also, why do it in front of God and everybody (the shooter was both aware he was being filmed and apparently documenting it himself).

I think on balance if ICE agents wanted to assassinate people they would probably both preplan it (planning planning planning is a big thing in the US military and I think it's trickled down into law enforcement) and carefully control the media exposure around it, to say nothing of their own personal safety.

I would guess OP's position is likely that they are doing stochastic assassinations, or essentially taking any plausible opportunity to shoot people, under the guise of self-defense.

I would guess OP is a troll, actually.

What if she's the partner that stays home and tends to the house though?

> calls the ICE altercation an "assassination"

> doesn't like when lesbians call eachother "wife"

I'm very curious to see where you fall on the political compass

The Chad Centrist (all four quadrants at the same time)

We need more insane centrists. There is a Lyndon LaRouche shaped hole in the USA; schizo cult leaders with beliefs to offend both sides of the political compass need to run for president more often. The Cynthia McKinney/David Duke antisemitism conference(no, not conference on antisemitism, there is a difference) cannot replace it.

Is OP's combination of beliefs any weirder than the mainstream US political parties? It sounds like he's a religious conservative who also is skeptical of big government and the police state.

Congratulations on trying to get a fight going. "Just asking questions about the assassination - why are they referring to the murder victim's wife when both parties were women?"

And before that, casually referring to the "totally intentional assassination". This is old school trolling, the black-hearted darkness of the Elder Time, back when men just woke up and chose violence.

If you believe that everything that you don't like is "trolling", I envy you. I would LOVE to be so confident in my epistemic superpowers

  • -19

I believe that you're an aged-but-empty account that just posted a pparagraph that had incendiary flame-bait for both sides of the American political spectrum.

OTOH, you're throwing off clear ESL flags, so maybe you just genuinely didn't know how Americans would take that. My sincere apologies for accusing you of being a mildly clever member of my culture.

If they're a troll, they could be pretending to be "sorry non-native speaker here, no idea my totally innocent questions would come across like that" for deniability and the lulz (will the dupes swallow this as an excuse? how much can I get away with before the penny drops?)

Besides, dear Iconochasm, let us not be narrow-minded! ESL speakers can be trolls on English-language fora, too!

Didn't want to get no fight going. I just meant to point out that while linguistically and culturally, for my blaming of the use of the "wife" word in such context, I surely seem the over-conservative "red tribe" person, I am actually believing that the ICE shooter is unexcusable for what he did. So my position is a little bit more complex than "purely extra-conservative zealot" as I could seem for my linguistic idiosincracies

You misspelled "idiosyncrasy".

Also, trying to get a row started by both left and right by using "assassination" (to rile up the rightwingers) and "wife" (to rile up the leftwingers) in the same comment was a good attempt, but over-ambitious. Stick to one inflammatory statement at a time! Once the initial fire is successfully lit, you can then throw more fuel on the flames later.

How do you propose to describe a woman who has performed particular ceremonies to join herself to another woman, and obtained a certain legal status as a result, which entails certain rights and obligations? I'm not totally unsympathetic to the view you espouse (pun not intended), but substituting "partner" or "lover" wouldn't fit the bill. By Good's "wife" we do not simply mean a woman she loved very much and had sex with, we mean a woman who is legally entitled to her inheritance etc. The terms are not interchangeable.

I used the the word in some of my comments and later had the thought that I should have used "wife" (with quotes) instead. "Partner" alone without qualification is too vague. "Girlfriend" implies a level of casualness that may or may not be present.

I am grateful, in Australia, that we have normalised the word 'partner', and media tends to exclusively use that. It's gender-neutral and it covers both married and non-married couples.

It's also an out for people like me, who think that 'wife' implies 'husband', and 'husband' implies 'wife', and therefore is unwilling to use either word in the context of a same-sex partnership.

There is still something lost in translation to partner. It may capture modern secular view of marriage as something akin to business partnership in Family LLC, where both owners have 50% share and which can be ended any time at court, mostly in favor of female shareholder. Which is far from actual sacramental marriage that involves holy vows etc. But I agree. I can be "partner registered by government" in view of outside society and a husband in sacramental marriage with my wife in front of my community.

The normalization of "partner" also extends to heterosexual couples now, at least among my peers, which I find rather irritating.

Didn't it start off with heterosexual couples, though? People who were co-habiting but not married, especially if they had kids together, getting irritated about being treated as 'lesser' since they weren't married and "boyfriend/girlfriend are terms you use when you're kids, not when you're grown adults living together" and so on? Something the way Ms was adopted - if you use "partner" then that says nothing about your marital status and so you aren't being treated as in a less serious, committed relationship for lack of 'the piece of paper'.

Then using it for gay couples was more natural since they couldn't legally marry at the time, and it was a way of treating them in line with straight couples.

People have moved to using it all the time now, which was one point of contention in the "this is queer erasure" complaint post I saw elsewhere: she's her wife, not just her partner!

Think that’s a status thing. Wife/husband mean there is someone in this world who was willing to permanently vouch for you which is offensive or lowers the status of people who no one would do that for.

I also think an early sign of the coming fertility crash was eliminating Mrs. and everyone goes with Ms. That made being married with kids as having no special status in society. Having kids is work. Taking away status of having kids took away one of the big benefits of doing that. Women probably even care more about status than men and something as simple as everyone has to call you Mrs. and being above the Ms. in the social hierarchy is big.

Also the word "woman" comes from the Old English word, wífmon. Literally, "wife man," or transliterated as, "wifely person." The word wíf denoted female, reflecting the female social role.

Does (or did) Mrs have more status? If yes it should have survived and Miss would have been eliminated? The beauty contests are “Miss Universe/World” and I can see older women wanting longer the young/sexy status of their youth and being called Ms.

The rationale was that men get called "Mr." and that indicates nothing about their marital status, whereas women were discriminated against by means of "Are you Miss or Mrs?" So the idea was a general term equivalent to "Mr." for women.

I wasn't too keen on it, but over time I've come around because it is handy, in a work context, where you don't know if Mary Murphy is Mrs. Murphy or Miss Murphy when you're writing an official letter, so a neutral term avoids giving offence. (I tend to get official letters addressed to Mrs. My Surname, seemingly on the basis that a woman my age is surely married, but I've given up trying to get it corrected since I don't want to sound like a Dick Emery sketch).

Ironically, if you like, in previous centuries women were referred to as "Mrs." even if not married, since it was abbreviation of "Mistress" a term of respect/status for older women/women in charge of households/important or high-status women.

where you don't know if Mary Murphy is Mrs. Murphy or Miss Murphy when you're writing an official letter, so a neutral term avoids giving offence

I can see how this is annoying.

The annoyance part is my point. It was higher status to be a wife and mother than girl boss and being called Miss was low status above a certain age. This added a lot of pressure to have children so you could take the title of Mrs. which boost the fertility rate. Being called Miss above a certain age was basically being an incel.

I feel like the existing "de facto partner" help distinguish between 'wife'/'husband' and 'partner', government mostly just use partner as a result of trying not to discriminate de facto relationship compare to standard marriage

Here is the list of the topic of top level posts in this thread since the viral ICE shooting.

  1. Minneapolis
  2. Minneapolis
  3. Minneapolis
  4. Iran
  5. Minneapolis
  6. Minneapolis
  7. Greenland
  8. Venezuela
  9. Minneapolis10
  10. Doctor Toilet hookup
  11. Minneapolis

Seven out of Eleven posts and they're by far the largest threads. It's probably too late at this point but I'd like to suggest that in the future mods should exercise some judgement and make a megathread on events like this that are likely to generate a ton of back and forth discussion with an expectation of new information coming out over the course of days/weeks. Both because it is more convenient for the reader to be able to check a dedicated thread and because it makes it much easier to find the more general discussion for those of us who find the interesting angles of the subject to have already basically been exhausted.

It does feel a little weird to me that this case is getting so much attention. Like, sure, I get that it's a contraversial situation. But is it really so important that it pushes everything else out of the news? I feel like there's been a lot of big news this week- Venezuela, Cuba, Greenland, the Somali daycare fraud leading to Tim Walz cancelling his plans to run for re-election... This situation, while tragic, is hardly unprecedented. There have been heated protests against ICE going on for years now. Frankly, I've stopped caring. Whether the officer shot her in cold-blooded murder, or whether it was completely justified self-defense, or somewhere ambiguously in-between... I just don't even care anymore. ICE will continue, protests will continue, illegal immigration will continue, small numbers of deportations will continue, small numbers of people get shot every day, and nothing big ever changes.

It does feel a little weird to me that this case is getting so much attention.

Because the case isn't about the case. It's about the limits of law enforcement in the US and what measures are justifiable in the name of immigration enforcement.

I feel like there's been a lot of big news this week

These are all largely tractionless issues. What is there to discuss about foreign policy? Nobody has any real expectation that Congress has the will to hold Trump accountable for overreaching his authority, and in the meantime it's just arguing about which of the Mad King's rantings are babble and which are dire warnings.

Just shows how myopic Americans are, I guess. We really, truly, do not give a shit about other countries. One white woman getting shot in Minneapolis is more important than conquering a foreign country in South America and potentially taking over another one from Europe.

edit- and I forgot all about Iran! I don't claim to know much about the situation there, but it seems important. It seems very important. Thousands of protesters there have been killed. I wish the news media would do more to inform us about what's happening there, instead of endlessly analyzing low-quality cell phone videos of this one stupid event.

There are simply more cell phone videos from Minneapolis than there are from Iran. And there's this sense of the ICE thing being something you, a random American, can actually influence in a meaningful way. That's what Ms. Good had been doing, after all. "A little less conversation, a little more direct action, baby"

To be fair, most people are pretty myopic everywhere, and it's easy to focus on domestic conflict when it's low-key existential.

It is pretty interesting on the meta level that the shooting was a good enough scissor that it generated much more discussion, vs. the abduction of a sitting (if not quite legitimate) head of state by the U.S. and the ongoing revolution fomenting in a country of 90 million people, and a major regional power.

Something something near mode vs. far mode.

You might think of it as a scissor but it's only so because one side refuses to leave dreamland. With the release of the officer's cam footage several lies/delusions were shattered, she was indeed there to protest, not deathly afraid for her life.

I think you're on to something but that it's kind of more mundane outgroup vs fargroup stuff. The ICE protestors are genuinely closer to me ideologically in most respect than chauvismo parties but they exist in my life in a much more visceral way. During the BLM protests I stood on my roof and watched people that rhyme with this group ram a U-haul into store fronts on my block, I have footage of it on my phone.

people that rhyme with this group

Not sure if I’m being obtuse, but what contextually-relevant term rhymes with “the Motte”?

Sorry, if it was unclear, 'this' is referring to the anti-ice contingent. I understand that the face is now middle aged white women but these were the people defending the riotous action during BLM as well.

ohh 🤦‍♂️ and here I was expecting a literal rhyme

It makes sense for you to be noticing stuff that is in your community.

But I guess from the 10,000 foot view, most should not be nearly as attentive to one lady being tragically gunned down when there's real, world-altering activity afoot somewhere else.

But I guess from the 10,000 foot view, most should not be nearly as attentive to one lady being tragically gunned down when there's real, world-altering activity afoot somewhere else.

I disagree on both a practical and a philosophical level. I (predict that) I am never going to interact with a Venezuelan government official, and I don’t believe that geopolitical avalanches ever actually affect Western people’s lived experience on the ground that much. So what happens to one woman in American suburbia is in fact more relevant to me than what happens to one man in Caracas.

Neither of them are very relevant to me, but at least Good is actually sorta kinda in my reference class, and I can actually sorta kinda take actionable lessons from it (most importantly: don’t let my wife tell me how to drive)

Oh, I agree with that, I'm the one here complaining about how overrun the thread is with these post. My basic position is that this stuff is what we're going to be arguing about when we lose the race to build a silicon god to the CCP. I just understand why that is even if it depresses me.

I was actually relatively impressed how long the conversation stayed under my initial post, almost exactly 24 hours before the next one. Often I see it happen within hours. I'm sympathetic to starting a new top level when the thread has fallen below the threshold. I'm less sympathetic to starting a new post on the same event when a top level on the event is still the newest.

This thread is now in the top 10.

I think it'd be no harm creating that now that we've established that the shooting in Minneapolis will be dominating discussions at least for the rest of the current news cycle, but this

I'd like to suggest that in the future mods should exercise some judgement and make a megathread on events like this that are likely to generate a ton of back and forth discussion

seems like an awful lot to ask. It's not like the mods have a crystal ball and can see into the future about which culture war topics will generate the most discussion. Some police shootings/killings become front-page news and stay there for months; most do not. A week ago, if you had asked me to predict which of this shooting or Trump's invasion of Venezuela would generate the most column inches, I would have predicted the latter.

I agree that it wouldn't be a science and in practice we might get some megathreads that in hindsight wouldn't have been necessary. But I think we should err on the side of false positives.

I really don't get the purpose of using a single "Culture War" thread for everything. Why not just let people make their own top-level posts? Most of the topics in this thread aren't even about the culture war, they're about politics.

It's just the historical formula, don't think we should mess with it too much but there is precedence of mega threads and I think they do work. The CW thread structure gets me to engage with topics I might not have opened a dedicated thread for.

It's a tradition from two locations ago (We used to be /r/themotte on reddit, and before that, we were on /r/ssc where Scott asked us to do a CW megathread to not plaster the front 5 pages of his subreddit with political arguments). We keep because it functions as a deliberate barrier to entry that wards off people who are uncomfortable with million word walls of text.

We keep because it functions as a deliberate barrier to entry that wards off people who are uncomfortable with million word walls of text.

Somewhat ironically I tend to mostly ignore main posts because they are so often million word walls of text or worse, links to the authors’ substack with megazillion word wall of text.

A few weeks ago, in my community, based on rumors I thought Trump was announcing Venezuelan intervention and made a megathread for his speech and its aftermath. Nothing happened. A bit later it actually happened... On the other hand, I totally dropped the ball on Greenland - those topics would just emerge out of unrelated threads etc. Modding is hard.

Mods were obviously caught off guard, as I was, by how incredibly nerd-sniped this place was about the particulars of the shooting. They probably expected each new thread surely to be the last one.

About 6 persistently dishonest commenters managed to keep the discussion going by assiduously ignoring every fact that emerged and more or less abusing a loophole in the rules of the site. Users continued giving them (you)s in the naive belief that one more argument could prevail.

more or less abusing a loophole in the rules of the site

What's the loophole? If common knowledge, why don't you think it's closed?

It’s not so much a loophole as a central rule of the site. As a rule, we should treat people with viewpoints that are not our own as arguing in good faith, and (in the event that there are factual disagreements) we should treat them as coming from a reasonable place.

So for example, if someone were to say that the women in question did not know that they were ICE, and instead thought they were random thugs, we address it by providing evidence that the women did know.

One reason that it is a loophole is that someone who is not arguing in good faith can make up more stuff than even the entire community can rebut. Most people, when they are presented with facts that go against their arguments, but who do not wish to change their mind, evolve their arguments - in the case of the above, for example, someone would stop arguing that they didn’t know the people were ICE, and instead argue that the instructions were unclear, or that running did not deserve death in this case. However, a determined troll will instead just go and continue making the same arguments in another spot.

There was a very determined individual named Darwin a while back who was infamous for doing this - one of the moderators here (I believe Amadan) eventually called him on it and told him that if he kept ignoring what people were responding with he’d be treated as a troll, and darwin quietly slunk away. I encourage you to look up the exchange if you’re interested - it’s a good example of the loophole while also illustrating that the mods are aware of the issue, but can’t really address it until it becomes egregious. (And of course, as we’re more right than left winged, there is a delicate act of balancing responses - someone who posts a left wing take will get a lot of replies that rebut it, and simply doesn’t have the resources to reply to all of them per se, so there needs to be some space for honest mistakes)

Minneapolis isn’t an obvious megathread. It’s not dominating my twitter algo. It’s something weird here that is causing a massive amount of posts. This lady dying is one of like 5-10 news items currently and from what I can tell barely mattering nationally.

A good board now would be 60% Venezuela (it matters), 20% Iran, 10% Minneapolis, 10% random. Venezuela has interesting discussions on whether we bribed people or we have some really cool new tech. Iran what I could tell from Israeli actions something like 90% of their administration are on Mossad payrolls. This should be geopolitics week.

Agreed that Venezuela is by far the most important thing going on right now. Iran is potentially more important, but based on the (very limited) available information the way to bet is nothing happens (in this case that the regime successfully cracks down).

I think "The President of the United States launches a criminal investigation against the Fed Chair" is a bigger deal than "10% random" implies, although I don't know if there is much to say about it.

I think "The President of the United States launches a criminal investigation against the Fed Chair" is a bigger deal than "10% random" implies, although I don't know if there is much to say about it.

He claims he wasn't personally involved, though in phrasing that generally means very little from him ("I don't know anything about it"), so there's a chance this ends up a nothingburger. (perhaps a trial balloon that didn't make it)

Tbh the shills are out in force on 4chan, spamming the board with this woman, the youtube algos are also relentless in trying to shove this shit down my throat.

There’s frustratingly little information available about what’s going on in Venezuela or Iran right now which dampens in depth discussion outside of speculation. There’s a lot of information about Ukraine but that’s been going for four years so everyone other than me is bored with it.

There is a cool story on this:

https://www.zerohedge.com/military/white-house-amplified-shocking-claims-us-super-soldiers-deployed-maduro-raid

Big if true. If not it’s good propaganda. Scares China on our capabilities.

If not it’s good propaganda

It definitely sounds somewhere between "it's not that we're incompetent, they were just too advanced" defensiveness and "this'll make a great story to sell to the media" opportunism, but yeah: why would the US government try to correct stories about "their troops were super-humanly accurate and their equipment was space-age advanced"? 😁 You really expect the DoD to come out with a correction "No, that's not the case at all! Our guys are just regular, some of 'em barely competent, and our kit is standard average like every other country's military!"

Venezuela may be incompetent. But I still expect country with 30 million people and some legacy wealth has a bunker or secure facility for their President to sleep in. And that he sleeps in said place when the USA is threatening to kidnap him. The men with guns protecting him have good places to shoot from versus guys landing in helicopters.

I am thinking about my condo building I sleep in. It’s a large building with 2 stairwells and 2 elevator shafts. It does have a 40th floor balcony. In order to get to me you either need to:

  1. Go up 40 flights of stairs. My armed men with guns can drop grenades on you and shoot you coming up.
  2. Take an elevator. My men with guns can light up the elevator even before the door opens.
  3. Come in thru the balcony. Which sounds like a very exposed entrance for a helicopter. My men with guns can shoot the helicopter from a few hundred balconies or the roof.

Of course you could fairly easily kill me. Just drop a bomb on my condo building. But we didn’t do that.

It does appear to me the US either bribed a lot of people or we have some technology that knocked guys out guarding choke points.

I think people overrate the testimony of that guy.

Venezuela can't even maintain their own oil industry, the core basis of their national wealth, why would they be any good at fighting? They probably didn't know how to use their equipment and certainly couldn't maintain it. The Russians quit giving Venezuela loans to buy military equipment a few years ago, I think that even they had written Venezuela off.

Security Guard: Without a doubt. I'm sending a warning to anyone who thinks they can fight the United States. They have no idea what they're capable of. After what I saw, I never want to be on the other side of that again. They're not to be messed with.

I think this indicates he was paid to say this as part of the propaganda campaign. He was probably paid much more than he was making as a soldier. The real superpower is just having a certain level of organization and discipline.

That, or a dude had a panic attack from the bombs and lack of comms and the physical intensity of the situation. Then he shit himself, and wondered what the fuck happened.

If the dude even existed.

Zerohedge is best characterized as a one-mind kiwifarms operation with less discipline. Its great fun, but the world it presents is a bit too lizard-pilled for my liking. This particular 'sonic weapon' thing sounds like Havana syndrome again, a malattribution to genericized discomforts that acutely present in stressful circumstances. LRAD is mitigated really easily because it suffers the standard problem of any beam weapon: it gets blocked by everything including atmospheric pressure, and just falling out of the cone makes the effect stop immediately. We aren't getting Atreides sonic tanks anytime soon guys, life just isnt that cool.

I’ve often pondered whether zerohedge might have the highest IQ readership on any newsite. It basically grew out trading desks communities which have a floor of about 120 IQ. I’m not sure how widely read they are outside of those communities. Traders also read news differently than other people.

Zerohedge posts conspiracy slop on the free page to attract the crazies and keeps the good shit hidden behind the paywall. Analyst reports out of Seekingalpha or Morningstar were obligate maximizers of whatever slop pushed by the funds, so there was too much noise within the signal. Zerohedge econs stuff is still crazy doomer but itll reveal good underlying points. Stuff like "the lizard globohomo are unwinding all their longs! watch for the metal inflection!"

Trading desks speak a different language than the rest of society. I guess every industry has their own language. You are always asking yourself why your wrong. Or a cottage industry has grown analyzing a CEOs body language and tone versus what he’s directly saying. Which I guess develops a natural bit of conspiracy thinking. It doesn’t apply to the automated shops which is basically more engineering.

More comments

Quite possibly. That or HackerNews, I'm not on there but even the stupidity that gets crossposted seems fairly erudite. I know a bunch of extraordinarily successful guys who read ZeroHedge, generally with a "this is silly but some of it might just be true" vibe.

HackerNews was the other one that I thought of that on average probably has a reader 1 standard deviation above the NYT average.

Scott’s readership is high IQ, but he writes in a smart person way.

RW Twitter has been having fun comparing this to how the Central Americans might have felt when Spaniards showed up with ships, steel, horses and guns.

I’ve seen that. I wouldn’t be surprised, I heard a lot of stuff about sonic weapons and pain rays 10-15 years ago and then it suddenly went quiet which means they are probably actually deployable now.

The Good shooting came in the middle of the Minnesota news. What we had was:

(1) Fraud allegations from that Youtuber (2) Walz dropping out of re-election (3) More fraud all the time, apparently (4) The ICE protests and shooting

It just happened to all be in Minnesota, which is probably the most excitement they've had in a long while. Living in interesting times, indeed.

(3) More fraud all the time, apparently

Huh?

Not just the childcare which was the most recent; the original fraud was the scamming of funds for meals for children during Covid, and there seems to have been a few other areas of 'creative accounting' as well. All of which started getting wider publicity after the daycare videos.

It's not weird. This is the Culture War thread. It's not the Geopolitics thread. Geopolitics are discussed here, but the Minnesota shooting is the most Culture War-y topic in the news cycle right now.

I agree that it doesn't need a megathread, but Minneapolis is incredibly important. The left has their mojo back. This is the moment the pendulem swings back and we end up with an immigration policy based on, "14 heartbreaking photos that will make you say fuck having borders and law and shit."

The left has their mojo back.

I kinda see what you mean, but I'd be careful with these sort of statements. It's not 2016 anymore, when all this was new, so I doubt following the same script will yield the same effect.

I haven't observed that. The only places I'm hearing about Minneapolis are here and DSL. I think I saw one thing on Youtube, but didn't click and it went away. There was a Facebook and Instagram storm in 2020.

What "you" are you thinking of here. The people who have strong feelings probably already wanted soft borders and lots of refugees.

Go to youtube and scroll down the front page until you get to the section that suggests news clips even though you never watch the news on youtube. For me, 3/4 are MN shooting (the other one is Trump talking about Cuba). Looking at the general news tab, the MN shooting is at least a plurality if not a majority of suggested videos.

OTOH, apparently the NYT has decided that this story is bad for their interests and begun memory-holing it.

OTOH, apparently the NYT has decided that this story is bad for their interests and begun memory-holing it.

There's a David French opinion column today. Predictably dishonest:

An eyewitness, however, said that she heard conflicting instructions — one agent telling Good to get out of the car, while another agent told her to drive away.

French probably knows this isn't actually the case, that's why he is careful to attribute it to an unidentified eyewitness. There's a shitload of video and audio, and not one indication that an agent told her to drive away. (Her wife yelled "Drive, Drive", however)

The Minnesota videos show that it was never necessary for the officer to open fire. If a first shot is taken only after an officer is out of the path of the vehicle, that shot is not necessary to save his life.

The first shot went through the front windshield. Seems unlikely it was taken once he was out of the vehicle's path.

That means a frame-by-frame analysis of a shooting doesn’t come close to resolving its legality.

Translation: "Well, shit, the evidence is against me, so don't look at it"

The first shot went through the front windshield.

I admit to not keeping up with this as much as most mottizens. Would you link me a timestamp or screenshot of when this?

There aren't any good videos from that perspective, but this shows him firing and being hit almost simultaneously at 7 seconds (in the slowed-down video)

How do you perceive that W.R.T. NYT? I just went to their homepage and the top 4 stories were in order:

  1. Noem Says 'Hundreds More' Agents Will Be Sent to Minnesota Over 'Corruption'
  2. Somalis Fled Civil War and Built a Community. Now They Are a Target.
  3. After Minnesota Shooting, ICE Again Limits Congressional Visits
  4. Who Was Renee Good, the Woman Killed by an ICE Agent?

The "front page" looks different, but I did actually overlook one.

Why are we obligated to follow some imagined proportionality of objective importance? You forget, this forum exists for entertainment, no different or more significant than Fortnite. We’re all just shooting the shit for fun and sometimes discussing gender relations in the latest season of Love Island is just plain more fun than some dry geopolitical developments that only nerds care about.

It’s mattering a lot nationally, people I don’t often see as intensely political have become emotionally affected by it, on both sides. It’s also being pushed by the media pretty hard, I can’t scroll through YouTube or try to read the news without a “special breaking news event!!!” banner about some new detail of the event being presented.

I don’t think it needs to be that important and I’m bewildered it’s become such a big deal, but it’s activated strong feelings on both sides and people have very different intuitions about it.

It’s like 10% of my media consumption. I guess I hope some of you are just in blue bubble worlds trying to make it a thing because it’s not finding its way into my bubble outside of the motte.

I’ve seen one girl mention it on instagram and it was praising ICE. So hopefully some of you are just in the blue bubbles because it doesn’t seem like it’s breaking out.

It’s something weird here that is causing a massive amount of posts.

It's not weird, or at least nothing new for this forum. It's just the n'th iteration of George Floyd, Kavanaugh, Nick Sandman, Jussie Smollet, Kyle Rittenhouse, Richard Stallman, James d'Amore, etc., etc., etc. One side decides to ride or die on a particular issue, so the discussion continues more or less indefinitely, because no argument works, and autists keep banging their head against the wall in frustration.

Unlike Iran and Venezuela, there's a lot of actual information available for Minneapolis.

But you can add Cuba now, Trump's at least talking about it.

I have to keep reminding myself that this is only the start of the second year of his second term because Good God it's all kicking off.

Are we thinking Greenland is really going to happen? This was one of the "just Trump being Trump" notions I dismissed, but he seems to be making noises like he's semi-demi-serious, and the EU seems to be taking it seriously.

I don't know whether to laugh or be terrified about it; is this the US attempt to finally technically qualify for Eurovision? Though it seems that they are currently ineligible, alas!

and the EU seems to be taking it seriously.

I don't think that means anything. There's political capital to win for western politicians in being the one who's most against or opposite Trump, and that's easier if you interpret everything he says in the least charitable, most unhinged way. We saw the same here in Canada, a certain defeat for the liberals was flipped by the media acting like Trump is seriously planning to invade.

That's true but there's equally political capital for Trump supporters to say no one should take him seriously when he says crazy things about invading allies. The fact their leaders are trying to curry favour with them is not an adequately reassuring thought to a European worried about the world order.

A lot of Trumpists, heavily practiced in sanewashing Trump and accustomed to the institutional restraints on his behavior from his first term, have basically become incapable of processing negative attitudes towards Trump as anything other than TDS. It's all a joke/big talk/hardball. Until he actually does it, at which point of course he did it. He said he was going to. The fact that Trump says twenty insane things a week and only follows through on two gives enough cover to act like taking him seriously is ridiculous.

In particular, I suspect the Venezuela operation rattled observers far more than Trump supporters grasp. You don't have to like Maduro to feel anxious about Trump suddenly deciding that rapid, unilateral operations are cool at the same time that he revives talk of taking Greenland.

He's not actually saying anything about invading allies, what happens is that he mentions he'd like something that's a long shot, journalists jump to ask "is a military intervention ruled out?" and then he (or a surrogate) answers "nothing is ruled out" because the administration doesn't want to play or discard cards in their hand because of some jackass journalists. And the circus of "he's planning to invade an ally!" starts.

Let's say John frequently talks about murdering his wife in a way that suggests he's not going to do it, but he just keeps randomly bringing it back up. Steve asks him if he's actually going to do it and John says his policy is to never confirm or deny anything. Oh and just the other day John beat somebody up that he similarly talked about beating up, but nobody liked that guy (Venezuela).

Is the problem here:

A: Steve for taking John seriously and repeatedly asking him about it. Who would openly talk about murdering their wife? That's crazy. He should know that John is weird, and that he never denies anything.

B: John because talking about murdering your wife is deeply unsettling behavior even if you're not being serious, and there's evidence John does in fact do crazy and possibly illegal things. If asked if you're going to kill your wife, maybe saying that you never confirm or deny anything shouldn't be considered an acceptable answer.

...because the administration doesn't want to play or discard cards in their hand....

Which is exactly what has people so alarmed! They believe that the reason we're not currently rebuilding from World War Five right now is because, for the last eighty years, there has been a rule that military intervention for territorial gain should not be considered as an option.

That's why so many people support Ukraine, why the world came to the defence of Kuwait in 1990, and why anyone besides a few anti-Semites gives a rat's tuchus about the West Bank settlements.

Trump himself said: “I would like to make a deal the easy way but if we don’t do it the easy way, we’re going to do it the hard way."

Then Vance told European leaders they should "take the President of the United States very seriously."

It's disingenuous to pretend it's all been kicked up by the media.

There really isn't - I think you underestimate the amount of TDS there is outside of the US. Seriously, we went from "liberal party may fit inside a minivan" to "a few seats shy of a majority" based not even on the CPC being seen as pro-Trump, but being seen as insufficiently anti-Trump.

If it helps, even Trump believes that he caused the LPC to win.

Poilievre losing to Carney is a profoundly non-central example of TDS. Canada's strategic situation actually changed because of a change in US policy.

If you treat the invasion threats as the social media rantings of a madman, the US (a) elected a madman President and (b) announced and executed on a tariff policy which Trump justified to his domestic supporters as a punitive measure to force Canada to address a non-problem (fentanyl flowing south across the US-Canadian border).

The tariffs were not really about fentanyl, and both Canadian elites and Canadian voters know this. If you think "Trump wants to annex Canada" is TDS then they are obviously not about that. So the best non-TDS read is that the US has, for domestic policy reasons, decided to pursue a new economic policy that was profoundly harmful to Canada (and is explicitly repudiating his own trade deal to do so). Canadian policy should change in response to this.

It is also worth noting that if Trump's threats to annex Canada were broadly understood in the US as the rantings of a madman, they would have been ignored (or even covered up) by his supporters and signal-boosted by his opponents. What actually happened is that MAGA Twitter went off on an orgy of reciting the (mostly made-up) crimes of Canada against the US that justified the invasion, boasting about how easy the invasion would be militarily and how cool it was that Canada and Canadians didn't get a say, and discussing plans for the government of post-annexation Canada. To remain in good standing with the Trump White House and the broader MAGA movement, MAGA-aligned elites had to pretend to take the ranting against Canada seriously. I don't think Trump is planning to invade Canada, but he is very careful not to send the kinds of reassurance you would expect if a joke between two friendly countries was getting out of hand.

The thing is, if people had been reacting on this basis I think they'd actually have had a point; they didn't.

They reacted solely as "Poilievre is conservative, Trump is conservative, obviously Poilievre is going to immediately capitulate and sell Canada to Trump!!!" (Nevermind that Poilievre almost immediately denounced the tariffs, and numerous conservatives stated that "Canada is not for sale").

He's serious about wanting it, not serious about taking it by force from Denmark.

I'd like rich people to give me all of their money, but obviously the people who would need to make that decision are not going to go for it. A one-off joke might be one thing, but it's a bit weird if I repeatedly talk about it like it's going to happen.

Trump is definitely more than a bit weird. And he's serious about wanting Greenland and probably DOES think he can make a deal to get it. But he's not going to take it by force.

As much as I dislike Trump, if Trump can make a deal that all parties are happy with to buy Greenland (including not bankrupting America) I'll give him credit.

But thus far I am not seeing any serious attempt to convince Denmark and Greenland to want to make that deal. From the Deal Maker in Chief I mostly hear complain, complain, insist that it's going to happen so they should just get with the program, complain, and make something that could vaguely be interpreted as a threat. I know he's serious about wanting it, but it would take a lot of effort for it to happen and I am seeing very little from Trump to explain his confidence. I know there's long odds that Trump will use force, but with Trump I can never rule anything out and I see more breadcrumbs of evidence that he might use force than I see evidence he's going to charm them into agreeing.

It's not that reassuring though. The EU ought to put troops from multiple countries there to create some sense of jeopardy for the US that it might not be a totally bloodless operation, even if they can't realistically stay to fight.

They could put troops in Nuuk and a few other Inuit towns, but the US would just ignore it. The navy can just show up to any spot on the hundreds of miles of uninhabited coastline and start building whatever facilities they want. I suspect that this is the agreement that will eventually be reached. The inhabitants of Greenland will continue to be under the dominion of Denmark, but the United States will have free reign over all currently uninhabited territory.

If Trump just wants extra military bases, he only had to ask.

This leaves us with the question of what the point of the entire drama is if the goal is simply to establish more US bases in Greenland, since the US can already do that under existing agreements with Denmark. Is Trump so thug-brained that he needs to see such actions as taking something rather than exercising a pre-existing option?

No, Trump wants to be able to say the US owns Greenland, and his reasons for wanting that are almost certainly incredibly stupid and thug-brained.

The EU ought to put troops from multiple countries there to create some sense of jeopardy for the US that it might not be a totally bloodless operation, even if they can't realistically stay to fight.

That's both never going to happen and would do the opposite of deterring Trump if he really wanted to do it.

I think it is actually very likely to happen under the guise (?) of saying the troops are there to repel China and Russia, and thus assuage Trump's stated concerns about the island being seized.

I thought about suggesting a megathread and then didn't get to it. My bad, but you're right, it would have been better to create a megathread than having a dozen people each creating a new top level post.

Right, I don't blame you or the other mods for not doing it. I would like it if we could have a general policy worked out though so in the future you or anyone else on duty would feel confident to throw one up even with like a placeholder OP. Nothing too explicit, just the general idea that it should be expected.

I created a top-level post in the CW thread because it feels even more presumptuous to create a megathread, but maybe I'm thinking about this wrong.

rather than debating the videos

I am not, give me that angles!

First we have this home surveillance with narration by CNNs Anderson Cooper. It lacks pixels though nd there is a tree in the way:

https://x.com/TheMaineWonk/status/2009506563732676847

Most frustrating is this new film by a neighbour: It has the clearest view and cuts at the exact important moment! Right wingers are retweeting it as it shows Ms Good being obnoxiously honking, but I wonder if it was leaked to them and why it was cut. If it would show the Ice officer only lightly (harmlessly? calculated by him?) being touched by the corner of the car the optics would be bad.

https://x.com/GrageDustin/status/2010037103665787019

...this home surveillance...lacks pixels....

Is that...Bigfoot?

No but there is a Tyrannosaurus in the neighbor's yard.

Some questions I am puzzling over currently:

  • Has anyone done the napkin math on how safe it is to be apprehended by ICE? I think it’s 30k ICE agents and only 1-2 people shot with questions of justification this year. It’s likely that on a per-hourly basis you are safer being around an ICE agent than you are around the most criminally-prone young male demographic, or walking around certain cities at night. I wonder what a top-tier AI would calculate on this. If ICE agents in the line of work are safer than the average person, then I’m not sure why anyone would be worked up about this event for a rational reason, but if there’s a non-rational reason then…

  • … Do humans have some instinct to argue about death? This would explain the perennial popularity of these stories + TrueCrime. I suppose it’s possible. Or is there an instinct to really, really hate when a low status male kills a female in the “tribe”? “White police officer” is coded extremely low status in Progressive America, and I can’t imagine anything near the same response if the officer was a Somali woman (!!!). Would these White progressives really shout “shame” at a Somali woman in uniform, which would connote high status and deference? Re: low status femicide, this would explain why the national park couple murder event got so much traction some years back. There was a uniquely large amount of vitriol online expressed against the murderer in this event, as in, more than both the typical murder (no one really pays attention) and the typical true crime murder.

  • Were it the case that everything is so instinctual, is there any way that ICE can short-circuit the instincts at play here? Maybe they can paint images of empathy on their car (cute animals, maternal colors, mothers protecting their young). Or better yet, like the Ancient Greeks with their apotropaic magic imagery, they can paint a Medusa’s head on their car, except the Medusa is actually an image of a strong disabled black woman in a same sex relationship. I have a hard time believing the protesters would yell at vehicles wielding the ultimate seal of inviolability within their own cultural norms. It would be a bad look. Or maybe there is a way to change the entire “spirit” of the social encounter through music. What if you played really relaxing Enya or Jack Johnson music from loud car speakers? Or, going the other direction, just for curiosity, Richard Wagner? I wish these kinds of things were studied.

Has anyone done the napkin math on ow safe it is to be apprehended by ICE? I think it’s 30k ICE agents and only 1-2 people shot with questions of justification this year. It’s likely that on a per-hourly basis you are safer being around an ICE agent than you are around the most criminally-prone young male demographic, or walking around certain cities at night. I wonder what a top-tier AI would calculate on this. If ICE agents in the line of work are safer than the average person, then I’m not sure why anyone would be worked up about this event for a rational reason, but if there’s a non-rational reason then…

The US white homicide rate is about 4/100k per year (the overall rate has been around 6 since the end of the 1990's crime wave, with the fluctuations dominated by the black homicide rate), so at first glance 30k ICE agents committing 1-2 homicides a year makes them about as dangerous as the average white American. But of course the homicide rate includes domestics, bar fights etc, and I don't think anyone is tracking the number of ICE agents who kill their wives, and nor does it affect the napkin math, for which the relevant number isn't total homicides - it is killings of strangers. Per the FBI about one in five homicides is a stranger killing (heavy missing data bias, and no racial crosstabs, so take with a pinch of salt) which would make ICE agents significantly more likely to kill a stranger than the average white American (c 0.8 stranger killings/100k) or even the average white male American (c.1.6/100k), and probably slightly more likely than the average male American regardless of race (c.2.4/100k).

Also the corollary is the napkin math on how safe it is to be ICE. If there are 30k ICE agents and about 700k LEOs nationwide (unsophisticated AI guess), then you expect to see a few percent of cop deaths being ICE deaths. In fact (per the National LEO Memorial Fund) we have 152 LEO deaths in 2023 and 148 in 2024 (the pandemic years are distorted by the large number of deaths due to occupational COVID-19 exposure). ICE report 1 death each in 2023 and 2024, but neither are duty deaths - they are both cancers allegedly caused by exposure to toxic waste in the 9-11 cleanup. They report zero deaths in 2025.

An alternative data source is the FBI which only counts felonious and accidental deaths (i.e. it excludes diseases, even if exposure happened on duty). This shows just over 100 deaths per year, with slightly over half being felonious. By these criteria, there have been just 2-3 ICE deaths in the last decade. (James Holdman shot himself "accidentally" in 2021, Brian Beliso had a heart attack while chasing a suspect on foot in 2016 (not sure if this counts as "accident" or "disease"), and Scott McGuire was in a taxi which was hit by a drunk driver in 2016. Zero felonious deaths in ten years, when we should be expecting 1-2 a year if the risk is proportional to other LEOs.

In other words, contrary to the "ICE need to be treated as speshul snowflakes because of the massive campaign of left-wing political violence they are facing" rhetoric of the administration, ICE are an order of magnitude safer than beat cops. The reason is obvious - they are spending a lot less time dealing with dangerous criminals than beat cops do. This implies that beat cops will also engage in a lot more justified shootings than ICE (and the vast majority of shootings by LEOs are uncomplicatedly justified), so trying to compare the lethality of ICE to other law enforcement agencies isn't going to be particularly helpful.

Of course none of this is going to matter to the optics. People (of both tribes - modulo the degree to which the victims are outgroup) care far more about organised violence (including both state violence and non-state political violence) than disorganised criminal violence, and far more about violent deaths of both types than other avoidable deaths like car crashes or industrial accidents. This appears to be true at all times and places, at least within the WEIRD world.

But of course the homicide rate includes domestics, bar fights etc

This is an argument for ICE, not against. Most people don't have to detain people (many of whom are violent criminals) over the course of their day.

Which is why the ICE death rate is critical to the argument - it shows that ICE are not detaining violent criminals in large numbers, unlike local police.

ICE are mostly detaining two groups of people who don't fight back:

  • Otherwise law-abiding illegal immigrants (They sometimes accidentally arrest a criminal immigrant, but the whole point of Trump's immigration enforcement agenda is to stop prioritising criminals in order to increase the pressure on non-criminals to self-deport)
  • Peaceful protestors (and I don't mean "mostly peaceful" here - so far anti-ICE protests have caused zero non-protestor deaths and have not set any cities on fire).

That said, I agree with you that ICE are violence professionals and should be more dangerous than the average male American - this comparison was a standard suggested by @coffee_enjoyer, and I was doing the napkin math he suggested. What ICE are doing is not friendly and neither its supporters nor opponents have any delusions about this, but given who is being targetted the number of "combat" deaths is negligible - I suspect @coffee_enjoyer may be overestimating the normal level of violence in nonblack America, which is even more negligible. I think some of the confusion is deliberate, in that large parts of MAGA Twitter want to see ICE go full brownshirt against Blue cities, and Trump admin poasters are trying to provide social media kayfabe to meet this demand (and also to scare immigrants into self-deporting, and possibly to encourage brownshirt-wannabees to work for ICE), but ICE are not in fact, as of early 2026, doing that.

Which is why the ICE death rate is critical to the argument - it shows that ICE are not detaining violent criminals in large numbers, unlike local police.

No it doesn't. If the entire police force were deployed as nothing but SWAT teams, their death rate would go down too. Further, arresting someone, even a normal person, is already a violent action on par with a bar fight, so excluding those in favor of "murder by a stranger" makes no sense.

Were it the case that everything is so instinctual, is there any way that ICE can short-circuit the instincts at play here? Maybe they can paint images of empathy on their car (cute animals, maternal colors, mothers protecting their young). Or better yet, like the Ancient Greeks with their apotropaic magic imagery, they can paint a Medusa’s head on their car, except the Medusa is actually an image of a strong disabled black woman in a same sex relationship.

I've said it before, but looking like cops should be enough.

Has anyone done the napkin math on how safe it is to be apprehended by ICE? I think it’s 30k ICE agents and only 1-2 people shot with questions of justification this year. It’s likely that on a per-hourly basis you are safer being around an ICE agent than you are around the most criminally-prone young male demographic, or walking around certain cities at night.

A similar thought experiment: Who would you rather babysit your kid for a week—a randomly selected ICE agent or a randomly selected Somali migrant?

“White police officer” is coded extremely low status in Progressive America, and I can’t imagine anything near the same response if the officer was a Somali woman (!!!).

While I also can't imagine there'd be anything near the same response, the Somali woman would still get some blowback for being a pick-me and Uncle Tom.

Were it the case that everything is so instinctual, is there any way that ICE can short-circuit the instincts at play here? Maybe they can paint images of empathy on their car (cute animals, maternal colors, mothers protecting their young). Or better yet, like the Ancient Greeks with their apotropaic magic imagery, they can paint a Medusa’s head on their car, except the Medusa is actually an image of a strong disabled black woman in a same sex relationship.

Or the ICE car version of a "pride missile."

A randomly selected Somali migrant is more likely to be a woman.

A similar thought experiment: Who would you rather babysit your kid for a week—a randomly selected ICE agent or a randomly selected Somali migrant?

Do I get to participate in the latter's subsidies?

Yes. You get to pay for them.

Who would you rather babysit your kid for a week—a randomly selected ICE agent or a randomly selected Somali migrant?

I'd have a lot more recourse if the migrant tried any funny business.... (This reasoning was also given by some women who chose the bear.)

What recourse would you have against the Somali migrant that you wouldn't against the ICE agent? In the role of baby-sitter, the ICE agent has no special privileges above those of a normal citizen. The most likely offenses a baby-sitter would commit would be state offenses, and it is well established that local law enforcement is not particularly supportive of ICE atm, so it seems unlikely LEO camaraderie will benefit them.

There’s a longer video of the honking out there, it kind of pans annoyingly back and forth on the street for several minutes. You’re seeing a cut version because there’s nothing of interest immediately after. She’s on the street honking and dancing him her car, parked perpendicularly and waving through non ice vehicles. At some point (off camera) she pulls back (to let non ice vehicles pass through).

The only think of interest there is that based on how far out the car was on various pans, it’s clear that she was pulling back and forth in the car, to variously obstruct and allow passage. She was not stationary until the attempted peel out. This (minorly) adds context to the agent not knowing exactly what she is doing / her actions being more unpredictable and the alertness / sense of danger being heightened.

I think that alone is a stretch but my point is that every single additional video that dribbles out throws addition drops (at least) into the full picture always looking worse for her.

We’ve moved far beyond “confused and panicked mom just dropping off her kid approached by masked strangers”, yet that remains the “moral” starting point from which every counter narrative tries to gap.

Instead we see that she was actively using her car as a deliberate object of obstruction, moving it strategically to thwart the ice activity, and was using noise to rile up the situation and interfere with ICE apprehensions. She was creating a dangerous scenario intentionally for several minutes, and that context is very relevant to what happened in the heat of the moment 3 minutes later.

At the very minimum she was hoping to help attempted detainees to flee arrest and prevent ICE from safely pursuing and apprehending them. So she was creating deadly conditions from the get.

Suppose she was blocking a SWAT team from a drug raid while also shouting into a loudspeaker to alert the suspects. There would be no question. That she was creating a physically dangerous environment and that would factor into the police’s actions and assumptions and benefit of doubt in those moments. It would be very different than reading the same outcome with the assumption that she had just been walking a dog by the raid and gotten confused.

Yet that initial frame was intentionally set to poison public opinion and create artificial priors in the public to emotionally distort the interpretation

it’s clear that she was pulling back and forth in the car, to variously obstruct and allow passage

If that is so, it should knock on the head the narrative that "she was only an innocent passer-by, driving home with her wife after dropping her kid off at school, a stranger to the city who wandered into the middle of this by mistake".

This entire situation was a mess, but this does sound like "play stupid games, win stupid prizes". She's moving around with the car, blocking and unblocking, and clearly putting herself into an adversarial position. Doesn't mean she should be shot dead, but she's making herself seem like a genuine risk.

I think the larger point here is this is happening numerous times a day, day in and day out.

You play this out a thousand times something will go sideways in an encounter. This was that encounter.

The leftist harassing ICE is stochastic hoping for a viral moment.

The leftist harassing ICE is stochastic hoping for a viral moment.

Exactly, especially considering one lapse in the rules of engagement for ICE can be blasted into the media forever (even this one probably was a legal shoot but had poor vibes) whilst anything that's palatable will fall off the radar immediately.

Isn't a lot of how ICE is being presented also hoping for a viral moment though? The administration wants ICE to create conflict in blue states, so that they have more people to villify.

Not really. The reason ICE is visibly present in blue states but not in red states is because of sanctuary laws. In Texas or Florida, once an illegal immigrant fails to show up for a deportation proceeding, or receives a final order of removal police departments across the state receive notice. When they then pull that fellow over for expired plates or DUI or speeding, they then arrest the illegal. That illegal is held for a statutory amount of time, typically 5 business days, for ICE to pick them up. Then ICE takes them to the judge that issued the warrant/order and then puts them on a plane home.

In Minnesota or California, that does not happen. If the illegal gets a DUI, the police just let him go with a court notice to show up in a month. Then ICE has to somehow find out on its own about that court date and arrest him on the courthouse steps, causing a scene. Or they have to go to his home, work, or school, causing a scene. Or they have to do a raid of an apartment complex they have probable cause has many illegals in it, causing a scene. The lack of cooperation causes extra work for ICE per deportee, and also requires more ICE agents.

That's not quite true - the administration is hoping to make it obvious that ICE can and will catch you if you're in the states illegally. They're hoping to set up an environment that feels unwelcoming for illegal immigrants, which means that they need to raid blue states as well.

It is probably to the administration's benefit if they capture people behaving badly, but not their purpose; you can trivially prove this by thinking about what happens if the resistance to their actions disappears.

If the blue states stop protesting ICE, ICE is still going to be arresting illegal immigrants. If ICE stops arresting illegal immigrants, then the protestors will stop protesting ICE (presumably; there is a chance that they simply swap to anti-Trump protests, but I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt). As a result, we can intuit that ICE is opposing illegal immigrants, while the protestors are opposing ICE.

Yes that narrative is 100% a fabrication based on a multitude of evidence and common sense and has always been a fabricated hopium, never evinced in any way. You can debate the shooting all you want, but the whole thing stinks of inauthenticity when the left started their position on a completely made up situation.

That guy who got shot in Kenosha was initially a Local community leader who saw some sort of argument happening in his community while driving and stopped to assist in restoring harmony to his community, then cops tried to assassinate him.

If that is so, it should knock on the head the narrative that "she was only an innocent passer-by, driving home with her wife after dropping her kid off at school, a stranger to the city who wandered into the middle of this by mistake".

It should, but arguments are soldiers and ONLY that. The comments on the David French column about this demonstrate this pretty clearly.

e.g. from "Cece"

Remember this phrase. Officer-created jeopardy. “Intentionally placing oneself in the path of an operating vehicle is considered an "officer-created jeopardy". This action can undermine any later claim that the use of deadly force (such as shooting at the driver) was necessary for self-defense, as the officer voluntarily created the dangerous situation.”

We know from the videos this didn't happen. Doesn't matter. Gets repeated over and over.

from "Niko"

If Ms. Good had intended to hit or run over the officer, she would have driven forward. The moment she initially reversed, the officer must have known he was not in danger. He clearly drew his gun to prevent her from fleeing.

We know from the videos the officer did not draw his weapon until she started going forwards.

From "SD"

From the video, there is no way Ms. Good was trying to weaponize her vehicle. She was just driving away.

No way? She did actually hit him. Whether that was her intent is not proven, but certainly the video does not rule it out. Of course, despite this having been shown from several angles (and heard), plenty of people still insist he wasn't hit.

From "OG MD"

Unfortunately, ICE is not law enforcement and have no jurisdiction against a US citizen and certainly had no legal right to physically remove Ms. Good from her vehicle without a court order.

Good thing this wasn't OG JD because that's all false.

From "Don't Think Twice"

Renee Good’s wife is reported to have said, “We had whistles. They had guns.” That sums it up for me. You don’t shoot someone whose choice of protest weapon is a whistle.

No, her choice of a weapon was a Honda Pilot. Even if she didn't mean to hit the officer, she was using it to engage in her blockade tactics.

And from "Back to MN"

ICE agents here in MSP seem to be purposely engaging in the practice of surrounding someone in their car and then intentionally giving conflicting orders, so the target is not complying no matter what they do.

We've got video and audio that clearly reveals that the orders she was given were "Get out of the car" and "Get out of the fucking car". These aren't conflicting.

Evidence doesn't matter; there is only narrative.

Normally (i.e. not under Trump) the way this would play out is law enforcement and the administration would refuse to comment. The protestor story would be the only one which got around. Then some months later when the officer was acquitted, people would be shocked and there'd be another round of protests. The Trump administration is trying something different -- backing up their officer to hyperbolic lengths. I'm not sure if that's better, but the old way wasn't working.

Renee Good’s wife is reported to have said, “We had whistles. They had guns.”

I don't know a delicate way to put this, so I'll just bull ahead. How effin' stupid do you have to be to turn up to a protest where you are facing "This is Fascist Dictator Disappearing Torture Regime", believing in the dogma that the cops/ICE/jackbooted thugs have carte blanche to shoot anyone they like particularly the black and brown, that you are putting yourself in real danger, and yet... not expect that anything bad will happen? "We have whistles and they have guns" - then either get guns yourself or have realistic expectations of injury or death.

I thought the guys in the Rittenhouse case were fools but even they (or at least one of them) turned up with a gun. That's criminal, but it's not entirely stupid and is at least consistent with what you believe: the pigs and their lackeys have guns and intend to shoot us, we're gonna shoot back.

The answer is that they believe ICE isn't allowed to do anything to US citizens. This is wrong; they can arrest US citizens who interfere with their operations. But they don't really believe this is what they say it is.

I don't know a delicate way to put this, so I'll just bull ahead. How effin' stupid do you have to be to turn up to a protest where you are facing "This is Fascist Dictator Disappearing Torture Regime", believing in the dogma that the cops/ICE/jackbooted thugs have carte blanche to shoot anyone they like particularly the black and brown, that you are putting yourself in real danger, and yet... not expect that anything bad will happen?

These Leftists have their own discussion forum / echo chamber, and anyone who raises this kind of point will be instantly banned/shadowbanned/excommunicated/etc. That's the price you pay for assabiyah - obvious inconsistencies and other flaws in your group's reasoning get swept under the rug.

I don't know a delicate way to put this, so I'll just bull ahead. How effin' stupid do you have to be to turn up to a protest where you are facing "This is Fascist Dictator Disappearing Torture Regime", believing in the dogma that the cops/ICE/jackbooted thugs have carte blanche to shoot anyone they like particularly the black and brown, that you are putting yourself in real danger, and yet... not expect that anything bad will happen? "We have whistles and they have guns" - then either get guns yourself or have realistic expectations of injury or death.

From a Certain Point of View, them turning up to #Resist despite the real danger only further illustrates how Stunning and Brave they are, that they as the plucky outgunned underdogs had the courage to go up against the Fascist Dictator Disappearing Torture Regime that has license to kill, that their presence and white privilege could at least make the Stormtroopers hesitate before gunning down black and brown bodies. Outnumbered Rebels with lightsabers against a Galactic Empire with spaceships and laser blasters.

I can respect protesters who show up even where they do realise they're in actual danger. I don't know what to think of protesters who think they can claim it's the Evil Evil Stormtrooper Show which they are protesting, and yet at the same time that they can behave with maximum irritating nonsense but nothing can or will happen to them, because - that's not fair? "I can yell abuse, slurs, make loud noises, throw things, and behave worse than a four year old having a sugar-fuelled meltdown, but they have to be nice to me and stand there and take it even though they are the low-IQ violent murder monsters who are going around murdering and assaulting people"????

I genuinely don't get it.

Perhaps they think that ICE are paper tigers - not actual Stormtroopers but wannabe-Stormtroopers who are in truth no better than schoolyard bully, and will fall apart if someone is on hand to puncture their delusions of grandeur? Perhaps they take the "white privilege" stuff a little too literally, and genuinely believe that although they have no scruples about assaulting innocent blacks and Hispanics, ICE's own white-supremacy forbid them to ever lay a finger on a white blonde?

If that is so, it should knock on the head the narrative that "she was only an innocent passer-by, driving home with her wife after dropping her kid off at school, a stranger to the city who wandered into the middle of this by mistake".

That should have died with the video from the officer's perspective, where they clearly taunting them.

Here's the Bluesky take on that video:

They were having a calm exchange seconds before he murdered Renee Good, and she was barely moving and clearly avoiding him.

Video evidence doesn't matter one lick because the kind of people getting riled up about this kind of thing want to get riled up. (Please generalize this instead of treating it as a phenomenon specific to Bluesky.)

I'm reminded of a study conducted by a large social media company (the presenter couldn't disclose the company's name but called them "Tip Top" with an exaggerated wink) where they randomized some users' feeds for a day. A notable finding was that when "toxic" users were presented with fewer toxic posts, the conditional probability of engaging with each toxic post went up, and the overall reduction of engagement with toxic posts barely declined. Their conclusion was that the algorithm isn't inducing the toxicity; these users are just toxic to start with and the algorithm is correctly identifying the kind of content they want to see.

Should have really died instantly from the first clip where the wife was standing outside of the car filming it which isn't standard practice for a 3-point turn.

It should have died with the witness interviews on day one....

If it would show the Ice officer only lightly (harmlessly? calculated by him?) being touched by the corner of the car the optics would be bad.

Bad for whom? We know the ICE agent was not seriously injured by the car. This "he didn't even hit him" followed by (when sufficient demonstration of contact is made using multiple video and audio feeds) "but it wasn't that bad a hit" is just minimal retreat, not bad optics for the side which claimed correctly that he was in fact hit.

Most frustrating is this new film by a neighbour: It has the clearest view and cuts at the exact important moment!

Yeah, it's suspicious that it helps one side but it cut off right at the critical moment. Based on what I've seen so far, I'm reasonably confident that the shooting was justified, but still.

I'm starting a new top-level regarding trigger happy Iceman meets wine mom in Minneapolis because, rather than debating the videos, I'd like to focus more on a compare and contrast to get a true culture war angle. People have made an analogy to the woman who died on Jan 6th but I don't think it lands strongly enough. Permit me to cut closer to the bone, friends.

The only fatality on Jan 6th was an unarmed woman being shot by a federal agent[1] because she was opposing what she considered an illegitimate government action. Liberals tearlessly argued this is what happens when you Fuck Around while conservatives argued she was righteously Resisting (TM).

Today the players are the same but the jerseys are flipped. Liberals cry with so, so many tears of empathy for the dead woman in the car while conservatives argue they were obstructing a legitimate state function and put the officer in danger and this is what happens when you Fuck Around.

In broad strokes it's clear neither side cares about democracy or rule of law per se. Conservative faith in rule of law evaporates when it says no to Trump and liberal empathy for the scrappy civil disobedients dries up when it's a Chud. Both sides are happy with mob violence when it's their side doing it and cry tyranny whenever they Find Out.

  1. Okay a federally employed capitol police officer, not technically a federal agent. Sorry for the artistic license.

I feel like in a lot of ways the questions around tyranny and anarchy sort of dance around the actual issue which is what a government is actually for. Why do we have one, why do we want one, what is the government supposed to do. And really I think until you answer that question in a way that makes sense, asking whether or not something is dangerously tyrannical or anarchistic is simply booing a given government or government action.

To sort of answer my own question, I see government as a sort of political operating system— the point isn’t to directly solve most problems, but to provide the necessary stability and infrastructure that allow other institutions: churches, civic groups, businesses, and so on to provide services to society. Now that sort of changes the way you’d think about crime policing. You’d want the government to keep the crime rate as low as possible without unduly interfering with the ability of people to organize and solve problems or do things. Putting up huge roadblocks at every corner would probably solve crime, but it would absolutely destroy the ability of people living in the city to do pretty much anything useful. Having no police presence would allow people to do things in theory, however because there are no cops, the crime rate is too high for it to be safe to do things. You can kind of apply the same lenses to other problems like business law (if you don’t have any, social trust is impossible, too many laws mean that almost all people are too busy with compliance to actually do anything useful) or health and environmental laws. A good government would be stable, but mostly invisible and provide known safety and security measures and predictable laws enforced predictably such that it’s mostly just there but invisible to end users.

trigger happy Iceman meets wine mom in Minneapolis

If this forum starts doing separate mega threads for high-levels-of-discussion events, you should be in charge of naming them

Both were fine, if not justified (the latter as the narrower question).

In general, people overestimate the risk of tyranny and underestimate the risk of anarchy.

How many truly tyrannical, totalitarian states are there in the world? North Korea, obviously. Eritrea, to some extent. After that the lines get a lot more blurred. You certainly wouldn’t want to be a dissident in Iran or China, but the vast majority of the population is not really ‘enslaved by the state’ (or ‘under constant, totalitarian absolute surveillance with extreme penalties for the tiniest stepping out of line’) the way that people are in a true tyranny.

Even across the 20th century, true tyranny was rare. Neither the Gestapo nor the KGB were capable of it, for example, nor was any CCP domestic intelligence agency, certainly until very recently. In fact, the only major Marxist nation that was truly, terrifyingly totalitarian in the 1984 sense was East Germany.

By contrast, how many ungovernable shitholes are there in the world in which criminals, gangs and others run riot, with the central government hopelessly weak, corrupt or otherwise powerless to stop them? Many, many more. Half of the Sahel, Haiti and a large chunk of Central America, Papua New Guinea, big parts of Somalia and Northern Kenya, large parts of Nigeria and Niger, parts of Syria etc.

We should be much more concerned about anarchy than tyranny.

In fact, the only major Marxist nation that was truly, terrifyingly totalitarian in the 1984 sense was East Germany.

Romania and Albania were definitely worse (Albania was never major by anyone's standards for sure, but the GDR was also not somehow more major than Romania). Anyway, since you brought up the issue of state capacity, I'd point out that since member states of the Soviet bloc were modeled alike, so their state security agencies had roughly the same capacity as well; it's that some of those regimes enforced a less rigid system of conformity than the others that made a difference.

ungovernable shitholes are there in the world in which criminals, gangs and others run riot, with the central government hopelessly weak, corrupt or otherwise powerless to stop them

The central government, sure. On the other hand, they are also characterized by vigilantism, militia building and the emergence of organic local power structures.

On a different note, I'm not sure what exactly your argument is - is it that more people suffer from anarchy than from tyranny in absolute numbers, or that anarchy is overall a bigger threat to individual human flourishing, or both?

How many truly tyrannical, totalitarian states are there in the world? North Korea, obviously. Eritrea, to some extent. After that the lines get a lot more blurred.

Chechnya. Turkmenistan. China is more than capable of doing this in conquered territories, although you're correct they do not do this in Shanghai.

Chechnya isn't a state in the everyday sense of the word.

Corrupt shitholes are actually tyranny too. If you do something with even the slightest economic value they will be all over you like a swarm of locusts.

There might be less total state capacity than north korea, but there will be more directed at you specifically than north korea spends on the average peon.

If you do something with even the slightest economic value they will be all over you like a swarm of locusts.

Sure, but as anyone who has peered at the relative tax burdens of women and ethnic minorities in the US will know, people who produce economic value are a tiny, tiny segment of the population. Regimes that persecute a small number of people a lot > regimes that persecute a large number of people a little?

Your point of view is consistently that of a wealthy, entitled person who sees the police as her personal gendarmarie whose job it is to keep the riff-raff from inconveniencing her life in any way. From that point of view, yes, anarchy is a much greater threat than tyranny, because tyranny will mostly leave you alone, while anarchy threatens you. Not to get all "woke" (har) but this is exactly why "privilege" dialog took root. There was originally a legitimate point to it. You consider the lower classes to be undesirables to be kept away from you, and the only thing you fear is revolting peasants. So nearly any level of state crackdown is acceptable to you because only at North Korean levels would it actually threaten your lifestyle. Whereas those beneath you understand what tyranny will do to them.

From a Conflict Theory perspective, there is no reason you should care about this, or people who are not you, as long as your side maintains the levers of power. But "Let them eat cakeboot" does have the potential to redound on you. Traditionally, rich people had some concern about oppression either out of genuine (liberal) conviction or self-preservation.

All the things that happen in tyranny to the lower classes can also happen in anarchy. In fact, they happen more. Just compare the murder stats for the underclass in Chicago vs. a rich suburb thereof. Everyone is better off empirically as law and order is implemented until a tipping point where the upperclass start being worse off.

I identify with 2rafa's POV. While I think what you're saying is true at the extremes, how does it apply to the US? The Jan 6th rioters appeared to me to be hallucinating a tyranny as much as the people opposing ICE's lawful deportations are now. I disagree with portraying me as a friend of the warlord because the warlord is about one guy's vibe about what's right and using his club, whereas rule of law is much more legitimate than that.

The anarchy here comes from people who are otherwise materially well-off and essentially free being made mentally unwell. While the state's rule of law corresponds to at least some attachment to reality: judges ultimately field test what lawmakers and the executive enact against the constitution and reality. Yes some judges are unhinged culture warriors but I think it's fair to say 1/3rd to a half still care about reality. And we are not yet at the point where judges are being assassinated for handing down judgments that powers don't want to see. Wake me up when that's happening, I guess.

EDIT: I asked SlopGPT for examples of states with solid democracy and rule of law that still underwent rebellion and it cited the UK w.r.t. The Troubles, Spain post-Franco w.r.t. ETA, and Canada w.r.t. Quebec separatism. Surprising. So I suppose I have some reading to do.

EDIT2: although these time periods coincide with global trends in relaxed policing. Pinker's view would be that lax policing encourages disorder instead of cooperation by changing the payoffs

Your point of view is consistently that of a wealthy, entitled person who sees the police as her personal gendarmarie whose job it is to keep the riff-raff from inconveniencing her life in any way. From that point of view, yes, anarchy is a much greater threat than tyranny, because tyranny will mostly leave you alone, while anarchy threatens you. Not to get all "woke" (har) but this is exactly why "privilege" dialog took root. There was originally a legitimate point to it. You consider the lower classes to be undesirables to be kept away from you, and the only thing you fear is revolting peasants. So nearly any level of state crackdown is acceptable to you because only at North Korean levels would it actually threaten your lifestyle. Whereas those beneath you understand what tyranny will do to them.

I don't agree with the general argument you're making. In first-world countries, wealthy people generally have less to fear from increasing steps towards disorder than poorer people, as they can afford things like private security and to live in areas with non-violent and conscientious neighbors. It's poorer people who live next to violent crackheads who have more to lose when the local mayor decides to enct policies that make it impossible to lock up the person who just break into your house because of racism or whatever. This is also reflected in revealed preferences: it's almost always richer people who vote for soft-on-crime, restorative-justice (read: anarchic) policies and candidates while poorer, less educated voters choose candidates with a much more hardline attitude towards criminals.

While you're not incorrect, for the low-level peasant the roving gangs are more dangerous. Big Warlord in the distant city can send his tax collectors round to seize your crops or pressgang your sons, but that's only every so often, like a bad harvest or a plague. It's part of life that bad things happen.

Unrelated gangs of thieves and small local chieftains who sweep through on an unpredictable schedule, and may happen several times in a row, are much more dangerous since they have no interest in leaving you anything until the next time. This is why people may and do prefer the Strongman who cracks down on the roving bands and then levies his tithes. It's why people could be nostalgic for Stalin or the hey-day of the USSR etc.

I'm not in any way endorsing anarchy. On the oppression-anarchy spectrum I'd be closer to @2rafa's POV than the typical DSA or antifa or what-have-you activist (and they would consider me as fascist as her). I agree that at a certain level of anarchy, it's better to have a brutal warlord who at least keeps the bandits at bay than a hellscape of marauding gangs.

That said, tyranny is bad too, and the Warlord's friends telling me life is better under the Warlord's absolute rule is not going to be very convincing.

Tyranny is bad, but the argument of my comment was to suggest that - right now - the long term political consequences of mass immigration (a lower trust, poorer, more violent, more unequal and more corrupt country) outweigh the risks that this almost certainly accidental death is a sure sign of descent into tyranny. I also just replied to wandererinthewilderness in this same thread, apologies for not tagging you.

I apologize for going in on you so hard. Against my initial, wiser judgment, I have found myself invested in this ridiculous case, and the more I am assailed by what I perceive to be low-effort culture warring bombs thrown by rightists and leftists alike (I genuinely do consider both sides at this point-at least at the edges of the argument-to be bad faith, dishonest, and actively destructive to this country), the more disgusted I am. For some reason that manifested in my response to your post, which I really did perceive to be kind of dismissive of the brutality of the police and the state wielded against its "enemies." While I do think you are frequently oblivious (or at least, indifferent) to people outside your social class, it was unfair of me to accuse you of being pro-tyranny.

Against my initial, wiser judgment, I have found myself invested in this ridiculous case

If it's any consolation, you've had the best takes on it of anyone on this site by far

Your point of view is consistently that of a wealthy, entitled person who sees the police as her personal gendarmarie whose job it is to keep the riff-raff from inconveniencing her life in any way. From that point of view, yes, anarchy is a much greater threat than tyranny, because tyranny will mostly leave you alone, while anarchy threatens you. Not to get all "woke" (har) but this is exactly why "privilege" dialog took root. There was originally a legitimate point to it. You consider the lower classes to be undesirables to be kept away from you, and the only thing you fear is revolting peasants. So nearly any level of state crackdown is acceptable to you because only at North Korean levels would it actually threaten your lifestyle. Whereas those beneath you understand what tyranny will do to them.

From a Conflict Theory perspective, there is no reason you should care about this, or people who are not you, as long as your side maintains the levers of power. But "Let them eat cakeboot" does have the potential to redound on you. Traditionally, rich people had some concern about oppression either out of genuine (liberal) conviction or self-preservation.

You know how sometimes you learn a new word or concept and you start to see it regularly?

I recently learned the word "bulverism" :)

Pointing out that "What's so bad about tyranny?" is coming from someone who will benefit from tyranny is not bulverism.

Except that isn’t what the other poster did. The poster said we are so worried about tyranny that we don’t worry about anarchy enough and anarchy is worse than tyranny.

That is not what you ascribed to the other poster.

This reminds me of Peterson’s complaint that we have a lot of antibodies for when the right goes too far but none for when the left goes too far.

This reminds me of Peterson’s complaint that we have a lot of antibodies for when the right goes too far but none for when the left goes too far.

Why does he discount the rather obvious examples of Pinochet and Franco, for example? Genuine question, as I'm not familiar with his work in detail.

Pinochet was pretty objectively good for the lower class in Chile though, so this critique, in in context, makes no sense. If you were complaining about the fates of egghead professors, then perhaps it makes more sense.

OP's point was specifically about scenarios where the Left goes too far, which is arguably what happened under Allende's rule. My critique regarding this is thus that "we" do have at least one example of an antidote.

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Fair point but Spanish and not Anglo world.

Interestingly people like Pinochet don’t command near the cultural respect as say Fidel despite Pinochet leaving Chile a lot better off compared to Fidel in Cuba.

Right. Seemed a non-sequitur to go from that post to "guess you're cool with police tyranny." To steelman Amadan, that is exactly what you'd do if you're intelligent about politics and sensitive to the implications of its arguments. To strawman, it's a hysterically paranoid progressive reflex.

I like that Peterson point. I sometimes feel my niche or role in the conversational eco-system is to provide antibodies for the left, as the right is already vigilantly watched (in this sense, being correct in absolute sense is less important than providing some balance). I think Matt Taibbi made a similar point about why he's journalistically more fixated on areas of rule not under Republican control.

Pointing out that "What's so bad about tyranny?" is coming from someone who will benefit from tyranny is not bulverism.

Looks like a textbook case to me. Wikipedia:

The Bulverist presumes that a speaker's argument is false or invalid and then explains why the speaker made that argument (even if said argument is actually correct) by attacking the speaker or the speaker's motive

Bulverism is only bulverism if it side-steps the speaker's argument entirely. Arguing that the speaker's motives caused them to make a reasoning error at a particular step in the chain is not bulverism. As I understood it, @2rafa argued that "so-called 'tyranny' short of North Korea isn't worthy of the name, because in practice it's very easy for ordinary people to live with unless they actively go out of their way to antagonize the regime"; and @Amadan retorted "no, in fact you are over-generalizing from the experience of a privileged few; living under USSR-style tyranny is very disruptive to actual ordinary people's everyday lives even if they keep their heads down, it's only the upper-middle-class who might get by alright if they're apolitical enough".

Bulverism is only bulverism if it side-steps the speaker's argument entirely. Arguing that the speaker's motives caused them to make a reasoning error at a particular step in the chain is not bulverism. As I understood it, @2rafa argued that "so-called 'tyranny' short of North Korea isn't worthy of the name, because in practice it's very easy for ordinary people to live with unless they actively go out of their way to antagonize the regime"; and @Amadan retorted "no, in fact you are over-generalizing from the experience of a privileged few; living under USSR-style tyranny is very disruptive to actual ordinary people's everyday lives even if they keep their heads down, it's only the upper-middle-class who might get by alright if they're apolitical enough".

Would you mind taking the post I was responding to and quoting the part which is NOT an attack on the previous poster's motivations? TIA.

I will grant you that this post, taken out of context, was very easy to interpret as straight bulverism. It's Amadan's original, longer reply to 2rafa which I believe can be more charitably interpreted as a more valid argument.

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All fair points. I don’t discount the risk of tyranny - North Korea scares me, too. But I also think a lot of our understanding of life being awful in eg the Soviet Union or Maoist China (an understanding that is generally accurate, I think) is because of the terrible ideological choices and economic system that led directly to famine, starvation, poverty, lack of material goods and squalor. Even the extreme violence of the Cultural Revolution - which was bottom-up, not top-down the way that totalitarian state-performed violence is - was part of this.

In fact, the kind of people who were really likely to be persecuted by the KGB were largely what passed for the Soviet upper and upper middle class, people “like me” if you want to take that line of argument, who worked in state administration, running large enterprises, academia, media and so on. Most average working class people had very different problems.

This is true; but then one might argue that the ability to pursue terrible ideologically-driven policies absolutely unconstrained is a key danger of tyranny, not something else that various tyrannies happened to do by coincidence.

‘under constant, totalitarian absolute surveillance with extreme penalties for the tiniest stepping out of line’

This doesn't seem like a germane definition of "tyranny". We get the word from the Ancient Greeks, while your definition would imply that it was more or less impossible for a pre-modern state to be a real tyranny, for lack of adequate surveillance technology. There is a reason that "surveillance state", "totalitarianism" and "tyranny" are all different words, and just because a triple-whammy is appreciably worse than each in isolation, doesn't mean I want to live in a "pure" tyranny (or for that matter a "pure" surveillance state).

The failure state of tyranny has the potential to be much more deadly. The highest crime-related murder rates in the world tend to cap out around 100 per 100,000 per year. The Khmer Rouge murder rate was something like 7,000 per 100,000 per year.

Even in Somalia it's not clear that the anarchy of the present is any worse than the tyranny of Siad Barre.

And of course, to bang my usual drum, lockdowns were tyranny, so that made the number of tyrannical states be at least 100 just a handful of years ago.

The Khmer Rouge murder rate was something like 7,000 per 100,000 per year.

I don't what method you used to arrive at this figure but I'd mention that according to the Pol Pot biography by Philip Short, about 3/4 of all excess deaths in Cambodia attributed to the Khmer Rogue were due to malnutrition and disease, in turn caused by government negligence and incompetence, plus the wholesale collapse of state capacity after five years of brutal civil war during the US-aligned military dictatorship.

With regard to Somalia I won't disagree with your point outright but would mention that the repression during the last years of Barre's rule was pretty damn bad by anyone's standards: the wholesale slaughter of "treasonous" clans, indiscriminate aerial bombing, mass rapes, the destruction of water reservoirs and livestock.

The highest crime-related murder rates in the world tend to cap out around 100 per 100,000 per year. The Khmer Rouge murder rate was something like 7,000 per 100,000 per year.

I don’t think counting extremely destructive, ideologically motivated civil conflict as “tyranny” is particularly productive in this discussion, or else plenty of early modern European countries that don’t really count ask ‘tyrannies’ are tyrannies. A totalitarian tyranny isn’t “when you kill half of your population for being the wrong race/religion/sect/caste”, that’s far too broad and common throughout human history. Humans living in tribes before the Neolithic revolution also saw very high male death rates to murder per year in many cases, is that ‘tyranny’?

The reality is that North Korea and Eritrea both probably still have higher quality of life than Haiti right now.

Taking GDP per capita as a rough proxy, NK is considerably worse than Haiti.

This just goes to show how bad GDP is as a measure. There is no way this is correct.

I don't think this is a problem with GDP as a measure, but a problem with measuring North Korea's GDP. Kim's regime doesn't exactly put out accurate economic reports.

The failure state of tyranny has the potential to be much more deadly. The highest crime-related murder rates in the world tend to cap out around 100 per 100,000 per year. The Khmer Rouge murder rate was something like 7,000 per 100,000 per year.

I'm not a political science expert, but I tend to agree with this. Another factor to consider is that tyrants are always tempted to start wars with other countries as a of holding on to power.

While I sympathise with your broader point, I don’t think that you’re making the argument well. People are afraid of living with the equivalent of the Gestapo or the KGB, so saying that they weren’t real tyranny is just going to get ‘well, I don’t want not-real-tyranny either thank you’.

And indeed one of the problems with tyranny is that it can coexist perfectly happily with anarchy.

It just seems manifestly obvious that the failure state where enforcement melts away is vastly more common that the failure state where the entire country is, essentially, imprisoned. Anarchy and tyranny can co-exist, but anarcho-tyranny is a conservative/reactionary concept precisely because it describes a failure of liberal democracy in which protected, left-friendly groups aren’t prosecuted while unprotected ones are.

The question isn't 'what's more common in world-historical terms'. The question is 'what's more likely in the modern west'. And modern western countries are tightening the noose around dissidents, they're not giving up their monopoly on violence.

My point is that you are excluding the vast majority of what people consider 'tyranny' from your list and then saying there isn't very much tyranny in the world. If we include the Gestapo, the KGB, COVID lockdowns, anti-Catholic burnings during the Reformation, the Terror in revolutionary France, Jim Crow etc. then it's still broadly true that people underweight the harms of anarchy compared to 'you can get along as long as you don't do anything to upset the government', but the picture is more complex than 'really there are only two tyrannies in the world and they're both tiny'.

We recently had much of the world fall into the failure state where the entire country was imprisoned by stay at home orders with lockdowns.

The enabling part of anarcho-tyranny is the tyranny part, not the anarchy part, because it describes the power of the state pressing on the scales. Can't go the other way.

The big difference between them is that the bullet that hit Babbitt was extremely effective. People were trying to break down the doors, one of them got shot, they stopped and lost all steam.

The iceman shooter could've been in the fight mode due to his previous car-related experience, but what are the situations in which shooting the driver is the action that fixes everything? Again, I'm not asking if his action was legally justified (I am leaning towards "yes" as in "yes, he's going to be acquitted"), but if it was the correct one.

Let's imagine there was no question whether he could dodge the car or not, that he was right in front of the grille. What would shooting Good have improved in this situation? It wouldn't have stopped the car, it wouldn't have saved him, it wouldn't have allowed her to escape justice. It could only prevent Good from going full Carmageddon on the rest of the team, which is not what she was trying to do.

It could only prevent Good from going full Carmageddon on the rest of the team, which is not what she was trying to do.

Which is an assumption as to intention on your part. We don't know what she would have done, which is the problem. Even if she didn't intend to run down other ICE agents, she could well have done so as part of her efforts to flee the scene. This happens in such situations; the Charlottesville guy hit people when trying to get away (after deliberately driving into the crowd), it's what contributed to the murders of two British Army corporals after they drove into an IRA funeral:

Wearing civilian clothes, both armed with Browning Hi-Power pistols and in a civilian car, the soldiers drove into the funeral procession of an IRA member, seemingly by mistake. Three days before, the loyalist Michael Stone had attacked an IRA funeral and killed three people. Believing the soldiers were loyalists intent on repeating Stone's attack, dozens of people surrounded and attacked their car.

The ICE guy was not a mind reader. "Well she's trying to knock me down, but that's not intentional, that's panic, and if I get out of the way she'll just drive off and not go after anyone else" was not something he could know for sure, especially given that she was demonstrably there using her car to block ICE and to get in the way (see @Blueberry's post above).

The best action would probably jumping on the hood, or getting the center of gravity high enough the car knocks you over instead of under. This is such a split second decision though. Shooting has high variance, maybe it only provides revenge.

The best action would probably jumping on the hood, or getting the center of gravity high enough the car knocks you over instead of under.

It's a Honda Pilot, not a Chevy Corvette. The hood is very high.

Let's imagine there was no question whether he could dodge the car or not, that he was right in front of the grille. What would shooting Good have improved in this situation?

It could have minimized the time a friend of his would get dragged, if he got stuck the same way he did in the other incident.

I can agree that with perfect hindsight he shouldn't have shot her, but that argument strikes as kinda insane. How was he supposed to have perfect hindsight in the moment it was happening?

How was he supposed to have perfect hindsight in the moment it was happening?

He wasn't, but the point of discussing whether what he did was optimal in hindsight is, IMO, to come up with a consensus that can be drilled into other LEOs so that they act more optimally if they ever find themselves in an analogous situation in the future. This is a high-profile case; whether the consensus emerges as "it was a good idea to shoot Good" or "in an idea world he should have jumped out of the way/whatever" can be expected to have some influence on cops' gut reactions when they find themselves in similar predicaments.

There is no such thing as “optimal”. It comes down to whether you think obstructing ICE is good.

  1. If he shoots we get fewer Goods obstructing ICE
  2. If he doesn’t shoot he’s probably safe getting away but we get more incidents.

I am pro-shooting because it reduces obstruction and reduces future crime.

If he shoots we get fewer Goods obstructing ICE

You might be right, but this is a massive assumption.

There's a world where she becomes a martyr and people rally around her image to protest ICE even harder in response.

I'm not sure what world we're in, but the outcomes of such things is not that easy to guess off rip.

It comes down to whether you think obstructing ICE is good.

Well, no. By "analogous situations in the future" I meant things of the shape "armed LEO thinks that a hitherto-non-murderous civilian is suddenly about to ram them with a car", whatever the identity and motivation of the civilian (and indeed, whichever law-enforcement unit the officer belongs to).

Also, with respect, you reasoning seems like a textbook example of terrorism in the original French Reign of Terror sense. "At the end of the day, it doesn't matter if the state was justified in killing this particularly citizen; so long as the killing frightens other civilians away from non-lethally obstructing state action in the future, then it was justified" is a very dark road.

I prefer my dark road to anarchy. Not taking the dark road means 1% of the population deciding they don’t want something can cancel the ability of the government to do anything. A hecklers veto.

And we are struggling with this in a lot of places. Shooting one blue haired lesbian now lets ICE do their job. Honestly probably saves a billion in lost ICE man-power hours. It’s just a good trade.

Not taking the dark road means 1% of the population deciding they don’t want something can cancel the ability of the government to do anything.

This is a very silly false dichotomy: you are assuming the conclusion that "kill Mrs Good, possibly unjustly" is the only way to curb the problem of excessive obstructive protesting, creating a binary choice between human sacrifice and anarchy run amok. In fact, I don't believe that killings intended to create mass terror are the only way to curb obstructionism, if that is what you want to do - let alone that it is the most effective one. That's the whole crux of the debate, and you just whizz past it.

What are my other options?

Killing a few obstructors feels like it will solve the obstruction problem to me. Honestly there is a meme going around now where a “solves the problem button exists” and then everyone says these reasons I don’t care about will be a problem for not pressing it. I think I can just press this button.

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perfect hindsight

I'm talking about perfect foresight, something that should be drilled into leos in the police academy. "Don't stand in front of the car, because there's literally nothing you can do if the driver floors it unless you have been a D1 track and field athlete. You might spend your last moments shooting the driver and you might even hit'em, but good luck explaining to Saint Peter why you shot a seventy-year-old lady with mild dementia. Yes, there are situations when spending the last moments of your life shooting at the perp trying to get away is the best course of action, but don't be a fucking dumbass cowboy and put yourself into them."

Ms. Good might have listened to her wife and floored it because her wife told her to in this particular case. In another universe she might've wanted to put the car in park to get out of the car and pressed the wrong pedal. In a third universe she was pulled out of the car when the car was in gear and she was the one holding the brake pedal. In a fourth one she was actually Basma Faheem, a recent convert to radical Islam trying to lure a federal officer into a false state of complacency and run him over.

I'm talking about perfect foresight, something that should be drilled into leos in the police academy

That's still pefect hindsight. The only reason you're acting like you know what should have been drilled into their heads is because you've seen the video and can analyze all the little things that could have been done to avoid this specific situation. It's not clear if your recommendations would run into other issues during standard police work, so I find it a bit silly to declare with so much certainty how this should be handled.

In exceptionally simplistic terms, the people on the left who are against ICE and pro Somali or whoever immigration don’t love Somalis, they just hate their fellow countrymen.

I don't think this works, as there are also relatively right-leaning libertarians like Bryan Caplan who are also in favor of more immigration.

My highly tentative suspicion is that at least some of the political division over immigration is downstream of genetic differences related to the Big Five personality trait of Openness to Experience. I think this also explains a lot of the increasing urban-rural divide in American politics, with people often self-sorting based on their genetic predisposition to cosmopolitanism and tribalism.

Unfortunately for the tribalists, there are a lot of benefits to city living due to networking effects, and so, generally speaking, city folk enjoy a higher standard of living than rural folk in the modern day. Since rural folk will have a higher genetic predisposition towards tribalism, this leads to growing resentment at their "unfair" status compared to urban elites, in a cycle that just gets worse and worse as the genetic ability to be cosmopolitan leaves rural breeding stock with each generation, leaving those who are left behind less and less able to cut it in the city.

It's not that rural people are genetically inferior. They're well suited to a small, close-knit tribal environment that was the human norm for 2 million years, but in the last 10,000 years the equation has flipped and cosmopolitanism generally outcompetes tribalism over the long term, and so humans keep building cities, and rural folk keep losing out and being xenophobic about the cosmopolitan urban areas.

I actually think H.P. Lovecraft is a great example of this phenotype. He was undoubtedly a genius, but with many of his aliens I find myself wondering if there isn't some way we could team up with them in a vast, galactic civilization? For example, the starfish-headed elder things and the mi-go seem like species we could eventually reach some sort of understanding with. Similarly, the underground K'n-yan seem like people we could get along with, under the right circumstances. And honestly, learning fourth-dimensional math witchcraft from a rat-human hybrid that can move through walls seems kind of cool actually (though I could do without the ritual baby sacrifice.)

But Lovecraft's horror was so effective because he understood the danger the Other posed. One of his most racist stories, "The Horror at Red Hook", which is partially inspired by his time living in New York city, is all about the effect that immigrant populations have on a native-born population. And yet, I find myself living in an apartment in a city, surrounded by black and brown people, not far from a bunch of Korean and Japanese law firms and restaurants, and with a largely LGBT friend group, and I'm generally pretty happy with my life, and I feel safe and good about where I live most of the time. I'm reminded of Curtis Yarvin's famous statement that Cthulhu always swims left, and a part of me wants to say, "Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn!"

One thing I don't think you've considered is that a lot of right wingers are actually fairly willing to accept immigration; their sticking point is that it has to be of individuals who help the country.

So as a general rule, I'd consider all of the following to be places where immigration shouldn't be used:

  1. When the immigration is used to keep costs down or drive profit up for business owners (so bringing in minimum wage workers when there is a lot of unemployment amongst low skilled workers is net negative).
  2. When there is a shortage in resources that immigration will make worse (for example, if you have an 72 hour wait to be seen in emergency, or house prices are going to the moon, you shouldn't bring in immigrants unless they are directly related to alleviating those issues).
  3. When the cost of the immigrant is greater than the benefit we receive from them (for example, someone who commits crimes, or someone who requires welfare).

A lot of right wingers have decided "no more immigration" because they believe (and I believe too) that the blue tribe isn't going to respect any of the above. In Canada, our left-wing appointed judges explicitly look at whether a criminal conviction would impact someone's immigration claims, and assign lower penalties if they would. The dreamers reform in the US was explicitly predicated on the ideal that immigration law would be enforced in exchange for amnesty for existing illegal immigrants. There have been numerous allegations that Walz and other senior members of Minnesota's government knew about the Somali fraud, but didn't do anything about it.

If you want the right wing to accept immigration, then you need to be willing to make the following sacrifices:

  1. Kick out illegal immigrants.
  2. Kick out criminal immigrants.
  3. Kick out net negative immigrants (as in, those that consume more services than they produce).
  4. Credibly commit to keeping these standards, going forward.

Another thing that doesn't help is the hypocrisy inherent in a lot of the left-wing positions. Most recently with Biden, but with Obama too, there was an opportunity for the left to reform the immigration laws in the way they want. Instead, they chose to just not enforce the rules. If they thought their position was defensible, they'd push to change the laws to reflect what they actually want to do. The fact that they didn't implies to me either that they don't actually believe that the position they're taking is popular enough to win an election, or that they prefer to keep the leverage they have over the illegal immigrants (so they can force them to work for less under threat of deportation). Both are indefensible, from my perspective - the government is elected to do the will of their constituents, so doing something that couldn't win an election should be strictly off the table. And of course, the other position is no better than slavery.

“I live in a highly filtered wealthy city with rents and zoning that keeps the poor immigrants out” And diversity is great.

Have you lived in Brazil? Or Venezuela or even Birmingham, Alabama?

I like my multi-ethnic slop bowls as much as the next guy but I will gladly consist of English food if it means I don’t have to worry about a lot of low IQ third worlders rising up and confiscating all my wealth like in S Africa or Venezuela.

So yes we have had some success paths to limited multiculturalism I guess in NYC, San Fran, and arguably Miami - but we’ve seen huge failure paths of multiculturalism in Latam and Africa. Early signs of trouble in the Nordics.

A big problem for elitists blues is they interact with the highly filtered elites of ethnic groups and not the average dude. But the low class reds know the average dude and not the elite.

Also I've been to plenty of 95%-local ethnostates in the world where they're totally covered on all the latest global food trends. Tier 1s in China don't have a hell of a lot of foreigners but they've got a staggering array of European, Asian and American cuisines available for cheap and high quality. The whole 'but the food' argument is pretty absurd in the days of Youtube.

Or Europe...

And yet, I find myself living in an apartment in a city, surrounded by black and brown people... I feel safe and good about where I live most of the time. I'm reminded of Curtis Yarvin's famous statement that Cthulhu always swims left, and a part of me wants to say, "Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn!"

If you're white, and if black and brown people give you warm and fuzzy feelings—those feelings are not only unreciprocated—but reciprocated in the inverse direction. And insofar as black and brown people tend to be net-tax consumers, that’s not a warm and fuzzy feeling for the wallets of white and white-adjacent people.

Individuals such as Bethany Magee and Ryan Carson found out the hard way, where the latter's friends would continue carrying water for blacks after his death:

Their friends say he [Carson] would consider his killer the 'victim of a broken system' and would want his death to be used to continue advocating for social justice causes.

Bonus quotes from an (also black) family friend of the killer, in hitting for the cycle when it comes to tropes, emphasizing the killer was just a teen and a good boy:

'It's a horrible tragedy because the son comes from a good family,' Riddick told DailyMail.com.

'I can't think of anything I can say why he went that route, or what triggered him to go that way.

'The kid is only 18 years old. And I really feel for the victim's family.'

'This was not the norm. He's a teenager.'

Riddick said it was 'a bad situation', but insisted Dowling was not a trouble maker.

'He wasn't the type of kid that followed,' said Riddick.

'He stayed to himself and was quiet. He never had any altercations.'

I enjoy how the family friend says the stabbing was a horrible tragedy because the black killer comes from a good family; the victim's family is just an afterthought (and the victim is a zero-thought). Additionally amusing is how he wonders what "triggered" the killer to stab, akin to pitbull defenders wondering what triggered a pibbie's reactivity.

If you're white, and if black and brown people give you warm and fuzzy feelings—those feelings are not only unreciprocated—but reciprocated in the inverse direction.

Interesting that Hispanics and Asians also rate every other group above whites (although "Asian" as a category is so broad as to be almost useless)

For Asians the ratings of the three other groups likely aren't statistically significantly different from each other. It does appear there's some greater variance in the ratings of Asian respondents, hence the wider errors (may be related to greater Asian heterogeneity, as you noted). Could just be lower sample size, though.

What's also interesting is that blacks have the highest degree of ethno-narcissism. They have the largest 1 vs. 2, 1 vs. 3, and 1 vs. 4 deltas of each of the four panels, where 1-4 correspond to the highest to lowest rated of each panel.

The 1 vs. 2 delta of black respondents (black vs. Hispanic) appears to be larger than the Asian 1 vs. 4 delta (Asian vs. white) and of similar magnitude as the Hispanic 1 vs. 4 delta (Hispanic vs. white), although these three deltas likely aren't statistically significant from each other.

And yet, I find myself living in an apartment in a city, surrounded by black and brown people, not far from a bunch of Korean and Japanese law firms and restaurants, and with a largely LGBT friend group, and I'm generally pretty happy with my life, and I feel safe and good about where I live most of the time.

Yeah. Because you feel like one of them.

Try being in a place where you think you're one of them, and then you say something like "You know, calling Curtis Yarvin a Nazi seems kinda dumb because he's Jewish" or "Uh, this story about a rape on campus is probably totally made up" or "I don't think there's anything wrong with the "Hide yo' wives" meme' and having everyone turn on you. You'll realize you were living in a fool's paradise.

Of course, YOU wouldn't ever say anything that would trigger such a reaction, right?

I always felt like Scott Alexander's Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning was at least in part a guide for people with controversial beliefs to go along to get along. See also Leo Strauss, and his idea that great thinkers of the past were often esoteric and hid their actual ideas for only the smartest to find and deal with.

I think our relatively free and open era has spoiled a lot of us. We chafe against any limits on our abilities to say whatever we want and not have the people around us react with social opprobrium. And yet, Plato, writing one generation after Socrates was executed for his open practice of philosophy, is supposed to have said in his seventh letter, 'I have never written down my true beliefs.'

I definitely have beliefs that would make me a pariah in some of the social circles I move around in. Who doesn't? But I am polite and politick enough to not make a big deal out of these beliefs in the circumstances where it could go bad for me.

Don't get me wrong, there's value in being a Socrates or a Helvidius Priscus, and being willing to die for your beliefs, while speaking truth to power. But there is also value in being a Plato or (as Strauss sees them) a Maimonides or a Machiavelli, and hiding your true views from all except a vanishingly small number of highly discerning readers. Luckily, the internet is still anonymous enough that I think we get a great compromise: able to be open about our beliefs in places like the Motte, and able to be Straussians/take the Kolmogorov option everywhere else in our lives.

I always felt like Scott Alexander's Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning was at least in part a guide for people with controversial beliefs to go along to get along.

[...]

I definitely have beliefs that would make me a pariah in some of the social circles I move around in. Who doesn't? But I am polite and politick enough to not make a big deal out of these beliefs in the circumstances where it could go bad for me.

You now find yourself advising people to act like they live in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, and implicitly criticizing those who do not.

Has there ever been a human society where there weren't taboos or ideas that were considered dangerous and wrong? Even relatively open societies have lines you're not supposed to cross.

I think there's a good chance that Classical Liberalism is dead in America. I had a little hope that the right might try to revive it, but Trump 2 has clearly not brought anything like a bedrock of Classical Liberalism back to our politics. If we're going to have to suffer under the rule of identity politics from the Right or the Left anyways, might as well start quietly building the foundations for a better society like Kolmogorov, and not worry about what we can't control.

Of course, this is all acting with some assumption that something like a normal human society exists in a few decades, and I don't rule out the possibility that AI may prove to be a total game changer in numerous hard to predict directions.

Has there ever been a human society where there weren't taboos or ideas that were considered dangerous and wrong? Even relatively open societies have lines you're not supposed to cross.

I'm just going to ignore this smokescreen, and again point out that you are not only comparing the social circles you are in with Stalinist Russia, but blaming anyone who doesn't keep silent for not getting along.

I've also implicitly compared them to Lovecraftian horrors and hive-minded vampires in this same thread. I'm not sure why you're hammering this point. It isn't a gotcha, it is built into what I am saying.

And I wouldn't say "blame" is the correct word here. I said it is noble to be Socrates or Helvidius Priscus and die for your beliefs. That isn't blame. I just personally think that there is more wisdom in being Plato or Maimonides. People are allowed to disagree with me, and turn themselves into Socrates or Helvidius Priscus.

My highly tentative suspicion is that at least some of the political division over immigration is downstream of genetic differences related to the Big Five personality trait of Openness to Experience.

Oh, how nice that we can explain away opposition to illegal immigration by "the right-wingers are just mentally deficient".

And yet, I find myself living in an apartment in a city, surrounded by black and brown people, not far from a bunch of Korean and Japanese law firms and restaurants, and with a largely LGBT friend group, and I'm generally pretty happy with my life, and I feel safe and good about where I live most of the time.

Don't you feel it's somewhat slightly colonialist to have the attitude "foreigners exist to provide me with tasty food from their cultures"? More seriously, how much interaction do you have with those black and brown people, how much are they part of your life and not just the scenic backdrop to "my fun time in the Big City"? Though I guess congratulations on being the Token Straight in your friend group! You are providing them with the same validation as the Korean restauranteurs are providing for you: "Hey, I know an actual straight guy in real life!" "No way!" "It's true, we even hang out sometimes, just ask DeShawn and Chasten!"

Oh, how nice that we can explain away opposition to illegal immigration by "the right-wingers are just mentally deficient".

I don't believe that right-wingers are just mentally deficient.

My belief is closer to "agonistic pluralism" or the idea that within society there's a tendency for the struggle between various personality phenotypes to result in better outcomes overall. You need a certain amount of openness in society, but too much can lead to bad outcomes. You need a certain amount of fear of the Other, but too much can lead to bad outcomes.

I think there are plenty of historical examples to learn from. Look at Rome conquering Greece militarily, and then being "conquered" by Greek philosophical thought. Would Cato the Elder, who famously spoke out against Greek philosophy as un-Roman, have been happy to learn that his grandson, Cato the Younger, was the poster boy for Stoic martyrdom two generations later? I think for us non-Romans looking back, we can see that it was a mixed bag. The Greeks had a lot of good ideas, and Rome importing them probably helped them transition from a Republic to an Empire, and maintain their new system for hundreds of years, but it did come at the cost of being "less Roman" than the generation of Cato the Elder in some sense.

Now, I'm not naive enough to think that we'll always get the perfect balance of struggle at all times. In fact, I'm worried that various trends of modernity might be killing the goose that lays the golden eggs for us.

For example, I suspect that men and women in heterosexual relationships had a tendency to "balance each other out" personality-wise in the past, and the increasing number of single men and women and the nightmare of the modern dating scene is leading to this balancing not happening. So we get women flying off into extremes of Progressivism and Leftism, and men flying off into extremes of Rightism. And honestly, I don't like either tendency. I was against Wokeism, and I'm against Trumpist identity politics as well.

Openness to foreign cultures, in my experience, is generally a bell-curve meme, with "wow, so many kinds of food" in the middle. Part of my political awakening was traveling a lot and seeing different stages of the world's progress towards becoming substantively identical multi-culti slop (with a few chintzy tokens from a people's old way of life), everything tossed into the blending blades of Scott's Universal Culture. It was realizing that I wanted Turkey to be Turkish that helped me realize I want America to be American. (Sadly this is far more complex than the culture war political narrative, and is more technocapital acceleration than just bad policy, but such is life)

Openness to foreign cultures, in my experience, is generally a bell-curve meme, with "wow, so many kinds of food" in the middle.

I hope my talking about "Korean and Japanese restaurants" didn't come off as my only exposure to other cultures. I've also gone through periods of curiosity about several cultural times and places, with most of my exposure being to the history and thought of Japan, India, the Roman Republic and Empire, Ancient Greece, Italian Renaissance Humanists, and the North American Southwest Indians, with a small sprinkling of Revolutionary American history and the era of Jacksonian Democracy.

I also tried to learn Indonesian, and did a language immersion class in Bali, and have taken trips to Slovakia and Scotland. I would honestly say the Bali trip is part of what helped me appreciate the value of tribalism, and take that back to some of my appreciation for rural people in the United States.

Part of my political awakening was traveling a lot and seeing different stages of the world's progress towards becoming substantively identical multi-culti slop (with a few chintzy tokens from a people's old way of life), everything tossed into the blending blades of Scott's Universal Culture

I think there are aspects I still admire about the Universal Culture.

The fact that anywhere you go Prussian Schooling is the norm for schools, and people are using Hindu-Arabic numerals, with standardized testing influenced by ancient China, and the effects of standardization and industrialism have shaped us all into similar cookie cutter shapes is kind of wonderful and terrible at the same time.

It's like the vampires in the movie Sinners. All you have to do is die as yourself, and be reborn as something not quite alive, not quite yourself but eternal and powerful and predatory.

Yeah, I think one can appreciate Universal Culture in a Landian sense, as part of the technocapital Elder God summoning itself from the future. But a lot is also lost, and, even if we side with the hyperstitional space tentacles, we have a human duty to preserve, remember, and mourn.

People in cities are still viciously tribal, though. Tons of them can't get through a casual conversation without mentioning how much they hate Trump, ICE, tech bros, cops, billionaires, conservatives, white people (while being white), rich people, straightness (while being straight), or men, and give you weird looks if you don't join in. And that's if you can even get them to talk to you.

My friend group here, despite being very adjacent to the LGBT community, has no actual LGBT people in it. (At most, It has the occasional straight chick who talks about Queerness a lot). And this isn't because we keep the LGBTs out, it's because none of us are "cool" enough for them; we dont speak in reddit-isms, too much of our conversation isn't about politics, and when one of them does wander in, we dont relentlessly praise their LGBTness like I presume other straight people do, we keep playing D&D. Oh, and the system we use doesn't have Tieflings in it, that's a big barrier. This suits me just fine.

Despite being full of minorities and anti-racists, the neighborhoods are still racially sorted somehow. It can't be the fault of conservatives, since there's none of them here.

Tribalism is alive and well in cities. By comparison, people outside of cities don't quake in performative fear when someone they don't know exists in their general vicinity, they don't constantly screech about all the things they hate, and what LGBT and People of Color that do exist there seem far more willing to socialize with non-queer/non-of-color people without making the entire interaction about queerness or of-color-ness.

Also, HP did describe the Elder Things as Men of a different age, they were ultimately people and more a subject of awe and fascination than horror. He arguably hated them way less than black people.

People in cities are still viciously tribal, though. Tons of them can't get through a casual conversation without mentioning how much they hate Trump, ICE, tech bros, cops, billionaires, conservatives, white people (while being white), rich people, straightness (while being straight), or men, and give you weird looks if you don't join in. And that's if you can even get them to talk to you.

Blue Tribers hating on Trump, tech bros, cops, billionaires, rich people, straightness and men are all hating on other blue tribers. (It's the local cops they object to, not random cops in small-town Iowa, and Trump is a renegade Blue Triber). "White people" is a corner case - white people performative hating on white people is mostly a weapon in intra-Blue status games, but can also be an expression of hatred for the Reds. But that is a quibble - more fundamentally, I think you are extrapolating from very online minorities. I have spent a lot of time professionally around PMC Blue Tribe Americans, and for most of them the only time they performatively hate on right-wing outgroups is for an hour a year as part of mandatory workplace diversity training. My more limited experience travelling in Red America is consistent - the minority of politically engaged Reds engage in performative hatred on the Blue target du jour (at the time it was Hilary Clinton) but the grill-pilled majority try not to talk about politics with otherwise-friendly strangers.

If stoking tribal hatred was popular with normies, American politics would not look the way it does. Poasters chasing clout online maximise tribal hatred, but both parties try to turn it down during general election campaigns (Trump with far more success than Harris, which is part of why he won) because it is a vote-loser.

All my examples come from IRL interactions in Chicago. It happens with randos, it happens with people I meet socially.

Three separate people said "ewww, there's a lot of white people around here" while wandering around the north side with me in 2020. Way back when I brushed it off, and went on to regret associating with them after how they behaved later.

All my examples come from IRL interactions in Chicago. It happens with randos, it happens with people I meet socially.

I am so, so tired of the "it's just some loud weirdos online" argument that you're responding to. No, I am talking about real-life examples dealing with blue-triber whites where they can't go 5 minutes without making some kind of snide comment about rednecks/chuds/white trash/whatever the preferred term of the day is for the residents of Red America. Trying to discuss the weather leads to it. Trying to discuss local events leads to it. There is no escape.

It's not even Red America being shit on, it's White People in general or Men in general. Sometimes they complete the trifecta and complain about Straight people. Since I'm the person they're talking to, I honestly can't tell if they're telegraphing that I should go away, or they just think this is how people interact.

Regardless of who the target is, it's still a fucking unhealthy and unbecoming amount of open vitriol for the people who claim they're all about Empathy/Niceness/Inclusivity.

Blacks with more red tribe adjacency(lots of them working in the trades, but bowhunting is the real reliable way to meet them) are real popular with the red tribe, generally. The tribalism in the US is about different kinds of white people hating each other, I don't see a massive difference between the two tribes in terms of actual dislike, and the fact of the matter is that we're too different to be friends easily so some tensions are always going to be there.

Also, HP did describe the Elder Things as Men of a different age, they were ultimately people and more a subject of awe and fascination than horror.

Yeah, that's one thing I like about "At the Mountains of Madness". Narrator starts off with "these horrible alien things attacked us and maybe even ate some of our dead" and ends with "they're people like us, we have much more in common than with the true monstrosities".

I don't think this works, as there are also relatively right-leaning libertarians like Bryan Caplan who are also in favor of more immigration.

Caplans position is actually quite far from the left. He favors a UAE type model: let the world in and deport them instantly if they jaywalk or consume any welfare. Also they and their America-born children get no political representation or welfare ever.

Apart from the complete inability to politically maintain this situation, it's a good plan.

Apart from the complete inability to politically maintain this situation, it's a good plan.

Sentences like this crack me up

"If you look passed the issues that make this plan fundamentally impossible to work, it would work so good"

Apart from the complete inability to politically maintain this situation, it's a good plan.

That's my beef with the left and with Caplan on this: let's import a permanent serf class to do the low-grade labour it would be too expensive to pay natives to do, forever!

The left is just less upfront about what this means in practice, and more self-deluding about 'and I guess we can let their kids go to college? just so long as there is a never-ending supply of replacement serf labour from their home countries so I get my tomatoes picked for cheap!'

If you import a bunch of slaves you might be able to beat and select the criminality out of them. But you won't get rid of their low trust clannish mentality and backwards culture.

And honestly, learning fourth-dimensional math witchcraft from a rat-human hybrid that can move through walls seems kind of cool actually (though I could do without the ritual baby sacrifice.)

I mean, that story ended with the rat bursting out of the main character's chest to claim the heart he had promised when he signed a contract with Yog Sothoth, so not terribly cool even without the baby sacrifice.

I think this is basically correct, though there are other personality traits that are related as well. With Lovecraft, in particular, my impression is that he was a highly Open to Experience person who nonetheless was extremely conscientious and concerned about contamination. The highest predictor of political liberalism is Openness to Experience, but the second-most is sometimes called "orderliness," or concern about order, contamination, structure.

There are also people who are highly Open to Experience in an intellectual sense, but closed to experience in a social sense, and I'd probably put myself in that category. I'm happy to try all sorts of wild cuisines or explore all sorts of interesting cultures, so long as it doesn't impose on me all sorts of social tests that I might fail, to humiliation or sorting into a category of "ignorant American tourist."

So I guess you might argue I'm defensively xenophobic; I know what Europeans and LatAms and the Chinese and the Japanese say about Americans behind closed doors. Why would I want people who don't view themselves as natively part of my group subject to that derision to come here, potentially with their derisive attitudes towards me and the people I care about and the customs that are meaningful to me? I know, say, what my friend's French-American coworker says about America. There simply aren't a lot of people who are truly xenophilic towards America, despite the media representations from Los Angeles that falsify what's it's really like here and which we pump out to the rest of the world -- I'm not sure whether we should be sending our political news or our cultural products to Timbuktu, but no one in Hollywood consulted me.

My opinion is that most immigrants, legal and illegal, to the US are people who view it as an economic resource, not a country and a people with its own customs and values that should be respected. I want people to come to my country because they share my love for it and want to make it their home, not because they see dollar signs. I want assurance that the place I live, the customs I grew up with, and the people I care about are not being judged as stupid, corrupt, or contemptible by those joining them.

The feeling that Americans have about our relations to the rest of the world is that we're hated for geopolitical reasons that the average American has no control over -- I don't know who I have to vote for to stop my country from antagonizing foreign peoples like we do every five milliseconds -- and because of wealth that to us feels like poverty, because cost of living adjusts. Both the left and the right feel this, but the left tries to apologize for it or adopt what people say we should (we should be more like Europe, European governments do this, all other western nations do this, we're really just like a third world country, Obama's apology tour), and the right either lives in denial of it ("leader of the free world!," "USA, USA!"), or, more recently, leans into it.

Trump, enter stage left. I don't know if you can understand the Greenland stuff or the America First stuff or the Venezuela stuff without the sense that a lot of red Americans have that the world believes (in their estimation) that the US has no soft power and is a fat, ugly, overprivileged waste of resources that believes in ridiculous, outmoded forms of belief like Christianity, or freedom of speech, or patriotism. I suppose Trump's gut feeling is, "well, if that's how you see us, then I guess that's our only avenue to global influence without abjection and humiliation." To some degree, American xenophobia is directly related to the impression that our attempts at xenophilia aren't met with mutual respect, if not from politicians, then at least from ordinary people or cultural elites.

It's true that cosmopolitanism often correlates with wealth generation, but at the same time, almost no countries on earth are truly xenophilic -- they use cosmopolitanism as a tool, like China and Japan or hell, MBS style Saudi Arabia, while retaining an intense sense of nationalism and a commitment to national identity. So I'm not convinced that cosmopolitanism is useful without limits, and may even be destructive and non-competitive should forming a strong, coherent national identity serve as an adaptive strategy in the modern era after all, as I'd argue it's doing for countries like China.

The issue isn't whether cities are economic engines or whether cosmopolitanism is useful for global economic trade. It's what the limits are to cosmopolitanism's utility. At times, cosmopolitanism begins to feel less like benevolence and more like unreciprocated vulnerability. The US oscillates between generosity and defensiveness because we're desperate to be seen as good. The debate is the same one the country had in 2016: should America be great (again), even if it means being terrible, or should America try to convince the world that, in Hillary Clinton's words, "America is great because America is good." The fear is that it's not possible to be both.

Describing Lovecraft as “conscientious” without mentioning neuroticism feels like burying the lede. You can’t separate his outlook from the absolutely miserable time he was having with his family and his finances.

I think Americans are the same way. Xenophobia comes from uncertainty. When times are good and people are optimistic, we’re all more willing to be cosmopolitan. As times get harsher, more people hit their personal neuroticism thresholds. Those with high conscientiousness are squeezed towards authoritarianism. Their less conscientious counterparts favor anarchy.

This is why Trump populism has outcompeted Tea Party libertarians. It’s why he keeps embarrassing neoliberals, whose radicals despise them, too. He is rewarded for playing the strongman in a way that a progressive cannot.

There simply aren't a lot of people who are truly xenophilic towards America

This is true for Euros and some foreign elites who have absorbed American blue-tribe memes. For the most part, people love meeting an American, with the same qualifiers as with any foreigner (respect/be interested in the culture, be friendly and funny, try to get off the tourist paths).

Coming here from the Quality Contribution thread, I have to concur. America still has a strong positive, but maybe not explicit halo for europeans, at least for working class europeans. My (Spanish) wife and I went to visit New-York in december and my in-laws wanted as souvenirs Statue of Liberty keychains and (more tellingly) american 1$ bills. They have put these bills in their wallets and phone cases as good luck charms. This is despite them also watching the news daily and absorbing all the anti-american signaling. I don't think a country's smallest denomination bill becomes a good luck charm for foreigners without at least unconscious good vibes being associated with it.

no soft power

The thing is that the US has crazy, overflowing amounts of soft power, it's just divided up between sides of a political scene pumping out content to to own the opposite side. So the half of Euros that buy into the Left side of the flood will of course be getting the message that America is basically Idiocracy, a country of cartoonish bigoted white supremacist cro-magnons. The growing share that is inundated more in the Right side of the slop will see America as the pink-haired jerks who are coming up with all this trans woke covid-lockdowns refugee rights stuff and exporting it here wholesale so we have to suffer it too. Pick either side of the stream and we get the crisp message that America is a sad, twisted, evil dystopia except for some plucky underdogs who barely matter.

derisive attitudes

IME though that feels halfway like an universal white-collar bonding ritual to assimilate and make friends most places in the world and be at home. US migrants elsewhere sure go for it. A surefire topic the cosmopolitan class of any country likes is how dumb and backwards the general populace is, how cringy the local folkways, and how surely other countries have it better.

The thing is that the US has crazy, overflowing amounts of soft power, it's just divided up between sides of a political scene pumping out content to to own the opposite side.

And 80+% of it is on the Blue side, so Reds who think that Blue America is fake America see real America as consistently losing soft power battles. Foreign tourists visiting America come for the Blue cities, Disney World, and the scenery (which is in Red states, but doesn't express Red political values). Foreign media consumers consume Hollywood, prestige TV, (Blue) pop music, (mostly Blue-allied Black) rap/hip-hop, and the subset of country produced by Reds with atypical political views like Taylor Swift and Dolly Parton. Foreigners who learn American history see the White South as villains, losers, or both. Pro-American foreigners (ipse dixit) see the greatest achievements of American capitalism as Manhattan, Silicon Valley and Hollywood, not Walmart or Cargill. And we generally respect the output of elite American universities much more than the Reds do, partly because the worst DEI BS that your universities put out is optimised for local consumption whereas foreigners are more likely to see the excellent work they are doing in less-politicised areas like physics.

If I try to think of important sources of Red soft power, I would come up with:

  • The infrastructure of American-funded Protestant missionary work in the third world. There are a lot of locally-middle-class evangelicals in English-speaking Africa and, increasingly, South America, whose religion comes from Red America. Immigrants from this group (like Kemi Badenoch) are an important right-wing force in UK politics.
  • Country music. Big, but as I said above, the stuff that penetrates internationally has limited overlap with the stuff that effectively expresses Red values.
  • The NFL. Smaller than Americans think because of the dominance of actual football (the game you play with the feet) in the rest of the world, and more "not explicitly Blue" than "red-coded".
  • Big-ass truck abundance, and blue-collar-coded wealth more generally. Near the bottom of the list because it isn't what foreigners see due to the dominance of Blue media - American wealth is depicted using the skyscrapers of Manhattan, not the large houses and cars of the suburbs. But it is clearly attractive to foreigners from countries with high urban crime. (If you have access to low-crime cities, most people find $100,000 in urban debauchery more fun than a $100,000 pickup).

I react differently to this kind of statement, as myself an expatriate (immigrant) living in Japan as a permanent resident. I sympathize with those here (in Japan) who grumble generally about foreigners, though I realize many of them are grumbling specifically about non-Japanese inability or failure to grasp basic politeness, cultural norms of quietude, humility, cleanliness, or language, etc. It's not that they despise anyone not-Japanese, it's that they're growing frustrated with the ever-increasing number of foreigners noisily crowding the bus, or smoking in the street, or spreading their giant suitcases all over the train aisle, or whatever. To say nothing of the occasional foreigner criminal.

What I am less sympathetic to is the straightforward contempt for anything that isn't 100% Japanese (forget that defining what qualifies as such is likely impossible) and the occasional stated desire to kick out all the foreigners. The 尊王攘夷 (sonno jooi)/"Revere the emperor, expel the foreigners!" type racism of late Edo. This is simply an unworkable, even bizarrely emotionally immature way of perceiving the world.

Copypaste this into America and say it's sovereignty; that's odd to me. I may be misunderstanding you.

I'm also an expat in Malaysia (which is notably less of an ethnostate than Japan and has its own vigorous fun Idpol stuff going on). There's a lot of illegal immigration here, and I'll probably get stopped at a roadblock every second month by happenstance for an immigration check. Generally it's a somewhat-amusing interaction since they're ostensibly looking for people from neighboring poorer Asian countries (Indonesia, Bangladesh, Myanmar etcetera) and I'm clearly not a member of one of Malaysia's main 'native' ethnicities so that the police feel it necessary to pull me over even if they're generally a lot more polite and circumspect with me than they would be with their actual targets.

I don't begrudge them their occasional checks. I do think the idea of Malaysian identity is quite messy, arguably moreso than even most Colonial Western nations, but I'm also not gonna start protesting the local police force for occasionally pulling me over. They're doing their jobs, Allah bless them.

Copypaste this into America and say it's sovereignty; that's odd to me. I may be misunderstanding you.

Not OP but for most it's not a hatred of anything foreign/unamerican (though that can play a role). It's the idea that the citizens of a country have absolute authority over who is or is not allowed to live in a country, regardless of the individual merits (or lack thereof) someone who wants to come live here may have. We may want to allow in talented doctors and engineers etc., but just because you are a talented doctor or engineer doesn't give you any sort of moral right to come here. We can choose exactly how many (or how few) doctors and engineers we want to bring in here, and we can decide we'd prefer more British, French, and Japanese doctors over Zimbabwean, Saudi, and Pakistani doctors or whatever arbitrary distinctions we want to make (more hot women and fewer men, or more tall men fewer short kings, etc.).

The big divide between the right and the left here is that the left is effectively saying we cannot choose who to allow or not allow into our country. Sometimes this is done under specious arguments, i.e. "all of those young Syrian men on the rafts are totally doctors and lawyers and engineers coming to enrich our country and therefore it is wrong to prevent them from coming here" and sometimes it's even more baldfaced (see all of the proactive attempts to protect criminal illegal aliens who have been convicted of heinous crimes like murder and rape from deportation). It's a fundamental mismatch of values, and I don't see it resolved any way other than one side giving up on their values, or one side conquering the other.

I think there are two separate value disagreements at work, one of which is susceptible to factual resolution. There is certainly a Left-wing position that freedom of movement is a human right in itself, and that there is simply no moral legitimacy to wanting to keep anyone out of the country, whatever the circumstances.

But this maximal open-borders-ism seems less common than the humanitarian argument - the one that goes: sure, in an ideal world where everyone's basic needs were seen to, countries would be entitled to setting whatever immigration policies they like - but there is a moral duty to help those in need which trumps this right. You normally have the right to decide who comes onboard your boat, but that does not apply if you sail past a drowning child and refuse to fish him out. America is ludicrously wealthier and safer than the Third World, therefore ~any immigrant is a de facto refugee who would have a substantially lower life expectancy if we didn't let them in. There's nothing wrong with restricting immigration from Canada or Germany, but restricting Somali immigration is tantamount to murder by inaction, so faced with the dilemma, any halfway-decent person would take their preferences and stuff them in favor of doing the right thing. And you are a halfway-decent person, aren't you? You do have a heart, right? Right?

This second framing seems much more widespread among left-wing pro-immigration normies than open-borders radicalism for the sake of it - see the focus on "refugees". Nor I do I think so lowly of the average right-winger as to think that this boils down to a "fundamental mismatch of values" where they disagree with the principle that if you want to call yourself a good person, you should let the drowning child onboard your boat whether or not you'd be prepared to say that anyone in the world can use your boat if they feel like it. (Though there are certainly a few people like that; indeed I think they tend to be disproportionately represented on forums like this one.) This position is simply one that is fundamentally naive about the facts - about the feasibility of alleviating all the world's suffering without destroying the wealth and security which gives us the power to alleviate some of it in the first place.

For my money, the primary divide is that left-wingers and right-wingers have opposite intuitions about how much inertia there is to work with. Partly, this is because the obvious fact that we cannot feed every pauper in the world is simply too grim to contemplate, so people stick their heads in the sand. But I suspect there's also a form of the overfitted absurdity heuristic familiar to x-risk advocates at play: progress and abundance are so taken for granted that right-wing doomsday prophets' ravings about economic, demographic, and/or civilizational collapse feel too melodramatic to be remotely believable; they seem so absurd that they feel as cartoonish, and as readily dismissed, as aliens, killer robots, and the Rapture.

And frankly, I also think that in recent years, excessive bullet-biting from the right about fundamental value differences has worsened this divide. Because they don't see right-wingers saying "Obviously we should help everyone in the world if we had infinite money and housing to gift to them; but we don't, and trying would only ruin us" nearly as often as "Well whoever said we had to be kind to people anyway? whoever said charity was better than selfishness? whoever said good was better than evil? fucking bleeding hearts", of course they think that the Right is simply made up of selfish, privileged assholes who won't spare a coin for Tiny Tim, and that this is the only reason why anyone would ever oppose immigration. It's an easier story to believe than the bitter pill of the dream simply not being achievable at that kind of scale.

It isn’t just absence is taken for granted but the left don’t really have a model for why different jdx have different levels of wealth outside of colonialism/ racism which doesn’t really explain much after examination.

So the right believes culture / genes matter. The left doesn’t.

That's also true, but I still don't think it's a deciding factor in the differing attitudes towards immigration. Right-wingers, IMV, aren't wrong to view left-wing rhetoric about "skilled immigration" as broadly disingenuous. The average leftist would certainly recoil from a positive claim that immigrants are on average less efficient economic actors than natural-born citizens - but their support for immigration is not downstream of an earnest belief that immigrants are good for the economy.

Arguing that immigrants will turn into valuable workers is not germane to the left-wing worldview, but rather, an attempt to speak the Right's language. Having formed a model of right-wing voters as totally unmoved by moral arguments, they resort to claims that immigration is in the nation's economic self-interest. Those claims might be more or less strained, and more or less sincere, depending on the particulars, but they are never the ultimate root of pro-immigration sentiment; at best, for people who earnestly believe them, they are simply a sign of the moral order of the universe ("helping immigrants is the right thing to do and it pays for itself besides, so there's really no reason not to do it short of sheer wickedness").

I also observe quite a lot of 1 but with a racial tint: the only possible reason not to want to have open borders is a dislike of foreigners, and therefore anything short of open borders is racist. And any rational non-racist argument against non-maximally-open-borders is just a covers for the racist argument (not always wrong!).

And any rational non-racist argument against non-maximally-open-borders is just a covers for the racist argument (not always wrong!).

Which is why the way to dismantle that is to publicly disavow that the "racist argument" has any meaning whatsoever (re: Fuentes/Morgan, though Trump is the best modern example). That's partially why he, uniquely among English-speaking nations, can still pull the Boomer vote (typically confused as "obligatorily right-wing" by the people who call themselves the left), since the other places are more reflexively fighting the racist bogeymen of 70 years ago.

Reform UK do marginally better among the 50-65 age group (mostly Gen X) than among the 65+ group (mostly Boomers), but the key point is that they do almost twice as well with the over 50's as they do with the under 50's.

Given the size of the Conservative vote among over 65's, I suspect the total right-populist vote (Reform voters + low information right-populist voters foolishly voting Conservative because they don't realise that Johnson's right-populism was fake) is strictly increasing with age.

My impression was that right populists in Australia also skew old.

The only Anglosphere country where right-populism is a youthful movement is Canada, and UK media coverage implies that is because right-populism in Canada is YIMBY in a way that it isn't in the US or UK.

If a country is a home and all citizens are roommates

Which is precisely the point on which the left disagrees! Not everyone believes that a country is analogous to a household!

The anti-ICE protesters shout "Get the fuck out of our neighborhood!" which seems to evince some sense of ingroup territoriality, just one whose boundary is drawn differently.

Some of those protesters may be operating under an 'ingroup good outgroup bad' mindset, but there is an ethically consistent schema fitting both of their beliefs.

The following exchange occurred regarding the recent ... unpleasantness ... in Venezuela:

Anonymous:

Getting mixed messages here about state sovereignty from the “borders shouldn’t exist” crowd

argumate:

Delta Force should be able to go wherever they like in the world as long as they don’t shoot anyone when they get there 😤

The same could be applied to 'ICE out of our neighborhood' protests; "They are welcome to live here, visit here, buy from shops here, apply for jobs here, but not come in and haul away our neighbours who were minding their own business."

The anti-ICE protesters shout "Get the fuck out of our neighborhood!" which seems to evince some sense of ingroup territoriality, just one whose boundary is drawn differently.

Well like a lot of these things, it's a matter of who and whom. So for example, suppose the hot issue at the moment were tolerance of homosexuality. This Good person and her partner would have no problem walking hand in hand through an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in New York or a Mormon community in Utah as a method of protest. If asked why they were going into someone else's neighborhood, then they would almost certainly take the position that they are Americans and they have a right to go into any neighborhood they want.

In fact, I think this is one of the fundamental principles of these types of people: "What's ours is ours; what's yours is ours too." Just look at Leftists when they speak about Israel. They are always whining about "Palestinian Land" but in their minds there is absolutely no such thing as "Jewish Land."

One can see here for a real-life example: 500 BLM protestors marching through a private gated community in St. Louis, leading to weapons charges for the McCloskey couple, who were neighborhood residents.

Shortly after the incident, the McCloskeys claimed that they support the Black Lives Matter movement

It's all so tiresome.

One can see here for a real-life example: 500 BLM protestors marching through a private gated community in St. Louis, leading to weapons charges for the McCloskey couple, who were neighborhood residents.

Thanks for pointing this out. In fact, it's worth noting that one of the more popular chants among progressive protestors is "Whose streets? Our streets!"

This Good person and her partner would have no problem walking hand in hand through an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in New York

I wonder? If they didn't get chased out of it (and then accused of anti-Semitism afterwards should they try "we're Americans, we can walk in an American neighbourhood"), they might self-censor because 'no imposing our personal values on others' so long as the others aren't mainstream straight white Christians. More likely they would try it with the Mormons because straight white Christians there.

I wonder? If they didn't get chased out of it (and then accused of anti-Semitism afterwards should they try "we're Americans, we can walk in an American neighbourhood"), they might self-censor because 'no imposing our personal values on others' so long as the others aren't mainstream straight white Christians.

Sadly, progressives have demoted Orthodox Jews to the status of honorary whites.

https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/nyclu-report-documents-21st-century-jim-crow-east-ramapo-schools-urges-state-action

If asked why they were going into someone else's neighborhood, then they would almost certainly take the position that they are Americans and they have a right to go into any neighborhood they want.

I think more intelligent ones would argue, cogently enough, that the point of a Pride march through a Mormon community is to show solidarity to closeted Mormons suffering from the oppression of their own community - i.e. that they're doing it to make the Mormon neighborhood a better place to live for its own inhabitants.

Now I am going to have to look up "are there Pride parades in Utah?" and yes there are.

I think more intelligent ones would argue, cogently enough, that the point of a Pride march through a Mormon community is to show solidarity to closeted Mormons suffering from the oppression of their own community

Sure, and ICE could argue that there are people in the neighborhood who want them there; that they are serving a larger good by being there, and so on.

Any intrusion into the territory of a person, group, can be justified in some way. Kinda the point of having territory is that the person (or group) who owns the territory gets to decide who can and cannot enter, irrespective of any justification.

Well, hang on, now, now you seem to be saying that neither ICE's presence in Good's neighborhood nor the hypothetical Pride March should be considered legitimate; as opposed to saying that both of them would be legitimate. Which is it?

Well, hang on, now, now you seem to be saying that neither ICE's presence in Good's neighborhood nor the hypothetical Pride March should be considered legitimate; as opposed to saying that both of them would be legitimate. Which is it?

Actually, I wasn't trying to make any statement at all about overall legitimacy; rather I was simply saying for progressives it's pure who/whom.

What do I actually think on the issue? Certainly the "this is OUR neighborhood" argument has no legitimacy at all when it comes to enforcement of national immigration laws. That neighborhood is part of the United States and if immigration laws are to be enforced, it just won't work to have neighborhoods where illegals can hide out at their convenience.

With respect to homosexuality, it's a closer question.

I don't think many people are doubting the legality of the Babbitt shoot. They're saying the optics were horrible and that the equivalent leftwing figure is a supermartyr.

Also the leftwing should inherently have their sympathy dial turned to 8/10 at all times versus the conservative dial being at 4/10, which makes it shocking when an incident like that just gets instantaneously overlooked and justified.

While it may feel good to play enlightened centrist and do some both sides’ing, there is a major area where Babbitt differed from Good: Babbitt posed no imminent threat to the officer who shot.

Breaking, entering, and looting is something progressives smugly defended as “that’s what insurance is for,” so merely breaking and entering can’t be too bad. No climber is illegal; walls and windows are but oppressive social constructs.

That being said, I’ve long been more than happy to chalk Babbitt up to “play stupid games, win stupid prizes.” The Wikipedia article summary of the event:

On the other side of the doors and barricade, Lieutenant Michael Byrd was aiming his pistol at the broken window. Despite several calls of "he's got a gun",[51] Babbitt, hoisted by two men,[10] began to climb through the shattered window. She was then shot in her left anterior shoulder[52] by Byrd[53][46] and fell back among the other protesters.[10] Babbitt had been warned not to proceed through the window: one witness recalled that "A number of police and Secret Service were saying 'Get back! Get down! Get out of the way!'; [Babbitt] didn't heed the call."

This is “’what is he going to do, shoot me?’ — Woman who was shot” territory and where Babbitt was more similar to Good and her wife, in feeling herself too much and overestimating her plot armor. Hardly would it be the first time Babbitt had acted impulsively:

In 2016, she faced criminal charges of reckless endangerment in Maryland after she allegedly repeatedly smashed her SUV into a vehicle being driven by a former girlfriend of Aaron Babbitt.[10][17] Citing ongoing harassment, the victim obtained multiple judicial orders forbidding Ashli any contact with her.[17]

Some bros can’t even get a text back while others have women ramming SUVs over them.

In any case, conservatives were somewhat ambivalent about Babbitt at the time, whereas progressives are far more unified in lining up behind Good and getting others to do the same. For example, the Minnesota Timberwolves held a moment of silence for Good. There was Soyjak-pointing at the moment of silence from online spaces such as /r/nba, then as well when individuals like Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr and Milwaukee Bucks coach Doc Rivers voiced their support.

“Stephen and Glenn are good at advising other men how to knock a ball into a hoop. That does not make them wise” — Olenna Tyrell, probably. And even then, until this week, many online NBA followers would have been quite vocal in doubting the coaching ability of Rivers.

Progressives have much greater asabiyyah than conservatives. The latter is much more willing to shrug and accept when a member of their “side” eats a negative consequence. Conservatives will even police their own side for progressive-coded things like alleged racism, sexism, or homophobia; whereas progressive self-policing generally takes the form of purity-spirals when other progressives are being insufficiently progressive. Hence quips over the years like conservatives are but progressives driving the speed limit, conservatives are happy to lose gracefully, conservatives are the Generals to the progressives’ Globetrotters.

Progressives will happily stan those on the Right Side of History and/or those with sufficient Who? Whom? credentials in maintaining and expanding Outposts. Normie conservatives will do things like forgive their son’s black killer but denounce those who do some Noticing over the occurrence, as Austin Metcalf’s father did when Karmelo Anthony sent his son to the shadow realm.

In and of itself, Good’s death has drawn comparisons to Kirk’s death and Floyd’s death (“George Foid” and “I can’t steer”). There are ample re-edits of an originally progressive-coded rendition of Kirk’s shooting but with Good taking a bullet through her neck instead of Kirk.

The Babbitt and Good equivalences are at least far less farcical compared to attempted equivalences from recent previous events. Babbitt and Good are practically theyre-the-same-picture.jpg compared to Charlie Kirk vs. George Floyd, Shiloh Hendrix vs. Karmelo Anthony.

On the Kirk and Floyd comparisons, one has a law-abiding man on one end who took a bullet through the neck in quite gruesome fashion. On the other end is a career criminal who experienced a drug overdose or an unintentional homicide.

Shiloh called a child a “nigger” when the child was indeed likely behaving like a Child Who Annoys You. On the other end is Karmelo Anthony who stabbed a high school football player, leading to his death.

That Kirk and Floyd—and Shiloh and Anthony—are/were often equated, is quite something.

While it may feel good to play enlightened centrist and do some both sides’ing, there is a major area where Babbitt differed from Good: Babbitt posed no imminent threat to the officer who shot.

The other major confounder for Babbitt is she had just passed other officers who provided no resistance at all, thereby giving her a contextual clue that her presence was authorized. It is similar to if the other ICE officer, not her wife, was yelling at Good to "floor it".

You could argue that Good and her wife were also given the wrong contextual clue. Their prior interaction with the shooter iceman was "filming each other menacingly", which probably reinforced their "ICE cannot do anything to US citizens legally" misconception.

That would be reasonable if she had just opened a door and got shot walking through but my understanding is that she was climbing through a window that her fellow protesters just broke. There's no ambiguity there about whether that was an authorized entrance.

Not really relevant as to her threat level to officers because she has just been next to a bunch of them and they suffered no harm and calmly let her do her thing.

In the Babbitt situation, the concern wasn't what she would do to the officer. The concern was what she and the other people who would likely follow her would do to the lawmakers they were getting close to.

If that is the genuine reason for the shoot it is wholly unjustifiable under the law. For lethal force to be deployed you need to reasonably fear that the person is imminently going to kill or cause great bodily harm to yourself or others. Defense of others based on a convoluted (and frankly unreasonable) speculation about Babbitt et al's evil mens rea causing bad results 30+seconds after you are contemplating deadly force is completely unjustifiable.

Nothing convoluted about it. It was a mob intent on reaching people whom they know they are not allowed to meet (thus the barricades). The police by virtue of their job have to speculate on bad outcomes because that's their job. A gallows had been put up by someone. A state rep and staff were right there. The shooter was pointing his gun at the wall directly in front of the window and it had been shouted out that a gun was drawn. If someone was willing to still try to get in I'd call it reasonable fear that someone is determined to do something at the cost of their life.

Do you think if a mob of lefties is breaking down a door to get to where they think Trump is, that the Secret Service is engaging in convoluted speculation about their motives? No, they're thinking "My job is to protect someone. They are close to someone I am trying to protect and behaving in an aggressive manner." The speculation that matters is they are willing to commit a crime (breaking down a barricade in a government building) in furtherance of another goal that involves getting close to a VIP.

I do think secret service would perform better most of the time.

That would be a good point, if that door / window / whatever was all that stood between the protestors and the lawmakers, but I was under the impression Congress was safely evacuated at that stage?

Babbitt was shot at 2:44 PM. At 2:42 some House members were walking through the tunnels. I couldn't find exactly how many people were not evacuated, but Markwayne Mullin saw the shot and says that there was still staff there.

You have to draw the line somewhere at some point, even if it's already Piccadilly, Watford Gap service station or the Reform Club.

With regards to enforcement, yes. When evaluating the likelihood of imminent threat of death or great bodily harm slow breaches of weak barriers that your fellow officers are giving her free access to while perceiving no threat....

Today the players are the same but the jerseys are flipped.

Identifying arguments as structurally similar is useful if you're studying how people argue, but it's not an especially insightful regarding object level disagreement. Certain patterns of argument frequently recur, but you can't substitute that observation for actually resolving the disagreement, because the substance of the disagreement is in the object level. The question of whether or not Ashli Babbitt was a traitor or a martyr depends almost entirely on whether or not you think the 2020 election was stolen*, not on whether or not you think it is legitimate to resist the government under at least some circumstances.

To put it another way: liberals and conservatives both generally agree that you are obligated to obey legitimate laws and you are not obligated to obey illegitimate laws** (and, indeed, may be obligated not to obey - 'orders are orders' not being considered a good excuse for bad behavior). Observing this doesn't help you adjudicate the differences between cases, because you still need to make judgments about the specific details of the case.

In broad strokes it's clear neither side cares about democracy or rule of law per se

I don't think you can infer that from their actions. If you ask them, they will generally argue that their actions are upholding rule of law and democracy, and for the most part they mean it.

*one could conceivably argue that the shooting was unjustified and the insurrection was unjustified, but that seems to be a marginal position

**In reality, people ignore all sorts of laws all the time, including laws they don't really question the validity of (e.g. traffic laws), which also raises the secondary question of which laws are important enough to care about violations. One could think a law is legitimate, but the measures taken to enforce it are not

To put it another way: liberals and conservatives both generally agree that you are obligated to obey legitimate laws and you are not obligated to obey illegitimate laws**

I think there's another question, which is whether it is okay to break otherwise legitimate laws in order to oppose various kinds of bad behavior. Presumably most Leftists would agree that in general, it should be illegal to block streets, burn other peoples' property, and so on.

I think leftists actually believe that the ability to engage in annoying protest, particularly including blocking streets, is a form of free speech. It is a rare case where the tactic is tribally-coded, not just the target.

Right-wing protesters whose message the left considers within the bounds of free speech (like pro-foxhunting protestors in the UK, or pro-motorist protestors almost everywhere) get the same kid glove treatment from the leftist establishment viz-a-viz enforcement of public order laws that leftist protestors get. Anti-immigrant, anti-COVID-restrictions, and explicitly racist protests get the jackboot, but then those messages got the banhammer when expressed peacefully on social media.

The only groups in Europe that come to mind that are remotely comparable to what the anti-ICE people are doing, are the climate activists that glue themselves to highways. Most of everyone else files for a protest permit at the town hall.

I'm mostly thinking about the various trucker and farmer protests involving deliberately blocking roads in the UK and France. These are usually nominally about fuel tax, but are clearly right-coded. They get the kid gloves, because tax policy is the type of issue where the left considers occasional roadblocks to be free speech. The Canadian trucker convoy got the jackboot because the left doesn't consider COVID-19 to be an issue where free speech applies.

The largest right-populist-coded protest movement in Europe in recent years is the gilets jaunes in France, which didn't touch the hot buttons around race and immigration and got the kid gloves.

I think leftists actually believe that the ability to engage in annoying protest, particularly including blocking streets, is a form of free speech.

Unless it's their political enemies doing it.

but then those messages got the banhammer when expressed peacefully on social media.

Sure, they don't think that their enemies have any free speech rights whatsoever. Their words are "violence" or "harassment." Or they are "nazis" who deserved to be "punched."

In other words, it's who/whom.

Right-wing protesters whose message the left considers within the bounds of free speech (like pro-foxhunting protestors in the UK, or pro-motorist protestors almost everywhere) get the same kid glove treatment

Here's a hypothetical: Suppose a bunch of NYC car drivers decided to have an organized "block the bike lane" protest throughout Manhattan. Do you really think that the Left would defend this as valid free speech?

Suppose a bunch of NYC car drivers decided to have an organized "block the bike lane" protest throughout Manhattan. Do you really think that the Left would defend this as valid free speech?

When right-wing protestors blocked streets to protest fuel taxes, speed limit enforcement etc. in various European countries, they got the same kid-glove treatment that left-wing protestors do.

The NYPD are notoriously reluctant to enforce laws protecting cyclists from drivers, including laws against parking in bike lanes - I can't comment on how a hypothetical protest situation would change that.

When right-wing protestors blocked streets to protest fuel taxes, speed limit enforcement etc. in various European countries,

I am not familiar enough with European politics to comment on this.

I can't comment on how a hypothetical protest situation would change that.

I'm very confident that the Left would NOT see it as free speech.

I enjoyed the various tweets about how cyclists will be thrilled to find out what you're allowed to do to a driver that bumps into you with their car.

To put it another way: liberals and conservatives both generally agree that you are obligated to obey legitimate laws and you are not obligated to obey illegitimate laws (and, indeed, may be obligated not to obey - 'orders are orders' not being considered a good excuse for bad behavior).

How does that not boil down to simply "the mob is right when it agrees with me over what laws are illegitimate"?

I think people generally feel like they're obligated to follow laws even if they disagree with them, and our opportunity to change them if we think they're unjust is through the ballot box. Of course, they feel this, but don't really mean it when it comes to some deeply tribal issues.

How does that not boil down to simply "the mob is right when it agrees with me over what laws are illegitimate"?

It can amount to that under sufficient dire circumstances. It doesn't have to boil down to that because no every instance of disobedience will take the form of mob violence.

I think the mistake you're making is thinking of support for "rule of law" as absolutist adherence to the letter of the law. This is a position that virtually no one holds and which is not practical in any event because laws are not code and require interpretation. When people say they support rule of law, it means they support an approach to governing that operates according to rules/procedures rather than the arbitrary judgment of individual leaders. It does not mean that they think any output of such a system is inherently legitimate.

I think people generally feel like they're obligated to follow laws even if they disagree with them

Disagreeing with a law is not the same thing as believing it is illegitimate. I disagree with my local zoning laws, but I accept that they're a legitimate extension the county government's authority (which in turn is legitimate because blah blah blah...). On the other hand, if the county government passed a law making it legal to sell your children's organs, I'd consider that illegitimate. Which is to say, I don't just disagree with it, I don't consider it morally valid or valid manifestation of governmental authority. That in turn justifies more extreme measures to oppose it than zoning laws.

Settling disagreements via voting is preferred, but for sufficiently high salience disagreements it's not going to be enough (especially if - as is the case in the US - the electoral system has contested legitimacy). Also, as I alluded up above and in the edit I made after you commented, this is often resolve in a different way: simply ignoring laws you don't like and trusting they won't be enforced or loudly complaining when they are.

Which basically amounts to “red tribe can never enforce one of their key goals of reducing immigration.” And if that’s the case, why should red tribe be in a political alliance with the blue tribe?

A bit of a side question - Do you think that they will succeed in martyring her? I see the tries, but to me it seems it probably doesn't have the needed dry biomass it had in 2020 with floyd. Like it is not getting much traction and only the true believers are really active.

I'll make a prediction after I see what happens today when the sun sets and the ICE protesters realize we still live under fascist tyranny or whatever.

Factors at play:

  • The blues burned up a lot of political capital, literally, in 2020, so normies are simply less inclined to side with them
  • Summer 2020 can be blamed to a large extent on cabin fever, and the fact that viral content on social media, controlled fairly overtly at the time by the blue tribe, pretty much constituted our shared reality. People in 2026 have lives outside of their screens in a way that people in summer 2020 didn't, X is now controlled by the red tribe, blue alternatives to X have nearly no mainstream penetration (i.e. are pretty much just blue siloes), and most people under 40 have quit Facebook.
  • The canonization of floyd came from a video that omitted the context of his resisting arrest and the drugs he swallowed at the beginning of his police encounter, and focused only on the use of force against him. For the events of the ICE shooting, the context is a lot more apparent and makes it much more clear that she largely brought her death upon herself. It's a lot harder for someone with no particular dog in the fight to look at the video and think it's an unreasonable use of force, than the original video of floyd that led one to believe that the police officer was choking him to death for no reason.

Factors at play:

I think there's another factor here, which is that the dead person is white. If she had been black, it would be a lot easier to get people fired up over the racial angle.

Also, the victim wasn’t black. Only blacks are allowed to be martyrs among a certain segment of the modern Left.

Some other Tweets I’ve seen but can’t find anymore:

“I’d like to remind y’all that “Say Her Name” is for Black women. Yes, it matters. Just like Rest in Power is for Black revolutionaries.”

and

why don’t Americans do something~ BECAUSE ICE WILL SHOOT US IN THE HEAD AND THEN CALL US TERRORISTS EVEN IF WE ARE UNARMED THANKS

THE BLACK COMMUNITY RISKED THIS AND MORE DURING THE CIVILS RIGHTS MOVEMENT AND IT’S CLEAR YOU WHITE PEOPLE WANT TO SIT BACK UNTIL MARGINALIZED PEOPLE GO FIRST AGAIN THANKS

You’ve probably also seen the video of the white woman who feels conflicted because of her own white privilege, to say nothing of the white privilege of the two women who were involved.

A lot of the diehard activists have been so caught up in racial discourse and race-based gatekeeping for so long that they can’t even set it aside when it might be beneficial to their cause to do so.

Also, the victim wasn’t black

Yeah, I made a similar point before seeing your comment. Although it's true that progressives on the whole display an impressive degree of group solidarity, the fact is that there are a lot of racial issues simmering under the surface. Non-whites in the movement have definitely noticed that the leadership is mostly white, the people getting the lion's share of the spoils are mostly white, etc., and for the most part it gives them a strong sense of either envy or opportunism or both.

For the white peoples' part (I mean whites in the progressive movement), they are just as afraid of being accused of racism as anyone else. Which is an obstacle to making a big deal out of this Good woman. Almost certainly they are frantically looking for a way to blame this shooting on Israel as a way of maintaining unity in their coalition.

Almost certainly they are frantically looking for a way to blame this shooting on Israel as a way of maintaining unity in their coalition.

I think I'd appreciate a bit of an elaboration here, because this is beyond crazy for the crazies I know.

I think I'd appreciate a bit of an elaboration here, because this is beyond crazy for the crazies I know.

What elaboration do you want? Progressives have regularly been making efforts to link their fantasies of American police misbehavior with their fantasies of Israeli military misbehavior.

Also the queerness. Can't find the tweet, but someone was very exercised that earlier reports were referring to her "partner". 'No it's her wife, she was a queer woman, this is erasure' type of outrage. Especially outraged that there were references to the ex-husband (father of two of her kids) but then "partner" instead of "wife".

Even with the prospect of a newly-minted martyr for the cause, they can't help all pulling in different directions.

These are qualitatively different events. The Babbitt question is about whether the police officer was justified in killing someone for tresspassing non-violently because (a) previously the protesters were violent, (a2) though they weren’t violent upon gaining entry into their desired locations, (b) pursuant to the security of VIP politicians, (b2) though the politicians had already begun evading minutes before, (b3) and despite no imminent danger to any politician. As we do not ordinarily kill on sight those who are trespassing while non-violently protesting, it is the politician’s security which is the pertinent detail.

In the ICE officer’s case, he was in the process of being hit by an accelerating car, and arguably excused for believing he would be run over in the center of the car rather than the side.

The Babbitt situation involved someone breaking a window and then Babbitt attempting to climb through the window. Breaking and entering is not usually part of nonviolent protest.

The Babbitt situation involved someone breaking a window and then Babbitt attempting to climb through the window. Breaking and entering is not usually part of nonviolent protest.

Babbitt was already in the building with Capitol Police standing next to her as the window portion of the door was broken, doing nothing.

Babbitt had been warned not to proceed through the window: one witness recalled that "A number of police and Secret Service were saying 'Get back! Get down! Get out of the way!'; [Babbitt] didn't heed the call."

Personally, I haven't been in a situation where I found myself mistaking a broken window for an invitation to climb through the window and enter. Have you had this happen to you?

I've never stood next to a police officer as other people damaged property, no.

But if that was the case and the officers approved of such conduct, as they did, I would think further similar actions are also sanctioned.

I've never stood next to a police officer as other people damaged property, no.

Ah, but that's not what I asked. The question is whether someone can reasonably confuse a broken window for an invitation.

But if that was the case and the officers approved of such conduct, as they did

Approved? Did they give the guy a handshake and $100 for breaking the window?

If you try to go through a window (already the sort of thing more often done by criminals rather than normal people), you're told there's a guy with a gun on the other side, the guy on the other side tells you not to go through the window - seems hard to believe that you thought you were invited to crawl through that window.

I think if 1/6 had been a left-wing riot, the response to this would be "breaking a window shouldn't be a death sentence!" and the left would memorialize the incident as "Ashli Babbitt - murdered by the government over a broken window," and would totally ignore every single other piece of important context around the incident. We are seeing this phenomenon happen right now with the ICE shooting in Minneapolis.

I say this not to suggest that Babbitt was a bad shoot, but to point out that the facts of the case simply don't matter all that much as far as politics are concerned. Folks have no problem lying to themselves and everyone else in order to create a good martyr as necessary to their cause.

We don't need to rely on hypotheticals, we can just look at recent examples of other legislature stormings, such as in Hong Kong, Nepal, Mexico, Bangladesh etc. The answer is that it just doesn't get widespread condemnation unless Red Tribe does it.

Conversely, if Minneapolis had been ATF "rounding up illegal gun owners" and shot someone in a car with a MAGA bumper sticker, all other facts remaining the same...

If it had been ATF doing it

  1. They would not have been in danger from any car

  2. They would have shot at the wrong car

  3. They would have missed.

But even if all these things were false and things were mutatis mutandis just as in the Minnesota situation, the bulk of the right wing would not have supported the driver. That a lot of "moderates" have a headcanon that the right and the left are the same in this does not make it so.

It is true that some of the right is rather consciously trying to become more that way, since Jan 6, since the Trump assassination attempt, and especially since Charlie Kirk's assassination. But it's a fairly small part and it mostly hasn't taken.

I think it's very clear what the ATF would have shot if they were present!

Ooh, good point. Unless they shot that random T-Rex instead. Eh, ¿por qué no los dos?

I think if 1/6 had been a left-wing riot, the response to this would be "breaking a window shouldn't be a death sentence!" and the left would memorialize the incident as "Ashli Babbitt - murdered by the government over a broken window," and would totally ignore every single other piece of important context around the incident. We are seeing this phenomenon happen right now with the ICE shooting in Minneapolis.

Yeah this is the point to me. I'm not arguing that Babbitt was an illegal shooting, but typically the way the leftwing litigates shootings is more vibe-based than giving a single shit about whether the shooting was legal in the current structure. The Good Shooting I believe a decent amount of people just focus on how bad the optics are and either aren't going to care or will have long moved on by the time that the police officer is absolved. The optics on Babbitt were bad enough (Unarmed woman posing zero threat getting gunned down on camera) that her Portland equivalent would be a gigantic national martyr.

I want to pay someone to make a huge mural of Good and Babbit hugging each other in heaven, just to see the reaction. It's also just a warm and de-escalating thing to do. (I mean, in theory.)

I think the hard part will be finding the artist willing to do it. Sounds like a job for (ugh) AI.

Managed it: https://x.com/DainFitzgerald/status/2010219703877431412

That's incredible. I would retweet this, if I didn't want to incur some micropoliticalviolencetarget charges.

It's beautiful. Almost makes the cost of RAM worth it.

That's a great point! I'm whipping one up on Gemini now. Good's likeness isn't so, well, good, so far.

I don't think the hearts of the reds are truly in it for the defense of Babbitt. At the very least, they are less successful at convincing me that they are deluded about the situation, as the blues are about their own various martyrs. It comes across as a cargo cult to me, trying to copy the blue's performative outrage over the consequences of their own actions, but without understanding the true underlying demonstration of solidarity that is the actual point of it. The blues understand and perform actual solidarity in ways that the reds don't, and part of that is by saying "we will defend literally anything you do in service of the cause, and do our best to ensure that you face the minimum possible consequences for doing it, and that anyone who interferes with you faces the maximum possible consequences, and all of the above are regardless of what laws, rules, or social customs you violate while doing so." This is basically a fundamentally left wing form of operating that the right cannot copy without not being the right anymore.

The attempts at outrage over Babbitt, at the end of the day, come across to me just as a plea: "Look, we all know that if capitol police had shot an unarmed woman at, say, the Kavanaugh protests, you guys would have gone apeshit," to which the response is "yes, thank you for noticing."

This is basically a fundamentally left wing form of operating that the right cannot copy without not being the right anymore.

Which, ironically, is what the right is figuring out it's going to become- whether it likes that or not.

What refers to itself as left-wing today is solidly motivated by the same thought and moral patterns that motivate more historic examples of right-wing thought (privilege preservation at all costs, message discipline for free as a consequence, attempts to enshrine the excuses providing those privileges as holy, conscripting the young to fight stupid wars, etc.). This is more obvious in Western countries outside the US.

but without understanding the true underlying demonstration of solidarity that is the actual point of it

This is what happens when the left- a specific revision of reform thought at the time- metastasizes into something that will displace the right at the time. The fact that the right doesn't seem to be winning is a sign that this hasn't happened yet, though this is also only recognizable once it has happened.

Is it cultural warring if my opinion is I think population replacement of people like me is bad and therefore I want aggressive deportations?

I have no problem with this Good lady. I don’t view her as my enemy. She’s probably just a midtwit that follows what she’s told to do. If it was Nazi Germany she would be a Nazi. Societies are filled with people like this.

I don’t even have a problem with the people I want deported. I just assume if we import a lot of Somalis and Amerindians that will end up voting against my interests like a lot of Latam countries. If I were them I would emigrate to America too.

I feel like a lot of the cultural war is cosplaying and people think it’s just a game. For the Good later I attribute this more to mistake theory and her interests are probably more similar to mine but she doesn’t know it. To the latter group I think longer run it’s more a conflict theory issue where we probably do have real long term differing interests.

For the Good lady well one obstructor getting killed means people see there are consequences to that behavior. So we get less of it and ICE can focus on their mission. And honestly I think a lot of midtwits are good at following the power structure when they figure out whose in charge.

I guess I would consider both Good and Babbit as midtwit versions of my own tribe. But the elites leading them have a fundamental mistake theory between them. I don’t think the Wasps who are now liberals are members of a different tribe. It’s more like the Cold War of an intertribe ideology conflict between capitalist and communists. One side had a fundamental mistake theory that wasn’t apparent and the other system works significantly better.

Minnesota has a significant Nordic heritage which has made them more liberal. But in the Nordic countries Social Democracy works well. I might even be a SocDem if I lived in Denmark. I think they just haven’t realized that political ideology doesn’t work with groups that evolved in different environments.

Liberals tearlessly argued this is what happens when you Fuck Around while conservatives argued she was righteously Resisting (TM).

Did they? Because as I recall, there were plenty of conservatives at the time who agreed that the Ashli Babbit shooting was a good shoot; it was somewhat later that some (but by no means all) groups on the right came out against. As opposed to here where on-the-close-order-of-zero leftists agree that this was a good shoot. Lots of other differences too; this looks like false both-sidesism.

The Motte discourse is also missing the possibility of considering both to be bad shoots, with a potential argument being that LEOs escalate to lethal force far too quickly. (In the case of Babbitt, for example, surely tear gas and tasers could be reasonably expected by a rioter to come before lead bullets.)

I think there's two separate things when it comes to 'good shoot'. There's 'was the shot legal/complying with regulations' and 'were the optics of the shoot bad'. A lot of people on the Left aren't really trying to have the first conversation since they operate purely on optics lines instead of 'will this clear in the court of law', which is what is so galling about them being totally fine about Babbitt whilst they're acting like Good was flat-out murder

Optics, however, is whatever the leftist media decides it is.

I think some conservatives are sort of coming around to the idea that the unconditional solidarity on the left is a serious strength, and so they need to adopt something like that too in order to keep up. But it's difficult to maintain the same energy because it conflicts so deeply with what conservatism fundamentally is, so the hagiography of Babbitt just comes across as a cargo cult of the left's more successful hagiographies of their own martyrs. It doesn't really work without the True Belief that Your Side is so morally righteous that it is exempt from the law.

I think some conservatives are sort of coming around to the idea that the unconditional solidarity on the left is a serious strength,

Arguably it's also a weakness. Consider the way that the Democratic party leadership picks winners instead of letting their base decide on a presidential candidate. While the Republican party allowed their base to choose Donald Trump. Although this was done over the objections of Republican leadership, he turned out to be a surprisingly strong candidate. By contrast, Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris turned out to be surprisingly weak candidates.

Or consider the Left's position on the Trans issue. It's obviously a losing issue for the Democrats but it's very very hard for internal dissenters to speak out against it.

I think the more relevant conflict in the Babbitt case might just be that police (as a group) and harsh policing (as a principle) have traditionally been pretty central to conservative identity, and so it is difficult for many Reds to take sides against them, or even more generally come to terms with a world where the "boys in blue" more often than not are the enforcers of Blue hegemony. In fact, isn't all of Jan 6 really rather incongruous with conservative aesthetics?

I feel like Jan 6 was a cargo cult of the 2020 summer of love. It felt to me like a bunch of people spent summer 2020 watching leftists burn shit down with few-to-no legal or political consequences, and all attempts to stop them turning into political victories, and those people thought "hey I can do that too" without realizing that those outcomes did not come from the burning shit down, they came from the political infrastructure that the blues have spent a century constructing or institutionally capturing. It takes a lot of effort and solidarity to turn intentionally criminal and anti-social behavior into political victories, that the reds simply have not done.

I guess I don't find these kinds of arguments about the structure of an argument very compelling these days. If I think that some government actions are illegitimate and resisting them via force is justified am I thereby required, as a matter of logic or consistency, to accept that any individual's subjective assessment of any government action and the appropriate resistance is correct? Sure, if there are liberals and conservatives out there talking about how, actually, both government actions were equally illegitimate but then they have contradictory reactions then charge them with hypocrisy. I think this describes relatively few people though. Rather, people disagree about the facts with respect to which actions were illegitimate and thus what resistance was justified.

You'd think so. This doesn't seem to be the case. People who demand resistance to ICE generally won't say out loud "anything you can get away with doing to ICE is justified and anything they do to you isn't". They don't want to sound like that, even if in some sense they believe that. So instead they pretend to argue that the facts of the case make things justified or unjustified, and they claim to be respecting principles that everyone should follow, even if those principles are not a load bearing part of their beliefs. It's fair to take them at their word unless and until they give those principles up.

I am not pretending to be some above-it-all enlightened centrist but I will happily bite the bullet and assert that both played stupid games and won stupid prizes, as they say, or more succinctly FAFO’d.

If you believe you are engaging in semi-violent civil disobedience against a regime you perceive as brutal/fascist/totalitarian then you should be prepared for and accepting of violent repression in response. Whining about it strikes me as pathetic LARPing to some extent. You want the glory of claiming to be fighting evil murderous fascists while secretly expecting you can endlessly shriek and obstruct and they will treat you with kid gloves. IMO if you want to pretend you are going into battle with the SS then you should be prepared to die and face it with courage.

Whining about it strikes me as pathetic LARPing to some extent

The whole point is to whine about it. The purpose of civil disobedience is to shout "come and see the violence inherent in the system" to anyone who can hear. It is to wave the implications of the status quo in the faces of people who would rather not see it - to force authorities to make good on their threats of violence and ask fence-sitters whether keeping segregated lunch counters justified such actions.

What would the purpose of suffering in silence be?

What would the purpose of suffering in silence be?

Not having something like a meme, "this is what happened last time Democrats tried nullifying federal law" spoken into existence?

Bare minimal respect for democracy, the law, and all norms and standards of our shared civil society. He behavior was a more central example of domestic terrorism than it was sitting in the front of a bus.

I have a hard time believing that the brains behind these anti-ICE protests aren't in fact counting on something they can use to make ICE look like stormtroopers.

There seems to be an uptick in women deliberately bringing their children to protests.

Yeah. If you do sufficient obstructionism it will inherently generate iffy media moments, and eventually one will slot into the right media environment and be questionable enough to potentially derail the whole project. Any good uses of violence by ICE will be immediately subsumed in the media but anything remotely controversial will be easy to keep magnifying and repeating.

I also have a hard time believing that the complaining about the consequences is a genuine act of surprise. It comes across as performative, mostly likely because it literally is a performance, for the phone in your hand or the people reading your comments. It's an act that allows them to tell each other stories about how their cause is so righteous that the evil enemies want to attack them for being a part of it.

The people who do these things are creatures of Conflict Theory, and their thoughts cannot be explained in the language of Mistake Theory that is mandatory in The Motte. They have no particular adherence to principles or truth, these are restrictions that Mistake Theorists adopt, which Conflict Theorists have no particular use for because they tend to prevent you from doing whatever is necessary to win. The principle at work is "the Other Team did a Bad Thing to Our Team, which makes Other Team Bad and Our Team Good, which therefore justifies everything that Our Team will now do in response, which will not be Bad because Our Team are the ones doing it to the Bad Other Team."

The goal this entire time has been to engineer conditions in which it would be inevitable that Other Team would eventually do something Bad to Our Team. That's the point of blue tribe politicians urging their own constituents to resist, and activist organizations encouraging disruptions of ICE operations. Any idiot can see that what happened in Minneapolis is the inevitable result of everyone, everywhere, actively agitating to make the environment around ICE operations as chaotic and hostile as possible. And any idiot can see that all it would have taken to prevent it would be simply not committing to making the environment around ICE operations as chaotic and hostile as possible. But that would mean losing, and we can't have that!

I simply can't get worked up about this situation to the extent that everybody else wants me to. I can't be outraged or saddened at something that everyone clearly wanted to happen. All I can really do is cling to my commitment to principles, truth, and the rule of law.

Whining about it strikes me as pathetic LARPing to some extent.

I'll give you to some extent, but non/semi-violent resistance as a strategy only works because the repression looks much worse in the public eye than the original resistance (see why American riot police don't use water cannons unlike plenty of other Western countries). I'm not sure I fault political actors for trying to bring attention to such, but often it does feel like things are magnified hugely out of proportion ("Help, I'm being repressed!"). In this case someone died, and I'm not really inclined to call that "out of proportion" specifically, but I will point to the incentives here in that tangible repression was certainly being sought by at least some parties involved (the protest movement as a whole, for example).

see why American riot police don't use water cannons

They did at Standing Rock, and it's not clear to me why that was the odd exception, unless whoever was in charge of the police thought it was funny (one can imagine: "they want the water? We'll give them the water, alright!")

Bad associated optics. Historically, the use of water cannons were used on MLK's protest march through Alabama, and it became viral at the time because of it.

...so, yes, sad to say, Leftists could claim that water cannons are racist with a straight face.

Governor Wallace was a retarded dumbfuck.

see why American riot police don't use water cannons unlike plenty of other Western countries

They should. You could even put a positive spin on it as "replacing less less-than-lethal riot suppression mechanisms with more less-than-lethal ones".

In order to put a positive spin on it, you have to have the media on your side.

It's a shared culture of narcissism. People look for identity and meaning in stupid acts of protest, and they imagine what the government does is provide the stage for it. Totalitarian symbolically, but it will never engage in any kind of violence at all against you personally, which would interfere in your bragging rights about how righteous and badass you are.

The individual instances can seem superficially similar but the overall context couldn't be more different. For instance you can make the argument that both were killed by the Dems making it seem like all kinds of unethical and dangerous protesting is safe, appropriate, and at times even mandatory.

This is simply not true but the treatment of leftist protestors doing dangerous things, rioting, and even directly harming people...all makes the case that doing crazy shit is reasonable and appropriate.

In this frame they both were killed by insane leftist protesting norms, but one was killed by accepting lies from her own side, and the other was killed by accepting lies told by the other side.

That's pretty different.

This is also why I have no tolerance for complaints about January 6th - the left burned down billions of dollars in property and everyone was told that was fine. "Oh not for you, just for us" is not a compelling counterargument. If you don't like scary protests don't support scary protests.

Don’t forget “both sides” being egged on by their preferred media, social media, and private group chats and meetings. “Tomorrow we enter the Capitol!” “Drive, baby, drive!”

Don’t forget the policy wonks claiming “Defection!” on “both sides,” citing the constant denial and dismissal of court cases seeking to reexamine the 2020 vote totals, and the international law re refugees and immigrants from Somalia.

But also don’t forget Statuary Hall and the peaceful televised procession between velvet ropes. The chaos was mostly left outside.

I think I broadly agree.

"Ashli Babbit and Renee Good both FAFO" is a coherent and consistent view. "Ashli Babbit and Renee Good both died unnecessarily because of law enforcement/state ineptitude" is also a coherent and consistent view. (The latter does not preclude acknowledging that both women, at the very least, made poor choices and could have and should have avoided the situation, which at this point I definitely think is hard to dispute.)

If you think one was an innocent martyr and the other got what she deserved, I would really like to hear the arguments for that.

If you think one was an innocent martyr and the other got what she deserved, I would really like to hear the arguments for that.

I can not deliver on that, but I can deliver on something that may be close to it.

Ashley Babbit was not exactly innocent, but she did not pose any immediate danger that could not be averted by any other means. She was a tiny unarmed woman which could be easily subdued by any of the male policemen (and a bunch of armed police entered the same place within minutes, maybe even less, after the shooting, so it was unlikely it would be even necessary to subdue her). While "innocent' is not exactly the appropriate description, since she did commit crimes (namely, destruction of property, trespassing and probably refusing to follow a legal order of law enforcement officer), she still was a victim of a cowardly and poorly trained policeman who decided to use deadly force without any necessity for it.

On the case of Good, she and her partner in crime actively taunted the police, telling them things like "come at me" and other words, while impeding police work, and then drove the vehicle towards the police. This is an extremely dangerous situation - a vehicle driven like that can severely injure or kill a person. While it is hard to say she "deserved" that, her being shot is a direct consequence of her actions putting a law enforcement officer into a mortal danger and him having to defend himself from a lethal threat. One can not easily subdue and stop a huge SUV, and in fact, one has no chance to outrun one, so if she were determined to murder one of the officers, the only way for them to prevent if would be to shoot her. It is important to understand that the difference here is not in the poor choices she made per se, when she decided to impede police work. If she stopped there - if she blocked the police, refused to move, and refused to obey police commands, even if she continued to taunt the police - still, there would not be any justification for shooting, as the police was not in any danger then. The danger appeared when she decided to move the vehicle with the police standing around. That's when the situation changed, and while the word "deserved" sounds too emotionally charged for me, the word "justified" is certainly appropriate.

See:

While it may feel good to play enlightened centrist and do some both sides’ing, there is a major area where Babbitt differed from Good: Babbitt posed no imminent threat to the officer who shot.

That is the consistent principle.

Also this post. (I'm willing to move discussion to either thread to not fragment the conversation further.)

I don't like the Babbitt shoot, but I could understand that in the moment, the police officer didn't see Babbitt, but a limb of an angry mob. It's the only way it makes sense to me outside of some weird castle doctrine defense. Babbitt of course was a clown to do what she did.

Notably in mid 2025 the govt settled a wrongful death suit with Babbitt's family for $5 million.

One was an assault on a police officer with a deadly weapon. The other was breaking and entering. I believe these have different thresholds for the use of deadly force.

As this thread has shown, both "assault on a police officer" and "breaking and entering" are disputed. As I keep repeating: yes, both sides will frame the respective events so Ours was martyred and Theirs FAFO'd. And no matter how much you (general you) insist the facts are indisputable and your version is true, I don't believe you (general you) unless your previous demonstration of principled and not motivated reasoning makes me believe that you wouldn't just frame them differently if the tribal participants were reversed.

Which facts are you disputing? The deadly weapon operated by Good was an automobile. Good struck the officer with her vehicle. Assault with a deadly weapon. Babbitt did not assault any police officer and was unarmed. Babbitt died while trying to breach a windowed door.

Which side is my side?

I haven't disputed anything.

I said that in this thread (and obviously elsewhere) people are disputing whether Good struck the officer, whether her actions meet the definition of assault, and whether either Reed or Babbit's actions merited a lethal response. I have opinions on some of these things, but I do not yet have a definite conclusion about everything with regards to the Reed case.

Which side is my side?

Which side is my side?

Another consistent view is that Ashley Babbit deserved it because she was protesting for a bad cause (overturning an election) whereas Renee did not because she was protesting for a good cause (stopping the feds from kidnapping us).

The real crime of january 6th was that they used up one of our most potent civil disobedience options on something so meaningless.

  • -15

Renee did not because she was protesting for a good cause (stopping the feds from kidnapping us).

That's not true. The feds were not "kidnapping" anybody - kidnapping is, by definition, illegal imprisonment, while ICE has legal rights to arrest illegal immigrants. Judging from your use of the pronoun "us", you are an illegal immigrant too, in which case I would recommend you to contact a lawyer to arrange a proper departure with the least bad consequences for you. And, of course, I don't think it is smart to advertise this fact in public, even if anonymously. Also, I would like to remind you that lying is bad.

they used up one of our most potent civil disobedience options on something so meaningless.

Meaningless for you, maybe. As an illegal immigrant, you probably do not see much meaning in having honest elections in a country where you can not even legally vote, but many citizens of this country do.

Another consistent view is that Ashley Babbit deserved it because she was protesting for a bad cause (overturning an election) whereas Renee did not because she was protesting for a good cause (stopping the feds from kidnapping us).

It's consistent if you openly acknowledge you are embracing Conflict Theory ("we are Good, so it's Good when our side does it - you are Bad, so it's Bad when your side does it").

Most Conflict Theorists aren't so nakedly open about it. People want to pretend they have principles and their conclusions are based on reason and some form of justice.

How can you respond to this comment without modding it? The other poster is claiming without any evidence that ICE is kidnapping presumably Americans. That’s an extraordinary explosive claim wi the zero evidence.

We are often asked to mod people for "being dishonest."

We aren't mindreaders. We often suspect someone is being disingenuous, but the poster may really believe what he is saying. (You are surely aware that most progressives do consider illegal immigrants "us" so it's not implausible to me that they really believe ICE is "kidnapping people.")

Do I think @LiberalRetvrn is sincere, or a troll trying to push buttons? He's certainly on our radar, but making bad arguments is not something we ban people for. Demanding we mod people for "being dishonest" is asking us to use more personal discretion in judging posts than I think you really want. Lots of regulars are, IMO, at the very least fond of making unsubstantiated and unverified claims very confidently.

"Inflammatory claim with insufficient evidence" is the rule usually cited. Contrary to what many people think, though, this does not mean "A claim that inflamed (pissed off) me and that I don't believe."

But how is “they are kidnapping us” not an inflammatory claim without sufficient evidence?

"Inflammatory" is subjective. We don't apply it every time someone says something that pisses you off. Arguably almost every argument made here is inflammatory to someone, and unsurprisingly, people who don't agree with the argument made typically consider it to have been presented with insufficient evidence.

I already pointed out the answer to your specific case: charitably, @LiberalRetvrn does consider the people ICE is arresting to be "us" and he does consider their actions to be lawless and tantamount to "kidnapping." I am not speaking for @LiberalRetvrn here, but this is definitely a perspective common on the left, and I'm sure you know this. That this make you angry does not make it "inflammatory" such that we're going to mod people who say it. (Nor should you make any assumptions about whether or not I personally agree with the argument.)

As a meta-comment, one of the failures of the Motte is that while in theory, we are here to debate and argue and test ideas, in principal most people just want validation, venting, and affirmation. When they see an argument they don't like- especially from an ideological opponent, especially someone whose tone or style or specific POV really pisses them off - rather than saying "Ah, someone with a challenging perspective to take on!" or "Hmm, a worthy opponent?" they rush for the report button, and then yell at the mods for not shutting the mf up.

Now here's a concrete example: "ICE is killing dozens of people every day!" would be an inflammatory and falsifiable claim that you could legitimately demand some evidence for. "ICE is kidnapping people" - well, you're going to have an argument over what constitutes "kidnapping." And that's okay.

Kidnapping suggests illegal. Where is the illegality? Now you are going to say that lefties can define words to mean other than commonly defined terms.

You mod for much less absurd things.

More comments

I do have principles, but I don't think it's possible to judge civil disobedience acts in a vacuum. Disobeying an unjust law is good, disobeying a just law makes you a nuissance to society. I have principles about freedom, individual rights, and liberalism, not about what tactics are justifiable to achieve those things.

If you think one was an innocent martyr and the other got what she deserved, I would really like to hear the arguments for that.

We've been doing that for days, and I believe you specifically mentioned in a subthread yesterday that you didn't care to follow closely because it was tiresome or some such thing, which I interpreted as "This looks bad for the side I like aesthetically and I want plausible deniability that the MAGAts were right".

We've been doing that for days

I have not seen much specific discussion of how Ashli Babbit was materially different (there is now some discussion of it in this thread).

and I believe you specifically mentioned in a subthread yesterday that you didn't care to follow closely because it was tiresome or some such thing,

I said in general, I've avoided arguing about Renee Good online. Notably, I was not only referring to the Motte. I was referring to all my online spaces, most of which are rather different in orientation from the Motte.

"This looks bad for the side I like aesthetically and I want plausible deniability that the MAGAts were right".

Really, that is your model of where I fall ideologically?

How fascinating.

Sometimes police need to use lethal force to enforce the laws. Like, if a criminal is trying to kill the police, or other people, then obviously the police should use lethal force.

Sometimes police need to use non-lethal force to enforce the laws. Like, a naked man running down the street, or breaking up a drunken brawl.

If the police use lethal force in a situation that does not call for lethal force, that is bad.

I do not think Ashli Babbit was a case where lethal force was warranted. Renee Good is very arguably a case where lethal force was warranted, on grounds of self defense.

Ashli Babbit was a case where non-lethal force was warranted.

A rioter who is just a rioter should be roughed up a bit, thrown in jail, and fully punished under the law.

A rioter who seriously endangers the lives of others, might warrant a bullet, and if not, absolutely warrants all of the above.

Maybe this stance does not constitute 'innocent martyr and the other got what she deserved' but my position is that the office in the Good case should not be charged with anything and the officer in the Babbit case is a murderer.

I do not think Ashli Babbit was a case where lethal force was warranted.

Perhaps not, but I think there is a general moral principle that when an activist inserts himself into an ugly/violent/explosive situation, the activist needs to be on his best behavior under penalty of forfeiting any claim to charity or sympathy. By this standard, neither Babbit, Good, nor Rittenhouse deserve much in the way of charity. In Rittenhouse's case though, he handled himself extremely well so that even without any charity, he should be (and was) exonerated.

From a legal perspective, these are different questions, of course. I do know that when it comes to private property, you can normally use lethal force against an intruder without waiting to see how much a threat the person poses. [Edit: Apparently this is not necessarily true] Does this principle apply to an intruder in a specific room in a public building? I don't know.

I didn't pay much attention to the Ashley Babbit situation at the time, but what concerns me now is this: If there is a general rule that law enforcement cannot open fire against an (apparently) unarmed intruder in a public building, it opens the door (so to speak) to mob tactics where the authorities won't be able to protect the building (and themselves) until it's too late.

I do know that when it comes to private property, you can normally use lethal force against an intruder without waiting to see how much a threat the person poses.

This is not in fact true in most states. Castle Doctrine says you have no duty to retreat within your home (though some states don't even have that), but you still have to have a reasonable fear of grave bodily harm.

This is not in fact true in most states. Castle Doctrine says you have no duty to retreat within your home (though some states don't even have that), but you still have to have a reasonable fear of grave bodily harm.

Thanks for pointing this out. I had recalled learning at some point that if there's an intruder in your house, you don't have to wait to see if the person has a gun, knife, etc. -- you can just open fire.

I did find this online:

Some states—including Arizona, Arkansas, California, Florida, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Wisconsin, and Wyoming—have replaced the "reasonable person" standard, which placed the burden on the defendant to show that their defensive action were reasonable, with a "presumption of reasonableness," or "presumption of fear," which shifts the burden of proof to the prosecutor. In these states, the prosecutor has the burden to prove the defendant was "unreasonable."

I do think that as a practical matter, a homeowner has a great deal of leeway in terms of using lethal force against an (unlawful) intruder. But it doesn't seem that this is a bright line rule.

I feel like a lot of the talk about Babbitt seems to assume that nothing short of lethal force would work. I think this is because currently our law enforcement uses basically no force when dealing with rioters so riots get out of hand. It is very easy and practical to use non-lethal force to crowd control unarmed people. If the police fully utilized the non-lethal options at their disposal to deal with rioters, rubber bullet, tear gas, water cannons, truncheons, handcuffs, etc. then I think that should be more than sufficient to control such hypothetical situations.

I think this is downstream of American Revolution/Independence hagiography and then Civil Rights.

For historical reasons, the US is very sensitive to the optics of putting down riots. It’s supposed to be done by the nasty people that America was made to get away from. So if it’s not serious enough to start shooting, nothing should be done.

Can you convince me that you would make exactly the same argument if Ashli Babbit had been a leftist protesting Trump's inauguration, and Renee Good had been, I don't know, a Christian at an abortion protest or something?

Babbitt was standing next to several other Capital police officers with no barriers between them and her for several minutes. They were unmolested by her. It is, indeed, hard to imagine a reverse situation given the history with people like Rittenhouse having to gun down multiple convicted criminals just to stay alive in a similar situation.

So you would confidently assert that if a crowd of leftists entered the Capital building to protest/disrupt Trump's inauguration, and a woman who had previously been standing next to several officers for several minutes subsequently broke through a door in the building and was shot, that you would say "This was murder and the Capital police officer should be charged"?

Nah. People shouldn't be charged so much. The guy should have lost a large civil lawsuit meaning his future earnings to eternity go to Babbitt's children if she has them. Its better to let things lie in the middle.

The sort of autist that posts on the the Motte tends to actually hold to principles somewhat instead of broad tribe identification.

So, if I had argued, for example, that Rene Good was fighting against a rightful authority, and Babbitt was fighting against an illegitimate authority, I would obviously be making an argument that could be very easily swayed by motivated reasoning, even if it could also be a principled argument in theory.

If Babbitt had been a leftists I would absolutely make the same argument, but I am not really sure how I can convince you of that, and I am not really sure which part of my argument feels like partisan hackery to you.

I accept that Babbitt was doing something illegal, that it warranted a response of force from the police, just that, as she did not seem to pose a credible threat to anyone, that force should be non-lethal.

Does that position really seem so devested from baseline reality?

Honestly, I think my position on both of these cases would be the 90%+ majority opinion of Americans if the politics could somehow be removed from them.

To be fair, I was asking a genuine question: how could you convince me? Since I don't know you (and don't really have much of an impression of you, specifically), I'll just have to take your word for it that if the polarities were reversed you'd stick to the same principles.

Provisionally, I will take someone's word for that (unless they've already given me reason to believe otherwise). But generally speaking, I think we're so deep into polarization that I think most people form their opinions based entirely on who? and whom?

Renee Good had been, I don't know, a Christian at an abortion protest or something?

Not OP, but I'm trying to think of what would actually be an analogous situation for Renee Bad[1] at an abortion clinic protest. There's not a lot of overtly disruptive things she could do in front of an abortion clinic that wouldn't be straightforward grounds for arrest, and I think the overall right generally has enough respect for the law and property rights to understand that even if they don't like that abortion is legal, that it's a matter for the legislators and the courts, not for Renee Bad to roll up and do a direct action.

[1] As in, the mirror universe right wing version of Renee Good. This is a pun and I don't intend it to imply that it's evil to be right wing. I think it's quite okay to be right wing. It's just a pun please don't hurt me.

It's harder to come up with an exact equivalent for Good, true. But I'm thinking something like, an anti-abortion protester has her SUV blocking the street in front an abortion clinic, cops arrive to clear out the protesters, she and/or other protesters are screaming at the cops, and then some cops tell her to 'Get out of the fucking car' and she accelerates- with all the subsequent minute analysis of whether she hit a cop, whether she saw the cop, whether she was provoking the cop, whether she was moving towards the cop, whether the cop was in danger, etc.

I am convinced rightists and leftists would mostly change their opinions about whether the cop was justified in shooting her in that case.

Probably not, no. Pro-life activists being arrested for protesting too hard outside abortion clinics is a thing that happens and conservatives often defend FACE violations, but, importantly, not pro-life activists who use actual violent action.

But the entire dispute is whether Good used violent action. I don't see any leftists who are saying "Yes, she tried to run down an ICE officer and she was justified." Rather, they are claiming she panicked/she didn't see him/he wasn't in danger and shooting her was unnecessary.

In the equivalent situation, no, I don't think the pro-life community would defend a pro-life activist who was actually trying to run over a cop, but they would defend someone in an ambiguous situation like this, where it is not at all clear what anyone's intentions or situational awareness was.

But the entire dispute is whether Good used violent action.

Fine, they also tend to not defend pro-life activists that non-violently drive a car at the police, in an attempt to escape them,

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Doesn't even have to be parking her SUV. Silently praying outside an abortion clinic is reproductive coercion and violence! That is the UK, though, so I think even the USA hasn't reached that level as yet due to robust freedom of speech rights.

I support rioters being shot. Thought they should’ve with BLM. Same with J6.

Of course, if Congress was not illegitimately closed for a bad cold, J6 doesn’t happen.

Problem is, if you're not going to shoot BLM rioters, you don't get to shoot J6 rioters. Simple as.

Sure. I think that’s the thing that pisses off a lot of reds. There was a tepid responses to months of serious rioting and looting.

Then maximal responses to the one red coded riot.

I certainly support the police using force against rioters and ending riots swiftly, but I don't really put rioting into the category of things that get you summarily executed, in the same way that, being an active shooter would. I view rioting as a crime more in line with vandalism or assault. If you are assaulting someone with a knife, then the police are justified in shooting you, if you are assaulting someone with your fists, although it could still be deadly, I would prefer the cops to try and physically restrain and arrest you rather than giving you new holes.

Does that include say arson?

Probably, fire is pretty deadly even if modern electronics have gotten so safe that most people have forgotten.

If you think one was an innocent martyr and the other got what she deserved, I would really like to hear the arguments for that.

The left's argument, as I understand it, can be summarised/paraphrased as follows:

"1. The belief that humans outside Our Tribe matter, just as much as those within, is Good.

"2. The belief that members of Our Tribe matter more than outsiders, thus weighing one of Us being robbed by an outsider worse than a myriad outsiders being tortured to death, is Evil.

"3. Renee Good, in opposing mass deportations, was advancing the cause of universal benevolence; therefore her actions were Good.

"4. Ashli Babbit, in attempting to forcibly overturn Mr Biden's election on behalf of Mr Trump, was advancing the cause of tribal chauvinism; therefore her actions were Evil.

"5. Actions done in the service of Good ought to receive more latitude than the same actions done in service of Evil."

I am less sure of the right-wing counterpart, but I suspect it would involve switching the alignment labels in 1-4, and possibly renaming the causes they were advancing.

Yes, exactly. People can argue that they are different because one was Good fighting Evil, and the other was Evil fighting Good. But then you're arguing the politics surrounding the events, not whether there was actually a difference in how the state responded to someone acting against it.

But then you're arguing the politics surrounding the events, not whether there was actually a difference in how the state responded to someone acting against it.

From what I have read and heard, "Because what the J6ers were doing is bad" is the overt, explicit justification among the left for the way they have been treated. It really is just political for them, and not based in any respect for principles.

Indeed. I think both sides are equally unprincipled.

I don't think it's incoherent to say that protesting an evil regime is good and protesting a holy regime is evil, which seems to be the reason for the split view. It's even my view and likely the majority view: although it might be unwise to publicly fight against Hitler/Stalin, I'd definitely be rooting for someone who does. Where I'd differ is in not judging either administration as calling for unmanaged or badly managed protest.

The issue is that maintaining public order inherently involves violence, and both Babbitt and Good (and their supporters) thought that they were somehow exempt from facing violence when they were protesting (ironic, since they probably think of the respective administrations as closer to Communist/Nazi than I do).

The primary argument I know is "Babbit (and the rest of the protestors) were actively engaged in violence (see also: the one officer who was struck in the head with a heavy object), and therefore Babbit was shot in self-defence (usually accompanied by a photo of protestors inside the Capitol with fists raised looking angry), whereas Good was at no point attempting to harm the officer, and even though he was probably out of the way of the car (especially when he fired the shots), he at the very least put himself in harm's way."

Is it accurate to the situation on the ground, in either case? I haven't looked at any videos of either, and I'm sure the exact opposite argument is made in circles I don't really frequent. I'm merely summarizing/aggregating the argument I see most often.

Is it accurate to the situation on the ground, in either case?

No. Babbit was trying to pry apart a shut door that someone else had already partially broken and having little success because she was a relatively small woman. There were numerous other armed officers around who didn't seem to consider her a particular threat. She might have been able to get through and then post a threat to someone, but it probably wasn't happening in the next 30 seconds. The officer who shot her had a history of bad decisions. It's much closer to a "cop just felt like he could get away with murdering a white bitch" situation than the comparable, valence-flipped situation where left-wing psychics intuit that the officer had murderous intent.

OTOH, she was part of a group that had stormed the building and had a lot of threatening rhetoric. If shooting her was good for that reason, then all the J6 protestors should have been killed, along with most left-wing protestors over the last 10 years.

Conversely, Good gunned the engine on her car while pointed at an ICE agent who was just a couple feet away. She did turn away from him, but if he had been a bit slower to get aside, or if she had turned the wheel just a few degrees less to the side then she could have very easily run him over and killed him.

One of those woman very much appeared to be a deadly threat to another person within the next second, and the other could plausible have posed a threat in a minute or two, presuming she managed to break down a door with her bare hands, to whatever extent you think an unarmed woman is a threat. For that last point, generally speaking, leftwingers usually argue that the threat of an unarmed woman to a male cop is "no threat at all, he should just manually restrain her, and also opening a door shouldn't be a death sentence!"

I was going to type up a full comment, but it's midnight here and I don't have time. What I will say is that it's really nice in this discussion to see someone who mostly spends time in liberal spaces coming here with an open mind and looking to hear out perspectives from other circles.


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