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A woman in Minneapolis has been killed in an altercation with ICE. I don’t really trust any of the narratives being spun up. Here are
twothree angles:Angle 1
Angle 2 [Twitter] [youtube]
Angle 3 (Emerged as I was writing this)
This is actually a fairly discussed type of shooting. Law enforcement confronts a person in a vehicle, the LEO positions himself in front of the vehicle, the person in the vehicle drives forward, and the cop shoots the person. Generally, courts have found that this is a legitimate shoot. The idea being that a car can be as deadly a weapon as anything.
Those who are less inclined to give deference to law enforcement argue that fleeing the police shouldn’t be a death sentence, and that usually in these situations the LEO has put himself in front of the vehicle.
I have a long history of discussing shooters in self-defense situations [1] [2] [3] and also one of being anti-LEO. However, I’m softer on the anti-LEO front in the sense that within the paradigm in which we exist, most people think the state should enforce laws, and that the state enforcing laws = violence.
The slippery slope for me: “Fleeing police shouldn’t be a death sentence”
“Resisting arrest shouldn’t be a death sentence”
“If you just resist hard enough, you should be able to get away with it”
People really try to divorce the violence from state action, but the state doesn’t exist without it.
You guys have all gotten so into the weeds about the mechanics of the individual shooting that you’re missing the big Fort Sumpter style moves that are going on right now:
•There’s something like 3000 federal law enforcement offers deployed in Minneapolis right now
•Mainstream media, Reddit, and various politicians have incited multiple assassination attempts on these officers
•Relatively photogenic citizen non-felon in gunned down in ambiguous situation, there is now a bloody shirt to waive
•Mayor and Governor are now calling for the removal of all federal agents from Minneapolis
•Governor Walz is now threatening to use the Minnesota National Guard to remove federal agents from the city, setting the stage for conflicting guard federalizations and call up orders
•You will have an armed unit of the state/federal military apparatus actually having to pick a side in a legally ambiguous situation
•You will have armed state/municipal police facing off against armed federal agents with the national guard caught somewhere in the middle
This is not good. No matter who’s fault it is, this is not good.
I Googled this and cannot find any mention of it.
There's a lot of snippets getting pulled like this. I haven't been able to find a full transcript.
That's quite different than saying he's going to forcibly remove federal agents from the city.
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Who do you mean by this?
Might as well include the whole population of the world in this category.
This one would be the simplest to prove, so if you don't respond to other ones, I'd like to see your response to this - who incited the assassination?
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This is utterly stupid. It's what George Wallace tried, and it gives Trump an ironclad reason (rebellion, literally) to invoke the Insurrection Act and federalize the Guard. Walz may be one of two politicians dumb enough to do something like that (the other being his former running mate), but hopefully someone will talk him down.
Whose fault matters. If you just say it's "not good", you're implying that any side which can stop it should even at the cost of backing down. And Trump is on solid ground here; Walz is allowed not to assist Federal law enforcement in carrying out their duties, but he's not allowed to keep them from carrying them out themselves, and immigration enforcement is not some fantasy spun off of a vague enabling statute, it's based on pretty solid statute law.
The sense that I get from Walz is that he's basically a patsy for powerful democrats. He should absolutely not be a national figure, and that type of attention can be intoxicating. A (potentially) dangerous mix.
I hope nobody is egging him on.
He's a lame duck and his career is over. He can flip tables as much as he wants with zero consequence.
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I mean Greg Abbott got away with it. It's possible Walz is dumb enough to think that he's Greg Abbott.
Nor is Minnesota Texas. I know exactly where the Texas National Guard stands in a conflict between their state and the feds. The Minnesota National Guard? Im not so sure. How strong is state identity and how popular is Trump among Minnesota guardsmen?
A lot of the guardsmen who sided with Abbott literally were not Texan- operation lone star was a coalition.
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I think it may be significant this follows so closely on the Somali daycare scandal. Minnesota Democrats have every incentive to blow this up as big as possible to distract from that, so I see major incentives for escalation here.
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Photogenic woman whose last name is Good. Hard to imagine a name more suited for emotionally-charged polemics.
Kind of shocking, how does a young mother decide to try to use her car to block ICE? Do these people have no sense these are dangerous activities?
It’s kind of interesting to me that the last story I remember hearing about an ICE shooting was also a woman (who survived). Why are women doing this? Do they have some sense of invincibility?
It's that they don't understand how dangerous the game they're playing is. People see a lot of youtube videos and tik toks and stuff and they feel empowered to act out their revolutionary fantasies.
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I suspect she never got The Talk. I got it in Driver's Ed class: if you're ever stopped by police, keep your hands at 10 and 2 on the wheel, and be polite: "Good [time of day] officer, what seems to be the problem?". You can disagree politely, but you're not going to win any arguments at that point: if you do well, a lawyer can get things tossed out later, though.
Of course, I'm not sure women normally get that one.
I've never even heard of this as being a special thing that is taught.
So you know how it's popular on Instagram to post about how women are taught to "never let them take you to another location, piss yourself, etc." to avoid sexual assault, and men don't have an equivalent of that? This is that equivalent.
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I was taught- stay in your vehicle, be polite, let them know if you have a gun but otherwise say nothing except direct answers to questions with no further details. Do not let them search your vehicle without a warrant.
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I'm a white 40yo male who grew up in a middle class CA suburb. It was explicitly taught to me in school that if a police officer pulls you over and you put your hands out of view, you will be shot (because you could be reaching for a gun).
Same, couple of years younger. Is how to deal with a police stop not a standard part of driver's ed elsewhere? I was literally tested on this in order to get my license.
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Should it have to be?
I dont think I ever had that officially instructed to me in some class. Just something you pick up on from family and relatives in addition to being intuitively obvious.
The part about being polite, no I guess not. But the thing about the hand positions sounds strange to me. I guess it's because guns are so common in the United States. Here in Canada, it's not really something anyone ever worries about because they're largely illegal.
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I'm guessing you grew up in a place or social/economic milieu where people didn't have many violent interactions with cops. It's very common for e.g. responsible black parents to teach their kids that lesson.
I guess not. According to this there have been six police officers deliberately killed on duty in my province of one million people. Two in my lifetime and about one every few decades. The latest one was relatively recent in 2020 because we had a mass shooting, which is very unusual.
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I never went to no drivers' ed class, but I'm not being "polite" to a police officer who is openly trying to charge me with something. The police are owed nothing from the citizens who pay their salaries. And ICE are not even police.
Are you trying to win a Darwin Award?
I agree with him on being polite to people who are trying to punish me, and it's gotten me in trouble. But I never tried to run them over and I'd fully expect them to shoot me if I did.
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Don't forget about the Mark Kelly video from a few months ago reminding soldiers that they should think hard about what orders they follow because they need to personally decide if they're legal or not.
I didn't follow that one too closely but it seemed like what he said is just...true, isn't it? Was the issue the implication?
If Trump had responded that the FBI should arrest any senators guilty of sedition that would also have been true.
Sure? I’d think it was weird but not much more.
The problem is the implication. We can play dumb and act like either are just innocent reminders of facts that are usually irrelevant because the preconditions for them (illegal orders or seditious senators) doesn't happen often, but what really matters is that the timing and the choice of messengers carries with it a neon flashing sign implying those preconditions have happened.
So hypothetically, if I think the President is giving illegal orders to the military, or might, it’s out of bounds to say that to soldiers?
The closest I can get to agreeing is seeing it as an escalation and playing with fire. Something like “a soldier’s duty to disobey illegal orders is extremely serious and can have extremely serious consequences don’t fuck around with it as part of your political posturing.” Is that accurate?
I think you would have an obligation to state with some precision what orders you think are illegal, or would be illegal, rather than trying to create a cloud of FUD.
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If you think so, you point to which orders you mean. Also, it's probably not up to a partisan politician to point it out, but to military instructors to explain it.
Pretty much. The military relies on obedience from soldiers except in the case of grossly illegal orders. "Don't execute illegal orders" is not for complicated matters that requires judges and courtrooms to parse, let alone those thorny enough that they often end up at the Supreme Court level, it's for obvious "I order you to set these unarmed civilians on fire" stuff. If those senators had any examples of those they should have been able to point them out. Otherwise, they're just messing up the chain of command by encouraging grunts to apply discretion to stuff that's way, way, way above their station to decide.
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I am not any kind of relevant professional, but my impression is that the military has a pretty strong "You should be following orders unless they are obviously insane" ethos... which seems pretty critical to their functioning as a military. Kelly's wink wink nudge nudge "You should disobey orders that might upset the cast of The View" is probably not the sort of thing that a serious military can tolerate.
This is not a charitable characterization of what he said. He said they're allowed to refuse illegal orders. Someone else in the video said they must refuse illegal orders, which I think is more accurate. I think this was in reference to the boat bombings, including bombing the second strike on the survivors of one of them.
These seem to be clearly illegal. I haven't seen any arguments about how they could be legal.
No they aren’t clearly illegal. Hell Kelly himself acknowledges they are legally grey.
The U.S. government is using the military to summarily execute people outside of a military conflict. That is illegal. The excuse is that they are alleged drug dealers. The correct and legal response to that is to present evidence for probable cause to a judge, get a warrant, and then arrest them, then to put them on trial, present evidence that proves them guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, and have a judge sentence them for some prison term.
They are not allowed to kill them at any point in this process. They are not allowed to do anything to them based on a mere suspicion of a crime being committed. They have presented no evidence, and the alleged crimes are not even within the jurisdiction of the United States. We know from experience that a quarter of suspected drug boats aren't even carrying drugs. Nonetheless, even proof that they are really drug boats or even proof that they are not only drug boats but smuggling drugs into the United States would not excuse what they've been doing.
If it is a military conflict, they need to get congressional approval. The only law that would give them the right to act unilaterally would be if they were attacking the United States, because the executive branch has the power to act in defence of the United States. Smuggling cocaine is not an act of war. So that is not sufficient.
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Context matters. If I started pointing out that there are circumstances where it would be legal and moral to kill you, I expect you would take that as a bit more than a detached hypothetical.
Then you haven't looked. Notice how that whole media stunt was dropped, instead of continuing with congressional hearings on these supposedly clearly illegal murders?
Take it a step further. Why do you think it's illegal? What law was violated?
If the US was not at war in the relevant legal sense, the law against murder. They were killings in peacetime with malice aforethought.
If the US was at war in the relevant legal sense, then the double tap violated various provisions of the Geneva Conventions relating to violence against shipwrecked sailors.
The Trump administration's defence of the boat killings is basically that drug dealers are hostis humani generis. This issue is a political loser for Trump's opponents because the median voter basically agrees with him on this point, but nothing in US or international law treats cocaine differently from any other kind of contraband.
You are assuming facts not in evidence (ie double tap)
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I am also not a soldier but my understanding was we actually have a pretty strong tradition of relying on the judgment of ground troops as to whether or not an order is illegal.
I suspect that's less a tradition than just the only thing that's actually practicable. The man on the ground receiving the potentially illegal order is the only one who can decide not to obey it. But I would be shocked if the military actually stressed this as something for soldiers to routinely think about. Even just being peripherally aware of it is a cost in friction for every action you want that solider to take.
I would expect the real world implementation is something like "Here's your mandatory once per year 'don't obey illegal orders' video. Shut up and watch it. If you get an illegal order, you have to refuse to obey it. This is your own responsibility, and if you ever guess wrong you're fucked. And if any of you dumbasses actually questions or refuses orders, you are way more likely to do pushups until you die and then we will court-martial your corpse. Now, never think about this again until next year's mandatory ethics video."
‘By the way, this video is in between our sexual harassment training video and our drug use in the workplace policy video, both of which you will actually be tested on.’
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If Tim Walz uses the Minnesota National Guard to remove federal agents then Trump will have full legal and ethical justification to invoke the Insurrection Act and send in literal tanks.
EDIT: I am watching the clips where people say that Tim Walz is threatening to use the National Guard against federal agents. He does not seem to be actually saying that.
None of this matters. The legal justifications don't matter. People are not swayed by logic or law.
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Unless I’m missing something huge, no, they didn’t.
Not the first. Won’t be the last. Law enforcement is hard.
Either Trump invokes Title 10 or he doesn’t. If he does, the Guard is at his disposal. Otherwise it’s under Walz.
You don’t say?
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