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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   25100 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026

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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 two three 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.

I'm not entirely sure where I stand on this issue, but to push back on the idea of it being a slippery slope, I think we can steelman the "fleeing the police shouldn’t be a death sentence" idea to something like "the police should not deliberately block off only nonviolent methods of fleeing in order to force an equivalence between fleeing and violence.

Imagine a dystopia in which police have a secret goal of wanting to shoot as many people as possible, but are legally prohibited from this because their laws are almost equivalent to ours: you can only shoot someone in self defense (or defense of another), but have some extra loopholes that allow the following scenario. The police always travel in pairs, and instead of normal handcuffs they carry one cuff with a long thin wire dangling off them. When a police officer cuffs someone it doesn't directly restrain them in any way, but the police officer ties the wire around their own neck. This means if the suspect attempts to run and gets far enough away, the wire tightens and slices/strangles the officer. The other officer can then legally shoot the suspect in order to save their partner's life. That is, the officer is deliberately endangering themselves in a conditional way in order to create opportunities to shoot people.

The steelmanned argument would then place "standing in front of a driven vehicle" in this same scenario. You are not physically restraining a person. You are not actually preventing them from escaping. Instead, you are creating a scenario in which you deliberately endanger yourself conditional on them fleeing as an excuse to shoot them. This is roughly equivalent to just training a gun on them and saying "don't run or I'll shoot you", which police officers are generally not allowed to do. This is a loophole in which they are allowed to do it. Saying "we should close this loophole, you can't just put yourself in danger for the express purpose of giving yourselves opportunities to shoot people" does not slip into "violence is allowed" because it's categorically and consistently anti danger/violence. It's not necessarily about deliberately giving people opportunities to flee, or even failing to close off opportunities to flee if you can actually do that, but it's a claim that abusing your legal power and using yourself as a hostage is not a legitimate means to close off escape.

Of course, I expect a large fraction of people do believe weaker versions of this and just hate police. But I think there is some legitimate point here in the stronger version.

The police always travel in pairs, and instead of normal handcuffs they carry one cuff with a long thin wire dangling off them. When a police officer cuffs someone it doesn't directly restrain them in any way, but the police officer ties the wire around their own neck.

Uh... sure, if the officer had the perfect opportunity to restrain a suspect, but instead chose to arm them with a deadly weapon, the use of which completely depends on the officer willingly exposing himself to it through a series of convoluted steps, I'd say any pretense of feeling threatened is illegitimate.

I fail to see how this is a useful analogy for a case where the suspect is already in possession of a deadly weapon, prior to restraint.

I fail to see how this is a useful analogy for a case where the suspect is already in possession of a deadly weapon, prior to restraint.

I think grouping cars, which most Americans have, in with deadly weapons for this purpose, while technically correct, is a good example of the non-central fallacy. "In order to make a living in this country, you need [thing]. If you have [thing], then police are entitled to kill you if you try to escape arrest" is rather Catch-22-adjacent.

Setting aside the question of the appropriate response to a fleeing suspect, this (and a lot of comments here) seem to be glossing the fact that fleeing the cops in a motor vehicle is a choice, just as much as fleeing the cops with a gun is. You can always attempt to flee on foot if you decide to flee.

Responding to you and @ArjinFerman simultaneously, the premise here is that more than one choice has been made: yes, the person the cops were trying to arrest chose to try to flee with a motor vehicle (resp. with the wire/handcuffs), but the cops previously chose to position themselves in the way of the car such that fleeing would entail driving the car at them, resp. chose to attach the wire. One can take the contrived example further - what if the cop holds a gun to their own head and says, "I will kill myself if you escape"? What if they do this using some scifi commitment device that forces them to follow through on this promise? (Is creating exploding collars for that and marketing them to police the next big startup idea?) What if the cop's on a PIP and will get fired if he makes another mistake and is known to be depressed, so the person who is getting arrested knows that the cop will likely kill himself if he gets away?

Supposing instead of any of these Rube Goldberg machines the person fleeing just decides to point a gun at the police and tell them he will shoot if they get any closer. Shouldn't the cops back off?

The answer to this question is prudential but at some point if you are going to enforce the law at all you have to escalate against resisters. This is true in principle regardless of edge cases.

That's presumably different, because in your setup the police did not set things up in such a way that you physically need to point a gun at them to attempt to escape [do something that is not normally taken to be punishable by death].

All right, supposing the police have someone cornered and his only plausible way out is to point the gun (he doesn't know movie karate that would allow him to defeat half a dozen cops unarmed). How is this different from the police having someone cornered and their only way out is to point a vehicle at a police officer? Shouldn't the duty to retreat be roughly analogous in both situations?

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