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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   18012 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.

The videos are a pretty reliable Rorschach test for political orientations.

Bluesky is full of people watching it from all sides and in slow motion saying "yup, officer murdered her! it's plain as day" while X is full of people saying "yup, clearly justified self-defense"

Amazing.

Not that amazing. We have numerous previous incidents demonstrating the American public's total incapacity for achieving consensus over tribally-charged law enforcement incidents. For at least one side, and perhaps both, it is "who, whom" all the way down. This has obviously not gotten better since the Bundy standoff, BLM riots, rittenhouse and Jan 6th. It is pretty obviously not going to get better in the foreseeable future.

Something about this case seems much more cut and dried than the rest of the ones you mention. All of the relevant facts are on camera, from multiple angles. There's very little else you need to know. And there's still hardcore disagreement!

For a counter-point, take this this case from 2019 where a cop kills a parent at a school. There's bodycam video of the arrest and shootout . A very left-wing activist was causing a disturbance at a public school. It's unrelated to left-wing activism, more of a co-parenting dispute. Anyway, a police officer told him he had to leave. He refused so the police officer tried to arrest him. During the struggle the guy pulls a gun out and shoots twice. The officer responds with deadly force, killing him.

Consensus was achieved fairly quickly! In public commentary, there was not much disagreement over who in the wrong. A few left-wing anarchist types thought it was unjust but most normal people seemed to accept the police officer was justified.

Today's case makes it clear to me if this exact situation from 2019 was re-played but it was an ICE agent instead of a police resource officer it would be seen as a murder by every Democrat.

Something about this case seems much more cut and dried than the rest of the ones you mention. All of the relevant facts are on camera, from multiple angles. There's very little else you need to know.

The Rittenhouse shootings were even more clear cut that this: they were textbook justified self defense, executed with exceptional aim and restraint, and followed immediately by an attempt to turn himself into the police.

And well, you know how that one went.

Today's case makes it clear to me if this exact situation from 2019 was re-played but it was an ICE agent instead of a police resource officer it would be seen as a murder by every Democrat.

There's an obvious point here where ordinary cops have a real job maintaining public order, whereas nothing about what ICE does requires them to act the way they do other than the appetite for ostentatious thuggery.

Could you share your dignified and courteous looking method for locating and arresting people that are trying to hide from law enforcement?

Local police manage to do it just fine. You do investigation/surveillance and perform targeted arrests rather than grandiose sweeps with masked agents cosplaying as soldiers. (Of course, ICE does that in the most psychotic and inept way possible as well - see the Ozturk case)

Or, since we're talking about immigration enforcement specifically, you change the laws to make employing illegal immigrants virtually impossible. That will, of course, never happen, because it would mean holding the business gentry that run the GOP liable for something.

I go back to: the ostentatious thuggery is the point. ICE doesn't have to be filled with the semi-trained dregs of the Red Tribe, but it is. If you're anti-Trump, ICE is supposed to scare you. If you're pro-Trump, ICE is a steady source of cruelty porn.

I'm sure part of the point is to be grandiose and look unstoppable and ferocious but I still don't know how you do mass arrests in a way that isn't outrageous looking. I think it needs to be mass arrests too. If you just go in and arrest one person at a time you tip off all of the neighboring illegals to make themselves scarce.

Or, since we're talking about immigration enforcement specifically, you change the laws to make employing illegal immigrants virtually impossible. That will, of course, never happen, because it would mean holding the business gentry that run the GOP liable for something.

Do we think the US could actually pull this off? It took us 20+ years just to implement Real ID.

but I still don't know how you do mass arrests in a way that isn't outrageous looking.

Why would you even need mass arrests? What even are mass arrests and what do they have to do with honest immigration control? Actual immigration police work should 99% paperwork. You see it all the time with border control and passports. It's the whitest of white collar crimes. You check papers and hand papers to people telling them their papers are not in order, and occasional escort people to a holding place to expel them from the country. It's not dramatic. These are not hardened criminals, they're mostly middle aged schlubs living normal lives.

What you do is you send actual real officers of the law, not ICE paramilitary LARPers, to go where you think your intelligence has informed you someone has overstayed their visa, or never had a visa to begin with, then inform them and maybe put them in a car to take them to a jail or something. It's not rocket science. It doesn't need guns, let alone hidden secret police identities, tacticool gear, assault and aggressive belligerence, or any of this extra crap.

Like if i were an illegal immigrant in Japan, overstaying my visa or whatever, I would expect the police to knock on my door politely "Sumimasen, you must come with us." inform me I have brokent the law and eventually get me on a plane out of the country. Why is this hard?

If you just go in and arrest one person at a time you tip off all of the neighboring illegals to make themselves scarce.

Make themselves scarce where? These are immigrants. Not squatters or fantasy realm thieves. They can't live in the mountains or sewers to hide until the heat is down. The entire point of (mass) immigration is people need and work jobs to live. If you know enough to find someone that border crossed or doesn't have their papers in order, why wouldn't you be able to find them at their cousins? Why wouldn't you just tell their place of work, "inform us when they come back, they are breaking the law."?

Do we think the US could actually pull this off? It took us 20+ years just to implement Real ID.

For sure it could. What would be hard about it? But it won't. Because immigration control is a fake issue they don't really want to enforce.

Is there anything about deportations that requires leftists to throw up road blocks to obstruct law enforcement and occasionally launch murderous militia attacks?

There's an obvious point here where ordinary cops have a real job maintaining public order, whereas nothing about what ICE does requires them to act the way they do other than the appetite for ostentatious thuggery.

Please elaborate. Given the Resistance (TM) to ICE doing its job's increasing boldness and aggression, escalations by ICE officers are predictable, if unfortunate.

IIRC, the Bundy standoff had no disagreement over the facts for the standoff itself, and the subsequent killing of one of the participants resulted in the FBI shooters being caught tampering with evidence. None of this changed the tribal split.

Rittenhouse was filmed from multiple angles, and the film was available more or less immediately. Evidence abounded that he had acted within the law, evidence of him committing a crime did not exist. In the subsequent trial, every significant additional piece of evidence broke in his favor. None of this, nor even his acquittal, changed the tribal split.

My assessment is that the BLM riots and Jan 6th followed similar patterns. Both are much larger scale and far more complex, but the pattern of the evidence consistently breaking one way seems to me to hold in both.

We are past the point where evidence is dispositive. People want results, not process. It's not even really a mystery why: people on both sides perceive government as ineffectual at securing their values, and perceive those values under existential threat from their tribal opposites. Under such conditions, the natural consequence is a loss of faith in institutions and burgeoning extremism in pursuit of a solution to the perceived crisis.

Rittenhouse was filmed from every angle, fully available for review, and then litigated in every detail during a weeks long trial.

A significant portion of the electorate is still just straight-up lying about all of it.

Were the videos of the Rittenhouse shootings viral videos posted day of? I somehow never saw a single one. I mostly just followed the case on Wikipedia and thought he was not guilty and in fact sounded pretty heroic.

But my impression of the Rittenhouse case was everyone heard a story first, "guy with AR-15 crossed state lines to look for an excuse to kill SJWs" and nobody would update from there. Today's case, pretty much everyone saw the videos first and came to wildly different conclusions.

Were the videos of the Rittenhouse shootings viral videos posted day of?

I saw the video of the skateboard attack and the false surrender/bye-cep within 24 hours of it happening. I'm pretty sure video of the initial shooting of Rosenbaum came out at about the same time but can't remember for sure, it was definitely only a few days max.

I think people vastly overrate how long the public actually follows and imbibes new information about these cases. I'm still seeing stuff positing Tyler Robinson was right-wing since 'his parents voted Republican' at which point a lot of people just stopped following the case or updating the information in their minds.

To toot my own horn I think I was the first to post in the old thread with time zones it's hard for me to say but I think I posted within a few hours of the shooting.

Were the videos of the Rittenhouse shootings viral videos posted day of?

I watched the shootings happen live on a stream.

Some contemporaneous discussion here and here and here, from the first few days after the shooting.

The videos were available, and that's how Grosskruetz got the nickname Byeceps; most people just didn't (and, to be fair, I'm not a big fan of watching people die myself). It's easy today to think everyone's getting the full explanatory video, but I'd be surprised if that's the retrospective the normies think in a week.

Yes, I remember seeing the videos the day of. People commented that the video evidence must be divine intervention in Rittenhouse's favor it was so clear-cut.

The first highly-upvoted video on Reddit had a title which described the rioters as trying to "lynch" Rittenhouse, iirc.

Huh. I thought I was very online but I'm apparently not nearly online enough to be commenting on this stuff.

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