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I agree that in practice, these kinds of histrionics aren't good for much. But I'm curious how you would answer the following - suppose, for the sake of argument, that you did believe ICE under Trump are an institution of evil, that ~every ICE operation is a moral outrage. How would you behave if you were walking around your neighborhood and found yourself witness to just such an operation? If necessary, switch out ICE and immigration enforcement under Trump for any atrocity of your choice that a lawfully-elected government with diametrically opposed values and politics to your own might legalize within your lifetime, and ask yourself how you'd react to seeing that underway.
The way I see it, no one wants to be the guy who walks past the drowning child without comment. A man's conscience won't take it - for that matter, neither will his pride. He must do something - anything! The absence of such a moral instinct would actually be quite a worrying sign. Lucky for the fabric of society, for most people, that instinct is tempered by reason, so they don't jump in blindly and try to suicidally obstruct the enactment of the (perceived-to-be-)evil law all by themselves. But the outrage still has to out. So they jeer and scream and organize protests.
In other words, where you see something that needlessly escalates tense situations towards violence, I see the useful venting of energy that could otherwise boil over into far more immediate violence.
Yeah but ask those 'observers' how they feel about people protesting abortion clinics and they'd flip their tune instantaneously.
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Isn’t this just Jan 6? If you are morally outraged - you Protest and go to jail. In some cases perhaps tortured. Or you keep your mouth shut and show up to work everyday while providing for your family etc. That is your choice when you fight the regime.
In the case of Jan 6 everyone else basically decided to agree with them. The regime changed and in many cases you become a hero and often the leaders of the new regime.
Jan 6 differed from what I'm talking about in that they actually broke laws. Not, I would gladly agree, to the extent that it justified the cartoonish levels of pearl-clutching or the severity of the repression - but I was specifically talking about the displays of helpless disapproval that are available to a citizen who remains committed to not breaking the law, even as they bear witness to something which they find unconscionable.
Either case is obstructing lawful government action. It’s just a question of how much obstruction they are doing. Going to an arrest or ICE detention and blasting loud music interferes with the ability of ICE agents to think and do their job. There is even a Wikipedia article about loud music torture. So we have already established that noise pollution can be torture. Being loud and protesting an arrest isn’t physically interfering but it is usually in a non-criminal sense obstructing the police action.
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One of the reasons I despise these sort of protestors is the LARPing, Stolen Valor element to it. If I happened upon the SS engaged in an operation, I can't really say what I would do without more of a scenario. But I am willing to go on the record and say that performatively screaming at them like the worst Karen to ever disgrace a department store, accomplishing nothing remotely useful except making sure the Legions of Terror know that I am powerless and that I hate them, seems like the stupidest fucking thing I could possibly do. It's literally a Futurama gag.
The anti-ICE protestors have been exactly that stupid for probably 9 digits worth of encounter-people in the last year, and the response from the Legions of Terror has been incredibly reserved and professional. They do this shit, and get away with this shit, millions of times, precisely because everything they pretend to believe is wrong.
And they either know that, on at least some level,
Or they're all appallingly useless retards.
In the real world, ICE is doing routine law enforcement, following real, democratically enacted laws, after their biggest booster just won an election on having them do exactly that, and their professionalism and accuracy rates are, AFAICT, unprecedented in government service.
If I thought that was still evil (and there are government agencies where that is the case), then I would, you know, argue against them. And vote against them. And try to convince other people. I certainly wouldn't interpose myself in an ATF agent's way while he was doing his job, screaming that he's a baby murderer in his face, and then have the unmitigated gall to act surprised when he didn't take that well.
The people protesting this by acting like the shittiest, pro-criminal, traitor Karens are basically throwing a parade with a marching band, riding in the position of honor atop a bus sized brass boar, banging cymbals overhead, while planes in the sky write "We refuse to abide by the results of elections and you'd have to be fools to tolerate sharing a country with us."
Would you be that sanguine if we "vented" some anti-immigration energy by screaming obscenities in the faces of Somali daycare owners every time they tried to enter any public space?
Or do you just accept that left-wingers are dumb children who can't be expected to act like proper citizens or adults?
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