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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   22585 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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

I haven't seen any arguments about how they could be legal.

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)

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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