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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   17055 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.

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.

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