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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   33033 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.

This case is a bit tough for me. The shot seems clearly more justified than the Babbitt shot. It seems to me at least reasonable that the officer could have thought the woman was trying to run him over, but personally my feeling is that the woman was simply trying to flee, recklessly.

The real reason the case bothers me is that, in the course of my life, I have often dealt with police trying to block off or redirect traffic. In two such cases the police (in my opinion) did such a poor job of this that I ended up driving into some area where I was not supposed to be. In both interactions the police were very aggressive and angry with me (at least at first; I'd like to think my genuine befuddlement wins them over in the end). While the situation is not perfectly analogous, I can't shake the mild fear that one of the officers could have believed that I was driving recklessly or intentionally into the blocked-off area, and viewed my action as a "deadly threat."

Ultimately, I think the police need to be able to use force to enact the law and take a very dim view of any sort of right to flee, but I can't help but wonder if the cop who murdered Babbitt would have murdered me for being confused and in the wrong place in my car.

While the situation is not perfectly analogous, I can't shake the mild fear that one of the officers could have believed that I was driving recklessly or intentionally into the blocked-off area, and viewed my action as a "deadly threat."

This is exactly why I think the other protestors bear moral blame for this woman's death, and ought to be legally disincentivized from behaving as they have been. A beat cop doing traffic control doesn't have any particular reason to worry about a driver accidentally going somewhere beyond the general high level of paranoia cops are taught to use.

Compare that to an ICE agent surrounded by protestors screaming the kind of insulting accusations that might morally justify vengeful violence against agents of the state. Physical attacks on ICE agents are already high, including numerous attempts to assassinate or perform mass killings of ICE agents.

This is obviously going to put them more on edge, raise the threshold for proper professionalism, and increase the likelihood of something unfortunate happening.

This is obviously going to put them more on edge, raise the threshold for proper professionalism, and increase the likelihood of something unfortunate happening.

Yeah, people need to listen to the audio around the events, it is STRESSFUL (even sitting at home). Raise the temperature, make the situation uncontrolled, make communication hard.....and communication is hard.

This also matters for securing the scene after the shooting.

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