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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026

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It just seems to be an unlucky tragedy caused if anything bad policies and stupid positioning rather than anyone involved acting bad.

A car passes in front of her (showing the way in front was clear) right before one of the unmarked ICE vehicles stops and two unidentified masked men with guns walk to the car screaming orders at her. While this is happening and her focus is on the approaching people from the left, two others who were originally behind the car circle from the right and end up to the top right of her.

One of the masked men grabs her door and she panics, pulls back and then starts going forward to the top right with her focus still likely on the two men to her left. There's a very good chance she didn't see the guys who moved in front at all. It's inappropriate driving, but it's also understandable when in a panic considering how bad normal drivers are even when not having masked men trying to open your car.

Meanwhile the guy who moved in front that shot the gun saw a car moving towards him and panicked in his own way. What he did is also moronic and inappropriate, shooting a driver with their foot on the gas isn't going to stop the vehicle very well. If anything, it's likely to accelerate. But again, it's understandable in a panic that someone with a gun would start shooting and it doesn't seem to be an intentional murder.

It's unfortunate and the real problem seems to be in policy/training. It's not a great idea to circle around a car without making your presence known, and it's not a great idea to just have a group of masked men grabbing at car doors and panicking the person inside. Preventing these dumb situations from happening requires more than just playing the blame game. As we learned in aviation

Humans are fallible creatures who make poor decisions, misinterpret data, and forget things. In a system where lives may depend on the accuracy of a single person, disaster is not only probable but, given enough time, inevitable. Barring cases of anomalous recklessness or incompetence, it won’t matter who is sitting in the controller’s chair when the collision happens. And the only way to fix such a system is to end the reliance on individuals by putting in place safeguards against error.

This happens all the time with shit like this. People on the internet love to roleplay the epic things they totally would do in any given situation, but it's imaginary. Heck they even do it to criticize actual heroes so they can be "yeah I'd be even cooler and more epic if it was me". Mark Wahlberg's claim he would have stopped 9/11 is just one example of this stupidity, but you can see it everywhere. Bragging about the bullshit awesomeness in their fantasy when in reality people panic and do dumb shit in stressful situations, and you want policies and training that help to minimize the adverse consequences of this. An easy general rule being, don't just walk out in front of cars and assume that you are noticed. People get injured/die constantly from not being noticed by drivers.

Edit: Actually, turns out there is video evidence from the front of it now too https://youtube.com/watch?v=Jbq98aqF794?si=JPc0rc7f7RQbuIf1 the guy literally just walks in front of the car as she's already pulling away and her wheels are turned towards the right away from him.

Yeah, I don't think was this intentional from her. She was distracted and in panic by the men grabbing at her and he seems like an idiot too busy focusing on his phone to think "is it stupid to walk in front of a car?"

People on the internet love to roleplay the epic things they totally would do in any given situation

Something I was discussing previous on a different board, and that is a larger issue beyond this event, is that the majority of people have effectively 0 experience making important, possibley life or death decisions, when their body is absolutely flooded with adrenaline. In our prehistorical past, this prepared us for violence. This response is, in the modern day, often an evolutionary trap. My father was a career NCO in the USMC and he occasionally spoke about training people to manage, and if possible prevent, adrenal responses to the events around them. Even people that are aware of the issue, who've had training and exposure to stimuli to try to assuage it, still don't ever really know what their response is going to be when it happens. The fight/flight/freeze response really doesn't understand modern society very well.