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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   22150 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.

As an aside: Noem labeling the victim a domestic terrorist is absolutely farcical and yet another example of the Trump administration's fundamentally authoritarian inclination.

edit:

The head of Minnesota’s state investigations agency said Thursday that the U.S. attorney’s office has barred it from taking part in the investigation into the fatal shooting of a Minneapolis woman by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer.

"Yep, that sure is the language of the innocent." Comparisons to the Chicago shooting leap to mind, including the likelihood of DHS sabotaging evidence after lying about events.

My first reaction was to scoff at the hyperbole.

But on second thought, she was abrogating the state's monopoly on violence in furtherance of political goals.

she was abrogating the state's monopoly on violence in furtherance of political goals.

Words have meanings and this is not what "terrorism" means. You would have a better case that she was guilty of insurrection - but terrorism is a specific strategy of using acts of extraordinary violence to create a climate of fear. I don't think the victim here was by any stretch of the imagination engaged in a long-term project of killing a few ICE agents pour encourager les autres. Even in the scenario where she consciously attempted to run the officer who shot her, all signs point to it having been an ordinary self-interested murder meant to enable her escape, not an attempt to make a statement.

There's no single definition of terrorism, but she was part of a direct action campaign that used violent confrontations with ICE to further their political goal to not enforce immigration laws.

Most terorrism definitions don't require killing, just violence.

This paper contains a wide range of definitions, I'll quote a few:

1998/2017 Bruce Hoffman: Terrorism is “ineluctably political in aims and motives; violent – or, equally important, threatening violence; designed to have far-reaching psychological repercussions beyond the immediate victim or target; conducted either by an organisation with an identifiable chain of command or conspiratorial cell structure (whose members wear no uniform, or identifying insignia) or by individuals or a small collection of individuals influenced, motivated, or inspired by the ideological aims or example of some existent terrorist movement or its leaders, or both; and perpetrated by a subnational group or nonstate entity.”

1987 Walter Laqueur: “Most authors agree that terrorism is the use or the threat of use of violence, a method of combat, or a strategy to achieve certain targets, that it aims to induce a state of fear in the victim, that it is ruthless and does not conform with humanitarian policy, and/or to destabilise and even overthrow government.”

1988 New Academic Consensus Definition (A.P. Schmid): Terrorism is an anxiety-inspiring method of repeated violent action, employed by (semi-) clandestine individual, group, or state actors, for idiosyncratic, criminal, or political reasons, whereby – in contrast to assassination - the direct targets of violence are not the main targets. The immediate human victims of violence are generally chosen randomly (targets of opportunity) or selectively (representative or symbolic targets) from a target population and serve as message generators. Threat- and violence-based communication processes between terrorist (organisation), (imperiled) victims, and main targets are used to manipulate the main target audience(s), turning it into a target of terror, a target of demands, or a target of attention, depending on whether intimidation, coercion, or propaganda is primarily sought.

I suppose a major point of contention is whether the direct action of anti-ICE is committed only for its first order effects of frustrating the specific enforcement actions happening at that time, or if they think that their acts taken together will have second-order effects that advance their political goals.

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