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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   27262 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.

The shot seems clearly more justified than the Babbitt shot.

That one:

Despite multiple warnings not to proceed,[7] Babbitt attempted to climb through a shattered window beside a barricaded door into the Speaker's Lobby, at which point she was shot in the shoulder[8] by a United States Capitol Police (USCP) officer.

Now, granted, this might be a uncharitable summary, WP is unlikely to be very sympathetic to J6 rioters.

I think that the difference of Babbitt and Good was that it was apparent that the former was in the middle of a breaking and entering mission. She was not climbing through that window because she was panicking and trying to flee, she was clearly looking for trouble.

Sure, it would have been better if a squad of cops in riot gear were in that hallway so they could stop the rioters with less than lethal methods. Or if they had stopped them well outside any federal buildings, for that matter. And if you want to argue that someone intended for that fuckup to happen, I have little to argue against that.

But I thought if anyone would be sympathetic towards a stand your ground approach, it would be Republicans.

I will not argue that Good was innocent. She had likely violated traffic rules with the intent to frustrate ICE's objectives. But from the way she steered her car, as well as her demographic group, it seems very likely that what she was thinking was not "finally a chance to kill one of these Gestapo fucks" but rather "oh my god, they are arresting me, Trump will send me to an El Salvador megaprison, I am about to get disappeared".

Which is delusional when in fact she would have gotten away with a fine and community service, but it is not an intrinsically aggressive delusion -- unlike thinking that you are meant to stop the steal, for example.

I think that the difference of Babbitt and Good was that it was apparent that the former was in the middle of a breaking and entering mission.

I think the maximal charitable case for Babbitt (which is probably about as charitable as plenty of takes for Good, but far more charitable than I'm typically inclined to be) is "unarmed American veteran shot by the State while attempting to petition elected representatives about a political issue", which is AFAIK factually correct (if missing a bunch of context) in ways that really do make the government's J6 response sound pretty tyrannical.

That said, I'm more inclined to "tragic, if predictable, on all accounts" framing in both situations.

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