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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   33439 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026

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After a day of reading and watching videos of the woman killed in Minneapolis yesterday, here are some thoughts:

  1. This iceman was hit by a different car previously.

  2. The woman was cosplaying resistance fighter, not really realizing how dangerous what she was doing actually was.

  3. It is unambiguous given the videos that she did try to hit the officer with her car, but just barely, and seems to have backed off immediately when her tires slipped on the ice.

  4. it seems reasonable to me that the iceman was looking for retribution for the previous car strike, and she gave it to him.

  5. Shooting her would have had no effect on his safety, even if she had gotten traction. They were at “point blank” range.

All in all I think everybody here is a victim of the current evil in our society. A woman in a gay relationship with a recently deceased husband, in a new city, is being fed a constant stream of propaganda. I can imagine the state of mind if this person, and it isn’t pleasant.

She decided to try and help, which is good, but was essentially a pawn, or unknowing martyr for political power struggles I doubt she understood. A comparison could be a child soldier/suicide bomber.

The iceman: I expect better than this. Unlike the woman, acting on pure propaganda fueled adrenaline, he is supposed to train for this. He also interacts with these people daily. He should be thinking rationally here, and the rational move is to just get out of the way, not walk in front of the car of a neurotic woman screaming at you. He is legally, technically in the clear, but this was immoral. Hes basically exploiting a series of laws and norms to allow him to “innocently” kill a woman as a form of retribution. This is akin in my mind to entrapment of some form. The iceman sets up a series of traps, and just waits for an untrained, trigger, fight or flight woman to fall into one of them. He shouldn’t be setting traps, he should by building golden off-ramps to de-escalate.

Unfortunately the same which gripped both the woman and the shooter is gripping everybody forming an opinion online around this. nyTimes put out am [absurd] “forensic analysis” and determined she was trying to escape, which will never be questioned by the blue tribe ever. We will forever live in the reality where an iceman killed a woman in cold blood on Jan 7th 2026 in Minneapolis.

I don’t think this will metastasize into Floyd 2.0, mostly because the woman was white, but also because of the weather. We’ll see how this weekend plays out though.

A final question: will the shooter be charged with a state crime in Minnesota and will he be able to avoid that charge? Could we run into a Chauvin type situation here?

It is unambiguous that the officer was in the way of the car, it is not unambiguous that it was done with the intent to hit him. In a stressful panic filled moment where her attention was on the guys directly to the left of her, it is quite plausible she just didn't notice him get into that position to begin with.

This slowmo is probably the best thing for it yet. Where do you think her attention was focused? Probably on the masked man trying to reach into her car, and not the guy who was walking in front.

Likewise, he probably wasn't thinking of "revenge". He is just walking there on his phone, sees the car start to pull towards him and he panics too and pulls out his gun and shoots. Because if he wasn't panicking and was thinking through every movement, then he's an idiot for thinking shooting the driver would slow down/stop a car instead of using those precious seconds moving his body out of the way.

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?"

Had the vehicle not moved, the spot the officer stopped moving would not have been in front of the vehicle. If you go frame by frame you can see he stops in the area covered by the tree. If you compare that to the angle of the car before it starts moving, if it moves straight forward it would not hit that spot.

I think it's pretty clear the woman did not begin backing up the war with the intention of running someone over.

I also think it's clear the officer did not deliberately position himself in front of the car with the intention of stopping the vehicle.

Considering the officer's previous experience of being run over by a car in a previous incident, it's possible he entered into a fight response, and in response he took out his gun to shoot at a perceived threat. But in reality she wasn't trying to hit an officer, she was in a moment of panic trying to run away from the officer that grabbed the vehicle's door.

It's important to note this all happens in a matter of seconds. There's a lot of analysis about what we can see from behind the car being able to rewind and watch what happened frame by frame. In contrast there is very little analysis about what the situation looked like from the perspective of the officer that took the shot (partially because there is still no footage from the officer's POV).

Stephen Crowder has an attempt at an analysis, although I find it a bit lacking and the positions to be off, but I think the key point he attempts to tackle is general correct, in that the officer has no vision of the direction of the wheel of the vehicle.

Now there could be an argument made about what the officer should've done as soon as the car starts moving backwards. I think my instinctual response would actually to walk backwards, which would actually put me MORE in the path of the car, but it's also possible this may have caused my figure to be more clearly in front of the car and maybe the woman wouldn't have accelerated forward to begin with.

Regardless, I think any analysis assuming he was trying to walk in front of the car is incorrect. I think there can be discussion to be had about his reaction once the car starts moving, but again this happens in a matter of seconds and I'm giving the officer some leeway here considering his previous experience of being run over. (There is also some potential discussion to be had about how someone would react if they had previously been in an incident and how fit that makes them to continue doing their job).

I think it wasn't a great shoot (especially for general optics), but also the officer was in a position where it's reasonable for him to say he perceived mortal danger (which was most likely contributed to by his earlier vehicular incident) which justifies the shot. But if people are going to make a policy of borderline-legal obstructionism of ICE at every turn that's inherently going to increase the surface area for incidents like this to occur

someone else has already raised this but should the same charity be extended to James Fields in the Charlottesville attack (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlottesville_car_attack).

Well, not anymore, but you could have maintained a charitable stance right up to the end of his trial.

Looking at the case, it's unlikely. Fields plead guilty and admitted to intentionally driving into the crowd with hostile intent, striking dozens of people before fleeing the scene, which even if the hit is accidental, hit and runs are still illegal. He was also found guilty on all charges by a jury.

These don't seem to be directly comparable cases, he had his due process and the public found him in the wrong.

I remember analyzing that at the time. I know those streets in cville. GPS would never take you that way. He chose to drive down that street.

I think if she had hit and killed the officer instead of getting shot and killed shed be getting a murder charge like James Fields.

And if someone had shot James Fields on that street as he was accelerating down it towards a crowd they would have been in the right.

some of the roads were blocked off so GPS would instruct drivers to use a path which was impossible to use which meant people there trying to leave were just turning down roads trying to find ones which weren't blocked off so they could leave; the entire area was a complete mess

fields chose to turn down that road because of the armed group of counter protestors who pointed a gun at him

as he was accelerating down it towards a crowd they would have been in the right

when? when he was going 25mph down the road, when he slowed before the crowd at which point his vehicle was hit by flag or bat, and then he accelerated into the crowd?

it is just not believable that fields wanted to ram anyone let alone ram his way through a crowd until he was already surrounded, had already had a gun pointed at him by a different group of people, went down another street, was surrounded by another group of people, had his car attacked, and then hit the accelerator

sometimes from different people's perspectives, they can each be reasonably "in the right" if they used deadly violence against each other

I feel like this is missing the difference between "these people could rip me from my car and do whatever they want, it's an angry mob, bad stuff has happened before and I could be next" and "ripped from the car and arrested" in terms of threat provided by what is happening outside the vehicle.

Your perspective is missing "I placed myself with a deadly weapon (a car) in a situation where it could be used as a deadly weapon"

Without that caveat I'd say both Fields and this lady have much more defensible reactions with their vehicles.

But vehicles are shitty deadly weapons. They are endangered by people to the sides of the vehicle, but they are deadly against people in front of and behind the vehicle. So self defense is much harder to justify.

Kyle Rittenhouse brought a deadly weapon to a protest and then managed to kill three people only in self defense. Ironically if he had been in a vehicle his body count likely would have been higher and against people in front of the vehicle and not his direct aggressors to the sides of the vehicle.

in terms of threat provided by what is happening outside the vehicle.

In terms of objective threat, sure.

But that's the entire debate in a nutshell: if one suffers from a [perhaps reasonable] expectation that cops are about to black-bag you, and in attempting to flee from them get shot by one who [perhaps reasonably] believes you're going to drive right into him, is it reasonable to suffer death under those circumstances?

Of course, we already have an answer to that: 12 locals and the relevant executive have to agree it isn't reasonable, since either one can [from a subjective standpoint] pardon, and the executive spends political power to do that.

Which is probably what it's going to come down to.

Objectively speaking nothing happened to Fields, even after he killed people, while Good was shot three times. So the threat is definitely different but not in the way you intended, I think.

My assertion is that an agitated mob of protestors is more of a lethal threat outside of a vehicle than cops arresting you is.

You can absolutely alter the threat level by doing things like leaning out of your car and shouting racial slurs, or threatening/assaulting the police with a deadly weapon (potentially by accident in this case, but still). The baseline is important however.

Also, who the administration considers cops to be varies.

In a protestor-friendly administration, the fiery-but-peaceful protestors (who are enforcing the law the administration wished it could have) have qualified immunity while the cops don't; in one that is not so friendly, they do not.

She put herself in the middle of an armed situation and then resisted lawful orders. Doesn't really matter if at the exact moment her foot was on the gas she meant to hit him or not. Play stupid games win stupid etc.

She put herself in the middle of an armed situation and then resisted lawful orders.

According to witness reports, she was also being told to leave. It's hard not to resist lawful orders if they're contradicting themselves.

It's also of course hard to know what is a lawful order if you don't even know who is giving them. Masked men popping out of an unmarked vehicle would not indicate police to me, nor many others.

Crazy how she ended up in the middle of a ICE enforcement activity at random after following them around all day

Did you watch the first video link? Specifically, the first few seconds have:

  1. A pickup truck with blue and red lights flashing in it.
  2. Someone saying "get the fuck out of our neighborhood".
  3. Two individuals coming out of the truck, one of whom says "get out of the car" twice, then "get out of the fucking car".

So unless the video is a fake, she was not being told to leave, and I think it is reasonable to assume (based on #1 and #2) that these individuals were at minimum police of some form, and probably known to be ICE.

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