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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?

I have my gripes with urbanists, but the amount of people online who diminish the deadly threat of a car driven by an agitated person is starting to make me sympathize with them.

Not to mention that there has been an ongoing arms race for a long time among suburbanite normies buying bigger and bigger, heavier and heavier vehicles, as DirtyWaterHotDog alluded to it below, because they all want more comfort and more protection from accidents.

My main complaint with Urbanists™ analysis is they fail to acknowledged that (until 2025) CAFE standards produced an enormously perverse pressure that contributed to the bigger and bigger vehicle trend. Normally people would be incentivized to buy smaller cars because they would be cheaper. The footprint model instead meant that small already efficient cars required expensive add-ons like hybridization or turbocharging to reach CAFE standards while giant trucks and SUVs could continue rolling along with much cheaper less fuel efficient systems.

There's also a pretty big gap on the enforcement. We have already crossed the diminishing returns point into negative territory with respect to additional vehicle safety you can buy. Despite progressively increasing vehicle safety standards and size, fatal crash rates are up from their lows. People clearly are at the point where their perceived safely produces absolute shit tier driver ability and attention. A huge portion of vehicular crashes are single vehicle incidents.

It's clear people in general don't realize how much of a hazard obstructing traffic with a two ton Honda Pilot is. Two things I think could help send the message that you need to pay attention and not block regular traffic.

  1. Increased enforcement against left lane campers. If you don't have the awareness to see a cop coming up from behind you and move over, you probably shouldn't be driving.
  2. Hear me out. Green light cameras. When the light turns green it detects when a car is still on the sensor after say two seconds. The light then takes a picture of the driver. If you're on your phone, automatic ticket. If whatever you're doing on your phone is more important that getting to where you're driving to, then pull off the road. I've more than once been stuck behind someone on a set of synchronized lights where me missed every green because it took them 20 seconds to move after the light change. You would think that after the line of cars behind them started honking at the first or second light that they would try to pay attention at the next red, but no. I'm sure it's wasn't just vindictiveness from being honked at too, you could see them go straight to their phone through the rear windshield.

Being distracted and obstructing traffic should not be normal parts or every day driving.

Semi related, but the US probably does need more tiers of vehicle licensing. Right now it takes extra testing and training to drive a motorcycle, where you're mostly a hazard to yourself, but until you hit 10,000 pounds GVW you're good to go with the license you got at 16. The 15 hours you spent with your driving instructor at 15 behind a 3,000 pound Chevy Cruze apparently did not prepare people to avoid rolling their Ford Explorers. Instead of being like, if you want to drive a huge SUV you have to demonstrate you are not going to be a hazard to yourself and others, we have TPMS requirements. A very small factor in this most recent incident, but the car clearly spun out the drive wheels. In that case you are clearly not in control of the car, which is at least reckless on a public road, especially when surrounded by people. TPMS discourages people running dedicated winter tiers at slightly lower pressures, even though climates like Minnesota clearly warrant them. The difference in traction on snow and ice between dedicated winter and (even good quality) all seasons is vast.

join the dark side

Imagine this discussion if the car was a tiny Renault Clio. I was hit by an accelerating car as a kid, and I got off with a few scratches because it was a tuk tuk and I was wearing a protective school bag. NGL, that bag was a formidable cushion.