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Notes -
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
twothree 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.
(Branching off the main debates about good shoot / bad shoot).
Viral Verbal Videography
I watched this entire video: https://x.com/JoshEakle/status/2008970977699639681.
The most relevant bits to the shooting are in the first thirty seconds. Then it is almost four additional minutes of nothing in terms of actual events, but a lot in terms of both literal and figurative background noise in the culture war context.
This is four minutes of high volume emotionalization and righteous indignation. The principal videographer here literally goes through cycles of yelling "What the fuck / what the actual fuck?", "Shame! Shame!" (I mean this literally), and "Do you have a conscience?"
Another common motif is someone, definitely male, elsewhere in the background doing a primal scream of "MURDERERS!" every so often. It's impressive in its sensationality.
I don't know just what to make of this. My immediate reaction to this was one of insufferability. When a person's vocalized response to these kind of events is "what the fuck? what the actual fuck?", it betrays a kind of chronic online-ness that I used to think was somewhat apocryphal. The origin of "what the actual fuck" is a bit obscure but we know that it definitely originated in a highly online context and was almost certainly intended to be sarcastically hilarious in its usage. I can remember videos of 9/11 where people are repeating, without full awareness, "oh my god" again and again. That kind of honest emotional reaction actually still hits me hard because, well, it's coming from somewhere genuine, isn't performative, and uses a vocabulary (religious) that really is mostly reserved - when earnest - for "big" moments. Turning "what the actual fuck" into a kind of emotional war cry cheapened the whole thing from the get go.
My nucleus of a theory is that this kind of outrage is some proportion of performativity and some proportion of a kind of programmed earnestness. The principal videographer knows that in this context she is not only permitted but expected to dial the histrionics up to 11. Maybe even 22 because she is recording everything with the foreknowledge that she'll post this to social media later. It seems to be she had a kind of emotional impact and righteous indignation checklist - shock and horror ("what the (actual) fuck"), public shaming ("shame! shame!" combined with off-screen guys "murderers!" yell), and finally moral grandstanding ("do you have a conscience?").
In the social media world, it isn't so much about you being present at an event so much as recording that you were present at an event and pre-rendering what you think should be your future reactions to that event in real time. The benign version of this is simply taking a video selfie and some concert or major sporting event with something like a caption reading "is this actually happening?" Your "disbelief" is actually a kind of self-effacing professional of modesty paired with a "highest of highs" in terms of transcendental enjoyment. But, on the dark side, you have videos like the one linked at the top of this post; Immediately turning the death of a human into an opportunity to demonstrate Right Think (at the loudest possible volume).
Part of me did think, at one point, that this is all in my own Turbo Autist head. I'm just over indexing on linguistic things because of a nerdy interest in that field. But the spell was broken just seconds before the video ends when the principal videographer says, to someone off camera;
"You okay, mami?" In a drastically different tone of voice. The spell was broken. She knew she had done her duty to The Cause and captured it on video, now, it was back to hanging out with her best girlies.
She just forgot to stop recording.
I was thinking the same thing, though not as articulately. I wondered, "What would 18th century Americans say if they were present at a similar event?" "Oh my God" is a good one. But the F-bomb becoming as common as "um" has not been a good turn of events. It feels very unserious.
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