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What is the truth you are so confident about? That she wasn't there accidentally? That she was trying to kill the ICE officer? That there was no misconduct or poor judgment? You're sure? Really, really sure? 100% sure?
You do seem to recognize the uncertaintiess, whether or not our conclusions are the same. (And you don't even know what why my conclusions are. Hell, right now I'm not sure what my conclusions are.)
My point is that I believe the majority of people commenting, and currently making earnest statements about how certain they are about the truth, would argue the exact opposite position, given the same evidence, if the tribal polarities were reversed.
In other words, everyone who says they are looking at the available video evidence to try to come to an informed conclusion--
I don't believe them*.
(FWIW, I mostly didn't believe anyone was even attempting to be honest during the Floyd and Rittenhouse cases either. I believe them even less now.)
(* "Them" meaning the vast majority. Not literally every single person with an opinion. Go ahead and assume you are an exception.)
You'd have to believe everyone that knows her, including her wife, is lying to believe there's a chance she was there accidentally. Weird one to include in your list of uncertainties; that she was there deliberately to interfere is like the second-most confident thing anyone can state about this situation.
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I hope this isn't getting too recursive, but what do/did you think about the Rittenhouse case?
I'm reluctant to answer both because clearly you want to use it as a litmus test, and because I don't want to start a Rittenhouse subthread, but as I said at the time, I think he was a twerpy hero-wannabe who didn't need to be there, but in the situation he found himself in, he acted in self-defense.
I was legitimately just curious.
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meta comment: as a long-time lurker just commenting now, I'm generally a big fan of how you mod (and comment) -- given that I'm criticising/arguing with you, I should take a moment to say thanks for maintaining this space. It's valuable and good.
Meanwhile, in the fray:
I tried pretty hard to outline exactly what this was. There are bullet points for the features I was uncertain about, largely around their states of mind, and a single bullet point that was the single truth I'm confident of -- specifically, that she accelerated an SUV directly at another human being, and this is an act that can easily kill people.
I think I went overboard on making this clear -- idk how I could've laid it out in a way that would short-circuit this question.
No; no; no; no; no; no.
I specifically outlined "these are the things I'm uncertain of", "these are the things I'm certain of". What part of that makes you think "this is a person who thinks maximally ICEpilled chud takes, and needs to be deprogrammed"? I don't need to be introduced to the concept of less-than-100%-certainty, after a post in which (I'm pretty sure) I made a pretty clear attempt to delineate exactly which things I was confident in.
Though it's not directly relevant, here are my answers to your questions. I believe:
I don't think that was a fair line of implications to throw at me. I've tried to be pretty clear in what parts I'm confident in, and what parts are more ambiguous.
True! And that's fine. My conclusions don't depend on yours, or vice versa. I won't blame you for disagreeing/agreeing with me. Again, I'm just talking about what I saw in the actual physical pixels of the video, which show a person driving a 1.5-ton metal machine towards a fragile human body -- that's the point of my comment. Trying to do theory of mind on each other is overcomplicating things.
Yeah, I broadly agree that this is the state of society in general. I think the Motte, while susceptible to the same dynamic, is much much better (but still flawed! And we're all still human!)
Like, for me personally: I don't live in the US. ICE and US immigration are not directly applicable to me. I don't particularly like Trump, or Biden, or the Republicans, or the Democrats, etc etc. While I'm deeply frustrated with wokeness, I am actually capable of noticing situations where the stopped clock is right twice a day. (Tho even that phrasing is uncharitable, as a stopped clock is wrong by coincidence; occasionally, woke-type arguments are actually correct on their own merits).
You're not entirely wrong, it's just a bit too blackpilled for me to go "everyone is just choosing along tribal lines". Free to disagree, obviously; I just don't think this is the situation where that's the takeaway.
While recognising that you do a ton of work (and produce a ton of content) in the Motte, while I'm basically a newcomer outside of lurking -- dude, come on. I don't think anything I said calls for this kind of (mild) hostility.
I do not think I am some special butterfly. As I'm pretty sure my previous comment implies, and as the existence of the Motte might imply, I believe that there are plenty of people capable of determining their beliefs based on evidence and truth. (If not, what the heck is everyone doing here?)
As an easy example, check out quantumfreakonomic's comment (idk how to tag a user, sorry) concerning Ashley Babbit below, who seems to be the locus of discussion around a "flipped parity" shooting:
Based on a quick scan of quantum's other comments on this topic, that seems like an example of one person not dividing along tribal lines?
Well, ok, but then you're just going to be wrong about some people. You need a finer brush. Yes, many people aren't trying to come to an informed conclusion (probably most). But everyone? No, that's just wrong. And I think there's a real problem with trying to implicitly label objections to that as a claim to higher status ("go ahead and assume you are an exception"). People genuinely do differ, some people try harder than others, we are all fallible. If no one here is trying to find the truth -- which I strongly disagree with -- then idk the point of the Motte, exactly.
I don't. I didn't say that about you (nor have I "called out" anyone specifically). I specifically noted that you recognized the uncertainties (and I avoided getting into where I disagreed with you on specifics).
@ in front of their username.
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... is the rule here that we're allowed to call large swatches of people out as inconsistent without evidence, but just not search through someone's post history to show it for specific individuals who do have that evidence?
Are you disputing that broad swathes of people on both the right and the left are inconsistent, complaining that you think it's against the rules (or should be) to say broad swathes of people on both the right and the left are inconsistent, arguing that only one side is inconsistent and demanding evidence that the other side is also inconsistent, or just asking permission to try to gotcha someone?
I'll take the last option, if it's on the table. But it's not my point. Similarly, I can and have written long top-level digressions on motivated reasoning reason and its failure modes, both on the right and the left; I can highlight other top-level posters today who're pretty clearly not caring about whether what they say is true or not. But whether it's present in general isn't my point, either, and it wasn't the claim you dived in with.
There are claims about a specific thing.
They aren't testable claims. There's no number of doubts in the first days of the Rittenhouse case, or situations like Arbery or Steven Ray Baca (or Babbit!) cases where the same posters have been either ambivalent or opposed to their supposed co-partisans, or others where people were willing to consider the alternative explanations for their supposed enemies. I can show myself literally writing "I'm reserving judgment on this whole thing til we get the bodycam". Doesn't matter, you threw an asterisk on at the last minute, done.
The 'what if the shoe were on the other foot' arguments write themselves. Would you consider it more acceptable were I to dive into a conversation saying, well, I don't think you're being blatantly dishonest, but darwin was three years ago? Because I don't particularly want to do that, but if it's permitted I at least need to consider what responses are available to it.
It wouldn't bug me as much you actually confronted the main truth that the other writer literally spelled out as their major update from the story ("From rest, the driver backed up her 1.5-ton SUV and accelerated towards the ICE agent"). ((or if your examples of things we Can't Be Sure of did not include multiple in strong contradiction with the evidence: so far the best example of motivated reasoning you've given is you)).
But as is, it seems like an epitome of "If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts; if you have the law on your side, pound the law; if you have neither the facts nor the law, pound the table". Regardless of whether it's in the rules or not, what do you think you're even arguing here?
What do you think I'm arguing here?
That's an honest question, because you seem to be accusing me of "pounding the table" for a particular argument, when I have not taken a side on Reed at all, other than gesturing at what I consider to be a number of possibilities, which I explicitly stated were not equally probable.
I infer from your post that you have slotted me into the "anti-ICE, pro-Reed" side, and are seeing everything I post through that lens. Which is what most people do, because if you don't immediately and vigorously sneer and cheer for the right side you're clearly carrying water for the other. This is inane and mindkilling, but here is where even the Motte is now.
If you really wanted to know what I think specifically about any given proposition, you could ask. But people don't do that, they just assume.
My argument is that most of the people on both sides are guilty of motivated reasoning and would change positions if the tribes were reversed, if Reed had been MAGA and Ashli Babbit had been woke. You shouldn't be confused about this, because that's what I said in plain English. But instead you seem to be trying to dig for my unstated tribal priors. You think you know what they are, and you don't.
I think you're arguing that :
And, by conjunction, that people's current assessments are at minimum overconfident or not based on available facts on this particular case. If you can't be bothered to defend it or provide evidence about other people's assessments -- or even highlight the specific ones you think are overconfident and how! -- I don't particularly care what those underlying positions are, and I'm certainly not going to speak on them. There's a fun space for Bulverism, and I'm trying to resist it, and I'm definitely not going to consider it useful to spell out.
And I know you know I didn't speak on your ground-level positions, or make claims about your underlying biases or perceptions related to this particular shooting, because you would have quoted me if I did.
The claim of motivated reasoning could be defended. I don't think it's a particularly strong one in this case, but I haven't exactly had time to evaluate a ton of the evidence for or against. You know what you haven't done? Present any evidence that the poster you responded to here made a claim incompatible with the available evidence. Instead we get hypotheticals that don't exist.
I could debate those! LaVoy Finicum has more overlap with Good than Babbit does, in that they weren't anywhere near a federal politician, they were doing a pretty overtly illegal protest of the type that no one really expects to get arrested nevermind shot over, they had a deadly weapon but it was contestable whether they were a 'real' threat to life before the first bullet rather than just doing something incredibly stupid that could hurt someone, yada yada.
It'd be a useless debate -- Red Tribers could quite aptly point to the many ways the Feds pushed before and misbehaved after the shooting, Blue Tribers can (and regularly do) just say Guns Are Different -- but before we even get there, we have to confront the bit where Finicum wasn't a Red Tribe cause celebre. Not even here. Literally, in the sense that the only person to ever use his name on this site other than me was to say "No one cares." (tbf, two indirect references, [ed: one of which I can't find now]). He had eight mentions in the entire history of TheMotte over at Reddit, four of them were me being ambivalent, and the here's the other four. Nobody's certain from day one that Finicum must be innocent, and that his shooter must be hanged.
But it doesn't matter that it's useless, if that's what it takes to avoid someone pretending "This is inane and mindkilling, but here is where even the Motte is now", while being more insistent to actual bring an actual specific fault of analysis than the broad majority of people you're criticizing. Does it matter for that analysis?
I do not think the poster I responded to here made a claim incompatible with the available evidence.
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