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I'm starting a new top-level regarding trigger happy Iceman meets wine mom in Minneapolis because, rather than debating the videos, I'd like to focus more on a compare and contrast to get a true culture war angle. People have made an analogy to the woman who died on Jan 6th but I don't think it lands strongly enough. Permit me to cut closer to the bone, friends.
The only fatality on Jan 6th was an unarmed woman being shot by a federal agent[1] because she was opposing what she considered an illegitimate government action. Liberals tearlessly argued this is what happens when you Fuck Around while conservatives argued she was righteously Resisting (TM).
Today the players are the same but the jerseys are flipped. Liberals cry with so, so many tears of empathy for the dead woman in the car while conservatives argue they were obstructing a legitimate state function and put the officer in danger and this is what happens when you Fuck Around.
In broad strokes it's clear neither side cares about democracy or rule of law per se. Conservative faith in rule of law evaporates when it says no to Trump and liberal empathy for the scrappy civil disobedients dries up when it's a Chud. Both sides are happy with mob violence when it's their side doing it and cry tyranny whenever they Find Out.
I think I broadly agree.
"Ashli Babbit and Renee Good both FAFO" is a coherent and consistent view. "Ashli Babbit and Renee Good both died unnecessarily because of law enforcement/state ineptitude" is also a coherent and consistent view. (The latter does not preclude acknowledging that both women, at the very least, made poor choices and could have and should have avoided the situation, which at this point I definitely think is hard to dispute.)
If you think one was an innocent martyr and the other got what she deserved, I would really like to hear the arguments for that.
The primary argument I know is "Babbit (and the rest of the protestors) were actively engaged in violence (see also: the one officer who was struck in the head with a heavy object), and therefore Babbit was shot in self-defence (usually accompanied by a photo of protestors inside the Capitol with fists raised looking angry), whereas Good was at no point attempting to harm the officer, and even though he was probably out of the way of the car (especially when he fired the shots), he at the very least put himself in harm's way."
Is it accurate to the situation on the ground, in either case? I haven't looked at any videos of either, and I'm sure the exact opposite argument is made in circles I don't really frequent. I'm merely summarizing/aggregating the argument I see most often.
No. Babbit was trying to pry apart a shut door that someone else had already partially broken and having little success because she was a relatively small woman. There were numerous other armed officers around who didn't seem to consider her a particular threat. She might have been able to get through and then post a threat to someone, but it probably wasn't happening in the next 30 seconds. The officer who shot her had a history of bad decisions. It's much closer to a "cop just felt like he could get away with murdering a white bitch" situation than the comparable, valence-flipped situation where left-wing psychics intuit that the officer had murderous intent.
OTOH, she was part of a group that had stormed the building and had a lot of threatening rhetoric. If shooting her was good for that reason, then all the J6 protestors should have been killed, along with most left-wing protestors over the last 10 years.
Conversely, Good gunned the engine on her car while pointed at an ICE agent who was just a couple feet away. She did turn away from him, but if he had been a bit slower to get aside, or if she had turned the wheel just a few degrees less to the side then she could have very easily run him over and killed him.
One of those woman very much appeared to be a deadly threat to another person within the next second, and the other could plausible have posed a threat in a minute or two, presuming she managed to break down a door with her bare hands, to whatever extent you think an unarmed woman is a threat. For that last point, generally speaking, leftwingers usually argue that the threat of an unarmed woman to a male cop is "no threat at all, he should just manually restrain her, and also opening a door shouldn't be a death sentence!"
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I was going to type up a full comment, but it's midnight here and I don't have time. What I will say is that it's really nice in this discussion to see someone who mostly spends time in liberal spaces coming here with an open mind and looking to hear out perspectives from other circles.
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