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Notes -
After a day of reading and watching videos of the woman killed in Minneapolis yesterday, here are some thoughts:
This iceman was hit by a different car previously.
The woman was cosplaying resistance fighter, not really realizing how dangerous what she was doing actually was.
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.
it seems reasonable to me that the iceman was looking for retribution for the previous car strike, and she gave it to him.
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?
Simplistically I voted for this. We won the election. I got ICE to enforce immigration law. As you said he’s been run over before. I don’t want my tax dollars going to him trying to be nice to people obstructing him from doing his job. I voted for ICE enforcing immigration law which includes using deadly force with people obstructed him from doing his job. One dead obstructor should eliminate thousands of others from obstructing. FAFO.
This wasn’t cosplay. I even read an article where an obstructor remarked what are they using real bullets instead of rubber bullets. Believe it or not but ICE are real policemen doing a real job of deporting millions of people unlawfully in America.
Well, invoking FAFO and what-not is always fun, but is there any sort of universal principle at play here or is it all who/whom? Would you be willing to bite the FAFO pill on the Jan 6th rioter (Ashley Babbitt or what her name was) that got shot while breaking into the Capitol? People there figure they won the election after voting to crack down on Trump-associated chaos, too.
I'll take that trade-off; even if you disagree with the authority of the government, disobeying an armed individual and taking actions that make you look like a threat can result in death, so both people FAFO.
I'd appreciate it if the other half of the deal also came through (as in, given the January 6th individuals were charged with assault and interference with officers, I'd appreciate it if the people obstructing ICE were charged with the same). Or alternatively, that both groups are pardoned.
Edit, to clarify a bit:
I'm of the opinion that although you have the right to protest, your right ends where others begin - so gluing yourself to the highway, impeding officers by blocking their cars in, blowing up cop cars, and assaulting individuals all are things that you can and should be arrested for. This is a good thing - if people agree with your position, there will be outcry against your arrest. Part of the reason that the civil rights movement worked was that the police were put in a position where they had to arrest people for things that are hard to consider a crime - things like being black in a whites-only diner, or sitting in the wrong spot on the bus. But an important point here is for the protest to work, the government needs to arrest you for breaking the law, and most people can't agree that the actions you took deserved you being arrested.
The "Just Stop Oil" protestors who keep attempting to deface works of art should expect that they'll be serving jailtime for their actions - because the act of protest is the act of committing crimes in an attempt to prove the laws unjust. Acting surprised when you are protesting in an annoying and illegal way for a cause that the majority does not support gets you arrested is just not examining how protests actually change things.
I am very frustrated by the number of protestors who seem to not have any understanding of how this works; if the government simply reacts to your protest by doing what you wanted, then it wasn't your protest that did it - it's what they wanted to do anyways.
And that is the problem with echo chambers, no? For all they can tell, it is the overwhelming majority that supports their actions, at least within one or two degrees of separation of their social circles.
Yes, sorry, that should've been written more as independent clauses.
A better way to phrase it would be something like: When you are protesting, especially when you are breaking laws, you should expect to be arrested for it; if you are annoying or otherwise not supported by the majority, this goes doubly.
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