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What are my other options?
Killing a few obstructors feels like it will solve the obstruction problem to me. Honestly there is a meme going around now where a “solves the problem button exists” and then everyone says these reasons I don’t care about will be a problem for not pressing it. I think I can just press this button.
Yes, well, ask Robespierre how that went. He might find it difficult to answer without his head, but you could ask. Ruling through fear - through actual fear, as opposed to reliable justice where punishment is meted out to the guilty in a predictable and orderly way - has not historically produced stable, long-term outcomes. If you make your government out to be made up of loose cannons who just might go nuts and kill you for sneezing at them, so watch it… you will only succeed in incentivizing the population to stay out of your way in the short term while plotting their very best to remove you ASAP.
If you want to solve the obstruction problem, you can actually arrest and prosecute people for obstruction, en masse, in an orderly, lawful, consistent way. A government which gives in to the temptation to murder random dissidents pour encourager les autres loses its mandate in a way that one which simply prosecutes crimes that are actually on the books in a scrupulous way does not.
(Of course, all of this is without getting into the thing where killing random people to create a state of terror, you know, falls petty squarely within what 99% of human beings would consider evil. I don't feel like getting into that would be a useful direction for this conversation, but it bears repeating.)
America doesn’t have the technology to run a process. Even if it was a 80-20 issue. The court dockets would be clogged for years. Soros would donate billions funding lawsuits and defenses. But outside of this case America just gets clogged in process. It’s why we are governed by executive orders now instead of congress. It’s why California funded high speed rail 20 years ago and now no high speed rail. We both know doing things this way is a strategy that won’t win.
So yes the only way to deal with obstructors is to just shoot them when you have plausible deniability.
Even accepting that premise, it doesn't really matter what percentage of arrests would lead to actual convictions for obstruction. The process is the punishment. Even making suspects spend a night or two in jail before letting them off with a warning would have significant deterrent value for dilettante protestors, never mind the prospect of a court-case-shaped millstone around their neck for the next two years. If they want to obstruct lawful operations through childish inconveniences like blocking roads with their cars or shouting "SHAME!" very loud, then inconveniencing them back, only harder, seems like the proper response.
Mrs Good may not have been some innocent bystander who wound up at the protest by mistake 'on the way' to picking her children up from school - but it is AIUI seemingly absolutely true that she casually thought she could maintain a schedule that went "3 p.m. - obstruct ICE raid, 3.15 p.m. - pick the kids up from school". This is the kind of attitude that you are up against. The prospect of handcuffs and a night in the slammer would be enough to cool down many tempers.
Even if you want to be meaner - even if you absolutely insist that extrajudicial violence is needed to get the point across - things like deploying tear gas into a rioting crowd still seem like a good bet that's far more ethically justifiable, and far less likely to result in a loss of perceived legitimacy for the regime, than jumping straight to murder.
A night or two in jail isn’t a punishment for them. They probably get a promotion at work for this behavior.
"If we do it your way, Kingslayer, you'd win. We're not doing it your way“
The Right unlocked a new technology here. You can just shoot lesbian woke agitators and nobody cares whose not in the 30% whose in their tribe.
First of all, I'd say you're definitely counting your eggs before they hatch here. It is plausible that Good's death will have the chilling effect you hope for, and anti-ICE obstructionists will vanish overnight, but we're rather far off from that being a certainty, and it could certainly go a lot of different ways.
Nor would I call murder a "new technology". People have been bashing their brothers' skulls in with jawbones since before humans developed language, often to secure the chieftain's authority. Some of us had rather hoped that we were in the process of outgrowing that sort of thing.
And I would never be so insulting to my political opponents as to say that "nobody cares" who wasn't a political ally of Good's. I do in fact believe that an overwhelming majority of human beings are generally against killing people, and especially against arbitrarily killing people to create a state of terror. This is, I repeat, an evil thing to do. Wicked. Wrong. Sinful. There may be millions of people who will buy the idea that Good actually had it coming, or that Ross's actions were otherwise justified in context; but, thankfully, I think there are very few people in America who would endorse your view that making an example of her would have been fine and dandy regardless of how much of a threat she actually posed to Ross.
I don’t agree it’s evil.
I think the average person at this point just wants the train to run on time. Which some of that includes deporting as many Somalis as possible.
I didn't ask what the average person wanted, I asked what they would consider evil. It is perfectly routine to want things which could (only?) be achieved by means which you know would be immoral. Whether or the average person wants the train to run on time, I don't think that they would consider murdering random women in order to terrify people to be an acceptable price for that.
What are some things you would consider "evil", if not this? Is there any foul deed which you think would be too far, if it could magically remove all Somalis from Minnesota and restore train schedules to their platonic ideal?
Evil only applies to people thinking in religious terms. It doesn’t exists in nature.
I just think of what’s good for civilization.
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