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Notes -
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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