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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   33504 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026

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On the purely linguistic side of the Minneapolis shooting (which looks as a totally intentional assassination by ICE to me) and the media reports on it. Does anyone, like me, feel puzzled from the naturalness and ease that media use when they talk about (the unjustly and brutally killed) Renee Good's "wife"? It's the same strange feeling I get when I read the online discussions on the PLURIBUS tv series and the first episode in which the female protagonist's "wife" is killed. What I find strange is the absolute nonchalance that is used in media to describe the partner of a woman as her "wife". The grumpy conservative in me would like to say: "No, no, no! She is a partner. She is a significant other. She is a lover. She is everything but she isn't a "wife". The word "wife" has a very different meaning!". Of course this is a tiny minority position: I understand that the zeitgeist, today, has completely normalized the use of the word "wife" to describe a woman who is sentimentally joined with another woman. But still I find a sense of uneasiness when I hear such uses of the "wife" word...

  • -39

What if she's the partner that stays home and tends to the house though?

I used the the word in some of my comments and later had the thought that I should have used "wife" (with quotes) instead. "Partner" alone without qualification is too vague. "Girlfriend" implies a level of casualness that may or may not be present.

I am grateful, in Australia, that we have normalised the word 'partner', and media tends to exclusively use that. It's gender-neutral and it covers both married and non-married couples.

It's also an out for people like me, who think that 'wife' implies 'husband', and 'husband' implies 'wife', and therefore is unwilling to use either word in the context of a same-sex partnership.

I feel like the existing "de facto partner" help distinguish between 'wife'/'husband' and 'partner', government mostly just use partner as a result of trying not to discriminate de facto relationship compare to standard marriage

There is still something lost in translation to partner. It may capture modern secular view of marriage as something akin to business partnership in Family LLC, where both owners have 50% share and which can be ended any time at court, mostly in favor of female shareholder. Which is far from actual sacramental marriage that involves holy vows etc. But I agree. I can be "partner registered by government" in view of outside society and a husband in sacramental marriage with my wife in front of my community.

The normalization of "partner" also extends to heterosexual couples now, at least among my peers, which I find rather irritating.

Didn't it start off with heterosexual couples, though? People who were co-habiting but not married, especially if they had kids together, getting irritated about being treated as 'lesser' since they weren't married and "boyfriend/girlfriend are terms you use when you're kids, not when you're grown adults living together" and so on? Something the way Ms was adopted - if you use "partner" then that says nothing about your marital status and so you aren't being treated as in a less serious, committed relationship for lack of 'the piece of paper'.

Then using it for gay couples was more natural since they couldn't legally marry at the time, and it was a way of treating them in line with straight couples.

People have moved to using it all the time now, which was one point of contention in the "this is queer erasure" complaint post I saw elsewhere: she's her wife, not just her partner!

Think that’s a status thing. Wife/husband mean there is someone in this world who was willing to permanently vouch for you which is offensive or lowers the status of people who no one would do that for.

I also think an early sign of the coming fertility crash was eliminating Mrs. and everyone goes with Ms. That made being married with kids as having no special status in society. Having kids is work. Taking away status of having kids took away one of the big benefits of doing that. Women probably even care more about status than men and something as simple as everyone has to call you Mrs. and being above the Ms. in the social hierarchy is big.

Also the word "woman" comes from the Old English word, wífmon. Literally, "wife man," or transliterated as, "wifely person." The word wíf denoted female, reflecting the female social role.

Does (or did) Mrs have more status? If yes it should have survived and Miss would have been eliminated? The beauty contests are “Miss Universe/World” and I can see older women wanting longer the young/sexy status of their youth and being called Ms.

The rationale was that men get called "Mr." and that indicates nothing about their marital status, whereas women were discriminated against by means of "Are you Miss or Mrs?" So the idea was a general term equivalent to "Mr." for women.

I wasn't too keen on it, but over time I've come around because it is handy, in a work context, where you don't know if Mary Murphy is Mrs. Murphy or Miss Murphy when you're writing an official letter, so a neutral term avoids giving offence. (I tend to get official letters addressed to Mrs. My Surname, seemingly on the basis that a woman my age is surely married, but I've given up trying to get it corrected since I don't want to sound like a Dick Emery sketch).

Ironically, if you like, in previous centuries women were referred to as "Mrs." even if not married, since it was abbreviation of "Mistress" a term of respect/status for older women/women in charge of households/important or high-status women.

where you don't know if Mary Murphy is Mrs. Murphy or Miss Murphy when you're writing an official letter, so a neutral term avoids giving offence

I can see how this is annoying.

The annoyance part is my point. It was higher status to be a wife and mother than girl boss and being called Miss was low status above a certain age. This added a lot of pressure to have children so you could take the title of Mrs. which boost the fertility rate. Being called Miss above a certain age was basically being an incel.

How do you propose to describe a woman who has performed particular ceremonies to join herself to another woman, and obtained a certain legal status as a result, which entails certain rights and obligations? I'm not totally unsympathetic to the view you espouse (pun not intended), but substituting "partner" or "lover" wouldn't fit the bill. By Good's "wife" we do not simply mean a woman she loved very much and had sex with, we mean a woman who is legally entitled to her inheritance etc. The terms are not interchangeable.

The gay marriage debate was always built around forcing society to give gay unions as much respect and reverence as regular marriage. It's stolen valour. If they want those unions to be respected then they should prove it through example that they are serious partnerships meant to last for life. They know about the instability and promiscuity rife in gay relationships and the big question marks hanging over child rearing by gay parents, but want you to ignore all that because there are laws telling you to do so. You're meant to pretend its the same as an institution with more than 4000 years of history behind it.

Edit: Should make it clear I'm all for equal legal rights in gay unions. I'm just against calling it marriage.

I think this is a mistake. Marriage is about conferring status to a couple who will copulate. It should only happen in the context of a serious relationship but the primary thing is child rearing.

Giving the same status to people who a priori cannot procreate ignores the telos of marriage and lowers the status of procreation.

Well, that's the point that social conservatives want to resist, no?

(I am deliberately making no further comment on the OP and definitely no comment on ICE or immigration. I am mainly just refreshed to have a good old-fashioned debate about marriage and sexuality, as if it were the early 2010s again.)

Obviously the point of using wife/wife or husband/husband language by default, and of getting everybody to use the word 'marriage' to include registered same-sex couples by default, is to cement the idea that these are the same as traditional marriage. The endgame of the movement for same-sex marriage was the idea that same-sex couples are, as much as is possible, literally the same as opposite-sex couples, and therefore should be treated the same way - in law, yes, but also in language and in social recognition. I can't begrudge a progressive for holding that position, but at the same time, I don't think you can begrudge a social conservative taking the opposite position.

A social conservative, given their position on marriage, has an entirely understandable desire to clearly disambiguate same-sex relationships (even vowed, legally-recognised same-sex relationships) from marriage. The government can say "we call these same-sex partnerships marriage", but the social conservative position is that the government is simply wrong. The government can pass a law calling a deer a horse, but that doesn't make it so; marriage is no different. The conservative would then feel a moral obligation to stick to using language that they understand to be truthful. It's no different to somebody here stubbornly referring to Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner as 'he', no matter what Jenner's official papers say.

OP is talking about a lesbian relationship. Lesbian relationships tend to be monogamous and serious. They report lower infidelity rates than straight marriages and have a predisposition towards commitment.

By your standard, why shouldn't lesbian relationships qualify for marriage status ?

Because marriage is between a man and a woman straight up. Happy for them to have equal legal protection.

Don't they also have staggeringly high rates of domestic abuse? Though it wouldn't shock me if that were just an artifact of women being more likely to report domestic abuse and thereby the two-women relationship being more likely to report it.

I thought that this was an artifact of how the survey supposedly finding this was conducted, ie. they asked about domestic general in general, during a woman's lifetime, and then this was represented as abuse within current relationship, ignoring cases where women turn towards exclusively dating women in part because they've been with so many abusive men in the past.

Even wiki seems to suggest that experience of intimate partner violence goes gay men (26%) < straight men (29%) < straight women (35%) < bisexual men (37%) < lesbians (43%) < bisexual women (61%).

That's an odd, relatively unintuitive result, to me. Men are usually established to be more physically violent than women, which would suggest that relationships with men in them ought to be the most violent. It sounds like, though, male-male relationships are the least violent, and female-female the most. The gap between straight women and straight men is perhaps attributable to men being more violent, but then what's going on with lesbians?

Part of it may be that women are just more likely to report violence, yes. Another may be different patterns in forming relationships - as the commenter one post up notes, lesbians are the demographic most likely to commit to a relationship early, whereas gay men are the slowest. Perhaps lesbians are therefore more likely to get into a foolish or inadvisable relationship, run on to the rocks, and end up facing violence? Sexual culture more generally may play a role - you might expect more promiscuous groups to encounter more violence, but that's counter-intuitive with gay men, by reputation the most promiscuous group, encountering the least. And something very disturbing seems to be happening with bisexual women.

Different types of violence may count differently - my understanding is that while men are more likely to be physically violent, women are usually more likely to be emotionally abusive, so if emotional or lifestyle abuse counts as violence on that study, that might be raising the figure? However, the wiki page I linked says 43.8% of lesbians reported "physical violence, stalking, or rape", and even with only two-thirds of that being exclusively female perpetrators, that's still pretty bad. Even if we consider the possibility that lesbians who have dated men are victims of male-originated violence at disproportionately high rates, female-on-lesbian violence is still unusually high.

I don't have enough to state a conclusion here, and I'm naturally somewhat skeptical of the way Wikipedia frames these results. So I'll just say that I don't know what's going on with sexual orientation and domestic violence. These figures are striking enough that it sure looks like orientation is a factor, but it's nothing so clear as "men/women/straights/gays are more violent".

See my sibling comment.

Wikipedia is difficult in these topics as there are homophobic people wanting to slam dunk on the outgroup and homophilic sweeping inconvenient truths under the carpet.

I worked as a bouncer through college and for a few years afterwards. I took a lot of shifts at the nearby LGBT+ night club as the pay was better and it was not any worse than anywhere else, though the dangers were...different. I made a lot of friends there too. I can't help with stats on this stuff at all, but I can share the sort-of popular, tribal understanding of these things from within part of the community. Its well understood within the LGB community that lesbians are hitters. They were also the most likely to attack the bar staff by a wide margin. In fact I'm pretty confident that all of the people we had to call the police on were lesbians, they were definitely all women, some could have been bi. On the subject of bisexuals, they are often looked down upon by the Ls and Gs. I'm talking about people who actually experience genuine attraction to both sexes that they have acted on and continue to pursue, not self ID bisexuals who are straight in practice. They are seen as unreliable, undependable sex-addicts who lie constantly. Some parts of the community have significant anti-bisexual bias to the point of not allowing them in some clubs/events at all.

That's an odd, relatively unintuitive result, to me. Men are usually established to be more physically violent than women, which would suggest that relationships with men in them ought to be the most violent. It sounds like, though, male-male relationships are the least violent, and female-female the most. The gap between straight women and straight men is perhaps attributable to men being more violent, but then what's going on with lesbians?

I'd argue against this theory of men being more violent than women. They are more damaging if they are violent and they are less prone to injuries if assaulted by women, but it does not mean that women are not violent. You know, the how can she slap effect, when man using self defense is still the first one to be neutralized. You can easily show this on stats where men are not in the picture. For instance when it comes to abuse of children in their care, then mothers are far more abusive than fathers and the disparity is even larger if they are not biological parent of the child. The same goes when it comes to abuse of patients by nurses and many other cases when women can safely inflict physical abuse without risk of being confronted by men, including extreme ones like female Nazi concentration camp guards like Irma Grese, the Hyena of Auschwitz. So of course if they try the usual slapping and violent outburst shenanigans in same sex relationship, it does not fly as well especially as both of them can act as weak victims in front of the police.

In general, I think that women are actually much more callous and not at all the exemplars of fairer gender as they are portraited to be in women are wonderful reality distortion. If by any chance women could overpower men in violent confrontation, I think that they would be far, far more vicious and uncaring toward them.

Also, men who do have the most capacity to inflict damaging violence - taller, stronger, richer (easier to get away with it) - are ironically the most desired. "Short king" is still a backhanded "compliment". The evolutionary desire for superior genetics offset the fear of potential violence, I suppose.

For instance when it comes to abuse of children in their care, then mothers are far more abusive than fathers and the disparity is even larger if they are not biological parent of the child.

Those appear to be absolute figures - isn't an alternative explanation that single mothers are simply much more common than single fathers? Statista for 2024 gives us 15,720,000 single mother households versus 7,214,000 single father.

So if we have 189,635 cases of an abusive mother, and 125,493 with an abusive father, then that works out to 1.2% of single mother households being abusive, and 1.7% of single father households. That would seem to track with the stereotype of men being more violent.

I agree with you that we have to be careful of the women-are-wonderful effect here, and women have a tremendous capacity for violence and cruelty, but this particular figure doesn't seem to show that women are worse.

Where did you find information that this data is only about single parent households? In fact there is even better data in there, where women are more abusive compared to men if they are non-parent in the household by factor of almost 6.

I agree with you that we have to be careful of the women-are-wonderful effect here, and women have a tremendous capacity for violence and cruelty, but this particular figure doesn't seem to show that women are worse.

Women are way worse and my claim is that their violence is vastly underreported. We see these things only in extreme cases with violence against children and of course in same-sex relationships where there is no bias against men.

Could be, but also women are statistically higher incidence of cluster B disorders and if you have two women in a relationship you stack that chance. Not sure if significant enough to account for that.

I think we might have to thank men and their inability to respond in kind to psychological manipulation. Consider the following interaction:

  • Wife: "Honey, could you vacuum the house, please?"
  • Husband: "Sure, no problem, I'll get round to it before lunch"
  • Wife: starts vacuuming passively-aggressively

There are two likely outcomes:

  • Husband A: grabs the vacuum aggressively "Jesus fucking Christ, Janice! I've told you I would get round to it before lunch! You know I hate this passive-aggressive bullshit! Just say 'right now' next time, I'm not asking you to explain the whole day's schedule to me, but I'm not a fucking mind-reader!"
  • Husband B: "Huh, I guess she didn't need my help after all"

No abuse whatsoever.

  • Wife 1: "Honey, could you vacuum the house, please?"
  • Wife 2: "Sure, no problem, I'll get round to it before lunch"
  • Wife 1: starts vacuuming passively-aggressively
  • Wife 2: thinking "You think you can manipulate me this easily, huh? You think two can't play this game?" "Oh, honey, I am so sorry! Please let me do it! You should do less chores, you've been so tired lately you even washed my white Pima cotton t-shirt with your latest Temu 'haul'. No-no, it's okay, you know I love you, sweetheart, and nothing can change that"
  • Wife 1: thinking "Seriously? First you refuse to help me and then you start acting like a petty bitch? I'll have to teach you a lesson"

Bam, a cycle of psychological abuse.

I looked years ago into the studies, but the data is pretty bad. Alcoholism is also the main driver, so I would say there is a big class difference which can be more important. A below average working class couple who binge drink will use violence as conflict resolution more often, regardless if they are homo or hetero.

And while Gay men report lower rates of domestic abuse, there are many kitchen-psychology explanations for that:

  • Does “Mutual assured destruction” lower the value of violence? Is there a difference between twinks and bears?
  • Or do Gay men have non-jealous/non-monogamous and chill relationship norms which lowers conflict potential?
  • Or as men dislike seeing themselves as “victimized” and abused do gay domestic abuse victims just suffer in silence?

See here for a discussion: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskGayMen/comments/1dfkn7z/gay_men_in_relationships_have_the_lowest_rates_of/

Anecdotally, I’ve known many gay men who were and are in abusive relationships, especially in relationships with large age gaps. I find that in a lot of relationships involving a young man and older man, the younger man is often physically, emotionally, sexually, and/or financially abused. It happens far more frequently than anyone would like to admit.

And in lesbian relationships higher rate of reporting could be because butch women internalized toxic masculinity. Or the violence rate could be higher but less dangerous and more low key (like disrespecting shoving, instead of beating up into the hospital). Or is it just an artifact of self reporting and women “exaggerating” small slights?

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6113571/#B108

Moscati (2016) ..” The sample comprised 102 lesbian women, mostly Italian (88.2%). Participants answered a questionnaire containing 29 multiple-choice questions. In over one case out of five (20.6% of the total), the interviewee admitted to be afraid of her partner coming back home. Further, 41.2% of women occasionally hid something from their partners because they were afraid of their reactions. In addition, 14.7% of lesbian women declared that they were always afraid of their partners. Almost half of the interviewees identified the damage resulting from a couple fight as psychological; physical damage was reported by 5.9% of the interviewees (Arcilesbica, 2011).

Imagine a fifth of all relationships of your friends being build on fear! These numbers are so high though that I am sceptical.

Tongue in cheekly, I'm not taking gay marriage seriously until your wife takes the kids and starts milking you for a percentage of your salary.

This feels close enough to trolling and one of your few previous posts was also trolling. And this gives off alt account vibes. Permaban, unless other mods care to speak on your behalf.

It's clearly trolling IMO. Obvious enough that people shouldn't be replying to it.

Ok, if we think ICE is going around calculatedly murdering people- why this one? AFAICT she was one protestor among many. There are many like it, this is the one unfortunate enough to drive her car directly at an ICE agent while being yelled at to stop.

Obviously, this partner isn't her wife; she has a husband, who she ditched out of ideologically induced mental illness. But getting mad over terminology is... well not exactly the most concerning part of this story, or even in the top ten.

Obviously, this partner isn't her wife; she has a husband

One report stated she had a husband, then they divorced (father of her first two kids), a second husband who died (father of her third kid, the one she was allegedly dropping off to school before the protest) and this current partner/wife.

Also, why do it in front of God and everybody (the shooter was both aware he was being filmed and apparently documenting it himself).

I think on balance if ICE agents wanted to assassinate people they would probably both preplan it (planning planning planning is a big thing in the US military and I think it's trickled down into law enforcement) and carefully control the media exposure around it, to say nothing of their own personal safety.

I would guess OP's position is likely that they are doing stochastic assassinations, or essentially taking any plausible opportunity to shoot people, under the guise of self-defense.

I would guess OP is a troll, actually.

> calls the ICE altercation an "assassination"

> doesn't like when lesbians call eachother "wife"

I'm very curious to see where you fall on the political compass

Is OP's combination of beliefs any weirder than the mainstream US political parties? It sounds like he's a religious conservative who also is skeptical of big government and the police state.

The Chad Centrist (all four quadrants at the same time)

We need more insane centrists. There is a Lyndon LaRouche shaped hole in the USA; schizo cult leaders with beliefs to offend both sides of the political compass need to run for president more often. The Cynthia McKinney/David Duke antisemitism conference(no, not conference on antisemitism, there is a difference) cannot replace it.

Congratulations on trying to get a fight going. "Just asking questions about the assassination - why are they referring to the murder victim's wife when both parties were women?"

Didn't want to get no fight going. I just meant to point out that while linguistically and culturally, for my blaming of the use of the "wife" word in such context, I surely seem the over-conservative "red tribe" person, I am actually believing that the ICE shooter is unexcusable for what he did. So my position is a little bit more complex than "purely extra-conservative zealot" as I could seem for my linguistic idiosincracies

You misspelled "idiosyncrasy".

Also, trying to get a row started by both left and right by using "assassination" (to rile up the rightwingers) and "wife" (to rile up the leftwingers) in the same comment was a good attempt, but over-ambitious. Stick to one inflammatory statement at a time! Once the initial fire is successfully lit, you can then throw more fuel on the flames later.

And before that, casually referring to the "totally intentional assassination". This is old school trolling, the black-hearted darkness of the Elder Time, back when men just woke up and chose violence.

If you believe that everything that you don't like is "trolling", I envy you. I would LOVE to be so confident in my epistemic superpowers

  • -19

I believe that you're an aged-but-empty account that just posted a pparagraph that had incendiary flame-bait for both sides of the American political spectrum.

OTOH, you're throwing off clear ESL flags, so maybe you just genuinely didn't know how Americans would take that. My sincere apologies for accusing you of being a mildly clever member of my culture.

If they're a troll, they could be pretending to be "sorry non-native speaker here, no idea my totally innocent questions would come across like that" for deniability and the lulz (will the dupes swallow this as an excuse? how much can I get away with before the penny drops?)

Besides, dear Iconochasm, let us not be narrow-minded! ESL speakers can be trolls on English-language fora, too!

This year has delivered a nonstop string of humiliations for MAGA isolationists as Trump has increasingly turned towards military measures. A few days ago Tucker Carlson claimed Trump captured Maduro for the explicit purpose of legalizing gay marriage in Venezuela (???). Tulsi Gabbard has arguably had it even worse, as her 2019 opening speech for her presidential campaign criticized Trump's flirting with regime change in Venzeula and Iran, yet she happily serves in the Trump administration and even supports Trump's policies. A report by Bloomberg today states that she was actually excluded from meetings discussing the Venezuela op, with her Director of National Intelligence (DNI) position jokingly being recast as "do not invite". Presumably the rest of Trump's team thought she might leak the details, or even commit outright treason by informing the Venezuelans beforehand.

It's hard to have principles when the MAGA movement is a cult of personality with an extremely narrow window of what's deemed acceptable to criticize Trump for. Over the coming few years I expect more MAGA isolationists to debase themselves with positions that are basically "actually interventionism is fine as long as it's Trump doing it, after all it hasn't turned into an Iraq-tier disaster yet."

  • -15

I stan'd Tulsi Gabbard, and I've been taking nothing but L's out of her.

Tucker Carlson claimed Trump captured Maduro for the explicit purpose of legalizing gay marriage in Venezuela (???).

It sounds less ridiculous in the video. Probably Trump wasn't thinking about gay marriage specifically, but this operation has probably been planned before Trump took office. Ousting a conservative communist authoritarian is a big win for liberalism.

It's interesting to watch Tucker Carlson's evolution into a Strasserite conservative leftist. But I think for most of the general public, the reaction to Maduro's capture was similar to when we got Bin Laden. It was a brief moment when neoconservatives and neoliberals could put aside our differences to celebrate a great big American victory against the commies.

I’m confused if you’re criticizing the isolationist faction or the interventionist faction here as you’re mixing the two together in your last sentence. And you’re providing examples of criticism while claiming there’s an extremely narrow window of criticism, which doesn’t make sense. In any case, we live in a two party system, so each party comprises strange bedfellows, like those who want American Imperialism and those who want strict interventionism, or those who want it in some cases but not every case.

IMO Venezuela is indeed very different from Iran / Ukraine. We didn’t cause harm to their citizens, whereas our pressure in Ukraine destined hundreds of thousands of young men to perish in absolute agony and demographically destroyed an entire nation. Our intervention in Iran could destroy an ancient and high-science civilization for little reason except that it benefits Israel and KSA. (Just months before Israel killed Persian scientists and their families while they slept in their beds, Iran was publishing about their important nuclear medicine products which formerly only Germany was able to produce). Personally I am all for Venezuela-type resource grabs and even taking Greenland, but I don’t want to see hundreds of thousands of guys just like me be slaughtered in Ukraine, or see science take steps back because of Israeli neuroticism and expansionism. There are reasonable utilitarian grounds for this imo

I’m confused if you’re criticizing the isolationist faction or the interventionist faction here as you’re mixing the two together in your last sentence. And you’re providing examples of criticism while claiming there’s an extremely narrow window of criticism, which doesn’t make sense. In any case, we live in a two party system, so each party comprises strange bedfellows, like those who want American Imperialism and those who want strict interventionism, or those who want it in some cases but not every case.

I'm not sure what you're confused about here. I'm saying isolationists hypocritically turn into interventionists after Trump intervenes. And then the right-wing criticism Trump has faced has been very muted, even from ostensible isolationists. Gabbard was highly isolationist before Trump, but now publicly praises interventions. Tucker is also isolationist, but instead of criticizing Trump he pulls his punches and nonsensically blames gay marriage instead, since he knows his audience will hate him if he comes out against Trump too much.

This is reminiscent of the Obama era.

Obama campaigned on a paradigm shift from Bush and the forever wars in the middle east. The reality was a surge in Afghanistan, a dirty war in Syria and the destruction of Libya. Most likely Obama was genuine and did not want Dick Cheney style interventionism in 2008. Once he took power the party establishment made sure medical insurance companies could continue to enrich themselves and the military industrial complex kept marching on. By 2011 Obama had his groyper moment with occupy wall street.

Trump was probably genuine with MAGA. Then he got captured by the mainstream republican establishment and he is now going to blow up the deficit with more spending on the military industrial complex. He is going to go all in on big brother government with palantir and integrate 30 million Venezuelans into the US empire.

It will be interesting to see if we get a right wing occupy movement. Occupy was neutered by the great awokening and by shifting the focus from real issues to distractions. Unfortunately it wouldn't surprise me if the Maga base get distracted in a similar fashion.

I think Trump could have been "genuine" when it came to his original foreign policy views, but that doesn't mean much since he's a waffle who frequently changes based on whoever was the last person to have spoken with him, or from whatever news headlines he watches on Fox. He got a lot of good right-wing press from this recent Venezuela adventure, which seems to have really whetted his appetite for more military actions

It will be interesting to see if we get a right wing occupy movement

Not gonna happen. MAGA is fully in the tank for the personality cult around Trump and I don't see that changing in the immediate future, and in 1-2 years Trump will be a lame duck anyways so it won't really matter.

What are you on about. Pissing away the last 70+ years of soft power is in no way mainstream republican policy (for all their faults).

(that is to say, Venezuela could well have been GOP capture if it happened in isolation, but repeatedly threatening to invade your allies because you looked at a mercator projection and thought Greenland is actually that big is fairly obviously just Trump being a retard)

Good point. The Deep State might have rolled Trump into doing military operations he didn't want to do, but it definitely hasn't rolled him into poasting about military operations that aren't happening.

The poasting about invading Canada, Greenland, and Panama is a character-revealing choice by Trump, as is the poasting about hypothetical kinetic operations against Blue Tribers within the US. And what it reveals is that Trump's objection to Bush-era American imperialism isn't that he opposes imperialism, its that he thinks Bush wasn't evil enough to make it work. And going into Venezuela in order to keep the regime in place, complete with the entire apparatus of domestic repression and regional narcoterrorism, but steal a relatively small amount of oil, is strong evidence that he is serious about this.

he thinks Bush wasn't evil enough to make it work

Maybe he just thinks Bush wasn't smart enough to make it work.

If Bush had pursued something like Trump's methodology, everyone (in the West) would remember the Global War on Terror as a success, or at least not the failure it is often viewed as now. If Bush had removed Saddam in a lightning strike and then negotiated with the remaining Baathist regime to stop doing dumb stuff under pain of also being removed, tens of thousands of people of deaths would likely have been avoided, along with the rise of ISIS and decades of costly and painful US occupation. (FWIW this doesn't seem very evil to me, but YMMV I suppose.) Same deal with simply punitively bombing Afghanistan and doing SOCCOM raids to snatch AQ leaders.

This basically seems to be Trump's plan in Venezuela. I want to caveat here that THERE IS STILL A CHANCE TO SCREW IT UP and that oftentimes such plans work out in unexpected and often bad ways. Maybe Venezuela will turn out to have been a horrible idea! But supposing a counterfactual where Bush had successfully done what Trump appears to be doing now, I think Bush would be viewed much more differently.

People forget that the US has a fairly successful track record of lightning interventions (arrive, blow everything up, install a new leader if necessary, leave). This may not be ethical or moral, but it "works" from the perspective that the military interventions tend to achieve their goals and be relatively popular or at least not unpopular. The US tends to do poorly (particularly in the public square) when it gets drawn into a prolonged intervention. People are now wary of the former because of the latter, which I think is entirely understandable, but it's important to understand that not all foreign interventions are created equal.

Some of the largest demonstrations in the world were when Bush invaded Iraq. Anti Vietnam demonstrations defined a generation. US foreign policy has always been a disaster in terms of PR.

With that said I do agree that threatening Greenland is a new low.

Greenland is actually that big. I mean, it's not as big as a Mercator projection would have it, but it's BIG. Over 158,000 square miles ice-free (and if you believe the climate change people, this will increase dramatically), almost as large as California. Over 677,000 square miles total, larger than Alaska

(And Trump is trolling about taking Greenland forcibly from Denmark, which I guess counts as being a retard.)

Just like he was previously trolling about Venezuela?

Did someone say he's trolling about Venezuela?

Nybbler claims that Trump is trolling about invading Denmark (as if "haha he's actually not pissing away every drop of American soft power and dismantling their entire alliance structure for some kind of gain, he's just doing it because he feels like it" was some kind of own). I am saying (implying) that if this was actually the case, we should expect him to have been trolling the last time he talked about starting a war for no tangible reason.

I am saying (implying) that if this was actually the case, we should expect him to have been trolling the last time he talked about starting a war for no tangible reason.

I absolutely disagree with this part, which is why I'm asking if you seen anyone claim he was just trolling about Venezuela. If not, that's evidence against your theory.

One small tangent I remember in particular was the media debate over the ethics of military drone usage. Set aside they’re cheap and effective so they were inevitable. But that it was growth of automated warfare that some worried would make the U.S. military more likely to engage in conflict, as there’s no bodies-of-downed-pilot video that can result in a nasty PR blowback with drones shot down — that debate largely ended when Obama succeeded Bush the Younger, and in spite of Obama significantly ramping up drone usage.

Obama campaigned on a paradigm shift from Bush and the forever wars in the middle east.

Obama chose Biden as his VP and Clinton as secretary of state.

Anyone who was fooled into thinking he was anti war or pro civil liberties wanted to be fooled.

And Trump took in Bolton, Rubio and other neo-cons despite running on America first.

Conceded on Bolton, but Rubio came up through the Tea Party how is he not "America first"?

This is reminiscent of the Obama era.

Obama campaigned on a paradigm shift from Bush and the forever wars in the middle east.

And, for that matter, of the Bush era, as Bush himself campaigned on a humble foreign policy, and no nation building, to contrast himself from Clinton.

IMO we really would have been better off with Lindbergh winning in 1940.

I’m a little bit more worried about having for a president a guy who possibly conspired to have his own son disposed of because the boy had birth defects, and fathered seven secret children with three women in Germany in the 1950s, two of the women being sisters. I think there’s reason to suspect his sympathies for staying out of the war went beyond isolationism.

fathered seven secret children with three women in Germany in the 1950s, two of the women being sisters.

You’re making him sound like even more of a baller. Having a pair of sisters as babies’ mommas is reaching the pinnacle of capitalizing on female mate-choice copying.

He didn’t even leverage his fame to do so. He operated under the pseudonym “Careu Kent.” I guess bro was a fan of Superman; they both flew and lived double lives.

Careu Kent, Carlos Danger, Ron Mexico. We need a fourth worthy of completing the Mount Rushmore of funny celebrity pseudonyms.

Having a pair of sisters as babies’ mommas is reaching the pinnacle of capitalizing on female mate-choice copying.

The Old Testament prohibits it as incest.

Bush himself campaigned on a humble foreign policy, and no nation building, to contrast himself from Clinton.

Yes, and then just under 8 months into his first term the chickens of neo-liberalism came home to roost. Turns out history doesn't just end because you declare it so.

I don't know if you're old enough to remember 9/11 as an adult, but Bush II wasn't really offered choice. The public was baying for blood and Clinton's people were still in control of the Senate and much of what we would now refer to as the "Deep State".

The Blob consumes all; it's undefeated.

At least Bush had 9/11. That justifies breaking some campaign promises IMO.

Afghanistan, maybe; no president could have gotten away with not retaliating. But Iraq? No, that was an unforced error; a target of political opportunity.

I'm pretty sure Iraq was forced by Cheney.

I suspect the same

Your user-handle, the tone of your post, and the fact that after 18 hours you still haven't replied to anyone in this thread, give me the distinct impression that you aren't really interested in discussion and are just here to vent your spleen.

However on the off chance that my impression is wrong, I have a few questions for you...

  • Who exactly do you believe has been humiliated here?
  • Do you believe that "isolationism" in the eyes of Trump's supporters literally means "no foreign interventions or entanglements ever" or do you concede that it might mean something closer to "no more spending blood and treasure without getting something to show for it"?
  • Do you believe that the Trump Administration's interventions in Venezuela and Iran have been more or less disastrous than the Biden Administration's handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal, or the Obama Administration's similar attempts at regime change in Libya and Syria?

Who exactly do you believe has been humiliated here?

Gabbard, for being so blatantly hypocritical. Also, MAGA partisans to some degree, although flip-flopping for them is so common whenever Trump does something they previously said they wouldn't support that it's not really news any more.

"isolationism" in the eyes of Trump's supporters

I would say most of them don't have consistent definitions. Some like Michael Tracey are consistent, but most are just vibing and will switch their positions to say they love whatever Trump does after the fact.

have been more or less disastrous than the Biden Administration

Biden was the only President that I would say had a genuinely good foreign policy. Getting us out of that stupid Afghan war is something every President since Bush should have done, including Trump, but none of them did it. His actions on Ukraine and uniting NATO were also exemplary, although I have quibbles with the scale of aid to Ukraine. He was right on all the major issues.

His immigration policy on the other hand... yeesh!

You're going to keep posting stuff like this at the top level, and when you finally get another mod warning, you're going to act like you're being targeted for your political views, aren't you?

If I got a warning for what was basically "you can't criticize the MAGA circlejerk", then yes I would complain especially if I could find inverse examples that are functionally equivalent, but just pointing in the other direction. And that wouldn't be hard. "Leftists seem to think" posts are not uncommon on this forum.

I mean, it's not great, but have you seen any top-level "DAE the outgroup are evil hypocrites?" posts from the right getting modded? If "OP has to know this offends the local circlejerk, so he must be consciously baiting" is necessary and sufficient grounds for moderator action, we might as well pack up and just call this a forum for right-wingers rather than the bag of niceties that is in the sidebar.

(...and either way, the Gabbard thing seems rather interesting and was new to me, so I don't think you can argue this is just bait.)

Eh, I think the substance of what he's saying is basically correct - the MAGA base is inconsistent and hypocritical, has few real principles other than loyalty to Trump, and will revise commitments in order to maintain that loyalty to Trump - but it is not framed in a very constructive way. I'm not sure I'd mod it, but I would want to mildly discourage this kind of posting.

The conclusion that Antipopulist is asserting seems true, to me, at least in broad strokes. But I'd hope for higher standards for opening posts than just "is true".

It should go without saying that this also applies to partisan posts in other directions.

Maybe. The question is whether the MAGA base is pacifists or anti-GWOT democracy building.

If the latter, then no hypocrisy. Venezuela seems very different than Iraq. But time will tell.

I mean, it's not great, but have you seen any top-level "DAE the outgroup are evil hypocrites?" posts from the right getting modded?

I can think of a few long-time users (including at least one former moderator) who ultimately got banned for expressing similar views.

I mean, it's not great, but have you seen any top-level "DAE the outgroup are evil hypocrites?"

To start with, does an analogous top-level post come to your mind?

If "OP has to know this offends the local circlejerk, so he must be consciously baiting"

If it's just about offending the local circlejerk, why did you call it "not great"?

(...and either way, the Gabbard thing seems rather interesting and was new to me, so I don't think you can argue this is just bait.)

I dunno, it's kinda hard to have a discussion based on the post. Best I could do is something like "this kinda reminds me of..." the way functor did, which is essentially completely separate from the top-level post.

have you seen any top-level "DAE the outgroup are evil hypocrites?" posts from the right getting modded?

Yes.

Over the coming few years I expect more MAGA isolationists to debase themselves with positions that are basically "actually interventionism is fine as long as it's Trump doing it, after all it hasn't turned into an Iraq-tier disaster yet."

Maybe you should have given an example of one then. All you posted were an official and a media personality who both apparently disliked the idea and presumably still do.

Also this whole schtick is kind of dumb and painful. You saw it all over the place on Twitter in the aftermath, people with their little "Trump has gotten us into a foreign entanglement" gotcha speeches that they were just going to doggedly recite into the void even though the "war" was over by the time they heard of it.

I think your model of "isolationists" needs some nuance. Very few people believe in zero US military action anywhere in the world at any time. We have a lot of security issues on our plate as global hegemon. We have a lot of national interests, and a lot of disagreement over what those are.

All presidents preach a less involved foreign policy than they actually produce once they're in office. What voters and "isolationists" seem not to like is long, expensive, bloody, drawn out conflicts. By that metric, Trump's military actions have been notably limited, most of all the Maduro op. The success of the operation sort of cuts out the legs from any isolationists arguing against it. Similar to the Iran bombing, which all the isolationists said would be WW3, and........wasn't.

The problem with this view is that foreign policy actions are highly contingent. The architects of the Iraq invasion in 2003 genuinely thought it would be a 6 month operation tops, that they would just go in and out, and it would be mostly over in a few news cycles. Then things started going a little bit badly afterwards so 6 months turned into 12 months, then one thing led to another and they ended up with a quagmire.

I'd say Trump deserves some credit for not going completely crazy out of the gate, but he's certainly rolling the dice. It's not difficult to see something bad happening in Venezuela that brings bad headlines, Trump recoiling at said headlines when they show up on Fox and Friends, and hawks coming to him to say "Sir, things are bad but if we just do a little bit more everything will be better. Pinky promise".

It's not difficult to see, and yet it keeps not happening.

After a day of reading and watching videos of the woman killed in Minneapolis yesterday, here are some thoughts:

  1. This iceman was hit by a different car previously.

  2. The woman was cosplaying resistance fighter, not really realizing how dangerous what she was doing actually was.

  3. 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.

  4. it seems reasonable to me that the iceman was looking for retribution for the previous car strike, and she gave it to him.

  5. 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?

It is unambiguous given the videos that she did try to hit the officer

Well I saw the video and it looks obvious to me that she was trying to escape and drive around the ICE employees. I don't know why we would jump to the conclusion that a suburban, educated white woman would suddenly try to murder someone for no reason. Other people can interpret the subtle movements of the car's wheels differently, but it's far from "unambiguous".

nyTimes put out am [absurd] “forensic analysis” and determined she was trying to escape, which will never be questioned by the blue tribe ever

I don't need a NY Times analysis to know she was trying to escape, I can just watch the video and apply basic common sense and pattern recognition. Not everything is a media narrative, sometimes people just disagree about what happened.

It doesn't matter that she was not trying to murder someone. What matters is that she was an imminent threat of death or great bodily harm to the agent standing near the car. I emphasize imminent because this happened in a matter of seconds and expecting anyone to instantly predict the path of a car they are standing next to -- whose driver you already know is uncooperative -- is unreasonable. For similar reasons, it doesn't matter if she was trying to escape, notwithstanding that a reasonable person would not attempt to flee police in the first place.

A comparison could be a child soldier/suicide bomber

Is the adjective "child" modifying both of the following nouns ("child soldier/child suicide bomber"), or just the first ("child soldier/adult suicide bomber")?

I think it’s someone who bombs both child soldiers and suicides.

Why is this so complex to people? Would anyone disagree with the following summary?

  1. She appears to have been trying to hinder/block ICE activities.
  2. She appears to have been trying to flee when she was shot, not kill ICE agents
  3. The front of her car contacted the agent that shot her.
  4. His shots were fired at a point where he personally was not in danger.
  5. He could have simply stepped out of the way of the car unharmed, as he eventually did.
  6. Legally the shooting seems defensible if not exactly ironclad given who knows how the politics plays out (see: Chauvin).

Open Questions:

  1. If he could have stepped out of the way of the car without shooting, is he morally (not legally) obligated to?
  2. Is it reasonable to expect him to recognize the danger has passed and to stop shooting in the fraction of a second this transpired and her car turned away?

Overall I don’t see the great significance of this case as it seems arguable either way. Even the most ardent anti-ICE types have to admit she was retarded, rammed him with her car and basically is a classic case of FAFO, not some random uninvolved innocent.

Even the most loyal police-supporter must recognize he could’ve easily avoided shooting her with no harm done and she doesn’t exactly deserve to die, making this in some sense a tragedy.

If he could have stepped out of the way of the car without shooting, is he morally (not legally) obligated to?

The officer's action is like dropping a gun where a pedestrian might flee, so that if the pedestrian flees, the officer can say "for all I know the pedestrian could have been trying to get the gun" and shoot the pedestrian. It's a form of taking himself hostage so that he can shoot in "self-defense". Morally, he should not take himself hostage in this manner.

Is it reasonable to expect him to recognize the danger has passed and to stop shooting in the fraction of a second this transpired and her car turned away?

I would say it is reasonable to expect him to recognize when the danger has passed, because he was the one who made it difficult to recognize the danger in the first place. He shouldn't make it difficult and then expect anyone to give him slack because it's difficult.

And again, yes this does apply when the protestor is the one deliberately standing in front of the car.

I think it’s important to add the context that this particular agent suffered serious injuries from being run over previously when trying to detain an illegal sex offender. It might explain why he was trigger happy when getting hit by a fucking car.

He actually wasn’t in front of the car until the driver reversed.

He wasn't actually in front of the car when it started moving. Further it turns out to be impractical to do the work he does without at some point being in front of a (stationary) vehicle.

It's good police policy not to stand in front of cars but also clearly a crime to actually try to run them over. Same way that saying 'officers should seek cover in a firefight' doesn't equate to 'shooting an officer outside of cover should be less penalized since it's easier'

His shots were fired at a point where he personally was not in danger.

Are you talking about general, objective danger with the benefit of hindsight; or are you talking about what he would have perceived at the time?

Even the most loyal police-supporter must recognize he could’ve easily avoided shooting her with no harm done

This may be true with the benefit of hindsight, but not necessarily given what he knew and saw that first quarter of a second.

In any event, I would be concerned about imposing a duty to retreat on the police. Especially since they are dealing with an adversary which would surely take advantage of any such duty so as to maximally hinder and obstruct the police.

The front of her car contacted the agent that shot her.

Have you ever been hit by a car? Even at parking lot speeds, they hit hard enough to wreck your shit. If you go under the wheels, the driver's intentions don't matter.

Large SUVs are especially dangerous because the high hood means you get knocked to the ground and then run over instead of thrown on top

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.

What happened to "be charitable"? She's just a libbed out body who got scared when she saw the people she was reading about online in real life. The people who will disappear her, deport her to El Salvador, put her in a cattle wagon straight to an Auschwitz equivalent located in Texas. Then she panicked and tried to flee without thinking too hard how her actions are going to be interpreted by a hostile party. Why instantly jump to accusing her trying to kill someone?

Who said she was trying to kill him? Regardless, the law of self-defense doesn't care about intentions, it cares about articulable, reasonable beliefs. It was reasonable for the agent to believe that the driver of the car, who resisted his force earlier, would use the car to cause death or great bodily injury to him, was capable of doing so, and was an imminent threat, and because of that, it was reasonable for him to use deadly force to stop the threat.

Who said she was trying to kill him? Regardless, the law of self-defense doesn't care about intentions, it cares about articulable, reasonable beliefs. It was reasonable for the agent to believe that the driver of the car, who resisted his force earlier, would use the car to cause death or great bodily injury to him, was capable of doing so, and was an imminent threat, and because of that, it was reasonable for him to use deadly force to stop the threat.

I agree, but I also think that a person who shows up to intentionally aggravate a situation doesn't deserve much in the way of charity. They must be on their very best behavior.

Is there any evidence she was at a protest or in the act of protesting? There's some evidence she wasn't.

We can't just go around shooting women if they can't make K-Turns quickly enough.

I have read that her wife was outside the car when this all happened. Presumably the wife was there for the protests.

I suppose it’s possible that Renee was coming to pick her wife up, which would explain why she might stop in a weird spot in the middle of the action.

Except all the commentary from the pro-protest side is that she was there as a Legal Observer, or otherwise intentionally. The ex-husband quoted in news articles says she and her wife were both in the car after dropping off her kid to school. So it doesn't seem like "Wifey was at protest, Good just turned up to collect her".

Except all the commentary from the pro-protest side is that she was there as a Legal Observer,

Reminds of the situation in Gaza with all kinds of Hamas operatives claiming to be "journalists."

https://www.mprnews.org/story/2026/01/08/renee-good-woman-killed-by-ice-agent-in-minneapolis-was-a-mother-poet-and-new-to-the-city

Her ex-husband, who asked not to be named out of concern for the safety of their children, said Macklin Good had just dropped off her 6-year-old son at school Wednesday and was driving home with her current partner when they encountered a group of ICE agents on a snowy street in Minneapolis, where they had moved last year from Kansas City, Missouri.

I'm not sure how much credibility to give this semi-sourced story, but it seems to me like if she was involved in an organized protest the government probably knows what group it was by now, and there's going to be video all over the internet of her at this or other protests. It's not really the kind of thing that would be a mystery.

To say nothing of the footage that ICE definitely has that has not been released for some reason.

The more statements issued, the more confused I am.

If she was just trying to drive home with her new spouse after dropping off the kid at school, and she's new to the city, I could buy that "oops, turned down the wrong street and drove into the middle of a protest".

In that case, though, why was New Wifey outside the car? If this is "two women driving the wrong way by mistake", then both women should have been in the car when Good tried to park/turn/drive back.

From other places, I'm seeing them identify her as deliberately being there for the protest:

...Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison told NPR she was acting as “a legal observer on behalf of her immigrant neighbors.”

ELLISON: You know, these are some important legal questions that need to be determined. And I can tell you that there are a number of parallel prosecutorial authorities that could be employed here, including the county and the state and even the federal government if - but, you know, we're looking at the reality of - the Homeland Security secretary has already said, we did nothing wrong, even though there's been no investigation, which is really disturbing. You know, you would think that the Homeland Security secretary would be the first to say, let's suspend judgment and look into it. That's not what we saw. We saw the Homeland Security secretary defame, you know, Miss Good by calling her a domestic terrorist. She was anything but that. She was a compassionate neighbor trying to be a legal observer on behalf of her immigrant neighbors. That's what she was doing at the moment of her death. And she was a poet. She was a mom. She was a daughter. And I'm deeply saddened by what happened to her and her family. And so I think that it is important for us to investigate this matter thoroughly. We need to keep our legal options open, and we must have transparency and accountability from the government.

I don't know what exactly a legal observer is or what they do, but both stories can't be true. She can't be just someone who got caught up in an event she had no idea about and there to observe ICE for the sake of immigrants.

Also, it's probably ironic that "domestic terrorism" became a standard definition in 2020 when Biden was president.

Also, it's probably ironic that "domestic terrorism" became a standard definition in 2020 when Biden was president.

It's not ironic; it was Ron Klain and Merrick Garland seeking legal cover to use the US domestic spying apparatus against political dissidents. Sulla never accomplishes his goals, he lays the groundwork for the populares to return with a vengeance.

Okay, but if this really was "innocent bystander got caught in the protest", why didn't she stop the car? Why be "fleeing the officer trying to arrest her"? Maybe she panicked, but that's a really bad decision as it turned out.

It's not that surprising she would panic though, the ICE officer strides towards her car and tries repeatedly to open her car door.

Thats only a reasonable response if she thought the ICE officer was an impersonator though...

I don't think it's reasonable, I think it's predictable.

I have an unverified video being shared around twitter that shows a supposed interview of a neighbour near the scene talking about seeing Renee actively engage in blocking ICE vehicles.

I traced it back to this GAB post, but can't find the wider interview that it was clipped from.

Edit: Got it; I traced it back to its source. There was an interview by local MPR photojournalist Ben Hovland with locals up on TikTok.

The full interview is here.

2nd Edit: Seems from the full clip that she was repeating information she received from 'another guy that was driving behind her'.

Thank you.

You should probably archive footage like that.

Do you know of any good tools to archive video? I know catbox is a good hosting site.

My first choice is to throw yt-dlp at it, if it fails I look at the network tab in the dev tools and pick either the largest media element or m3u files if any.

Yesterday the narrative for Democrats was that she was a "Legal Observer", what that is I don't know.

Libs of TikTok

Direct to Rep. Ilhan Omar's Tweet.

Yeah everyone seems to have made that assumption from all sides, but her family members have come forward and said she wasn't involved in any protests.

With all the cameras around, I'd think we'd have pretty concrete evidence if she was involved in any organized protest group. So far it's just politician statements.

It's a pretty dark scene here if she wasn't, @WhiningCoil might be right about this country.

I'm still hoping someone will put out a longer video that shows the lead up. All the footage I've seen so far is the same couple of videos that all begin seconds before the shooting (granted, it's entirely possible that's just when people started recording).

People here seem to be taking it as a given that she was trying to block ICE vehicles, but the footage we have doesn't actually support that. There are ICE vehicles on either side of her, and we see another vehicle pull past her before the confrontation. It is inference, but it looks more to me like ICE boxed her in rather than vice versa.

Depends on the layout of the street, right?

Man, don't ping me on this. There is nothing I can say that won't get me banned!

I kid, I kid.

Kind of.

It does bring me comfort though that I no longer need to say the things that will get me banned. You know.

I'm not trying to get you into trouble. Quite the opposite, this is strong bayesian evidence that you might be right. Initially I assumed that ICE was going after an immigrant, and the escaping immigrant was indifferent to driving at a cop and got shot in the process, and that seemed unfortunate but basically orderly to me. Then it came out that this was a middle aged white woman, but there were the allegations this was a protestor, which seems more like "bad situation all around."

But if it really is the case that this was an American citizen, driving down the street, trying to turn around, and got shot; and the response is as it has been. Then this is a pretty deep black pill for me. I hope it isn't the case.

Sorry, do you mind elaborating what you're talking about for the peanut gallery?

What is WhiningCoil right about? Are they pro or anti ICE?

I'm not angling for anyone to be banned (why would anyone be banned is another question I have) but this interaction has flown right over my head

What is WhiningCoil right about?

My learned friend in Kettlebells Mr. Coil has frequently expressed distress that his ideological enemies want him dead, and would celebrate his and his family's deaths simple because of who he was. Particularly around the Jay Jones controversy.

If this woman turns out not to have been involved in any protest actions, then the broad reaction from the right wing internet is pretty black pilling to me, in that people are celebrating the killing of a white American citizen because she looks like an ideological enemy.

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Defenders of Good seem to think she was part of the protest. That would be wild if not.

After big terrorist attacks, many groups claim credit to display impact and efficacy. Similarly, one can easily imagine relevant groups here claiming a martyr or presuming her involvement - it strengthens the besieged narrative too.

Actually, the fact she was being recorded by her partner surely blows that idea out of the water

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Not particularly. The information has been spotty from the beginning.

And anyway, protestors have a vested interest in it being bad for protestors to get shot, for obvious reasons. Protestors don't think it is better if she was an "innocent bystander" as they think protestors are definitionally innocent.

The only people interested in the distinction would be those, like me, whose opinions would change if she weren't protesting.

I got the impression “legal observer” wasn’t a job title, but a claim that she was observing the protest legally.

That was my first thought too, but I think now that it means “person observing the legality (or lack thereof) of the officers.”

Apparently it can be kind of like a job title: https://www.nlg.org/massdefenseprogram/los/

Doesn't sound like a paying job, but the words do have meaning I guess...

It's definitely not a job title, but I'm reminded of ACLU Legal Observers, where the point is to observe and document the legal interactions at a protest, either between protesters and police, or protesters and counter-protesters. In theory, they're supposed to specifically be separate from the protest even if they're associated with the protestors, though sometimes they get very hands-on.

That said, I can't find good or trustworthy information on the status here.

The term "legal observer" was trademarked in the U.S. by the National Lawyers Guild, a longstanding radical activist group. I mostly remember them from Days of Rage, regarding them funding and otherwise supporting the Weather Underground. Searching around I can't find confirmation of whether she was actually a certified NLG Legal Observer or if it's other activists using the same terminology, as another comment pointed out even the ACLU uses the term. (And it looks like the trademark is lapsed.)

We can't just go around shooting women if they can't make K-Turns quickly enough.

My High School driving instructor would like to respectfully disagree with you.

It's a tragedy and a nesting doll of bad decisions. The shooting iceman is technically justified in shooting her, but he as his buddy from the other pickup were both terrible at policing and teamwork.

His goal was to get the two women to drive away and stop their sousveillance. The other iceman thought detaining them was the better option and spooked Ms. Good by loudly and aggressively demanding she get out of the fucking car. She panicked and stepped on the gas.

The next level has, of course, been discussed here already:

  • the icemen are bad at policing, but they are supposed to work in tandem with local police, but state and municipal police have been ordered not to cooperate with them
  • bleeding-heart liberal white women don't treat icemen like LEOs because they've been told icemen can't touch citizens
  • interfering with the ICE has been promoted as a prosocial activity

The path of least pain would be for the ICE to have some officers trained and dressed as police in their convoys. Trick'em out like they're auditioning for Village People and have them deal with "concerned citizens".

Yesterday I wanted to reserve judgment until I saw body cam footage. If ICE was conducting an “enforcement action,” their policy is supposedly to have cameras on. It should make the direction of the car obvious.

I think we started from similar assumptions about the role of the officers. ICE has the funding, the manpower, and the operational initiative. They ought to have a better plan than having some guy stand out on a frozen road. And if that really is the best they can do, they should at least be able to cover their asses. Do it by the book. Show us the book. Release the footage. Not this tight-mouthed bullshit.

Sure, ICE almost certainly is not following the best policing practices ever. But driving directly at an officer while resisting arrest is still a darwin award.

I mean these federal agencies are designed to operate with local LEO support, but in blue states that is refused. That causes problems.

Furthermore ICE is the victim of an organized protest movement that has a specific goal of making it impossible for them to do their job safely. Well.....it works.

Furthermore ICE is the victim of an organized protest movement that has a specific goal of making it impossible for them to do their job safely

I more or less agree with this. Anyone who argues that ICE should have better plans and procedures needs to address the point that whatever these plans and procedures are, these protestors are going to develop counter-plans and counter-procedures designed to frustrate, provoke, and embarrass to the maximum extent possible.

So, for example, suppose ICE implements a policy that they won't try to apprehend someone behind the wheel of a running car but will instead photograph the person's license plate and arrest that person on a future date. In that case, you can bet that these protestors will (1) arrange their cars, with the engines running, so as to block ICE vehicles; and (2) use borrowed cars so frustrate any attempts to later apprehend the drivers.

I mean these federal agencies are designed to operate with local LEO support, but in blue states that is refused. That causes problems.

I've seen this as the most consistent problem with recent ICE operations. Local police should be controlling the crowd. Actually there shouldn't be a crowd at all. Somehow there is a coordinated convoy stalking the ICE facilities and either blocking the facility itself, or tailing the vehicles to disrupt them as they go to make an arrest elsewhere.

Local Mayors deliberately refuse support, then when the situation escalates into violence, use it as ammunition to pressure ICE to leave their cities. All this helps their public opinion at the cost of public safety.

The way ICE has been set up, and communicated, which I will refer to as "the policy" as a shorthand, is a bad (or suboptimal) policy for enforcing immigration.

Well if you were a senior official in the Trump Administration, how would you suggest changing the Policy so as to be substantially more effective?

they wouldn't have made ICE so emotionally charged (it still would have become emotionally charged, but they'd do everything they could to mitigate that, instead of inflame it).

By doing exactly what?

There are huge bottlenecks for the Federal Government w/r/t deportation. It takes years to get the final order of removal for everyone. If they want to achieve their goal of reducing illegal immigration, they need to try to create strong disincentives for illegal immigration outside the normal process.

So they set up ways to soften the blow of self-deporting. Just use an app, we'll set up a flight anywhere you want to go and give you cash.

And if you don't self-deport, here is the consequence. Swift arrest without being able to settle your affairs.

An estimated 1.9 million people self-deported this year, with or without the app. Far more people are leaving on their own than are being removed by ICE.

More importantly, this signals to others not to make the attempt. Even when the US goes back under control of the Dems, there will always be this hesitancy for an entire generation of people. "Do I really want to go to the US, set up a life, just to risk the Americans electing another Trump and losing everything I built?" Now it seems possible in a way it didn't before.

ICE will never deport a tenth as many people as it can disincentivize from staying.

You can enforce immigration, you can own the libs, you cannot do both at once as effectively as focusing on one.

Doesn't the whole sanctuary city thing indicate that even if you're trying to enforce the most milquetoast sort of stuff in this arena a decent amount of the country will just say 'No fuck you' and jam up the gears deliberately? Especially considering the Sanctuary City movement started in the 1980s and is almost 50 years old so you can't even say it's responsive to Republicans or Trump.

I do also think the clumsy visibility of ICE is intentional for two reasons. Firstly, it means that the Republican base feels that 'something is being done' to a degree that it hasn't in recent history since a plethora of headlines are generated. Secondly, it does a lot to change the tone of immigration and IMO has probably been part of why fresh incursions are very low.

He shouldn’t be setting traps, he should by building golden off-ramps to de-escalate.

Granting the argument for a second, I fundamentally disagree, more traps like this should be set up. There should be shit tests the same way the left has tried to cancel and un-employ people with the pronouns shit. They should be forced to put up or shut up for their ideology, where putting up essentially gives the authorities a carte blanche to imprison or use force against them.

This gets pretty close to calling for legalisation of entrapment. Do you understand why that particular fence was put there, if you want to remove it?

I don’t understand the american obsession with entrapment. In other countries the definition is more lax and sting operations are used to greater effect.

Can you explain why the fence is there, beyond ‘a cop forced me to do it’?

Agree. Building “golden” off ramps is just going to incite more of this shit, where people think disrupting police activity is acceptable and then panicked fleeing when they are detained. Even if officers try to comically deferentially deescalate, it’s a fundamentally dangerous scenario to embolden. What happens when a detainee hurts someone or the fleeing driver hits a bystander in their recklessness.

And the whole, find them later and arrest them, is also a joke. First the massive waste of resources and difficulty, second what happens when those involve reckless fleeing. “Officer showed up at their home and they ended up shot” is going to be much worse optics than it happening at the scene

Speaking of not getting shot when doing a follow up detention of some one who has fled, is the current procedure to freeze all bank assets? How about making phone/internet/power companies unilaterally cut off services?

Right Wingers who aren't even under any clear criminal investigation frequently get debanked by Paypal and whatnot just off vibes. Meanwhile one can be an active obstructionist of the right tribe and essentially do whatever they like without pissing off the payment processing overlords.

Right Wingers who aren't even under any clear criminal investigation frequently get debanked by Paypal and whatnot just off vibes

This is terrible and should not happen either

What happens when a detainee hurts someone or the fleeing driver hits a bystander in their recklessness.

This is a really good point I haven't seen people mention. This woman was, in the charitable reading, so flustered she was incapable of seeing an armed man standing a couple feet from her face in front of her, while looking right at him. What happens if he's not there, and a second or two later someone steps out from between the parked cars down the street? There's a reason car chases are dangerous even over a relatively short area.

Agree. Building “golden” off ramps is just going to incite more of this shit

Yes, in formulating policy, one needs to keep in mind that these Leftists are not ordinary criminals but rather organized agitators who are there to disrupt, obstruct, and provoke. If an additional "off-ramp" is set up, these protestors will only adjust their tactics so as to dance even closer to the line of full on attacking the government agents.

these Leftists are not ordinary criminals but rather organized agitators who are there to disrupt, obstruct, and provoke

What is the difference from a mob, in practical terms?

Mobs are dangerous but dumb. Police have developed tactics over the centuries to disperse mobs, or at least divert them into areas where they do less damage. These won't work on organized agitators, and if there's a mob that's being directed by the organized agitators, they will work less well.

How and when did this form of organized agitation start? If it stretches back more than a few decades, why haven't police tactics adapted?

What is the difference from a mob, in practical terms?

Let me give you a hypothetical: Suppose that ICE were to implement a policy that if a person is sitting behind the wheel of a running vehicle, and that vehicle is obstructing them, they will not attempt to arrest that person until they have read that person a formal statement and then given the person a chance to calmly drive away. (So that there is a nice "off-ramp" on the path to escalation.) In that case, these protestors will almost certainly adjust their tactics by blocking ICE with vehicles, ignoring any requests to move, waiting for that formal statement, and then driving around the block while other vehicles block ICE, their drivers confident that they can similarly ignore any requests to move.

With a random mob, there is a chance that adding "off-ramps" might actually improve the situation. A random, unprepared person who is asked to disperse by the authorities might actually comply.

Yes, it's true that an off-ramp to escalation could be gamed by protestors. But it seems to me that the situation is already being gamed by the police (or ICE in this case), and that isn't good either, especially since the police can game things that protestors can't.

Yes, it's true that an off-ramp to escalation could be gamed by protestors. But it seems to me that the situation is already being gamed by the police (or ICE in this case), and that isn't good either, especially since the police can game things that protestors can't.

How exactly are the police gaming the situation?

By standing in front of the car, they are creating a situation where fleeing is a threat to their life and therefore they can shoot someone who is fleeing.

More comments

It is unambiguous that the officer was in the way of the car, it is not unambiguous that it was done with the intent to hit him. In a stressful panic filled moment where her attention was on the guys directly to the left of her, it is quite plausible she just didn't notice him get into that position to begin with.

This slowmo is probably the best thing for it yet. Where do you think her attention was focused? Probably on the masked man trying to reach into her car, and not the guy who was walking in front.

Likewise, he probably wasn't thinking of "revenge". He is just walking there on his phone, sees the car start to pull towards him and he panics too and pulls out his gun and shoots. Because if he wasn't panicking and was thinking through every movement, then he's an idiot for thinking shooting the driver would slow down/stop a car instead of using those precious seconds moving his body out of the way.

Edit: Actually, turns out there is video evidence from the front of it now too https://youtube.com/watch?v=Jbq98aqF794?si=JPc0rc7f7RQbuIf1 the guy literally just walks in front of the car as she's already pulling away and her wheels are turned towards the right away from him.

Yeah, I don't think was this intentional from her. She was distracted and in panic by the men grabbing at her and he seems like an idiot too busy focusing on his phone to think "is it stupid to walk in front of a car?"

Had the vehicle not moved, the spot the officer stopped moving would not have been in front of the vehicle. If you go frame by frame you can see he stops in the area covered by the tree. If you compare that to the angle of the car before it starts moving, if it moves straight forward it would not hit that spot.

I think it's pretty clear the woman did not begin backing up the war with the intention of running someone over.

I also think it's clear the officer did not deliberately position himself in front of the car with the intention of stopping the vehicle.

Considering the officer's previous experience of being run over by a car in a previous incident, it's possible he entered into a fight response, and in response he took out his gun to shoot at a perceived threat. But in reality she wasn't trying to hit an officer, she was in a moment of panic trying to run away from the officer that grabbed the vehicle's door.

It's important to note this all happens in a matter of seconds. There's a lot of analysis about what we can see from behind the car being able to rewind and watch what happened frame by frame. In contrast there is very little analysis about what the situation looked like from the perspective of the officer that took the shot (partially because there is still no footage from the officer's POV).

Stephen Crowder has an attempt at an analysis, although I find it a bit lacking and the positions to be off, but I think the key point he attempts to tackle is general correct, in that the officer has no vision of the direction of the wheel of the vehicle.

Now there could be an argument made about what the officer should've done as soon as the car starts moving backwards. I think my instinctual response would actually to walk backwards, which would actually put me MORE in the path of the car, but it's also possible this may have caused my figure to be more clearly in front of the car and maybe the woman wouldn't have accelerated forward to begin with.

Regardless, I think any analysis assuming he was trying to walk in front of the car is incorrect. I think there can be discussion to be had about his reaction once the car starts moving, but again this happens in a matter of seconds and I'm giving the officer some leeway here considering his previous experience of being run over. (There is also some potential discussion to be had about how someone would react if they had previously been in an incident and how fit that makes them to continue doing their job).

I think it wasn't a great shoot (especially for general optics), but also the officer was in a position where it's reasonable for him to say he perceived mortal danger (which was most likely contributed to by his earlier vehicular incident) which justifies the shot. But if people are going to make a policy of borderline-legal obstructionism of ICE at every turn that's inherently going to increase the surface area for incidents like this to occur

someone else has already raised this but should the same charity be extended to James Fields in the Charlottesville attack (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlottesville_car_attack).

Looking at the case, it's unlikely. Fields plead guilty and admitted to intentionally driving into the crowd with hostile intent, striking dozens of people before fleeing the scene, which even if the hit is accidental, hit and runs are still illegal. He was also found guilty on all charges by a jury.

These don't seem to be directly comparable cases, he had his due process and the public found him in the wrong.

Well, not anymore, but you could have maintained a charitable stance right up to the end of his trial.

I remember analyzing that at the time. I know those streets in cville. GPS would never take you that way. He chose to drive down that street.

I think if she had hit and killed the officer instead of getting shot and killed shed be getting a murder charge like James Fields.

And if someone had shot James Fields on that street as he was accelerating down it towards a crowd they would have been in the right.

some of the roads were blocked off so GPS would instruct drivers to use a path which was impossible to use which meant people there trying to leave were just turning down roads trying to find ones which weren't blocked off so they could leave; the entire area was a complete mess

fields chose to turn down that road because of the armed group of counter protestors who pointed a gun at him

as he was accelerating down it towards a crowd they would have been in the right

when? when he was going 25mph down the road, when he slowed before the crowd at which point his vehicle was hit by flag or bat, and then he accelerated into the crowd?

it is just not believable that fields wanted to ram anyone let alone ram his way through a crowd until he was already surrounded, had already had a gun pointed at him by a different group of people, went down another street, was surrounded by another group of people, had his car attacked, and then hit the accelerator

sometimes from different people's perspectives, they can each be reasonably "in the right" if they used deadly violence against each other

I feel like this is missing the difference between "these people could rip me from my car and do whatever they want, it's an angry mob, bad stuff has happened before and I could be next" and "ripped from the car and arrested" in terms of threat provided by what is happening outside the vehicle.

Objectively speaking nothing happened to Fields, even after he killed people, while Good was shot three times. So the threat is definitely different but not in the way you intended, I think.

My assertion is that an agitated mob of protestors is more of a lethal threat outside of a vehicle than cops arresting you is.

You can absolutely alter the threat level by doing things like leaning out of your car and shouting racial slurs, or threatening/assaulting the police with a deadly weapon (potentially by accident in this case, but still). The baseline is important however.

Also, who the administration considers cops to be varies.

In a protestor-friendly administration, the fiery-but-peaceful protestors (who are enforcing the law the administration wished it could have) have qualified immunity while the cops don't; in one that is not so friendly, they do not.

in terms of threat provided by what is happening outside the vehicle.

In terms of objective threat, sure.

But that's the entire debate in a nutshell: if one suffers from a [perhaps reasonable] expectation that cops are about to black-bag you, and in attempting to flee from them get shot by one who [perhaps reasonably] believes you're going to drive right into him, is it reasonable to suffer death under those circumstances?

Of course, we already have an answer to that: 12 locals and the relevant executive have to agree it isn't reasonable, since either one can [from a subjective standpoint] pardon, and the executive spends political power to do that.

Which is probably what it's going to come down to.

Your perspective is missing "I placed myself with a deadly weapon (a car) in a situation where it could be used as a deadly weapon"

Without that caveat I'd say both Fields and this lady have much more defensible reactions with their vehicles.

But vehicles are shitty deadly weapons. They are endangered by people to the sides of the vehicle, but they are deadly against people in front of and behind the vehicle. So self defense is much harder to justify.

Kyle Rittenhouse brought a deadly weapon to a protest and then managed to kill three people only in self defense. Ironically if he had been in a vehicle his body count likely would have been higher and against people in front of the vehicle and not his direct aggressors to the sides of the vehicle.

She put herself in the middle of an armed situation and then resisted lawful orders. Doesn't really matter if at the exact moment her foot was on the gas she meant to hit him or not. Play stupid games win stupid etc.

She put herself in the middle of an armed situation and then resisted lawful orders.

According to witness reports, she was also being told to leave. It's hard not to resist lawful orders if they're contradicting themselves.

It's also of course hard to know what is a lawful order if you don't even know who is giving them. Masked men popping out of an unmarked vehicle would not indicate police to me, nor many others.

Crazy how she ended up in the middle of a ICE enforcement activity at random after following them around all day

Did you watch the first video link? Specifically, the first few seconds have:

  1. A pickup truck with blue and red lights flashing in it.
  2. Someone saying "get the fuck out of our neighborhood".
  3. Two individuals coming out of the truck, one of whom says "get out of the car" twice, then "get out of the fucking car".

So unless the video is a fake, she was not being told to leave, and I think it is reasonable to assume (based on #1 and #2) that these individuals were at minimum police of some form, and probably known to be ICE.

The way I see it is that nobody was trying to murder anyone, but two people committed aggravated stupidity in the presence of the enemy (and I'm not desperately impressed by the ICE agent by the car door either - scaring someone into fight-or-flight mode when your partner is standing in front of their car comes close to blue falconry by aggravated stupidity).

WTF was he doing standing in front of the car? Cops are trained not to do this for a reason. I don't like hostile mindreading, but the most plausible explanations are either complete failure to think or a Rachel Corrie-esque belief that standing in front of the car would hold it in place while his partner made the arrest.

WTF was she doing? Other than "A woman being aggressively approached by men dressed like hostile soldiers went into fight-or-flight mode and did something senseless" I can't make sense of it.

Aggravated stupidity in the presence of the enemy shouldn't be a capital crime (except where the enemy is a foreign enemy in an actual war) but per natural law it often is. The fool from ICE got lucky. Good didn't.

If this was regular cops, the other question would be why make so much effort to effect a marginal obstruction arrest. Unless Good had done something worse than making an illegal U-turn in an area ICE were operating in, it isn't likely that obstruction charges would stick if they did arrest her. This would have been, had it worked, a contempt of cop arrest. I'm not the kind of pro-disorder leftist who thinks that contempt of cop arrests should never be made, but they are a tool for removing assholes* from the situation. If someone who is an asshole but isn't actively criming wants to be somewhere else, that is a win-win outcome.

* This is a semi-technical term used by cops

WTF was he doing standing in front of the car? Cops are trained not to do this for a reason. I don't like hostile mindreading, but the most plausible explanations are either complete failure to think or a Rachel Corrie-esque belief that standing in front of the car would hold it in place while his partner made the arrest.

You can see from the agent's POV footage (phone? bodycam?) that he'd been walking around the car to record the driver and tag info, and that he was focusing on recording the wife who'd just been yelling at him as he walked in front of the car.

The officer who shoot the decedent wasn’t originally standing in front of the car. It wasn’t until the decedent reversed at an angle that the officer was put in the path of the car. The car then accelerated and the officer pulled his gun and shot.

The officer probably should’ve been more aware of his situation but I think it’s an overstated talking point that he put himself directly in front of the car.

"A woman being aggressively approached by men dressed like hostile soldiers went into fight-or-flight mode and did something senseless"

Except that she knew they were ICE agents.

In the longer videos, you can see her hand "waiving through" the ICE vehicles before she is approached. She knew who they were and knew what she was doing. Perhaps she did freak out and panic when she realized the ICE agents weren't going to play nice anymore, but it's not possible to plead ignorance and "scary masked men."

More generally, a reasonable reading of the context suggests almost beyond doubt that these are cops. It's the middle of the day, they have lights on, there's a bunch of people with cameras filming what the guys with guns are doing. If this was actually some sort of impersonation of an officer or actual bad masked men (terrorists? chechens?), it seems less than likely they'd be so nonchalant about their terroristing being filmed by bystanders.

The "I got scared so I ran" defense is one of the most commonly trotted out by those that are the most comically guilty - and aware of the guilt. It's a retreat to infancy and a desperate spasm designed to cast of any and all responsibility whatsoever. It's not quite as bald faced as a temporary insanity plea, but it's in the same ballpark.

My read of the comment above yours was that she counted ICE as hostile soldiers.

I'm not defending the woman's behaviour, which I described as aggravated stupidity. I am attacking the ICE agents for poor police work culminating in a legal but avoidable shooting.

Allowing your fight-or-flight instincts to override common sense, causing you to do something dangerously stupid to evade cops, is not acceptable behaviour, but it is reasonably predictable behaviour. Good policing isn't just about insisting on co-operation, it is also about making it psychologically easy for an untrained normie to co-operate without panicking. That is part of why normal beat police have, going back to the time of Robert Peel, eschewed the paramilitary aesthetic.

Even if you know they are all cops, a cop in tacticool gear is scarier than a cop in a regular cop uniform. (And a cop in riot gear is even scarier). If you are trying to intimidate a hardened violent criminal into surrendering without a fight, this is a good thing. In the more common scenario where you are trying to encourage petty criminals, peaceful protesters, and randos in the wrong place at the wrong time to co-operate without making loud noises or sudden movements that could be mistaken for a threat, it is a bad thing.

is not acceptable behaviour, but it is reasonably predictable behaviour

Should it really be unacceptable to do reasonably predictable behavior? At least if you're being reasonably predictable, others can be trained to maneuvre around you.

I am attacking the ICE agents for poor police work culminating in a legal but avoidable shooting.

I think it is a valid criticism that ICE agents are not well-trained for performing this kind of policework. But it is the local officials who have forced them into this role, by refusing to allow local police who are better-trained for this to do their jobs. If those officials truly want to de-escalate, they should start arresting people who obstruct ICE themselves, rather than treating them as outlaws.

  1. This iceman was hit by a different car previously.

I haven't seen this claim before, so I found this article discussing the issue, in case anyone else here might be curious about this piece of information.

https://bakersfieldnow.com/news/nation-world/ice-agent-who-shot-minnesota-woman-dragged-by-car-in-june-by-fleeing-child-sex-offender-renee-good-dhs-ice-mn

I don't think the driver was trying to hit the guy, but it doesn't matter too much because she did anyways. And she's not going to be able to do any interviews explaining her intent.

In terms of prosecution, another commenter said so below, but federal officers are generally immune from state charges, so we're not going to get another chauvin situation.

Seems like almost a pure accident to me. The driver panics when an aggressive man yanks on her car's door handle, and tries to get away ASAP. Officer with an itchy trigger finger interprets the car accelerating at him and decides to shoot first and ask questions later.

Of course, if you go looking for fault then you can definitely dig some up. She shouldn't have been there in the first place. She should have listened to the directions of the officers. She shouldn't have panicked. The Iceman shouldn't have been in front of the car. He should have focused on getting out of the way instead of pulling out a gun. Shooting wouldn't have made a difference since he was so close. He wasn't in the vehicle's path when he shot -- it actually sort of looks like he leaned in to get a better angle to shoot.

Partisans will selectively parse evidence to support their side and vilify their outgroup. The fact it's ambiguous makes it a pretty good scissor event, though I doubt it will reach the heights of BLM since that was a 3-standard deviation phenomenon.

scissor event

@beej67 argues as much.

For all the nerds who enjoy playing video games, there is a FPS game called Ready Or Not which involve disarm criminals who either captured civilians or disguised as them, while it is only a game and hurting civilians only lower our score, we can also restart if we die, it do give me and my friends a new perspective on what pressure police is under in these situation

One main pressure is, you never know if someone is armed and potentially kill you before you restrain them, people can comply all you orders all day long but one last non-compliance and kill half of your team

In my opinion we don't pay police enough for them to risk their life in these situations, rationally they should always shoot first given any legal justification

If police aren't paid enough to sometimes not shoot people, surely the civilians on the other side of the interaction - who are paid even less - are even more justified in shooting?

Home defence? Yes Street? No

As a non-american, to me bringing firearm out of home as civilians comes with higher than normal responsibility and expectation from society of you are not expected to use it, while police are required and expected to use lethal force in certain situations with the risk of misjudging can mean their own life

In my opinion, a better solution will be to increase police responsibility on lethal/non-lethal force usage AND responsibility of failing to respond, while simultaneously increase their pay level to balance out these increased responsibilities

If medical doctor's training and responsibility give them such a high wage, police's training and responsibility should be on a similar level with similar pay

Sure! For example a long time ago I heard of a case where the police was executing an arrest warrant, but got the wrong address. The owner thought he's being burgled and opened fire, and luckily for him, he managed to survive the whole ordeal that resulted from that. He got taken to court, where it was indeed determined that he was justified in shooting.

And it happened in Germany!

will the shooter be charged with a state crime in Minnesota and will he be able to avoid that charge?

He'll avoid it. Lon Horiuchi, the FBI sniper in Ruby Ridge was charged with murder, because he is a murderer, but the case was thrown out.

https://famous-trials.com/rubyridge/1142-idahovhoriuchi

the Supreme Court has held that the Supremacy Clause cloaks federal agents with immunity if they act reasonably in carrying out their responsibilities. See In re Neagle, 135 U.S. 1, 75

There's an if there, but my call is no state murder trial.

Um, did you read the case? He was charged with murder, and the District Court dismissed on immunity grounds, and the 9th Circuit, in the opinion you linked, reversed the District Court and allowed the case to proceed. Subsequent to this the en banc 9th Circuit upheld the decision. Horiuchi ultimately wasn't prosecuted, but that's because the successor to the original prosecutor dropped the charges. All of this is irrelevant anyway since Minnesota isn't in the 9th Circuit. There may be other caselaw out there but I haven't seen anything to suggest that a state prosecution would be precluded entirely.

New York v. Tanella, 374 F.3d 141 (2nd Cir. 2004) or Texas v. Kleinart, 855 F.3d 305 (5th Cir. 2017), are probably the kind of thing you're looking for, but those are admittedly other circuits.

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?

No. The Chauvin example is actually the wildly unlikely scenario. As it always has been.

1. Can we get some links to full videos that aren't on Mass Media website? Navigating those with all of their ads and popus - even with AdBlocker - is a nightmare. The first one I saw, also, was only a clip of about the final ten seconds.

Here are good links to multiple angles of the video. @self_made_human posted them downthread:

Angle 1

Angle 2 [Twitter] [youtube]

Angle 3 (Emerged as I was writing this)

  1. Hard disagree on your assessment of the culpability of the shooter. When the car starts moving (i.e. the driver doesn't kill the engine and present their hands), this is pretty much brandishing a deadly weapon. At point blank, the cop is justified 100%. I've posted before about how people really overestimate the ability to "think rationally" in situations like this. You default to a lot of training / muscle memory / self-preservation instincts. Again, go watch some police bodycam videos on YouTube to understand how quick things can turn from ho-hum traffic stop to shots fired.

About ten or twelve years ago I was walking down the street and an older woman pulling out of a bank drive-thru bumped me with her car. Then she bumped me again after I banged on the hood and started yelling. I had a 4-year-old kid walking with me at the time, too. It's good to know I could have shot her in the face three times if I had been strapped.

  • -10

Unnecessary antagonism aside, this is actually a pretty good scissor statement.

Because my answer is an unqualified "Yes."

If someone hit me with a car twice, I would view that as 2x assault with a deadly weapon. In terms of the next course of action, reasonable people can disagree over whether or not they would flee or try to "de-escalate" (whatever the hell that means), but the justification for self-defense - up to and including lethal force - is now, in my mind, undoubtedly present.

It's not clear whether you're being sarcastic or not. I'm somewhat compelled to report this to the mods for being low effort and probably antagonistic, but I feel like they have better things to do.

If you want to actually engage with my argument, I'm here for it, pal.

I thought the mental image of my comment was amusing.

It is, but it's also a confusing non-sequitur, since the previous discussion was of a car's bumping a pedestrian, not a fender bender between two cars.

You were a police officer conducting a law enforcement action at a bank drive-thru with a 4-year-old-kid?

The last I checked the criminal laws police officers conducting law enforcement operations didn't get any special privileges regarding standards when lethal force is justified, but even assuming they did:

  1. This lady actually hit me. Not hard enough for it to matter, but she did make contact; there are nor arguments about whether if you look at which way the wheel was pointing you can divine if she was trying to steer towards me or go around or had the car in reverse or whatever.

  2. She hit me again after I yelled at her for hitting me and putting a kid in danger.

Well, police officers do genuinely have more lattitude in the use of force than the rest of us, for the good reason that they are police officers and we are not. For example, in many jurisdictions there is a duty to retreat from a violent confrontation if you can safely do so. A police officer does not have a duty to retreat, because if they did, you could evade arrest by just becoming violent. Someone who is not a police officer must be a "reluctant participant" in order for their use of force to be legal. Police are not required to be reluctant participants - they can initiate force to secure compliance.

But you are right that generally, there really aren't any situations where police get to use lethal force where the rest of us couldn't if we found ourselves in the same situations.

...and neither of those give you legal equivalency a law enforcement officer conducting legitimate law enforcement activities.

The last I checked the criminal laws police officers conducting law enforcement operations didn't get any special privileges regarding standards when lethal force is justified,

This begs three questions:

  1. When did you last check?

  2. How did you last check?

  3. Why did your check fail to find rules of engagement?

This, but unironically.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=K9CJY5p0xz4

Can we get some links to full videos that aren't on Mass Media website? Navigating those with all of their ads and popus - even with AdBlocker - is a nightmare. The first one I saw, also, was only a clip of about the final ten seconds.

This seems to have collected the different angles at the beginning and then random coverage afterwards (didn't watch that far).

This is just the main video.

I think you mean @zoink instead of @self_made_human for who shared links to multiple angles of the video.

I am pleased that I have achieved a level of fame/notoriety where I don't even have to do the hard work myself.

@100ProofTollBooth I'm afraid I don't think I've added anything to the discussion on Mrs. Good. It was probably someone else.

self_made did share links as well.

Continuing downthread, there are actually a bunch of video links. Shame on me for not reading more before posting and the re-editing. But now, it's all a little messy, so I'm just going to send out a blanket "Great job, everyone. Terrrrrr-ific!"

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.

Yes. The Ashley Babbitt shooting was justified. Waco was justified. Arguably Kent State was justified. It is okay to use force against people resisting law-enforcement activity.

I suspect an agent provocateur of some kind triggered Kent state by firing rifle shots over the heads of the guardsmen. There were several soldiers that reported that they opened fire because they were being shot at, and civilian reports of seeing armed people in civilian clothes. And the shooting doesn’t really track like a traditional riot control accident given the distances involved.

This case looks a lot more justified than Babbitt. Accelerating a vehicle towards a police officer is an imminent threat of death or serious harm, while Babbitt was unarmed and did not present an immediate threat to anyone. The officer could have used force, but I don't think they were justified to use deadly force given the circumstances.

Being overrun by a hostile mob seems to me like an imminent threat of serious harm, too. In retrospect we know the protestors were unarmed and mostly well-behaved (by riot standards, anyway), but the officer couldn't have known that.

Its simply a bad comparison. The central problem with Jan6th is that the Capital Police consistently failed to do their job, and those failures were the cause that escalated the protest into a riot, and eventually into Babbitt's death. Its important to note that the officer that shot Babbitt was not the first one she encountered that day, she had just walked past several other officers who were acting as if she was legally inside the building. There is no such lack of cohesion here by the ICE officers. None of them are telling her to drive while another is telling her to stop.

I think the Jan 6 fought against the regime and fafo. Now I like the Jan6 people but they got the punishment you get when you fight the current regime. And then they were mostly pardoned when we got a new regime.

Whether the 2020 election had fraud doesn’t matter. They protested and fought the regime that took power and got what happens to people who fight the current political power. I thank them for their service .

The central problem with Jan6th is that the Capital Police consistently failed to do their job, and those failures were the cause that escalated the protest into a riot

I had thought that riots are caused by the rioters rioting. I can kind-of see one making the argument that undercover agents incited the crowd, but I can't see how the police failing to prevent people from entering a building is what causes people to enter a building, as if this particular crowd of people is just a force of nature with no agency or responsibility.

failing

You mean, given the command to let them in. I'm sure if the govt wanted to post the god damned military with rifles there they could have stopped an unarmed crowd of Q-propagandized boomers from entering.

Seems like you don't understand the psychology of riots. Very few people set out to riot, and certainly there is little evidence jan 6 was such a time. Instead protests escalate to riots when certain factors come to play, most notably on J6 was that no actual guidance was given by police as to what borders were going to be enforced. Instead there was a shoddily constructed perimeter which was quickly abandoned, and then the fleeing police failed to secure the doorways.

That is the proper, traditional Riot. What is muddying it is the conflation of "riots" where a group of people go to a protest looking for trouble ahead of time, armed and armored. Jan 6 seems like a traditional riot. BLM and Anti-ICE protests have been something else, but called a protest/riot for some reason.

Edit: Kids these days, can't even riot properly! SMH.

A lot of people had to do dumb shit they shouldn't have done for Babbit's death to fall out of it, is what I take that person's point to be.

Pointing out that the police did something wrong doesn't require thinking the rioters were in the right. People have this zero-sum picture of how blame works that just doesn't correspond to reality at all. You see it from the other political direction in "victim-blaming" discourse - "maybe you shouldn't have dressed like that or gotten that drunk" does not mean "the guy who assaulted you did nothing wrong and you deserved it", but when people get emotional common sense gets left behind. In a lot of these situations, a lot had to go wrong, many people contributed to it, some of them doubtless behaved worse than others, but even so, it makes no sense to insist there is one and only party at fault.

Would you be willing to bite the FAFO pill on the Jan 6th rioter

Yes, and both are downstream of the same problem: we've developed a culture where 'protestors' are allowed to do almost anything and expect no reaction or meaningful punishment... until they meet the one person that reacts.

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.

for a cause that the majority does not support

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.

I voted for ICE enforcing immigration law which includes using deadly force with people obstructed him from doing his job.

If the issue was the woman obstructing a law officer, then surely arresting her would have been an appropriate and proportional response? I doubt this would have become a viral story if that was all that ended up happening.

Most people who find the situation outrageous seem to think so because they believe the suspect was truly trying to flee and not hit any of the officers, and they therefore think that the use of deadly force was not appropriate. Separate from any of the facts of the case, is it your position that merely obstructing law officers or fleeing law officers should be punishable by immediate death?

Because I can say that sounds like a cure that is worse than the disease to me.

I disagree. Getting rid of obstruction is a cure that I very much want to solve the disease.

To your question. Yes. I think the police can kill to enforce the law.

To your question. Yes. I think the police can kill to enforce the law.

This sort of doesn't answer my question. I think everyone except for the most committed anarchists believe it is appropriate for police to kill to enforce the law in at least some circumstances.

What I am interested in is what the limits to your position are? For example, you mentioned voting in your original post as a possible source of law enforcement legitimacy. Given that there is a fair argument that Donald Trump would have won the 2020 elections if not for COVID, and thus it was the democratic will of the people to have harsher lockdowns, under what circumstances do you think it would have been appropriate for law enforcement to kill people who violated curfews or lockdowns in 2020-2022?

I guess I'm curious if you recognize any limiting principle on law enforcement's use of lethal force? Do you hold democratic will above constitutional limits? Do you bite the bullet when your political opponents are in power, and accept that they can pass and enforce laws that might make you a criminal under the right circumstances?

We already crossed this rubicon. Yes they can and did in 2020-2024.

They did. I wasn’t allowed to work or travel to weddings during Covid. They won the election. They enforced their will.

But this situation is different since the person who died used physical force on an officer. I guess I shouldn’t get shot on the street for violating Covid rules but if I hit an officer while violating those rules I am at the mercy of the regime.

We already crossed this rubicon. Yes they can and did in 2020-2024.

They did. I wasn’t allowed to work or travel to weddings during Covid. They won the election. They enforced their will.

I understand that they did that. I'm asking you if you consider that legitimate within your own political beliefs?

Is it just might makes right, and the will of the people as interpreted by whoever is currently in charge, or do you believe that the law or its enforcement can, in principle, be wrong or invalid for some reason?

As another set of examples, do you consider the American Revolutionary War or the American Civil War to be just wars? Is it ever correct to rebel against the current authorities? If so, what circumstances make it correct or legitimate?

Yes. Might makes right. I don’t believe multicultural societies and Democracy are compatible

Revolutionary War from a moral perspective was not just.

But if you win then you win.

Is it just might makes right, and the will of the people as interpreted by whoever is currently in charge, or do you believe that the law or its enforcement can, in principle, be wrong or invalid for some reason?

What an interesting question. What do you see as the implications of that statement being either true or false?

I do personally prefer the old rule that police or civilians can use deadly force to subdue criminals fleeing from a felony. Obstruction would not be a common law felony but thats only relevant for a question where the cop shot her in the back while she's on foot.

fleeing law officers should be punishable by immediate death?

Fleeing in a car? Yes. If you try to take the police on a car chase where you can slam into random civilians in an attempt to escape you should be shot before you get the chance to take anyone else down. Thinking you could just get away with it if you resist hard enough shouldn't be encouraged.

To make this even slightly possible the penalties for non-murderous lesser crimes should be reduced to reduce the incentive to try and flee.

Tennessee v. Garner supports using deadly force to stop a suspect if they are a danger to the community, and Plumhoff v. Rickard is a case directly supporting shooting such a driver who was considered a deadly threat to others under the totality of the circumstances.

If the issue was the woman obstructing a law officer, then surely arresting her would have been an appropriate and proportional response?

Surely. But when one officer attempted to arrest her, she attempted to flee by driving her car through the space occupied by another officer.

My intention was to clarify /u/Opt-out's exact position. I didn't want to jump to conclusions based on potentially sloppy wording.

I don't know, based on the comment I'm responding to alone, whether they would make the sort of statement you're making here, or whether they would disagree and say that even attempting arrest would not have been necessary in this case, and going straight to trying to kill her would have been appropriate and (potentially) just. Hence my question.

Sure, arresting her would have been reasonable. That's why they tried to do it.

Unfortunately, she tried to escape by driving through the police cordon, and they, understandably, thought she was trying to run one of them over and shot her. It's a tragedy that could have easily been avoided had she 1) not been there or 2) cooperated with the arrest(realistically I doubt she faces charges).

For what it is worth, I think your position and /u/The_Nybbler's are both fairly reasonable takes.

They don't seem to be what /u/Opt-out was saying, hence me asking the question the way I did. I don't believe anyone else in this thread has implied that they think law enforcement officers should kill people who merely obstruct them, and I was trying to clarify whether it was just a sloppily worded post or whether it represented their true opinion on the subject.

I even read an article where an obstructor remarked what are they using real bullets instead of rubber bullets.

I saw the video, but can't find a link now. Basically a black dude was filming on his porch directly in front of where the woman's car finally crashed. Her partner? was sitting on his driveway screaming 'Why did you use real bullets?!' amongst other things.

I think the woman and her partner didn't understand the seriousness of the situation they were putting themselves into by choosing to obstruct a law enforcement operation and attend a protest.

Edit: Found a link. Might be taken down quick.

2nd Edit: Full version

it seems reasonable to me that the iceman was looking for retribution for the previous car strike, and she gave it to him.

Nothing about this is reasonable. That is an enormous and entirely-unwarranted leap in logic. Possible isn't the same as probable.

Did I say probable?

Reasonable is the correct word here. Crazy gangstalking conspiracies are possible, body doubles and crisis actors are possible, but these are both unreasonable.

Considering that the officer's state of mind was being effected by his previous encounter with a protestor and their car is both possible and reasonable.

The adjective "reasonable" as applied to a conclusion is often (though not always) exclusive of other conclusions also being considered reasonable; definite vs. indefinite article helps, but there wasn't an article here. TitaniumButterfly was objecting to the idea that your hypothesis was the reasonable conclusion.

"Plausible" would be a synonym for the sense you intended without the ambiguity.

We’re splitting hairs here. You’re right plausible would also work, but I think what I was saying was clear.

Yes of course it is obvious to assume his previous history was affecting his state of mind.

But it isn’t obvious it affected it in the way you postulated (ie revenge) but instead may (likely?) created fear.

the other thing is if the guy has been run over before it is not retribution it is reacting to previous stimuli. dude doesn't want to be run over again so does the only thing that might prevent him from being run over.

Much the same as someone pointing a gun at you though -- just because deadly force may not always prevent deadly force doesn't mean that you can't try it.

I was doing some research and there were 260k ICE detentions for 2025 alone, and afik this is the only incident where a non-detainee died during the detention process,and more so, and only 20 detainees have died while being detained, for reasons unrelated to excessive force. The overwhelming majority of arrests are uneventful and professional. Even if he was in the wrong, incidents such as this are exceedingly rare, even more so compared to traffic police stops. Just as police shooting videos occasionally go viral and it's unclear who was in the wrong, this was bound to eventually happen with an ICE arrest, too.

This iceman was hit by a different car previously.

I guess that explains why he was so quick. She starts the car moving towards him, he instantly pulls his gun.

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.

I don't think so. I don't think she even knew he was there; she was fleeing the OTHER officer, the one at her door trying to arrest her.

it seems reasonable to me that the iceman was looking for retribution for the previous car strike, and she gave it to him.

More likely he just didn't want to get hit again.

Shooting her would have had no effect on his safety, even if she had gotten traction. They were at “point blank” range.

I think if he hadn't shot her, he would have been struck by the car in pretty much the same way and she would have driven away. But he couldn't know that at the time. If she'd been meaning to hit him (and he hadn't shot her), she could have instead squared up better on him and killed him.

I have my gripes with urbanists, but the amount of people online who diminish the deadly threat of a car driven by an agitated person is starting to make me sympathize with them.

join the dark side

Imagine this discussion if the car was a tiny Renault Clio. I was hit by an accelerating car as a kid, and I got off with a few scratches because it was a tuk tuk and I was wearing a protective school bag. NGL, that bag was a formidable cushion.

Not to mention that there has been an ongoing arms race for a long time among suburbanite normies buying bigger and bigger, heavier and heavier vehicles, as DirtyWaterHotDog alluded to it below, because they all want more comfort and more protection from accidents.

My main complaint with Urbanists™ analysis is they fail to acknowledged that (until 2025) CAFE standards produced an enormously perverse pressure that contributed to the bigger and bigger vehicle trend. Normally people would be incentivized to buy smaller cars because they would be cheaper. The footprint model instead meant that small already efficient cars required expensive add-ons like hybridization or turbocharging to reach CAFE standards while giant trucks and SUVs could continue rolling along with much cheaper less fuel efficient systems.

There's also a pretty big gap on the enforcement. We have already crossed the diminishing returns point into negative territory with respect to additional vehicle safety you can buy. Despite progressively increasing vehicle safety standards and size, fatal crash rates are up from their lows. People clearly are at the point where their perceived safely produces absolute shit tier driver ability and attention. A huge portion of vehicular crashes are single vehicle incidents.

It's clear people in general don't realize how much of a hazard obstructing traffic with a two ton Honda Pilot is. Two things I think could help send the message that you need to pay attention and not block regular traffic.

  1. Increased enforcement against left lane campers. If you don't have the awareness to see a cop coming up from behind you and move over, you probably shouldn't be driving.
  2. Hear me out. Green light cameras. When the light turns green it detects when a car is still on the sensor after say two seconds. The light then takes a picture of the driver. If you're on your phone, automatic ticket. If whatever you're doing on your phone is more important that getting to where you're driving to, then pull off the road. I've more than once been stuck behind someone on a set of synchronized lights where me missed every green because it took them 20 seconds to move after the light change. You would think that after the line of cars behind them started honking at the first or second light that they would try to pay attention at the next red, but no. I'm sure it's wasn't just vindictiveness from being honked at too, you could see them go straight to their phone through the rear windshield.

Being distracted and obstructing traffic should not be normal parts or every day driving.

Semi related, but the US probably does need more tiers of vehicle licensing. Right now it takes extra testing and training to drive a motorcycle, where you're mostly a hazard to yourself, but until you hit 10,000 pounds GVW you're good to go with the license you got at 16. The 15 hours you spent with your driving instructor at 15 behind a 3,000 pound Chevy Cruze apparently did not prepare people to avoid rolling their Ford Explorers. Instead of being like, if you want to drive a huge SUV you have to demonstrate you are not going to be a hazard to yourself and others, we have TPMS requirements. A very small factor in this most recent incident, but the car clearly spun out the drive wheels. In that case you are clearly not in control of the car, which is at least reckless on a public road, especially when surrounded by people. TPMS discourages people running dedicated winter tiers at slightly lower pressures, even though climates like Minnesota clearly warrant them. The difference in traction on snow and ice between dedicated winter and (even good quality) all seasons is vast.


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