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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   33503 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026

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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.

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.

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'

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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

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.

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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.

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

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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

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?"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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 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?

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

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

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.

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.

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!"

  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

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.

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.

I'm starting a new top-level regarding trigger happy Iceman meets wine mom in Minneapolis because, rather than debating the videos, I'd like to focus more on a compare and contrast to get a true culture war angle. People have made an analogy to the woman who died on Jan 6th but I don't think it lands strongly enough. Permit me to cut closer to the bone, friends.

The only fatality on Jan 6th was an unarmed woman being shot by a federal agent[1] because she was opposing what she considered an illegitimate government action. Liberals tearlessly argued this is what happens when you Fuck Around while conservatives argued she was righteously Resisting (TM).

Today the players are the same but the jerseys are flipped. Liberals cry with so, so many tears of empathy for the dead woman in the car while conservatives argue they were obstructing a legitimate state function and put the officer in danger and this is what happens when you Fuck Around.

In broad strokes it's clear neither side cares about democracy or rule of law per se. Conservative faith in rule of law evaporates when it says no to Trump and liberal empathy for the scrappy civil disobedients dries up when it's a Chud. Both sides are happy with mob violence when it's their side doing it and cry tyranny whenever they Find Out.

  1. Okay a federally employed capitol police officer, not technically a federal agent. Sorry for the artistic license.

The big difference between them is that the bullet that hit Babbitt was extremely effective. People were trying to break down the doors, one of them got shot, they stopped and lost all steam.

The iceman shooter could've been in the fight mode due to his previous car-related experience, but what are the situations in which shooting the driver is the action that fixes everything? Again, I'm not asking if his action was legally justified (I am leaning towards "yes" as in "yes, he's going to be acquitted"), but if it was the correct one.

Let's imagine there was no question whether he could dodge the car or not, that he was right in front of the grille. What would shooting Good have improved in this situation? It wouldn't have stopped the car, it wouldn't have saved him, it wouldn't have allowed her to escape justice. It could only prevent Good from going full Carmageddon on the rest of the team, which is not what she was trying to do.

The best action would probably jumping on the hood, or getting the center of gravity high enough the car knocks you over instead of under. This is such a split second decision though. Shooting has high variance, maybe it only provides revenge.

The best action would probably jumping on the hood, or getting the center of gravity high enough the car knocks you over instead of under.

It's a Honda Pilot, not a Chevy Corvette. The hood is very high.

It could only prevent Good from going full Carmageddon on the rest of the team, which is not what she was trying to do.

Which is an assumption as to intention on your part. We don't know what she would have done, which is the problem. Even if she didn't intend to run down other ICE agents, she could well have done so as part of her efforts to flee the scene. This happens in such situations; the Charlottesville guy hit people when trying to get away (after deliberately driving into the crowd), it's what contributed to the murders of two British Army corporals after they drove into an IRA funeral:

Wearing civilian clothes, both armed with Browning Hi-Power pistols and in a civilian car, the soldiers drove into the funeral procession of an IRA member, seemingly by mistake. Three days before, the loyalist Michael Stone had attacked an IRA funeral and killed three people. Believing the soldiers were loyalists intent on repeating Stone's attack, dozens of people surrounded and attacked their car.

The ICE guy was not a mind reader. "Well she's trying to knock me down, but that's not intentional, that's panic, and if I get out of the way she'll just drive off and not go after anyone else" was not something he could know for sure, especially given that she was demonstrably there using her car to block ICE and to get in the way (see @Blueberry's post above).

Let's imagine there was no question whether he could dodge the car or not, that he was right in front of the grille. What would shooting Good have improved in this situation?

It could have minimized the time a friend of his would get dragged, if he got stuck the same way he did in the other incident.

I can agree that with perfect hindsight he shouldn't have shot her, but that argument strikes as kinda insane. How was he supposed to have perfect hindsight in the moment it was happening?

perfect hindsight

I'm talking about perfect foresight, something that should be drilled into leos in the police academy. "Don't stand in front of the car, because there's literally nothing you can do if the driver floors it unless you have been a D1 track and field athlete. You might spend your last moments shooting the driver and you might even hit'em, but good luck explaining to Saint Peter why you shot a seventy-year-old lady with mild dementia. Yes, there are situations when spending the last moments of your life shooting at the perp trying to get away is the best course of action, but don't be a fucking dumbass cowboy and put yourself into them."

Ms. Good might have listened to her wife and floored it because her wife told her to in this particular case. In another universe she might've wanted to put the car in park to get out of the car and pressed the wrong pedal. In a third universe she was pulled out of the car when the car was in gear and she was the one holding the brake pedal. In a fourth one she was actually Basma Faheem, a recent convert to radical Islam trying to lure a federal officer into a false state of complacency and run him over.

I'm talking about perfect foresight, something that should be drilled into leos in the police academy

That's still pefect hindsight. The only reason you're acting like you know what should have been drilled into their heads is because you've seen the video and can analyze all the little things that could have been done to avoid this specific situation. It's not clear if your recommendations would run into other issues during standard police work, so I find it a bit silly to declare with so much certainty how this should be handled.

How was he supposed to have perfect hindsight in the moment it was happening?

He wasn't, but the point of discussing whether what he did was optimal in hindsight is, IMO, to come up with a consensus that can be drilled into other LEOs so that they act more optimally if they ever find themselves in an analogous situation in the future. This is a high-profile case; whether the consensus emerges as "it was a good idea to shoot Good" or "in an idea world he should have jumped out of the way/whatever" can be expected to have some influence on cops' gut reactions when they find themselves in similar predicaments.

There is no such thing as “optimal”. It comes down to whether you think obstructing ICE is good.

  1. If he shoots we get fewer Goods obstructing ICE
  2. If he doesn’t shoot he’s probably safe getting away but we get more incidents.

I am pro-shooting because it reduces obstruction and reduces future crime.

It comes down to whether you think obstructing ICE is good.

Well, no. By "analogous situations in the future" I meant things of the shape "armed LEO thinks that a hitherto-non-murderous civilian is suddenly about to ram them with a car", whatever the identity and motivation of the civilian (and indeed, whichever law-enforcement unit the officer belongs to).

Also, with respect, you reasoning seems like a textbook example of terrorism in the original French Reign of Terror sense. "At the end of the day, it doesn't matter if the state was justified in killing this particularly citizen; so long as the killing frightens other civilians away from non-lethally obstructing state action in the future, then it was justified" is a very dark road.

I prefer my dark road to anarchy. Not taking the dark road means 1% of the population deciding they don’t want something can cancel the ability of the government to do anything. A hecklers veto.

And we are struggling with this in a lot of places. Shooting one blue haired lesbian now lets ICE do their job. Honestly probably saves a billion in lost ICE man-power hours. It’s just a good trade.

Not taking the dark road means 1% of the population deciding they don’t want something can cancel the ability of the government to do anything.

This is a very silly false dichotomy: you are assuming the conclusion that "kill Mrs Good, possibly unjustly" is the only way to curb the problem of excessive obstructive protesting, creating a binary choice between human sacrifice and anarchy run amok. In fact, I don't believe that killings intended to create mass terror are the only way to curb obstructionism, if that is what you want to do - let alone that it is the most effective one. That's the whole crux of the debate, and you just whizz past it.

What are my other options?

Killing a few obstructors feels like it will solve the obstruction problem to me. Honestly there is a meme going around now where a “solves the problem button exists” and then everyone says these reasons I don’t care about will be a problem for not pressing it. I think I can just press this button.

More comments

I don't think many people are doubting the legality of the Babbitt shoot. They're saying the optics were horrible and that the equivalent leftwing figure is a supermartyr.

Also the leftwing should inherently have their sympathy dial turned to 8/10 at all times versus the conservative dial being at 4/10, which makes it shocking when an incident like that just gets instantaneously overlooked and justified.

In exceptionally simplistic terms, the people on the left who are against ICE and pro Somali or whoever immigration don’t love Somalis, they just hate their fellow countrymen.

I don't think this works, as there are also relatively right-leaning libertarians like Bryan Caplan who are also in favor of more immigration.

My highly tentative suspicion is that at least some of the political division over immigration is downstream of genetic differences related to the Big Five personality trait of Openness to Experience. I think this also explains a lot of the increasing urban-rural divide in American politics, with people often self-sorting based on their genetic predisposition to cosmopolitanism and tribalism.

Unfortunately for the tribalists, there are a lot of benefits to city living due to networking effects, and so, generally speaking, city folk enjoy a higher standard of living than rural folk in the modern day. Since rural folk will have a higher genetic predisposition towards tribalism, this leads to growing resentment at their "unfair" status compared to urban elites, in a cycle that just gets worse and worse as the genetic ability to be cosmopolitan leaves rural breeding stock with each generation, leaving those who are left behind less and less able to cut it in the city.

It's not that rural people are genetically inferior. They're well suited to a small, close-knit tribal environment that was the human norm for 2 million years, but in the last 10,000 years the equation has flipped and cosmopolitanism generally outcompetes tribalism over the long term, and so humans keep building cities, and rural folk keep losing out and being xenophobic about the cosmopolitan urban areas.

I actually think H.P. Lovecraft is a great example of this phenotype. He was undoubtedly a genius, but with many of his aliens I find myself wondering if there isn't some way we could team up with them in a vast, galactic civilization? For example, the starfish-headed elder things and the mi-go seem like species we could eventually reach some sort of understanding with. Similarly, the underground K'n-yan seem like people we could get along with, under the right circumstances. And honestly, learning fourth-dimensional math witchcraft from a rat-human hybrid that can move through walls seems kind of cool actually (though I could do without the ritual baby sacrifice.)

But Lovecraft's horror was so effective because he understood the danger the Other posed. One of his most racist stories, "The Horror at Red Hook", which is partially inspired by his time living in New York city, is all about the effect that immigrant populations have on a native-born population. And yet, I find myself living in an apartment in a city, surrounded by black and brown people, not far from a bunch of Korean and Japanese law firms and restaurants, and with a largely LGBT friend group, and I'm generally pretty happy with my life, and I feel safe and good about where I live most of the time. I'm reminded of Curtis Yarvin's famous statement that Cthulhu always swims left, and a part of me wants to say, "Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn!"

My highly tentative suspicion is that at least some of the political division over immigration is downstream of genetic differences related to the Big Five personality trait of Openness to Experience.

Oh, how nice that we can explain away opposition to illegal immigration by "the right-wingers are just mentally deficient".

And yet, I find myself living in an apartment in a city, surrounded by black and brown people, not far from a bunch of Korean and Japanese law firms and restaurants, and with a largely LGBT friend group, and I'm generally pretty happy with my life, and I feel safe and good about where I live most of the time.

Don't you feel it's somewhat slightly colonialist to have the attitude "foreigners exist to provide me with tasty food from their cultures"? More seriously, how much interaction do you have with those black and brown people, how much are they part of your life and not just the scenic backdrop to "my fun time in the Big City"? Though I guess congratulations on being the Token Straight in your friend group! You are providing them with the same validation as the Korean restauranteurs are providing for you: "Hey, I know an actual straight guy in real life!" "No way!" "It's true, we even hang out sometimes, just ask DeShawn and Chasten!"

Oh, how nice that we can explain away opposition to illegal immigration by "the right-wingers are just mentally deficient".

I don't believe that right-wingers are just mentally deficient.

My belief is closer to "agonistic pluralism" or the idea that within society there's a tendency for the struggle between various personality phenotypes to result in better outcomes overall. You need a certain amount of openness in society, but too much can lead to bad outcomes. You need a certain amount of fear of the Other, but too much can lead to bad outcomes.

I think there are plenty of historical examples to learn from. Look at Rome conquering Greece militarily, and then being "conquered" by Greek philosophical thought. Would Cato the Elder, who famously spoke out against Greek philosophy as un-Roman, have been happy to learn that his grandson, Cato the Younger, was the poster boy for Stoic martyrdom two generations later? I think for us non-Romans looking back, we can see that it was a mixed bag. The Greeks had a lot of good ideas, and Rome importing them probably helped them transition from a Republic to an Empire, and maintain their new system for hundreds of years, but it did come at the cost of being "less Roman" than the generation of Cato the Elder in some sense.

Now, I'm not naive enough to think that we'll always get the perfect balance of struggle at all times. In fact, I'm worried that various trends of modernity might be killing the goose that lays the golden eggs for us.

For example, I suspect that men and women in heterosexual relationships had a tendency to "balance each other out" personality-wise in the past, and the increasing number of single men and women and the nightmare of the modern dating scene is leading to this balancing not happening. So we get women flying off into extremes of Progressivism and Leftism, and men flying off into extremes of Rightism. And honestly, I don't like either tendency. I was against Wokeism, and I'm against Trumpist identity politics as well.

“I live in a highly filtered wealthy city with rents and zoning that keeps the poor immigrants out” And diversity is great.

Have you lived in Brazil? Or Venezuela or even Birmingham, Alabama?

I like my multi-ethnic slop bowls as much as the next guy but I will gladly consist of English food if it means I don’t have to worry about a lot of low IQ third worlders rising up and confiscating all my wealth like in S Africa or Venezuela.

So yes we have had some success paths to limited multiculturalism I guess in NYC, San Fran, and arguably Miami - but we’ve seen huge failure paths of multiculturalism in Latam and Africa. Early signs of trouble in the Nordics.

A big problem for elitists blues is they interact with the highly filtered elites of ethnic groups and not the average dude. But the low class reds know the average dude and not the elite.

Also I've been to plenty of 95%-local ethnostates in the world where they're totally covered on all the latest global food trends. Tier 1s in China don't have a hell of a lot of foreigners but they've got a staggering array of European, Asian and American cuisines available for cheap and high quality. The whole 'but the food' argument is pretty absurd in the days of Youtube.

Or Europe...

I think this is basically correct, though there are other personality traits that are related as well. With Lovecraft, in particular, my impression is that he was a highly Open to Experience person who nonetheless was extremely conscientious and concerned about contamination. The highest predictor of political liberalism is Openness to Experience, but the second-most is sometimes called "orderliness," or concern about order, contamination, structure.

There are also people who are highly Open to Experience in an intellectual sense, but closed to experience in a social sense, and I'd probably put myself in that category. I'm happy to try all sorts of wild cuisines or explore all sorts of interesting cultures, so long as it doesn't impose on me all sorts of social tests that I might fail, to humiliation or sorting into a category of "ignorant American tourist."

So I guess you might argue I'm defensively xenophobic; I know what Europeans and LatAms and the Chinese and the Japanese say about Americans behind closed doors. Why would I want people who don't view themselves as natively part of my group subject to that derision to come here, potentially with their derisive attitudes towards me and the people I care about and the customs that are meaningful to me? I know, say, what my friend's French-American coworker says about America. There simply aren't a lot of people who are truly xenophilic towards America, despite the media representations from Los Angeles that falsify what's it's really like here and which we pump out to the rest of the world -- I'm not sure whether we should be sending our political news or our cultural products to Timbuktu, but no one in Hollywood consulted me.

My opinion is that most immigrants, legal and illegal, to the US are people who view it as an economic resource, not a country and a people with its own customs and values that should be respected. I want people to come to my country because they share my love for it and want to make it their home, not because they see dollar signs. I want assurance that the place I live, the customs I grew up with, and the people I care about are not being judged as stupid, corrupt, or contemptible by those joining them.

The feeling that Americans have about our relations to the rest of the world is that we're hated for geopolitical reasons that the average American has no control over -- I don't know who I have to vote for to stop my country from antagonizing foreign peoples like we do every five milliseconds -- and because of wealth that to us feels like poverty, because cost of living adjusts. Both the left and the right feel this, but the left tries to apologize for it or adopt what people say we should (we should be more like Europe, European governments do this, all other western nations do this, we're really just like a third world country, Obama's apology tour), and the right either lives in denial of it ("leader of the free world!," "USA, USA!"), or, more recently, leans into it.

Trump, enter stage left. I don't know if you can understand the Greenland stuff or the America First stuff or the Venezuela stuff without the sense that a lot of red Americans have that the world believes (in their estimation) that the US has no soft power and is a fat, ugly, overprivileged waste of resources that believes in ridiculous, outmoded forms of belief like Christianity, or freedom of speech, or patriotism. I suppose Trump's gut feeling is, "well, if that's how you see us, then I guess that's our only avenue to global influence without abjection and humiliation." To some degree, American xenophobia is directly related to the impression that our attempts at xenophilia aren't met with mutual respect, if not from politicians, then at least from ordinary people or cultural elites.

It's true that cosmopolitanism often correlates with wealth generation, but at the same time, almost no countries on earth are truly xenophilic -- they use cosmopolitanism as a tool, like China and Japan or hell, MBS style Saudi Arabia, while retaining an intense sense of nationalism and a commitment to national identity. So I'm not convinced that cosmopolitanism is useful without limits, and may even be destructive and non-competitive should forming a strong, coherent national identity serve as an adaptive strategy in the modern era after all, as I'd argue it's doing for countries like China.

The issue isn't whether cities are economic engines or whether cosmopolitanism is useful for global economic trade. It's what the limits are to cosmopolitanism's utility. At times, cosmopolitanism begins to feel less like benevolence and more like unreciprocated vulnerability. The US oscillates between generosity and defensiveness because we're desperate to be seen as good. The debate is the same one the country had in 2016: should America be great (again), even if it means being terrible, or should America try to convince the world that, in Hillary Clinton's words, "America is great because America is good." The fear is that it's not possible to be both.

Describing Lovecraft as “conscientious” without mentioning neuroticism feels like burying the lede. You can’t separate his outlook from the absolutely miserable time he was having with his family and his finances.

I think Americans are the same way. Xenophobia comes from uncertainty. When times are good and people are optimistic, we’re all more willing to be cosmopolitan. As times get harsher, more people hit their personal neuroticism thresholds. Those with high conscientiousness are squeezed towards authoritarianism. Their less conscientious counterparts favor anarchy.

This is why Trump populism has outcompeted Tea Party libertarians. It’s why he keeps embarrassing neoliberals, whose radicals despise them, too. He is rewarded for playing the strongman in a way that a progressive cannot.

There simply aren't a lot of people who are truly xenophilic towards America

This is true for Euros and some foreign elites who have absorbed American blue-tribe memes. For the most part, people love meeting an American, with the same qualifiers as with any foreigner (respect/be interested in the culture, be friendly and funny, try to get off the tourist paths).

Coming here from the Quality Contribution thread, I have to concur. America still has a strong positive, but maybe not explicit halo for europeans, at least for working class europeans. My (Spanish) wife and I went to visit New-York in december and my in-laws wanted as souvenirs Statue of Liberty keychains and (more tellingly) american 1$ bills. They have put these bills in their wallets and phone cases as good luck charms. This is despite them also watching the news daily and absorbing all the anti-american signaling. I don't think a country's smallest denomination bill becomes a good luck charm for foreigners without at least unconscious good vibes being associated with it.

no soft power

The thing is that the US has crazy, overflowing amounts of soft power, it's just divided up between sides of a political scene pumping out content to to own the opposite side. So the half of Euros that buy into the Left side of the flood will of course be getting the message that America is basically Idiocracy, a country of cartoonish bigoted white supremacist cro-magnons. The growing share that is inundated more in the Right side of the slop will see America as the pink-haired jerks who are coming up with all this trans woke covid-lockdowns refugee rights stuff and exporting it here wholesale so we have to suffer it too. Pick either side of the stream and we get the crisp message that America is a sad, twisted, evil dystopia except for some plucky underdogs who barely matter.

derisive attitudes

IME though that feels halfway like an universal white-collar bonding ritual to assimilate and make friends most places in the world and be at home. US migrants elsewhere sure go for it. A surefire topic the cosmopolitan class of any country likes is how dumb and backwards the general populace is, how cringy the local folkways, and how surely other countries have it better.

The thing is that the US has crazy, overflowing amounts of soft power, it's just divided up between sides of a political scene pumping out content to to own the opposite side.

And 80+% of it is on the Blue side, so Reds who think that Blue America is fake America see real America as consistently losing soft power battles. Foreign tourists visiting America come for the Blue cities, Disney World, and the scenery (which is in Red states, but doesn't express Red political values). Foreign media consumers consume Hollywood, prestige TV, (Blue) pop music, (mostly Blue-allied Black) rap/hip-hop, and the subset of country produced by Reds with atypical political views like Taylor Swift and Dolly Parton. Foreigners who learn American history see the White South as villains, losers, or both. Pro-American foreigners (ipse dixit) see the greatest achievements of American capitalism as Manhattan, Silicon Valley and Hollywood, not Walmart or Cargill. And we generally respect the output of elite American universities much more than the Reds do, partly because the worst DEI BS that your universities put out is optimised for local consumption whereas foreigners are more likely to see the excellent work they are doing in less-politicised areas like physics.

If I try to think of important sources of Red soft power, I would come up with:

  • The infrastructure of American-funded Protestant missionary work in the third world. There are a lot of locally-middle-class evangelicals in English-speaking Africa and, increasingly, South America, whose religion comes from Red America. Immigrants from this group (like Kemi Badenoch) are an important right-wing force in UK politics.
  • Country music. Big, but as I said above, the stuff that penetrates internationally has limited overlap with the stuff that effectively expresses Red values.
  • The NFL. Smaller than Americans think because of the dominance of actual football (the game you play with the feet) in the rest of the world, and more "not explicitly Blue" than "red-coded".
  • Big-ass truck abundance, and blue-collar-coded wealth more generally. Near the bottom of the list because it isn't what foreigners see due to the dominance of Blue media - American wealth is depicted using the skyscrapers of Manhattan, not the large houses and cars of the suburbs. But it is clearly attractive to foreigners from countries with high urban crime. (If you have access to low-crime cities, most people find $100,000 in urban debauchery more fun than a $100,000 pickup).

I don't think this works, as there are also relatively right-leaning libertarians like Bryan Caplan who are also in favor of more immigration.

Caplans position is actually quite far from the left. He favors a UAE type model: let the world in and deport them instantly if they jaywalk or consume any welfare. Also they and their America-born children get no political representation or welfare ever.

Apart from the complete inability to politically maintain this situation, it's a good plan.

If you import a bunch of slaves you might be able to beat and select the criminality out of them. But you won't get rid of their low trust clannish mentality and backwards culture.

Apart from the complete inability to politically maintain this situation, it's a good plan.

Sentences like this crack me up

"If you look passed the issues that make this plan fundamentally impossible to work, it would work so good"

Apart from the complete inability to politically maintain this situation, it's a good plan.

That's my beef with the left and with Caplan on this: let's import a permanent serf class to do the low-grade labour it would be too expensive to pay natives to do, forever!

The left is just less upfront about what this means in practice, and more self-deluding about 'and I guess we can let their kids go to college? just so long as there is a never-ending supply of replacement serf labour from their home countries so I get my tomatoes picked for cheap!'

And honestly, learning fourth-dimensional math witchcraft from a rat-human hybrid that can move through walls seems kind of cool actually (though I could do without the ritual baby sacrifice.)

I mean, that story ended with the rat bursting out of the main character's chest to claim the heart he had promised when he signed a contract with Yog Sothoth, so not terribly cool even without the baby sacrifice.

And yet, I find myself living in an apartment in a city, surrounded by black and brown people... I feel safe and good about where I live most of the time. I'm reminded of Curtis Yarvin's famous statement that Cthulhu always swims left, and a part of me wants to say, "Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn!"

If you're white, and if black and brown people give you warm and fuzzy feelings—those feelings are not only unreciprocated—but reciprocated in the inverse direction. And insofar as black and brown people tend to be net-tax consumers, that’s not a warm and fuzzy feeling for the wallets of white and white-adjacent people.

Individuals such as Bethany Magee and Ryan Carson found out the hard way, where the latter's friends would continue carrying water for blacks after his death:

Their friends say he [Carson] would consider his killer the 'victim of a broken system' and would want his death to be used to continue advocating for social justice causes.

Bonus quotes from an (also black) family friend of the killer, in hitting for the cycle when it comes to tropes, emphasizing the killer was just a teen and a good boy:

'It's a horrible tragedy because the son comes from a good family,' Riddick told DailyMail.com.

'I can't think of anything I can say why he went that route, or what triggered him to go that way.

'The kid is only 18 years old. And I really feel for the victim's family.'

'This was not the norm. He's a teenager.'

Riddick said it was 'a bad situation', but insisted Dowling was not a trouble maker.

'He wasn't the type of kid that followed,' said Riddick.

'He stayed to himself and was quiet. He never had any altercations.'

I enjoy how the family friend says the stabbing was a horrible tragedy because the black killer comes from a good family; the victim's family is just an afterthought (and the victim is a zero-thought). Additionally amusing is how he wonders what "triggered" the killer to stab, akin to pitbull defenders wondering what triggered a pibbie's reactivity.

If you're white, and if black and brown people give you warm and fuzzy feelings—those feelings are not only unreciprocated—but reciprocated in the inverse direction.

Interesting that Hispanics and Asians also rate every other group above whites (although "Asian" as a category is so broad as to be almost useless)

For Asians the ratings of the three other groups likely aren't statistically significantly different from each other. It does appear there's some greater variance in the ratings of Asian respondents, hence the wider errors (may be related to greater Asian heterogeneity, as you noted). Could just be lower sample size, though.

What's also interesting is that blacks have the highest degree of ethno-narcissism. They have the largest 1 vs. 2, 1 vs. 3, and 1 vs. 4 deltas of each of the four panels, where 1-4 correspond to the highest to lowest rated of each panel.

The 1 vs. 2 delta of black respondents (black vs. Hispanic) appears to be larger than the Asian 1 vs. 4 delta (Asian vs. white) and of similar magnitude as the Hispanic 1 vs. 4 delta (Hispanic vs. white), although these three deltas likely aren't statistically significant from each other.

People in cities are still viciously tribal, though. Tons of them can't get through a casual conversation without mentioning how much they hate Trump, ICE, tech bros, cops, billionaires, conservatives, white people (while being white), rich people, straightness (while being straight), or men, and give you weird looks if you don't join in. And that's if you can even get them to talk to you.

My friend group here, despite being very adjacent to the LGBT community, has no actual LGBT people in it. (At most, It has the occasional straight chick who talks about Queerness a lot). And this isn't because we keep the LGBTs out, it's because none of us are "cool" enough for them; we dont speak in reddit-isms, too much of our conversation isn't about politics, and when one of them does wander in, we dont relentlessly praise their LGBTness like I presume other straight people do, we keep playing D&D. Oh, and the system we use doesn't have Tieflings in it, that's a big barrier. This suits me just fine.

Despite being full of minorities and anti-racists, the neighborhoods are still racially sorted somehow. It can't be the fault of conservatives, since there's none of them here.

Tribalism is alive and well in cities. By comparison, people outside of cities don't quake in performative fear when someone they don't know exists in their general vicinity, they don't constantly screech about all the things they hate, and what LGBT and People of Color that do exist there seem far more willing to socialize with non-queer/non-of-color people without making the entire interaction about queerness or of-color-ness.

Also, HP did describe the Elder Things as Men of a different age, they were ultimately people and more a subject of awe and fascination than horror. He arguably hated them way less than black people.

People in cities are still viciously tribal, though. Tons of them can't get through a casual conversation without mentioning how much they hate Trump, ICE, tech bros, cops, billionaires, conservatives, white people (while being white), rich people, straightness (while being straight), or men, and give you weird looks if you don't join in. And that's if you can even get them to talk to you.

Blue Tribers hating on Trump, tech bros, cops, billionaires, rich people, straightness and men are all hating on other blue tribers. (It's the local cops they object to, not random cops in small-town Iowa, and Trump is a renegade Blue Triber). "White people" is a corner case - white people performative hating on white people is mostly a weapon in intra-Blue status games, but can also be an expression of hatred for the Reds. But that is a quibble - more fundamentally, I think you are extrapolating from very online minorities. I have spent a lot of time professionally around PMC Blue Tribe Americans, and for most of them the only time they performatively hate on right-wing outgroups is for an hour a year as part of mandatory workplace diversity training. My more limited experience travelling in Red America is consistent - the minority of politically engaged Reds engage in performative hatred on the Blue target du jour (at the time it was Hilary Clinton) but the grill-pilled majority try not to talk about politics with otherwise-friendly strangers.

If stoking tribal hatred was popular with normies, American politics would not look the way it does. Poasters chasing clout online maximise tribal hatred, but both parties try to turn it down during general election campaigns (Trump with far more success than Harris, which is part of why he won) because it is a vote-loser.

All my examples come from IRL interactions in Chicago. It happens with randos, it happens with people I meet socially.

Three separate people said "ewww, there's a lot of white people around here" while wandering around the north side with me in 2020. Way back when I brushed it off, and went on to regret associating with them after how they behaved later.

All my examples come from IRL interactions in Chicago. It happens with randos, it happens with people I meet socially.

I am so, so tired of the "it's just some loud weirdos online" argument that you're responding to. No, I am talking about real-life examples dealing with blue-triber whites where they can't go 5 minutes without making some kind of snide comment about rednecks/chuds/white trash/whatever the preferred term of the day is for the residents of Red America. Trying to discuss the weather leads to it. Trying to discuss local events leads to it. There is no escape.

It's not even Red America being shit on, it's White People in general or Men in general. Sometimes they complete the trifecta and complain about Straight people. Since I'm the person they're talking to, I honestly can't tell if they're telegraphing that I should go away, or they just think this is how people interact.

Regardless of who the target is, it's still a fucking unhealthy and unbecoming amount of open vitriol for the people who claim they're all about Empathy/Niceness/Inclusivity.

Also, HP did describe the Elder Things as Men of a different age, they were ultimately people and more a subject of awe and fascination than horror.

Yeah, that's one thing I like about "At the Mountains of Madness". Narrator starts off with "these horrible alien things attacked us and maybe even ate some of our dead" and ends with "they're people like us, we have much more in common than with the true monstrosities".

Blacks with more red tribe adjacency(lots of them working in the trades, but bowhunting is the real reliable way to meet them) are real popular with the red tribe, generally. The tribalism in the US is about different kinds of white people hating each other, I don't see a massive difference between the two tribes in terms of actual dislike, and the fact of the matter is that we're too different to be friends easily so some tensions are always going to be there.

Openness to foreign cultures, in my experience, is generally a bell-curve meme, with "wow, so many kinds of food" in the middle. Part of my political awakening was traveling a lot and seeing different stages of the world's progress towards becoming substantively identical multi-culti slop (with a few chintzy tokens from a people's old way of life), everything tossed into the blending blades of Scott's Universal Culture. It was realizing that I wanted Turkey to be Turkish that helped me realize I want America to be American. (Sadly this is far more complex than the culture war political narrative, and is more technocapital acceleration than just bad policy, but such is life)

Openness to foreign cultures, in my experience, is generally a bell-curve meme, with "wow, so many kinds of food" in the middle.

I hope my talking about "Korean and Japanese restaurants" didn't come off as my only exposure to other cultures. I've also gone through periods of curiosity about several cultural times and places, with most of my exposure being to the history and thought of Japan, India, the Roman Republic and Empire, Ancient Greece, Italian Renaissance Humanists, and the North American Southwest Indians, with a small sprinkling of Revolutionary American history and the era of Jacksonian Democracy.

I also tried to learn Indonesian, and did a language immersion class in Bali, and have taken trips to Slovakia and Scotland. I would honestly say the Bali trip is part of what helped me appreciate the value of tribalism, and take that back to some of my appreciation for rural people in the United States.

Part of my political awakening was traveling a lot and seeing different stages of the world's progress towards becoming substantively identical multi-culti slop (with a few chintzy tokens from a people's old way of life), everything tossed into the blending blades of Scott's Universal Culture

I think there are aspects I still admire about the Universal Culture.

The fact that anywhere you go Prussian Schooling is the norm for schools, and people are using Hindu-Arabic numerals, with standardized testing influenced by ancient China, and the effects of standardization and industrialism have shaped us all into similar cookie cutter shapes is kind of wonderful and terrible at the same time.

It's like the vampires in the movie Sinners. All you have to do is die as yourself, and be reborn as something not quite alive, not quite yourself but eternal and powerful and predatory.

Yeah, I think one can appreciate Universal Culture in a Landian sense, as part of the technocapital Elder God summoning itself from the future. But a lot is also lost, and, even if we side with the hyperstitional space tentacles, we have a human duty to preserve, remember, and mourn.

One thing I don't think you've considered is that a lot of right wingers are actually fairly willing to accept immigration; their sticking point is that it has to be of individuals who help the country.

So as a general rule, I'd consider all of the following to be places where immigration shouldn't be used:

  1. When the immigration is used to keep costs down or drive profit up for business owners (so bringing in minimum wage workers when there is a lot of unemployment amongst low skilled workers is net negative).
  2. When there is a shortage in resources that immigration will make worse (for example, if you have an 72 hour wait to be seen in emergency, or house prices are going to the moon, you shouldn't bring in immigrants unless they are directly related to alleviating those issues).
  3. When the cost of the immigrant is greater than the benefit we receive from them (for example, someone who commits crimes, or someone who requires welfare).

A lot of right wingers have decided "no more immigration" because they believe (and I believe too) that the blue tribe isn't going to respect any of the above. In Canada, our left-wing appointed judges explicitly look at whether a criminal conviction would impact someone's immigration claims, and assign lower penalties if they would. The dreamers reform in the US was explicitly predicated on the ideal that immigration law would be enforced in exchange for amnesty for existing illegal immigrants. There have been numerous allegations that Walz and other senior members of Minnesota's government knew about the Somali fraud, but didn't do anything about it.

If you want the right wing to accept immigration, then you need to be willing to make the following sacrifices:

  1. Kick out illegal immigrants.
  2. Kick out criminal immigrants.
  3. Kick out net negative immigrants (as in, those that consume more services than they produce).
  4. Credibly commit to keeping these standards, going forward.

Another thing that doesn't help is the hypocrisy inherent in a lot of the left-wing positions. Most recently with Biden, but with Obama too, there was an opportunity for the left to reform the immigration laws in the way they want. Instead, they chose to just not enforce the rules. If they thought their position was defensible, they'd push to change the laws to reflect what they actually want to do. The fact that they didn't implies to me either that they don't actually believe that the position they're taking is popular enough to win an election, or that they prefer to keep the leverage they have over the illegal immigrants (so they can force them to work for less under threat of deportation). Both are indefensible, from my perspective - the government is elected to do the will of their constituents, so doing something that couldn't win an election should be strictly off the table. And of course, the other position is no better than slavery.

And yet, I find myself living in an apartment in a city, surrounded by black and brown people, not far from a bunch of Korean and Japanese law firms and restaurants, and with a largely LGBT friend group, and I'm generally pretty happy with my life, and I feel safe and good about where I live most of the time.

Yeah. Because you feel like one of them.

Try being in a place where you think you're one of them, and then you say something like "You know, calling Curtis Yarvin a Nazi seems kinda dumb because he's Jewish" or "Uh, this story about a rape on campus is probably totally made up" or "I don't think there's anything wrong with the "Hide yo' wives" meme' and having everyone turn on you. You'll realize you were living in a fool's paradise.

Of course, YOU wouldn't ever say anything that would trigger such a reaction, right?

I always felt like Scott Alexander's Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning was at least in part a guide for people with controversial beliefs to go along to get along. See also Leo Strauss, and his idea that great thinkers of the past were often esoteric and hid their actual ideas for only the smartest to find and deal with.

I think our relatively free and open era has spoiled a lot of us. We chafe against any limits on our abilities to say whatever we want and not have the people around us react with social opprobrium. And yet, Plato, writing one generation after Socrates was executed for his open practice of philosophy, is supposed to have said in his seventh letter, 'I have never written down my true beliefs.'

I definitely have beliefs that would make me a pariah in some of the social circles I move around in. Who doesn't? But I am polite and politick enough to not make a big deal out of these beliefs in the circumstances where it could go bad for me.

Don't get me wrong, there's value in being a Socrates or a Helvidius Priscus, and being willing to die for your beliefs, while speaking truth to power. But there is also value in being a Plato or (as Strauss sees them) a Maimonides or a Machiavelli, and hiding your true views from all except a vanishingly small number of highly discerning readers. Luckily, the internet is still anonymous enough that I think we get a great compromise: able to be open about our beliefs in places like the Motte, and able to be Straussians/take the Kolmogorov option everywhere else in our lives.

I always felt like Scott Alexander's Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning was at least in part a guide for people with controversial beliefs to go along to get along.

[...]

I definitely have beliefs that would make me a pariah in some of the social circles I move around in. Who doesn't? But I am polite and politick enough to not make a big deal out of these beliefs in the circumstances where it could go bad for me.

You now find yourself advising people to act like they live in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, and implicitly criticizing those who do not.

Has there ever been a human society where there weren't taboos or ideas that were considered dangerous and wrong? Even relatively open societies have lines you're not supposed to cross.

I think there's a good chance that Classical Liberalism is dead in America. I had a little hope that the right might try to revive it, but Trump 2 has clearly not brought anything like a bedrock of Classical Liberalism back to our politics. If we're going to have to suffer under the rule of identity politics from the Right or the Left anyways, might as well start quietly building the foundations for a better society like Kolmogorov, and not worry about what we can't control.

Of course, this is all acting with some assumption that something like a normal human society exists in a few decades, and I don't rule out the possibility that AI may prove to be a total game changer in numerous hard to predict directions.

Has there ever been a human society where there weren't taboos or ideas that were considered dangerous and wrong? Even relatively open societies have lines you're not supposed to cross.

I'm just going to ignore this smokescreen, and again point out that you are not only comparing the social circles you are in with Stalinist Russia, but blaming anyone who doesn't keep silent for not getting along.

I've also implicitly compared them to Lovecraftian horrors and hive-minded vampires in this same thread. I'm not sure why you're hammering this point. It isn't a gotcha, it is built into what I am saying.

And I wouldn't say "blame" is the correct word here. I said it is noble to be Socrates or Helvidius Priscus and die for your beliefs. That isn't blame. I just personally think that there is more wisdom in being Plato or Maimonides. People are allowed to disagree with me, and turn themselves into Socrates or Helvidius Priscus.

If a country is a home and all citizens are roommates

Which is precisely the point on which the left disagrees! Not everyone believes that a country is analogous to a household!

The anti-ICE protesters shout "Get the fuck out of our neighborhood!" which seems to evince some sense of ingroup territoriality, just one whose boundary is drawn differently.

Some of those protesters may be operating under an 'ingroup good outgroup bad' mindset, but there is an ethically consistent schema fitting both of their beliefs.

The following exchange occurred regarding the recent ... unpleasantness ... in Venezuela:

Anonymous:

Getting mixed messages here about state sovereignty from the “borders shouldn’t exist” crowd

argumate:

Delta Force should be able to go wherever they like in the world as long as they don’t shoot anyone when they get there 😤

The same could be applied to 'ICE out of our neighborhood' protests; "They are welcome to live here, visit here, buy from shops here, apply for jobs here, but not come in and haul away our neighbours who were minding their own business."

The anti-ICE protesters shout "Get the fuck out of our neighborhood!" which seems to evince some sense of ingroup territoriality, just one whose boundary is drawn differently.

Well like a lot of these things, it's a matter of who and whom. So for example, suppose the hot issue at the moment were tolerance of homosexuality. This Good person and her partner would have no problem walking hand in hand through an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in New York or a Mormon community in Utah as a method of protest. If asked why they were going into someone else's neighborhood, then they would almost certainly take the position that they are Americans and they have a right to go into any neighborhood they want.

In fact, I think this is one of the fundamental principles of these types of people: "What's ours is ours; what's yours is ours too." Just look at Leftists when they speak about Israel. They are always whining about "Palestinian Land" but in their minds there is absolutely no such thing as "Jewish Land."

This Good person and her partner would have no problem walking hand in hand through an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in New York

I wonder? If they didn't get chased out of it (and then accused of anti-Semitism afterwards should they try "we're Americans, we can walk in an American neighbourhood"), they might self-censor because 'no imposing our personal values on others' so long as the others aren't mainstream straight white Christians. More likely they would try it with the Mormons because straight white Christians there.

I wonder? If they didn't get chased out of it (and then accused of anti-Semitism afterwards should they try "we're Americans, we can walk in an American neighbourhood"), they might self-censor because 'no imposing our personal values on others' so long as the others aren't mainstream straight white Christians.

Sadly, progressives have demoted Orthodox Jews to the status of honorary whites.

https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/nyclu-report-documents-21st-century-jim-crow-east-ramapo-schools-urges-state-action

If asked why they were going into someone else's neighborhood, then they would almost certainly take the position that they are Americans and they have a right to go into any neighborhood they want.

I think more intelligent ones would argue, cogently enough, that the point of a Pride march through a Mormon community is to show solidarity to closeted Mormons suffering from the oppression of their own community - i.e. that they're doing it to make the Mormon neighborhood a better place to live for its own inhabitants.

I think more intelligent ones would argue, cogently enough, that the point of a Pride march through a Mormon community is to show solidarity to closeted Mormons suffering from the oppression of their own community

Sure, and ICE could argue that there are people in the neighborhood who want them there; that they are serving a larger good by being there, and so on.

Any intrusion into the territory of a person, group, can be justified in some way. Kinda the point of having territory is that the person (or group) who owns the territory gets to decide who can and cannot enter, irrespective of any justification.

Well, hang on, now, now you seem to be saying that neither ICE's presence in Good's neighborhood nor the hypothetical Pride March should be considered legitimate; as opposed to saying that both of them would be legitimate. Which is it?

Well, hang on, now, now you seem to be saying that neither ICE's presence in Good's neighborhood nor the hypothetical Pride March should be considered legitimate; as opposed to saying that both of them would be legitimate. Which is it?

Actually, I wasn't trying to make any statement at all about overall legitimacy; rather I was simply saying for progressives it's pure who/whom.

What do I actually think on the issue? Certainly the "this is OUR neighborhood" argument has no legitimacy at all when it comes to enforcement of national immigration laws. That neighborhood is part of the United States and if immigration laws are to be enforced, it just won't work to have neighborhoods where illegals can hide out at their convenience.

With respect to homosexuality, it's a closer question.

Now I am going to have to look up "are there Pride parades in Utah?" and yes there are.

One can see here for a real-life example: 500 BLM protestors marching through a private gated community in St. Louis, leading to weapons charges for the McCloskey couple, who were neighborhood residents.

Shortly after the incident, the McCloskeys claimed that they support the Black Lives Matter movement

It's all so tiresome.

One can see here for a real-life example: 500 BLM protestors marching through a private gated community in St. Louis, leading to weapons charges for the McCloskey couple, who were neighborhood residents.

Thanks for pointing this out. In fact, it's worth noting that one of the more popular chants among progressive protestors is "Whose streets? Our streets!"

I react differently to this kind of statement, as myself an expatriate (immigrant) living in Japan as a permanent resident. I sympathize with those here (in Japan) who grumble generally about foreigners, though I realize many of them are grumbling specifically about non-Japanese inability or failure to grasp basic politeness, cultural norms of quietude, humility, cleanliness, or language, etc. It's not that they despise anyone not-Japanese, it's that they're growing frustrated with the ever-increasing number of foreigners noisily crowding the bus, or smoking in the street, or spreading their giant suitcases all over the train aisle, or whatever. To say nothing of the occasional foreigner criminal.

What I am less sympathetic to is the straightforward contempt for anything that isn't 100% Japanese (forget that defining what qualifies as such is likely impossible) and the occasional stated desire to kick out all the foreigners. The 尊王攘夷 (sonno jooi)/"Revere the emperor, expel the foreigners!" type racism of late Edo. This is simply an unworkable, even bizarrely emotionally immature way of perceiving the world.

Copypaste this into America and say it's sovereignty; that's odd to me. I may be misunderstanding you.

Copypaste this into America and say it's sovereignty; that's odd to me. I may be misunderstanding you.

Not OP but for most it's not a hatred of anything foreign/unamerican (though that can play a role). It's the idea that the citizens of a country have absolute authority over who is or is not allowed to live in a country, regardless of the individual merits (or lack thereof) someone who wants to come live here may have. We may want to allow in talented doctors and engineers etc., but just because you are a talented doctor or engineer doesn't give you any sort of moral right to come here. We can choose exactly how many (or how few) doctors and engineers we want to bring in here, and we can decide we'd prefer more British, French, and Japanese doctors over Zimbabwean, Saudi, and Pakistani doctors or whatever arbitrary distinctions we want to make (more hot women and fewer men, or more tall men fewer short kings, etc.).

The big divide between the right and the left here is that the left is effectively saying we cannot choose who to allow or not allow into our country. Sometimes this is done under specious arguments, i.e. "all of those young Syrian men on the rafts are totally doctors and lawyers and engineers coming to enrich our country and therefore it is wrong to prevent them from coming here" and sometimes it's even more baldfaced (see all of the proactive attempts to protect criminal illegal aliens who have been convicted of heinous crimes like murder and rape from deportation). It's a fundamental mismatch of values, and I don't see it resolved any way other than one side giving up on their values, or one side conquering the other.

I think there are two separate value disagreements at work, one of which is susceptible to factual resolution. There is certainly a Left-wing position that freedom of movement is a human right in itself, and that there is simply no moral legitimacy to wanting to keep anyone out of the country, whatever the circumstances.

But this maximal open-borders-ism seems less common than the humanitarian argument - the one that goes: sure, in an ideal world where everyone's basic needs were seen to, countries would be entitled to setting whatever immigration policies they like - but there is a moral duty to help those in need which trumps this right. You normally have the right to decide who comes onboard your boat, but that does not apply if you sail past a drowning child and refuse to fish him out. America is ludicrously wealthier and safer than the Third World, therefore ~any immigrant is a de facto refugee who would have a substantially lower life expectancy if we didn't let them in. There's nothing wrong with restricting immigration from Canada or Germany, but restricting Somali immigration is tantamount to murder by inaction, so faced with the dilemma, any halfway-decent person would take their preferences and stuff them in favor of doing the right thing. And you are a halfway-decent person, aren't you? You do have a heart, right? Right?

This second framing seems much more widespread among left-wing pro-immigration normies than open-borders radicalism for the sake of it - see the focus on "refugees". Nor I do I think so lowly of the average right-winger as to think that this boils down to a "fundamental mismatch of values" where they disagree with the principle that if you want to call yourself a good person, you should let the drowning child onboard your boat whether or not you'd be prepared to say that anyone in the world can use your boat if they feel like it. (Though there are certainly a few people like that; indeed I think they tend to be disproportionately represented on forums like this one.) This position is simply one that is fundamentally naive about the facts - about the feasibility of alleviating all the world's suffering without destroying the wealth and security which gives us the power to alleviate some of it in the first place.

For my money, the primary divide is that left-wingers and right-wingers have opposite intuitions about how much inertia there is to work with. Partly, this is because the obvious fact that we cannot feed every pauper in the world is simply too grim to contemplate, so people stick their heads in the sand. But I suspect there's also a form of the overfitted absurdity heuristic familiar to x-risk advocates at play: progress and abundance are so taken for granted that right-wing doomsday prophets' ravings about economic, demographic, and/or civilizational collapse feel too melodramatic to be remotely believable; they seem so absurd that they feel as cartoonish, and as readily dismissed, as aliens, killer robots, and the Rapture.

And frankly, I also think that in recent years, excessive bullet-biting from the right about fundamental value differences has worsened this divide. Because they don't see right-wingers saying "Obviously we should help everyone in the world if we had infinite money and housing to gift to them; but we don't, and trying would only ruin us" nearly as often as "Well whoever said we had to be kind to people anyway? whoever said charity was better than selfishness? whoever said good was better than evil? fucking bleeding hearts", of course they think that the Right is simply made up of selfish, privileged assholes who won't spare a coin for Tiny Tim, and that this is the only reason why anyone would ever oppose immigration. It's an easier story to believe than the bitter pill of the dream simply not being achievable at that kind of scale.

It isn’t just absence is taken for granted but the left don’t really have a model for why different jdx have different levels of wealth outside of colonialism/ racism which doesn’t really explain much after examination.

So the right believes culture / genes matter. The left doesn’t.

That's also true, but I still don't think it's a deciding factor in the differing attitudes towards immigration. Right-wingers, IMV, aren't wrong to view left-wing rhetoric about "skilled immigration" as broadly disingenuous. The average leftist would certainly recoil from a positive claim that immigrants are on average less efficient economic actors than natural-born citizens - but their support for immigration is not downstream of an earnest belief that immigrants are good for the economy.

Arguing that immigrants will turn into valuable workers is not germane to the left-wing worldview, but rather, an attempt to speak the Right's language. Having formed a model of right-wing voters as totally unmoved by moral arguments, they resort to claims that immigration is in the nation's economic self-interest. Those claims might be more or less strained, and more or less sincere, depending on the particulars, but they are never the ultimate root of pro-immigration sentiment; at best, for people who earnestly believe them, they are simply a sign of the moral order of the universe ("helping immigrants is the right thing to do and it pays for itself besides, so there's really no reason not to do it short of sheer wickedness").

I also observe quite a lot of 1 but with a racial tint: the only possible reason not to want to have open borders is a dislike of foreigners, and therefore anything short of open borders is racist. And any rational non-racist argument against non-maximally-open-borders is just a covers for the racist argument (not always wrong!).

And any rational non-racist argument against non-maximally-open-borders is just a covers for the racist argument (not always wrong!).

Which is why the way to dismantle that is to publicly disavow that the "racist argument" has any meaning whatsoever (re: Fuentes/Morgan, though Trump is the best modern example). That's partially why he, uniquely among English-speaking nations, can still pull the Boomer vote (typically confused as "obligatorily right-wing" by the people who call themselves the left), since the other places are more reflexively fighting the racist bogeymen of 70 years ago.

Reform UK do marginally better among the 50-65 age group (mostly Gen X) than among the 65+ group (mostly Boomers), but the key point is that they do almost twice as well with the over 50's as they do with the under 50's.

Given the size of the Conservative vote among over 65's, I suspect the total right-populist vote (Reform voters + low information right-populist voters foolishly voting Conservative because they don't realise that Johnson's right-populism was fake) is strictly increasing with age.

My impression was that right populists in Australia also skew old.

The only Anglosphere country where right-populism is a youthful movement is Canada, and UK media coverage implies that is because right-populism in Canada is YIMBY in a way that it isn't in the US or UK.

I'm also an expat in Malaysia (which is notably less of an ethnostate than Japan and has its own vigorous fun Idpol stuff going on). There's a lot of illegal immigration here, and I'll probably get stopped at a roadblock every second month by happenstance for an immigration check. Generally it's a somewhat-amusing interaction since they're ostensibly looking for people from neighboring poorer Asian countries (Indonesia, Bangladesh, Myanmar etcetera) and I'm clearly not a member of one of Malaysia's main 'native' ethnicities so that the police feel it necessary to pull me over even if they're generally a lot more polite and circumspect with me than they would be with their actual targets.

I don't begrudge them their occasional checks. I do think the idea of Malaysian identity is quite messy, arguably moreso than even most Colonial Western nations, but I'm also not gonna start protesting the local police force for occasionally pulling me over. They're doing their jobs, Allah bless them.

These are qualitatively different events. The Babbitt question is about whether the police officer was justified in killing someone for tresspassing non-violently because (a) previously the protesters were violent, (a2) though they weren’t violent upon gaining entry into their desired locations, (b) pursuant to the security of VIP politicians, (b2) though the politicians had already begun evading minutes before, (b3) and despite no imminent danger to any politician. As we do not ordinarily kill on sight those who are trespassing while non-violently protesting, it is the politician’s security which is the pertinent detail.

In the ICE officer’s case, he was in the process of being hit by an accelerating car, and arguably excused for believing he would be run over in the center of the car rather than the side.

The Babbitt situation involved someone breaking a window and then Babbitt attempting to climb through the window. Breaking and entering is not usually part of nonviolent protest.

The Babbitt situation involved someone breaking a window and then Babbitt attempting to climb through the window. Breaking and entering is not usually part of nonviolent protest.

Babbitt was already in the building with Capitol Police standing next to her as the window portion of the door was broken, doing nothing.

Babbitt had been warned not to proceed through the window: one witness recalled that "A number of police and Secret Service were saying 'Get back! Get down! Get out of the way!'; [Babbitt] didn't heed the call."

Personally, I haven't been in a situation where I found myself mistaking a broken window for an invitation to climb through the window and enter. Have you had this happen to you?

I've never stood next to a police officer as other people damaged property, no.

But if that was the case and the officers approved of such conduct, as they did, I would think further similar actions are also sanctioned.

I've never stood next to a police officer as other people damaged property, no.

Ah, but that's not what I asked. The question is whether someone can reasonably confuse a broken window for an invitation.

But if that was the case and the officers approved of such conduct, as they did

Approved? Did they give the guy a handshake and $100 for breaking the window?

If you try to go through a window (already the sort of thing more often done by criminals rather than normal people), you're told there's a guy with a gun on the other side, the guy on the other side tells you not to go through the window - seems hard to believe that you thought you were invited to crawl through that window.

I think if 1/6 had been a left-wing riot, the response to this would be "breaking a window shouldn't be a death sentence!" and the left would memorialize the incident as "Ashli Babbitt - murdered by the government over a broken window," and would totally ignore every single other piece of important context around the incident. We are seeing this phenomenon happen right now with the ICE shooting in Minneapolis.

I say this not to suggest that Babbitt was a bad shoot, but to point out that the facts of the case simply don't matter all that much as far as politics are concerned. Folks have no problem lying to themselves and everyone else in order to create a good martyr as necessary to their cause.

I want to pay someone to make a huge mural of Good and Babbit hugging each other in heaven, just to see the reaction. It's also just a warm and de-escalating thing to do. (I mean, in theory.)

I think the hard part will be finding the artist willing to do it. Sounds like a job for (ugh) AI.

That's a great point! I'm whipping one up on Gemini now. Good's likeness isn't so, well, good, so far.

Managed it: https://x.com/DainFitzgerald/status/2010219703877431412

It's beautiful. Almost makes the cost of RAM worth it.

That's incredible. I would retweet this, if I didn't want to incur some micropoliticalviolencetarget charges.

I think if 1/6 had been a left-wing riot, the response to this would be "breaking a window shouldn't be a death sentence!" and the left would memorialize the incident as "Ashli Babbitt - murdered by the government over a broken window," and would totally ignore every single other piece of important context around the incident. We are seeing this phenomenon happen right now with the ICE shooting in Minneapolis.

Yeah this is the point to me. I'm not arguing that Babbitt was an illegal shooting, but typically the way the leftwing litigates shootings is more vibe-based than giving a single shit about whether the shooting was legal in the current structure. The Good Shooting I believe a decent amount of people just focus on how bad the optics are and either aren't going to care or will have long moved on by the time that the police officer is absolved. The optics on Babbitt were bad enough (Unarmed woman posing zero threat getting gunned down on camera) that her Portland equivalent would be a gigantic national martyr.

We don't need to rely on hypotheticals, we can just look at recent examples of other legislature stormings, such as in Hong Kong, Nepal, Mexico, Bangladesh etc. The answer is that it just doesn't get widespread condemnation unless Red Tribe does it.

Conversely, if Minneapolis had been ATF "rounding up illegal gun owners" and shot someone in a car with a MAGA bumper sticker, all other facts remaining the same...

If it had been ATF doing it

  1. They would not have been in danger from any car

  2. They would have shot at the wrong car

  3. They would have missed.

But even if all these things were false and things were mutatis mutandis just as in the Minnesota situation, the bulk of the right wing would not have supported the driver. That a lot of "moderates" have a headcanon that the right and the left are the same in this does not make it so.

It is true that some of the right is rather consciously trying to become more that way, since Jan 6, since the Trump assassination attempt, and especially since Charlie Kirk's assassination. But it's a fairly small part and it mostly hasn't taken.

I think it's very clear what the ATF would have shot if they were present!

Ooh, good point. Unless they shot that random T-Rex instead. Eh, ¿por qué no los dos?

I think I broadly agree.

"Ashli Babbit and Renee Good both FAFO" is a coherent and consistent view. "Ashli Babbit and Renee Good both died unnecessarily because of law enforcement/state ineptitude" is also a coherent and consistent view. (The latter does not preclude acknowledging that both women, at the very least, made poor choices and could have and should have avoided the situation, which at this point I definitely think is hard to dispute.)

If you think one was an innocent martyr and the other got what she deserved, I would really like to hear the arguments for that.

If you think one was an innocent martyr and the other got what she deserved, I would really like to hear the arguments for that.

We've been doing that for days, and I believe you specifically mentioned in a subthread yesterday that you didn't care to follow closely because it was tiresome or some such thing, which I interpreted as "This looks bad for the side I like aesthetically and I want plausible deniability that the MAGAts were right".

We've been doing that for days

I have not seen much specific discussion of how Ashli Babbit was materially different (there is now some discussion of it in this thread).

and I believe you specifically mentioned in a subthread yesterday that you didn't care to follow closely because it was tiresome or some such thing,

I said in general, I've avoided arguing about Renee Good online. Notably, I was not only referring to the Motte. I was referring to all my online spaces, most of which are rather different in orientation from the Motte.

"This looks bad for the side I like aesthetically and I want plausible deniability that the MAGAts were right".

Really, that is your model of where I fall ideologically?

How fascinating.

If you think one was an innocent martyr and the other got what she deserved, I would really like to hear the arguments for that.

The left's argument, as I understand it, can be summarised/paraphrased as follows:

"1. The belief that humans outside Our Tribe matter, just as much as those within, is Good.

"2. The belief that members of Our Tribe matter more than outsiders, thus weighing one of Us being robbed by an outsider worse than a myriad outsiders being tortured to death, is Evil.

"3. Renee Good, in opposing mass deportations, was advancing the cause of universal benevolence; therefore her actions were Good.

"4. Ashli Babbit, in attempting to forcibly overturn Mr Biden's election on behalf of Mr Trump, was advancing the cause of tribal chauvinism; therefore her actions were Evil.

"5. Actions done in the service of Good ought to receive more latitude than the same actions done in service of Evil."

I am less sure of the right-wing counterpart, but I suspect it would involve switching the alignment labels in 1-4, and possibly renaming the causes they were advancing.

Yes, exactly. People can argue that they are different because one was Good fighting Evil, and the other was Evil fighting Good. But then you're arguing the politics surrounding the events, not whether there was actually a difference in how the state responded to someone acting against it.

But then you're arguing the politics surrounding the events, not whether there was actually a difference in how the state responded to someone acting against it.

From what I have read and heard, "Because what the J6ers were doing is bad" is the overt, explicit justification among the left for the way they have been treated. It really is just political for them, and not based in any respect for principles.

Indeed. I think both sides are equally unprincipled.

I don't think it's incoherent to say that protesting an evil regime is good and protesting a holy regime is evil, which seems to be the reason for the split view. It's even my view and likely the majority view: although it might be unwise to publicly fight against Hitler/Stalin, I'd definitely be rooting for someone who does. Where I'd differ is in not judging either administration as calling for unmanaged or badly managed protest.

The issue is that maintaining public order inherently involves violence, and both Babbitt and Good (and their supporters) thought that they were somehow exempt from facing violence when they were protesting (ironic, since they probably think of the respective administrations as closer to Communist/Nazi than I do).

Sometimes police need to use lethal force to enforce the laws. Like, if a criminal is trying to kill the police, or other people, then obviously the police should use lethal force.

Sometimes police need to use non-lethal force to enforce the laws. Like, a naked man running down the street, or breaking up a drunken brawl.

If the police use lethal force in a situation that does not call for lethal force, that is bad.

I do not think Ashli Babbit was a case where lethal force was warranted. Renee Good is very arguably a case where lethal force was warranted, on grounds of self defense.

Ashli Babbit was a case where non-lethal force was warranted.

A rioter who is just a rioter should be roughed up a bit, thrown in jail, and fully punished under the law.

A rioter who seriously endangers the lives of others, might warrant a bullet, and if not, absolutely warrants all of the above.

Maybe this stance does not constitute 'innocent martyr and the other got what she deserved' but my position is that the office in the Good case should not be charged with anything and the officer in the Babbit case is a murderer.

I support rioters being shot. Thought they should’ve with BLM. Same with J6.

Of course, if Congress was not illegitimately closed for a bad cold, J6 doesn’t happen.

Problem is, if you're not going to shoot BLM rioters, you don't get to shoot J6 rioters. Simple as.

Sure. I think that’s the thing that pisses off a lot of reds. There was a tepid responses to months of serious rioting and looting.

Then maximal responses to the one red coded riot.

I certainly support the police using force against rioters and ending riots swiftly, but I don't really put rioting into the category of things that get you summarily executed, in the same way that, being an active shooter would. I view rioting as a crime more in line with vandalism or assault. If you are assaulting someone with a knife, then the police are justified in shooting you, if you are assaulting someone with your fists, although it could still be deadly, I would prefer the cops to try and physically restrain and arrest you rather than giving you new holes.

Does that include say arson?

Probably, fire is pretty deadly even if modern electronics have gotten so safe that most people have forgotten.

Can you convince me that you would make exactly the same argument if Ashli Babbit had been a leftist protesting Trump's inauguration, and Renee Good had been, I don't know, a Christian at an abortion protest or something?

Renee Good had been, I don't know, a Christian at an abortion protest or something?

Not OP, but I'm trying to think of what would actually be an analogous situation for Renee Bad[1] at an abortion clinic protest. There's not a lot of overtly disruptive things she could do in front of an abortion clinic that wouldn't be straightforward grounds for arrest, and I think the overall right generally has enough respect for the law and property rights to understand that even if they don't like that abortion is legal, that it's a matter for the legislators and the courts, not for Renee Bad to roll up and do a direct action.

[1] As in, the mirror universe right wing version of Renee Good. This is a pun and I don't intend it to imply that it's evil to be right wing. I think it's quite okay to be right wing. It's just a pun please don't hurt me.

It's harder to come up with an exact equivalent for Good, true. But I'm thinking something like, an anti-abortion protester has her SUV blocking the street in front an abortion clinic, cops arrive to clear out the protesters, she and/or other protesters are screaming at the cops, and then some cops tell her to 'Get out of the fucking car' and she accelerates- with all the subsequent minute analysis of whether she hit a cop, whether she saw the cop, whether she was provoking the cop, whether she was moving towards the cop, whether the cop was in danger, etc.

I am convinced rightists and leftists would mostly change their opinions about whether the cop was justified in shooting her in that case.

Doesn't even have to be parking her SUV. Silently praying outside an abortion clinic is reproductive coercion and violence! That is the UK, though, so I think even the USA hasn't reached that level as yet due to robust freedom of speech rights.

Probably not, no. Pro-life activists being arrested for protesting too hard outside abortion clinics is a thing that happens and conservatives often defend FACE violations, but, importantly, not pro-life activists who use actual violent action.

But the entire dispute is whether Good used violent action. I don't see any leftists who are saying "Yes, she tried to run down an ICE officer and she was justified." Rather, they are claiming she panicked/she didn't see him/he wasn't in danger and shooting her was unnecessary.

In the equivalent situation, no, I don't think the pro-life community would defend a pro-life activist who was actually trying to run over a cop, but they would defend someone in an ambiguous situation like this, where it is not at all clear what anyone's intentions or situational awareness was.

But the entire dispute is whether Good used violent action.

Fine, they also tend to not defend pro-life activists that non-violently drive a car at the police, in an attempt to escape them,

More comments

So, if I had argued, for example, that Rene Good was fighting against a rightful authority, and Babbitt was fighting against an illegitimate authority, I would obviously be making an argument that could be very easily swayed by motivated reasoning, even if it could also be a principled argument in theory.

If Babbitt had been a leftists I would absolutely make the same argument, but I am not really sure how I can convince you of that, and I am not really sure which part of my argument feels like partisan hackery to you.

I accept that Babbitt was doing something illegal, that it warranted a response of force from the police, just that, as she did not seem to pose a credible threat to anyone, that force should be non-lethal.

Does that position really seem so devested from baseline reality?

Honestly, I think my position on both of these cases would be the 90%+ majority opinion of Americans if the politics could somehow be removed from them.

To be fair, I was asking a genuine question: how could you convince me? Since I don't know you (and don't really have much of an impression of you, specifically), I'll just have to take your word for it that if the polarities were reversed you'd stick to the same principles.

Provisionally, I will take someone's word for that (unless they've already given me reason to believe otherwise). But generally speaking, I think we're so deep into polarization that I think most people form their opinions based entirely on who? and whom?

The sort of autist that posts on the the Motte tends to actually hold to principles somewhat instead of broad tribe identification.

Babbitt was standing next to several other Capital police officers with no barriers between them and her for several minutes. They were unmolested by her. It is, indeed, hard to imagine a reverse situation given the history with people like Rittenhouse having to gun down multiple convicted criminals just to stay alive in a similar situation.

So you would confidently assert that if a crowd of leftists entered the Capital building to protest/disrupt Trump's inauguration, and a woman who had previously been standing next to several officers for several minutes subsequently broke through a door in the building and was shot, that you would say "This was murder and the Capital police officer should be charged"?

Nah. People shouldn't be charged so much. The guy should have lost a large civil lawsuit meaning his future earnings to eternity go to Babbitt's children if she has them. Its better to let things lie in the middle.

I do not think Ashli Babbit was a case where lethal force was warranted.

Perhaps not, but I think there is a general moral principle that when an activist inserts himself into an ugly/violent/explosive situation, the activist needs to be on his best behavior under penalty of forfeiting any claim to charity or sympathy. By this standard, neither Babbit, Good, nor Rittenhouse deserve much in the way of charity. In Rittenhouse's case though, he handled himself extremely well so that even without any charity, he should be (and was) exonerated.

From a legal perspective, these are different questions, of course. I do know that when it comes to private property, you can normally use lethal force against an intruder without waiting to see how much a threat the person poses. [Edit: Apparently this is not necessarily true] Does this principle apply to an intruder in a specific room in a public building? I don't know.

I didn't pay much attention to the Ashley Babbit situation at the time, but what concerns me now is this: If there is a general rule that law enforcement cannot open fire against an (apparently) unarmed intruder in a public building, it opens the door (so to speak) to mob tactics where the authorities won't be able to protect the building (and themselves) until it's too late.

I feel like a lot of the talk about Babbitt seems to assume that nothing short of lethal force would work. I think this is because currently our law enforcement uses basically no force when dealing with rioters so riots get out of hand. It is very easy and practical to use non-lethal force to crowd control unarmed people. If the police fully utilized the non-lethal options at their disposal to deal with rioters, rubber bullet, tear gas, water cannons, truncheons, handcuffs, etc. then I think that should be more than sufficient to control such hypothetical situations.

I think this is downstream of American Revolution/Independence hagiography and then Civil Rights.

For historical reasons, the US is very sensitive to the optics of putting down riots. It’s supposed to be done by the nasty people that America was made to get away from. So if it’s not serious enough to start shooting, nothing should be done.

I do know that when it comes to private property, you can normally use lethal force against an intruder without waiting to see how much a threat the person poses.

This is not in fact true in most states. Castle Doctrine says you have no duty to retreat within your home (though some states don't even have that), but you still have to have a reasonable fear of grave bodily harm.

This is not in fact true in most states. Castle Doctrine says you have no duty to retreat within your home (though some states don't even have that), but you still have to have a reasonable fear of grave bodily harm.

Thanks for pointing this out. I had recalled learning at some point that if there's an intruder in your house, you don't have to wait to see if the person has a gun, knife, etc. -- you can just open fire.

I did find this online:

Some states—including Arizona, Arkansas, California, Florida, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Wisconsin, and Wyoming—have replaced the "reasonable person" standard, which placed the burden on the defendant to show that their defensive action were reasonable, with a "presumption of reasonableness," or "presumption of fear," which shifts the burden of proof to the prosecutor. In these states, the prosecutor has the burden to prove the defendant was "unreasonable."

I do think that as a practical matter, a homeowner has a great deal of leeway in terms of using lethal force against an (unlawful) intruder. But it doesn't seem that this is a bright line rule.

One was an assault on a police officer with a deadly weapon. The other was breaking and entering. I believe these have different thresholds for the use of deadly force.

As this thread has shown, both "assault on a police officer" and "breaking and entering" are disputed. As I keep repeating: yes, both sides will frame the respective events so Ours was martyred and Theirs FAFO'd. And no matter how much you (general you) insist the facts are indisputable and your version is true, I don't believe you (general you) unless your previous demonstration of principled and not motivated reasoning makes me believe that you wouldn't just frame them differently if the tribal participants were reversed.

Which facts are you disputing? The deadly weapon operated by Good was an automobile. Good struck the officer with her vehicle. Assault with a deadly weapon. Babbitt did not assault any police officer and was unarmed. Babbitt died while trying to breach a windowed door.

Which side is my side?

I haven't disputed anything.

I said that in this thread (and obviously elsewhere) people are disputing whether Good struck the officer, whether her actions meet the definition of assault, and whether either Reed or Babbit's actions merited a lethal response. I have opinions on some of these things, but I do not yet have a definite conclusion about everything with regards to the Reed case.

Which side is my side?

Which side is my side?

The primary argument I know is "Babbit (and the rest of the protestors) were actively engaged in violence (see also: the one officer who was struck in the head with a heavy object), and therefore Babbit was shot in self-defence (usually accompanied by a photo of protestors inside the Capitol with fists raised looking angry), whereas Good was at no point attempting to harm the officer, and even though he was probably out of the way of the car (especially when he fired the shots), he at the very least put himself in harm's way."

Is it accurate to the situation on the ground, in either case? I haven't looked at any videos of either, and I'm sure the exact opposite argument is made in circles I don't really frequent. I'm merely summarizing/aggregating the argument I see most often.

I was going to type up a full comment, but it's midnight here and I don't have time. What I will say is that it's really nice in this discussion to see someone who mostly spends time in liberal spaces coming here with an open mind and looking to hear out perspectives from other circles.

Is it accurate to the situation on the ground, in either case?

No. Babbit was trying to pry apart a shut door that someone else had already partially broken and having little success because she was a relatively small woman. There were numerous other armed officers around who didn't seem to consider her a particular threat. She might have been able to get through and then post a threat to someone, but it probably wasn't happening in the next 30 seconds. The officer who shot her had a history of bad decisions. It's much closer to a "cop just felt like he could get away with murdering a white bitch" situation than the comparable, valence-flipped situation where left-wing psychics intuit that the officer had murderous intent.

OTOH, she was part of a group that had stormed the building and had a lot of threatening rhetoric. If shooting her was good for that reason, then all the J6 protestors should have been killed, along with most left-wing protestors over the last 10 years.

Conversely, Good gunned the engine on her car while pointed at an ICE agent who was just a couple feet away. She did turn away from him, but if he had been a bit slower to get aside, or if she had turned the wheel just a few degrees less to the side then she could have very easily run him over and killed him.

One of those woman very much appeared to be a deadly threat to another person within the next second, and the other could plausible have posed a threat in a minute or two, presuming she managed to break down a door with her bare hands, to whatever extent you think an unarmed woman is a threat. For that last point, generally speaking, leftwingers usually argue that the threat of an unarmed woman to a male cop is "no threat at all, he should just manually restrain her, and also opening a door shouldn't be a death sentence!"

See:

While it may feel good to play enlightened centrist and do some both sides’ing, there is a major area where Babbitt differed from Good: Babbitt posed no imminent threat to the officer who shot.

That is the consistent principle.

Also this post. (I'm willing to move discussion to either thread to not fragment the conversation further.)

I don't like the Babbitt shoot, but I could understand that in the moment, the police officer didn't see Babbitt, but a limb of an angry mob. It's the only way it makes sense to me outside of some weird castle doctrine defense. Babbitt of course was a clown to do what she did.

Notably in mid 2025 the govt settled a wrongful death suit with Babbitt's family for $5 million.

Another consistent view is that Ashley Babbit deserved it because she was protesting for a bad cause (overturning an election) whereas Renee did not because she was protesting for a good cause (stopping the feds from kidnapping us).

The real crime of january 6th was that they used up one of our most potent civil disobedience options on something so meaningless.

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Another consistent view is that Ashley Babbit deserved it because she was protesting for a bad cause (overturning an election) whereas Renee did not because she was protesting for a good cause (stopping the feds from kidnapping us).

It's consistent if you openly acknowledge you are embracing Conflict Theory ("we are Good, so it's Good when our side does it - you are Bad, so it's Bad when your side does it").

Most Conflict Theorists aren't so nakedly open about it. People want to pretend they have principles and their conclusions are based on reason and some form of justice.

How can you respond to this comment without modding it? The other poster is claiming without any evidence that ICE is kidnapping presumably Americans. That’s an extraordinary explosive claim wi the zero evidence.

We are often asked to mod people for "being dishonest."

We aren't mindreaders. We often suspect someone is being disingenuous, but the poster may really believe what he is saying. (You are surely aware that most progressives do consider illegal immigrants "us" so it's not implausible to me that they really believe ICE is "kidnapping people.")

Do I think @LiberalRetvrn is sincere, or a troll trying to push buttons? He's certainly on our radar, but making bad arguments is not something we ban people for. Demanding we mod people for "being dishonest" is asking us to use more personal discretion in judging posts than I think you really want. Lots of regulars are, IMO, at the very least fond of making unsubstantiated and unverified claims very confidently.

"Inflammatory claim with insufficient evidence" is the rule usually cited. Contrary to what many people think, though, this does not mean "A claim that inflamed (pissed off) me and that I don't believe."

But how is “they are kidnapping us” not an inflammatory claim without sufficient evidence?

"Inflammatory" is subjective. We don't apply it every time someone says something that pisses you off. Arguably almost every argument made here is inflammatory to someone, and unsurprisingly, people who don't agree with the argument made typically consider it to have been presented with insufficient evidence.

I already pointed out the answer to your specific case: charitably, @LiberalRetvrn does consider the people ICE is arresting to be "us" and he does consider their actions to be lawless and tantamount to "kidnapping." I am not speaking for @LiberalRetvrn here, but this is definitely a perspective common on the left, and I'm sure you know this. That this make you angry does not make it "inflammatory" such that we're going to mod people who say it. (Nor should you make any assumptions about whether or not I personally agree with the argument.)

As a meta-comment, one of the failures of the Motte is that while in theory, we are here to debate and argue and test ideas, in principal most people just want validation, venting, and affirmation. When they see an argument they don't like- especially from an ideological opponent, especially someone whose tone or style or specific POV really pisses them off - rather than saying "Ah, someone with a challenging perspective to take on!" or "Hmm, a worthy opponent?" they rush for the report button, and then yell at the mods for not shutting the mf up.

Now here's a concrete example: "ICE is killing dozens of people every day!" would be an inflammatory and falsifiable claim that you could legitimately demand some evidence for. "ICE is kidnapping people" - well, you're going to have an argument over what constitutes "kidnapping." And that's okay.

Kidnapping suggests illegal. Where is the illegality? Now you are going to say that lefties can define words to mean other than commonly defined terms.

You mod for much less absurd things.

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I do have principles, but I don't think it's possible to judge civil disobedience acts in a vacuum. Disobeying an unjust law is good, disobeying a just law makes you a nuissance to society. I have principles about freedom, individual rights, and liberalism, not about what tactics are justifiable to achieve those things.

Renee did not because she was protesting for a good cause (stopping the feds from kidnapping us).

That's not true. The feds were not "kidnapping" anybody - kidnapping is, by definition, illegal imprisonment, while ICE has legal rights to arrest illegal immigrants. Judging from your use of the pronoun "us", you are an illegal immigrant too, in which case I would recommend you to contact a lawyer to arrange a proper departure with the least bad consequences for you. And, of course, I don't think it is smart to advertise this fact in public, even if anonymously. Also, I would like to remind you that lying is bad.

they used up one of our most potent civil disobedience options on something so meaningless.

Meaningless for you, maybe. As an illegal immigrant, you probably do not see much meaning in having honest elections in a country where you can not even legally vote, but many citizens of this country do.

If you think one was an innocent martyr and the other got what she deserved, I would really like to hear the arguments for that.

I can not deliver on that, but I can deliver on something that may be close to it.

Ashley Babbit was not exactly innocent, but she did not pose any immediate danger that could not be averted by any other means. She was a tiny unarmed woman which could be easily subdued by any of the male policemen (and a bunch of armed police entered the same place within minutes, maybe even less, after the shooting, so it was unlikely it would be even necessary to subdue her). While "innocent' is not exactly the appropriate description, since she did commit crimes (namely, destruction of property, trespassing and probably refusing to follow a legal order of law enforcement officer), she still was a victim of a cowardly and poorly trained policeman who decided to use deadly force without any necessity for it.

On the case of Good, she and her partner in crime actively taunted the police, telling them things like "come at me" and other words, while impeding police work, and then drove the vehicle towards the police. This is an extremely dangerous situation - a vehicle driven like that can severely injure or kill a person. While it is hard to say she "deserved" that, her being shot is a direct consequence of her actions putting a law enforcement officer into a mortal danger and him having to defend himself from a lethal threat. One can not easily subdue and stop a huge SUV, and in fact, one has no chance to outrun one, so if she were determined to murder one of the officers, the only way for them to prevent if would be to shoot her. It is important to understand that the difference here is not in the poor choices she made per se, when she decided to impede police work. If she stopped there - if she blocked the police, refused to move, and refused to obey police commands, even if she continued to taunt the police - still, there would not be any justification for shooting, as the police was not in any danger then. The danger appeared when she decided to move the vehicle with the police standing around. That's when the situation changed, and while the word "deserved" sounds too emotionally charged for me, the word "justified" is certainly appropriate.

Today the players are the same but the jerseys are flipped.

Identifying arguments as structurally similar is useful if you're studying how people argue, but it's not an especially insightful regarding object level disagreement. Certain patterns of argument frequently recur, but you can't substitute that observation for actually resolving the disagreement, because the substance of the disagreement is in the object level. The question of whether or not Ashli Babbitt was a traitor or a martyr depends almost entirely on whether or not you think the 2020 election was stolen*, not on whether or not you think it is legitimate to resist the government under at least some circumstances.

To put it another way: liberals and conservatives both generally agree that you are obligated to obey legitimate laws and you are not obligated to obey illegitimate laws** (and, indeed, may be obligated not to obey - 'orders are orders' not being considered a good excuse for bad behavior). Observing this doesn't help you adjudicate the differences between cases, because you still need to make judgments about the specific details of the case.

In broad strokes it's clear neither side cares about democracy or rule of law per se

I don't think you can infer that from their actions. If you ask them, they will generally argue that their actions are upholding rule of law and democracy, and for the most part they mean it.

*one could conceivably argue that the shooting was unjustified and the insurrection was unjustified, but that seems to be a marginal position

**In reality, people ignore all sorts of laws all the time, including laws they don't really question the validity of (e.g. traffic laws), which also raises the secondary question of which laws are important enough to care about violations. One could think a law is legitimate, but the measures taken to enforce it are not

To put it another way: liberals and conservatives both generally agree that you are obligated to obey legitimate laws and you are not obligated to obey illegitimate laws (and, indeed, may be obligated not to obey - 'orders are orders' not being considered a good excuse for bad behavior).

How does that not boil down to simply "the mob is right when it agrees with me over what laws are illegitimate"?

I think people generally feel like they're obligated to follow laws even if they disagree with them, and our opportunity to change them if we think they're unjust is through the ballot box. Of course, they feel this, but don't really mean it when it comes to some deeply tribal issues.

How does that not boil down to simply "the mob is right when it agrees with me over what laws are illegitimate"?

It can amount to that under sufficient dire circumstances. It doesn't have to boil down to that because no every instance of disobedience will take the form of mob violence.

I think the mistake you're making is thinking of support for "rule of law" as absolutist adherence to the letter of the law. This is a position that virtually no one holds and which is not practical in any event because laws are not code and require interpretation. When people say they support rule of law, it means they support an approach to governing that operates according to rules/procedures rather than the arbitrary judgment of individual leaders. It does not mean that they think any output of such a system is inherently legitimate.

I think people generally feel like they're obligated to follow laws even if they disagree with them

Disagreeing with a law is not the same thing as believing it is illegitimate. I disagree with my local zoning laws, but I accept that they're a legitimate extension the county government's authority (which in turn is legitimate because blah blah blah...). On the other hand, if the county government passed a law making it legal to sell your children's organs, I'd consider that illegitimate. Which is to say, I don't just disagree with it, I don't consider it morally valid or valid manifestation of governmental authority. That in turn justifies more extreme measures to oppose it than zoning laws.

Settling disagreements via voting is preferred, but for sufficiently high salience disagreements it's not going to be enough (especially if - as is the case in the US - the electoral system has contested legitimacy). Also, as I alluded up above and in the edit I made after you commented, this is often resolve in a different way: simply ignoring laws you don't like and trusting they won't be enforced or loudly complaining when they are.

Which basically amounts to “red tribe can never enforce one of their key goals of reducing immigration.” And if that’s the case, why should red tribe be in a political alliance with the blue tribe?

To put it another way: liberals and conservatives both generally agree that you are obligated to obey legitimate laws and you are not obligated to obey illegitimate laws**

I think there's another question, which is whether it is okay to break otherwise legitimate laws in order to oppose various kinds of bad behavior. Presumably most Leftists would agree that in general, it should be illegal to block streets, burn other peoples' property, and so on.

I think leftists actually believe that the ability to engage in annoying protest, particularly including blocking streets, is a form of free speech. It is a rare case where the tactic is tribally-coded, not just the target.

Right-wing protesters whose message the left considers within the bounds of free speech (like pro-foxhunting protestors in the UK, or pro-motorist protestors almost everywhere) get the same kid glove treatment from the leftist establishment viz-a-viz enforcement of public order laws that leftist protestors get. Anti-immigrant, anti-COVID-restrictions, and explicitly racist protests get the jackboot, but then those messages got the banhammer when expressed peacefully on social media.

The only groups in Europe that come to mind that are remotely comparable to what the anti-ICE people are doing, are the climate activists that glue themselves to highways. Most of everyone else files for a protest permit at the town hall.

I'm mostly thinking about the various trucker and farmer protests involving deliberately blocking roads in the UK and France. These are usually nominally about fuel tax, but are clearly right-coded. They get the kid gloves, because tax policy is the type of issue where the left considers occasional roadblocks to be free speech. The Canadian trucker convoy got the jackboot because the left doesn't consider COVID-19 to be an issue where free speech applies.

The largest right-populist-coded protest movement in Europe in recent years is the gilets jaunes in France, which didn't touch the hot buttons around race and immigration and got the kid gloves.

I think leftists actually believe that the ability to engage in annoying protest, particularly including blocking streets, is a form of free speech.

Unless it's their political enemies doing it.

but then those messages got the banhammer when expressed peacefully on social media.

Sure, they don't think that their enemies have any free speech rights whatsoever. Their words are "violence" or "harassment." Or they are "nazis" who deserved to be "punched."

In other words, it's who/whom.

Right-wing protesters whose message the left considers within the bounds of free speech (like pro-foxhunting protestors in the UK, or pro-motorist protestors almost everywhere) get the same kid glove treatment

Here's a hypothetical: Suppose a bunch of NYC car drivers decided to have an organized "block the bike lane" protest throughout Manhattan. Do you really think that the Left would defend this as valid free speech?

Suppose a bunch of NYC car drivers decided to have an organized "block the bike lane" protest throughout Manhattan. Do you really think that the Left would defend this as valid free speech?

When right-wing protestors blocked streets to protest fuel taxes, speed limit enforcement etc. in various European countries, they got the same kid-glove treatment that left-wing protestors do.

The NYPD are notoriously reluctant to enforce laws protecting cyclists from drivers, including laws against parking in bike lanes - I can't comment on how a hypothetical protest situation would change that.

I enjoyed the various tweets about how cyclists will be thrilled to find out what you're allowed to do to a driver that bumps into you with their car.

When right-wing protestors blocked streets to protest fuel taxes, speed limit enforcement etc. in various European countries,

I am not familiar enough with European politics to comment on this.

I can't comment on how a hypothetical protest situation would change that.

I'm very confident that the Left would NOT see it as free speech.

Both were fine, if not justified (the latter as the narrower question).

In general, people overestimate the risk of tyranny and underestimate the risk of anarchy.

How many truly tyrannical, totalitarian states are there in the world? North Korea, obviously. Eritrea, to some extent. After that the lines get a lot more blurred. You certainly wouldn’t want to be a dissident in Iran or China, but the vast majority of the population is not really ‘enslaved by the state’ (or ‘under constant, totalitarian absolute surveillance with extreme penalties for the tiniest stepping out of line’) the way that people are in a true tyranny.

Even across the 20th century, true tyranny was rare. Neither the Gestapo nor the KGB were capable of it, for example, nor was any CCP domestic intelligence agency, certainly until very recently. In fact, the only major Marxist nation that was truly, terrifyingly totalitarian in the 1984 sense was East Germany.

By contrast, how many ungovernable shitholes are there in the world in which criminals, gangs and others run riot, with the central government hopelessly weak, corrupt or otherwise powerless to stop them? Many, many more. Half of the Sahel, Haiti and a large chunk of Central America, Papua New Guinea, big parts of Somalia and Northern Kenya, large parts of Nigeria and Niger, parts of Syria etc.

We should be much more concerned about anarchy than tyranny.

Your point of view is consistently that of a wealthy, entitled person who sees the police as her personal gendarmarie whose job it is to keep the riff-raff from inconveniencing her life in any way. From that point of view, yes, anarchy is a much greater threat than tyranny, because tyranny will mostly leave you alone, while anarchy threatens you. Not to get all "woke" (har) but this is exactly why "privilege" dialog took root. There was originally a legitimate point to it. You consider the lower classes to be undesirables to be kept away from you, and the only thing you fear is revolting peasants. So nearly any level of state crackdown is acceptable to you because only at North Korean levels would it actually threaten your lifestyle. Whereas those beneath you understand what tyranny will do to them.

From a Conflict Theory perspective, there is no reason you should care about this, or people who are not you, as long as your side maintains the levers of power. But "Let them eat cakeboot" does have the potential to redound on you. Traditionally, rich people had some concern about oppression either out of genuine (liberal) conviction or self-preservation.

Your point of view is consistently that of a wealthy, entitled person who sees the police as her personal gendarmarie whose job it is to keep the riff-raff from inconveniencing her life in any way. From that point of view, yes, anarchy is a much greater threat than tyranny, because tyranny will mostly leave you alone, while anarchy threatens you. Not to get all "woke" (har) but this is exactly why "privilege" dialog took root. There was originally a legitimate point to it. You consider the lower classes to be undesirables to be kept away from you, and the only thing you fear is revolting peasants. So nearly any level of state crackdown is acceptable to you because only at North Korean levels would it actually threaten your lifestyle. Whereas those beneath you understand what tyranny will do to them.

From a Conflict Theory perspective, there is no reason you should care about this, or people who are not you, as long as your side maintains the levers of power. But "Let them eat cakeboot" does have the potential to redound on you. Traditionally, rich people had some concern about oppression either out of genuine (liberal) conviction or self-preservation.

You know how sometimes you learn a new word or concept and you start to see it regularly?

I recently learned the word "bulverism" :)

Pointing out that "What's so bad about tyranny?" is coming from someone who will benefit from tyranny is not bulverism.

Pointing out that "What's so bad about tyranny?" is coming from someone who will benefit from tyranny is not bulverism.

Looks like a textbook case to me. Wikipedia:

The Bulverist presumes that a speaker's argument is false or invalid and then explains why the speaker made that argument (even if said argument is actually correct) by attacking the speaker or the speaker's motive

Bulverism is only bulverism if it side-steps the speaker's argument entirely. Arguing that the speaker's motives caused them to make a reasoning error at a particular step in the chain is not bulverism. As I understood it, @2rafa argued that "so-called 'tyranny' short of North Korea isn't worthy of the name, because in practice it's very easy for ordinary people to live with unless they actively go out of their way to antagonize the regime"; and @Amadan retorted "no, in fact you are over-generalizing from the experience of a privileged few; living under USSR-style tyranny is very disruptive to actual ordinary people's everyday lives even if they keep their heads down, it's only the upper-middle-class who might get by alright if they're apolitical enough".

All fair points. I don’t discount the risk of tyranny - North Korea scares me, too. But I also think a lot of our understanding of life being awful in eg the Soviet Union or Maoist China (an understanding that is generally accurate, I think) is because of the terrible ideological choices and economic system that led directly to famine, starvation, poverty, lack of material goods and squalor. Even the extreme violence of the Cultural Revolution - which was bottom-up, not top-down the way that totalitarian state-performed violence is - was part of this.

In fact, the kind of people who were really likely to be persecuted by the KGB were largely what passed for the Soviet upper and upper middle class, people “like me” if you want to take that line of argument, who worked in state administration, running large enterprises, academia, media and so on. Most average working class people had very different problems.

This is true; but then one might argue that the ability to pursue terrible ideologically-driven policies absolutely unconstrained is a key danger of tyranny, not something else that various tyrannies happened to do by coincidence.

Bulverism is only bulverism if it side-steps the speaker's argument entirely. Arguing that the speaker's motives caused them to make a reasoning error at a particular step in the chain is not bulverism. As I understood it, @2rafa argued that "so-called 'tyranny' short of North Korea isn't worthy of the name, because in practice it's very easy for ordinary people to live with unless they actively go out of their way to antagonize the regime"; and @Amadan retorted "no, in fact you are over-generalizing from the experience of a privileged few; living under USSR-style tyranny is very disruptive to actual ordinary people's everyday lives even if they keep their heads down, it's only the upper-middle-class who might get by alright if they're apolitical enough".

Would you mind taking the post I was responding to and quoting the part which is NOT an attack on the previous poster's motivations? TIA.

I will grant you that this post, taken out of context, was very easy to interpret as straight bulverism. It's Amadan's original, longer reply to 2rafa which I believe can be more charitably interpreted as a more valid argument.

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Except that isn’t what the other poster did. The poster said we are so worried about tyranny that we don’t worry about anarchy enough and anarchy is worse than tyranny.

That is not what you ascribed to the other poster.

This reminds me of Peterson’s complaint that we have a lot of antibodies for when the right goes too far but none for when the left goes too far.

This reminds me of Peterson’s complaint that we have a lot of antibodies for when the right goes too far but none for when the left goes too far.

Why does he discount the rather obvious examples of Pinochet and Franco, for example? Genuine question, as I'm not familiar with his work in detail.

Pinochet was pretty objectively good for the lower class in Chile though, so this critique, in in context, makes no sense. If you were complaining about the fates of egghead professors, then perhaps it makes more sense.

OP's point was specifically about scenarios where the Left goes too far, which is arguably what happened under Allende's rule. My critique regarding this is thus that "we" do have at least one example of an antidote.

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Fair point but Spanish and not Anglo world.

Interestingly people like Pinochet don’t command near the cultural respect as say Fidel despite Pinochet leaving Chile a lot better off compared to Fidel in Cuba.

Right. Seemed a non-sequitur to go from that post to "guess you're cool with police tyranny." To steelman Amadan, that is exactly what you'd do if you're intelligent about politics and sensitive to the implications of its arguments. To strawman, it's a hysterically paranoid progressive reflex.

I like that Peterson point. I sometimes feel my niche or role in the conversational eco-system is to provide antibodies for the left, as the right is already vigilantly watched (in this sense, being correct in absolute sense is less important than providing some balance). I think Matt Taibbi made a similar point about why he's journalistically more fixated on areas of rule not under Republican control.

All the things that happen in tyranny to the lower classes can also happen in anarchy. In fact, they happen more. Just compare the murder stats for the underclass in Chicago vs. a rich suburb thereof. Everyone is better off empirically as law and order is implemented until a tipping point where the upperclass start being worse off.

I identify with 2rafa's POV. While I think what you're saying is true at the extremes, how does it apply to the US? The Jan 6th rioters appeared to me to be hallucinating a tyranny as much as the people opposing ICE's lawful deportations are now. I disagree with portraying me as a friend of the warlord because the warlord is about one guy's vibe about what's right and using his club, whereas rule of law is much more legitimate than that.

The anarchy here comes from people who are otherwise materially well-off and essentially free being made mentally unwell. While the state's rule of law corresponds to at least some attachment to reality: judges ultimately field test what lawmakers and the executive enact against the constitution and reality. Yes some judges are unhinged culture warriors but I think it's fair to say 1/3rd to a half still care about reality. And we are not yet at the point where judges are being assassinated for handing down judgments that powers don't want to see. Wake me up when that's happening, I guess.

EDIT: I asked SlopGPT for examples of states with solid democracy and rule of law that still underwent rebellion and it cited the UK w.r.t. The Troubles, Spain post-Franco w.r.t. ETA, and Canada w.r.t. Quebec separatism. Surprising. So I suppose I have some reading to do.

EDIT2: although these time periods coincide with global trends in relaxed policing. Pinker's view would be that lax policing encourages disorder instead of cooperation by changing the payoffs

While you're not incorrect, for the low-level peasant the roving gangs are more dangerous. Big Warlord in the distant city can send his tax collectors round to seize your crops or pressgang your sons, but that's only every so often, like a bad harvest or a plague. It's part of life that bad things happen.

Unrelated gangs of thieves and small local chieftains who sweep through on an unpredictable schedule, and may happen several times in a row, are much more dangerous since they have no interest in leaving you anything until the next time. This is why people may and do prefer the Strongman who cracks down on the roving bands and then levies his tithes. It's why people could be nostalgic for Stalin or the hey-day of the USSR etc.

I'm not in any way endorsing anarchy. On the oppression-anarchy spectrum I'd be closer to @2rafa's POV than the typical DSA or antifa or what-have-you activist (and they would consider me as fascist as her). I agree that at a certain level of anarchy, it's better to have a brutal warlord who at least keeps the bandits at bay than a hellscape of marauding gangs.

That said, tyranny is bad too, and the Warlord's friends telling me life is better under the Warlord's absolute rule is not going to be very convincing.

Tyranny is bad, but the argument of my comment was to suggest that - right now - the long term political consequences of mass immigration (a lower trust, poorer, more violent, more unequal and more corrupt country) outweigh the risks that this almost certainly accidental death is a sure sign of descent into tyranny. I also just replied to wandererinthewilderness in this same thread, apologies for not tagging you.

I apologize for going in on you so hard. Against my initial, wiser judgment, I have found myself invested in this ridiculous case, and the more I am assailed by what I perceive to be low-effort culture warring bombs thrown by rightists and leftists alike (I genuinely do consider both sides at this point-at least at the edges of the argument-to be bad faith, dishonest, and actively destructive to this country), the more disgusted I am. For some reason that manifested in my response to your post, which I really did perceive to be kind of dismissive of the brutality of the police and the state wielded against its "enemies." While I do think you are frequently oblivious (or at least, indifferent) to people outside your social class, it was unfair of me to accuse you of being pro-tyranny.

Your point of view is consistently that of a wealthy, entitled person who sees the police as her personal gendarmarie whose job it is to keep the riff-raff from inconveniencing her life in any way. From that point of view, yes, anarchy is a much greater threat than tyranny, because tyranny will mostly leave you alone, while anarchy threatens you. Not to get all "woke" (har) but this is exactly why "privilege" dialog took root. There was originally a legitimate point to it. You consider the lower classes to be undesirables to be kept away from you, and the only thing you fear is revolting peasants. So nearly any level of state crackdown is acceptable to you because only at North Korean levels would it actually threaten your lifestyle. Whereas those beneath you understand what tyranny will do to them.

I don't agree with the general argument you're making. In first-world countries, wealthy people generally have less to fear from increasing steps towards disorder than poorer people, as they can afford things like private security and to live in areas with non-violent and conscientious neighbors. It's poorer people who live next to violent crackheads who have more to lose when the local mayor decides to enct policies that make it impossible to lock up the person who just break into your house because of racism or whatever. This is also reflected in revealed preferences: it's almost always richer people who vote for soft-on-crime, restorative-justice (read: anarchic) policies and candidates while poorer, less educated voters choose candidates with a much more hardline attitude towards criminals.

The failure state of tyranny has the potential to be much more deadly. The highest crime-related murder rates in the world tend to cap out around 100 per 100,000 per year. The Khmer Rouge murder rate was something like 7,000 per 100,000 per year.

Even in Somalia it's not clear that the anarchy of the present is any worse than the tyranny of Siad Barre.

And of course, to bang my usual drum, lockdowns were tyranny, so that made the number of tyrannical states be at least 100 just a handful of years ago.

The highest crime-related murder rates in the world tend to cap out around 100 per 100,000 per year. The Khmer Rouge murder rate was something like 7,000 per 100,000 per year.

I don’t think counting extremely destructive, ideologically motivated civil conflict as “tyranny” is particularly productive in this discussion, or else plenty of early modern European countries that don’t really count ask ‘tyrannies’ are tyrannies. A totalitarian tyranny isn’t “when you kill half of your population for being the wrong race/religion/sect/caste”, that’s far too broad and common throughout human history. Humans living in tribes before the Neolithic revolution also saw very high male death rates to murder per year in many cases, is that ‘tyranny’?

The reality is that North Korea and Eritrea both probably still have higher quality of life than Haiti right now.

Taking GDP per capita as a rough proxy, NK is considerably worse than Haiti.

This just goes to show how bad GDP is as a measure. There is no way this is correct.

I don't think this is a problem with GDP as a measure, but a problem with measuring North Korea's GDP. Kim's regime doesn't exactly put out accurate economic reports.

The Khmer Rouge murder rate was something like 7,000 per 100,000 per year.

I don't what method you used to arrive at this figure but I'd mention that according to the Pol Pot biography by Philip Short, about 3/4 of all excess deaths in Cambodia attributed to the Khmer Rogue were due to malnutrition and disease, in turn caused by government negligence and incompetence, plus the wholesale collapse of state capacity after five years of brutal civil war during the US-aligned military dictatorship.

With regard to Somalia I won't disagree with your point outright but would mention that the repression during the last years of Barre's rule was pretty damn bad by anyone's standards: the wholesale slaughter of "treasonous" clans, indiscriminate aerial bombing, mass rapes, the destruction of water reservoirs and livestock.

The failure state of tyranny has the potential to be much more deadly. The highest crime-related murder rates in the world tend to cap out around 100 per 100,000 per year. The Khmer Rouge murder rate was something like 7,000 per 100,000 per year.

I'm not a political science expert, but I tend to agree with this. Another factor to consider is that tyrants are always tempted to start wars with other countries as a of holding on to power.

In fact, the only major Marxist nation that was truly, terrifyingly totalitarian in the 1984 sense was East Germany.

Romania and Albania were definitely worse (Albania was never major by anyone's standards for sure, but the GDR was also not somehow more major than Romania). Anyway, since you brought up the issue of state capacity, I'd point out that since member states of the Soviet bloc were modeled alike, so their state security agencies had roughly the same capacity as well; it's that some of those regimes enforced a less rigid system of conformity than the others that made a difference.

ungovernable shitholes are there in the world in which criminals, gangs and others run riot, with the central government hopelessly weak, corrupt or otherwise powerless to stop them

The central government, sure. On the other hand, they are also characterized by vigilantism, militia building and the emergence of organic local power structures.

On a different note, I'm not sure what exactly your argument is - is it that more people suffer from anarchy than from tyranny in absolute numbers, or that anarchy is overall a bigger threat to individual human flourishing, or both?

Corrupt shitholes are actually tyranny too. If you do something with even the slightest economic value they will be all over you like a swarm of locusts.

There might be less total state capacity than north korea, but there will be more directed at you specifically than north korea spends on the average peon.

If you do something with even the slightest economic value they will be all over you like a swarm of locusts.

Sure, but as anyone who has peered at the relative tax burdens of women and ethnic minorities in the US will know, people who produce economic value are a tiny, tiny segment of the population. Regimes that persecute a small number of people a lot > regimes that persecute a large number of people a little?

‘under constant, totalitarian absolute surveillance with extreme penalties for the tiniest stepping out of line’

This doesn't seem like a germane definition of "tyranny". We get the word from the Ancient Greeks, while your definition would imply that it was more or less impossible for a pre-modern state to be a real tyranny, for lack of adequate surveillance technology. There is a reason that "surveillance state", "totalitarianism" and "tyranny" are all different words, and just because a triple-whammy is appreciably worse than each in isolation, doesn't mean I want to live in a "pure" tyranny (or for that matter a "pure" surveillance state).

While I sympathise with your broader point, I don’t think that you’re making the argument well. People are afraid of living with the equivalent of the Gestapo or the KGB, so saying that they weren’t real tyranny is just going to get ‘well, I don’t want not-real-tyranny either thank you’.

And indeed one of the problems with tyranny is that it can coexist perfectly happily with anarchy.

It just seems manifestly obvious that the failure state where enforcement melts away is vastly more common that the failure state where the entire country is, essentially, imprisoned. Anarchy and tyranny can co-exist, but anarcho-tyranny is a conservative/reactionary concept precisely because it describes a failure of liberal democracy in which protected, left-friendly groups aren’t prosecuted while unprotected ones are.

We recently had much of the world fall into the failure state where the entire country was imprisoned by stay at home orders with lockdowns.

The enabling part of anarcho-tyranny is the tyranny part, not the anarchy part, because it describes the power of the state pressing on the scales. Can't go the other way.

My point is that you are excluding the vast majority of what people consider 'tyranny' from your list and then saying there isn't very much tyranny in the world. If we include the Gestapo, the KGB, COVID lockdowns, anti-Catholic burnings during the Reformation, the Terror in revolutionary France, Jim Crow etc. then it's still broadly true that people underweight the harms of anarchy compared to 'you can get along as long as you don't do anything to upset the government', but the picture is more complex than 'really there are only two tyrannies in the world and they're both tiny'.

The question isn't 'what's more common in world-historical terms'. The question is 'what's more likely in the modern west'. And modern western countries are tightening the noose around dissidents, they're not giving up their monopoly on violence.

How many truly tyrannical, totalitarian states are there in the world? North Korea, obviously. Eritrea, to some extent. After that the lines get a lot more blurred.

Chechnya. Turkmenistan. China is more than capable of doing this in conquered territories, although you're correct they do not do this in Shanghai.

Chechnya isn't a state in the everyday sense of the word.

I feel like in a lot of ways the questions around tyranny and anarchy sort of dance around the actual issue which is what a government is actually for. Why do we have one, why do we want one, what is the government supposed to do. And really I think until you answer that question in a way that makes sense, asking whether or not something is dangerously tyrannical or anarchistic is simply booing a given government or government action.

To sort of answer my own question, I see government as a sort of political operating system— the point isn’t to directly solve most problems, but to provide the necessary stability and infrastructure that allow other institutions: churches, civic groups, businesses, and so on to provide services to society. Now that sort of changes the way you’d think about crime policing. You’d want the government to keep the crime rate as low as possible without unduly interfering with the ability of people to organize and solve problems or do things. Putting up huge roadblocks at every corner would probably solve crime, but it would absolutely destroy the ability of people living in the city to do pretty much anything useful. Having no police presence would allow people to do things in theory, however because there are no cops, the crime rate is too high for it to be safe to do things. You can kind of apply the same lenses to other problems like business law (if you don’t have any, social trust is impossible, too many laws mean that almost all people are too busy with compliance to actually do anything useful) or health and environmental laws. A good government would be stable, but mostly invisible and provide known safety and security measures and predictable laws enforced predictably such that it’s mostly just there but invisible to end users.

Is it cultural warring if my opinion is I think population replacement of people like me is bad and therefore I want aggressive deportations?

I have no problem with this Good lady. I don’t view her as my enemy. She’s probably just a midtwit that follows what she’s told to do. If it was Nazi Germany she would be a Nazi. Societies are filled with people like this.

I don’t even have a problem with the people I want deported. I just assume if we import a lot of Somalis and Amerindians that will end up voting against my interests like a lot of Latam countries. If I were them I would emigrate to America too.

I feel like a lot of the cultural war is cosplaying and people think it’s just a game. For the Good later I attribute this more to mistake theory and her interests are probably more similar to mine but she doesn’t know it. To the latter group I think longer run it’s more a conflict theory issue where we probably do have real long term differing interests.

For the Good lady well one obstructor getting killed means people see there are consequences to that behavior. So we get less of it and ICE can focus on their mission. And honestly I think a lot of midtwits are good at following the power structure when they figure out whose in charge.

I guess I would consider both Good and Babbit as midtwit versions of my own tribe. But the elites leading them have a fundamental mistake theory between them. I don’t think the Wasps who are now liberals are members of a different tribe. It’s more like the Cold War of an intertribe ideology conflict between capitalist and communists. One side had a fundamental mistake theory that wasn’t apparent and the other system works significantly better.

Minnesota has a significant Nordic heritage which has made them more liberal. But in the Nordic countries Social Democracy works well. I might even be a SocDem if I lived in Denmark. I think they just haven’t realized that political ideology doesn’t work with groups that evolved in different environments.

A bit of a side question - Do you think that they will succeed in martyring her? I see the tries, but to me it seems it probably doesn't have the needed dry biomass it had in 2020 with floyd. Like it is not getting much traction and only the true believers are really active.

I'll make a prediction after I see what happens today when the sun sets and the ICE protesters realize we still live under fascist tyranny or whatever.

Factors at play:

  • The blues burned up a lot of political capital, literally, in 2020, so normies are simply less inclined to side with them
  • Summer 2020 can be blamed to a large extent on cabin fever, and the fact that viral content on social media, controlled fairly overtly at the time by the blue tribe, pretty much constituted our shared reality. People in 2026 have lives outside of their screens in a way that people in summer 2020 didn't, X is now controlled by the red tribe, blue alternatives to X have nearly no mainstream penetration (i.e. are pretty much just blue siloes), and most people under 40 have quit Facebook.
  • The canonization of floyd came from a video that omitted the context of his resisting arrest and the drugs he swallowed at the beginning of his police encounter, and focused only on the use of force against him. For the events of the ICE shooting, the context is a lot more apparent and makes it much more clear that she largely brought her death upon herself. It's a lot harder for someone with no particular dog in the fight to look at the video and think it's an unreasonable use of force, than the original video of floyd that led one to believe that the police officer was choking him to death for no reason.

Factors at play:

I think there's another factor here, which is that the dead person is white. If she had been black, it would be a lot easier to get people fired up over the racial angle.

Also, the victim wasn’t black. Only blacks are allowed to be martyrs among a certain segment of the modern Left.

Some other Tweets I’ve seen but can’t find anymore:

“I’d like to remind y’all that “Say Her Name” is for Black women. Yes, it matters. Just like Rest in Power is for Black revolutionaries.”

and

why don’t Americans do something~ BECAUSE ICE WILL SHOOT US IN THE HEAD AND THEN CALL US TERRORISTS EVEN IF WE ARE UNARMED THANKS

THE BLACK COMMUNITY RISKED THIS AND MORE DURING THE CIVILS RIGHTS MOVEMENT AND IT’S CLEAR YOU WHITE PEOPLE WANT TO SIT BACK UNTIL MARGINALIZED PEOPLE GO FIRST AGAIN THANKS

You’ve probably also seen the video of the white woman who feels conflicted because of her own white privilege, to say nothing of the white privilege of the two women who were involved.

A lot of the diehard activists have been so caught up in racial discourse and race-based gatekeeping for so long that they can’t even set it aside when it might be beneficial to their cause to do so.

Also, the victim wasn’t black

Yeah, I made a similar point before seeing your comment. Although it's true that progressives on the whole display an impressive degree of group solidarity, the fact is that there are a lot of racial issues simmering under the surface. Non-whites in the movement have definitely noticed that the leadership is mostly white, the people getting the lion's share of the spoils are mostly white, etc., and for the most part it gives them a strong sense of either envy or opportunism or both.

For the white peoples' part (I mean whites in the progressive movement), they are just as afraid of being accused of racism as anyone else. Which is an obstacle to making a big deal out of this Good woman. Almost certainly they are frantically looking for a way to blame this shooting on Israel as a way of maintaining unity in their coalition.

Almost certainly they are frantically looking for a way to blame this shooting on Israel as a way of maintaining unity in their coalition.

I think I'd appreciate a bit of an elaboration here, because this is beyond crazy for the crazies I know.

I think I'd appreciate a bit of an elaboration here, because this is beyond crazy for the crazies I know.

What elaboration do you want? Progressives have regularly been making efforts to link their fantasies of American police misbehavior with their fantasies of Israeli military misbehavior.

Also the queerness. Can't find the tweet, but someone was very exercised that earlier reports were referring to her "partner". 'No it's her wife, she was a queer woman, this is erasure' type of outrage. Especially outraged that there were references to the ex-husband (father of two of her kids) but then "partner" instead of "wife".

Even with the prospect of a newly-minted martyr for the cause, they can't help all pulling in different directions.

I guess I don't find these kinds of arguments about the structure of an argument very compelling these days. If I think that some government actions are illegitimate and resisting them via force is justified am I thereby required, as a matter of logic or consistency, to accept that any individual's subjective assessment of any government action and the appropriate resistance is correct? Sure, if there are liberals and conservatives out there talking about how, actually, both government actions were equally illegitimate but then they have contradictory reactions then charge them with hypocrisy. I think this describes relatively few people though. Rather, people disagree about the facts with respect to which actions were illegitimate and thus what resistance was justified.

You'd think so. This doesn't seem to be the case. People who demand resistance to ICE generally won't say out loud "anything you can get away with doing to ICE is justified and anything they do to you isn't". They don't want to sound like that, even if in some sense they believe that. So instead they pretend to argue that the facts of the case make things justified or unjustified, and they claim to be respecting principles that everyone should follow, even if those principles are not a load bearing part of their beliefs. It's fair to take them at their word unless and until they give those principles up.

The individual instances can seem superficially similar but the overall context couldn't be more different. For instance you can make the argument that both were killed by the Dems making it seem like all kinds of unethical and dangerous protesting is safe, appropriate, and at times even mandatory.

This is simply not true but the treatment of leftist protestors doing dangerous things, rioting, and even directly harming people...all makes the case that doing crazy shit is reasonable and appropriate.

In this frame they both were killed by insane leftist protesting norms, but one was killed by accepting lies from her own side, and the other was killed by accepting lies told by the other side.

That's pretty different.

This is also why I have no tolerance for complaints about January 6th - the left burned down billions of dollars in property and everyone was told that was fine. "Oh not for you, just for us" is not a compelling counterargument. If you don't like scary protests don't support scary protests.

Don’t forget “both sides” being egged on by their preferred media, social media, and private group chats and meetings. “Tomorrow we enter the Capitol!” “Drive, baby, drive!”

Don’t forget the policy wonks claiming “Defection!” on “both sides,” citing the constant denial and dismissal of court cases seeking to reexamine the 2020 vote totals, and the international law re refugees and immigrants from Somalia.

But also don’t forget Statuary Hall and the peaceful televised procession between velvet ropes. The chaos was mostly left outside.

While it may feel good to play enlightened centrist and do some both sides’ing, there is a major area where Babbitt differed from Good: Babbitt posed no imminent threat to the officer who shot.

Breaking, entering, and looting is something progressives smugly defended as “that’s what insurance is for,” so merely breaking and entering can’t be too bad. No climber is illegal; walls and windows are but oppressive social constructs.

That being said, I’ve long been more than happy to chalk Babbitt up to “play stupid games, win stupid prizes.” The Wikipedia article summary of the event:

On the other side of the doors and barricade, Lieutenant Michael Byrd was aiming his pistol at the broken window. Despite several calls of "he's got a gun",[51] Babbitt, hoisted by two men,[10] began to climb through the shattered window. She was then shot in her left anterior shoulder[52] by Byrd[53][46] and fell back among the other protesters.[10] Babbitt had been warned not to proceed through the window: one witness recalled that "A number of police and Secret Service were saying 'Get back! Get down! Get out of the way!'; [Babbitt] didn't heed the call."

This is “’what is he going to do, shoot me?’ — Woman who was shot” territory and where Babbitt was more similar to Good and her wife, in feeling herself too much and overestimating her plot armor. Hardly would it be the first time Babbitt had acted impulsively:

In 2016, she faced criminal charges of reckless endangerment in Maryland after she allegedly repeatedly smashed her SUV into a vehicle being driven by a former girlfriend of Aaron Babbitt.[10][17] Citing ongoing harassment, the victim obtained multiple judicial orders forbidding Ashli any contact with her.[17]

Some bros can’t even get a text back while others have women ramming SUVs over them.

In any case, conservatives were somewhat ambivalent about Babbitt at the time, whereas progressives are far more unified in lining up behind Good and getting others to do the same. For example, the Minnesota Timberwolves held a moment of silence for Good. There was Soyjak-pointing at the moment of silence from online spaces such as /r/nba, then as well when individuals like Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr and Milwaukee Bucks coach Doc Rivers voiced their support.

“Stephen and Glenn are good at advising other men how to knock a ball into a hoop. That does not make them wise” — Olenna Tyrell, probably. And even then, until this week, many online NBA followers would have been quite vocal in doubting the coaching ability of Rivers.

Progressives have much greater asabiyyah than conservatives. The latter is much more willing to shrug and accept when a member of their “side” eats a negative consequence. Conservatives will even police their own side for progressive-coded things like alleged racism, sexism, or homophobia; whereas progressive self-policing generally takes the form of purity-spirals when other progressives are being insufficiently progressive. Hence quips over the years like conservatives are but progressives driving the speed limit, conservatives are happy to lose gracefully, conservatives are the Generals to the progressives’ Globetrotters.

Progressives will happily stan those on the Right Side of History and/or those with sufficient Who? Whom? credentials in maintaining and expanding Outposts. Normie conservatives will do things like forgive their son’s black killer but denounce those who do some Noticing over the occurrence, as Austin Metcalf’s father did when Karmelo Anthony sent his son to the shadow realm.

In and of itself, Good’s death has drawn comparisons to Kirk’s death and Floyd’s death (“George Foid” and “I can’t steer”). There are ample re-edits of an originally progressive-coded rendition of Kirk’s shooting but with Good taking a bullet through her neck instead of Kirk.

The Babbitt and Good equivalences are at least far less farcical compared to attempted equivalences from recent previous events. Babbitt and Good are practically theyre-the-same-picture.jpg compared to Charlie Kirk vs. George Floyd, Shiloh Hendrix vs. Karmelo Anthony.

On the Kirk and Floyd comparisons, one has a law-abiding man on one end who took a bullet through the neck in quite gruesome fashion. On the other end is a career criminal who experienced a drug overdose or an unintentional homicide.

Shiloh called a child a “nigger” when the child was indeed likely behaving like a Child Who Annoys You. On the other end is Karmelo Anthony who stabbed a high school football player, leading to his death.

That Kirk and Floyd—and Shiloh and Anthony—are/were often equated, is quite something.

While it may feel good to play enlightened centrist and do some both sides’ing, there is a major area where Babbitt differed from Good: Babbitt posed no imminent threat to the officer who shot.

The other major confounder for Babbitt is she had just passed other officers who provided no resistance at all, thereby giving her a contextual clue that her presence was authorized. It is similar to if the other ICE officer, not her wife, was yelling at Good to "floor it".

You could argue that Good and her wife were also given the wrong contextual clue. Their prior interaction with the shooter iceman was "filming each other menacingly", which probably reinforced their "ICE cannot do anything to US citizens legally" misconception.

That would be reasonable if she had just opened a door and got shot walking through but my understanding is that she was climbing through a window that her fellow protesters just broke. There's no ambiguity there about whether that was an authorized entrance.

Not really relevant as to her threat level to officers because she has just been next to a bunch of them and they suffered no harm and calmly let her do her thing.

In the Babbitt situation, the concern wasn't what she would do to the officer. The concern was what she and the other people who would likely follow her would do to the lawmakers they were getting close to.

That would be a good point, if that door / window / whatever was all that stood between the protestors and the lawmakers, but I was under the impression Congress was safely evacuated at that stage?

Babbitt was shot at 2:44 PM. At 2:42 some House members were walking through the tunnels. I couldn't find exactly how many people were not evacuated, but Markwayne Mullin saw the shot and says that there was still staff there.

If that is the genuine reason for the shoot it is wholly unjustifiable under the law. For lethal force to be deployed you need to reasonably fear that the person is imminently going to kill or cause great bodily harm to yourself or others. Defense of others based on a convoluted (and frankly unreasonable) speculation about Babbitt et al's evil mens rea causing bad results 30+seconds after you are contemplating deadly force is completely unjustifiable.

Nothing convoluted about it. It was a mob intent on reaching people whom they know they are not allowed to meet (thus the barricades). The police by virtue of their job have to speculate on bad outcomes because that's their job. A gallows had been put up by someone. A state rep and staff were right there. The shooter was pointing his gun at the wall directly in front of the window and it had been shouted out that a gun was drawn. If someone was willing to still try to get in I'd call it reasonable fear that someone is determined to do something at the cost of their life.

Do you think if a mob of lefties is breaking down a door to get to where they think Trump is, that the Secret Service is engaging in convoluted speculation about their motives? No, they're thinking "My job is to protect someone. They are close to someone I am trying to protect and behaving in an aggressive manner." The speculation that matters is they are willing to commit a crime (breaking down a barricade in a government building) in furtherance of another goal that involves getting close to a VIP.

I do think secret service would perform better most of the time.

You have to draw the line somewhere at some point, even if it's already Piccadilly, Watford Gap service station or the Reform Club.

With regards to enforcement, yes. When evaluating the likelihood of imminent threat of death or great bodily harm slow breaches of weak barriers that your fellow officers are giving her free access to while perceiving no threat....

I don't think the hearts of the reds are truly in it for the defense of Babbitt. At the very least, they are less successful at convincing me that they are deluded about the situation, as the blues are about their own various martyrs. It comes across as a cargo cult to me, trying to copy the blue's performative outrage over the consequences of their own actions, but without understanding the true underlying demonstration of solidarity that is the actual point of it. The blues understand and perform actual solidarity in ways that the reds don't, and part of that is by saying "we will defend literally anything you do in service of the cause, and do our best to ensure that you face the minimum possible consequences for doing it, and that anyone who interferes with you faces the maximum possible consequences, and all of the above are regardless of what laws, rules, or social customs you violate while doing so." This is basically a fundamentally left wing form of operating that the right cannot copy without not being the right anymore.

The attempts at outrage over Babbitt, at the end of the day, come across to me just as a plea: "Look, we all know that if capitol police had shot an unarmed woman at, say, the Kavanaugh protests, you guys would have gone apeshit," to which the response is "yes, thank you for noticing."

This is basically a fundamentally left wing form of operating that the right cannot copy without not being the right anymore.

Which, ironically, is what the right is figuring out it's going to become- whether it likes that or not.

What refers to itself as left-wing today is solidly motivated by the same thought and moral patterns that motivate more historic examples of right-wing thought (privilege preservation at all costs, message discipline for free as a consequence, attempts to enshrine the excuses providing those privileges as holy, conscripting the young to fight stupid wars, etc.). This is more obvious in Western countries outside the US.

but without understanding the true underlying demonstration of solidarity that is the actual point of it

This is what happens when the left- a specific revision of reform thought at the time- metastasizes into something that will displace the right at the time. The fact that the right doesn't seem to be winning is a sign that this hasn't happened yet, though this is also only recognizable once it has happened.

I am not pretending to be some above-it-all enlightened centrist but I will happily bite the bullet and assert that both played stupid games and won stupid prizes, as they say, or more succinctly FAFO’d.

If you believe you are engaging in semi-violent civil disobedience against a regime you perceive as brutal/fascist/totalitarian then you should be prepared for and accepting of violent repression in response. Whining about it strikes me as pathetic LARPing to some extent. You want the glory of claiming to be fighting evil murderous fascists while secretly expecting you can endlessly shriek and obstruct and they will treat you with kid gloves. IMO if you want to pretend you are going into battle with the SS then you should be prepared to die and face it with courage.

Whining about it strikes me as pathetic LARPing to some extent

The whole point is to whine about it. The purpose of civil disobedience is to shout "come and see the violence inherent in the system" to anyone who can hear. It is to wave the implications of the status quo in the faces of people who would rather not see it - to force authorities to make good on their threats of violence and ask fence-sitters whether keeping segregated lunch counters justified such actions.

What would the purpose of suffering in silence be?

Bare minimal respect for democracy, the law, and all norms and standards of our shared civil society. He behavior was a more central example of domestic terrorism than it was sitting in the front of a bus.

What would the purpose of suffering in silence be?

Not having something like a meme, "this is what happened last time Democrats tried nullifying federal law" spoken into existence?

Whining about it strikes me as pathetic LARPing to some extent.

I'll give you to some extent, but non/semi-violent resistance as a strategy only works because the repression looks much worse in the public eye than the original resistance (see why American riot police don't use water cannons unlike plenty of other Western countries). I'm not sure I fault political actors for trying to bring attention to such, but often it does feel like things are magnified hugely out of proportion ("Help, I'm being repressed!"). In this case someone died, and I'm not really inclined to call that "out of proportion" specifically, but I will point to the incentives here in that tangible repression was certainly being sought by at least some parties involved (the protest movement as a whole, for example).

see why American riot police don't use water cannons unlike plenty of other Western countries

They should. You could even put a positive spin on it as "replacing less less-than-lethal riot suppression mechanisms with more less-than-lethal ones".

In order to put a positive spin on it, you have to have the media on your side.

see why American riot police don't use water cannons

They did at Standing Rock, and it's not clear to me why that was the odd exception, unless whoever was in charge of the police thought it was funny (one can imagine: "they want the water? We'll give them the water, alright!")

Bad associated optics. Historically, the use of water cannons were used on MLK's protest march through Alabama, and it became viral at the time because of it.

...so, yes, sad to say, Leftists could claim that water cannons are racist with a straight face.

Governor Wallace was a retarded dumbfuck.

It's a shared culture of narcissism. People look for identity and meaning in stupid acts of protest, and they imagine what the government does is provide the stage for it. Totalitarian symbolically, but it will never engage in any kind of violence at all against you personally, which would interfere in your bragging rights about how righteous and badass you are.

I also have a hard time believing that the complaining about the consequences is a genuine act of surprise. It comes across as performative, mostly likely because it literally is a performance, for the phone in your hand or the people reading your comments. It's an act that allows them to tell each other stories about how their cause is so righteous that the evil enemies want to attack them for being a part of it.

The people who do these things are creatures of Conflict Theory, and their thoughts cannot be explained in the language of Mistake Theory that is mandatory in The Motte. They have no particular adherence to principles or truth, these are restrictions that Mistake Theorists adopt, which Conflict Theorists have no particular use for because they tend to prevent you from doing whatever is necessary to win. The principle at work is "the Other Team did a Bad Thing to Our Team, which makes Other Team Bad and Our Team Good, which therefore justifies everything that Our Team will now do in response, which will not be Bad because Our Team are the ones doing it to the Bad Other Team."

The goal this entire time has been to engineer conditions in which it would be inevitable that Other Team would eventually do something Bad to Our Team. That's the point of blue tribe politicians urging their own constituents to resist, and activist organizations encouraging disruptions of ICE operations. Any idiot can see that what happened in Minneapolis is the inevitable result of everyone, everywhere, actively agitating to make the environment around ICE operations as chaotic and hostile as possible. And any idiot can see that all it would have taken to prevent it would be simply not committing to making the environment around ICE operations as chaotic and hostile as possible. But that would mean losing, and we can't have that!

I simply can't get worked up about this situation to the extent that everybody else wants me to. I can't be outraged or saddened at something that everyone clearly wanted to happen. All I can really do is cling to my commitment to principles, truth, and the rule of law.

I have a hard time believing that the brains behind these anti-ICE protests aren't in fact counting on something they can use to make ICE look like stormtroopers.

There seems to be an uptick in women deliberately bringing their children to protests.

Yeah. If you do sufficient obstructionism it will inherently generate iffy media moments, and eventually one will slot into the right media environment and be questionable enough to potentially derail the whole project. Any good uses of violence by ICE will be immediately subsumed in the media but anything remotely controversial will be easy to keep magnifying and repeating.

Liberals tearlessly argued this is what happens when you Fuck Around while conservatives argued she was righteously Resisting (TM).

Did they? Because as I recall, there were plenty of conservatives at the time who agreed that the Ashli Babbit shooting was a good shoot; it was somewhat later that some (but by no means all) groups on the right came out against. As opposed to here where on-the-close-order-of-zero leftists agree that this was a good shoot. Lots of other differences too; this looks like false both-sidesism.

The Motte discourse is also missing the possibility of considering both to be bad shoots, with a potential argument being that LEOs escalate to lethal force far too quickly. (In the case of Babbitt, for example, surely tear gas and tasers could be reasonably expected by a rioter to come before lead bullets.)

I think there's two separate things when it comes to 'good shoot'. There's 'was the shot legal/complying with regulations' and 'were the optics of the shoot bad'. A lot of people on the Left aren't really trying to have the first conversation since they operate purely on optics lines instead of 'will this clear in the court of law', which is what is so galling about them being totally fine about Babbitt whilst they're acting like Good was flat-out murder

Optics, however, is whatever the leftist media decides it is.

I think some conservatives are sort of coming around to the idea that the unconditional solidarity on the left is a serious strength, and so they need to adopt something like that too in order to keep up. But it's difficult to maintain the same energy because it conflicts so deeply with what conservatism fundamentally is, so the hagiography of Babbitt just comes across as a cargo cult of the left's more successful hagiographies of their own martyrs. It doesn't really work without the True Belief that Your Side is so morally righteous that it is exempt from the law.

I think some conservatives are sort of coming around to the idea that the unconditional solidarity on the left is a serious strength,

Arguably it's also a weakness. Consider the way that the Democratic party leadership picks winners instead of letting their base decide on a presidential candidate. While the Republican party allowed their base to choose Donald Trump. Although this was done over the objections of Republican leadership, he turned out to be a surprisingly strong candidate. By contrast, Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris turned out to be surprisingly weak candidates.

Or consider the Left's position on the Trans issue. It's obviously a losing issue for the Democrats but it's very very hard for internal dissenters to speak out against it.

I think the more relevant conflict in the Babbitt case might just be that police (as a group) and harsh policing (as a principle) have traditionally been pretty central to conservative identity, and so it is difficult for many Reds to take sides against them, or even more generally come to terms with a world where the "boys in blue" more often than not are the enforcers of Blue hegemony. In fact, isn't all of Jan 6 really rather incongruous with conservative aesthetics?

I feel like Jan 6 was a cargo cult of the 2020 summer of love. It felt to me like a bunch of people spent summer 2020 watching leftists burn shit down with few-to-no legal or political consequences, and all attempts to stop them turning into political victories, and those people thought "hey I can do that too" without realizing that those outcomes did not come from the burning shit down, they came from the political infrastructure that the blues have spent a century constructing or institutionally capturing. It takes a lot of effort and solidarity to turn intentionally criminal and anti-social behavior into political victories, that the reds simply have not done.


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