This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The equal blame incident.
I'm libertarian. I'm pro immigration. I'm generally not a fan of the institution of policing and think it is run badly in many ways. I also think the average protestor belongs in a mental institution.
All of that to say I think this is generally a no one is at fault incident. Or at least one where everyone's culpability balances out in ways that they are all equally to blame.
Good went to a protest with the intent to use a deadly weapon (a car) to obstruct police officers in their duty. This is a risky thing to do. It endangers yourself and endangers others. Cars are not toys. They are about equal with guns in terms of killing people in the US each year Source. And the same holds true for police officers, where gun and car deaths in the line of duty are about equal Source.
I hate litigating specific incidents, because 99% of the time the main "this could have been prevented" turning points happen before the incident. I can think of at least two major ways Good could have prevented this (not going to the protest, or getting out of her vehicle to protest). I cannot think of any specific policy that police or ICE could have that would have prevented this. Officers are allowed to defend themselves from bodily harm or attacks on their person. Just like people in general are allowed to defend themselves from bodily harm or attacks on their person. The officer was not trying to create a situation, they were moving around the vehicle not trying to stay in front of it. If you are around police officers you should be aware that they have a heightened sense of "someone is going to attack me". Don't pretend like you are going to pull a gun on them, or pretend to charge them like you are going to beat them up. Don't nearly run into them with your vehicle. Unless you want to get shot. All of these things are also advice for how to treat a member of the public that might be carrying a firearm. People dying is a tragedy. But doing something dangerous towards someone carrying a gun and then getting shot is what I consider "accidental suicide". Its a tragedy if someone runs out into a street at a not-crosswalk and gets killed by a vehicle, no one is really at fault. Its an accidental suicide.
I've mostly been describing why Good is to blame. So why do I call it an equal blame incident? Well police and law enforcement still have some level of duty to exercise restraint in the use of deadly force. I do think the officer could have exercised that restraint here. I do not like that we have to treat police officers like wild animals or rabid dogs that might attack at the slightest provocation. Its not true for most officers, but its true for enough of them that I feel comfortable invoking the "accidental suicide".
To summarize, Good placed herself in a dangerous situation, and then did something that could be perceived as attacking an officer. The officer could have exercised restraint, but I would not expect that restraint of a private citizen.
Longevity and scissor statements
I have been surprised by the longevity of this incident in the news cycle. I mostly consider it a boring incident. As I said above I hate litigating specific incidents and asking could have been done in a split second of thinking for things to turn out differently. My rule of thumb is that something always went wrong long before someone had to make a split second life or death decision. In this case it doesn't seem like either side is strongly to blame. Good made more bad decisions leading up to the incident, but she died as a consequence which feels a little too heavy for her level of bad decision making. If the officer had died instead I'd say it was clearly Good's fault.
But I'm realizing now why I should not be as surprised by the longevity. You don't go to battle over a culture war incident if you feel like it is a losing ground. In an alternate world where Good had struck and killed a police officer with her vehicle I'd bet the story would be buried. Or at least no more talked about than the incident where 15 armed people tried to shoot and attack ICE agents (its still insane to me that this happened).
In all battles you only want to commit when you feel you can win. In the culture war winning means being morally right. Battles take two to tango though. So major controversies spring up when both sides feel like they are in the right. In this theoretical model the most battled over topics will always be scissor statements. The likelihood of "battles" is also helped along by however distorted the view of reality is by the partisans. If partisans had perfect perceptions of reality then only truly 50-50 incidents would spark up any controversy. But if they have something like a 5% bias for their side then incidents that are 45-55 would also spark up battles. The wider the gap in perception the more things become battles.
But I think reality can still partially penetrate partisan perceptions, so even when they have noticeable bias towards their own side they can notice a slightly losing argument. So they'll drop the topics where they feel that they are losing. Meaning that even if with partisan perceptions distorting reality a 50-50 incident is going to stick around much longer.
Come on, this is a false equivalence. Try parking a truck into the parking lot of your local police department, then walk in while carrying a shotgun. Carefully observe which of these actions will cause more concern. Try to convince them that the real danger is your truck.
Cars kill a lot of people because they are ubiquitous. The majority of adult Americans are drivers, and drivers spend around an hour per day driving. The average American definitely does not spend half a hour every day shooting or even handling guns. There is a reason while there are few mafia movies where the cleaners rely on cars to kill their victims.
If she had pointed a gun at Ross, I would completely concede self-defense immediately. The main purpose of a gun is to kill or incapacitate soft targets, and given the low frequency of mountain lions in urban Minnesota, it is 100% reasonable to assume that she was in fact going to shoot Ross. Even if her gun was later found to be unloaded.
But cars (even bloody SUVs -- that is another CW angle) are rarely used in intentional or even depraved heart homicides, most car deaths are accidents, negligent manslaughter.
So Good driving in the general direction of Ross is a lot more ambiguous than her pointing a gun at him, because cars have plenty of uses besides killing federal agents. There was of course a chance that she was absolutely going to murder him. There was also a chance that she was going to drive over him because she had decided that ICE lives don't matter (depraved heart), or that she had not realized that he was standing in her path. There was also a chance that she was merely going to graze him either from a motivation of depraved heart or because she had misjudged the turn radius of her car. Possibly there was also a chance that she was going to miss him entirely.
Now, if she either intended to run him over or did not give a fuck about killing him, I will concede that he was entitled to self-defense in an unlikely attempt to stop her. (Though the risk of hitting bystanders would still need to be weighted against the probability of stopping her car.) Even then, it was not a good tactical move compared to getting out of the way, but that would not have been a legal issue.
For the injuries she actually inflicted on him, a headshot was clearly an overreaction, I think most people will agree that letting people grazed by cars shoot the driver is generally a bad idea.
These probabilities do matter if we evaluate a claim of self-defense. Basically, if you see a 6yo (-15) in Germany (-20) on Fasching (-20) point a gun-shaped object which looks like plastic (-15) at you, it is not reasonable to conclude that you are about to be shot by a live firearm and kill the kid. If you see a drug addict in Central Park point what looks like a firearm in your direction, that conclusion would be different.
In this case, a good prosecutor might make the case that you had someone who was distracted by filming with a mobile phone getting startled by a car which was suddenly moving towards him and then decided to compensate his lack of situational awareness through deadly force.
As I've said before I don't like litigating split second decision making. Most of your post is that.
The only real person with the ability to make decisions beforehand that could have prevented this is Good. She could have chosen to exit her vehicle at the protest or to turn off the engine. The other possibility that I just thought of is that ICE starts using armored vehicles and just starts ramming through obstructing vehicles. I don't want ICE to adopt that policy, do you?
She choose to use a vehicle to obstruct other vehicles and to drive in an area with pedestrians and people on foot. Her obstructing vehicles is part of the reason there were officers on foot in the first place. Unless she thought it would just be a perfect statement where she gets to obstruct a law she doesn't like and the result is that ICE just politely sits in their vehicles going no where and letting her obstruct them?
Your truck example is the false equivalence. Try using your truck to block the entrance to the police parking lot or your body to block the entrance of the front door. Those are equivalent.
Or line your truck up with the pedestrian exit to the police station and rev the engine like you are about to run them over. You will be treated like you are holding a shotgun. They will aim their guns at you and tell at you to get out. If you instead start moving the truck towards them they will unload as if you had lifted the shotgun into an aiming position.
In your example they get out of the truck. I suggested that was one of the things Good could have done to deescalate the situation. The equivalent would be leaving your shotgun in the trunk of your car. A weapon that you do not currently possess is of course far less threatening in the immediate situation.
If a policy relies on people making split second complex judgements then the policy sucks. I already put some fault on ice for being too willing to use deadly force. But that is because I hold agents of the government to a higher standard than I do individuals. And I think any individual would have been justified in using deadly force against a vehicle in this exact situation. In the US they'd also be legally in the clear, in Europe, which doesn't believe in self defense, probably not.
What policy changes would you suggest that could have prevented this? Being reasonable in the sense that any policy that amounts to "be ineffective anytime someone uses this tactic against you" is a non-starter.
I say this as someone that disagrees with the goals of ICE. But I do not see a policy that would have lead to a guaranteed better outcome here.
The officer could have prevented it by not getting in front of the car.
So the policy suggestion you have is "never be vaguely in front of a vehicle with its engine on"
That is too restrictive and I can't imagine trying to follow that rule in practice without basically giving up anytime anyone brings a car to disrupt your operations.
More options
Context Copy link
The officer was not in front of the car when she began backing up. Her reverse maneuver is what put him (barely) there. Certainly it is true there are places he could have been (Cleveland, for instance) where no action on her part could have put him in front of the car, but in fact he didn't put himself there.
Eh... the way I see it, it's kinda both, he was walking from the right to the left side of the car. Though funnily enough this also means he was putting himself out of harm's way, by doing exactly what everyone here is screaming at him about.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Now, try driving the truck through the front of the building and see what the reaction is.
The SUV here is dangerous when it is being pointed at a human being; hell, if she'd had a rifle in her passenger seat when she did this, I'd still argue that the SUV is the greater threat.
If he had a reasonable belief that she either intended to run him over or did not give a fuck about killing him, I will concede that he was entitled to self-defense in an unlikely attempt to stop her. Self-defense standards do not require someone to be a mind reader, nor do they require that the other person has an intent to kill. It is permissible to shoot someone who is high out of their mind, but pointing a gun at a crowd, even if he is unable to comprehend how dangerous the gun is at the moment. It is also reasonable to shoot someone who yells out in anger "I'm going to fucking kill you!" and reaches towards what appears to be a concealed weapon (even if they aren't actually armed, and were simply going to whip out their dick or some such nonsense).
Just for fun, go stand in front of a parked SUV - and take a look at what you could see of the "driver". You'll notice that it is basically only the head, especially on a smaller driver (like, say, a woman).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think you're underestimating the impact of racism, sexism, tribalism, and profiling in the perception of this incident as compared to others.
Renee Good was a 37 year old white mother of three. I haven't looked into her background, but just judging from the car not being a complete heap I don't think she was impoverished, we can probably label her middle class. There's virtually no chance, with just that data, that she was out there engaged in a suicide terrorist mission. She might literally have to be the first middle aged white woman in all of American history to do something like that. I asked both ChatGPT and Grok, neither could bring me a single documented case of a white woman between the ages of 30-50 killing an on-duty police officer in the history of the United States. If we included "middle class," "mother of three," and "not visibly disordered" it would cut those odds even more. When I asked for 30-50 year old white female terrorists period (not just anti-cop), the closest I got was Shawna Forde who murdered two illegal immigrants as part of some cockamamie border militia thing, and maybe some left wing bank robbers from the 70s but those were getaway drivers. If anyone else can find me examples of 30-50 year old white women killing on-duty cops, let me know!
Liberals might decry racial profiling, but they believe in it, because it is obviously true. A male suspect is vastly more likely to be dangerous than a female, an old suspect less dangerous than a young one, a black suspect more dangerous than a white one. A middle aged white woman is just vastly unlikely to be a domestic terrorist engaged in an anti-cop suicide mission.
The white middle class might dislike what ICE is doing or we might not particularly care, but we pretty much assume that whatever happens it won't touch us. This is one of us getting shot. Not some immigrant getting sent to a foreign torture prison in Cuba or El Salvador, not some black kid in baggie pants getting killed, this is a middle aged woman who looks like my sister, my coworkers, my grad school classmates. I might roll my eyes when they lib out, that doesn't mean I'm comfortable with a world where they might get shot. A middle class liberal might decry his privilege, but he still believed in it, that as a middle class white person he was protected, that bad things wouldn't happen to him. This pierced that privilege. And that's hard to deal with.
The reason this is hanging around is because Renee Good doesn't fit the profile of the kind of person who gets killed by the cops. Turbolibs love to quote Wilholt's law: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." And they believed that, they believed they were in the group that the law protected but did not bind. Every accusation is an admission. White liberals believed that their privilege would protect them. It turns out it will not.
And that means you have to make a decision. Because when the gun turns against your tribe, the nature of war is that you don't get a choice of which tribe you are part of. If we decide that killing middle aged women for being turbolibs is ok, I can't decide that I'm not part of the tribe, my family and my friends decide that for me. I can only decide whether I'm ok with their deaths or not.
You are likely right that I'm underestimating the demographic impacts of the situation. I'm always looking at the actions of individuals. I did write a post a while back that I mostly ignore race as an information category.
I will say that there is some uniqueness in this ICE situation where people have been using vehicles to obstruct ICE. It's definitely not the first time people have tried to obstruct vehicles. But usually it's human bodies vs vehicles. Some exceptions I know of: during the Canadian COVID lockdown protests it was parked vehicles. During French farmer protests they took tractors into the city to block traffic.
There is some question remaining of how the white mom demographic responds to this incident. If they never use this tactic again then maybe it shows it was a poorly thought out tactic and once the danger is apparent they abandon it en masse.
I think they perceived it as "using your body to block others" and they didn't realize they were doing the equivalent of waving a gun around. Their privilege and lack of experience with dangerous situations could probably excuse them for not thinking through the consequences of their actions. I've said elsewhere that I doubt Good fully thought through the consequences of using a vehicle to obstruct law enforcement. Typically the result of someone carelessly endangering other is that they injure others. In this case Good was shot dead. In an alternate reality she ran over an ICE officer and the news story is being buried like the one where ~15 people tried to shoot at ICE officers in an organized attack.
More options
Context Copy link
I find it so difficult to see this perspective. Literally all anyone has to do to achieve complete safety is not deliberately antagonise and obstruct members of the police force or equivalent as they go about their duty. You see a bunch of agents, you give them five minutes and you don't get in the way.
Do they really think that ICE are on some spree killing of middle-aged white women now?
Non-violent resistance and civil disobedience are things, actually.
A few people might believe that their government is always morally right, axiomatically. Most believe otherwise.
A lot of people will concede that a government can become so evil that it is imperative to violently oppose it. I think that is a popular idea in America, in the abstract.
But what if government does evil, but not on a scale were you feel justified waging total war against it?
Then people often employ methods to hamper the goals of the government, especially the goals they find morally objectionable, without resorting to violence. Perhaps you just 'forget' to add the fuse in half of the bombs you build for the Nazi war machine. Perhaps you use your privileged status as a white person to help slaves escape to the northern US. Perhaps you give aid to civilians persecuted by a regime. Perhaps you just decide that you did not see a petty theft.
The specifics vary widely over axes such as personal risk, effectiveness, cause. Morality being subjective, some causes you will agree with and some you won't. I don't share the world view of anti-abortion activists, so I would view the attempt to sabotage an abortion clinic by welding their front door shut as property damage. However, I will vastly prefer an activist who employs such tactics to one who has decided to just blow up doctors instead. The former is an annoyance, but at the end of the day we are merely disagreeing about some details how civilization should work. With the latter, there can be no peace or common ground.
Nor is non-violent resistance necessarily ineffective. The underground railroad freed a lot more slaves than John Brown did (debatable indirect effects like the ACW aside).
Good was obviously believing that using her plot armor as a white US woman to hinder ICE was moral. (Like whenever a human does something, there were also signaling considerations involved, but to pretend every action is just caused by them is too cynical by half.) She was likely willing to deal with fines and the like for her cause, but probably did not expect to be shot.
I have criticized her rather harshly for her fatal decision, but on reflection I think I was wrong to characterize her as 'cosplaying #LaResistance'. Her beliefs are not my beliefs, I would have preferred for her to work and donate to some EA cause area (not that I am one to talk, there). But for all these differences, she was faced with something she considered morally wrong in her society and did not react by mashing the defect button as much and as fast as possible, e.g. planting IEDs against ICE.
TL;DR: 'She should just have stayed at home, and nobody would have shot her' only works if either you believe your government to be infallible or your own moral beliefs to be fundamentally true while every other belief is just a silly error.
I understand where you are coming from but to be frank I see this doctrine as an aberration. The fact of the matter - to me - is that you simply cannot run a prosperous and well-ordered society when any random person feels entitled to sabotage it every time that they personally feel it is important enough (and there is always someone who feels it's important). It is a recipe for lies, betrayal of duty, and the kind of despairing slowdown we now see where any attempt by the government to solve any problem is bogged down by activists until it grinds to a halt. Notably this behaviour featured heavily in sabotage manuals that both the USSR and the CIA gave to their fifth-column spies, because it is the most effective method of destroying a well-defended country over time.
Like the doctrine that soldiers should disobey orders when they decide they ought to (yes there are rules but ultimately it comes down to a personal decision), the idea that you personally are enjoined to enforce your morality on your country even if it means betraying your duty is a malign holdover from the memory of Nazi Germany* that has been rotting Western civilisations for the last eighty years, supported by the accession to global superpower of a country that for historical reasons fetishises rebellion.
If someone doesn't wish to build bombs, and their children aren't being held at gunpoint, then they shouldn't get a job as a bomb-maker. If you want to stop the government doing something that you think is wrong, then go into politics, fight as hard as you can, and accept that you may lose. If you are not going to see the hungry homeless man stealing bread, do not let someone pay you to guard their shop. Again, it's not that I'm not sympathetic to some of these scenarios, I've been there to some degree. But the whole point of having laws against obstruction is to make it clear, harshly clear when necessary, that just because you don't like where society is going doesn't give you the right to unilaterally sabotage it. In a sense, going on a killing spree would almost be more admirable than a smile and a knife in the back, because it clearly signals that you are an enemy of the current society and intend to war against it and suffer the consequences.
TL;DR: 'She should just have stayed at home, and nobody would have shot her' works if your beliefs have nothing to do with whether you are allowed to sabotage law enforcement
*that is, the problem with NG is that it did things that are bad, not the fact that its populace were effective at doing them. If a man kills three children with a kitchen knife, it does not mean that kitchen knifes should be made cheap and rusty in the future. Or to put it another way, telling people to do whatever they're told risks disaster, but in the long term telling them to #resist whenever it seems appropriate guarantees disaster.
To be honest, yeah I don't see how you can run a democratic, free society where people aren't entitled to sabotage it when they feel it's important enough. That's a core mechanism of how societies remain free; the state being afraid of the populace!
A free state has to keep nearly everyone baseline content nearly all the time. I think that's genuinely the whole reason why it's better to live in one than an autocracy.
With the logical corollary that if it's not possible to keep everyone baseline content nearly all the time (due to values inhomogeneity / economic headwinds), it's impossible to run a state that is free according to your definition?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The right to peacefully protest is a direct Constitutional right. A direct right. I think there's reasonable room to disagree about, and interesting discussion to be had, regarding the line between obstruction and protest. From that framing, obviously protesting/obstructing is risky, sure, but that's an official state-approved exercise of rights as much as free speech is or as much as the right to a jury trial. There's considerable meat to the argument that a right left unexercised is effectively a dead right.
But can we agree that sabotaging ICE arrests and barricading streets falls well on the wrong side of that line? Peaceful protest is when you see how many people you can get to go to the town square and wave a sign to make it clear they're unhappy.
Of course, for all I know you may be right about the legalities of it. I personally think that the American Constitution is a document considerably flawed by being written by people who had persuaded themselves that it was appropriate to wage violent revolution over being asked to pay a couple of pennies on the pound of tax to repay the money that had been spent defending their homes from invasion. American philosophy of rights and liberty has been flawed from inception by its inability to agree on when you should sit down and shut up vs. when you should erupt and slaughter all the people down the road who you don't like and take their stuff, which is why e.g. Americans also have a direct constitutional right to free speech surrounded by a penumbra of all the things you aren't allowed to say and when you aren't allowed to say them.
That is not to say that American ideas have nothing to give to the world, far from it, but American constitutionality seems like Christianity to me in that it is an essentially apocalyptic doctrine which has survived and thrived for hundreds of years only because it gets interpreted so loosely.
In all honesty, I'd say the line between appropriate and inappropriate depends entirely against the injustice being fought. Revolution against the government/terrorism is murder, but justifiable against if the government in question is Hitler's Germany. During the civil rights era, sit ins were technically trespassing by refusing to leave. The Underground Railroad was abetting the escape of slaves. I guess I'd like to know what your thoughts are on those illegal activities.
The American Constitution was written by people who believed their aims could only be reached in their lifetimes by breaking the rules. The thing about standing in the town square waving a sign is that most of the time it doesn't work. I think that you know that, based on your comments about getting into politics or accepting that you've lost. So to what extent do you believe citizens are enabled to seek effective political change outside of an election cycle?
According to the latest political poll, 52% of the public disapprove of ICE, 39% approve, and 10% have no opinion. To what extent is the government obligated to respect the wishes of the people? Is there some level of unpopularity to which Trump should change course? Does a citizen have any recourse if he doesn't?
That's a lot lower than I thought it would be. Sure, regarding public opinion, 40% of that is "strongly disagree"... but then, how much of that is distinct from the anger that the government would take their slaves away to begin with?
So like what ICE is doing now, basically (though yes, a lack of intent to escape is irrelevant in this case; you will be "freed" regardless). In fact, they're going into the places where the slaves are and removing them from their owners (ostensibly, the <52% of the American public that feels they gain material benefit from their presence) with violence from/against slave-owners being a very narrow exception, not the rule. I mean, what, about 20 dead for 2 million deported? A 1:100,000 KDR [so to speak] for an armed operation of this type and size is absurdly successful.
I'm sure John Brown would be proud, if somewhat conflicted- and I find it ironic that the people who go out of their way to name their organizations after him are actually the ones most aligned with the historic Confederate cause, while the losers of the resulting Civil War over it are now proud Unionists (who fly the flags of its vanquished enemies in its defense [lol wtf?]). Of course, the CSA was formed by people who believed their aims could only be reached in their lifetimes by breaking the rules, too- it's just that they lost, so they're the bad guys. I think that's how that works.
It's a State's Rights [to keep slaves] issue.
They can use the soap box, the ballot box, the jury box, or the ammo box (or other boxes of that type; like the pedal box). They're all legal to keep and bear for this purpose, and all 4 have been used in this conflict, on both sides. (And yes, the fact that the citizens that want this are existentially in conflict with the ammo box, and that's inextricably linked to their decision to retain slaves, is relevant. The people who would normally be depended on to use the ammo box are all strongly in favor of anti-slavery measures.)
This is a fascinating example of using creative language to frame war as peace and weakness as strength. Of all of the things that could be argued to be negatives of lax immigration policy, arguing that it's bad for the migrant is certainly a choice. With an offhand parenthesis that intent to escape is irrelevant, you casually steer away from the tiny detail that one of the defining concepts of slavery is the slave's lack of choice in the matter.
And uh, A KDR is a useful tool to measure the effectiveness of a military operation, but an odd standard to use for measuring enforcement of what is normally a misdemeanor. I'd argue that any number of deaths starts to make me ask questions.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Sometimes you reach a point where no more accommodation is possible, when you wage war on your own society (revolution). When that time comes, all bets are off.
Before that, well, that's hard. Emotionally, morally, there are things I approve of and I don't approve of. Arguably, I am doing sabotage already by quietly working to direct my employer towards business directions that I approve of and away from directions that I don't approve of. I'm a child of my culture and my age, and I can't be otherwise.
Intellectually, I believe in the case above - that you simply cannot run a country on the principle that 'the line between appropriate and inappropriate depends entirely against the injustice being fought'. A country simply doesn't work when everyone feels entitled to have an opinion on matters over their pay grade. I worked in Japan for many years and in many ways I miss it bitterly, because it worked and the reason it worked was that people acted together towards a common goal without individually deciding whether to permit it, subvert it or oppose it.
British schools used to be pretty unpleasant, and they taught children very sternly about Honour and Duty and Honesty. After WW1 and WW2 and it was suggested that this teaching had turned Englishmen into sheep, ready to be slaughtered, and the teaching system was repurposed towards self-confidence and self-expression. Japan has a pretty similar system today, though explicitly pacifistic. They teach children to fit in and to work together and not to put themselves above the group, and by all accounts that teaching can be pretty unpleasant too. But it helped make Britain great and it seemed to work pretty well for Japan, and I think any answers to our current omnicrisis have to address the fact that we have been made ungovernable by the philosophy you describe.
Which makes me a rebel and a hypocrite, so I can't really answer your question, but at least I'm not blockading the police.
I would say that the entirety of America's history has operated on this principle, and it has endured. It came close to failing during the civil war, but Motte pessimism aside, I don't think we're near that level yet. I would argue that the Civil Rights protests is an example of people manipulating the levers of public opinion through civil disruption and some intentional lawbreaking, and not it only did it not tear society apart, it was a pretty significant success.
I would say that your view inherently holds that the state is just, and by just I mean that your highest ideal is order. This represents an inherent trust in authority, which let's say a Russian wouldn't share. America is inherently founded on a certain distrust in authority.
I also have a question about "matters over their pay grade." Right now the scientific consensus is that gender affirmation is good and life saving. Now the general view of the Motte, and one I to some degree with, is that the doctors are ideologically captured. But some places have gone to the level that not affirming your child is legally considered child abuse. So whose pay grade is it to make these decisions? The doctors? The legislators? The parents? And to what degree does the parent have the right to not comply if they believe this is unjust?
It DID fail during the civil war, that's what a civil war is. There's a saying, "there's a great deal of ruin in a nation," and I think that goes 10x for America for various reasons: the USA realistically has a continent to itself and no serious rivals, it is gifted with oil + fertile farmland + good rivers + other natural resources beyond the dreams of any other country in the world except maybe Russia, and in a much more convenient form.
I don't actually mean to be too anti-American, I respect it more than comes across on this site because the site is pro-America enough that I end up providing the alternate view, but I think that America has a vast cushion for failure that other countries don't. More than that, though, @JeSuisCharlie posted the old-but-good Adam's quote that American society is suited only to a moral and religious people, and in practice I think he was expressing the same kind of sentiment. Think of it this way through the ages:
What I am getting at is that, in my reading, various factors conspired to keep the views of Americans reasonably homogenous on the level at which government was primarily operating, and that the one time this failed America had a civil war. Perhaps it would have been more accurate to say,
This is getting to be a long comment and I'm nervous about losing it, so to answer the rest of your points very briefly:
I am not very keen on my state at the moment, and I certainly don't consider it just. I am a Reform voter, which is the closest the UK has to a 'blow it all up' party. Likewise I voted for Brexit, my feelings on trans and immigration are not in line with the state, and I spend perhaps 1 hour a day arguing politics on this website. I could justify it by saying that I am by hereditary class and education part of the group of people who absolutely are expected to have an opinion on matters like this, and that in that way it is in my 'pay grade'. But it would be more accurate to say that I am a hypocrite who intellectually believes that what I have said is true but can't hold to it. As the Operative of Serenity says, "there's no place there for me". It's one of the reasons I left Japan despite liking it so much.
Americans in many ways have a deeper trust in authority than almost any other country - apart from the Borderers they entirely lack the corrosive distrust you tend to see in Old World countries like Europe and Russia. What they distrust IMO is foreign authority, whether that be London or Washington.
(Epistemic confidence: low. I'm not sure I believe what I'm saying and I can think of lots of counterexamples.)
This is sort of what I'm getting it, in a 'fish have no word for water' way. When individual parents and doctors are making decisions like this (except to the extent that individual children to some extent have different needs), when legislators are deciding to coerce behaviour and we are debating whether parents have the right to resist that coercion, your country is already well on the way to breaking down. The mechanisms for achieving consensus have failed, and legislators/doctors/parents are engaged in inter-nicene brawl which is time-consuming and damaging to the medical profession plus every individual involved. Note that even Britain, which is dysfunctional in many ways, has been able to move relatively seamlessly and easily from 'transing the children is good' to 'transing the children is bad'.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's my understanding that absent actually aiding a specific crime, it's perfectly legal albeit obnoxious to whistle and make people aware of police/ICE presence (lookout for a robbery no but generally warning people about ICE or a speed trap is fine) and is not sabotaging an arrest. Although you may get arrested anyways despite it being plainly unlawful for ICE to do so (personally I think the incentive structure regarding illegal arrests is pretty damn flawed but that's an issue for another day). Blocking a street on the other hand, against a specific patrol, is obstruction, yes. Blocking a street more generically is nominally a traffic crime and therefore not ICE jurisdiction, though obviously the line between those two is pretty weak. Blocking a street as part of a larger group is a different kind of discussion that has to do with "authorized" vs "unauthorized" protests and generally you can't march on a street that normally has traffic unless you have a permit.
It is historically true that the American rationale for when revolution is justified vs unjustified is a little muddled, although the Declaration of Independence attempts a standard. I mean, we did have a civil war over more or less that same issue. However speaking on the Constitution more broadly, despite some flaws I find it hard to argue too hard against it seeing as it's still the oldest democracy in the world. Norway is the second oldest and only dates to 1814 and even then it and many others typically went through far more extreme changes over the years to the core structure than ours did. The American Constitution notably stands virtually unchanged in its core formulation (the most significant change, in the long view, being merely senators being popularly elected). The rest were details, or adding in new rights, and not a fundamental reshaping of the balance of power or the structure of the checks and balances! This is quite rare. IIRC Belgium has a better claim and even that is almost 50 years later (amusingly they did somewhat the opposite than we did about 15 years ago, changing their senate from direct election to an assortment of regional parliaments).
I suppose it's fair to think that the loose interpretation helped its longevity, but to me rather it's that the checks and balances were generally done well, that the amendment process usually worked all right, and thus it's still a success I attribute to strength of structure, not looseness of structure. And although history is not a great experimental proving ground, that longevity is pretty decent evidence that at least something has worked. A lot of Americans at least are often surprised at how many democracies have had to toss out or totally rejigger their constitutions much more recently than you'd naively expect.
Blocking the road for ICE vehicles, on the other hand, absolutely is.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Time, place, and manner restrictions, applied in a viewpoint-neutral manner, have been repeatedly held to be fully compliant with the First Amendment. The First Amendment doesn't give you the right to scream directly in someone's face, if that would be disorderly conduct in any other circumstance.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
At the least, if you have a middle-aged white woman in your life that you care about, please talk to them, make sure they know real people in grass world love them, and research de-radicalization strategies.
De-radicalization strategies? Do they exist? I'd like to try some on myself. This forum is great at radicalizing people and turning them doomer, but not so great at reversing the process...
For de-radicalization I suggest you try a diet high in vine fruits, including beverages made from them.
That'll keep those free radicals away, and as a bonus, you have the excuse to spend all day drunk while ostensibly detoxing.
In all seriousness the best way to use the forum is as an analysis tool. There's nothing to be done; the systems are not in your control (unless and perhaps especially if you're secretly JD Vance).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If you know of some, unironically I would like them. I do have a brother that is thankfully living abroad right now, but who otherwise I'd be genuinely worried about them doing something very rash at an anti-Israel protest. He does know we love him at least.
More options
Context Copy link
Thankfully the middle-aged white women in my life are much more liberal than me but still reasonably sensible. It's the middle-aged men who spam me with 'did you see what Trump did today' and 'this would never have happened before Brexit'. (I'm in the UK).
EDIT: I realised that you meant 'middle-aged' as in 37 and now I feel old. I was talking 50-60.
You have an optimistic middle age! That at least seems like a good thing
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I can't get on board with setting the scene as "intent to use a deadly weapon (a car)". I use a car all the time, without any intent to use it is as a deadly weapon or for it to have any function as such. Sure, it is probably reasonable that if I murder someone with a car, it can be classified as murder with a deadly weapon, just as a baseball bat also seems like a deadly weapon if I swing it at someone's head. But I can bring a car or a baseball bat to my kid's school, and I have a lot of doubt that Good brought her car to the scene in order to take advantage of the car's potential function as a deadly weapon (i.e., to harm or to threaten). Mostly, it seems like they wanted to use the car's large mass to impede the path of the ICE vehicle, and also that the car was their transportation.
Let's say someone hits somebody with a car at a school. Should the lede really be that "The driver brought a deadly weapon (their car) to an elementary school?"
Using a car as transportation is not something I'd say qualifies as intending to use a deadly weapon.
Using a car's physical mass, and the threat of that physical mass to intentionally obstruct others? That is definitely crossing into weaponization territory.
Also what happens when Good's obstruction is determined to be illegal? If she is on foot the authorities can use their bodies to arrest and restrain her. If she is in a vehicle they need her to cooperate and leave the vehicle. If she decides instead to flee in that vehicle she has now created a hazardous car chase scenario. Even if she had not nearly run someone over and no one had shot her, she still did the wrong thing by driving away.
I doubt she was thinking through any of these things, but thats exactly the problem she escalated the danger of the situation for others by adding her vehicle to it. The fact that she was ultimately the one to get killed feels a little harsh to me, but if anyone was going to die that day for what happened I'd have most preferred it to be Good.
If you can pass a law which says that the authorities can shoot someone for driving away, get it passed.
If you can't pass such a law, then you should let them drive away.
Pick one.
You are allowed to defend yourself and others in this country from threats of deadly harm with lethal force. A vehicle driving at someone is a deadly threat. This is already the law of the land.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
What about just using a car's physical mass, and NOT the threat of it, to intentionally obstruct others? Moving your car back and forth to block someone else's car is just using the physical mass, not threatening.
Then turn off the engine.
More options
Context Copy link
And if someone gets in the way of that physical mass while you are moving it?
At that point you are probably weaponizing the car, yes. My complaint is describing her as initially having been at the scene with the intent of weaponizing her car.
When you are repeatedly blocking/unblocking a street by moving your car back and forth across it, you are continually running the risk of somebody getting in your way -- for most values of 'somebody', the consequences of this risk will rest more on them than on you due to the physics of the matter; this can change quickly if they have brought their own weapons though. That's kind of the whole thing about weapons and self-defense -- it's all fun and games when you are the only one with a weapon.
I think of moving your car back and forth across the street as putting your car in other people's way, with the obstruction being not just physical but also that the other driver (ICE, in this case) can't reasonably choose to just ram your car. (Though this would have been a better outcome than what actually occurred.) Although I suppose you could also enforce your blockade by attempting to ram cars that try to go around your blockade, in which case your car would indeed by weaponized, that does not seem to be what was happening in this case.
When the ICE officers were on foot around the car yelling at the driver, I'm willing to say that the driver was weaponizing the car, treating it as an equalizer that would allow them to drive away even if the on-foot ICE officers didn't want them to.
The point being that even when your focus is on blocking other people in cars, there will also be pedestrians around who might wander into the hazard zone of your antics -- it's quite a lot like waving a knife or gun around in public. Even if you aren't planning to shoot anybody, you are being reckless with a (potential) weapon.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
She was actually kind of using it as a weapon though -- more of a defensive weapon, but still.
If after you dropped your kids off at the school parking lot, you parked in front of the entrance and didn't let anyone but your friends through, I think it would be fair to say that you were using the car as something like a weapon? Certainly it's a tool of physical force.
Even the ultimate defensive weapon could easily be used to commit the very commonly recognized crime of false imprisonment.
Imagine impenetrable shield. It cannot hurt anyone. But it also cannot be bypassed. A person with this this shield could surround another person and prevent them from going where they want. This would be textbook false imprisonment.
And it seems exactly what she intended to do to ICE agents. Physically confine them to a bounded area without consent or legal authority.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link