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So we're really doing "will nobody think of the children?" now? Okay, "dead mom of six year old orphan" would not be a dead mom if she stayed home like a normal person and didn't decide to play La Résistance.
So you really think that cowering in your home, as the cited person on twitter was saying, is a valid thing we should accept as a society? Anyways, you've made my point nicely for me. Victim blaming can be bad for a few reasons (it can also be abused, for sure) but possibly the biggest one is when excessive attention on the victim leads to ignoring the consequences for the perpetrator.
Most narrowly, the point of the post was this: Looking at the situation and believing the officer should face zero consequences is insane. There are people making noise about immunity or asserting that it's so clear-cut that we don't even need to charge the officer. That's a massive problem. I've looked at a lot of comments by now and if you want to think the shooting would hold up in court, that's fine I suppose. But virtually no one seems to be actually continuing that thought and saying that he should be charged anyways. We have rules. ICE has rules. That's the point of having rules, to use them! If Good had survived and Ross died then I would be saying that Good should be charged too.
More broadly, we're starting a slow society-wide slide into cheering for death. That's scary. That's bad. It's happening to some extent on both sides (e.g. Charlie Kirk). But only one of those sides is making a habit of claiming immunity, pardoning people left and right, and undermining the rules of law on some misguided quest for vengeance "because game theory". I mean for fuck's sake, I read an article recently that the pipe bomb guy who they caught might get off scot-free because Trump's J6 pardon, being so broad, probably applies to him too!
TIL that not going out to do stupid shit that gets you killed is "cowering in your home". Drunk drivers everywhere raise a glass in salute!
I'm probably burned out because of one too many goddamn stupid online posts from keyboard warriors doing their best to encourage people like Good to go out and get themselves into real trouble. Allegedly, a list of ICE and border agents identities was made public, and one such "let's you and him fight" was posting very thinly veiled hints about "go out and find these nazis and make their lives hell". (This is why ICE agents are now all masked up, and probably why they are regarding members of the public with paranoia - that idiot blowing the whistle in your ear may only mean to deafen you, or they could be planning to show up at your home and do who knows what?)
And people like Good, who seem to believe that a fake title ('I'm a Legal Observer! Can't touch me!') is going to protect them from any consequences, so they can stroll right up to the line of "I can hit you but you can't do a thing to me", including "try and use your car as a getaway vehicle, get treated like a criminal fleeing the scene" , and that the usual result of that won't somehow, miraculously, happen to them - they read and listen to all this encouragement, and go and do stupid shit, and get hurt or killed.
Yeah. "Cowering in her home" would have kept this woman alive and her child not an orphan, but gee, let's all pretend that Trump is the exact same as Kim Jong Un and that we are bold brave French Maquis resistance fighters. Then we'll go home after the protest that defeated the jackbooted stormtroopers and post about it online and everything will be beer and skittles.
What do you expect when nominally respectable media sources are implying exactly that (emphasis mine):
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Excuse me, did you miss the "shout your abortion" campaign like a decade ago? The way people reacted to Margaret Thatcher's death?
LOL. Also you don't need to claim immunity when your side has the AGs and just won't prosecute to begin with.
And Antonin Scalia's.
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What was that refrain they were shouting on the same street, "save a life, kill an ICE"? We're already there, this was bound to happen with the monstrous levels of violent ideation and anti-government agitation from the left. These same people cheered with glee the assassination of a milktoast debate me bro, you will excuse me if I don't care to lie down and let them do whatever they please as they stomp on my face and continue to cheer on the destruction of the concept of having laws and borders and shit.
Come to think of it, did that work as an act of terrorism? Did it deter other debate-me-bros from public apperances? Were there any others to begin with?
Well Crowder is in the mix. But it did radicalize a bunch of normie-cons. It had the opposite effect of whatever that trans-boy/girlfriend having shooter had in mind.
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There are other options besides automatically prosecuting any officer who shoots someone on the assumption that a trial will sort it out. Granted, I doubt ICE's ability to conduct professional internal investigations, but in theory, that is how a professional police force would handle it.
Good's side is definitely claiming protesters should be immune from consequences (to include being arrested or forcibly removed from the area, I don't mean they deserve to be shot), and had Good in fact injured or killed the officer and not been shot herself, I am confident you'd see a lot of anti-ICE people saying she should face zero consequences.
No one is really (openly) claiming that the person who killed Charlie Kirk should face zero consequences, because "You should literally be able to murder someone in public and not be charged" is actually insane. (In Good's case, whether it was "murder" is in dispute, in Kirk's case, no one disputes it was murder.) But people were certainly celebrating it, piling on anyone who expressed such tepid sentiments as "Hey, celebrating a husband and father's murder is bad mmkay?", and would almost certainly fist-pump an acquittal for his killer.
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Biden pardoned a bunch of people at the end of his admin.
J6 enforcement was extreme compared to say BLM rioting. The whole point of the pardon power is to correct injustices. The extreme disparate treatment was injustice.
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No, you can walk around anywhere without impeding ICE operations. You can even get a poster printed by a union or a Soros NGO and go scream whole day under Trump tower, and absolutely nothing would happen to you. You can even harass ICE and still absolutely nothing will happen to you as longs as you do not actively resist arrest and try to run people over with a car. Worst you are facing is a brief arrest followed by quick release and Gofundme fundraiser. There are plenty of opportunities to hashtag-resist the literally fascist dictatorship of literally Hitler in thousands of ways, some of which, as rumor has it, can provide one with a decent living. But some ways - like violently attacking the police - are not a free ride. It was once a widely understood banality, but the reality of Trump's literally fascist regime, together with complete detachment of luxury liberal class from reality and some thorough education helping to erase any trace of the said reality from one's consciousness somehow made some people think that violently fighting the police on the streets is a safe and fun activity. At least antifa, with all my disgust with them, understands who they are - when they are LARPing the revolutionaries, they go all the way and they expect to be treated accordingly. Chardonnay liberals don't even have this much of connection to the reality.
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Except one small detail - the Left does not believe in having rules. At least not in any rules they don't like, and that includes any rules that allow for any enforcement of the immigration laws, especially - any enforcement against the people already on US territory. They believe no enforcement should be happening at all, thus listening to any noises from their side about how exactly this enforcement should be happening is pointless - it is nothing but a tactics to lead to the ultimate goal, no enforcement happening at all, ever.
You don't need to pardon if you don't convict. Michael Byrd had not been convicted. And, of course, for "pardoning left and right" one first needs to "prosecute left and right" (otherwise there's nobody to pardon) and I don't remember any examples of mass political prosecutions by the right (giving the left the chance for mass pardons) anytime in 21st century. With all the hate directed at the last two Presidents from the Left, I do not remember any effort to frame them for treason, prosecute them criminally and all the security apparatus working against them while they are being nominally in power. Democrats are the party of lawyers, and the are much more successful in lawfare than Republicans had ever been. The only two weapons on Republican side are pardons and SCOTUS (the latter is more a matter of luck, and so far Republicans have been lucky).
And, of course, Biden's blanket pardons should put the topic of "pardoning people left and right" to rest for good.
As for immunity, all the law enforcement has immunity, so the claim only one side claims it is transparently false. If you want to get rid of qualified immunity, I am all for it, but somehow the left only remembers such a thing exists when it's convenient to use it to claim Republicans are fascists, but completely forget about it the moment it becomes inconvenient for them. Again, one can't help but conclude there's nothing but angling for power here.
And I read an article that aliens built Egyptian pyramids and stole Atlantis. There are a lot of articles on the internet, so what?
Maybe, but this slide does not look like you're implying it looks. The left has slid to the bottom and gleefully and openly celebrates any political murder for years now. Charlie Kirk is just one of many examples, and we see many people on the left openly agitating for the same treatment for other political enemies. So if the right is "starting" to slide into it - which is doubtful, I haven't seen any celebration and cheering - as opposed to somber justification, which is not the same thing - on the right - the "starting" here would be only on one side, the other side is deep down the slide already. There is no implied symmetry here - the right says "if you attack a cop with a deadly weapon, the cop has the right to kill you", the left says "if you say words we do not like or think thoughts we do not like, anybody of use has the right and the duty to kill you". Very different thing.
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Yeah but he's clearly enough on the right side of the rules that nobody with any real power on the Democrat side of the aisle wants to force this to a court case since they'd lose embarrassingly.
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Yeah, no. It's happening extremely heavily on one side -- the side that your obvious example is on.
Attempting to parley that into "akshually the other side is doing it worse!" needs receipts you don't have.
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You don't have to cower in your home. You can just go about your life, neither interfering in ICE operations nor hiding from them.
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What was your opinion of lockdowns?
Probably does us a disservice to get into it, but I begrudgingly accepted them for the first half a year or so as an emergency measure, and then opposed them after (emergencies can't be indefinite, nor did the facts suggest it should have been). I was the only one in my liberal family (I'm more of a moderate) to oppose the (massed, non-distanced) BLM protests on grounds of hypocrisy, so no issues there.
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After the government and media messaging circa 2019-2021, I think that would be an unequivocal yes from the vast majority.
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Point me to the law that says people who act in self defense must be tried in a court of law to prove their innocence.
IANAL, but...isn't that exactly how it works? You go to court, where the case is examined and it is established that it was indeed self-defence, if that happens to be how the judge sees it?
If not, how else is it determined that the act was self-defence?
Typically speaking, there is a Grand Jury to assess if there is enough evidence to prosecute. Prosecutors do not want to take on cases where there is insufficient evidence to convict, because they cherish their conviction rate.
In cases of a government agency being involved with the self-defense, there is an internal review. If the internal review finds nothing wrong, it is unlikely to make it to a Grand Jury in the first place.
A murder trial is expensive for the government. It isn't a thing to undertake lightly. You have to rip away 12 random people (the jury) from their lives for weeks. The level of evidence gathering, expert testimony to be paid out, etc. is very high. I would recommend watching the Rittenhouse trial to see what it looks like for an innocent man to go through all that. Then watch Daryll Brooks trial to see how hard it is on everyone else in the courthouse to go through all that even when the man is guilty as sin.
Edit: something else is that we are innocent until proven guilty. The assumption that someone acting in self defense needs to prove their innocence is wrong. They are not in a nebulous "not sure if guilty" state. It is on the courts to prove guilt, and if they do not think they can they should not make the attempt.
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It's only brought to court if a prosecutor doesn't think it's self-defense, and accuses you of something more serious.
(In)famously, the prosecutor in the Rittenhouse case said that if the mob ended up killing him, he wouldn't have brought charges, for example.
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The fact that the case generated extreme controversy ipso facto suggests that a trial is likely needed.
I disagree that that is how the law should work. For example, the Rittenhouse case should never have been brought to trial. Prosecutors generally do not bring cases to trial that they know they will lose. This case is likely one they would lose. Therefore, the incentive is against drawing this out in a court of law.
Honestly I feel like the calculus for Democrats is pretty good for drawing this out in the court of law. Keeps it in the media cycle longer and from the Rittenhouse thing the guy actually being cleared probably wouldn't actually change most people on the 'murder' side of the affair's opinions
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That kind of makes a mockery of your commitment to due process, if we're just making decisions based on public opinion.
What? No. It's strictly a one-directional formulation. If super controversial -> then charge someone seems like a perfectly reasonable take to me. Nothing there violates due process. The whole issue about prosecutorial discretion (which to be fair isn't quite "due process") is a tricky one, and honestly probably the weakest part of our system (though possibly the "least bad" attempt at a solution), but that kind of "patch" seems super reasonable, yeah?
To add a personal flavor to this:
One of my police uncles was out on patrol one day with his partner. They responded to a robbery at a convenience store. When they tried to arrest the guy, the partner was shot and killed. My uncle was shot and seriously wounded - multiple surgeries in a hospital wounded. My uncle managed to shoot back and killed the guy.
Believe it or not, this was controversial in the local community! The black community decried it as racial discrimination. Surely he could have shot to wound, surely petty larceny wasn't worth the lives of two people, why did the police have to intervene? The gun was planted, it didn't even belong to the robber (no one argued the guy didn't shoot, just that the gun didn't belong to him, except it turns out it did!) There was even an article in the NYT I'm not going to link to for the tiniest bit of opsec remaining to me. But trust me, it was controversial.
Despite it very clearly being an act of self defense, should my uncle have had to stand trial for this? If the only metric is 'Was the action controversial?" then yes, he would have had to go through a trial and relive that day with his freedom and life on the line. That would have been an injustice.
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If it's legally controversial, then sure. But the vast majority of people don't know much about the law at all, so their intuition about what is legally controversial is irrelevant. I don't consider show trials acceptable.
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I don't remember Biden evoking immunity, though?
Except when he gave Hunter an unconditional pardon for things he hadn't even been charged with
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjwl3venz39o
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The officer should face zero consequences. This is just politics. I am not insane. Thank you for your opinion.
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How are you comparing this to Charlie Kirk? Charlie Kirk was talking at a college campus and was murdered in cold blood, a "bad shoot" by any definition. You've seen plenty of other comments giving a heck of a lot of reasons that this wasn't cold blooded murder. I'm not in many right wing spaces, but I have only seen one person actually celebrate her death online. Saying that the shoot was fine morally or legally or that they'd shoot in the same scenario is not celebrating. This is not a black-and-white scenario being presented.
Clear cut cases of self defense getting charged in court anyway is always intended as a chilling effect, because there's always a chance that the jury pulls an OJ Simpson and gives a terrible verdict, against all odds. Take a look at @stoatherd's post: what behavior are you trying to change, specifically?
Sorry, I guess that was unclear. I was referring to the whole conversations about some liberals being happy Kirk was dead, or even celebrating. So that example was more about "cheering for death" rather than "claiming immunity". A second, perhaps better example, was how many people seemed to be sad that Trump's assassination didn't work.
However there have been several comments here highly upvoted along the lines of 'that nasty protestor got what's coming to her and agitators are evil for putting her in that situation too' and 'the case is so clear-cut self-defense that we don't need the judicial process'. The behavior I'd like to see changed is less cheering on for one side and less 'revenge makes rules irrelevant'.
More broadly I'm seeing a worrying slide towards a pro-revenge society. You see it on reddit, instagram, tiktok, facebook, everywhere, and on non-political topics too. And I see intellectual apologists here saying with a straight face stuff like this comment.
Your moral compass seems broken.
Charlie Kirk by all accounts was a good man and father. He was murdered sitting on a college campus engaging in debate. His murder was fundamentally an attack on free speech and democracy itself. Better to silence your opponents with murder as opposed to best their arguments.
In contrast, Good wasn’t just some protestor who was shot. She was patently illegally barricading the road to prevent lawful exercise of the police power. She then attempted to flee arrest with reckless disregard for the life of LEO. Indeed, if the car didn’t spin out she almost certainly seriously injured the officer who killed her. She did in fact strike an officer with her car.
She was, in one sense, a low level insurrectionist. She could be compared to Babbit.
Comparing her to Charlie is an insult to Kirk and principles of free speech.
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I'll note that @oats_son asked you:
Your answer:
... you know that's not what my posts contain, right?
Or were you ignoring his question so you could answer a more convenient one? (with the bonus of being able to implicitly micharacterise my posts, so you could later go "sigh, I never explicitly said I was talking about your posts")
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I mean, it depends. I think people who don't belong in this country, who are here illegally, if they aren't going to do the honorable thing and leave of their own accord, should absolutely cower in their homes. Why do we want a world where criminals are free to parade themselves around our cities without fear of justice?
Some people deserve to be afraid of the consequences of their actions.
The whole point of the Constitution and our rule of law is that we must take great pains to limit collateral damage to innocents when pursuing the guilty. "Just trust me bro" is not a long-term viable route for justice, no matter how correct you might think Trump personally might be about stuff. The twitter guy said that innocents should cower in their homes. Those two things are not the same.
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