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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.
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.
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?
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?
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'.
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