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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   24846 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026

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https://www.newsweek.com/video-appears-to-show-new-ice-shooting-in-minneapolis-11411971

Ice shooting round 2 has kicked off. Numerous rumors already flying around but will be a bit before we have facts I imagine.

This is all coming down to a simple question: does the state have a legitimate right to a monopoly on violence?

It seems as though a very small contingent of revolutionary communists believe that the answer to this question is no. This is where the idea of disrupting police, "de arresting" people, rioting, etc. comes from. They don't agree that the state should have the ultimate power to enforce laws that they don't agree with. In this case they seem to disagree with immigration laws, and because of this disagreement they don't believe that ICE/DHS has a right to enforce these laws.

This is a big problem. An actual threat to democracy. Half the country voted in an almost single issue fashion to have our immigration laws enforced. A small (but growing) contingent of the left does not believe that that is legitimate, and therefore believe that they have the right to use force to oppose this.

The real question is: how do you de-escalate from here? These people (some of them) have convinced themselves that they are living through the rise of an authoritarian/fascist dictatorship and have precipitated some things that do pattern match to that. Aside from some sort of science fiction style deprogramming effort: how do you bring them back to reality?

This is a question that genuinely troubles me.

This is all coming down to a simple question: does the state have a legitimate right to a monopoly on violence? It seems as though a very small contingent of revolutionary communists believe that the answer to this question is no.

A large number of right-wingers also believe that the answer is no. They're just largely keeping quiet about it at the moment because right now it's their opponents who are feeling the violence of the state.

Half the country voted in an almost single issue fashion to have our immigration laws enforced.

I understand your point, but to be precise only about 32% of eligible voters voted for Trump, and that 32% includes some voters (probably not many, but some) whose reasons for voting for Trump did not include immigration.

This is all coming down to a simple question: does the state have a legitimate right to a monopoly on violence?

Shouldn't that be nuanced somewhat? I'd suggest narrowing it down to a legitimate right to a monopoly on the initiation of violence.

Most people would, I would guess, say that there is a legitimate right to individual self-defense. If someone is trying to do violence to me or my property, I have a right to respond with violence myself. This isn't a communist position, and in general the right or conservatives have been more supportive of an individual's right to use defensive violence.

If we limit the state's monopoly to the initiation of violence, we allow for defensive violence by individuals, and I think that better captures most people's intuitions.

In the context of the United States it's a little more complex than this again, because the American political tradition in particular grants that there is a right for the people to organise themselves and overthrow a tyrannical government, by violent means if necessary. Sic semper tyrannis is not merely a slogan. Here there is, I think, more overlap with communists, since both liberals and communists accept that in principle it can be legitimate to engage in revolutionary violence. In that case the dispute is more about in what circumstances that kind of violence is justified, and I think American conservatives, borrowing from the just war tradition, would have a lot to say about that. Revolutionary or rebellious violence must be proportional to the level of tyranny, must have a reasonable chance of success, must conform to some sort of jus in bello in terms of legitimate targets, must happen under the aegis of some sort of revolutionary organisation or authority, and so on. 'Revolution' is not a blank cheque to just go and shoot anyone you associate with the oppressor, but rather, legitimate revolutionary violence must be organised, strategic, and proportional to the threat posed by a genuine tyranny.

(Disclaimer: this is all on the abstract, theoretical level. I'm talking about political philosophy, not current events.)

I'm also a bit surprised we haven't seen bombings yet.

The real question is: how do you de-escalate from here? These people (some of them) have convinced themselves that they are living through the rise of an authoritarian/fascist dictatorship and have precipitated some things that do pattern match to that. Aside from some sort of science fiction style deprogramming effort: how do you bring them back to reality?

You cannot. There is only one way out, and that is that the left gets what they want.

As in, the left gets what they want politically, or they get a hot war?

They get what they want politically. All they have to do is escalate, and eventually either the right will back down or the "moderates" will throw the right out.

does the state have a legitimate right to a monopoly on violence?

Of course it does, except when it doesn't.

Very few people have anything approaching a coherent political philosophy. I would assert that the vast majority of people never think about the state in terms of the monopoly of violence. Maybe they heard it in school, but they never internalized the concept.

I am and was always skeptical of how Trump would be able to pull mass deportations off because of this. Even if there wasn't actually violence, the media would manifest it like in Texas where they used forced perspective to make it look like the illegal aliens were getting whipped. Law enforcement is inherently violent, and with millions of interactions there was going to be violence, and scissors.

Not just inherently, definitionally violent. Every single thing the police do is something being done against the will of the person it is being done to.

I wasn’t aware that having my passport and ID card renewed or being granted a drivers license was ”definitionally violent”…

If you forgo the drivers license, and still drive on the road, the state will fine you. If you refuse to pay the fines, eventually the state will arrest you, if you refuse to come quietly because you don't recognize the authority of the state, the state will inflict violence on you until you comply. Your drivers license is the state's permission to drive without falling afoul of the state's monopoly on violence. Whether this is the non-central fallacy or not, it is practically how society works. We just abstract much of the unpalatable stuff away behind a veneer of civility so we don't need to remind ourselves of how violent the world is and how fragile peace is.

a very small contingent of revolutionary communists believe that the answer to this question is no

I don't see how this is an extreme viewpoint at all. The purpose of the second amendment is partially to check state power, by giving the government something to fear (in minecraft) if they behave unreasonably. I'm not sure what that has to do with communism. Communism in practice generally involves the rule of law and "the people" having absolute power over the individual.

Here's the timeline as of about 6:30 Western time day of:

  1. Alexi Petti shows, armed, up to participate in an ICE observation/disruption event in Minneapolis.

  2. Alex gets into an altercation with police, possible involving a woman who was pepper sprayed.

  3. The police/ICE pepper spray him as well, and tackle him to the ground.

  4. Alex appears to, during the scuffle, also attack the initial woman who was sprayed. He seems to grab her and try to pull her somewhere (possibly trying to "de-arrest" her)

  5. A so-far unknown law enforcement officer appears to disarm Alex while many other officers are wrestling with him on the ground. The scene is chaotic

  6. A second or so after Alex appears to be disarmed, he also appears to reach for his (no missing) gun

  7. This is when he is shot and killed.

Here is a slow motion video purporting to show him reaching for his missing weapon: https://x.com/KimKatieUSA/status/2015181670576775302

Here is an annotated/slowed video showing what appears to be an LEO disarming him: https://x.com/brandonstraka/status/2015140156806934987

Non-Twitter links: 1 2

Here is a slow motion video purporting to show him reaching for his missing weapon

I personally can't see any reaching in this video. But the uploader claims to see Pretti reaching at the 27-second mark, which is well after he was first shot by the officer at the 21-second mark. So your items 6 and 7 need to be corrected:

(6) An officer draws his gun and shoots Pretti.

(7) All the officers disperse and stop holding Pretti down. Pretti partially rises from the compressed kneeling/dogeza position in which the officers were holding him, but soon falls back to the ground. Pretti allegedly (observer opinions vary) reaches for his empty holster as he rises.

(8) The aforementioned officer shoots Pretti several more times.

I saw this post on Kiwifarms, but I've also seen others make the same argument elsewhere. The gun Pretti had on him is incredibly unreliable. Pretti was disarmed, but the gun still went off by itself in the officer's hands. You can see this in the linked video. There are a few frames where there's a muzzle flash and the gun jumps up. The gunshot spooks the other agents, who then promptly execute Alex Pretti as a result.

https://uploads.kiwifarms.st/data/video/8457/8457365-a397cfea4716acf38f4dfed2c6bb7098.mp4

Having painstakingly reviewed the video frame by frame from the 0:37 to 0:40 mark, when the first gunshot happened, I am as sure as I can be that this is what happened:

  1. ICE agent retrieves the gun from the guy
  2. As we would find out later, this gun is a SIG Sauer P320. This is a crucial detail that pretty much everybody is overlooking but it's the entire lynchpin of this unfortunate incident.
  3. ICE agent with the guy's gun starts to move away
  4. The gun just goes off. No, the agent did not fire the gun. If you look closely, the agent's finger is not on the trigger. The gun just went off. At 0:38 and 0:39 if you go frame by frame you can see what appears to be a muzzle blast and you can see what is definitely the gun suddenly jumping in his hand, both telltale signs that the gun has just discharged. Despite the distance and the video quality, it is still obvious the agent does not have his finger on the trigger.
  5. This spooks the rest of the ICE agents and they shoot the guy dead.

Why did the gun go off? Short answer: the SIG P320 is a notoriously dangerous piece of shit and it literally does just go off sometimes.

Long answer: The P320 has a specific design feature intended to make the trigger lighter, however this introduces a safety problem that could cause the gun to go off if dropped, put in a holster, placed gently on a table, or even shaken or jerked around, as happened to that particular gun in the footage. If the gun were made well, it would be safe, but SIG is notorious for its cost-cutting measures including the outsourcing of component manufacture, this affects the military, police, and civilian P320s. These guns have been built poorly and have in fact literally gone off, injuring many across the world. Don't believe me? Just google "Sig P320 incidents" or something along those lines and you'll have no shortage of articles to peruse. Ask SIG about all the lawsuits.

My analysis: the gun went off because it's an unsafe piece of crap, this spooked the ICE agents and they lit him up. That is what happened. That is history. Was it right? Was it wrong? Does this even matter? I won't answer the first two questions but I think we all know the answer to the third. Ultimately, the first shot being a not-so-rare accident from a known unsafe gun will be forgotten except by people like me who were here today and choose to not forget. Hopefully that's a few of you.

but the gun still went off by itself in the officer's hands.

I'm not a gun guy, but I know physics. I don't buy it yet. I don't see a muzzle flash. There is a bright spot that appears near the end of the barrel at about the correct timeframe, but it's also there in the exact same spot a few seconds earlier. This is a brightly-lit spot of background concrete. We also don't see any impact on the ground where the bullet would have hit if it had been fired from that gun at that moment. The recoil looks wrong too. The arm moves out yes, but there is no rotation of the gun relative to the arm. There doesn't seem to be any torque applied, as would be the case if the motive force came from the gun itself.

Previous discussion on the unreliability of the P320 here.

I saw this post on Kiwi Farms

Link

Big if true, I guess.

I would appreciate if people would reply to me with the best quality, most original videos from the original sources.

Angle 1:

Twitter Link: https://x.com/sentdefender/status/2015127355937677537

Length: 0:38 seconds

Posted: 10:19 PST

Description: Across the street where the shooting happened.

Angle 2:

Twitter Link: https://x.com/DropSiteNews/status/2015131503622021472

Length: 2:50

Posted 10:36 PST

Description: "Lady in Pink" angle. On the same side of the street. This video starts the earliest in the confrontation.

Angle 3:

Twitter Link: https://x.com/Lurker640463/status/2015141021584064913

Length: 0:42 seconds

Posted: 11:13 PST

Description: Starts on the opposite side of the street, video moves to being in the street.

Aftermath:

Twitter Link: https://x.com/BulwarkOnline/status/2015136655468904815

Length: 0:53

Posted: 10:56 PST

Image of The gun:

Twitter Link: https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/2015146919350128943

I'm just so viscerally disgusted by this method of "shrieking women" protest, blowing whistles nonstop, trying to be as annoying as possible that I can't even be objective about this. This seems like an obvious failure of this type of protest strategy, anything that's annoying to ICE agents will also be annoying to the audience. I just can't bring myself to sympathize with people who are being maximally annoying, it's like a bully kid doing the whole "I'm not touching you" thing. This protest method may be effective in generating these snapshot moments of violent reprisal that work on some people, but for me it has the exact opposite effect. I watch about five seconds of one of these videos and have decided quite firmly that I hate the protestors. Additionally the way women react to violence just disgusts me, you see this in body cam footage from ghetto shootings too. The moment something happens dozens of fat women materialize somehow and just start shrieking their heads off. Maybe it has some sort of evolutionary purpose, like summoning aid or something, but god, whatever evolutionary impulse is totally absent in me.

Everything makes sense viewed through the lens of politics. Both sides show hypocrisy on this issue. If this were jan 6th we'd see the same people arguing that it was excessive force or overreach. I saw that circulated video and could not see anyone pull a weapon. Looked like a scuffle and someone dead after gunshots. The question is, will this get worse or what are the longer term implications. MN has now sorta become the modern Fort Sumter. The thing is, ICE has the authority to make these arrests and use lethal force if necessary, and there isn't much that can be done unless Congress steps in, which they likely won't.

Specifically, the left seems to think federal law enforcement is a game. Their protests are part of the game, and it's just not just and playing by the rules to treat this as a serious issue that people can die in. Aside from toxoplasmosis, that's what all the outrage is coming from- this isn't supposed to be real. And to be completely fair, this attitude has treated them OK before this issue.

Right wingers have never treated their mass public protests as playtime. That's why you had state capital invasions with sufficient discipline that there weren't little incidents- that people could get seriously hurt in. And that in turn freaked out the left even more- when the Oregon or Virginia state capitals were overrun back in the late 2010's or the Covid protestors turned out the militias and everybody behaved with perfect seriousness and discipline. Remember the freakout about militias? Remember the contrast with the Not Fucking Around coalition(which was, actually, fucking around).

Right wingers have never treated their mass public protests as playtime.

Jan 6th was filled with playtime protestors. Remember "Qanon Shaman"?

That's why you had state capital invasions with sufficient discipline that there weren't little incidents- that people could get seriously hurt in.

Likewise, the 140+ police officers injured during Jan 6th might have a different view.

Both sides show hypocrisy on this issue.

I think not. The left is united in claiming the Good shooting was bad. The right is NOT united in claiming this shooting was good.

hmm on twitter I have noticed very little objection by the right , or at least by the accounts i track

In the normie sphere Joe Rogan been talking against ICE performance. I think they will be some big defection among the right.

I just looked and it wasn't hard to find dissenting voices from 2A advocates if that counts as right wing. James Reeves has a bunch of skeptical tweets, and he is one of the most famous industry personalities, a lawyer, and shitposter. He quotes Kostas Moros in a few of his shared posts who is a fierce 2A advocate. It's still all speculative, admittedly.

I'm not watching each and every video to inform my speculation. It doesn't look like an "execution" to me, but it does look like a bad shoot. What it looks like to me: police attempted to arrest a man and successfully disarmed him during his arrest. The presence of a weapon heightened alert of agents who, despite the number of men in arm's reach, did not coordinate well enough to restrain the individual. That failure allowed the man to squirm and contort enough to the moment where a cop blasts him. That cop will probably claim he saw him reach into his pants or whatever and he will probably be correct. Doesn't make it a good shoot.

Let's throw Fenix in as well.

Users on /r/conservative and Kiwi Farms seem to be fairly split.

The video looks BAAAAD. Would like to see resident Trump supporters explain this one.

How it looks? We're way beyond that now. Competing narratives will emerge. Each side will believe it alone possesses the truth. I think the people below debating the facts of the case as informed by this frame of that video or whatever are wasting their time. The truth is not relevant.

Do you know what time it is? The left has threatened to prosecute those who have participated in the current administration, yes? Is this an environment conducive to a peaceful transition of power? Is it surprising to a student of history that in an environment as factional as ours that faction-affiliated armed groups (Antifa, ICE) have emerged? Are you shocked that each faction won't prosecute its loyal enforcers?

The progression we're now observing is an almost comically central example of how republics die. Maybe there will n an election in 2028. Maybe there won't be. No matter who wins, violence will escalate further. Cycles of retribution will turn. At some point soon, somebody's going to cross a Rubicon.

I am, I guess, a Trump supporter, in that I simply take for granted that the process of stasis has proceeded to the point of being irreversible and prefer a MAGA Caesar to an expertocrat one quite strongly. Perfectly understandable, given the way that the expertocrats treated me and mine.

But the ICE claim is that he was pulling a gun on them. This is, in the understanding of every police force ever, a perfectly normal and legitimate reason to use lethal force. We have some evidence for this claim even if it's hard to see- they recovered a gun(I doubt they're capable of planting a gun on someone while being observed- this sounds legitimately very hard) from him, there was a shot preceding ICE opening fire, and the ICE agents seem to be reacting as if it was a good shoot, not in a 'dude, what the hell' way. None of these datapoints are dispositive in themselves, but all of them point in the same direction.

But the ICE claim is that he was pulling a gun on them.

Are they actually claiming that? This was conspicuously absent in the initial statement, even though one would expect it to be there.

Resident partisan hack checking in (well sort of). I am making this comment in the spirit of “expressing a worldview” of “resident Trump supporters” as requested rather than to argue the point per se. But I do earnestly hold the following beliefs.

We (the right) now clearly understand that the purpose of this sort of protest is to create violent situations with “bad optics” for ICE or whatever other group. The protestors (from “our” point of view) want violence and want shootings, because they perceive this as a win condition.

We’re quite simply not going to give them the win anymore. They want death and violence, and are actively going out of their way to create situations that can cause escalation. That makes them, in my opinion which is shared by others with similar worldviews, the baddies. This guy was being a baddy, played a stupid game, and won a stupid prize.

I honestly haven’t watched the video and don’t care. We consider the instant replay era over. It really has no bearing whatsoever on the question of whether illegal immigrants should be deported.

That is the main reason these protests are not really succeeding. The only reason these situations are happening is because of the protestors (who we really consider at this point, insurrectionists who are committing federal crimes). “ICE needs to stop deporting illegal immigrants from Minnesota because some protestors are getting hurt.” There is literally zero logic to this statement.

We also don’t consider them legitimate protestors. They don’t have a “right” to impede federal law enforcement from executing the legal and popular will simply because they lost an election in which they were fairly represented.

It was probably a good shoot if you slow it down to 10k frames per second. Like I said, we honestly don’t know or care.

That is the view of (at least my slice of) the overly online right currently.

I think that the question of whether the protests are succeeding will not really be answered until the results of this year and 2028's elections come in.

The protests are not stopping deportations. However, whether or not these shootings were justified, the optics are bad - and that may have important political consequences which might possibly stop deportations a couple of years from now.

Also, a minor note about:

The protestors (from “our” point of view) want violence and want shootings, because they perceive this as a win condition.

I agree that for the protestors this is a good strategy. If law enforcement full-out massacres a dozen or two protestors in a big shooting, this might be one of the best things that could possibly happen "for the cause" of the protestors. However, I don't think that any more than a tiny handful of protestors are actually driven by a desire to pursue this strategy. Some of the organizers might be, but even then I think it's a very rare motivation. I think most of them are genuinely just trying to interfere with ICE, to impede ICE activities. But they are in part following, because it is easier to do what has been done before, the well-worn tracks of decades of leftist tactics - and those tactics have evolved in part in order to create sympathetic media footage in which leftists have violence used against them.

That makes them, in my opinion which is shared by others with similar worldviews, the baddies. This guy was being a baddy, played a stupid game, and won a stupid prize.

Ok now consider if appealing to only people with the exact same worldview as you, up to just straight up killing people without care because they're a "baddie" in your eyes is going to be a great strategy for 2026 and 2028 elections.

I had a similar response. It’s hard to see anything in the video. But even if the officer technically made a mistake, there was enough confusion there (due to the hysterical protesters) that I believe he is blameless.

There is no situation where Trump admin should give a single inch on this. No situation where the man should be subject to the hostile MN government apparatus.

Federal agents cannot be prosecuted by the state for actions that occur during their duties. They can only be prosecuted at the federal level. He'll be fine, or at least safe from the MN government apparatus.

understand that the purpose of this sort of protest is bad optics

Yeah, that's politics. Why are you surprised ? The adversary baits you, but do you need to bite ? The protests are getting more heated, because Trump is biting onto the bait.

The US is maximally polarized, but it has been for a while. The other party does everything it can to block their adversary. It's Mitch blocking Garland's confirmation. It's red governors banning blue city policies. It's business as usual.

In Canada, the farmers protests were clearly a conservative bait that Trudeau bit into, and it caused his downfall. The farmer's protest is another example of a political torpedo that would have brought Modi down in India. He avoided a few baits, primary among them was Sikhs replacing the Indian flag on the red fort. But no. No anti-protest rubber guns, no tear gas, nothing. He held his nerve, and IMO, it saved his govt. He eventually reformed the bill to involve state-by-state adoption and had to take an L. But, it could have been worse.

Look, as a kid, when I made fun of my sibling, he'd eventually snap and break something. I'd get punished for instigating, but he'd get a bigger punishment for giving in and breaking something (I promise we are very tight now, and I believe I have been a good brother on the balance). Point is, it doesn't matter what the bait is. The individual is still responsible for how they respond. Humans have an intuitive smell for this. Govts, laws or individuals, it doesn't matter. Biting onto to bait makes you a sucker. You may call them reasons, but the people will always view them as excuses.

Point is, it doesn't matter what the bait is. The individual is still responsible for how they respond.

See also: any sports flag for unsportsman like conduct. It's almost always the retaliation the refs notice and flag, not the instigation.

It's not about biting. It's about not backing down, because just packing up and going home is even worse then what's happening now. A surrender like that will only make the next round of protesting 10x bigger.

Trump and ICE didn't do anything in response to the protests except keep trying to do their jobs. The enemy forced this by making simply running a country impossible.

You may call them reasons, but the people will always view them as excuses.

I second this almost completely.

As soon as I heard the whistling that was going on - I mean, what are we doing?

I want ICE to deport illegals … if you want to protest that than ok but you can’t stop this - it’s what I voted for!

Unfortunately they aren’t going after the business owners so it’s mostly optics but good damn at least they’re doing something about an issue.

Let’s see if I can walk the streets at night in the cities within my lifetime like you can in Poland.

Perhaps it was unjustified, and if so, so what? Any sufficiently large scale operation will have things go wrong, especially when you have large numbers of people that are trying to harass, antagonize and violently obstruct things. Chernobyl happened, does this mean nuclear power is evil or forever forbidden? Car accidents happen and vehicular manslaughter happens, does this mean we should abandon cars? I'm not very moved by an individual incident, especially when the victim appears to have gotten into a violent confrontation with ICE, resisting arrest, while carrying a gun, that's Darwin Award territory.

My reaction would be, let's investigate this properly and perhaps prosecute the agents involved. But this should in no way cause us to pause ICE operations and is in fact a very good reason for the media to stop agitpropping retarded leftists into getting into violent confrontations with ICE.

Edit: For the record, after reviewing all the angles, I can say that the shooting appears to be unjustified. I don't think he reached for his weapon and I don't think it accidentally discharged, I think an ICE agent just basically executed him by shooting him in the back then shooting him a few more times when he attempted to stand. That said, this is an extremely predictable outcome of having a gun in your waistband when choosing to physically confront ICE and resist arrest.

Chernobyl happened, does this mean nuclear power is evil or forever forbidden?

No, but we recognized that there is such a thing as a nuclear plant that's been built too haphazardly. Just like Trump's expansion of ICE.

Note, ICE was still deporting about 60% of the current amount of people during Biden's terms. They mostly dressed in official clothing (vs plain clothes), avoided masks and avoided overt display of large weapons. the criticisms of ICE have to do with the 2025 avatar of it. Not the institution that existed before.

Car accidents happen and vehicular manslaughter happens

To be fair, I am very anti-car, pro-transit and pro self-driving cars. I say this begrudgingly, because I love engineering cars and consider them the pinnacle of late-20th century art. But, fast cars should be driven on the track, not the road. Until recently, banning cars was impractical. But the US has been extremely reckless in tolerating a 3-4x higher automobile death rate than other developed nations.

while carrying a gun

What's wrong with carrying a gun in a public place in Minnesota ? Isn't are American LEO not trained to handle situations with gun-owners peacefully ?

Carrying a gun while peacefully protesting is something that American LEOs are generally trained to deal with, because outside of DC and NYC it is legal and at least common enough to need training for. Carrying a gun while interrupting police operations is a very serious crime that they are trained to deal with as a threat. Same thing as how you can carry a gun on your belt but absolutely not in your hand. It's a different brightline than the rest of the developed world has settled on, but it is a brightline nonetheless.

If you plan on committing a crime to act as a human shield, do so unarmed. Don't break the law while you're breaking the law. One crime at a time and all that.

Comparing Biden ICE is missing the point — Biden’s ICE could be “professional” since blue states weren’t actively trying to resist the feds.

Biden's ICE left all these aliens with final deportation orders and multiple felonies in place. That's not so professional. What's left of the libertarian in me is opposed to current immigration controls, but getting rid of felons I'm wholeheartedly for.

I’ve become convinced that libertarianism works but not for all societies and especially not for democracies with open borders.

Yeah, if you have a libertarian democracy with open borders, you have no defense against your libertarianism being voted away by the new arrivals who just want to pry up the surface of your gold-paved streets.

The question isn’t what’s wrong with carrying a gun in Minnesota - you’re muddying the water attempting to ask it.

especially when the victim appears to have gotten into a violent confrontation with ICE, resisting arrest, while carrying a gun, that's Darwin Award territory.

It’s putting it all together that’s insane.

Fair.

Still think Darwin award behavior isn't reason enough to be shot. The average person is not very bright. The system should be built with an assumption of dysfunctional behavior from randos.

I mean, dysfunctional behavior while carrying a gun is, well, FAFO territory. And don't need to be anti-second amendment to think that.

The system should be built with an assumption of dysfunctional behavior from randos.

It is, but it isn't perfect.

A leftwing agitator impeded the the lawful and moral imperative to remove illegal third world invaders and reverse demographic replacement.

Yeah, basically the goal is to ethnically cleanse the country, and if you resist the agents it’s their right to kill you

ICE, which is about 30% Hispanic, thinks they're going to ethnically cleanse the country by killing white people? Man, they must be really dumb.

Seems like pretty much a fact that much of the anti-immigrant right wants America to be a nation of whites, or at least a white majority. NYTreader said as much explicitly elsewhere in the thread.

So I don't know what point you're making. Also lots of ice agents probably are dumb yeah.

Always fun to check in on this place from time to time to see how far it's descended. I'm grateful at least /r/SlateStarCodex and most other rat-adjacent places are still sane.

Still better than Reddit, or X, or shudder bluesky.

I hate this place more than anywhere else on the Internet, except all the other places.

The quality keep going down. But I don't know any alternative

If we actually have fallen so far we are what you made us, as was predicted:

My Id On Defensiveness

There’s a term in psychoanalysis, “projective identification”. It means accusing someone of being something, in a way that actually turns them into that thing. For example, if you keep accusing your (perfectly innocent) partner of always being angry and suspicious of you, eventually your partner’s going to get tired of this and become angry, and maybe suspicious that something is up.

Declaring a group toxic has much the same effect. The average group has everyone from well-connected reasonable establishment members to average Joes to horrifying loonies. Once the group starts losing prestige, it’s the establishment members who are the first to bail; they need to protect their establishment credentials, and being part of a toxic group no longer fits that bill. The average Joes are now isolated, holding an opinion with no support among experts and trend-setters, so they slowly become uncomfortable and flake away as well. Now there are just the horrifying loonies, who, freed from the stabilizing influence of the upper orders, are able to up their game and be even loonier and more horrifying. Whatever accusation was leveled against the group to begin with is now almost certainly true.

This is just condoning being low agency and having low commitment to objectivity.

Im generally sympathetic to people with low agency but let's not act like it's a virtue.

you have to learn to ignore the noise. There are good discussions on here. The rhetoric has gotten heated the last few weeks. Most times, it's less .... heartless.

Personally, I find 2026's /r/SSC to be full of wannabe Mensa types. The internet is dead. a healthy dose of diverse echo-chambers is the next best thing.

It hasn't descended, pointing at the crazy insane partisan hobo on the street is no more indicative of the local communities culture than an indictment of what is considered mainstream.

I’ve been reading SSC for - a decade now?

This is the cultural thread … not every rat should be a progressive cog.

I want UBI and free healthcare / university and basically agree with the poster on this matter.

  1. You can’t see the hands or arms of the decedent. It looks either good nor bad. More facts are required.

  2. Even if LEO did something bad, the benefits of removing thousands of illegal immigrants is worth it. Probably saves American lives in the aggregate.

  3. LEO are under immense stress. Listen to the start of the video. Multiply that day by day. These protestors are nuts.

Even if LEO did something bad, the benefits of removing thousands of illegal immigrants is worth it. Probably saves American lives in the aggregate.

This is ultimately the best justification. As far as I can tell there's no argument against this.

The argument against it is pretty easy and clear. You can remove thousands of illegal immigrants without this chaotic clusterfuck the Trump admin has unleashed on Minneapolis. It's a cliche at this point, but Obama deported illegal immigrants at twice the pace of Donald Trump. And he did so while managing not to kill any American citizens.

And he did so while managing not to kill any American citizens.

Technically untrue in a darkly funny way (an ICE agent shot his supervisor and was subsequently shot and killed by another ICE agent).

The Obama administration did detain and possibly wrongfully deport American citizens, as well.

The intra-ICE shooting happened in 2013.

Yes; Obama was President in 2013.

But that line of argument basically goes 'the left can veto any right immigration policy enforcement with a heckler's veto', because they'll never cooperate with the right, ever, even when they lose elections.

  1. Your basic facts are wrong. Turnarounds aren’t the same as deporting. Obama didn’t actually deport people in meaningful numbers where deportations mean people living in the U.S. illegally.

  2. Blue states weren’t going to obstruct Obama in the same way if he tried to remove illegals living in the States.

So your premises are wrong. I do think there is a better way of doing this though — cut off funding to illegals, e verify, and offer free ticket + cash to leave

Obama deported illegal immigrants at twice the pace of Donald Trump.

No, he did not. His admin changed the metrics and counted turnbacks at the border as deportations to juice his stats. Why this idiotic talking point refuses to die is beyond me.

"See! Democrats could care about the border and be humane about it! You republicans just love brown people suffering! Wait what do you mean Abbott is bussing them to my suburb? Biden said the border was secure, its just 2 million migrants camping in Eagle Pass, Texas is big why don't they stay there"

And, notably, Eagle Pass doesn't have any higher of a standard of living than the towns on the Mexican side of the border(once you take local cost of living into account- northern Mexico is the nice developed part). The migrants got on the busses voluntarily because they wanted to go to the big cities with higher wages.

Initial thoughts, this reminds me of 2020 in the leadup to BLM. Remember Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor? I think the Arbery shooting was in February and Taylor in March and then Floyd of course came at the very end of May. In retrospect there was a clear agitation by the media, and it took them about 4 months or so to rile people up enough for mass action. The first case (Arbery) didn't do it and. neither did the second. I think we're seeing a similar agitation by the media for Spring/Summer 2026. I don't think this case will do it (it's a White man that died), but be on the lookout for something in April that finally activates people.

Arbery is the case that SHOULD have rallied people, he was just a jogger that got shot for being in the wrong neighbourhood. Breonna was in the wrong place when her dipshit boyfriend shot back at police. Instead the rallying point was an overdosing career criminal who got recasted as a gentle giant, because he providing the spark for 4 years of US anger at Trump which was accelerated by COVID and progressives thought they could harness the energy for their revolution. They did, they succeeded, and the revolution failed. This next revolution will fail again, whether it will fizzle early or burn cities again is another issue.

Nah, that one a once in a quarter century event. The left learned that BLM, and civil unrest in general, ultimately was a failure. They didn't get any of the sought policing reforms (except perhaps body cams , which have only hurt their cause by showing the arrests and homicides were justified ) and it arguably killed wokeness, too. Also, the liberal establishment is not going to break the law over White deaths--that is only reserved for blacks.

You are neglecting the principal agent problem. 'The left' is not a unitary entity to learn, or judge success for failure.

A lot of people got very rich from BLM and associated advocacy funding. A lot of agitators got experience, social credibility, or organizational relationships and boosts to their careers in the party-NGO patronage complex. That BLM-unrest harmed the Democratic Party, or even 'killed wokeness' outside of the democrat political machines, does not mean that those inside the political machines felt it was a failure. Survivor bias alone, mixed with the bromides of 'lived experience,' gives a basis for many to go 'it worked well enough for me / here.' It's not like there's ever a shortage of socialist-adjacent politicians arguing this time will be different.

'The liberal establishment' is in the midst of a party civil war only barely papered over by Trump as a unifying antagonist. That civil war is because of a lack of consensus on what went wrong, or what is wrong. Many of those partisans may be

I would counter that it was a wild success. They demonstrated they can riot with impunity and use this to threaten their opposition at will. Wokeness (just universalism) is further entrenched. Two steps forward one step back is a very successful long term strategy.

I am not saying that there were no media trying to fan the flames, but what did end up riling the BLM protests was videos of what a jury would later rule was a cop murdering a Black suspect over minutes, while his cop buddies prevented onlookers from interfering.

Against a setting of COVID lockdowns, this was clearly enough to start race riots. The parts of the media itching for blood did not have to do a lot of spinning, distributing the video via the usual platforms (which is their job) was quite sufficient.

That's how modern propaganda works though. In a country with 340 million people, you don't need to make things up whole cloth. Just find that one outlier incident that suits your narrative and blast it out for weeks until people are suitably outraged.

There's a reason normies were blasted with the George Floyd footage for weeks, but not the Irina Zaretska video, which was arguably even more horrifying.

-I don't think it's reasonable for Democrats to create a massive mess, and then to expect Republicans to have perfection in how they clean up the mess made by Democrats. And I think that should be one framing that conservatives use- "sometimes bad things will happen when Democrats create a mess and we have to clean it up for them".

-I think conservatives should use incidents like this to raise attention to the fact that the media, and the left (but I repeat myself a bit), comparatively give so little attention to the victims of illegal immigrants and recidivist criminals out on the streets from liberal policies. The people getting into incidents with ICE are much less "innocent" than the random victims of recidivist criminal nutjobs or illegal immigrants let out on the streets by liberal policies.

-Conservatives tend to get into the weeds about whether or not a shooting was "justified", instead of simply pointing out that almost all of the unwanted tragic incidents that relate to politics are mainly committed by the groups which are the chief recipients of liberal sympathies.

Every time the left gives a massive amount of attention to someone getting into a confrontation with ICE and it ends badly, conservatives should be asking why Iryna Zarutska et al didn't get the same level of concern for not seeking out any trouble whatsoever.

-Speaking as a former leftist, if conservatives really want to get the media to not be such overwhelming propaganda outlets for the left, then I think they absolutely must implement 2rafa's idea of jobs quotas by ideology.

The simple reality, and many studies back this up, is that liberals are more bigoted against conservatives, than conservatives are bigoted against liberals. And the level of liberal bigotry is at an all-time high.

-Especially when it comes to the media, it's easy to portray it as a free-speech right. If conservatives can almost never be admitted nor hired by colleges, nor hired for media jobs, then they are cut off from major sources of "speech" in their country. (And colleges often have received federal grants, making it even more egregious that these institutions are taking tax dollars from conservatives, while refusing to admit or hire them).

-I think the jobs quota needs to be portrayed as universal protection for every ideology. And to emphasize that free speech is completely protected, I think quotas should be proportional to the ideology of the audience.

So, if an institution deliberately wants to only cater to a universally left-wing audience, that's fine, then they can hire only leftists, if that is their desire. And conservative institutions would have the same freedom to hire only conservatives, if they want to cater exclusively to a conservative audience.

But I can guarantee that nearly every single media and academic institution in the western world has more conservative audience members (and taxpayer funders), than the number of conservatives the HR-liberals are willing to hire.

-Everyone would then clearly be free to engage in any speech they want. This is just about hiring practices in cases where there is a clear discrepancy in who is getting hired.

But any conservatives by now should see that it's obvious that "policy follows personnel". As institutions have hired more leftists, they have become more leftist in their policies & in their speech habits.

-I would suggest that ideological hiring quotas should also apply for government jobs, which skew massively leftist in practice. Voters deserve a government which matches how they vote!

-Hiring quotas by ideology in government jobs would accomplish a lot of major conservative goals at once: 1. Significantly lower the risk of civil war. 2. Massively expand conservative power. 3. Reduce liberal enthusiasm for spending and for government power in general (liberals will perhaps suddenly lose interest in having their taxes fund lots of conservatives in easy government jobs.).

-A major part of why government jobs have consistently skewed leftist is that government jobs tend to be concentrated in urban areas that lean left. So, government jobs not only tend to be functionally hostile to conservatives on ideological grounds, government jobs also tend to have a massive regional bias against conservative-leaning rural areas in particular.

-"Regionalism" is underdiscussed as a type of bias which badly harms some people. I think this is because "regionalism" mostly harms conservative-leaning groups. A lot of liberals have been very good at making a massive fuss about some types of bias which evidence suggests harms relatively few people (like racism), while ignoring the more common harmful biases which can get wielded against people based on where they live, what religion they practice, or how they vote.

Interesting, but in practice this would be super hard and cause major problems for some institutions.

How are you going to get a 50:50 split in the police or military? Do you really want aome of these organisations to reflect the voter base, rather than the base of people who want to work in that field?

My understanding is that the military is already fairly split by voting preferences among active-duty military, e.g. https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2020/08/31/as-trumps-popularity-slips-in-latest-military-times-poll-more-troops-say-theyll-vote-for-biden/.com

In general, in all nations, the military is a fantastic candidate for balanced ideology, since coups require the support of the military in 100% of cases (the support of the media is also essential).

But if the military is always split relative to the nation's voting preferences, then it's really hard to take over the military as a part of a coup of the government. It's a great way to protect democracy.

And regarding the police (and ICE), a great way to get the left to stop attacking law enforcement so much (and to hopefully improve community relations and improve the skewed perspective most leftists have about law enforcement), would be to get more leftists working in law enforcement. I'm sure there would be some negative effects, too, but there are some big major positives about ideological balance in law enforcement.

Do you really want aome of these organisations to reflect the voter base, rather than the base of people who want to work in that field?

This is a good question, and I think that ideological fairness should be assessed in the same way that things like gender fairness or racial fairness are often assessed: that as long as you can show that the workplace is not hostile, and that no minimally qualified candidates were rejected, then if there simply aren't enough qualified leftist/rightist candidates that applied, then it's fine if there is a resulting imbalance.

The reality is that a lot of media/academic/government workplaces are massively hostile to conservatives, and a lot of conservative talent is not being admitted nor hired.

would be to get more leftists working in law enforcement.

No I agree that this would solve the problem you're describing, and I think it's an interesting perspective I hadn't heard of before.

But operationally, how do you encourage e.g. lefties to go to police academy or righties to go to the department of fairness and equality (or whatever).

Institutions bust their ass to get e.g. women into the police and they can't really make it happen.

It's another good question.

Since I come from a leftist activist background, I basically fall back on the types of suggestions that leftists make to increase "representation" in other areas:

-Advertise more in those spaces

-Increase representation in the media

-Reduce any hostility in the workplace for those kinds of people, if you reasonably can

-Make them aware that they have legal rights

-...and if all else fails, simply accept that if people don't want to do those jobs, even when fully aware of the opportunities, then so be it. People can't be forced to do things they don't want to do. But you can at least make the opportunities available and raise awareness.

-I think conservatives should use incidents like this to raise attention to the fact that the media, and the left (but I repeat myself a bit), comparatively give so little attention to the victims of illegal immigrants and recidivist criminals out on the streets from liberal policies.

The typical victim of an illegal immigrant might be killed by an illegal the Democrats did not deport after he served some sentence for a crime (not sure what their exact policies were).

Note that the Biden admin generally did not use federal taxes to buy guns for illegals and paid them a federal salary to engage in behavior where they were somewhat likely to shoot people, so we might want to hold Trump's ICE to slightly higher standards.

The people getting into incidents with ICE are much less "innocent" than the random victims of recidivist criminal nutjobs or illegal immigrants let out on the streets by liberal policies.

Is that so? The central case of an illegal murdering someone is not a serial killer murdering some random women. It is likely either an acquaintance or romantic partner of the criminal or a member of a rival narcotics gang. Also, we do not generally rank murders by how innocent their victim was, so we do not need to get into discussing if a woman who elects to date a man who previously committed violent crime is more or less innocent than a woman who tries to hamper ICE through nonviolent means. A judge might be a bit more lenient when a murderer kills the rapist of his sister in revenge than when he guns down a random stranger in the streets, but at the end of the day either is murder. "He was a bad person, the world is better off without him" is not an argument we let anyone make in court, and I see no reason why we should let ICE make it.

-Conservatives tend to get into the weeds about whether or not a shooting was "justified", instead of simply pointing out that almost all of the unwanted tragic incidents that relate to politics are mainly committed by the groups which are the chief recipients of liberal sympathies.

I would not euphemize killings as "unwanted tragic incidents".

Furthermore, I think "killings that relate to politics", which I imagine you imagine as "killings by illegals, prior offenders whom liberals released, and killings related to political protests" is unfortunately a bit broader. In 2019 (the latest year for which the FBI has data), there were 13,927 homicides. Of these, 10,258, or some 73.6%, were committed using firearms. The degree how easily firearms should be available is clearly political as much as which offenders should be released. I am sure that somewhere in the 13927 murders, there is one which it totally non-political, not touching illegals, prior offenders, narcotics, firearms, sex work, domestic violence, housing policy and so forth, but for practical purposes it seems simpler to assume that most murders will touch policy somewhere.

(Your point technically stands, Blacks commit disproportionally many murders (mostly on other Blacks), and are certainly recipients of liberal sympathies. As most of the Blacks in the US are not recent immigrants, it just does little to motivate the removal of illegals.)

-I think the jobs quota needs to be portrayed as universal protection for every ideology. And to emphasize that free speech is completely protected, I think quotas should be proportional to the ideology of the audience.

I think you would need a new SCOTUS for that. Citizens United clearly established that companies enjoyed free speech. Seems kinda hard to exempt media companies from that.

To be honest, "X% of the NYT readers are conservative, therefore the NYT should have X% conservative commentators", seems rather un-American to my European ears. Are you sure you are on my side of the pond? In fact, it seems slightly worse than just extending affirmative action to political ideology, because it would incentivize consuming media to neuter them. Imagine millions of liberal college students hate-watching Fox News so that they can force them to carry their viewpoints.

Quite frankly, in human history, it has never been easier to broadcast your viewpoint than it is today. You have social media companies run by people with very different political leanings. Anyone can open a blog or substack or video channel. MAGA-adjacent billionaires are spending billions to acquire platforms to get political clot. Big Tech has kissed the ring of the Donald and seems unlikely to offend him by shadowbanning MAGA content. Crying that CNN would not hire you seems as petty as some pink-haired liberal crying that Fox News would not hire them. There are a ton of other options, and the audience only reachable by traditional TV is growing smaller every year.

Note that the Biden admin generally did not use federal taxes to buy guns for illegals and paid them a federal salary to engage in behavior where they were somewhat likely to shoot people, so we might want to hold Trump's ICE to slightly higher standards.

If we actually care about innocent people dying, then no, we shouldn't care any more about someone that dies at the hands of ICE, than someone that died from some criminal the Democrats let out on the streets. And there are VASTLY more people that die from those Democrat causes, than at the hands of ICE.

If the left actually cared about innocent people dying, their crime and immigration policies would be vastly different. But from what I can tell, their focus is mostly on making life easier for convicted criminals, and known illegal immigrants.

Also, we do not generally rank murders by how innocent their victim was

Most members of the public do this, actually. Most people don't care that much if some gang member is killed by some other gang member. They care a lot more if some innocent child dies. This is perfectly logical and normal.

"He was a bad person, the world is better off without him" is not an argument we let anyone make in court, and I see no reason why we should let ICE make it.

I'm not saying the people that confront ICE are bad people (though I think that they are misguided). I am mostly noting that someone that gets in a confrontation with a member of law enforcement wielding a weapon is knowingly taking on a big risk. They are not 100% innocent in the situation, like Iryna Zarutska and other victims were.

And since members of ICE are humans, and all humans make occasional mistakes, these incidents will keep happening as long as the left goads on enough people into getting into confrontations with LEO.

This is a major part of why the left is so incredibly complicit in these deaths. It isn't just that the left deliberately imported millions of illegal immigrants and forced the voters to elect Republicans to clean up their mess, it's the fact that they keep goading suggestible people into confronting ICE. These incidents will keep happening as long as the left keeps doing that.

Can ICE policies be improved? Sure. But it's actually a lot harder to perfect that side of the equation, than for the left to stop creating these problems and confrontations in the first place.

I think you would need a new SCOTUS for that. Citizens United clearly established that companies enjoyed free speech. Seems kinda hard to exempt media companies from that.

What I'm proposing would be massively beneficial to conservatives, and SCOTUS does lean conservative.

BTW, I'm not suggesting at all that corporations should be forced to make ANY specific changes to their speech. I am only suggesting that corporations should be forced to engage in fair hiring practices, and then expect that as the personnel changes, the speech will likely change, too, once conservatives finally get a fair shot in the workplace in the media, academia, and government.

Are you sure you are on my side of the pond?

I am an American, and I feel deep sorrow at once-astonishing Europe's slow slide into irrelevancy, so I will probably stay here.

Imagine millions of liberal college students hate-watching Fox News so that they can force them to carry their viewpoints.

Amusing :). I'm sure Fox News would be completely happy with that outcome, though, and so would most conservatives, to see liberals finally get more exposure to conservative viewpoints. (Studies show that liberals are generally much more ignorant of conservative media and viewpoints, than the reverse.)

There are a ton of other options, and the audience only reachable by traditional TV is growing smaller every year.

The audience for traditional media is still absolutely vast. And all "new media" would also be included. And in some cases it would help to protect the left!

Couple of thoughts:

  1. If Trump is going to fulfill the left's dictatorship fantasies - better do the coup soon. After the midterm he will be the lamest duck that ever quacked. Holding to any shreds of power will be miracle even by his standards.
  2. Do you think that body cameras will be turned off or exonerating?
  3. The second Trump is way way more outrageous than the first one. And people mostly shrug. This is what happens when you are 10 years with emotional afterburner on.
  4. I wonder how the things will go down now when there are real consequences to larping or being the resistance - will it put more people on the streets or will it change the calculus?

Folks on Reddit are openly calling for the murder of ICE agents, and for a leftist coup.

Sure, who is going to carry out the leftist coup? The field grade officers in the military are still conservative. Federal law enforcement by the numbers is still conservative, even if certain agencies aren't.

Mid-level environmental protection bureaucrats don't carry out coups.

Why hasn’t the FBI gotten to Reddit yet? They do open terrorist incitement all the time.

Reddit is not real.

That being said, I am surprised that the US doesn't have more violent rebellions. That's what the 2nd amendment is for right ? From a purely strategic perspective, say you believe that Trump's people are a few years away from turning the US into a dictatorship. In that case, wouldn't you want to be violent before they consolidate all power and not after ?

I mean, the second amendment people are on Trump's side, because the opposition will betray them immediately and they know it.

Should've made friends long ago.

From a purely strategic perspective, say you believe that Trump's people are a few years away from turning the US into a dictatorship. In that case, wouldn't you want to be violent before they consolidate all power and not after ?

The optics on who shoots first matter a lot, and I think people understand this intuitively. The South probably did more harm to its cause than good by shooting first during the Civil War.

Everyone is brave on reddit.

https://apnews.com/live/minneapolis-ice-shooting-updates-1-24-2026

Gov. Walz has activated the national guard. It's unclear what, exactly, they're going to be doing. ICE claims to have recovered a gun from the scene; they're not going to admit fault, obviously, but planting a gun on a suspect seems like a pretty far bridge when they're on video. Obviously, the footage looks really bad.

The suspect did have a gun. It was pulled off of him just before the first shot was fired. The officer who fired should have had a clear view of this. I don't know what he thought he saw.

I've watched the video a bunch of times and it's unclear to me where the first shot comes from, which this entire thing hinges on. IMO we need the footage from the lady in the pink who was right there. If we're to believe the posted photo of the weapon from DHS, it is a SIG, though I'm not sure if it's a P320. The only thing I want to add to the discussion is the dark possibility that if this is a P320, there's a small but non-zero chance that this is another case of a self-discharging P320, which caused the agents here to believe he had fired at them and caused them to unload on him.

Edit: her video is linked in this thread and it's not looking good for the agents but also it's still unclear if the guy could have pulled a gun. I'm leaning towards bad shoot.

Immediately after the grey-jacketed agent gets the dead guy's gun (we can see the red dot sight; it's definitely the weapon DHS says was the dead guy's, not an ICE weapon. I'm pretty sure it is a P320 but it did not go off), the agent to his left (in the pink lady's video) draws his weapon and fires the first shot, I believe. Not clear why, but it seems like he fucked up. Then there's a bunch more shots, which seems like a further fuckup. I assume if the guy had a second weapon, DHS would be crowing about that from the heights of X, so it definitely seems like an unjustified shoot. But I predict that the less-sympathetic (i.e. male) victim means this makes less news.

Yeah, after seeing more video it does seem like they disarmed him during (one of the agents is shown to have his gun, the same one that can be seen taking it from him during the struggle) and that one agent did fire the first shot. Real bad and none of the angles is redeeming the administration. No idea why they're doubling down on the "domestic terrorist" rhetoric. They're out of control.

No idea why they're doubling down on the "domestic terrorist" rhetoric.

It's the same playbook the left has been using. As for why... because it worked for their enemies.

The video from the other side is posted e.g. here: https://x.com/i/status/2015131503622021472

But it doesn't make the situation clearer.

Good luck to all rightists in the next years, trying to dodge the incoming 1000 years Unlimited Immigration Reich. The problem is that immigrationism is an extremely powerful ideology, because everytime you try to go against it you need to use force, and force make normies have the ick, and reinforce immigrationism. A lesson for all future societies, if we will ever have one (Demography is the most important thing ever and nothing else matters)

Instead of luck, maybe the rightists could use some competence instead ? They have dug their own graves.

I bet if ICE roamed in suits with slicked back hair, they wouldn't have half the issues they're facing. Instead, they chose maximally aggressive optics, and they're getting the obvious reaction. You expect Americans to view ICE favorably when they dress and act like bank robbers from a crime procedural ?

Were they forced to to digitally alter images of people to make them uglier ? Was the white house forced to post AI memes about detention centers with alligators in them ? The right is setting themselves up to fail for no good reason.

Either way, ICE's operation isn't particularly effective either. The number of convicted criminals being detained has remained unchanged. There is a modest increase in detentions for those pending charges, but nothing ground breaking. At the same time, the amount of arrests (esp. of non criminals) has skyrocketed. The deaths in custody numbers tripled, and 2026 has gotten off to a horrifying start. More people have died in ICE custody in January (15 days) than died in the entire year of 2023 !! (This warrants 2 exclamations)

With the Somali scandal, Trump had a solid narrative for the midterms. If MAGA loses the mid-terms, it is because they are both incompetent and intensely dislikeable. Hilarious that Trump came to power by swinging non-white voters and gen Z. Now that the same voters are turning their back on him ( in polls at least), it is somehow a sign of the woke mind-virus and immigration led anti-Americanism.

Either way, ICE's operation isn't particularly effective either. The number of convicted criminals being detained has remained unchanged.

...you did catch at least a half dozen of the ways that link was trying to manipulate the reader, no?

Like, there are way more than a half dozen techniques being used. A common one was making a big deal of % increases without giving base numbers, or whether % increases they don't like correspond to % increases in things they don't care to admit. The 'Annual Deaths in ICE Custody' chart takes the deaths in the first half of January- without establishing any cause of death or even alleging they were a result of ICE mistreatment- and then multiplies them by the time for the rest of year to claim 122 'projected deaths' for 2026.

It's also notably including in the 2025 death count the migrant detainees killed by anti-ICE people trying to shoot ICE.

I particularly liked how the 'Systemic Accountability Failure' accepts "billions of dollars in claims" against ICE as the baseline (invented by people opposed to ICE no less) for which 'less than $1 million in settlement' is the systemic accountability failure in question to make the reader upset... and then goes on to blame / concede that acts of congress, longstanding judicial policy, and the sovereign immunity of the state. Only not in that order, of course, because sovereign immunity is the scary boo word, and the New Deal law passed by the Democratic Party and regularly used over the last half-century is to be last-noted and without such context.

The sort of people who will be moved by that website are not the sort of people whose opinions would be changed if and where ICE behaved particularly differently. That is an advocacy/propaganda website, and there will always be propaganda to make anything come across as a travesty. The only thing that would change the position of the people so easily moved by such blatant propaganda is if they didn't get propagandized.

This, in turn, would require the propagandists in question to not see a need to generate the propaganda. Which would primarily be if ICE wasn't doing deportations, as opposed to if ICE was doing deportations differently.

Yes, they have an agenda. But I couldn't find the detentions and arrests bar chart anywhere else.

The statistics I am interested in, were still sound. I deliberately highlighted the 3x number which is over an entire year, instead of the rather ambitious 2026 projection. Cause aside, 7 deaths in 15 days is anomalously high and warrants explanation.

That's usually how it goes. The dirt is usually unearthed by those who want to bring you down. Back during the excesses of the work movement, opposing statistics required swimming through doomer incel sewers. Just because they wanted to radicalize me into giving up didn't mean their numbers were wrong.

Yes, they have an agenda. But I couldn't find the detentions and arrests bar chart anywhere else.

The availability bias is truly a wonder, and an easy tool to exploit.

Cause aside, 7 deaths in 15 days is anomalously high and warrants explanation.

Sure. But also questions. Among which- what would have been the death rate in 2023 had the Biden Administration surged ICE differently? After all, a core premise of your critique is the (in)competence. Incompetence requires a baseline of competence, which in turn requires a baseline of 'acceptable' failures across an institution.

And also- what would the death rate in January 2026 have been had the Obama and Biden administrations not taken their benign neglect for over a decade? Had they changed policy, would the downstream factors of January 2026 been possible?

But also- 115 compared to what base number? Not only what is the base numbers in January 2026 versus 2023, so that you can have some % comparison, but also what is the 'acceptable' number of deaths in general?

And this is if we concede 'cause aside.' Someone might- quite reasonably- believe that cause must not be put aside. It matters quite a bit for discussions of competence if deaths in ICE detention are because ICE beats the detainees to death, or if the prisoners kill eachother, or if they die because of heart attacks but previous administrations didn't have such figures because they were ideologically opposed to deporting people at risk for heart attacks when stressed.

That's usually how it goes. The dirt is usually unearthed by those who want to bring you down. Back during the excesses of the work movement, opposing statistics required swimming through doomer incel sewers. Just because they wanted to radicalize me into giving up didn't mean their numbers were wrong.

Ah, but numbers are wrong. Quite commonly. Especially numbers provided for the primary purpose of propaganda- and especially numbers presented to prime emotions. As they say, lies, damn lies, and statistics.

How about “ICE is under siege so violent events are more likely to happen?”

Leftists want to identify and harass or kill ICE agents. If my brother or dad worked for ICE I'd want him to cover his face.

The memes are dumb, I agree.

I simply no longer care if people get killed while impeding efforts to deport invaders. As @Armin states succinctly, immigration is a ratchet especially when you have a rabidly pro-immigration media. If people don't want to get shot, they can stay in their countries of origin or not get aggressive with federal law enforcement trying to work in a hostile area.

MAGA will lose the house because the average normie is clueless and because the persecution complex energizes leftist. But there was really no way to avoid that as the entire media complex has gone into overdrive spinning a narrative of persecution since 2016.

Trump was shot a year and a half ago, Kirk was shot a few months ago. Those high profile cases of leftist violence are just the tip of the iceberg. Antifa is a real impediment for right wing politics in the US. The professional activists are not going to stop. These are the same people who rioted in 2020. Getting rid of them is a strategic victory and the price is a news story that will live for a new cycle.

The most strategic thing Trump could do would be to get the ring leaders locked up. There are plenty of narcotics related charges that could be used on antifa types. Rioting creates opportunities to arrest people, to search their houses and find things.

I will grant you the Kirk shooter being a leftist (a trans activist, though raised as a Mormon (and gun enthusiast), IIRC).

Calling the Trump shooter a leftist is a bit of a stretch. As he had made bomb threats before I would rather categorize him as "crazy" than "central leftist".

These are the same people who rioted in 2020.

My feeling was that the rioting was mostly done by various opportunistic criminals, while the SJ activists mostly stood on the sidelines and celebrated their empowerment or something. I would be extremely surprised if either of two people recently killed by ICE was credibly implicated in committing felonies during the BLM riots.

The most strategic thing Trump could do would be to get the ring leaders locked up.

I think you are confused. There is no Antifa version of Bin Laden who decided that agent Crooks should go forward with trying to shoot Trump, or who assigned Goods to "hampering ICE" duty on the day she was shot.

The most strategic thing Trump could do would be to get the ring leaders locked up.

IMO it'd be to push Congress for a bill to mandate a minimal level of local/state cooperation with federal immigration authorities in exchange for federal funding eligibility, and in return offering a stand down of current operations. I don't see another real offramp available to the right, here: they can't practically expect to focus so exclusively on Minnesota indefinitely.

What other practical political goal are they trying to achieve while they're there burning political capital like The Joker burns piles of cash?

Interesting but how does that survive anti commandeering? You would need to tie things like federal spending grants but that becomes tricky where the official policy is “help ICE” but you allow deviation from policy.

Would a straight quid pro quo tying state/local law enforcement cooperation with federal funding to those agencies run afoul of that? We manage to tie highway funding to highway drunk driving laws.

Alternatively, mandatory E-Verify, but the lack of interest there hints in a deep unseriousness about the issue overall.

Not sure I follow the logic here, what about enforcing immigration laws necessitates a mass of poorly trained officers taking down and beating on a citizen, seemingly just for recording them, and then shooting him multiple times while he's on the floor?

Immigration is a not a dichotomy between "full immigrant open borders" and "government thugs just executing people on the streets", there's plenty of room inbetween. The incompetence and open abuse of ICE is a fixable issue and you should be mad at the Trump admin for creating a problem that doesn't need to happen and causing unnecessary PR problems. The public was on his side for a long while, it was his failures that lead to polling shifts against.

Immigration is a not a dichotomy between "full immigrant open borders" and "government thugs just executing people on the streets", there's plenty of room inbetween.

You're right, because in-between is exactly where we are.

The incompetence and open abuse of ICE is a fixable issue and you should be mad at the Trump admin for creating a problem that doesn't need to happen and causing unnecessary PR problems.

What sort of ICE behavior would you would find acceptable? Because from what I can tell the vast majority of anti ICE leftists seem to believe that the only acceptable ICE action would be "disband entirely." They may claim otherwise, but I don't believe it. If you take away ICE officers' guns, leftists will complain about "beatings." If you ban clubs and fists they'll complain about nebulous "excessive force." It's strategic and disingenuous moving of the goalpost towards their ulterior goal.

What sort of ICE behavior would you would find acceptable?

Behaving like normal professional law enforcement for one. Bad trigger discipline, widespread violation of rights ike that recent memo that was leaked trying to allege they can search houses with just an administrative warrant, which is of course a theory you know they're confident about when they kept it hush hush and told people not to take notes about it, a propensity to escalate situations with unnecessary violence and threats etc are all things that can be improved on dramatically.

I'll say the same thing I said in previous threads, go watch the British show Police Interceptors and compare their professional deescalatory polite behavior to the current thuggery of the ICE and you'll understand how much room for improvement there is while still getting a job done. They are public servants, they should be professional instead of behaving like some sort of legalized gang.

the vast majority of anti ICE leftists seem to believe that the only acceptable ICE action would be "disband entirely."

There are those who would favour deporting some people (those who have individually done Very Bad Things), but believe that it should be done by a different agency with a less bloodthirsty institutional culture.

Prior to 2003, deportations of undocumented/illegal immigrants were handled by the same agency processing documented/legal immigrants; this may have resulted in fewer xenophobes and more Lawful Neutrals.

what about enforcing immigration laws necessitates a mass of poorly trained officers

I freely confess that I don't know what the view looks like from the inside, but I sort of suspect a lot of the way ICE is being used is to create political pressure/optics.

I wonder if it would be much more efficient (to say nothing of much less optically problematic) to just send a few guys in plainclothes to pick up each dude ID'd as illegal. I sort of suspect that "running around in camo and plate carriers" is either the idea of people in ICE who think it is cool, or the idea of admin higher-ups who think that creating a scene like that is necessary to intimidate would-be illegals and deter illegal immigration. But part of me suspects that quietly and efficiently deporting massive numbers of illegals is in its own way scarier and more deterring than these highly visible scenes, if run at high volume for a sustained period of time.

Really interested to know if there is anyone here who can speak to that though.

the idea of admin higher-ups who think that creating a scene like that is necessary to intimidate would-be illegals and deter illegal immigration.

Don't border crossing numbers suggest that they've basically already done this even before the current drama?

Border crossing numbers started declining when Greg Abbott intimidated the Biden admin into letting him seal the border(well, most of it).

That seems likely, but I could see the rationale being that you want to make a lasting impression.

The political pressure on jurisdictions that aren't cooperating with ICE might be much more relevant, though.

Federal authorities have been incredibly soft by any reasonable standards given the scope of demographic replacement.

We have individual rights in the United States, you don't respond to societal-wide problems by violating the rights of individuals for no reason in isolated incidents.

given the scope of demographic replacement.

If you believe it to be important then isn't that all the more reason the Trump admin should maintain good PR and keep public opinion in support of ICE operations?

The media is a propaganda tool for the left; there will never be "good PR".

The only solution is deporting 40-50 million people over the next decade.

If you think the media is against you, then again that just makes it more important to not give over free wins for no reason. Americans all over, many independent and otherwise supportive of kicking out illegal immigrants, are going to see this video of a man being beaten, thrown to the ground and then shot multiple times and think twice of supporting your cause.

This isn't some RTS where you get to micro every local unit. One of the main criticisms against the protestors (and the reason for a growing absence of sympathy for them) is that they are intentionally engineering scenarios where violence and even fatalaties become a statistical inevitability. There is no way to avoid 'giving a free win' in that kind of rigged game, short of just packing up and leave.

That seems like more of a media control problem. Right now an illegal immigrant who murders someone typically gets called a "Texas man" with no photo and a stub of an article in the local newspaper. Rare exceptions exist, but they are usually because Trump forced the story into the national conversation, and the national media coverage is to "debunk" whatever he said. Meanwhile these ICE incidents get weeks of breathless coverage by national media, orders of magnitude higher than comparable police shootings that happen every day. It's easy to give normies the ick, the problem is that the right doesn't own the propaganda apparatus.

Yes. A "Culmore man" is a white man. If he is a foreigner, it needs to be phrased as "A Salvadoran (or whatever) living in Culmore."

Doubt this change will ever make it to the AP Stylebook though.

What about a black man whose ancestors lived there when they were freed by the Emancipation Proclamation?

What about a man whose ancestors came from El Salvador during the Fillmore Administration?

What about a man who was born in El Salvador, but naturalised twenty years ago and no longer has Salvadoran citizenship?

The right can't own propaganda in a current day liberal society. All the right can do is react to the receipts of long term progressive policy and gain power temporarily. Then the right will overplay their hands and power will switch back to progressives because liberals are completely averse to use of force and can't actually defend our society from left leaning bad actors. It's like we've contracted HIV as a society and our cultural antibodies have no clue what to do. We don't have the self-preservation instincts to protect anything worth protecting on a societal level. We see a terrible incident and shape our entire social policy based on that incident. We are extremely sensitive to seeing and doing harm, but almost completely indifferent to being harmed slowly.

Well, the upside here is that it can't possibly remain stable for more than a generation or two before the inevitable and utterly ruthless backlash commences, after which whites will never again forget their place at the head of humanity. My two cents, I guess.

Make babies and raise them to rule with an iron fist.

Yes, this is exactly why we are home schooling all our children and live in a 90%+ white community. It's the only way to instill a sense of belonging to our Volk and to remedy the post-WW2 race-blind propaganda, especially the Holocaust narrative.

Our Volk?

The only 'Volk' I consider meaningful is that of the scions of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve.

I think you are joking but would endorse entirely and ask you why you don't.

I don't follow. Why I don't what?

Contingent on you having been insincere, I ask why you are insincere. Maybe you've been forthright, in which case I'd like to know that too.

Even if it's legal to carry a gun, violently resisting a bunch of cops while having one is a bad idea. Firstly I'm pretty sure this guy wasn't just taking a walk and a bunch of agents jumped him. Secondly, if you have a piece and police are trying to arrest you, justified or not, it's a really really good reason to be extremely polite and respectful to show you're not going to use it.

The media is so vulnerable to this kind of shit though. Hamas explicitly has a defensive policy that baits Israelis into bombing an apartment block full of kids. Media: "israel bombed an apartment full of kids".

Protestors do everything they can to stress law enforcement into fucking up: "police kill protestor".

Zero accountability or culpability to those who deliberately create the confusing circumstances that result in these things going wrong. But an absolute demand for complete and perfect performance that transcends any fog of war from the authorities.

When the media can't honestly engage against their preferred social groups you have a major asymmetry that most neutral readers just don't ever think about.

Obviously if you don't want to get shot or have your children bombed, the onus is in you to control what you can, rather than bizarrely expect that the powers that be cowtow to you.

The media is ao vulnerable to this kind of shit though.

Not so much vulnerable as complicit. They know what's going on, certainly in the Hamas case if not the instant one. They report what their favored side wants even though they know it is deceptive.

There is a lot of behavior which is a Bad Idea which might get you killed but still no excuse for murder.

We do not let the guy who kills his ex get off the hook because her decision to date a guy with a criminal record and anger management issues.

In this case, if the body cam of the cop (which was clearly on, right?) shows that from his perspective, it looked like the suspect was going to reach for his gun, then I will file this under "sometimes people do risky things and tragedy ensues". If it does not show that, I would be inclined to convict on murder 2 from the videos I saw.

Tim Walz:

I just spoke with the White House after another horrific shooting by federal agents this morning. Minnesota has had it. This is sickening.

The President must end this operation. Pull the thousands of violent, untrained officers out of Minnesota. Now.

The left seems to be running a massive hecklers veto. After GF, the right can’t do it again. It’s only going to get worse

I just spoke with the White House after another horrific shooting by federal agents this morning. Minnesota has had it. This is sickening.

"Spoke with the White House" is incredibly vague. It can imply that he spoke with Trump. It can mean he merely spoke with a White House staffer. It can mean he spoke with a White House receptionist who wrote down his message and was like "Okay thanks for calling! I'll tell someone to let President Trump know you called." It can even mean he just left a voice message after his call went straight to voicemail.

The President must end this operation. Pull the thousands of violent, untrained officers out of Minnesota. Now.

Cringe as fuck that Walz blusters like he's in a position of strength to make any demands, a few weeks after ending his re-election bid to become a lame duck because he let third world immigrants steal hundreds of millions from under his nose.

Trump could further bury what remains of Walz's career by responding to Walz with the Jennifer Lawrence "thumbs up" gif. However, knowing Trump—if he does respond directly—it'll likely be in the form of a rant with lots of ALL CAPS. Where's Vance and his millennial genre savviness when you need him?

A hecklers veto being used against federal law enforcement being used to provoke and punish a city. There's no defense of Minneapolis of all place to be crawling with immigration agents.

The defense is pretty simple:

  1. There are still people in Minneapolis who have no right to be roaming the United States.
  2. INS and now ICE is the duly appointed agency responsible to enforce the immigration laws our Congress has repeatedly passed with large bipartisan support over the last hundred years.
  3. Minneapolis and Minnesota have refused to cooperate with these federal laws, necessitating a disproportionate number of agents in the area to help do both their job and the job of the police at crowd control and mitigating disturbances of the peace.

Immigration on a massive scale impacts the country as a whole due to many factors, but one of the biggest is how congressional seats are apportioned and how our birthright citizenship works. Minnesota cannot just press the defect button and rake in the political rewards.

This defense is a bit thin since you can use it to justify an uncapped amount of federal agents as long as there's non-zero illegal immigrants in Minneapolis, which applies to basically every American city.

A much more reasonable defense is that they are doing it as a punitive expedition to make Minneapolis an example so other sanctuary cities start to less resistant to federal authority on immigration. However, it is still a punitive expedition. And after these shootings, it has clearly failed, because I don't see how it will be effective at persuading other liberal strongholds to cooperate with ICE rather than digging in their heels and be even more resistant.

Yes, I could justify an uncapped amount of federal agents to enforce very popular and longstanding bipartisan federal law. The only restraining principle is the expense.

The most reasonable defense is that this is what it takes to capture only a tiny percentage per capita of people who do not have permission to be here compared with cooperative jurisdictions. Just because jurisdictions are non-cooperative does not give them the right to defect from the country's laws.

Edit: And before you come at me saying ICE is suddenly unpopular in polls immediately after the shooting of Good and relentless negative news coverage, a majority of Americans still want more deportations.

I probably want illegal Somalis to be deported. However, I do not want illegal Somalis deported if the only way to do this is spend crazy amounts of money on an agency that seemingly cannot stop escalating encounters with protestors into shootings that leave US citizens dead. Further, I am very unconvinced that ICE's current incarnation would be very effective at its job (deporting illegal immigrants, ideally prioritizing bad actors) in the absence of active protestors. This really seems like a failed project staffed by and led by incompetent people. The correct move is to clean house and start over, prioritizing optics; most of all, don't shoot people!

There are functionally no illegal Somalis. Perhaps they shouldn't have been granted legal status but they were.

The only restraining principle is the expense.

Yes and that is the key here isn't it? There's no infinite amount of federal agents available, and there's clearly diminishing returns dependent on the amount of illegal immigrants actually in the city and the number of federal agents present. Add on the current volatile circumstances, I hardly think this is the most efficient strategy if your goal is to maximize deportations. I would expect any good defense to actually address the part that Minneapolis is singled out compared to the other cities, which was the main point of the comment you initially replied to.

Does it matter to this conversation that deportations in the abstract is popular? The whole point is how they are being done. If the administration maintains their current tactics and ICE continues to shoot a US citizen every couple of weeks, would you say it would improve their electoral chances or lessen them?

There are no infinite amount of federal agents, but it is possible that surging to one city for a few months, then another city, and so on might be the best strategy. Or by refusing to back down in Minnesota, the feds are showing the other sanctuary cities that resistance is futile. Minneapolis is a good starter city - medium size, possibly fewer organized international gangs, a good place to develop new tactics.

ICE will not continue to shoot a US Citizen every few weeks because either the states will capitulate and the peace will be kept or the states will not capitulate and the Federal government will step in even more until the peace is kept. As far as electoral chances, what is the point of electing more GOP if they don't enforce immigration laws? This is the biggest issue they ran on.

If the shooting of Charlie Kirk is this generation's Charles Sumner, Minneapolis is turning into this generation's Kansas territory.

If I had a dime for every time affluent white Democrats tried to kick-off a Civil War over whether they should be allowed to exploit a racial underclass I would have two dimes. Which isn't a lot but it's weird that it happened twice.

Oh come on. Why is Minneapolis now become the center of ICE operations? The whole thing is getting so heated because everything was done in bad faith from the beginning. I really don't think ICE on the corners in Minnesota is the result of a sober cost benefit analysis of how to deport the most illegals. It was designed to provoke tensions and it did. People don't like it when armed outsiders show up in their home and end up shooting. （justifiably or not) locals. Renee good was a lot closer to the average resident of Minneapolis then an ICE agent is. This kind of nakedly tribal provocation was always going to lead to bad blood.

It's a standard badguy move to use resistance to force to justify further force with no actual reason for the initial force. It's also a standard braindead-institutional move to stay the course, grip the nettle firmly, the boldest measures are the safest, et cetera. I err towards incompetence.

They're there because of something to do with Somalis, who are almost all here legally.

The specter of AntiFa hangs heavy in the minds of conservatives; maybe there's a desire to re-litigate the last war and anti-ICE protesters can be called AntiFa with some squinting.

I don't get the antifa denialism that some people have. The group has flags, posters, uniforms, websites, safehouses etc. It's extremely easy to find photos of all of these things on the internet. Yet there's a constant group of people who continue to say that antifa isn't a thing.

The antifa of right-wing paranoia is some sort of well-organized shadowy terrorist group with coherent plans. The antifa that actually exists is a loosely-federated movement with no true leadership or strategy, whose "members" include people with very disparate beliefs and abilities - including a substantial, though not overwhelming, percentage of posers whose idea of praxis is stealing traffic cones. The problem isn't that there's no flags, posters, uniforms etc. - it's that any idiot can and does create an antifa website or leave antifa posters or cosplay as antifa with no oversight or endorsement by anyone else already using the name.

(Of course, this doesn't necessarily make them harmless - you could phrase the comparison as "right-wingers think Antifa is like ISIS, whereas in fact Antifa is more like Jihadis in general", after all. But it does at the very least render "there were antifa members at such-and-such protests" a kind of meaningless statement. Even if there were people who like to think of themselves as antifa members at that protest, it does little to prove that there's some shadowy men in a bunker pulling the strings of all protests at which such people are found. It just proves that left-wing protests attract a fringe of the kind of edgelords who are attracted to the antifa memeplex. You don't say.)

"right-wingers think Antifa is like ISIS, whereas in fact Antifa is more like Jihadis in general"

While this seems very true, it is even messier. At least international Jihadi terrorists roughly agree on the acceptable means (killing infidels in countries which mess with Muslim countries) and broad ideological world view, even if they differ on concrete strategy and priorities.

Within the left, you would be hard-pressed to find two people who agree on the political theory. Some are anarchists, communists, others are likely more moderate. And SJ did not make that any simpler.

Basically, anyone who subscribes to "fascism should be violently resisted where required" can adopt the label Antifa. (Indeed, I myself subscribe to that, though I do not consider myself Antifa. I just do not see any fascism which could be effectively neutered by me violently resisting anyone.)

The devil is in the details. What counts as fascism, now that Hitler and Mussolini are dead? Paleoconservatives? MAGA? Nethanyahu? Putin? Any Western capitalist society? Neo-Nazis?

And what violence is required? Smashing the state to bring about a communist utopia or stop the colonial exploitation? Beating up a few Neo-Nazis? Celebrating the traditional riots on the first of May in Kreuzberg? Spraying ACAB on a cop car, or a wall?

A lot of it is armchair activism. Certainly subject to the usual signaling spirals. You don't convince anyone that you are the hot shit by being a moderate on the internet. There is probably three to five OOMs more people willing to endorse deadly violence in memes and comments than there people willing to even commit property damage personally. Still, it can give the odd homicidal member the impression that the community endorses their violence. Which it does, verbally, just not by revealed preference.

The other group identity one might liken Antifa to is Anonymous. Both are very much grass root things. There is no Antifa pope who consecrates or excommunicates bishops (who then consecrate priests (who then baptize believers into Antifa)).

Exploit some shitty website, post about it on 4chan using the Anonymous logo: congratulations, you are now Anonymous. Buy a button with the red and black flag, go to a protest wearing a black hoodie, or commit some petty property crime and upload a picture on indymedia (or whatever kids use this century): congratulations, you are now Antifa.

It is more a category than a group, really.

"right-wingers think Antifa is like ISIS, whereas in fact Antifa is more like Jihadis in general"

This is a great analogy. It always really irritates me to see left-wingers engage in their standard disingenuous rhetoric to run interference for Antifa, only for right-wingers to completely fumble the argument by misunderstanding the nature of the problem.

It's a still a thing. I'm just comparing its presence now to 2020 and not seeing much. They been subsumed by generic normie protesting and now I only hear about them as a boogeyman from boomers.

I thought the fiction was that they exist, but they're the good guys, it says it right there in the name.

Yet there's a constant group of people who continue to say that antifa isn't a thing.

They're supporters.

ICE is in Minneapolis for the same reason federal troops were deployed to Arkansas and Alabama back when segregation was the hot-button issue of the day.

The City and State Leadership have openly broadcast their intent to not only not enforce but actively defy federal immigration law, and this is happening in the context of what appears to be rampant fraud and abuse of federal programs.

In short, the feds don't need to enforce the law on states that are already cooperating.

ICE is in Minneapolis for the same reason federal troops were deployed to Arkansas and Alabama back when segregation was the hot-button issue of the day.

I basically agree with this. For the system to work, it needs to be made clear that rioting and obstructionism won't have the desired results.

The difference is that Arkansas and Alabama were two of the more adamant segregationist states. Minnesota is not exactly a hotbed of illegal immigration.

That's not a difference, it is a similarity. Minnesota and New York are two of the more adamant "sanctuary" states and that's why ICE's attention is on them and not states like Texas.

As I keep saying, the Feds don't need to enforce compliance on states that are already cooperating.

Why was Little Rock the center of 101st Airborne operations?

Other places cooperate, or at least dont display this level of constant obstruction and intransigence.

everything was done in bad faith from the beginning.

How? Even if you think this is political ping-pong, it's completely par for the course.

"At 9:05 AM CT, as DHS law enforcement officers were conducting a targeted operation in Minneapolis against an illegal alien wanted for violent assault, an individual approached US Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun, seen here.

The officers attempted to disarm the suspect but the armed suspect violently resisted. More details on the armed struggle are forthcoming.

Fearing for his life and the lives and safety of fellow officers, an agent fired defensive shots. Medics on scene immediately delivered medical aid to the subject but was pronounced dead at the scene.

The suspect also had 2 magazines and no ID—this looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.

About 200 rioters arrived at the scene and began to obstruct and assault law enforcement on the scene, crowd control measures were deployed for the safety of the public and law enforcement.

This situation is evolving, and more information is forthcoming."

What a strange statement. What does, "approached US Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun," mean? I can't imagine the guy had the gun in his hand when he approached. If he did, that would be extremely relevant context that I would expect to be included. What did this guy actually do to get arrested? Why was disarming him warrented? What caused the officers to decide to shoot?

Indeed a strange statement. I'm seeing people on social media claim that ICE had already disarmed the victim, holster and all, prior to the shooting, and I'm also seeing people claim that he was pulling his gun and the first few gunshots were from him, which lead to his death. As far as I'm aware there's no good evidence for either of these interpretations. But judging by the fact the government is merely claiming that "he had a weapon", rather than "he fired at the officers", I'm inclined to believe it's a bad shoot and this is damage control.

EDIT: With more evidence coming out it looks like they DID disarm the guy before shooting.

What a strange statement.

It's fairly standard legalese. Depositions often read like this because the point is to state only that which can be demonstrated in court.

  • Questioner: What color is that house?
  • Deposee: This side of the house appears to be light brown.

It's also why they hedge in the latter part with bits like "this looks like" and "Fearing for his life and the lives and safety of fellow officers".

That sounds like dialogue straight out of Stranger in a Strange Land, the whole "Fair Witness" bit.

It basically is.

The "Fair Witness" bit from Stranger in a Strange Land is often used as a training example when teaching students how to give and take depositions.

Damage control it looks like.

The context of the Goode shooting after the fact made it reasonable - I’m gonna hold my tongue for a few days.

For some reason my favorite Libertarian podcast The Reason Roundtable still talk about the Goode shooting as if it wasn’t at all reasonable - so I’m not sure anything will have any meaning with this shooting either.

But it LOOKS egregious.

yeah I don't feel any reason to have an opinion on this for 4 days. Seems like the MN Governor disagrees.

Tim Walz is a giant douche. He is also preventing any climb down even if he wanted it

I mean, it's a shooting by federal agents in his state. Guy is supposed to have some sort of early opinion on it, one way or another.

Once again, this is not X and we would prefer people actually wait until they have something substantive to say about breaking news rather than rushing to be the first to start a thread about it.

It seems obvious that there is going to be discussion about it and also we won't know the substantive truth for 48-72 hours if not longer, isn't linking the initial reporting and videos sufficient to start discussion?

Yes, there is going to be discussion about it, and you wanted to be FIRST!!!!

It's not a race. You don't have to wait until there is "substantive truth" but you should wait until you have something more to post than a link. Yes, that means someone else might start a thread before you.

I don't understand the point of this rule. It is less a comment and more of a sign saying "[Talk about the recent Minneapolis shooting here]", what is the harm in that? We could just put into Chatgpt "Generate 200 words of filler text that will make Amadan happy that really says nothing about the recent Minneapolis shooting". I would get it if he had some low effort take and posted the link with his only comment being "Looks like another murder by the fascist death squads" but I don't really consider this different from a megathread. If you're starting a megathread, does the post body need to be substantive? No, it is more or less the same just "Talk about the recent Minneapolis shooting here"

This rule isn't new and it's not "my" rule. We don't want low-effort posts. That's not an invitation to violate the spirit of the rule while obeying the letter- the point is not whether you can generate 200 words by yourself or with ChatGPT. The point is we are not a news aggregator, we are not reddit, and taking a little while to reflect on whatever big happening is happening before posting about it would improve the quality of discussion.

I don't care about being first as should be obviously evidenced by my extremely small number of threads started. I wanted to see thoughts on this that weren't reddit hivemind, there was no thread, I started a thread.

I promise you I'm not counting up votes or stats on themotte.org as a meaningful part of my life haha

I wanted to see thoughts on this

This is also exactly why the rule exists. Everyone wants high quality discussion on their particular issue. But that takes effort by other people. So we gate that behind having to put in some effort yourself.

You could at least be useful and edit your top comment with new information or things coming in.

I mean honestly I think we should just have a megathread on this. I don't see discussion going away

I think a good start would have been an analysis of the video, plus Twitter link because I have to enable so much Javascript to watch a newsweek article video, plus relevant facts, plus the reaction from social media/leftists, plus an analogy to a past incident (he had a gun and yet this is going to be rioted over, my guess is that it's Jacob Blake shooting part 2). I understand the impulse, comments here are great. But you have to play by the rules.

Fair enough. Slap on wrist accepted

The Reddit Department of Justice has already determined it to be murder. I have to admit that the optics again do not look good, but there was a gunshot during the struggle that initiated the rest of the shooting. DHS has claimed the guy was armed with a handgun and "two magazines".

DHS has claimed the guy was armed with a handgun and "two magazines".

Time and Newsweek?

Playboy and Car and Driver.

Before the man was shot, he yelled "I buy it for the articles!" This obviously enraged the ICE officers.

The person standing at the back of the current angle in the Red Jacket seems to be filming and that'll likely give a ton of clarity to the proceedings

Red jacket woman on the far side seems to be filming, her clip'll likely provide a lot more clarity.

Does seem crazy that 5 or so guys couldn't better-restrain the perp, though if he did indeed pull a gun as people are claiming then it probably justifies the shoot.

Here's her clip: https://files.catbox.moe/sp296e.mp4

edit: the same video that @4doorsmorewhores linked

Seems like there were two perps. But after watching both angles I really can't tell a damn thing about the shooting.

Here's the other angle, it seems much more egregious

https://xcancel.com/anythingelsegg/status/2015130851764318288

It definitely seems a lot less defensible than Good did from the footage - having watched both angles of this shooting, I'm going to say that unless footage comes out of the arrestee drawing/firing a weapon, this was an awful shoot. From the footage, it isn't possible to tell if he drew a weapon; to my eyes, he seems unarmed in both (but to be fair, I also can't see which officer shot him).

The only reason I'm putting this caveat in place at all is due to around ~1:00 in the video; from what I can tell, there is a gunshot, all agents recoil, then two more gunshots and the arrestee drops. If the first gunshot was from the arrestee, that provides an adequate excuse for the officer(s) to shoot him in self defense.

Struggling with the cops while armed is a terrible idea. If I struggled with the cops while armed and was shot (while not agitating for a popular cause with media backing) , I wouldn't expect anyone to give a damn.

The proper thing to do if you are looking to obstruct police officers while exercising your second amendment right is to peacefully and respectfully submit to arrest. Guns make people jumpy, even if they shouldn't be, even if it's a mistake, you're still dead.

If the decedent first shot at LEO, then that isn’t “an adequate excuse” but fully justified.

He didn't, though; his gun is taken from him by the gray-jacketed agent just before the first shot is fired, I believe by the agent roughly center of frame in the light-colored jacket.

I don’t know how you can tell that. Looks like trying to see a fumble in a scrum.

People on X and other forums zoomed in on video from the first side e.g. so you can see the gray-jacketed agent talking the gun. In the second video from the reverse angle you can identify that agent and while you can't see what he's doing, you can match it up with the first video and figure out he's got the dead guy's gun when the agent in the middle draws and fires.

Sorry, yes, agreed.

Good stuff. Honestly hope there is body cam footage. Would help a lot.

"This definitely seems a lot less defensible, besides the part that might make it far more defensible, which I can't tell one way from the other in the video" is certainly a way to form an conclusion.

I mean, given that I was all over the Good thread defending the shoot, I wanted to at least leave my impression of this one. I can't see if there was a weapon on the arrestee, but it doesn't appear so from my viewing. If evidence comes out that shows a weapon, I've pre-committed to changing my mind, but as it is now, I think the ICE officers were wrong.

Maybe a better way of phrasing it would be something like this:

  1. Shooting unarmed people who do not pose an imminent threat is bad.
  2. ICE claims that this person posed an imminent threat.
  3. Video evidence is unclear at best, leaning towards "does not have a weapon". Audio evidence indicates that a shot was fired before the arrestee was shot, but the origin is unclear.
  4. As such, currently my opinion is "ICE fucked up big time".

Given that I attempted to analyze the evidence presented and form an opinion of it based on the videos, I find your statement kind of rude; I tried to clearly indicate what I could definitively tell and what I could not, so people could understand where my opinion came from and understand where I was uncertain, and what would change my mind on it. I suppose next time I should just say "lol ICE obviously evil" and leave it at that.

Video evidence is unclear at best, leaning towards "does not have a weapon". Audio evidence indicates that a shot was fired before the arrestee was shot, but the origin is unclear. As such, currently my opinion is "ICE fucked up big time".

And basing your judgement on unclear video evidence, with potentially contradictory evidence, when you yourself note the gaps, it is what you are receiving a raised eyebrow for.

Given that I attempted to analyze the evidence presented and form an opinion of it based on the videos, I find your statement kind of rude;

And I find ignoring the conclusions of one's own analysis, such as how the cited evidence does not support a conclusion is but carrying on as if it did, also rude. Rude towards the persons who will be accused of murder regardless of what clearer evidence might show, but also rude towards other readers trying to come to conclusions.

Maybe we should form a rude club.

I suppose next time I should just say "lol ICE obviously evil" and leave it at that.

If you want, but that too would be rude.

Well, yes, what else can one do? "Here's my impressions from the video, here's an important question it leaves unanswered, here's the sort of evidence that would change my mind" is perfectly reasonable and I have no idea why you seem determined to describe it so uncharitably. It's more thoughtfulness than you'll see from the vast majority of people on social media.

Well, yes, what else can one do?

Refrain from judgement until you have sufficient information to reach a sound conclusion. If you can identify key variables that would radically change your conclusion, start there.

This is all the more important in an information environment known to be contested by people who want to shape your first impression and conclusions regardless of ultimate accuracy.

"Here's my impressions from the video, here's an important question it leaves unanswered, here's the sort of evidence that would change my mind" is perfectly reasonable and I have no idea why you seem determined to describe it so uncharitably.

Because the 'key evidence' in question isn't evidence to change a mind, but to justify the conclusion one way or another in the first place.

There is a term for making a conclusion before you have the evidence for it, and it is 'assuming the conclusion.' This is a bad practice because it triggers fallacies and psychological biases that lead people to interpret later information in ways that confirm the first judgement..

It's more thoughtfulness than you'll see from the vast majority of people on social media.

That is a bar low enough to trip over.

A few things

a) I didn't draw a conclusion, I posted a better snippet and compared it to the other shooting (Which legally speaking, seems pretty cut and dry like the Kyle Rittenhouse self defense situation).

b) "Don't talk about it until you have sufficient information to reach a conclusion" at best thought-terminating and at worst bad faith. You could indefinitely not talk about anything you choose forever, I'm not going to listen to people who tell me to not to think about and discuss things.

c) New information could come to light 5 or 10 (or 500) years from now, take the recent example we found out of the Chinese officer who refused to march on the Tiananmen protestors in the 1980s. I'll discuss with what current information I have and continue to update it as I get more information.

recent example we found out of the Chinese officer who refused to march on the Tiananmen protestors in the 1980s

Wait what recent examples?

I’m pretty sure it was well known that there were high ranking members of the military who were disapproving of the crackdown, from a letter co-signed by multiple generals to Xu Qinxian refusing to march into Beijing, or Xu Feng, or He Yanran etc.

b) "Don't talk about it until you have sufficient information to reach a conclusion" at best thought-terminating and at worst bad faith. You could indefinitely not talk about anything you choose forever, I'm not going to listen to people who tell me to not to think about and discuss things.

Fortunately I am not telling you to not think about or discuss things.

Your paraphrase is this-

"Don't talk about it until you have sufficient information to reach a conclusion"

And my position is this-

Refrain from judgement until you have sufficient information to reach a sound conclusion.

Do you recognize that the the later is not only not the former, but is itself a justification to talk and seek information to reach a sound conclusion?

c) New information could come to light 5 or 10 (or 500) years from now, take the recent example we found out of the Chinese officer who refused to march on the Tiananmen protestors in the 1980s. I'll discuss with what current information I have and continue to update it as I get more information.

Discussion was not what was being discouraged.

Those seem like valid observations to me.

Let's see Paul Allen's conclusion.

You can literally see the agent draw his gun and shoot the guy in the back. I'm not sure what part of this you think is defensible.

Edit: @ minute 1:00 you can see the agent in the middle reach and pull his gun from his holster. The victim appears to be kneeling resisting arrest with multiple agents holding him down. At minute 1:01 that agent points his gun at the victim, and then it is blocked from view by another agent, milliseconds later you hear shots. The victim is still on his knees, it looks like one hand is supporting himself on the ground. His other hand is by his side.

I'm not sure what part of this you think is defensible.

The question isn't my thought, but Zephyr's thought- which notes major gaps in the evidence ('it isn't possible to tell if he drew a weapon,' the 1:00 mark which is compatible with a defensible shoot) that undercuts its value as evidence to form an opinion off of.

Do you disagree with the principle that if evidence doesn't actually support or deny a conclusion, it should not be used to support or deny a conclusion?

I have a really hard time with considering shooting a man being restrained, kneeling, in the back regardless of evidence of having a gun or not, to be a good, defensive shoot. I expect competence from Agents of the State, and this is not it. I think much like a felony murder, an agent of the state acting in such a way that is negligent, and leads to the death of someone should be charged with manslaughter.

I have a really hard time with considering shooting a man being restrained, kneeling, in the back regardless of evidence of having a gun or not, to be a good, defensive shoot.

Is your difficulty in considering potential factors supposed to invalidate the relevance of factors you did not consider but which may apply to the validity of the shoot?

I expect competence from Agents of the State, and this is not it.

Are you competent enough in the particulars of Agents of the State to judge competence?

I think much like a felony murder, an agent of the state acting in such a way that is negligent, and leads to the death of someone should be charged with manslaughter.

Are you any more competent in judging manslaughter than you are in judging competence?

More comments

If the decedent shot first, then shooting him in the back is very reasonable since there were agents in all directions. Lethal force need not be solely for protection of yourself but also for others.

Here are some stills

/images/17692879616745007.webp

/images/1769287962086671.webp

You can’t see the decedent’s arms or hands so you can’t tell what the decedent was doing.

It doesn’t mean the LEO had a justification but it also doesn’t mean they didn’t. It does mean that based on the current evidence it is indeterminate and we ought to wait for more evidence to emerge.

More comments

I'm sure why this is relevant it's almost a non-sequitor, look at that video and tell me who had a gun drawn. I cannot see the victim with the gun but i can see the ice agent draw his and then fire the first shot.

I mean the fact that the other ICE agents didn't seem to react with shock and 'dude what the fuck did you do' indicates that some justification was present for the shooting- we have plenty of evidence that they interpret use of force rules more broadly than the cops in general, and very little that they operate random death squads.

More comments

That still seems impossible to tell if he drew a weapon or not. It seems like all the agents back off prior to a first shot suggesting something but really impossible to be definitive. Hopefully there is a body cam.

This one seems like a bad shoot but I really can't tell anything. I'm not even sure I know who shot first. I see someone draw their gun, but their arm seems weirdly angled for them to be firing in the deceased's direction. When I watched the video from the other angle I thought maybe someone was shooting from within the building behind them.

I'm someone who generally sides with police and thought Babbitt and Good were both good shoots. It's a harder sell when you have several men on top of the deceased. If they saw a gun, the simpler thing would be for one of the men on top of him to restrain his hands or to grab it themselves. Shooting him while there were still people holding onto him is reckless unless there was really imminent danger we don't see on the cameras.

I watched the whole video.

Self-linking may be gauche, but what I wrote about the Renee Good video seems bang on for this as well.

The videographer gives us a couple dozen "what the fuck"s and "oh my god"s. After the gnashing of teeth, we get the performative righteousness slogan; "You're killing US!"

Us? Us?

Lady, did you you just get shot? Or did the dead guy who got shot get shot?

The "us" is the tribe, the team, the cause. The videographer gets to self-identify as an innocent victim but also gets to go on living. She will receive accolades and tribute from the other members of the tribe for her volume and repetitive efforts.

The videographer gives us a couple dozen "what the fuck"s and "oh my god"s. After the gnashing of teeth, we get the performative righteousness slogan; "You're killing US!"

Reminds me of Lebron James's "We’re literally hunted EVERYDAY/EVERYTIME we step foot outside the comfort of our homes."

Us? Us?

Lady, did you you just get shot? Or did the dead guy who got shot get shot?

The "us" is the tribe, the team, the cause.

This would be consistent with progressives having a stronger sense of asabiyyah than conservatives, akin to how blacks like James have a stronger sense of ethnonarcissism than other racial groups (especially whites, who don't appear to exhibit any).

The videographer gets to self-identify as an innocent victim but also gets to go on living. She will receive accolades and tribute from the other members of the tribe for her volume and repetitive efforts.

She is now a Stunning and Brave survivor who now has to courageously fight the Trauma of this event for the rest of her life. Women have always been the primary victims of men getting shot.

There's pics of the supposed gun... but it's a P320, which ICE agents have carried (though I believe current issue is a Glock)

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