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Notes -
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.
EDIT: I've been asked to add some relevant points, I'll say: this comment has links to various angles: https://www.themotte.org/post/3493/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/405295?context=8#context This comment mentions the "Sig misfire" angle that I've seen a bit: https://www.themotte.org/post/3493/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/405451?context=8#context
Walz has activatedthe national guard: https://x.com/MnDPS_DPS/status/2012614253090619619 The NBA postponed the Minnesota/Golden State game tonight.
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.
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.
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.
I don't know, but the mainstream media, the alternative media, and social media are not helping much. We are living through years and years of events that act as scissor statements and videos that get analyzed like the Zapruder film, argued endlessly about online even if the events that they capture are statistically quite rare. When Charlie Kirk was killed I pointed out that statistically speaking, assassinations are extremely rare in the US given how angry people are about politics and how many guns are in private hands. But many right-wingers in media made it seem like the killing meant that the cold civil war had gone fully hot and that it was time to prepare to deliver retribution.
Now with these ICE-perpetrated killings, something similar is happening. I am not a fan of what ICE is doing, but to get a clear picture it's probably a good idea to take into account statistics and try to figure out how frequent ICE killing someone is as a fraction of the total number of interactions between ICE and other people. Then one could compare it to how other law enforcement agencies measure up in similar situations or compare it to an ideal but realistic model of how high quality law enforcement would behave - and thus try to figure out whether ICE really are the crude violent bumpkins that their opponents often depict them as. But on social media, which after all rewards engagement more than anything else, too often the discussion is more like "this means fascism has come to America". Meanwhile some people on the other side aren't helping by celebrating the shootings, just as was also the case with the killing of Charlie Kirk.
Almost needless to say, consistent principles other than "my side should win" are rare and both sides flip-flop in their opinions of what the boundaries of proper interactions between law enforcement and "civilians" should be depending on which side currently is in charge of the law enforcement.
By this reasoning, "the people voted for" doesn't matter for any issue and any president, since the number of voters for everyone is pretty much always goinbg to be below 50%.
I smell an isolated demand for rigor here. This is not the standard used where Democrats are involved.
Obvious way to understand this, did Biden winning in 2020 mean >50% of the public supported student loan forgiveness?
There's tons of different reasons why people would have voted for Trump (or not voted at all). From standard Republican reasons like Abortion, 2nd amendment rights, or against price controls (even if ironically, Trump has come out in support of those). Or maybe they just think Biden was responsible for inflation and thought Trump would bring prices down to 2019 levels. Remember "Biden high prices, Trump low prices" signs?
Even people who voted for immigration reasons don't necessarily back things like revoking legal immigrants status or having ICE act like thugs beating people up and shooting them.
Mistaking an electoral victory as a full permission slip to do whatever you want is a major part of what sank the Dems. Why embrace the same delusions they did?
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I am not saying that people voting for Trump doesn't matter. What I am doing is giving more precise figures. I don't recall having ever claimed that 1/3 of eligible voters voting for a Democrat meant that one of the Democrats' favorite policy stances was supported by half of the country.
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