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Notes -
Squeeze this in before the thread goes away. More as a way that I can refer to my own thoughts in the future.
I think this is a worse shooting than Renee Good. This is reflected by several people on X, with strong 2A people like James Reeves, Kostas Moros, Fenix, and Garand Thumb [1][2] is calling out stupid takes from the pro-ICE side of things.
A common critique of Kyle Rittenhouse - even among those who felt he should be acquitted - was that it was stupid for him to be there. I fully support Kyle’s right to open carry and fully support Alex Pretti to conceal carry. “Victim blaming” is a common talking point. What did you expect wearing that outfit down a dark alley? I still think the rapist should be executed, but you did a dumb thing with a known outcome. Does that make you less sympathetic? Actually, it does.
The Right feels like they’ve been losing an existential battle with the left for decades. There are many facets to this, but even wins seem like losses. Reagan gives amnesty, the Bushes are globalists, what would McCain and Romney (called right-wing extremists) have done? So here’s Trump, put that in your pipe and smoke it. And now you dare invoke Ruby Ridge and Waco, imploring the Right - people you hate, people who one of your presidential candidates talk about nuking to stand up for you? Save us!
A sentiment from Greg Price that a right-wing friend sent me. This resonates with me quite a bit, especially since I subscribe to the conspiracy theory that at the base of all this are Marxists and Communists undermining society like they have for almost a century now. And I think Marxists and Communists are evil, as evil as Nazis, but our society gives Marxists and Communists tenure at universities even after they perform terrorist acts. It’s really unfair! Life’s unfair
I think of violence being a knob for the left and a switch for the right. The right has always been pretty comfortable that if you fight police, you’re not a sympathetic homicide. If you mess with the bull, you get the horns. The sharp end of state violence is deadly sharp, and when you wrestle with an unsheathed knife, you’re going to get cut. Not that the right is amazing at it, but as was pointed out by a poster here, Kyle was un-humanly good in his situation.
Watch a professional 1st amendment auditor’s interaction. The transition from “FUCK YOU AM I BEING DETAINED!”
“Yes”
And then - relatively - calmly let themselves get arrested.
I’ve heard “Concealed carry comes with the burden to lose every argument and to walk away” as “Fudd Lore”. The reason it’s Fudd Lore is to try and prevent idiots like Alex Pretti from getting into trouble. Because while “Always lose every argument” is not taught in all concealed carry courses, there are several things that I expect are.
Try really, really, really… really hard to avoid getting in a wrestling match while carrying.
Conduct yourself very carefully when interacting with law enforcement while carrying.
Something that is not said is: “Don’t get in a wrestling match with law enforcement while concealed carrying.” Why is this not taught? Because only a complete idiot would get in a confrontation with police while carrying, because that’s a surefire way to end up dead. Really should be included in that “Dumb Ways To Die” add campaign.
But this is why I’ve been skeptical of Trump’s ability to pull off millions of deportations. Even if ICE was practically perfect, the media would come up with some way to tell a sad story. There’s little incentive to play nice, so again shove this in your pipe and smoke it. This is bad for ICE and the administration. Kind of a minor thing but evidence that we’ve got idiots in charge why are all these ICE guys sliding around all over the place? Go buy some Yaktrax.
I keep getting sent “leaks” from my right-wing friends showing how organized this is. Old news, NPR did a ride-along months ago. Yes, the left has people working full-time to make these interactions as tense as possible, and ICE should be doing the same. The normies got restless when a fentanyl addict died while being detained, how do you think they’ll feel when it’s a mother and a nurse?
From my personal philosophy I hate this. Put the area under wide-area persistent surveillance. Set up your own situations when the protestors commit obvious felonies against ICE and make an example of them. Send in an FBI SWAT team with all their ducks in a row, and send them in hard.
I was debating whether I should move this to the new thread for visibility, but I just saw your "More as a way that I can refer to my own thought sin the future." edit and I'll respect that.
I tend to sympathize with the position the right takes here, though it does get tricky: the physics of violent threats are a continuum, yet we have to break that continuity somewhere because the game theory of responses to violence demands discrete Schelling points.
I'll double down on your 2010s sci-fi-writer citation with a 1980s sci-fi-writer citation:
Niven uses as an example the events that Wikipedia call the 1968 Democratic National Convention protests, though Google wants to autocomplete "1968 dnc" with "riots" ... and yet that's a surprisingly tame example, in hindsight? Hundreds of injuries, on both sides, but only one death, of someone who shot at the cops first? Impressive trigger discipline, despite widespread reports and video of the Chicago cops showing ... less discipline ... with clubs and gas and mace. If they were operating on a "switch" mentality, it seems it was a ternary rather than a binary switch, and they managed to hold it to that middle position.
And I don't see that the knob-vs-binary-switch distinction accurately describes the left-vs-right side of the conflict this time. Calling the officers in Minnesota "the right": are they really Switch people?
One of my most-upvoted comments on TheMotte (+34,-2) discusses the problems you get into when knob mentality meets switch mentality: when someone suddenly knocks you to the ground, thinking that they've just turned up that knob a bit, a Switch might reasonably decide that such a sudden and improbably-but-possibly-lethal attack means a switch has been flipped from "non-lethal" to "lethal".
In the latest videos of Pretti I've seen, his last intelligible words before the incident seem to be "do not push them into traffic!", and the officers only oblige in the sense that shortly afterward we see the officers suddenly shoving a woman into the curb instead of the street. Even if we presume that she's done something criminal, is this proper arrest procedure? It seems to be literally accelerating motion rather than arresting it. Pretti should have just filmed a sloppy arrest (or even an illegal assault under the color of law, if that's what it was), not gotten literally into the middle of it while armed, but in the end he was more-than-amply punished for not thinking like a Switch while trying to defend the woman knocked to the ground. Will there also be any punishment for the offense? None of the DHS officers drew a gun until after one took (and too-ambiguously announced) Pretti's un-drawn gun, so they likewise didn't seem to believe that the violence thus far had flipped a binary switch.
Perhaps they're a bunch of Knobs too.
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