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Recently I've had a related observation while browsing a different website, which has an amount of bots and shills. But interestingly people seem to really despise it if you call a bot a bot, or a shill a shill. They might defend some obvious AI slop by saying "it's not a crime to write well" or "many people use em-dashes legitimately" or even just call you an idiot with no further explanation. All humanly written posts, all defending an obvious bot with vigor. I saw a similar thing on a local Facebook group, where an obvious paid shill posted a wall of text clearly written by ChatGPT, yet everybody just ate it up. It seems like when you bring up concerns, you end up as the bad guy for disturbing the peace, while the bot is the good guy because it's following the right conventions.
I remember a previous discussion about non-autistic vs autistic communication, where autistic communication is centered around an exchange of facts, while the core of non-autistic communication is emotional signalling. It seems that that this phenomenon extends to bad actors insofar as they can provide the right emotional cues to be accepted. Or at least people feel that it's not a disqualifying factor from engaging at face value. Meanwhile I know a shill is paid to say anything necessary in order to spread his message, and a bot is just a program with no emotions or sense of true or false.
But I think this touches on the idea of arguments as soldiers. To many people, it likely doesn't matter what the facts are, just the emotional message that they encode. And while debunkings exist, the practice they just act as another soldier from the other side knocking on the door.
Looping back into current events, it seems like there's little incentive for the administration not to bend the truth. The enemy was already deploying their rapid response arguments with zero regard for the truth, saying that a boneheaded ice agent just executed an innocent bystander on the street in cold blood. What good does it do to say "The agent made a split second judgement thinking he was grabbing a gun, which turned out to be the wrong call" (the truth) versus "an armed and violent individual resisted arrest and was shot while police were trying to disarm him" (not technically a lie). Twitter autists might try to go over the frame by frame, but for everyone else they're gonna live the lie.
It feels like you're just carrying water for the Trump admin's foolishness. "The outgroup is going to behave bad, so we need to behave just as bad!"
Or the admin could, you know, just not do inflammatory things when stuff like this happens? Do the politician-speak of "this was a terrible tragedy", imply it was an "accident" from split-second judgement, then leave the sectarian shitposting to people like Catturd who were going to do it anyways. Biden mostly did this with a few exceptions that I can think of.
Then again, the even smarter thing would be for them to call off this whole punitive ICE expedition. Minnesota has a problem with Somali fraud, and the US as a whole has a problem with illegal immigrants, but this expedition is not an effective way to address either. It exists mostly to goose up R's on social media, and because Trump personally dislikes people like Walz and Ilhan Omar. In terms of actual effects, its end effect will be to incinerate the anti-immigration political capital built up from Biden's open borders years with remarkable efficiency.
In for a penny in for a pound, you can’t back down now or leftists internalize that they have a veto over Trump policies. They can make anything “not an effective way” by protesting loudly enough.
I remember when learning Russian military ideology was the popular thing to do. A key Russian doctrine was escalate to deescalate. Which is basically where the Trump admin is right now.
You could choose to deescalate though you’ve earned legitimacy to act thru elections. Thus giving up a monopoly on violence and making the price to stop anything you want to do being the mild sum of 2 leftist. Or you can not sacrifice your political power and double or triple down. I don’t think we are anywhere close to a point where they could back down.
I think at this point it’s obvious these encounters are being engineered by leftist groups. Probably with some local government support. For whatever reasons both sides have decided this is where they will battle. The left hoping to sink Trump with a version of his Vietnam. If he wins here then he will gain a lot of power and have a demoralized opponent.
The last killing I believe is obviously a suicide by ICE. He doesn’t look like a guy who’s too dumb to not understand what happens when you’re armed and start fighting cops. Perhaps not quite a suicide but if his chosen encounter escalated he was a willing martyr.
People's stupidity is one of the few things we don't know the limits of. You might have internalized the knowledge that bringing a gun to a protest makes sense only if you are willing and ready to use it, and if you want this to be a peaceful protest, then you open carry and never escalate.
This guy didn't. Maybe he really wanted to take one for the team. But my take is that he simply was this clueless.
He’s an ICU nurse and looks basically semi-normalish white guy. At some point you have to assume a person has agency and semi-rationality.
1.Taking a full-loaded gun with extra mags 2. Getting into fisticuffs with ICE 3. 2 weeks after ICE shot a chick
99% of males who can hold down a professional career would view this behavior as strongly correlated with getting shot. It’s also possible according to the video that he had some plan of shooting a bunch of ICE guys as he appears to reach for his gun after he had be unarmed.
I am semi-surprised Right-Wing media hasn’t tried the suicide by ICE narrative because this clearly looks like suicide by ICE. It’s not going to be 100% of the time but solidly in the 2-10% chance something happens and you get shot.
Are you not an American? It's a pretty basic tradition for American gun owners to bring weapons with them to protests and it's extremely uncommon for them to get executed for it. He wasn't even egregious about it, for example here is some of the protests during COVID.
There's this image of the "Bundy sniper" who was even pointing the rifle directly at federal agents from a vantage point like a sniper, he still went home without trouble.
If you bring a gun to a protest in the US you do not expect to be killed for it because we have the 2nd amendment.
This is clearly a current debate going on whether GOP is light on 2nd Amendments so I don’t understand the “are you American question”. If Trump cited him being armed.
The 2nd Amendment is your right to have arms. It is not a right to use arms. In this situation Pretti chose be violent with LEO while have deadly escalation 1s away. And everything I am seeing recommends that gun owners de-escalate situations in physical confrontations especially with LEO. They are specifically citing Kyle Rittenhouse who when interacting with LEO clearly showed his hands.
Everything I’m seeing all firearm training teaches you to be extra vigilante when carry since misinterpretations turn into good shoots very quickly
Also do NOT make arguments I did not make. I did not say you would get shot at a protect while carrying. I said if you do a violent act like fighting with police while carrying you are at a high risk of being shot. You still need commit a crime which Pretti did and the officers will still try to arrest you without killing you which ICE tried to in this instance. Until he also had a cheap gun the fires on its own making ICE thinking he was firing on them.
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