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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   33986 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026

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As I looked out my window, I saw the park across from my house. But something was wrong. There was a man sleeping in the park, by the playground fence, in the middle of winter.

I’ve been tracking the weather closely because our fridge went out and we are keeping our cold stuff in the garage. It’s a constant struggle to make sure food doesn’t get too warm or too cold. Lately the outside temperature has been getting down into the single digits at night and while the garage stays a bit warmer it has been hard to keep our food from freezing.

I knew it was under 10 degrees outside and no one can sleep on the ground in that cold. At least, not without a lot more equipment than he had on. This man didn’t even have a hat. So I worried that he might be dying.

As I got myself ready to go outside and check on him I imagined how the interaction might go. I know vagrants can be volatile, unpredictable, and dirty. I thought I would talk to him, tell him he needed to go, maybe offer to take him to a shelter in my car. I could give him my extra winter hat and one of my coats. I was loathe to invite him into my house with my wife and child but my car could be okay. I toyed with the idea of just calling 911 and not interacting with him at all. But I figured I would first observe up close and make a judgment call.

With my winter gear donned, I stepped out the door and walked to where he was laying. I spoke to him, “Hey man, it’s too cold out here. Can I take you somewhere warm?” or something like that. It was quickly apparent that my fears of him were misplaced. He was breathing and shivering slightly. His eyes were open. There was a pain in them, animal-like. Sadness without language. His fingers were curled and stiff. He was in far worse shape than I had imagined him to be.

I called 911 and moved my car closer to the park as a potential warm haven for him. The ambulance was on the way, and we live very close to the hospital so I knew it wouldn’t be long. Approaching the man again, I saw that walking would be out of the picture and to move him would require that he be physically carried. I wasn’t confident in my ability to do so. He was breathing heavily and his eyes were darting around. His limbs looked frozen and stiff.

He appeared to be of Hispanic background, about 50 years old, short with a slim build. And as the ambulance was coming in a few minutes, I decided to do what I could to keep him warm. I put my coat over him and placed my hands on his cold skin. I said whatever little prayers I know from the liturgy in Spanish - “lord have mercy” and “the father, the son, and the Holy Spirit”. I played the Lord’s Prayer in Spanish on my phone and I lay next to him, covering us both with my coat to warm his body with mine. I reverted to praying in English since my Spanish is so limited.

Within a few minutes I heard the ambulance approaching. Still laying next to him, I waved the paramedics in. My hands felt like they were freezing, being outside only 10 minutes or so in the 8 degree weather. His fingers had a grey hue to them and seemed frozen stiff.

The paramedics parked and approached with a stretcher and I gathered my coat and walked off. They didn’t say much to me. One asked me if he had spoken (“not a word”) and one said thanks for calling. The four of them easily lifted him onto the stretcher and took him away.

I didn’t know how much my interventions mattered, besides calling the ambulance. Perhaps someone else would have called the ambulance if I had not. But it’s easy to get used to vagrants sleeping on the ground in an urban area and not put the facts together that given the weather and his dress it was an emergency situation. When there is a crisis, it’s easy for everybody to assume that someone else will handle it. I felt there was a chance that had I not called 911 then the next time my family went outside we would have been greeted by a corpse.

Later, trying to make sense of the incident, I asked Grok about the details of hypothermia and found it was a somewhat less urgent situation than I imagined. The man likely had been outside for 1-2 hours and likely would have been dead in about 3 more. Grok gives a big range of 2-12 hours for death by exposure in similar situations, varying based on the size and health of the person and whether or not they had any alcohol and drugs in their system.

I don’t know anything about the man but I can guess given the circumstances he found himself in. It’s likely that he was new to town and unfamiliar with the homeless support system. He had no friends or family nearby that cared about him. It’s quite possible that he was an illegal migrant — there are quite a few in my city, and my city has declared that it will not cooperate with federal immigration enforcement efforts.

Politically, I am an immigration restrictionist and fairly onboard with MAGA. I don’t see a contradiction in saving a migrant’s life in a tragic situation, and advocating that there be fewer such tragic situations, thousands of miles from home. I am in the party that insists on following the rules, because after a complicated calculus of plusses and minuses I think they make the world a better place. Had the man been picked up by ICE and sent back to Honduras or Ecuador or wherever he came from, I don’t view that as an inhumane outcome compared to a lonely death in a strange land.

The more extreme people on the political left, the kind currently protesting ICE in Minnesota, call people like me “nazis”. Well, if I am a nazi, I am one with a soft heart.

But I’m just guessing about the man’s circumstances. Perhaps he is a legal resident with mental illness or a drug abuse problem who somehow fell through the cracks.

Grok thinks the man will make a full recovery. Probably today, he will be released from the hospital. To go where, is the question. Who will take him in? Where does he belong? Who cares for him? Will he find himself in the same situation again? A blizzard is coming tomorrow.

May the Lord have mercy on us in this deep winter.

Not gonna lie, I was happy to see that your story was one of sympathy and compassion. From the tone around here lately, I was half-expecting it to end with "I decided 'Fuck this guy, one less illegal is a good thing.'"

The more extreme people on the political left, the kind currently protesting ICE in Minnesota, call people like me “nazis”. Well, if I am a nazi, I am one with a soft heart.

I think the right and the left are increasingly unable to model one another's thinking. I come here and see people who are celebrating violence and clearly want more of it. I get disgusted, go to other places, and see people... celebrating violence and clearly want more of it. Just directed at different people. I think about a reddit (yeah yeah, I know) post I read the other day, where some woman out of the blue texts her brother basically demanding to know "where he stands" on Trump and ICE. No indication that this had been a previous topic of discussion or that he was MAGA, just suddenly she needs to know if he's aligned with her. When he replies with a sort of mealy-mouthed "It's not a black and white issue, but I love you and family over politics," etc. etc., she informs him that she's going no contact with him and his family forever, and immediately tells their mother that he's cut out of his life. He didn't even say he's a Trump supporter (though I guess one could infer it), just that he's not completely on-board with her TDS.

I recently got into an argument here where I said I know very leftist "woke" people, and they are not evil. I was piled on by Motters saying of course they are, they just haven't turned on me yet. Unsurprisingly, I have had similar arguments in left spaces. "I know conservatives/MAGAs, they aren't Nazis, they aren't evil." "Well, you can say that because they don't want to kill you." (I mean, some of y'all do, but...)

It's just... very sad. And tiresome. Thank you for still having a heart.

From the tone around here lately, I was half-expecting it to end with "I decided 'Fuck this guy, one less illegal is a good thing.'"

And they say being the resident mod bad cop brainbroke Hlynka.

The mod log looks absurd. Amadan is doing too much of the work.

From some of the responses, I am not far off.

I appreciate the compliment about my writing. For what it’s worth, I have a history of leaving right wing spaces that become too harsh. It just became too dissonant to be dating my now wife and open my group chats to see TND spelled out and applauded.

It’s an odd position to be in. I’m full-right. Deport them all, pro capital punishment, hell I could be convinced to support a military coup. But I’m an extreme right-winger because I want to preserve what is good and beautiful in this world. I want to live a beautiful life with those I love. I want to feel like I’m fighting side-by-side with Aragorn, not sniggering in a cave with a bunch of imps reciting the word “nigger”.

I’m thinking I need to be a little slower about leaving though. If I leave, the places just become more harsh. I love the motte, I think it is one of the best run forums on the internet. But I have noticed an increase in harshness lately from people on my side.

I appreciate what the mods do here to tend the garden and I hope to provide the tone and perspective that I want to see in the world

I think the right and the left are increasingly unable to model one another's thinking

Most people aren't good at modeling their own thinking, thus are very bad at communicating it, and the outsider map is more accurate in some ways, less so than others.

I recently got into an argument here where I said I know very leftist "woke" people, and they are not evil.

I've come around to a sort of cold comfort in that what the sides mostly see as "evil" in the other is what the allowable failure modes are, and the selectivity of attention (whiteness studies professors and actual no-joke neonazis aside, those two groups are evil in the regular sense). Maybe this is just warmed-over Arendt, I haven't taken the time to read her in full. A person can't legitimately care about everything, and where one chooses not to care- to draw their blinders close- has outsize effect on how they're seen by people that make the opposite choice.

Good and evil aren't the same thing as safe and dangerous, are they? And I care more about who's likely to get me killed than about the hope in their hearts while they do it.

People who say "don't judge appearance" and then hate anyone wearing a dress shirt and slacks are dangerous.

Especially when they aren't interested in letting ask questions first.

If I were a god, I would save everyone. They deserve it anyway. But I'm not a god.

Yes, well, define it however you like. Rightists and leftists both clearly believe the other side wants to kill you and is dangerous. Good news for the accelerationists -this will become a self-fulfulilling prophecy!

You don't need to want to kill someone to do it. I rather get the impression that that's how we got here. Being nice is the problem.

But I don't disagree. This will end in tears.

I remember my surprise at how this forum reacted to the atrocities in Gaza. Not a lot of posts or interest about it; nothing compared to how it gripped political discussion in America at large. I was even mod-warned for posting on the subject too many times. Our empathy can be exceedingly narrow when it is convenient.

Mostly ignoring Gaza is a sign of a healthy forum culture, unless your forum has a mission that specifically includes paying attention to obscure third-world humanitarian disasters. The Israel-Palestine conflict is boring, notoriously intractable, and has a low death toll relative to a mid-tier African civil war. It gets far more press than it deserves because it somehow became a proxy for the US culture war.

The key point of interest IMO is that we funded it and supported it, and so, as the evidence right now points to a lot of children having faced needless starvation for no legible reason, we actually funded and supported a policy of arbitrary mass starvation directed at children. For a lot of Americans that deserved attention in a way that an African civil war typically does not, although I’d note that we cared a lot about the Rwandan Civil War back in the day, and even growing up years after the fact I can recall seeing a lot of ambient social and political interest about it.

for no legible reason

The reason is that their leaders which enjoy overwhelming popular support started a war. You might not like it but it is a very legible reason. I'm personally on the fence whether anyone in the middle east should receive western support, but if it's going to be anyone it's going to be israel over palestinians every day.

But really, middle east is gonna middle east, no point discussing it too much.

I agree that Americans have more of an excuse for caring about the I-P conflict than other Westerners do.

"The UK should butt out of the I-P conflict, and individual Britons who pick a side either have dual loyalties or are idiots" is probably my most dangerous political opinion in polite company.

supported a policy of arbitrary mass starvation directed at children

The communications around this are/were so messy and awkward that it became quickly illegible to most people.

You were never warned for posting too much about Gaza.

The motte is inherently going to lean towards conversations that can only be had in the motte. There's an infinite supply of places to discuss the plight of the Palestinians

You may or may not find it heartening to know that this is almost always a choice.

Every hospital has regulars, people who have medical, psychiatric, substance use problems. Sometimes (but rarely) nothing at all.

We see them once a year, once a month, once a week, once a day. We know them. Sometimes they disappear and it's because they moved on to the next hospital or stop on their rotation.

Sometimes they pass away.

Always. Every time - we make offers. During winter or especially days like today we make many, many offers. Do you want to stay the night? Please this time go to the shelter. Etc.

Scores of bright eyed and scores of burnt out social workers emerge from the offices like lice, all trying to get the patient help.

They usually refuse.

Living on the street is a choice. That choice is often complicated by drugs, and the way someone was raised. Sometimes it's complicated by medical or psychiatric problems and we can often intervene in those.

But most people on the street are there because they made a choice and our society lets people make choices.

They may regret it in the moment in the cold, but they will make the same choice again.

It sucks.

Certainly true for your frequent fliers. A Hispanic guy wearing the wrong clothing for the weather? That sounds like a classic case of "No entiendo, Senor". The people who made the choice for him were the ones who brought him here without mentioning or particularly caring that the US gets real cold compared to Guatemala.

Or he got lost on the greyhound. Or he was dressed appropriately for the weather a week before and didn't check the weather forecast. Or...

On an individual level, there’s no dissonance here. We should save this man’s life. But let’s zoom out. How many ambulances and EMT workers can be extended in your town? The fact that we have a moral duty to help this man, makes the moral duty to prevent this situation with unsustainable immigration all the more grave.

I’m caught up in this ice storm myself. My wife is currently 9 months pregnant and starting contractions. There is a real possibility we will need an ambulance tonight to get her to the hospital. What if every ambulance is busy with homeless illegals? I don’t want these people not to get help. But I also want a functional infrastructure.

The only dissonance is with the side that refuses to consider the world in any terms other than endless handouts without any trade offs, or worse resolving the dissonance with “fuck whitey”.

I don't think that is very likely in this case. I live 3 blocks from the hospital and the ambulance times are very short. This man was not taking up an ambulance spot for much time.

Anyways, I'm morally obligated to make the right actions given the information I have. I didn't have any information about this being the last available ambulance and someone else needing it more. So I did what I did.

I keep voting for the most immigration restrictionist candidates, as I'm concerned about the same externalities of mass migration that you are.

No I don’t think this or any specific instance is a moral conundrum; my point is that it can’t scale infinitely. At scale illegal kmmigrants and homeless do take up emergency room resources and cause downstream issues.

Were I in your situation I wouldn’t think twice about resolving some moral tradeoff over whether to help him. My issue is the system that grows the problem or anyone trying to frame this is as a contradictory wordview, as your OP pondered

Congrats! Hope for a happy and healthy mom and baby.

Good luck and congratulations! I had my second under similar conditions and in hindsight makes for fun stories.

I asked Grok about the details of hypothermia and found it was a somewhat less urgent situation than I imagined. The man likely had been outside for 1-2 hours and likely would have been dead in about 3 more. Grok gives a big range of 2-12 hours for death by exposure in similar situations

Grok thinks the man will make a full recovery. Probably today, he will be released from the hospital.

Grok is a narrow-sighted idiot. Hours in single digit temperature weather and wind means frostbite. Even superficial frostbite (skin frozen solid) will blister, require pain management and permanent wound dressing. Walking on superficially frostbitten toes is excruciating, and for a reason - it should be avoided unless for survival.

His fingers had a grey hue to them and seemed frozen stiff.

Likely deep frostbite. Dead tissue may take weeks to declare itself. If that's the case, he's facing certain permanent damage to his hands and possibly amputations.

Let's hope he had his hands under his clothes for some of the time outside, and that he had proper boots.

Politically, I am an immigration restrictionist and fairly onboard with MAGA. I don’t see a contradiction in saving a migrant’s life in a tragic situation, and advocating that there be fewer such tragic situations, thousands of miles from home

That's because there isn't any. "I wish these people would not come to my country" is not the same as "I wish these people were dead".

Regardless, you did the right thing. Thanks for posting, as reminders to have a compassionate heart are always helpful in my view.

A problem with this idea is that this doesn't extend to a general responsibility to save all freezing homeless people. If it did, the reasons why it's unworkable would be obvious. And since it doesn't, it's imposing a responsibility to save the people in front of you which means that "out of sight, out of mind" is actually true and that poor people have more requirements to help the homeless (since they live in worse areas and have to use public transportation, so they run across more homeless).

Unless you're going to have a moral standard "everyone has to save X number of homeless. If you run across fewer than that, you need to save some extras outside your sight to reach X. If you run across more than that, you only need to save up to X of them."

I don't think this sentiment is very uncommon. One of the most frequent IRL complaints I have about my neighborhood is the number of homeless/violent drug addicts that wander around it all day. It really bothers me that my kids can't use any of the parks in my town because they have become de-facto homeless shelters/injection sites.

And yet: the number of shoes, clothes, etc. I've given away to people walking through my front yard who need these things is not small. The number of times my family has noticed it's cold, and left boxes of blankets and hand warmers around places where we know these guys congregate is not small.

Love the sinner, hate the sin.

There may be a causal relationship between your second paragraph and your first.

Yeah maybe! It’s definitely a struggle to be upset at the general conditions, but also recognize the human suffering.

For me the thought experiment is rather something:

  1. To live somewhere where there are numerous homeless/violent drug addicts wandering about my neighborhood
  2. Where 1. includes the homeless/violent drug addicts walking through my front yard
  3. Where 1. includes the homeless/violent drug addicts rendering local public spaces unusable for my family
  4. Yet I do things that'll further enable and encourage 1., 2., and 3.

Your love for the sinner also poses a negative externality upon your neighbors who may not share such a love.

I’m an Orthodox Christian and I’m not allowed to leave a man to die, even if his existence is an annoyance. That said, I resist all attempts of people to use my faith to blackmail me to support suicidal empathy as a national policy. I’m firmly in the deport them all camp.

It’s called “the middle way” or “the royal road”.

I am, by far, the most conservative person in my entire neighborhood. I live in probably the most liberal 1 square mile area of a liberal state. If anything my neighbors are upset I am not doing enough.

I'm not arguing that what I'm doing is rational, but I'm also a pretty devout Catholic and believe that everybody has intrinsic value. I want broad policies that fix these problems, but in the mean time also love the people who are suffering these things as individuals, and if they are in legitimate need, I will help them.

On a practical level, I want these people to understand that they aren't fully lost. They can come home if they want to and the world still loves them.

On a practical level, I want these people to understand that they aren't fully lost. They can come home if they want to and the world still loves them.

LOL. The world is at best indifferent.

You're still supposed to hate what God hates. God hates sin.

Loving the sinner doesn't mean helping or enabling them to sin.

Loving the sinner is calling them to repent and allowing them the benefit of the natural consequences of their sin.

Loving the sinner is calling them to repent and allowing them the benefit of the natural consequences of their sin.

What if the 'natural consequences of their sin' make them less likely to repent?

Do you have an example?

If they die on a park bench they're out of opportunities to repent.

Are the only options providing resources directly to the indigent and perhaps inducing them to remain in the area or having them die on a park bench?

Some individuals 'rock-bottom' is death.

Each individual act seems merciful in isolation, collectively, it creates an unofficial support system that makes street life sustainable enough to avoid the harder choice.

This is the same dynamic as the family who keeps bailing out the addict, paying their rent, letting them crash "just one more time." Each act feels like love. The pattern is death.

Higher-intensity services often require something in return, sobriety, curfews, accountability.

The street, subsidized by scattered charity, requires nothing. You've made the path of least resistance also the path of continued destruction.

This isn't cruelty. It's refusing to be complicit in their slow death while feeling good about yourself. The hardest part of love is sometimes not helping in the way that feels most immediately compassionate.

Still, if you see someone actually freezing to death, call for help.

There's something very David French about this, but I suppose that's just being Christian, and what makes them such frustrating fellow travelers. I think it's the sense that they would rather lose as long as they satisfy their own personal feelings of being a good person first and foremost. It's like a desire for martyrdom or something, they active want to lose while feeling righteous about their own goodness. Because if your goal is "live in a neighborhood without violent drug addicts", handing out free things to violent drug addicts directly undermines that. With allies like these, who needs enemies? Like, one could very easily donate to some kind of cause that aids the homeless without actively undermining one's own neighborhood. If there were actively violent drug addicts congregating outside my house and I found out my neighbor was giving them free shit I would be just about ready to kill my neighbor.

Because if your goal is "live in a neighborhood without violent drug addicts", handing out free things to violent drug addicts directly undermines that. With allies like these, who needs enemies?

I think you will find that this is not in fact the goal of the poster you are replying to or any of the other related posters.

Your stated goal is easy to "paperclip optimize" away by, for example, killing all of your neighbors. After the massacre, you would clearly "live in a neighborhood without violent drug attics", but you would also be living in a much worse neighborhood.

To use proper RAT/utilitarian/machine learning terminology, I view Christian morals as a form of regularization on goals like the one you state. You already are applying a regularizer that prevents you from considering murdering all humans as the correct solution to your optimization. The Christian is applying a stronger regularization where the ultimate goal of "living in a neighborhood without violent drug addicts" is just as much about wanting to benefit the drug addicts as it is about wanting to benefit yourself.

I've lived in a bunch of countries that are very low tolerance of random antisocial behavior. Generally I've found my average neighbor quality skyrockets in Singapore, even if they grapple with having Singaporean energy.

I think it's the sense that they would rather lose as long as they satisfy their own personal feelings of being a good person first and foremost.

The one thing Christianity isn't about is your own personal feelings. If the God of the Bible is real, and his only-begotten son Jesus Christ died on the Cross for our sins, then this matters. Different strains of Christianity differ over the precise relationship between "being a good person" and faithful acceptance of the gift of Jesus' sacrifice, but the end goal is mutual love between God and Man, and "If you love me, you will keep my commandments". (John 14:15). There is a lot of moral and social teaching in the Bible (although very little about secular politics), and if you find that 100% of it agrees with opinions your allies have adopted for secular reasons, you are engaging in motivated reasoning.

It's like a desire for martyrdom or something

Many people who are sincerely religious desire martyrdom. Read the lives of the Saints, or the sermons at your local Salafi mosque. The reward they seek is not of this world, and trying to point out the worldly unwisdom of what they are doing invites and deserves ridicule.

Jesus cured lepers, not leprosy.

Isn't a leper just someone with leprosy?

I think the distinction being made is curing individuals with a disease versus eradicating it from the population.

Some bloodshed is priced into immigration law enforcement, especially after decades of intentionally lax enforcement. Of course, the alternative is not 'no bloodshed', but just different victims in different places and a net increase in bloodshed overall. The rest is propaganda.

Of course, the alternative is not 'no bloodshed'

The alternative is enforcing existing laws against employers of undocumented immigrants in red states where they are concentrated the most. It is it not happening due to fear of backlash - if ICE was hauling away CEO's it would have 90% approval rate. But, instead, you have violent street circus to satisfy sadism and bloodlust of MAGA base. You really do not have to be tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorist to understand what is going on.

This reads as nonserious when we JUST had a reveal and discussion of billions with a "B" worth of dollars being fraudulently appropriated for essentially fake businesses run by various immigrant groups, with one standout being the Somalis.

Largely in blue states.

Targeting employers would ignore this particular flow of tax dollars into dubiously legal immigrant communities who have seemingly separated themselves from 'legitimate' society and operate insular networks with outsized political influence.

That seems like a pressing matter that can't be ignored.

JUST had a reveal

This emphasis is just bollocks when the fraud was out in the open and essential shut and close by 2025 if what I am reading here is correct https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020s_Minnesota_fraud_scandals

Anyway, ICE can do both and should do both. Let’s round up the illegal immigrants (kindly) AND prosecute the employers that employ them (kindly). I bet that if we crunch the numbers it would also be “B” worth of dollars that employers “took” from an equivalent hypothetical American worker.

If we think of the population of illegal immigrants as the “supply” of illegal work meeting the “demand” of cheap labor then it makes sense to shut off the supply. But we can also think the “supply” of willing dollars to employ shadily/illegally is meeting the “demand” of people wanting better economic future, then it’s just as important to shutoff that supply too.

Let’s round up the illegal immigrants (kindly) AND prosecute the employers that employ them (kindly).

And if the state in which the persons in question reside not only refuse cooperation, but actively interfere, can we also go after the officials who are thwarting any enforcement at all?

Can we also arrest them?

I just want to know where the limits of 'accountability' stop and why it should extent to employers but not state actors.

Why not? Maybe if you go after the CEOs, the people of the state would not vote in the politicians that “helps the helpless” because clearly CEOs aren’t helpless.

Por qué no los dos?

I'd guess the reason we can't currently do both is the sheer amount of enforcement resources that are tied up in dealing with the active interference from protestors and state officials.

In theory, it should be simple enough to identify the largest employers with large numbers of illegals on the payrolls, throw the book at one or two of the CEOs, and let incentives take their course.

I am... very skeptical that the reason the administration isn't going after businesses is that those darn protesters are tying up too many resources, and if they all went home and localities stopped declaring themselves sanctuary cities, we'd start seeing CEOs arrested.

In theory, it should be simple enough to identify the largest employers with large numbers of illegals on the payrolls, throw the book at one or two of the CEOs, and let incentives take their course.

In theory it should be. Yet no one does this. Why?

For many years, I have heard, ironically from both open borders enthusiasts and even immigration conservatives, that we can't "really" crack down on employers because then crops would rot in the fields and restaurants and hotels would have to close. A tacit admission that we have entire sectors of the economy that are completely dependent on the existence of illegal labor.

I always found this a strange thing to admit, especially from liberals. "So... basically you want an underclass of underpaid, easily exploited labor with no real rights so your grocery bills will stay low?"

It's absolutely true that if we could magically teleport every last illegal out of the country, it would wreck a lot of the economy. In the absence of magical deportation rays, a serious effort to go after businesses depending on illegal labor would over time result in rising costs (you'd have to actually pay American citizens American wages to pick those crops and clean those hotel rooms).

I think this would be a good thing, but it seems to be a price even the so-called anti-immigrationists are not willing to pay.

So instead, what we have right now is absolute fucking theater. Does anyone think all this ICE sturm und drang is really going to result in a meaningful reduction in the number of illegals in the country? Because I'd like to check back in on that in one year, two years, and five years.

I agree that not going after hotels and restaurants and farms for illegal labor is hypocrisy. But those in favor of remigration and deportations of such are not in the Trump administration: presumably, he is obliged to the business part of the coalition. This is not a happy marriage. But let it not be said that the good be the enemy of the perfect. If the current spectacle justifies building up the infrastructure so that such a future policy shift is feasible, I'm okay with it.

In theory it should be. Yet no one does this. Why?

This is a full-on guess from my side.

At the top level, its not great optics. And from the corruption angle, some don't want their donors arrested.

On the practical, ground level where the prosecutions happen:

How do you prove that a CEO was knowingly complicit in the hiring process, was directing people to hire illegals, basically fully aware that the company relied on this to function?

A number of middle manager types would probably take the fall for the guys in charge in most cases.

Its a trickier prospect than proving that someone was de facto here without permission, and thus can be summarily removed.

It's absolutely true that if we could magically teleport every last illegal out of the country, it would wreck a lot of the economy.

I think "correction" is really the term to use. That is, there's clearly a ton of 'distortions' in the economy that will be removed if immigration laws are aggressively enforced.

I have pointed out how they actively compete with working class/poor citizens for housing, and use up healthcare and similar public services, and of course if there's increased crime/decreased public cohesion, that is mostly borne by the poor and middle class as well. Over the long term I think it creates Brazilification..

I think that the benefits and costs are very unequally distributed and we get effects like cheap food on one hand but far more expensive housing, car insurance, and medical care on the other. Distortions in economic distribution due to the presence of an underclass for whom the 'normal' rules are not applied.

Teleporting them all away would, I'd wager, remove a lot of the benefits... which were disproportionately enjoyed by the elite classes... but also would remove the costs that were broadly imposed on the middle/lower classes.

So yes, there might be some 'wreckage.' I would be willing to accept the bet that the pain is mostly endured by the upper class and thus the vast majority of the populace would suffer minimally, especially after the things get reshuffled over the course of months or years.

I mean, I don't think we necessarily need to arrest the CEOs of Tyson Chicken and Walmart (though that would sure send a message). But as it stands, the Trump administration isn't willing to even make a token gesture towards recognizing the actual root cause of illegal immigration. Which makes me think they are fundamentally unserious about addressing it as a real economic/social issue and are mostly engaging in performative theater to please their base.

I would accept such an economic "correction" if they were really serious about it, even if that meant I felt some of the pain. But they won't do it.

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... especially from liberals. "So... basically you want an underclass of underpaid, easily exploited labor with no real rights so your grocery bills will stay low?"

I disagree this is in conflict with the liberal (i.e. pro-illegal-immigrant wellbeing) position.

Allowing the illegal immigrant to stay in the country is clearly in their interest. No matter how bad the conditions are, we know this is a good deal for them, because their revealed preference is to stay in the country as an illegal.

They are only "underpaid" relative to a legal citizen. But the liberal isn't able to give them citizenship - so trying to get society to look the other way and let them stay is the next best thing. And ditto for exploitation.

In general I find this line of thinking - in which it constitutes "exploitation" to give someone in a really bad situation a kinda bad option - very odd. See also:

  • It is morally neutral to just not help some random homeless woman (we're both doing it right now)
  • It is (extremely) virtuous to give her money, no-strings-attached, so she can get off the streets and back on her feet.
  • It is villainous (worse than just not helping at all) to do the above via hiring a prostitute. Even though she prefers to make the trade, this constitutes "exploitation".

The end result of this logic seems to incentivise avoiding interacting with suffering people at all.

Illegals do not make massively less than citizens doing the same job. They are simply willing to do jobs it is difficult to get an American labor force on, and far more reliable than the non-working class that would theoretically be doing those jobs.

The problem with that is it eliminates the price incentive to find better ways of doing those shitty low-wage jobs. No VC will invest money into a startup trying to replace sub-$10/hour migrant hotel maids with robots. At $25/hour? Suddenly that's a lot more space to capture value.

Just as an example of this dynamic, look at touchscreen ordering in fast-food restaurants and self-checkout machines. The technology had been there already for 10+ years, what made it finally hit mass adoption was the point where the marginal hourly cost of a unit and its maintenance went below the cost of a worker by a significant enough margin that stores were willing to annoy their customers for a bit as people got used to it. I'd personally rather have an economic makeup that has fewer low-wage jobs and more engineers figuring out automation rather than an underclass of serfs that are paid so poorly (yet subsidized by the taxpayer) that they are impossible to displace.

jobs it is difficult to get an American labor force on

...at what price? If you raise the price, you can likely get American labor force on it. If you don't have to raise the price massively to get American labor force on it (because illegals don't make massively less than citizens doing the same job), then it seems somewhat minor. If you do have to raise the price substantially to get American labor force on it, well then I guess we're back to potentially significant cost increases for various crops/clean hotel rooms/etc.

far more reliable than the non-working class that would theoretically be doing those jobs.

If one raises the price, it is not clear to what extent the people attracted to those jobs will come from the currently-non-working and to what extent it will come from folks working other jobs. You can generally get the reliability you desire by raising the price. Of course, this will compete with other job opportunities, pushing wages up more broadly and likely ending some jobs that are at the low end of value. This could increase costs for other goods/services that don't directly employ illegals now.

The open boarders economists like Bryan Caplan make the argument well that immigration restrictions have effects like ending those low value jobs, reducing overall economic efficiency and total output. I've already observed that, for example, hotels have significantly rolled back on regular room cleanings post-COVID. You could imagine effects that feel kind of like that, possibly still in combination with price increases, as the market adjusts. Some folks think the tradeoffs are worth it (and may point to various different things that are trading off, one prominent example being distributional affects purely in terms of American wages), others disagree, and well, yeah, some are probably ignorant of how they're likely to be connected.

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That's just "We should maintain an arbeiter class" with extra rationalizations.

You can get people to do any job, reliably, if you pay enough. We don't want to pay enough to entice Americans to do this work. So right now, the only way we can get a reliable workforce willing to do it at acceptable wages is by importing illegal labor. If you actually want to end mass illegal immigration, you have to solve the left side of the equation somehow.

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Yeah, I have a hunch it's much more about lack of political will than lack of resources.

Here is a DOJ guide intended for employers to understand their obligations and responsibilities with regard to I-9 work authorization forms. I don't know what year it is from, but reading it gave me a much greater appreciation for why we ended up in this mess. Some choice quotes (emphasis mine):

"While not required by law, an employer may conduct an internal audit of Forms I-9 to ensure ongoing compliance with the employer sanctions provision of the INA. An employer may choose to review all Forms I9 or a sample of Forms I-9 selected based on neutral and non-discriminatory criteria. If a subset of Forms I-9 is audited, the employer should consider carefully how it chooses Forms I-9 to be audited to avoid discriminatory or retaliatory audits, or the perception of discriminatory or retaliatory audits."

"Internal audits should not be conducted on the basis of an employee’s citizenship status or national origin"

"An employer is required to accept original Form I-9 documentation that reasonably appears to be genuine and to relate to the individual presenting the documentation. If an employer subsequently concludes that a document does not appear to be genuine or to relate to the person who presented it, the employer should address its concern with the employee and provide the employee with the opportunity to choose a different document to present from the Lists of Acceptable Documents. An employer may not conclude without foundation that a photocopy of an employee’s Form I-9 documentation is not genuine or does not relate to the individual. In the context of an internal audit, for an employer that has photocopied Form I-9 documentation, it should recognize that it may not be able to definitively determine the genuineness of Form I-9 documentation based on photocopies of the documentation. An employer should not request documentation from an employee solely because photocopies of documents are unclear."

"While tips concerning an employee’s immigration status may lead to the discovery of an unauthorized employee, tips and leads should not always be presumed to be credible. An employer is cautioned against responding to tips that have no indicia of reliability, such as unsubstantiated, retaliatory, or anonymous tips. Heightened scrutiny of a particular employee’s Form I-9 or the request for additional documentation from the employee based on unreliable tips may be unlawful, particularly if the tip was made based upon retaliation, the employee’s national origin or perceived citizenship status."

There are two contradictory regulatory schemes here. One is considered more important than the other. It's basically illegal for employers to enforce immigration law.

My abject guess:

On the top level its an optics thing.

On the rubber-meets-the-road level, good luck proving that a CEO or anyone in C-Suite was "knowingly" approving hiring of illegals, especially if the immigrants in question were able to produce sketchy but minimally sufficient papers to prove legitimacy.

Sure there's probably some who put it in an e-mail that you can uncover, but these are the guys who can afford quality legal representation.

Are the businesses hiring illegal immigrants ones that have C-suites? I would have guessed the majority are employed by small firms (potentially contracting for larger ones) as, if nothing else, plausible deniability. And I think quite a few work in cash --- residential construction, yard work, and housekeeping. Are there significant numbers in formal office jobs with tax paperwork?

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When you have lax immigration enforcement for decades, the whole structure of the economy rearranges around the presumption that illegal labor will be available. You can't just pull the rug out from under that in an afternoon. Those kind of structural changes take years to work out. The fault lies with the previous administrations, both red and blue, who intentionally allowed this to happen. Indeed, they were counting on it: "Oh well, I guess we can't deport now! Too costly, too unpleasant". And they are kind of right, because restructuring the economy is painful, and deporting millions is costly and often ugly. Unfortunately, it is necessary to pick and choose your priorities, where progress can be made quickly and where it must be made more slowly.

In principle, I'd like to do what you say, but I think it comes from a place of bad faith. The purpose of that suggestion is to maximize short-run economic pain and suffering, to maximize difficulties with politically influential businesses. The purpose is to make immigration enforcement so painful that it is essentially abandoned altogether, which is the same purpose that is driving things in Minnesota right now.

The pragmatic response is to acknowledge that immigration enforcement needs to proceed with some appreciation for the fact that we have dug ourselves into in a very deep hole. The laws weren't really written for a world where they would be neglected or subverted for decades before finally being enforced, and they would likely have been written quite differently had that circumstance been taken into account.

The pragmatic response is to acknowledge that immigration enforcement needs to proceed with some appreciation for the fact that we have dug ourselves into in a very deep hole. The laws weren't really written for a world where they would be neglected or subverted for decades before finally being enforced, and they would likely have been written quite differently had that circumstance been taken into account.

Hmmm, just jumping in here but what are your proposals? What are these “pragmatic responses”. On some level I think the wolves should be fed on both sides. Do some mass deportation of illegal immigration AND high profile CEO arrests for employing said illegals.

This is assuming that the only way illegals are getting money is via working illegally. There are tons of NGOs that will gladly help.

That is a fake alternative, made up by the left. More detail here: https://www.themotte.org/post/3493/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/405679?context=8#context

This is really lazy, right? Trump could easily change the "reasonably genuine" wording and just have employers only submit real proof of citizenship/visa status when they resister for employer-paid payroll taxes. That's how every single other first word country does it.

And sure, even then you're left with is millions of people working without anybody collecting employer-paid payroll taxes of their work, you're dealing with millions of "independent contractors" and the standard off-the-books shadow economy. But at least then you can nail them all for tax evasion. Keeping millions of people off the books and hiding envelopes of cash being passed around is a whole lot harder than just going "oops, I couldn't possibly have known, that would have been discriminatory and/or retaliatory! It's the liberals fault!"

I agree the law should be changed. I was disagreeing that Trump could simply enforce existing law.

The issue right now is this.

Waltz could stop what’s happening in Minnesota by cooperating. Trump could stop it by going after the employers. Neither actually want the problem solved because they both have a lever.

In the absence of this, ICE is the only avenue and they can’t be heckled into giving up. There is absolutely no dissonance with this view and the view that the leaders are failing us at the top on both sides or that homeless lives have inherent dignity and deserve emergency services where possible.

I'd probably do the same thing. The leftist mindset (or at least its narrative) often has no concept of the distinction between political convictions and basic humanity. To a leftist, I must be more universal in my morality or else I'm a nazi. I've been told I hate brown people because of this, yet I'm typing this right now while my brown adopted child (whose bio parent was probably an illegal) keeps saying "Dada look!"

I support restrictive immigration policies to maintain order and to deal with tragedies that I don't have to deal with, but that doesn't mean I don't feel a personal obligation to save a life. I understand the plight of many immigrants, but I strongly believe that we cannot afford to "save" them on a massive level. I support a system that will make these difficult and sometimes sad decisions about immigration so I don't have to. I support this because I believe it is necessary, not because I derive pleasure from turning away millions who want more opportunity.

If you do not have a US birth certificate for your adopted child, you will need to make sure they get citizenship before their 18th birthday. It's relatively easy to do before the 18th birthday, harder after. It's something many adoption agencies forget to help with for some reason.

They were born in the US and issued a birth certificate.

Some Nazis were known for having a soft heart. John Rabe is a famous one. He seemed to misunderstand the nature of the larger movement.

On 23 February 1938, Rabe left Nanjing. He traveled first to Shanghai, returning to Berlin on 15 April 1938. He took with him a large number of source materials documenting Japanese atrocities in Nanjing.[14] Rabe showed films and photographs of Japanese atrocities in lecture presentations in Berlin, and he wrote to Hitler, asking him to use his influence to persuade the Japanese to stop further violence. Rabe was detained and interrogated by the Gestapo; his letter was never delivered to Hitler.

It's not like joining the Nazi Party immediately overrode your general moral compunctions. A lot of things in life are a matter of finding the path of least resistance, especially with Rabe spending the vast majority of his time between 1910 and 1938 in China working for Siemens during the rise of the Nazi party during an era of middling communications and joining the party after they already assumed power.

I was driving my daughter to school on Friday when I saw a man laying down on the side of the road, just by my house. He was very underdressed, looked cold, and had tears in his eyes. I'm guessing he was high and confused. Most homeless around here are white, but this one had dark skin. I didn't think he would last long at all with how cold it was and how underdressed he was.

I didn't want to stop with my daughter in the car so I texted my wife and said could you just take a quick look and call 911? Just eyeball him from the front yard and see if you agree with calling 911

She texted me back later to say he seemed fine, he was bundled up and had another homeless friend with him.

I thought that was odd but did the school drop-off and came back home, then we spoke about it. It became evident then, that she thought I was talking about a different homeless person. The two she spotted were curled up in an alley behind a restaurant on the corner while the guy I was talking about was on the sidewalk in front.

But he wasn't there anymore. I don't know what happened to him.

The more extreme people on the political left, the kind currently protesting ICE in Minnesota, call people like me “nazis”. Well, if I am a nazi, I am one with a soft heart.

Hah, I love this. Very much agree. I'm a conservative and similar to you, but I am also a softie in many ways. I think that's the correct way to be.

Many conservatives seem extremely drawn to strict, overly rigid systems and get almost addicted to the authority derived therein. Personally I think the most virtuous way to be a conservative is to see the rules as sometimes harsh and cruel but necessary for greater flourishing down the road. Ideally we don't revel in causing others pain or hardship.

There's a lot of people online - including some of the official Twitter accounts - that seem to think, as the saying goes, that "the cruelty is the point".

I think a lot of people feel like their empathy has been abused over time. You are a nazi if you question tran kid surgeries and a Nazi if you do genocide.

To get immigration enforcement you not only need to win a lot of elections. You also need to be good at working the processes in the bureaucracy or ignoring them. Then apparently there is still a hecklers veto. If you try to do things the right way you’re never going to win. At some point a lot of us just decided if your going to call me a Nazi anyway then maybe I will just be the bad guy.

Doing things “cruelty” actually works. Shooting protestors - eventually gets rid of protestors. Being mean to migrants discourages future migrants in the future when the other side is in power. So yes I think the right has learned that just be the bad guy has a lot of benefits.

I think the right would prefer to be nice guys and when we win elections we get to do the stuff we want to do. Dealing with things like the hecklers veto it’s going to be much easier to be the bad guy.

There is definitely an element of revenge and signaling. There is a lot of cruelty, neglect, and betrayal in enabling mass illegal immigration for decades. This is not counted, but it is felt by many. They are angry, and they want to see cold and harsh enforcement; they want no quarter to be given and if a few troublesome protestors die that is more than a price they're willing to pay. If they allow ICE to fail because it's hard and upsetting, then they lose their country.

Indeed. It's the ugliest part of the modern conservative movement, in my personal opinion.

Later, trying to make sense of the incident, I asked Grok about the details of hypothermia and found it was a somewhat less urgent situation than I imagined. The man likely had been outside for 1-2 hours and likely would have been dead in about 3 more.

I think it was still pretty urgent, given frostbite...

I think it's worth keeping mind that in a lot of situations, your neighbors end up subsidizing your compassion. For example, in this case, everyone in the community will have to pay for emergency services as well as hospitalization for this individual. Which is not a huge deal in the case of a one-off situation, but as someone who lives near a large American city, I can report that situations like this can multiply rather rapidly. Especially if word of local kindness/compassion makes it back to whatever low-trust society the person came from.

Edit: By the way, I don't know where you are, but assuming that half of the expenses for this guy were reimbursed by the federal government, I would estimate that I personally paid 1 or 2 cents for your decision. Merry Christmas!

I guess I don't think it is a "decision" to save a dying man. I would gladly report him to ICE if I knew he was in fact illegal and I had any contact details for him. But "hey, raid the hospital in my local Pennsylvania town, I'm pretty sure there's illegals there" isn't a great tip.

I guess I don't think it is a "decision" to save a dying man.

It's absolutely a decision. And I don't blame you for making it, but it's one decision among millions which, when combined together, have a very noticeable and significant impact on life in the United States.

Politically, I am an immigration restrictionist and fairly onboard with MAGA. I don’t see a contradiction in saving a migrant’s life in a tragic situation... I am in the party that insists on following the rules, because after a complicated calculus of plusses and minuses I think they make the world a better place.

You also called the hospital to leave your financial details right? To make good on the bill in case that man can't pay. Otherwise, net-tax payers and/or patients who do pay their hospital bills will find themselves in the situation of subsidizing your decision-making. Generally, the rule is that a bill is paid by the person or entity who requested the good or service.

I don’t see a contradiction in saving a migrant’s life in a tragic situation, and advocating that there be fewer such tragic situations, thousands of miles from home.

Your choice, at the margin, increased such situations. Whether it be with this migrant in the future finding himself in such situations again, or if other (potential) migrants hear yet another story of the soft-heartedness of gringos and the ultra low cost of consuming public services in the EEUU ($0).

The more extreme people on the political left, the kind currently protesting ICE in Minnesota, call people like me “nazis”. Well, if I am a nazi, I am one with a soft heart.

That's why they call people like you "nazis" and why the discourse is so one-sided. Because it works.

Because you (the general you) have a soft heart and care what they call you, whereas they have a hard heart toward you and people like you and don't care what you call them. Calling you "nazi" gets you to do more of what they want and do less of what they don't want. It makes you shy away from fighting them head on and instead turn toward policing yourself and your own side for Empathy and Compassion, for Going too Far. And then if you're religious they also have the "No, I'm not Christian and I have nothing but contempt for your backwards beliefs" card to play.

I felt there was a chance that had I not called 911 then the next time my family went outside we would have been greeted by a corpse.

For this reason I would had called emergency services to come pick him up, to spare my family this unpleasant sight.

Your choice, at the margin, increased such situations.

Indeed. The fact he reacted to a homeless guy sleeping in a park within sight of his house with “Won’t someone think of the poor homeless guy and help him” is exactly why we are in this mess in the first place. We need more people whose first thought is “Ew, get that disgusting bum out of my park” if we are ever to have hope of solving this.

I do have a bit of feeling of disgust at the sight of a homeless man in the park. Hostility even. It offends me as a sign of lack of public order and I resent the inconvenience I’ve undergone throughout my lifetime on their behalf. But I’m also a Christian and I’m bound to help a fellow man, even if I resent his presence.

We need more people whose first thought is “Ew, get that disgusting bum out of my park” if we are ever to have hope of solving this.

We don't need that at all. Indeed, if those people were to stop there (though in fairness you didn't say that should be their only thought) they would be evil people indeed, so if anything I think we very much need fewer such people. What we need in order to solve the immigration problems we have is people who are compassionate, but don't let that impulse override every other consideration. We can, and should, try to help the less fortunate, but also take into account whether third parties will be hurt by our attempts to do so.

Getting the bum out of your park means that the bum will move to someone else's park. Kicking the can is the reason why we are in this mess. If there were death squads killing them there would be no bums, if there were mental institutions working - there would be no bums, if there was better safety network there would be no bums, if there were plentiful cheap and affordable housing there would be no bums, if there were some form of rehabilitation and reintegration programs there would be no bums. If anyone was willing or capable of taking the full measures anywhere on the compassion/cruelty spectrum there would be no bums. The bums are failed because everyone is taking the half measures - enough to get them out of their park and their sight.

Oh - and in harsh conditions when someone is in what in my country is known as helpless condition - you go and check on them. Because next time it may be you, and you probably wouldn't want your life to depend on whether the single person passing by you can do the heuristic that you are not a bum, but upstanding citizen right while in severe snowstorm.

Getting the bum out of your park means that the bum will move to someone else's park.

And then they can kick him out. And if this keeps happening eventually he'll move someplace which isn't a park.

Oh - and in harsh conditions when someone is in what in my country is known as helpless condition - you go and check on them. Because next time it may be you, and you probably wouldn't want your life to depend on whether the single person passing by you can do the heuristic that you are not a bum, but upstanding citizen right while in severe snowstorm.

If it were me, conditions would be such that no one would check. "There for but the grace of God goes I" is usually false. And the prevalence of the false ones probably makes it less likely the real ones get helped.

I’m a liberal, I don’t think immigration restriction is wrong and would not call you a nazi even though I wish I was in a position to protest. I guess that means I’m not extreme in your books. I wanted to focus on one thing though because I think it highlights one of our differences.

Had the man been picked up by ICE and sent back to Honduras or Ecuador or wherever he came from, I don’t view that as an inhumane outcome compared to a lonely death in a strange land.

I don’t trust that ICE currently would treat the homeless kindly. To me, the way ICE follows the law is not the way I think you follow the law. Would they really get the paperwork right? Would they talk to the man if he’s able to talk? Would they deport him to the correct country? ICE says they followed all procedures, how can I tell? Who can verify? I admit mistakes are just going to be baked into any large scale system, and I’ll hold my final judgment until the dust settles and the stats can be collected. But I don’t feel good vibes at the moment with the way ICE carries themselves. At the very least, what ICE should do is target the companies and individuals that hire illegals, Americans are complicit in creating the initial circumstances of the current situation.

As a last note, “Honduras or Ecuador or wherever he came from” might at least be warmer, but I don’t think it guarantees there won’t be a “lonely death in a strange land” for him still either.

If somebody's gotten all the way to the USA without the communication skills to even identify their country of origin, it seems a very long bow to draw that they've both managed to do it entirely under their own power and that they're going to have a particularly successful integration.

I've done a bunch of traveling. The vast majority of countries in the world are broadly fine in the year 2025. Starvation and absolute poverty's been fairly effectively combated, especially amongst those with the resources and gumption to actually manage to get all the way to a Western Democracy. There are definitely places with less opportunity than Western democracies, but a reasonable floor of life quality can generally be accomplished

Well we are talking about a possible illegal that is definitely homeless and was in the process of dying of exposure, this isn’t the usual illegal that has under-the-table jobs and has some level of resources and gumption as you say.

I put my coat over him and placed my hands on his cold skin. I said whatever little prayers I know from the liturgy in Spanish - “lord have mercy” and “the father, the son, and the Holy Spirit”. I played the Lord’s Prayer in Spanish on my phone and I lay next to him, covering us both with my coat to warm his body with mine. I reverted to praying in English since my Spanish is so limited.

Uh... pardon me if I'm mistaken, but this is where my bullshit radar started sounding.

When you mention temperatures are you talking F? So, less than -12 C?

The US is in the middle of a winter storm. If he lives in the mountains or the north, that's an entirely plausible temperature range.

According to my weather app, the current "feels like" temperature (in the afternoon in the Midwest US) is -20 degrees Celsius. And it's not going to get much warmer for at least a week and a half.

Why the hell is everyone telling me this? I don't doubt that the US can get very cold. I'm just asking what unit of measurement is used. Most of the world uses celsius. In a story where the temperature is highly relevant it would be best to specify the unit.

  • -12

Why the hell is everyone telling me this? I don't doubt that the US can get very cold. I'm just asking what unit of measurement is used. Most of the world uses celsius. In a story where the temperature is highly relevant it would be best to specify the unit.

In the United States, it's very unusual for native speakers of English to report outdoor temperature in anything other than Fahrenheit. Even among scientists and engineers who regularly use the Metric system.

As a side note, it seems pretty clear to me that Fahrenheit is a much better scale for discussing weather since (1) 0-100 roughly covers temperatures your typical person experiences, including the occasional extreme; and (2) there's no real need to convert to other units like there might be among inches, feet, yards, and miles.

As a side note, it seems pretty clear to me that Fahrenheit is a much better scale for discussing weather since (1) 0-100 roughly covers temperatures your typical person experiences, including the occasional extreme; and (2) there's no real need to convert to other units like there might be among inches, feet, yards, and miles.

We're so not going back to this topic. It's purely a status quo preference. Which is a perfectly cromulent reason, but there's no need to insist that F is intrinsically better than C.

We're so not going back to this topic.

I'm not sure I understand you here. Is this sarcasm?

It's purely a status quo preference.

I would have to disagree with this. F really does appear to be better for discussing air temperature, for reasons mentioned by me and others.

I would have to disagree with this. F really does appear to be better for discussing air temperature, for reasons mentioned by me and others.

If this was the case, I would expect to see a nontrivial amount of people used to C, trying out F for a while as a result of travel, and saying "wow, this really is better".

What we seem to be seeing instead is everyone who grew up in a C regime preferring C, and everyone who grew up in an F regime preferring F, which seems to point to status quo preference.

To be fair, I tried out F as a Brit for fun / as a private in-joke post Brexit and I did like it and I still use it for weather, though I wouldn't use it scientifically.

It is quite obnoxious to be using a different unit than the locals. A better test might be how long it takes the average person to develop an intuition for the alternative unit. Such that they no longer have to explicitly or mentally calculate.

If this was the case, I would expect to see a nontrivial amount of people used to C, trying out F for a while as a result of travel, and saying "wow, this really is better".

To an extent I agree with this. There is a little bit of a confound because the choice between F and C will be perceived as a choice regarding America in general. For example, I can imagine a typical liberal American college student spending a year in Europe and then crowing about Metric units as a kind of virtue-signalling. That being said, yes, I would expect that a non-trivial amount of Europeans, Middle-Easterners, Africans, etc. who spend a couple years in the US would admit, at least privately, that the F scale is better.

What we seem to be seeing instead

Where is this coming from? Is there a subreddit for foreign ex-pats living in the US?

Your comment at a glance reads like the temperature is causing you to doubt the story (because the temperature is unlikely?). Instead, it seems like you meant the two sentences in your comment to be disconnected from each other.

It's a question to be answered separately from the first line but it is also related to the credibility of the story.

Americans are going to use Fahrenheit, that's just the way of the world. It's probably a better measurement system in many ways but I will never bother to learn it.

You can make whatever argument you want for metric, but F is objectively superior to C in daily life. There's no 'metric' advantage to C, you don't multiple or divide temperatures real world use cases. Both are effectively arbitrary.

However with Farenheit, 0-100 is basically, human habitable range. 0 is dangerously cold, 100 is dangerously hot. With Farenheit, 1-100 are basically every day weathers around the globe and in every day life describing your freezer up to your body temperature. Meanwhile 40-99 C are nearly useless.

The only time these numbers are really relevant in daily life is internal temperature of meats, but it's nearly arbitrary numbers with either measure, so C brings nothing to the table here.

Finally, Farenheit is over twice as precise as C, and right around human noticability. You can distinguish 1 degree F, but not really 1/10th degree Celsius, making F a more useful and intuitive unit.

You can make whatever argument you want for metric, but F is objectively superior to C in daily life. There's no 'metric' advantage to C, you don't multiple or divide temperatures real world use cases. Both are effectively arbitrary.

I basically agree. The strongest argument I can think of for Celsius is that the freezing point of water has some degree of relevance for day-to-day life, and therefore there is some basis for making it 0 instead of 32.

That being said, people mainly use temperature to discuss air temperature not water temperature. And as a lot of people have pointed out the scale from 0F to 100F does a pretty good job of roughly capturing the variation of temperature experienced by people. Much better than the C scale does.

Fahrenheit set its 0 at 0 because that was the coldest temperature old fashioned dial thermometers could measure, and its degree as 5/9 of a degree celsius to make it 180 degrees(like degrees of an angle) on old timey dial thermometers between the freezing and boiling point of water. They're both arbitrary and random.

Fahrenheit has nothing to do with dial thermometers; it was originally set with mercury and alcohol liquid thermometers.

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I've heard this a million times from Americans, but you can just remember what C number means what outdoors (0 is freezing, under 10 is time to wear a proper coat, 20 is the beginning of tshirt weather, 30 is the start of too hot, and 40 is time to get out of Texas), and the only thing I actually need precision in degrees for is cooking/baking, where chemical reactions really do matter. I don't believe for a second that Americans actually use it as a % scale rather than finding their own personal breakpoints just as one does with Celsius (I suppose some do, some people also don't have internal monologues). If you can actually distinguish degrees of 1F, it may be that Irish thermostats are much better than American ones.

I can absolutely distinguish a thermostat set 1 degree. Not, I can walk into a room and tell you the temperature to a degree of precision. But in a building that I am intimately familiar with, like my house, I can tell when the thermostat is set differently at night. A degree F happens to be about the amount you can roughly distinguish

My experience of American thermostats is that 65 degrees is too cold and 80 degrees is too hot. Yet somehow 72 degrees is also too hot and 74 degrees too cold, while 68 degrees is too cold and 67 too hot. Weather's weird here.

However with Farenheit, 0-100 is basically, human habitable range. 0 is dangerously cold, 100 is dangerously hot. With Farenheit, 1-100 are basically every day weathers around the globe and in every day life describing your freezer up to your body temperature. Meanwhile 40-99 C are nearly useless.

You do not use 100 points of precision to tell the weather.

Like the other guy said, everybody just recognises like 3 to 5 ranges of temperature for the weather. Very cold, cold, light jacket, t shirt, very hot.

Do you think you need a much wider range of numbers to work this out? You don't, and in practice nobody does. They just snap-lock certain ranges to be relevant.

Celsius is definitely intuitive and a metric system more broadly works better on the whole.

You’re conflating two separate points. When setting a thermostat you can tell the difference between 66 and 67. It’s a good increment of noticable but slight. Celsius degrees are too far apart and tenths are too small.

Separately, 0-100 is roughly human haitable weather

On the metric point, there’s nothing more “metric” about Celsius. It doesn’t math any differently. It’s just set to a different reference point, which is less human centric

Celsius degrees are too far apart and tenths are too small.

There is no way you can start with "objectively better" and end up with this lol. You're talking about a half degree of difference. My aircon works in denominations of .5. If you have a preference for 18.5 degrees, there's no limitation on this if you use Celsius.

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The people of Arizona spend a surprising amount of time discussing each degree between 100 and 120, and they do actually matter for "eh, pretty hot, the metaphorical ice has broken on the sand river" and "get in a pool or inside right now before you faint."

I'm from Australia. We talk about the heat too.

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This is complete nonsense. All you've done is follow 'objectively superior' with a list of subjective claims.

For that attitude, I retract any concession that other metric units may actually have merit. Imperial all the way.

These units are the worst thing you Yankees have done since dumping loads of valuable tea into the sea. I trust you Ameribarbarians will see the light of reason one day and join the civilized world!

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It is objectively true that the range of double and single digit numbers is more fully used by F for day to day use. You can make subjective arguments about how relevant that is, but I think those numbers are easier to remember and work with.

The one advantage of C, that it benchmarks nicely to water, is not really something you need to think about, and doesn’t even hold true for people living at altitude.

I’m an American who goes out of his way to buy metric tools. I’m a big metric fan. Temperature is the one area were it’s just worse.

It is objectively true that the range of double and single digit numbers is more fully used by F for day to day use.

That would depend on your day to day, wouldn't it? 0°F is a random freezing temperature while 100°F would make a really cold sauna. 0°C is a much starker boundary where the outside world begins to transform, turning either to snow and ice or into slush and water. A day in frost is very different from a day in the positives. If the temperatures dip below 0°C your crops will die. And I could just as well say that Fahrenheit wastes an extra digit into the entire 38°C to 99°C range.

The one advantage of C, that it benchmarks nicely to water, is not really something you need to think about, and doesn’t even hold true for people living at altitude.

I don't know anyone quite so privileged that they don't need to think about water. I personally don't live on a mountain top and find it neat to know what the temperature of something is from the physical phenomena occurring in its water content without having to memorize the magic numbers 32 and 212.

I’m an American who goes out of his way to buy metric tools. I’m a big metric fan. Temperature is the one area were it’s just worse.

Well, I'm glad you can see reason somewhere!

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Eight celsius is cold enough that it might be unpleasant without proper clothing, but it's not 'passers-by should worry about hypothermia'.

Exactly. Which is why I'm voicing the lack of unit specification as an issue with the post.

Kinda clear from context he wasn’t talking about 46 F.

That depends on the assumption that the story is true and not made up bs.

It still wouldn't make any sense if it was 46 F out.

Pennsylvania

The average high in my area of the US is 50°F. It's 10°F right now. Almost the entire lower half of the US got slammed by a winter storm this weekend.

When you mention temperatures are you talking F? So, less than -12 C?

For what it may be worth, there are a lot of places in the United States where the temperature is plausibly in that range.

That being said, the story does feel a bit like it might be concern trolling ("I support immigration restrictions but I have some concerns . . .") or just straight up trolling.

I’d absolutely save a man’s life and send him back to Guatemala without much hesitation. Although to get to the point that both decisions are obvious to me took a lot of life experience and thought

Ex-Uvalde Officer Found Not Guilty of Endangering Children in Mass Shooting (NYT link, worked for me without an account)

Adrian Gonzales, the first officer to arrive at the school, was facing 29 counts of abandoning or endangering children, 19 for the dead and 10 more for survivors, after seven hours of deliberations Wednesday.

During the three-week trial, prosecutors argued that Mr. Gonzales, 52, failed to stop the gunman despite a witness alerting him to his whereabouts moments before the assailant stormed two connected classrooms.

Defense lawyers persuaded the jury that Mr. Gonzales had done the best he could with the information he had and that at least three other officers had arrived seconds later and also failed to stop the gunman. They also presented evidence that Mr. Gonzales had rushed into the building minutes after arriving, but retreated with the other officers after shooting began.

My immediate thought, having read about prosecutions of police officers before, was that they found the special prosecutor version of Ralph Wiggums to ensure an acquittal. However, Bill Turner appears to have been the elected DA for Brazos County from 1983-2013, so it's hard to say. Many elected DAs have little trial experience and can be ineffective compared to a regular assistant DA who grinds 4-10+ trials per year, but maybe he's been getting some trial experience since 2013.

It's an interesting disparity that many people have commented on before: officers receive all kinds of "training and experience" (as they will brag about ad nauseum when testifying or in a pre-trial interview), but when it really counts and they fail to make effective use of that training and experience, it won't be held against them. They will instead be given infinite benefit of the doubt, as can be seen when officers are sued under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 lawsuits (heavily slanted law review article, but it correctly describes the reality of trying to sue for excessive force violations).

It takes a few minutes, but it's not hard to find examples of people with no training or experience engaging a mass shooter. Or officers who did so when they were off-duty: example 1, example 2.[1]

It seems to be one more piece of the overall modern American problem of failing to hold people accountable for high-profile failures because they had the correct credentials and merit badges. It's the brain on bureaucracy that 100ProofTollBooth notes below. "So-and-so had the correct credentials and followed the correct procedures, therefore no one is to blame for this terrible outcome." And then they might not even be held accountable when they don't follow those procedures, like here.

If the rule you followed all the training and experience brought you to this, of what use was all that training?

[1]Incidentally, this one is a fine example of wikipedia's slant on defensive use of arms. If you track down the shooter's post-arrest interview, he says he dropped his gun because he saw armed people approaching him, but wiki presents some witness statements to try to make it sound like he dropped his guns and the guys approaching with guns played no role in stopping the shooting.

I believe rights come with responsibilities. If cops are going to get the benefit of the doubt in use of force because it's their job (as I believe they should to some degree), then they owe a moral debt to those they defend. Laws are thin and high, but I honestly don't know how this guy lives with himself. I'd have slapped that police chief in his bitch face and gone through the door, because I don't want to spend every night for the rest of my life wishing I had. Dying is easy compared to that. A reprimand is nothing.

The law cannot solve every problem. We have to enforce the norms we want to see. My words mean nothing in society, and relatively little in the more rarified air of professional violence. But I've seen my days. I've made those calls, and there's 0-5s no doubt alive today who can tell you exactly how well their orders worked when they ran counter to the mores and interests of my team.

Every man on his worst day should be judged by his peers. For those cops, I am their peer. If there be any honor in violence, surely it is from the defense of the weak. Sixty armed men listening to children die? Utterly contemptible. Every single one should do the honorable thing, it should never have come to a court case. They should lacquer their badges into the floor under the urinals of the school. Their children should take their mother's surname. Their parents should cut them out of every family photo.

In the hierarchy of violence known colloquially as "honor", these men are the lowest of the low. Cowards who shirked their duty when it mattered most. I'd rather have a hitman for the cartels at my dinner table than one of the Uvalde cops. All who train for that terrible day that probably won't come gaze in horror, pity and contempt at those whose day came and who failed the moment. Complete moral collapse. Dishonor.

Today, we do not hold our men of violence to such standards. Which is why we are policed by dishonorable cowards.

I disagree only in that I think rights do not come with responsibilities (and saying they do is a common way of vitiating rights, "You have the right to do X, you have the responsibility to only do X the way we say"), but privileges do -- and what the police have as a result of being police is the latter.

You want be a cop, you can't use "the criminals might shoot me" as a reason not to do your job in any given instance. You signed up for that.

I keep wanting to compare this to the recent ICE shooting, loathe as I am to discuss that more here. In that case "the officer should not have put himself in potential danger (standing in front of the car) so that lethal force wouldn't have been necessary" seems a common talking point (and I'm not interested in debating the specific facts of the case further). In the Uvalde case there seems to be plenty of ire that the officers did not place themselves in such danger regardless of the risk to the suspect, especially since it sounds like they were informed of a barricaded shooter, not a spree shooting.

Both sets of logic make sense to me in isolation, but I have trouble fully squaring them. "It's good that the Uvalde cops say around: if they had charged in someone (the shooter) might have gotten hurt" is plausibly true, but laughable. It somewhat works if you assume Good wasn't intent on ramming lots of pedestrians, but that isn't always true: there was a deliberate truck attack in New Orleans last year, for example. That driver didn't have priors, and we'd plausibly be having a similar discussion if officers had blocked the car and ended up shooting the driver there, 14 lives would have conceivably been saved.

Obviously the details are quite different, but I have trouble imagining generic bright lines that don't lean heavily on verboten characteristics: "of course the white woman wasn't trying to be a spree killer."

Why can't we lean on verboten characteristics? No middle aged white woman has ever killed a cop*, very few middle aged white women are good at driving SUVs in tight quarters and really know where their wheels are pointing at any given time.

*In the line of duty, some have killed boyfriends who happened to be cops

Name: Lynda Cheryle Lyon Block
Age at Crime: 45
Race: White
Incident Date: October 4, 1993
Victim: Sergeant Roger Lamar Motley, Jr. (Opelika Police Department)

Name: Cheryl Dawn Kidd
Age at Crime: 57
Race: White
Incident Date: April 22, 2011
Victim: Officer Chris Kilcullen (Eugene Police Department)

Name: Martha Donald
Age at Crime: 60
Incident Date: August 1, 2002
Victim: Officer Melissa Schmidt (Minneapolis Police Department)

There are a number of negligent homicides as well drunk / drugged driving, etc.

Kidd killed Kilcullen

Just had to point that out.

Obviously the details are quite different,

Yes they are!

but I have trouble imagining generic bright lines that don't lean heavily on verboten characteristics: "of course the white woman wasn't trying to be a spree killer."

The best place to stop her if she was a spree killer would not have been to stand in front of her vehicle. Ross did only fire after she had hit him (slightly, because she was not aiming her car for him). If she had aimed for him, he would have been under her SUV before he had fired her first shot.

A person sitting in a car, even a bloody SUV, is not a similar level of danger as a armed suspect entering a school. You do not need to rely on protected characteristics to tell the difference. Some suspects are an imminent danger to the public and it is reasonable to require cops to risk their lives to stop them if it decreases the expected value of innocents dying. Some are not.

If Goods had already injured someone with a gunshot, then entered and locked a classroom, and shots had then be heard from the classroom, I certainly would have wanted Ross to breach that classroom and shoot her if she threatens him, not assume that as a liberal middle-class middle-age woman, she was likely only firing blanks from a prop gun and not trying to hurt anyone.

I suppose my interest here is that the two are at opposite ends of the "justified use of lethal force" scale: there is probably broad, but not universal agreement that the Good case is at least a regrettable case ("justified" is almost certainly more split), and that the Uvalde case is almost unconscionable in its lack of use of force (although this jury declined to convict in this specific case).

I was hoping to use this to better pin down clear boundaries for the acceptable range of force, but I don't see clear choices there still.

I remember saying to a friend that those cops were lucky to live in pretty much the only type of society in the long history of humanity that would permit them to live after a failure of this magnitude. In any other, either they would have been executed, or the social shame would have been so great they would have killed themself. But more to the point, they likely would not have abandoned their duty so flagrantly in the first place.

If cops are going to get the benefit of the doubt in use of force because it's their job (as I believe they should to some degree), then they owe a moral debt to those they defend.

Phenomenal take. I've never thought about police in this context of bravery/honor but I really like it.

You seem very certain of yourself and like you have experience so I'd like to ask you, what were the police supposed to do when the door was locked and the suspect was firing through it whenever he heard them messing with it?

There are close quarters combat protocols for how to go through a doorway as team. That's dangerous but with training you can minimize the danger. But what's the protocol for trying to open a door when bullets are coming through it? Are the men, unable to live with themselves if they don't act, supposed to line up by the door and take bullets until the shooter runs out of bullets, or someone manages to break it open?

AFAICT, the reason they were able to breach it is because a Border Patrol agent came on scene and was just a lot more effective at finding the master key and opening the door. Maybe he was much smarter and more competent and took his oath more seriously, but he also could have had the benefit of coming in very late with a fresh perspective and no chain of command diffusing his own sense of responsibility.

In the meantime the police were looking for keys and stealthily trying them out and none worked. It seems they got confused about locating keys and keeping track of which they tried. Everyone thought someone else was apparently on it.

This strikes me as systemic idiocy that comes up in crises, not individual cowardice. But I say this as an armchair QB.

It's... a little more morbid than that.

At 12:21 p.m., 48 minutes after the subject entered the school, the subject fired four additional shots inside classrooms 111/112. Officers moved forward into formation outside the classroom doors but did not make entry. Instead, presuming the classroom doors were locked, the officers tested a set of keys on the door of a janitor’s closet next to room 112. When the keys did not work, the responders began searching for additional keys and breaching tools. UCISD PD Chief Arredondo continued to attempt to communicate with the subject, while UPD Acting Chief Pargas continued to provide no direction, command, or control to personnel. After another 15 minutes, officers found a second set of keys and used them to successfully open the janitor’s closet. With working keys in hand, the officers then waited to determine whether a sniper and a drone could obtain sight of and eliminate the subject through the window. Those efforts were unsuccessful. At 12:48 p.m., 27 minutes after hearing multiple gunshots inside classrooms 111 and 112, and 75 minutes after first responders first entered Robb Elementary, officers opened the door to room 111. A team composed of BORTAC members, a member of the U.S. Border Patrol Search, Trauma, and Rescue Unit (BORSTAR), and deputies from two local sheriffs’ offices entered the rooms, and officers killed the subject when he emerged shooting from a closet. The subject was killed at approximately 12:50 p.m., 77 minutes after the first officers entered the school and after 45 rounds were fired by the shooter in the presence of officers.

With master keys in hand and confirmed to work, the BORTAC commander paused on the room entry so that a sniper and drone could attempt to get a visual on the classroom. If successful, the sniper could have mitigated a great deal of risk posed by a gun battle inside the classroom. The sniper or drone could have provided valuable intelligence on the layout of the room, location of victims, and the shooter that would create a great tactical advantage for the entry team. However, assessing these options added 10 minutes to the overall response time.

And separately:

“Though the entry team puts the key in the door, turns the key, and opens it, pulling the door toward them, the CIR Team concludes that the door is likely already unlocked, as the shooter gained entry through the door and it is unlikely that he locked it thereafter”

There's a variety of failures, here, and it's very much a 'porque no los dos' situation. But the other side's more overt:

In some instances, outside the school and near the funeral home across the street, officers also used force to keep concerned parents from approaching the school or funeral home, where some of the evacuated students had been taken. One mother was handcuffed by the U.S. Marshals, who accused her of being uncooperative regarding where to park her car and remaining outside the law enforcementperimeter. As soon as she was released from the handcuffs, she ran and got her two children out of the school and to safety. She indicated that law enforcement “was more aggressive with keeping us parents out than going in to get the shooter.” In another instance, one family member who was very upset on the scene, trying to get information on the whereabouts of their child, was thrown to the ground by law enforcement and threatened with a Taser when they tried to go to their child.

Ah, but those were just the untrained, and as laudable as their bravery or desperation might have been, they could have been killed or caused further harm. Surely the officers in command didn't stop other poli--

Texas Department of Public Safety Director Col. Steven McCraw said that [Officer] Ruiz tried to save his wife, but was barred from doing so. State Rep. Joe Moody said despite what surfaced in the video, he confirmed that Ruiz had tried to engage the shooter but was disarmed.

The flip side to heroic responsibility is that once you start prevent other people from being heroes, you've picked up a lot of responsibility.

Yikes. The cringe, it's too much.

The flip side to heroic responsibility is that once you start prevent other people from being heroes, you've picked up a lot of responsibility.

Especially when an armed pack of parents would almost certainly have been much more effective than the police.

EDIT: Thinking about how much better a job motivated and armed parents would have done, I wonder if trying to train Uvalde police mopes made them more incapable of acting, not less. You have to follow the procedures! You have to listen to the chain of command! Everyone struggle to remember what you were taught. With adrenaline! If a kid dies when you did the wrong thing, it'll be your fault! Wait is this a barricaded shooter situation or a hostage situation or something else? Where are the tools? The protocols man, the protocols!

Whereas parents would just be like, do some of us have guns? Good, let's go.

Absent being inside the officers heads instead of what written down, I’m going to assume the officers froze or at best had decision paralysis. If we have an alternate mirror universe where the door was fully unlocked and open, we can then contrast and compare, but froze is froze, and others (that Nashville school shooting showed that) didn’t freeze assuming essentially the same training.

The standard protocol would be to destroy the door.

Honest question: how? Doesn't using, say, a shotgun on the lock risk collateral damage? Doesn't trying to use a contact tool mean whoever volunteers for that is going to get shot at?

the harder and more massive a projectile is, the worse the risk of collateral damage. Hard projectiles retain more energy from a penetration or deflection, larger projectiles have more energy.

Shotguns fire shot, ie lots of small, soft projectiles. These have low individual energy and are bad at retaining the energy they do have through an impact. Dedicated breaching rounds generally use something like compressed lead dust to greatly minimize the chance of a ricochet, but even with buckshot the danger is much, much lower than that presented by an active shooter.

The short version is that any reasonable risk assessment would have held that breaching the door was a good idea, even if they didn't have dedicated breaching rounds on-hand.

As I understand it, if you find a need to breech a locked door in a rough and messy sort of way, you're going to use a shotgun, fired extremely close up, but also at a downward angle so as to not hit any potential friendlies.

whoever volunteers for that is going to get shot at

Well, yes. That's what they're getting paid for. Slot in the level 4 plates and get to it.

Been a minute since I looked at the floor schematics, but I'm pretty sure the room had multiple doors. Get teams with a shield up front and a ram, charge, breaching shotgun or Halligan on each entrance and go to work. If one team is pushed back by fire, the others can work on the other doors. Yes, some guys are probably gonna catch rounds, but with body armor and a shield, plus the perp is shooting through walls and metal doors, risk of death minimal.

I also want to say there were ground level windows in the room, which could have been covered by teams outside the building. As a tactical problem, this one was pretty fucking easy.

Keys. The fuck outta here.

Good post. Reminds me of this comment from @KulakRevolt:

After the battle of Cannae the roman citizenry hounded and tormented the survivors who ran. Their families were hounded, they were reduced to penury and begging in the streets as citizenry who recognized them spat on them and their children.

Finally when Rome took the fight to Carthage, these men begged, pleaded, that they be permitted the honor of a suicide mission, some inevitably fatal horror that might certainly kill them but restore the honor of their families that their surviving children not starve. The roman senate, in a moment of uncharacteristic mercy, permitted them to die so.

These officers should be begging that they be permitted to join some press-ganged penal battalion in Ukraine. That they might atone for their cowardice by having their half burnt ashes scattered in the wind of Russian artillery.

Your periodic reminder that KulakRevolt is a fabulist who outright makes shit up, especially about the ancient Greeks and Romans. He is not a historian or a classicist. He embellishes history to make the ancients sound bloodthirsty and psychotic, just as he does for the Founding Fathers.

The "Ghosts of Cannae" were not "hounded in the streets, spat upon, and families reduced to penury." They were banished to Sicily. Later, they were recruited by Scipio Africanus and allowed to serve again, on the front lines in Spain and Africa, but they did not "beg for a suicide mission" and the Senate did not vote on whether to allow them to serve.

Kulak's versions of history have about the same degree of verisimilitude as a Disney cartoon.

With far less catchy lyrics, I might add.

Great post! I agree completely.

Shout-out to the Nashville officers - Jeffrey Mathes, Rex Engelbert, Michael Collazo, Ryan Cagle, and Zachary Plese - who were true heroes. They went in without hesitation, clearly ready to stop the shooter or die trying, and they earned the Medal of Valor for it. The body-cam footage is amazing. The way Mathes enters is exactly the kind of bravery all men should aspire to. But that's kind of the thing, isn't it? Is the binary really criminal or national hero?

That doesn't seem quite right to me. When someone is given the chance to be a hero and doesn't take it, they should feel deep shame. If it's part of their job, they should be removed from positions that expose them to situations requiring valor, or they should lose their job altogether. But convicting them of a crime seems too far. With this though, if being a hero is not the expectation you are not treated as a hero for just having the job. I have similar feelings about "public-servants".

No, this guy was a police officer. If he didn't want to risk his life in that situation he shouldn't have become a cop- there's tons of other careers available. Notably, they don't involve carrying guns.

No, it should never be a crime to fail to act. Otherwise would be literal slavery, simple as. Justify your knee-jerk vengeful reaction to dead children all you want. Yes conscription is wrong too.

I don't care how much training he had. Don't care that he was on premises. I could have training myself. I could have been passing by myself. Don't care who was signing his paychecks.

It should never be a crime to not act.

No, it should never be a crime to fail to act. Otherwise would be literal slavery,

There exists zero jurisdictions in which it is a crime to not be a police officer. Police officers are not drafted. Being forced to do your job, that you volunteered to do and get paid to do, isn't slavery.

Once you've signed up to do certain jobs, not doing those jobs should certainly be criminal. If you call 911 and the EMTs show up just to watch you die, I'd certainly be in favor of a legal regime that sees them charged with something.

No, it should never be a crime to fail to act

So... abolish "criminal neglect" as a concept?

Also does the combination of refusing to act, while also forcefully preventing others from acting not strike you as deeply perverted?

Central examples of criminal neglect usually refer to reckless driving or a doctor incompetently misdiagnosing a patient to catastrophic effect. Would you convict the doctor in the next room over who could have prevented it by eavesdropping and intervening?

What about both not acting and forcefully acting? Is that the same as not acting?

What? I'm unfamiliar with the particulars of the Uvalde shooting response. Did he turn his gun on his colleagues and order them to stop? If he did something like that, shouldn't that have been more central to our discussion here, and not job expectations?

Central examples of criminal neglect usually refer to reckless driving or a doctor incompetently misdiagnosing a patient to catastrophic effect.

Central examples of criminal neglect are parents refusing to feed or otherwise take care of their children, or generally speaking - people refusing to take care of others who are under their custody. You could probably also find examples of neglecting the maintenance of buildings and machines being criminal.

What? I'm unfamiliar with the particulars of the Uvalde shooting response

Uh... then maybe lower the levels of confidence with which you are speaking?

Did he turn his gun on his colleagues and order them to stop?

It wasn't just him, the entire police force deployed to the location was forcefully preventing parents from entering the school to save their children. Some of the parents were armed, so they could have taken on the shooter.

Though I think one officer who wanted to enter was also prevented from doing so.

As a reminder, here's the comment I responded to originally. It in turn is responding to "Is the binary really criminal or national hero?" and "But convicting them of a crime seems too far."

No, this guy was a police officer. If he didn't want to risk his life in that situation he shouldn't have become a cop- there's tons of other careers available. Notably, they don't involve carrying guns.

I don't think it's terribly productive to add to the tragedy of a passed child by dragging the parents into prison, no. They've been punished enough. There's one example that comes to mind where the parents declined medical interventions for their sick child, who died. The state decided that children are actually the state's, and not the parents', and the state disagreed with that child-rearing decision, so off to prison. Yes I disagree with that. Yes I disagree with "turn this wrench or you come with us downtown."

Child handcuffed to her bed and starving to death? Sure send the boys in to liberate her. Is handcuffing inaction?

It's not like I'm opposed to other solutions or repercussions. I just think bringing the physical force of the law to bear on those who decline to do things is obviously wrong.

It wasn't just him, the entire police force deployed to the location was forcefully preventing parents from entering the school to save their children. Some of the parents were armed, so they could have taken on the shooter.

Did the parents have legal access to the property? If they did, did the police batter the parents to keep them out? If they did, were battery charges brought against any police? If there were, I don't think my statements about inaction would apply. Do you agree?

I don't think it's terribly productive to add to the tragedy of a passed child by dragging the parents into prison, no.

It's not much of a tragedy if they do it knowingly, and it's productive to deter other parents from acting the same way.

Child handcuffed to her bed and starving to death? Sure send the boys in to liberate her. Is handcuffing inaction?

How about a child that's simply too young to leave on their own? Or even one that leaves, but just ends up being more abused by people they encounter on the streets?

I just think bringing the physical force of the law to bear on those who decline to do things is obviously wrong.

And I'm saying you're obviously wrong. There are cases were people are obligated to act, under penalty of law, that's a good thing, and this case should obviously be included.

Did the parents have legal access to the property?

The access not being legal just confirms my point that the state was preventing parents from entering. In itself that's not wrong, but in doing so, the state assumes responsibility for what happened in the area they restricted. This is exactly what creates the obligation for the police to act against the shooter.

If they did, did the police batter the parents to keep them out?

Yes, they were tackled, handcuffed, and pepper-sprayed.

If they did, were battery charges brought against any police?

I'm not sure, but I don't think so. Why would they? The police are generally allowed to batter uncooperative people in order to detain them.

If there were, I don't think my statements about inaction would apply. Do you agree?

I don't. I think you these questions are completely irrelevant to what you said about inaction.

As a reminder, here's the comment I responded to originally. It in turn is responding to "Is the binary really criminal or national hero?" and "But convicting them of a crime seems too far."

Your comment was so extreme that whatever you responded to doesn't really matter. Again, you said: "It should never be a crime to not act", twice.

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UCMJ Article 99: Misbehavior Before The Enemy

Is a thing.

Also

The 15-year-old German girl who knew the Uvalde shooter's plan and failed to alert the authorities was prosecuted for her inaction. She was found guilty of "failing to report planned crimes," she was issued a warning and required to undergo "educational measures".

That's a neat law but it's not a rebuttal. I'm not like some lawyers here to spin a mile-long yarn about how incredibly nuanced I find this whole situation. I now this is nails on a chalkboard to those who love hair-splitting and reading 300-page pdfs to point out a single contradiction, but my views on this are relatively simple and they don't rely on laws.

Clearly.

Your views seem to be ought rather than is, as clearly there are at least some situations where failure to act is a crime.

Your claim that this is literal slavery seems a bit thin on evidence.

The 'payment' received making this not slavery in this incident is the literal salary collected by the officer and the participation in online social media and instant messages with strangers by the German girl. Both had other options. Not being a cop, not talking to weirdos on the internet. Both of those come with potential obligations to act.

The military has dereliction of duty - if you refuse to perform your duty or are willfully negligent, that's a UCMJ charge. I think you could apply a similar argument to police. This is not slavery or conscription. A soldier who voluntarily signs up for the military, knowing what it entails, can do a significant amount of harm by simply refusing to do their job in a critical moment. The time to make that call is before enlisting, not months or years later when lives are on the line. By commiting to performing an action and then intentionally failing to perform it in a way that cases harm, that creates liability, potentially criminal liability.

Another good example is fraud. If you pay someone $10k to fix your roof, and two weeks later they "refuse to act" and keep the money, that's a crime. This case is less black and white obviously, but police officers receive pay and benefits in excess of comparable jobs because of the potential danger. Police officers who defect on this social contract should be punished accordingly, whether that's administratively or through criminal charges in the most extreme cases.

You and Walruz make a good point.

I obviously don’t believe that if a man rips open another’s throat and puts his hands in his pockets to watch him bleed and insists that he’s being prosecuted for “doing nothing,” that he’s innocent, but the thing is he wouldn’t be prosecuted for the nothing, but the ripping.

So your position must be that police officers are conscripting themselves to battle whenever they agree to join the force. That’s a defendable position but it’s not one I think I agree with.

They’re being paid to respond first, but they don’t hold moral powers beyond civilians. They can only use force if it’s confirmed ex post that it was a valid arrest. They can only use deadly force in fear of grievous harm to them. These also hold for civilians (even if judges will be much harsher about valid arrests). The only difference is that they’re compensated and dedicated actors to these functions. But I don’t think that rises to a solemn covenant to do battle on pains of imprisonment.

I would change my mind if you could find some affirmative vow among the force agreeing to consequences if they fail to act in some situation. All I know of is an oath to the law.

An air traffic controller who fails to stop two planes from colliding will merely have failed to act.

A teacher who keeps his mouth shut about the sexual abuse of a kid merely fails to act.

A doctor who does not render assistance merely fails to act.

A lifeguard who falls asleep and lets a kid drown merely fails to act.

A truck driver who fails to hit the brakes when someone is standing in front of him merely fails to act.

In Germany, we have a general duty to rescue. If on my way home, I see a car crashed into a tree, and decide that I will not miss the start of the Tatort for some stranger, I could go to prison for up to a year for that. I can report that I do not feel very enslaved by that rule.

An air traffic controller who fails to stop two planes from colliding will merely have failed to act

should be fired and subject to penalties that were articulated and agreed to beforehand, not dragged to prison and killed if he resists being dragged to prison.

A teacher who keeps his mouth shut about the sexual abuse of a kid merely fails to act.

A doctor who does not render assistance merely fails to act.

A lifeguard who falls asleep and lets a kid drown merely fails to act.

Etc.

A truck driver who fails to hit the brakes when someone is standing in front of him merely fails to act.

Driving a truck is not inaction, come now. This isn't hard.

In Germany

My brother let me stop you right there. German law is not the standard for morality. I could take rhetorical cheapshots and point to its history of laws. Or I could point to the heresy laws that are on its books now.

Okay, so. Where are the goalposts going now? May I suggest attacking my use of the word "slavery"?

I could take rhetorical cheapshots and point to its history of laws.

Come on. Two (small!!1) World Wars, one reference-class-defining genocide and now we are the bad guys forever?! Most of us were not even born back then, and the ones who were had absolutely no idea what that guy and a handful of his followers were (allegedly!) doing, should we be really blaming a whole people for a few bad actors, etc.

(I jest. As a left-leaning German, I am perfectly fine with Germany firstly being known for being crazy genocidal for the next 10 billion years or so. I would slightly prefer for us to be known for having been crazy genocidal but become civilized (and strongly prefer for that distinction to continue to hold, naturally), but I will take what I can get.)

Or I could point to the heresy laws that are on its books now.

Nasty old § 166 (warning: Kraut WP), yes. Some 15 convictions a year, apparently. Should we get rid of it? Totally. Does it mean that German law, or the French/Continental tradition of law in general, is ipso facto not a standard for civilized people and not worth more moral regard than the mutilation rites of some cannibal tribe? I think not.

Driving a truck is not inaction, come now. This isn't hard.

Physically speaking, it is. Well, not going up to speed. But if you let go of the gas once you see the kid, you should be in the clear. In your frame of reference, you are at rest, and the kid is recklessly approaching you at 100km/h. Not applying any force and having your truck follow Newton's first law of motion seems like a textbook example of inaction.

The thing is, society restricts the use of trucks. Once you have started up a truck, you are obliged to take further action to keep it from harming bystanders, a process known as driving. While driving, you can and will go to prison for mere omissions of action.

Likewise, there is a widespread understanding that ending up in charge of a baby (either through your or your partner giving birth to one and not giving it up for adoption or through adopting one) will force you to take some actions on pain of imprisonment. "Oh, I simply did not feed her, can't punish me for not doing something" will not convince anyone.

Or in countries which do have a draft (which includes god's own country, in theory), you can take a young man and make him perform all sorts of dangerous and morally questionable actions on pain of imprisonment. (I'm not personally a fan of that one, but it is widespread.)

Or consider the Kindergarden teacher who goes on record "yes, I saw Kevin play with a fork in the power socket, but to be honest he was the single most annoying kid in the class, so I merely watched and made sure that none of the other kids were touching him. Smelled terrible, though. Anyhow, good thing we don't punish omissions, right?"

It should never be a crime to not act.

  • If I'm a teacher, and one of my students confides in me that another adult has been sexually abusing him, I should not face legal repercussions if I fail to report it?
  • If I'm in a room when two of my friends are plotting a murder, I don't bother to report it, and they succeed in killing their victim, then I shouldn't be charged with conspiracy or being an accessory before the fact?
  • If I'm a doctor, I see one of my patients choking, and I don't bother to try to save his life, then I shouldn't be charged with gross negligence?
  • If a lifeguard sees someone drowning but doesn't try to save his life because who is he to play God, he shouldn't be charged with gross negligence?
  • If I work in a pharmaceutical company, I know that a specific batch of drugs my company has produced has been tainted, but I don't bother to call attention to it, I shouldn't be charged with gross negligence?

While I agree with you on most of your scenarios that there should be repercussions, there is a distinction between crime and legal repercussions (which could be civil lawsuits).

I have to admire the jump straight to reductio ad absurdum when I professed to believe in any kind of principle at all.

You all have been great sports, truly. I know I’m coming off as aggressive but I truly don’t know how to argue any other way. I love you all and I love this place!

Well yeah, it's a bad principle. Dereliction of duty should be punished.

“Slavery is okay if I really care about what should be done” is not an acceptable substitute for my principle.

The bar is finding where the actor in question agreed affirmatively to imprisonment if he fails to act to a certain standard. That will change my mind!

You throw around the word “duty,” so it shouldn’t be hard to find terms of the duty.

I think you're using the word "slavery" in a nonstandard way. The fact that someone will be punished for inaction doesn't imply that they are therefore owned by another individual.

I don't understand why you're demanding that an actor must affirmatively agree to do something in order to face punishment for failing to do so. This isn't how we treat crimes of commission ("well we found Bob standing over Carol's corpse holding a bloody knife – but he never explicitly agreed not to murder anyone, so legally our hands are tied"), so why should it be the case for crimes of omission? This sounds like some sovereign citizen nonsense: the laws of the country in which you reside apply to you, whether you approve of them or not.

If Alice knows that Bob is planning to kill Carol and does nothing to prevent it (say, reporting him to the police), that obviously implies that Carol's murder could have been prevented had Alice acted. The fact that she didn't personally stab Carol doesn't make her any less party to the crime. The fact that she never explicitly agreed to report any instances in which she had foreknowledge of a murder doesn't either.

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To steelman this position - there are certain situations (which bear a passing resemblance to this one) in which failing to act (and actively restraining others from doing so) could be the right decision. For example, in a situation where someone has rigged the school with lethal traps, not entering (and preventing parents from entering) would be the right decision, even if you can hear him actively executing the children within. Likewise, a situation where the shooter has hostages (and is being negotiated with) is a fairly well known one, and one where it would make sense to keep bystanders away even when it seems like the cops are doing nothing. Likewise, a situation where it is guaranteed lethal or nearly so to enter (I'm thinking the hallways flooded with a poison gas or similar) would also justify not acting. I'd also say that a situation that falls far outside normal training and expectations is one in which the cops should be given the benefit of the doubt on not acting (like, hypothetically, if sorcerers took children hostage, I don't expect police to throw their lives away against literal magic that they have no idea how to handle).

I think the problem here is that this situation doesn't come close to falling into those buckets - it's a situation we expect cops to handle routinely (aka, armed person attempting to threaten harm to innocents). And the solution of firing them and giving them a dishonourable discharge feels inadequate to the magnitude of the action. So in addition to feeling like they had a gross dereliction of duty, we also feel like they betrayed the societal covenant of "you are given the right to use violence, but in exchange you must protect us."

And more personally, I know that this would never be respected in any other situation; if I'm a nuclear plant engineer, and I decide to not check up on the error code that I'm seeing and the plant explodes causing a second Chernobyl, there is no chance in hell that I'm getting away with just a firing. If I also lock the error manual away and physically restrain my coworkers from checking on it, I'd be lucky to get away without treason charges, let alone life in prison/the death penalty.

Is the binary really criminal or national hero?

When someone is given the chance to be a hero and doesn't take it, they should feel deep shame.

The missing middle option is "don't become a police officer." For the civilian in the Greenwood Park mall shooting I linked to, I would totally understand him having feelings of shame had he been carrying and chosen to retreat instead (not saying that action would be shameful, but that I would understand the feelings). But retreating wouldn't be criminal.

For someone who has signed up for a job where they get treated as a hero for just having the job (plus an incredibly cushy pension in many states), then perhaps it really is binary: engage in the risks that you have been trained for and paid for (both financially and with social status), or risk the criminal prosecution.

Elisjsha Dicken, the 22-year-old civilian at the Greenwood Park mall shooting, struck the shooter with 8 of 10 shots at 40 yards with a Glock 19 while underfire.

I'd be more afraid of being demoralized - and less dramatically, constantly annoyed and frustrated - than killed and maimed, as a cop. The engagement with parts of the public most of us can just walk away from. I'd be eager to take a desk job as soon as possible, actually.

From watching way too many body cam videos, my biggest fear that would keep me being a cop is having to deal with nasty smelly hobos and druggies and their bodily fluids.

Moral philosophy draws a distinction between ethical actions which are expected of you (i.e. which you will be condemned for failing to carry out), and supererogatory actions, which are "beyond the call of duty" (i.e. you will be praised for carrying them out, but no one will blame you if you don't do so). Obviously, which category a given action falls into varies from person to person, depending on their skills and responsibilities. If someone suffers from a medical emergency in front of me, obviously I should put a sweater under their head and try to keep them comfortable, but it's not really expected of me to do more than that. But if I was a doctor, rendering proper medical assistance to that person is my responsibility, and failing to do would be a serious derelection of duty.

Likewise, if you're just a private citizen, an ordinary civilian, no one expects you to intervene in the event that an active shooter scenario erupts in your vicinity. Elisjsha Dicken deserves praise, commendation, every honour that his government can bestow on a civilian: his courage in the face of extreme danger is awe-inspiring, breathtaking. But I don't think anyone would have held it against him had he failed to intervene and ran for cover: he did more than could reasonably be expected of him, because it wasn't his responsibility.

It is a cop's responsibility. While police officers who intervene in active shooter scenarios will receive praise, this is really just a courtesy masking the fact that, for a police officer, intervening in situations like this is not a supererogatory action: they will be condemned for failing to do so, and deservedly so. Being a hero is the job you signed up for. If you weren't willing to put yourself in harm's way to protect vulnerable people, what the hell did you become a cop for?

(The same argument applies, obviously, to the Secret Service agents who could be seen cowering behind Trump while he was being fired upon. "Interposing the principal between an active shooter and yourself" is pretty much the exact opposite of a bodyguard's job.)

Maybe criminal conviction would be too harsh a punishment, although maybe not: imagine some other hypothetical in which 21 children were killed as a result of an adult's derelection of duty (e.g. a schoolbus driver who literally fell asleep at the wheel and survived a crash while 21 of his passengers were killed) – I find it hard to imagine no criminal convictions would be sought in such an instance.

Either way, none of these men are fit to be police officers, and should be forced to resign.

At the same time, we have a draft. It's not foreign to our country to have a concept of, "We will force you, at the penalty of a worse fate, to do something dangerous and heroic for the benefit of society."

To be a devil's advocate (I don't morally agree with Gonzales' acquittal), we have the draft because it matters quite a lot to the continued existence of our country. Some kids dying in mass shootings is tragic, but rare, even when compared to other gun deaths, and it's not a threat to the nation as a whole. An invasion from a foreign power has much more serious consequences.

Now I'm just saying that's the platonic ideal of the draft. Whether in practice the military actually wages wars that are necessary for the survival of the US, that's an entirely different matter.

The only war that was existential for the US that I can think of is the Civil War.

The war of 1812 felt existential at the time (once it became clear to the Americans that the British would actually fight back - something Madison had assumed they wouldn't), even if modern historians with access to British archives think it wasn't.

The revolutionary war, a good chunk of the Indian wars, and the pacific theater of WWII surely qualify.

the pacific theater of WWII

I am not an expert, but I am dubious. I mean, it certainly was existential for the US territory of Hawaii, but losing control of Hawaii (or even Alaska) would not have placed the US in an existential crisis. Did imperial Japan really have the manpower to take even California, never mind fight their way towards the East Coast at the end of a very precarious logistics trail?

Whether in practice the military actually wages wars that are necessary for the survival of the US, that's an entirely different matter.

Of course, in fairness it must be said that we do not in practice have a draft either. Theoretically we do, but the last time soldiers were drafted was what, Vietnam? Long enough that many men in the US today will never have been at risk of conscription, even if they did have to register with the selective service.

Eh, there’s certainly a case that many of the soldiers in the GWOT did not want to join even if there wasn’t a formal draft.

I'm not sure what you mean, but on the face of it I'm extremely skeptical that we should care. If they were not forced, then they are responsible for their decision to join even if they later came to regret it. But perhaps there is some context here I'm missing.

I see roughly three levels of response for professionals. You can fail to do your duty. You can do your duty. You can be heroic. I will admit that the lines are not always very clear.

It is easiest to recognize clearly heroic actions. The unarmed street vendor who rushed that Australian beach shooter. The civilian running into a burning house without protective gear to save another.

But there is no clear line separating heroism from doing one's duty. If you abandon your MG nest because the enemy is firing rifles towards your trench line, that might be seen as a dereliction of duty by most -- a soldier who curls up behind cover any time there is lead in the air is not very useful, after all. If you get hit, I would personally consider your duty to man your post discharged, and consider a decision to continue to fire (and likely learn how many more shots it will take to disable you really soon) as going beyond what can be expected. (If I would consider it as 'heroic' depends on the specifics, most warfare conduct being roughly zero sum.)

Of course, different cultures have different expectations there, and some did and do expect people to have a duty to engage in suicide missions.

And in the military, where most state-sponsored gun use tends to take place, a failure to do your duty is generally seen as worthy of criminal punishment. Historically, pretty harsh too, especially when your self-preservation instinct got a lot of the wrong people killed.

I will grant you that cops are not soldiers and we actually require them to have a vast skill set to employ outside of Rambo violence, and that even most militaries today are very reluctant to actually hang someone for cowardice even if they caused deaths on the wrong side (though I would imagine that Ukraine would be a lot more willing to do so than the US in GWB's oversea wars).

The job of a police officer is not to protect people. Their job is to enforce the laws of their jurisdiction. It's the ugly truth.

Plenty of good police officers have the instinct and desire to protect others, like the Nashville officers. But it is not in fact their job, and they have repeatedly been found not guilty for failing to protect people. This is not the first time a police officer or police department has been sued for not protecting someone. Even under the most unsympathetic circumstances for the officers they get found not guilty.

This should be an ugly reminder for people. Self defense is a personal right, but the government will not help you secure that right. They won't even help children who are incapable of responsible self defense secure that right.

I wonder how gun control advocates have responded to the fact that police have no obligation to protect anyone, if they have even addressed that at all. It's already bad enough that in the best case scenario, the police are only minutes away when seconds matter. But the fact that police can and have done nothing at all? I would be interested in seeing their counterargument for why people shouldn't arm themselves and have the ability to be their own first responder.

I wonder how gun control advocates have responded to the fact that police have no obligation to protect anyone, if they have even addressed that at all.

Mostly they ignore it. Warren v. DC comes up all the time in online Second Amendment discussions, but since the anti-gunners and the mainstream media are on the same side, they don't have to address it in public.

I imagine it's not a conversation they enjoy, since inevitably it would force them to address the fact that unless we increase the amount of cops by orders of magnitude, they simply cannot be there to protect people in many or most cases. Not that their policy choice cannot be defended despite this, after all the optimal number of children drowning in pools is not zero. But the gun control side puts a lot of effort in thinking around this, as it feels wrong in a primal way, especially for men (and blue tribe men are still men, they do feel the macho impulse to be providers and protectors), that they are not trusted with the tools to defend their family or themselves and need to rely on people who are not likely to be present when it counts. It's not great to have to go and acknowledge "Yeah, some people are going to die helpless without means to defend themselves, but such is the price of safety", the same way the opposite side doesn't enjoy acknowledging that "some people are going to get shot with guns being legal but such is the price of freedom and self-reliance".

I imagine it's not a conversation they enjoy, since inevitably it would force them to address the fact that unless we increase the amount of cops by orders of magnitude, they simply cannot be there to protect people in many or most cases.

We've already had cases where police were present and watching things unfold and did not intervene until the civilian in question had subdued the attacker.

So even if you increase the number of law enforcement in the field to a stratospheric number, that still doesn't mean they have to do jack all.

We've already had cases where police were present and watching things unfold and did not intervene until the civilian in question had subdued the attacker.

It was New York City, that guy should count himself lucky they didn't arrest him after all was said and done.

So even if you increase the number of law enforcement in the field to a stratospheric number, that still doesn't mean they have to do jack all.

Yeah, but what we're talking here is an hypothetical scenario where we were addressing the fact that they don't have to do anything. My point was that the gun control side doesn't want to get into this discussion because discussing this gets to close to discussing how even if they were forced to defend the population, you'd need even more police than in the worst police states for them to actually be close enough to stop most violent crimes in time.

Most of them are fine with only the police having guns. They will generally argue something about stricter gun control making school shootings less frequent because the shooter wouldn't be able to get a gun in the first place. Yes, you can readily pick at this, but you aren't going to cause them to segfault by proposing a dilemma like "police don't have to protect you, but school shootings happen."

When they address it, it’s usually some variation of ‘guns don’t help’ with true but misleading statistics about running away saving lives in confrontations or dogs deterring burglars well.

I wonder how gun control advocates have responded to the fact that police have no obligation to protect anyone, if they have even addressed that at all.

The fact that (American) cops are under no obligation to protect anyone isn't a law of nature.

Just like a gun control advocate can advocate for changing the laws with regards to who can own which gun, he can obviously also advocate for actually forcing the cops to protect people.

You can probably count the actual people who hold the implied opinion "nobody should be allowed to defend themself, and cops shouldn't protect anyone" on the fingers of one hand.

There is a fundamental tension between protecting people and enforcing the law.

There are plenty of "victimless crimes" on the books. And way more laws where the act of arresting and imprisoning a person is way more dangerous and harmful than what you are trying to prevent.

It's why "police" didn't really exist until the 1800s. Prior to that time the roles were more split up and dispersed. Sheriff's would form a posse to go catch criminals. Standing armies were typically the way governments enforced their edicts and laws. Towns and cities sometimes had proto-police forces called a town watch, but usually they were more oriented towards protecting the rich and politically powerful.

Town watches were most frequently militia organizations oriented towards external defense.

England and Philadelphia had proto police town watch.

Most != All

And I'm talking about history of police so context clues should lead you to think about the proto police town watches not the defense force town watches.

OK, but which one actually gets done? WA is passing a law to handicap 3d printers (and cnc lates and end mills, because they're idiots) in order to stop ghost guns. Have they done anything to require police to protect people?

No. Instead, and you'll never believe this, they vote to protect criminals instead.

Maybe they're just communists who want to take away all the guns, let loose all the criminals, and steal all my wealth through taxation. And maybe if the gun-grabbers didn't want me to think they're nothing but communists, they wouldn't always be on the side of criminals and taxes.

But the typical self-defense gun owner does not 3d print a ghost gun- in fact very few people do. They buy their guns at a regular gun store.

Now I don’t really think there is much of a reason for passing this law, but it’s not ipso facto an attack on self defense. It is merely an attempt to address a non-problem.

Their problem is real, it's just not the one that they are claiming to address.

Maybe they're just communists who want to take away all the guns, let loose all the criminals, and steal all my wealth through taxation. And maybe if the gun-grabbers didn't want me to think they're nothing but communists, they wouldn't always be on the side of criminals and taxes.

Or maybe laws are made by voting among a body of legislators, and are differentiated in regard to the ease with which they are passed.

You'll also note that making it harder to create your own guns is orthogonal to whether guns are allowed in the first place; it is perfectly cromulent to have legal recreational McNukes (for example), but where the government wants to know who happens to own WMDs.

You'll also note that making it harder to create your own guns is orthogonal to whether guns are allowed in the first place

This is flatly not true and it's laughable on its face, especially in light of the comment you're responding to. The same people making it harder to make are the ones making it harder to own, and they're doing both for the same reasons. There's nothing orthogonal about it, these are highly correlated events.

It appears to be the actual position of multiple major governments, however. I think for iron law reasons we can just kind of assume that that’s the equilibrium we’ll wind up at if self defense is more restricted.

Just like a gun control advocate can advocate for changing the laws with regards to who can own which gun, he can obviously also advocate for actually forcing the cops to protect people.

I mean, he can. Does he? Could be my own ignorance talking here, but I don't think I've ever heard this point from gun control advocates. It ought to be a lot easier to get passed than gun control, since the committed opposition is... the police union, I guess? Not half the country; you can see the rightists in this thread agree cops should have that duty. And by doing so first they'd make gun control more likely by neutering this argument against it. So where is the advocacy?

The gun control side doesn't want to discuss self-defense and protection, it's not a productive topic for their side. Having to rely on the police for your protection is something they want to steer the conversation away from, because even if you did neuter the anti control argument that the police don't have to protect by making it that yes the police does have to protect people, they are still not likely to be present when it matters, and neutering that argument is not really possible.

I think the answer is that the vast majority of gun control advocacy is a poorly thought through emotional reaction, and not something based on considering the issue. This is not the same thing as gun control advocates being low IQ, they just aren't really thinking. Some of this is for tribal reasons and some of it is for normal toxoplasmosis but most of it is because it's predominately an emotional reaction to extreme tail events. Very, very few gun control advocates are focused on handguns- statistically the firearm used in such an overwhelmingly large percent of our gun deaths that it rounds to 100%. Add in the outright fabulists like the violence policy center and the tribally-driven shitflinging and you tend to wind up with gun control advocates that stop, research, and think about the issue being notably different from other gun control groups; the Brady campaign isn't welcome at their dinner parties ever since it decided to do the research.

I wonder how gun control advocates have responded to the fact that police have no obligation to protect anyone, if they have even addressed that at all. It's already bad enough that in the best case scenario, the police are only minutes away when seconds matter. But the fact that police can and have done nothing at all? I would be interested in seeing their counterargument for why people shouldn't arm themselves and have the ability to be their own first responder.

I'm not a gun control guy, but my justification for opposing it isn't this particular self defense line. I think a gun control advocate would say that guns don't really protect you either in the sense you're looking for. Both guns and police are post crime tools. They can be used to punish/kill criminals but by the time you're using one you're already in a situation where you've been aggressed upon. Yes, there are high profile weird cases like rittenhouse or the few times a lady shoots her night time assailant, there are definitely some situations where a gun will help, but it's not a talisman and mostly it helps by making possible aggressors afraid on consequences, which is also how the police function.

Even given SCOTUS precedent in Castle Rock, "This decision affirmed the controversial principle that state and local government officials have no affirmative duty to protect the public from harm it did not create" (WP), I think there are legal workarounds. My parsing of that sentence is that they have no implied legal duty. You could just add a law to the books that a police officer who fails to stop a victim from getting hurt because he deviates from standard police protocol without sufficient excuse will get punished. We do punish air traffic controllers who fail to prevent planes from colliding (even if they did not set the planes on a collision path), or teachers who fail to report sexual abuse of kids.

Even if the ruling applied more broadly, e.g. that no official could ever be held responsible for stopping a harm they did not create, and any law to such an effect was void (which would severely limit what tasks we could trust officials with, e.g. an EPA chemist might decide to just affirm that all measurements are below thresholds instead of actually running his measurements -- he did not create the harm, after all), I think there would be some workarounds.

A city could only hire cops who are also willing to work as civilian guards concurrently, and give them the obligation to protect people in their capacity as civilian contractors. Or you could try some legal trickery to make them national guards and place them under the UCMJ (or state level equivalent), then issue them a general order to follow standard procedures to keep civilians safe. § 892 is very broad in what punishments you can get, after all.

But also, the fact that there is no affirmative duty for cops to protect you is not in itself very relevant. The relevant question is, when you call 911 to report an intruder in your home, what is the probability that the cops will respond "not now, baseball is on"? Them getting in trouble over failing to act will not resurrect you.

If the probability of a grossly unprofessional response is high, then that is indeed a reason to rely more on self-defense. Just the fact that it would be legal (but still involve professional repercussions, the Uvalde officers will probably not find a PD willing to employ them again) is not particularly relevant.

For example, I do not know if an EMT who decided they can make a quick detour to McDonald's while responding to a medical emergency would face criminal charges. Knowing the answer to that question is not very relevant to the amount of first aid I would want to learn. OTOH, if I knew that ambulances were notoriously unreliable, that would certainly motivate me to learn more first aid and keep more supplies ready.

In the end, it is a numbers game. You have to weigh the probability that you will use a handgun to defend yourself (which is certainly related to the competence of your local PD) against the probability that it is used to kill an innocent, either because your toddler finds it, a tinder date who is a lot crazier than you thought finds it, you use it recklessly while dead drunk, etc. Looking at statistics, gun deaths from accidents and civilian self-defense are actually quite rare, and the likeliest use a non-criminal will find for a gun is suicide. (Which might be an argument for or against gun ownership depending on your other beliefs.)

This should be an ugly reminder for people. Self defense is a personal right, but the government will not help you secure that right.

If all they did was not help people secure that right, that would be not ideal, but tolerable. They actively prevented people from securing it.

Even if you believe cops should only enforce the law, not protect people, they shouldn't actively put others' lives at stake (like these cops did blocking parents). At minimum, that will make people resent cops and the law itself, which will make it harder to enforce.

Moreover, enforcing the law is not just arresting people, but preventing the law (e.g. murder) from being broken.

Even if you believe cops should only enforce the law

Emphasis added. There is a difference between talking about what Ought to be and what Is. I was mostly talking about what Is. I agree that there Ought to be a police like force that is responsible for protecting us, and if the police are not gonna do it they Ought not get in the way of others doing it.

This ruling did not surprise me, I was only slightly surprised that the officer was charged in the first place. It seems to have surprised others, so I was sharing my mental map of the situation. It is possible to be unsurprised and disappointed in the way the world works, that is how I feel here.

followed the correct procedures

But is that what happened in Uvalde?

Two months before Tuesday's mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, that left 19 children and two adults dead, the Uvalde school district hosted an all-day training session for local police and other school-based law enforcement officers focused on "active shooter response."

"First responders to the active shooter scene will usually be required to place themselves in harm's way," according to a lengthy course description posted online by the Texas agency that developed the training. "Time is the number-one enemy during active shooter response. ... The best hope that innocent victims have is that officers immediately move into action to isolate, distract or neutralize the threat, even if that means one officer acting alone."

The excuse for ignoring all that was that the cops supposedly thought the shooter was barricaded in there alone, not with children, hence they were in no rush to assault the shooter and were free to assault the kids' parents instead.

The excuse for ignoring all that was that the cops supposedly thought the shooter was barricaded in there alone, not with children, hence they were in no rush to assault the shooter and were free to assault the kids' parents instead.

Interesting.

According to this timeline of events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uvalde_school_shooting#Timeline_of_events

They originally thought this and began the barricaded shooter playbook. But then they were informed there were kids inside and failed to process the update and switch tactics.

Replying to myself, having read the timeline, can we all just recognize that the off-duty Border Patrol agent came on scene, saw how retarded the Uvalde police were, ignored their command structure, asked a school administrator for the master key, opened the door, and then organized a breach party in like 5 minutes? Bro got shit done.

To be fair, according to the timeline there were only 19 of them, sitting on their backsides for the better part of an hour while kids were bleeding out. And there were multiple border patrol agents, per official reports.

It seems that Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District (UCISD) Chief Arredondo was in charge for most of the situation, until the CBP breached protocol by going in and saving the remaining kids.

If their is a villain in this story apart from the shooter, it seems that guy is it.

Now, I know nothing about how schools in Uvalde work, but I would be surprised if that guy was actually the one with the most tactical experience in gunfights. A protocol where a school cop is in charge seems bad. (Funny side note: Germany (and Europe in general, I think) does not have police units for schools. Even large universities do not have their own police units. Instead, we rely on municipal police departments.)

But also, it means that 18 of the 19 cops were following procedures in so far as they were obeying the orders of their commanding officer.

This is not a case like the Floyd murder, where Chauvin's colleagues were convicted of abetting manslaughter. Arredondo was not obviously engaging in a criminal act. Ideally, the other officers would have voiced their disagreement with his tactical decisions, but at the end of the day, a police operation is not a democracy where cops vote on what they feel their next tactical step should be.

Even if they were all telling him "that guy has an AR-15, don't make us go in there", that makes them cowards, but there is generally no law against that.

OTOH, from the timeline, it seems like Arredondo belongs in prison. Oh, and if the acting UPD chief did have the authority to overrule him he should join him.

The Texas State Police on site outnumbered the school police and appeared much better armed. One wonders why the ranking officer with the Texas State Police did not get frustrated with the slow progress, walk up to Arredondo, say you suck, you're out. My men are in. Have your people stand outside and try not o shoot your own dicks off when the action starts.

The fundamental problem is that there's just no law saying a police officer has to protect anyone. See Castle Rock v. Gonzales and Warren v. DC. That's why they've gone with child endangerment charges, which is a huge stretch compared to something more relevant. It's the same tactic they tried with that Parkland deputy who also did nothing during a school shooting, and he got acquitted too.

Police are required to protect people directly in their custody, such as the cop who left a detainee in a patrol car parked on train tracks and was convicted for the foreseeable train collision.

I don't see a general requirement to protect, but school children are placed in loco parentis. It's not like the parents can come in and defend them. It's a shame the Parkland and Uvalde school district law enforcement who were directly responsible for the school were not convicted.

It's a shame the Parkland and Uvalde school district law enforcement who were directly responsible for the school were not convicted.

The laws on child endangerment just weren't made for them. For example, in the Parkland case, for the charge to stick they had to argue with a straight face that the deputy was somehow a caretaker of the children, as in he would have been giving them meals and monitoring them to make sure they don't do anything stupid. Obviously, that's not the case, so he was acquitted.

I have not followed the case. But being a coward in the moment does not seem like a criminal charge to me.

His appropriate punishment is being fired from the police force for being a coward. Most decent jobs in his community he is rejected from. He then has to take a job paying $25 an hour as the night shift manager at McDonalds.

Yes he should have done more. But cowards are not criminals. Maybe if he has sons they have a hard year for a grade in school and the class bully gets to wail on them once. The loss of stature etc is the way for society to police someone being a coward. And then we move on.

I disagree. I think a police officer has a duty to not be a coward. When you accept that job, that role, you promise to do the right thing and stand up to evil in exchange for money and prestige and being put on a schedule filled with people who have made that promise. So that when an emergency happens, we have people who we can count on to stand up and be the hero because they have made that promise. That's what you've been being paid for all this time. You are the insurance and the emergency has happened and now you have to pay up. It is your obligation. You don't get to claim to not be a coward in order to pass a job interview and then get paid for months and months not putting your life at risk only to back out as soon as your life is at risk.

I'm not sure that I would have the courage to put my life at risk to stop a shooter or other criminal. So I'm not a police officer. They're not paying me to do the job that I'm not doing. And it's not just about the money, it's about the slot. We need people who can stand up to criminals, and if there aren't enough we go to further lengths and recruit more and pay more until we can hire enough of them. If you make a promise to stand up to criminals and then don't, you are taking up a slot that someone else could have filled. When they called the police and four officers arrived at the scene, they could have called four brave officers instead of cowards, if we as a society had done a better job of screening and training and there weren't any coward police officers because it disqualified them from the job.

It's fraud, dereliction of duty, to take up the position that requires you to not be a coward. I don't think it's criminal for just a random person to be a coward. It's criminal to voluntarily take up a legal duty and then renege on it after the fact.

"you promise to do the right thing and stand up to evil in exchange for money and prestige and being put on a schedule filled with people who have made that promise."

This is not an adult understanding of LEO.

It is not dereliction of duty. That is a military standard that applies to the military. And it would be impossible to prove he knew in advance that he would behave like a coward once he faced real danger.

He is a disappointment as a human being. That is not a criminal offense. The punishment for being a poor excuse for a person is public shaming. Which this trial caused -- his cowardice and disregard of children's lives was exposed via mass media to the entire world. His face was on every newspaper front page, like he was a depraved criminal. He has been punished with the ultimate shaming; beyond tar and feathers and scarlet letters.

People died.

Shaming is an appropriate response to things like shouting racial slurs, or cheating on your partner, or being a coward and backing down from a domestic violence abuser who is not immediately threatening anyone's life.

He has been punished with the ultimate shaming; beyond tar and feathers and scarlet letters.

No. This was mild. Tar and feathers causes massive physical trauma and can result in death. Scarlet letters require you to physically carry it around with you and everyone who sees you knows what it means and what you did. Anyone who doesn't watch the news isn't going to recognize this guy on sight. If he moves to another town then a year from now no one he meets on the street will recognize him. This was a medium sized shaming. In sheer total number of people who hate him now sure it outweighs anything anyone would have experienced a hundred years ago, because the news is so widespread. But in relative terms, the percentage of people he meets in his daily life who will even recognize him is probably less than 10%.

More importantly, shaming can't undo what he did, and clearly it can't pre-emptively disincentivize it. People died here. People died because the police were cowards instead of heroes, and taking the place of the real heroes who could have been there if people had known there was an absence. If these individuals did not exist, or refused to apply to the job, then someone else could have taken their place and saved lives.

I'm not a legal expert, I'm not concerned with the pedantic details about what the law literally says their obligations are in the specific jurisdiction this took place in, but what it should be. The police should be legally required to do their jobs, and their jobs should legally require them to intervene in this sort of situation, and police who enable this sort of mass shooting should face criminal penalties for failing to stop it. If what they did is not technically against the law then the laws should be changed, and then all the cowards can stop larping as police officers because they'll be afraid of getting in trouble, and make room for people willing to do the job and save lives.

If the only consequence is shame then cowards are going to keep being police officers, cross their fingers, and hope they don't ever encounter a shooting. Departments are going to keep poorly training people, because they won't face legal consequences either. If we want this to not happen again (because it's happened before too) there needs to be consequences.

It is not dereliction of duty. That is a military standard that applies to the military. And it would be impossible to prove he knew in advance that he would behave like a coward once he faced real danger.

Right, which is why we need deterrence of punishment after the fact.

A town can only afford to hire so many police officers (and firefighters), they should be assured that the ones they hire will do the job.

One of the unspoken assumptions about our legal system is that it isn’t illegal to be bad at your job. The defense made a decent argument that the officers initially thought that the suspect went into the school to flee from the cops. This was a bad assumption with massive downside risk in the event they were wrong (which they were), but it was still explainable as a good faith mistake.

Actually, it can be illegal. A doctor whose defense is "Yes, so I confused milligrams and micrograms and so injected the patient with 500x the maximum dose, silly me" will end up in jail. So will a civil engineer who miscalculated a bridge because he assumed that a bus would weigh no more than 50kg.

Nor is this limited to academic professions. A truck driver going 80km/h in a 30km/h zone and running over a kid will go to jail. So will a lifeguard at a swimming pool who falls asleep on the job and lets someone drown. (I will grant that both of these examples are of criminal negligence or recklessness.)

My gut feeling is that if 30% of your profession would have made the same mistake (e.g. not tested for a rare disease, not spotted a badly visible tumor in an MRI image, failed to take a life-saving shot or missed that shot), we can not really send you to prison for being subpar and unlucky (unless you were doing something illegal at the time, like going above the speed limit).

OTOH, if 99% of your profession would have made your mistake with a lower frequency than you would, then it is less of a "you got unlucky to get into that situation" or "you got unlucky and made a mistake that anyone might have made with a small probability" and more of a "the victim got unlucky by having someone so incompetent as a professional", and I generally have no problem with punishing people for that. (This is assuming that 1% of the professionals in most professions have a grossly inadequate skill level, which in my experience is a conservative estimate.)

He wasn't 'bad at his job' he didn't do it in the first place. We punish people for criminal negligence all the time.

What I find really grating about this conversation is that you live in a deeply unserious society, and then when something like this happens people are like oh my god wow how could this have possibly happened. As if all your institutions will just somehow magically be immune to the social and moral decay of the last 100 years. Same thing with the secret service and Trump assasination attempt. I guess a similar thing with covid. All this hand wringing; no where near the root issue, nor even approaching it.

The system is much better at preventing Presidential assassinations than it was 100 years ago. There were some weird things about the Butler, PA assassination attempt, but how close it came to success didn't really surprise me. Trump does many more outdoor events than the typical Presidential candidate or President, and given enough exposure even the Secret Service will eventually almost inevitably slip up.

It's not like there are assassins at every rally. Butler isn't just the secret service happening to screw up once; it's the secret service screwing up consistently enough that about 1 in 3 untrained, civilian assassins manage to slip through.

If the rule you followed all the training and experience brought you to this, of what use was all that training?

When something bad happens, it allows the organization responsible to say, "well, we have a training program in place, so we did our due diligence and are not responsible." See also diversity and sexual harassment training sessions. At worst the organizational fix is to just hire a new set of training consultants to revise the training program.

If they followed the correct procedures, they should be held blameless. Although that should often mean the people who created the procedures should be blamed. (And if the situation could not reasonably be anticipated by even the people who created the procedures, nobody should be blamed, though the procedures should still be fixed.)

I don't think it is reasonable to expect cops to put their lives on the line in a society that affords them no additional respect. As the saying goes, "you get what you pay for", and I mean "pay" holistically in cash but also in social status and respect. The left wants cops to be culturally conversant therapist mental health experts fluent in six languages, the right wants them to be warriors ready to give up their lives in an instant, but most cops are just people that wanted a job. We could hypothetically get warrior poet therapists willing to lay down their lives at the drop of a hat but we would have to pay them exorbitantly and afford them enormous social status in order to attract the rare person able to fulfill those qualifications.

I think of some of this stuff like an RTS game or something where a society can choose how to allocate its units. And as a society we definitely aren't allocating (through incentives) the kind of hyper-competent people necessary to fulfill the left and the right's fantasies of cops to actual police work. So as I said, you get what you pay for. So yea, this cop is shitty, but I don't blame him, that's just the caliber of person we are choosing to allocate to policing.

As others have pointed out, police officers are afforded a great deal of respect in most communities. Once you adjust for the actual qualifications required, it is hard to think of jobs that offer more respect—fireman and soldier come to mind, but there are not many. And in the few places where they aren't respected, they are at least generally well-compensated. To take an admittedly extreme example, Palo Alto publishes salaries for city employees and you'll often see fairly junior officers managing to pull in 200-300k compensation with the benefit of overtime.

Even outside of HCoL areas, being a police officer can be more lucrative than you'd think. Most departments offer full pensions after 20-25 years, and it is not uncommon for a cop to retire with a full pension from one department and then start over at a second department and collect another pension. (My elite psychiatrist grandfather had a summer house in a highly desirable part of Long Island, and his neighbor was a former NYC police captain who had employed this strategy to great effect.) Additionally, in places like Texas many cops can make more money on the side by moonlighting as armed security. Claude informs me that pay can be anywhere from 25/hr in the worst case, to 150/hr in the best, with 60/hr being typical, which is not bad for what is often just sitting around and watching a concert.

Cops also have excellent insurance and protection for any eventuality. Unlike a civilian or a private security guard, an on-duty cop can know with certainty that any medical expenses incurred will be covered, that disability payments will be generous and indefinitely provided, and that in the worst case, their family will be looked after. The family of a cop killed in the line of duty receives: a one time tax free $420,000 federal pay out, typically the full pension of the dead cop (until death or remarriage of the surviving spouse), as well as department life insurance and additional support from state programs (child subsidies, tuition assistance, state payouts—Texas gives the surviving spouse another 500k!) and private charitable orgs. Basically, society has set things up so that it is fairly easy for a cop to make the heroic decision.

So I don't find the Uvalde officers sympathetic. They took respected, well compensated positions in their community that came with a small condition: a tiny chance that they might actually have to be heroes, rather than just collect the respect and the pay for it. And they failed. I understand it can often be hard to truly know how one might behave in a situation where death is a possible outcome, but I want cops to be composed of the small fraction of the population that doesn't have a hard time answering this question. And in the event a cop that is unlucky enough to be tested finds he made a good faith mistake about his tolerance for danger, I want him to act anyway, because to not do so is incredibly corrosive to the institution of policing and to society at large.

Cowards look at the Uvalde incident and now tell themselves, "hey, I can be a police officer, and in the worse case, if it gets scary, I can just hide." In so doing, they steal the resources society has apportioned to support a warrior, as well as the equipment, the training and the badge. Citizens post Uvalde will look at the police and feel less respect, reducing the effectiveness of law enforcement, the quality of recruits, and the safety of the community. Society is coarsened more generally when the people who are entrusted to "serve and protect" others behave in such a flagrantly selfish manner. Many will look at the low standard set by the Uvalde officers and feel comfortable setting an even lower standard for themselves: "If the police, with their insurance and pensions and line-of-duty death protections can sit by and watch a bunch of little kids get murdered, why should I bother to take the slightest risk to help somebody else?" This is all unacceptable; there need to be consequences.

What consequences? In another time, perhaps shame could have sufficed. But we live in a shameless, atomized society with a lot of mobility, so I don't think shame will do. Instead, I think legal consequences were required: consequences of the sort that would clear out the cowards who know themselves to be cowards and who are currently wearing a badge; consequences that would drive the coward police officers who don't know they are cowards into gunfire, should such a situation arise, because the alternative of hiding would be still more frightening; consequences that would make it clear to citizens that the moral bar for everyone is much, much higher than what happened in Uvalde. For me, it is not about exacting revenge or making the Uvalde officers suffer (I honestly feel badly for them, and I'd personally treat them with a measure of kindness); rather, it's about excising a dangerous rot before it has a chance to spread.

I don't think it is reasonable to expect cops to put their lives on the line in a society that affords them no additional respect.

My former boss was a part-time police officer for the town where he lived.

The amount of stuff people would do for him completely out of the blue when he had to drive the police cruiser was surprising. We're talking 'people paying for his meal in the drive through' level of surprising.

Nevermind the attention from women he'd get when out in uniform.

I've seen a little how the sausage is made, so to speak, so I'm not going to pretend that law enforcement has an easy job, but to say that society affords them no additional respect doesn't line up much with my experience.

Nevermind the attention from women he'd get when out in uniform.

Gotta double-check on that one. Their Hinge profiles are full of ACAB and I personally heard some woman I know talking about finding out her date was a cop and getting the ick.

It's about hit rate, not miss rate. If 90% of women are ACABers and 2.42% are badge bunnies, then their dating pool has ten five women per man (better than college, which is around 1.5). As long as the selection effects aren't too severe (and the numbers are anywhere close to my wild-ass guess), that sounds pretty good.

See also serial killers. They are unattractive to the vast majority of women, but still massively outnumbered by female fans.

"Part Time" and "Town" are giveaways. The kind of town with part time officers will almost always be low crime, and cops will be respected culturally. His main job would be writing speeding tickets to out of towners, writing DUIs (but only to the REALLY DRUNK drivers), amd responding to domestic incidents. In the latter two his judgement is respected by the community and if he deems the person arrestable, they lose an immense amount of social status, regardless of conviction (which is basically guaranteed).

That has almost nothing in common with the experience of a police officer in Chicago or Memphis.

Like most things, it will depend on location. In my flyover Red area, a cop is going to do way better on the dating market than I would as a defense attorney (if I were still single).

'Badge Bunny' is the search term you're looking for.

He'd work alot of local festivals/events(cause, y'know, part-time Police Officer) and he'd get alot of women coming up out of the blue to flirt with him. (He already had/has a girlfriend/partner, so it wasn't as if he was actively looking.)

It was just one of the more amusing things I noted.

Cops in most places (almost certainly including Uvalde) get shitloads of "additional respect". Uvalde ain't Minneapolis or San Francisco or Portland or Seattle.

It may be afforded some additional respect at a low level, but it isn't really afforded prestige, maybe that's a better word for what I'm driving at. If you came from a wealthy, elite family and attended Phillips Exeter or something, would "cop" be considered a valid and respectable career path your family would be proud of? Not really. Tech, finance, doctor, lawyer, academia, those would be considered prestige jobs that would be acceptable for a son of the elite. So while police officers get some ground-level respect at the local diner, it's not really a high prestige. Nobody with a son at an elite private school is saying "I hope he grows up to become a police officer!" And basically the same goes for the military, of course it wasn't always this way but it is now.

Aside from the fact that ‘military officer’ is perhaps the single most acceptable career for elite young men, most people are not and never will be elites. Cops get some additional respect, and that’s all they need.

Upper class cops are FBI agents.

If you're a cop, you can beat up people in tech, doctors, lawyers, academia, judges, and well, pretty much anyone else with impunity. Maybe not politicians. You may not have the prestige of a top doctor, but you have deference from the legal system and respect from the community. This is certainly more than enough to support being required to actually do your job when it involves the sort of things that would actually justify that respect.

What? From article

“Raffaele says he was struck when he came upon officers wrestling with a man wielding a pipe.“

So you can hit a judge if you’re a policeman if the said judge jumps into a fight when a dude is beating you with a pipe. But to be clear you can’t as a policeman just pick a judge and beat the shit out him.

Military can still be high status but it’s far more narrow today. In WW1 from what I’ve read the British elite took a lot of military deaths. If you go into Special Ops - Seal Teams/Delta it has a lot of respect. Lesser Green Beret. Some of this is fitness bro respect. I guess this is dated now but the Pritzkers and the governors brother is a colonel (also a tranny now). It’s more narrow now but there are some paths with military prestige.

It honestly depends. You are talking about rank and file. But most elites wouldn’t be embraced about having a military son who is an officer that goes up the ranks (eg colonel is still very prestigious). But a sergeant? That’s low class.

Most would probably see a local cop as kind of low status. But an FBI agent that moves up the ranks? That’s prestigious.

Speaking as a German, I have a relative who became a cop and I am totally fine with that. It is an important job and we need qualified and well-adjusted people for it. I would be much more reluctant to admit to admit having a relative working in marketing or yellow press journalism, actually. (Of course, Germany might have a different police culture than the US. While I did have unfortunate interactions with police, on the whole my experience is that they are generally friendly and competent.)

American cops are also generally friendly and competent. They’re rarely particularly bright or outside the box thinkers, but the cops killing people makes headlines because it’s so rare(and most of those killings are justifiable and well within the range of normal police behavior in Western Europe). Our police are genuinely less likely to randomly beat the shit out of people than euro cops, though.

It's not about what cops actually do. Six years ago I had actual people I actually knew insisting that police were only invented as a concept to oppress black people and capture runaway slaves. People marched in the street without proper social distancing during a deadly pandemic, chanting that the police should be abolished (yes, sanewash that into "reform" all you want, that's what the people who claimed to speak for the movement said they wanted). 25% of all women's dating profiles have ACAB in them to this day.

25% of all women's dating profiles have ACAB in them to this day.

Citation needed? Sorry to be annoying; usually when I see an unsupported claim that looks like hyperbole I'll try to be the change I want to see in the world and find references myself rather than just asking for them, or even do the sample counting myself if I have to ... but I'm happily married and "I swear I only downloaded that dating app to tally statistics! Statistics!!" is the sort of idiot plot that I wouldn't even want to watch in a sitcom.

I'll admit to some hyperbole there, but I'm pretty sure being a Leftist requires you to hate cops, and "I'm a Leftist and you must be one too" IS on 25% of the Hinge profiles I see.

I don't think the far left wants cops to also be therapists, I think they want to send therapists and protective services in instead of or in addition to cops. I think this is to some degree a stupid idea, but it is different from what you described.

It depends on risk. I don't expect a cop to sacrifice themselves to save a civilian, but I expect a cop to at least shout from a distance at an unarmed man.

I think it was these cops' duty to intervene. This case is more like the latter scenario: there was risk, but one shooter against multiple cops with bulletproof vests doesn't seem like much for the cops. It's especially egregious that they prevented parents from intervening. They did worse than nothing.

Should they face jail time for not doing so? Personally I lean towards no: the cops aren't a danger to society, and I think jail should be reserved for more obvious (serious, direct) crimes. But jail time wasn't mentioned in the NYTimes article, it may not have been certain. The cops should definitely be fired and shamed, and fining them seems reasonable (especially if the fines go to the parents).

failing to hold people accountable for high-profile failures because they had the correct credentials and merit badges

I mean, of course they wouldn't be held accountable- for the credentials exist solely to front-load accountability (and act as a form of corporate welfare for the class of people who work for the organizations that bestow them). So...

If all the training and experience brought you to this, of what use was all that training?

...sure, maybe doing that is destructive, but it justified the education-managerial complex for a while and that's what actually matters.

at least three other officers had arrived seconds later and also failed to stop the gunman

We should try this for other crimes. Your honor, there were 3 other guys also (robbing the bank|rioting against ICE|storming the capitol)!

I see what you did there, friendo.

Another random thought.

I remember when gun control laws limiting the ownership of AR-15s were dubbed "scary gun laws". The implication being these laws simply ban weapons guns the left thinks look scary. I am sure that some of the laws were focusing on the wrong characteristics, like Clinton's Federal assault weapon ban focusing on flash suppressors.

Still, looking at the Uvalde timeline, it is very apparent that pink haired leftists who have never held a gun in their lives are not the only ones who consider AR-15s "scary guns":

He's got an AR-15. He's shot a lot ... we don't have firepower right now ... It's all pistols

It seems to me that this was a major factor in the cops being reluctant to open/breach the door and engage the shooter.

I am not a gun expert, but I think there are some points which make a semiautomatic assault-style rifle much scarier than a handgun in a firefight. The 5.56x45mm is likely a lot more capable of defeating body armor than 9x19mm. If you are wearing body armor while facing a handgun, you can reasonably hope your opponent is shooting common JHPs, no such hope with an assault rifle. A rifle will enable a shooter to fire accurate shots in quicker succession than with a pistol. The magazine size is less likely to be a tactical limitation than for a handgun.

Sure, the cops will have AR-15s which fire bursts (once they fetch them from their vehicles), while civilians are restricted to semiautomatic versions, but it does not seem that this is a big difference in deadliness.

The primary purpose of an AR-15 seems to be to take out a guy in a firefight who dressed for the occasion. (Secondary purposes like sports shooting have been invented, but these seem like an excuse to own a cool gun to me. If you allowed Texans to own hand grenades, they would invent a 'sport' involving their use as well.) For home defense, they seem overkill -- the central example of a criminal home invader is some junkie carrying a stolen handgun, not a close quarter combat team in body armor.

So the point of civilian ownership would be that it is a rifle near the cutting edge of current military technology which will enable civilians to effectively engage government forces. Some consider this beneficial in itself. I think it is a bit of an odd place to set the border between prohibited and allowed technology, though.

An AR-15 might be used to effectively engage police departments. But any government (tyrannic or otherwise) faced with an insurgency (e.g. anti-government forces openly carrying long arms) will not rely on police departments to combat them. Against an infantry armed with small arms only, any commander would use armored vehicles (which are impervious to AR-15s) and helicopters (which are at least very hard to shoot down using rifles). Luckily, there are relatively cheap weapon systems which enable infantry to combat either effectively: RPGs and MPADSs. Any infantry force faced with even a third-rate military would want either. Simply having a credible threat against vehicles and aircrafts will limit the use your enemy gets out of his tens-of-million-dollar toys.

Of course, either could also do a lot of damage in the hands of someone bent on killing a lot of civilians, e.g. by shooting down an airliner, and legalizing them would by necessity also legalize high explosives. Still would be a more logical place to draw the line than at semi assault style rifles, IMO.

(Realistically, an US insurgency powered by 2A weapons would stick to the cities, hiding among a civil population a federal government might be reluctant to bomb. I just don't think AR-15s would play a big role. They are not very concealable, for one thing.)

I am not a gun expert

And it does show.

we don't have firepower right now ... It's all pistols

This is always going to be a problem when you bring only your sidearm to a gunfight. Even if your opponent only has handguns (which have the problem of being easier to conceal), you'd still be better off grabbing your long gun from the trunk. Or, more likely, for modern departments running Ford Explorers from a center console mount.

See rule 6 of gun fighting:

If you can choose what to bring to a gunfight, bring a long gun and a friend with a long gun.

Yes, any rifle cartridge fired from a rifle-length barrel will have more kinetic energy than a pistol caliber fired from a pistol-length barrel. No, this is not unique to guns that look particularly scary. No, there is nothing magical about 5.56; FMJ, varmint rounds, soft points, steel cores, etc., exist for all sorts of rifle rounds. The various American .30s used ubiquitously for game like deer in North America are all capable of being more powerful than the 5.56. The main advantage of the 5.56 is a flatter trajectory at intermediate distance, which doesn't matter indoors.

For home defense, there are different philosophies. The advantage of the 5.56 is the velocity gives you the ability to use frangible ammunition, which reduces the risk of overpenetration. There is also no need for portability or concealment for home defense, which favors the more effective long gun. See rule 6.

The cops do have other slight advantages in an indoor environment. Mainly, they can use carbine-length barrels, which are more wieldy for clearing work. The rest of us would have to fill out an eon's worth of paperwork to get permission from the ATF to make an SBR.

The AR platform is far from cutting-edge at this point, being designed in 1956 (70 years ago). They have, in fact, made a difference even if a government has armor, see, for example, the Troubles.


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