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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   31678 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026

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Apologies if someone has brought this up already, but new video of Pretty is out from days before he died.

https://apnews.com/article/minneapolis-ice-alex-pretti-videos-immigration-809506eb23f44a3e8f6e53b9fda7b700

He appears to be caught on video at least one other time engaging violently with the police while armed (for some definitions of violent) and is alleged by some sources to have been spitting at the cops.

This generates two thoughts for me:

  1. Every single time. Every one. The person involved deserved it - many here may think deserve applies in the traditional sense, but I think at minimum we see "deserve" here in the sense of "engaged in stupid avoidable behavior that necessitated the response or failing that represents a lifestyle that drastically increases the likelihood of a bad outcome."

Don't do crimes. Hell, don't be a career criminal doing multiple crimes. Don't engage in unethical and illegal protests. Don't attack the police, however well intentioned. Rarely - don't date people who commit serious and violent crimes.

I can think of a very small number of cases where this sort of thing didn't turn out to be true and while those are tragedies we have a large population with a large criminal underclass, if our ratio is a hundred million to one then we are doing okay.

These are simple rules - don't be a criminal asshole, even if you are convinced of your own virtue unless you can accept the consequences. And perhaps we shouldn't burn down our society for anti-social criminals.

As corollaries-

I am now essentially convinced you can dismiss most defenses of these individuals reflexively. This is probably not good intellectual hygiene but every single time (every one!) you see a lot of lies put forth without evidence that don't make sense and often contradict available information. People later acknowledge the error or follow-up. People still don't know the undisputed facts about Rittenhouse, or the issues with the Arbery narrative (as seen in this weeks thread).

Additionally I don't know how many of us here actually regularly interact with American black people but it's a core feature of my job and I have some in my extended family. They (and their woke allies) are absolutely convinced they are liable to be killed for no reason at all at any time by police. This includes the guy from the ghetto, this includes the well behaved upper class by birth Harvard educated chair of surgery who walks to and from work in a suit more expensive than most cars.

The beliefs many people have are just completely untethered from reality and unchallenged. If knowledge is a justified true belief then these people know nothing.

  1. The psychology of the left is worse than you think and if anyone has any white pilling at all I'd love it.

My social network is unsurprisingly riddled with healthcare professionals, as Pretti was. To fully describe what I see in most of them in full would likely get labeled as a straw man, so I won't, but most of the accusations seem to be trivially true for me - they think Trump is literally Hitler and that ICE is the Gestapo, they are seeking violence and finds it justified and at the same time don't seem to think what they are doing constitutes violence.

Perhaps most importantly - everyone seems to have big opinions and feelings about politics but at the same time has no quality information, consumed no quality analysis and doesn't know agreed upon facts, much less the ones that aren't agree upon. Nothing has ever been engaged with critically, analyzed, discussed, pushed back on.

This includes the highly intelligent and educated and the guy who pushes the food carts.

Feelings about ICE and Pretti and Good are mandatory. Informed opinions are absent.

In truth I am not sure why I wrote this, some if it is surely cover to point out that Pretti appears to be an idiot. Some of it is processing my feelings. I don't think much of what I'm saying is novel, but I can tell those who don't have the experience that as someone working in an environment with a lot of minorities and a lot of institutionalized wokeness...well people have been lobotomized.

Perhaps I'm hoping someone will say something that gives me hope, but even here our left leaning posters mostly seem to be blind soldiers for the cause.

This is totally retarded. The standard that best protects officers from being second guessed in the courts is the "moment of threat" rule (although it was dialed back a bit in Barnes) in which plaintiffs and courts cannot go back indefinitely into the encounter. That sort of thing is abused a lot in State civil courts that don't need to follow federal precedent -- for example in a civil suit in CA, you'll see arguments that officers precipitated the conditions for deadly force by standing in the way of a vehicle.

You really really don't want to open the door to evaluating these kinds of things based on what anyone did in the minutes up to the use of deadly force, let alone days before or just general "this guy is a thug" vibes. Even if it's true, it undermines the entire analytic structure and that structure is by far the most beneficial to law and order more generally.

This is totally retarded. The standard that best protects officers from being second guessed in the courts is the "moment of threat" rule (although it was dialed back a bit in Barnes) in which plaintiffs and courts cannot go back indefinitely into the encounter.

This was not "dialed back a bit" in Barnes. It was completely overturned and throughly repudiated in Barnes. (And rightly so -- imagine the Good case, only no Ross and the cop who was at her driver's door jumps up on the doorsill as she's driving away and shoots her because he's now in danger)

You really really don't want to open the door to evaluating these kinds of things based on what anyone did in the minutes up to the use of deadly force, let alone days before or just general "this guy is a thug" vibes.

From Barnes

Most notable here, the “totality of the circumstances” inquiry into a use of force has no time limit. Of course, the situation at the precise time of the shooting will often be what matters most; it is, after all, the officer’s choice in that moment that is under review. But earlier facts and circumstances may bear on how a reasonable officer would have understood and responded to later ones. Or as the Federal Government puts the point, those later, “in-the-moment” facts “cannot be hermetically sealed off from the context in which they arose.” Taking account of that context may benefit either party in an excessive-force case. Prior events may show, for example, why a reasonable officer would have perceived otherwise ambiguous conduct of a suspect as threatening. Or instead they may show why such an officer would have perceived the same conduct as innocuous. The history of the interaction, as well as other past circumstances known to the officer, thus may inform the reasonableness of the use of force.

(Omitted inline citation)

In this case, if those prior interactions were known to the officer, they may well be relevant.

It should be noted that SCOTUS didn't rule directly on officer-created jeopardy, just said that the "moment of threat" doctrine is wrong and totality of the circumstances is correct and sent the case back to the lower court for them to make the ruling with the proper standard. Does anyone know if the ruling has come out yet or if there are rulings for other cases with officer-created jeopardy made under the totality of the circumstances?

The Fifth Circuit reaffirmed, without any new argument, the summary dismissal on remand. Apparently they've been learning from the way the First, Second and Ninth circuits managed SCOTUS on gun cases. I imagine it will eventually go back to to the Supreme Court and (because this isn't a gun case) the Supreme Court will tell them that no, you do have to actually consider what we told you.

Officer-created jeopardy, on the other hand, is an untenable doctrine on its face... a similar thing doesn't even exist for civilians, and part of the job of police officers is sometimes to put themselves in jeopardy. Affirming that doctrine is basically making heroes of the Uvalde cops.

IMO, unrestricted suffrage was a big mistake.

As someone who has worked a job where you encounter a lot of criminals, your sentiments are not unheard of. Both the part where you dont really care anymore and the part where you feel swamped with idiots who insist on giving them chance number 1200. Because of this, I basically went into, "do your job" mode, wherein I defined doing my job as getting results that were, averaged over all cases, beneficial to the public. Sometimes this meant bad results on individual cases. A sorta bad guy gets a decent offer because a really bad guy has trial scheduled the same day. Sometimes it means driving a hard bargain even on a bad case for a bad guy and risking him getting no sentence at all because the conduct you allege is so egregious.

I think the plan of doing your job mostly works when you are encountering the dregs of society. Any other plan will cause you troubles.

Sometimes this meant bad results on individual cases. A sorta bad guy gets a decent offer because a really bad guy has trial scheduled the same day.

I don't understand the constrained resource here. Why do you go easier on the sorta bad guy because there's a really bad guy who has a trial scheduled the same day? Is it just exhausting to go maximally hard on both of them?

Speedy trial considerations. You can't do multiple trials, particularly jury trials at once

the part where you feel swamped with idiots who insist on giving them chance number 1200

Oh yeah, my reaction to an idiot judge (and I know I'm being unfair here, I have no clue as to her reasoning) who went, while sentencing a couple for prolonged abuse of their children, "but they're engaging with therapy and are really sorry now" was "you goddamn fool, these are the same people who coached their kids to lie to the child services and social workers about how everything was fine at home. why do you think they're sincere now, and are not lying to the therapists and to you in order to get reduced sentences?"

I know I could never be a social worker (a former boss came out of social work and was a much better person than me, and also much more compassionate even while acknowledging that yeah, some people game the system). But I also could not be a judge, because I do not understand how you come to the conclusion that proven liars are now this one time telling the truth, when lying is to their observable advantage.

The world is full of such judges. And when they run into someone whose bad behavior was through error that the person regrets, they'll consider that person insincere and throw the book at them.

Lying to game the system is a submission to the system and reinforces the judge's position.

Sincere regret is a submission to actual morality and needs to be punished.

You know I've never had any issue with treating patients who are rapists, murderers, and pedophiles (and rarely even worse).

But my now my friends and colleagues are starting to remind me of those people...

Some of us still think that "deserve it" means "commit a crime that would normally attract the death penalty".

This is a confusion or equivocation about a word that can be used in multiple, similar senses.

Imagine a man goes to a bad part of town. He gets very drunk, flashes around his expensive watch and wallet full of cash, and then passes out in a gutter.

You wouldn't say he "deserves" to get robbed in the sense that the robbery is an actively good thing, or an act of justice.

But you might say that he "deserves" to get robbed in the sense that he was willfully stupid to an inexcusable degree, and the misfortune that befell him was meaningfully downstream of his own deliberate choices - choices where he has no viable excuse for not being able to predict the likely outcome.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. If you scuffle with the police while armed in a situation that you have deliberately engineered to be as stressful and confusing as possible, sometimes you are going to get shot even if your scuffling doesn't appear to rise to the level of morally deserving to get shot. An ostensible adult who is not capable of comprehending that chain of logic should probably be in some sort of conservatorship where they are not allowed to own guns or vote or interact with the public unsupervised.

Would it be better if I said he earned his death, instead of deserved it?

I think of it as like a gestalt 'whilst his death was probably illegitimate him and his peers have essentially accumulated sufficient chance of something going wrong during an interaction with fatal consequences that it was somewhat earned'

Some of us still think that "deserve it" means "commit a crime that would normally attract the death penalty".

I really do not understand this argument. Let's take the case of someone deciding to go for a run on a busy highway at night. Let's also say that the person about to run him over decides not to swerve or do a full break because they consider the risk to themselves or any passengers too great. This results in the runner's death.

If I now think that the driver's behaviour is acceptable or that he should not be punished, hell, even if I take a FAFO stance towards the runner's fate, that is a far cry from saying that the runner "deserved" his death. And even further from the usual polemic that "running on a highway at night should be punishable by death". I am just taking a blasé attitude towards the death of somebody who took stupid risks. In the words of Norm MacDonald: He was 44 years old, I say that's a ripe old age for a crocodile hunter.

Edit: I now see that OP did, in fact, play the strawman straight. Oh well.

Yeah, but in reality it just means "we don't care because even if he was a victim of injustice, he was so costly to society it doesn't matter".

The idea that you can assault police officers because they're not allowed to "execute" people for assault is ridiculous. Stupidity always carries the death penalty.

Especially if you're deliberately generating as many contentious situations as possible.

I am tempted to respond merely with, "go on", but, being in a charitable mood I will explain why I think this reply is very stupid.

The "death penalty" thing is just always stupid in these situations. It logically devolves into anarchy in, actually, very few steps.

Let me assume, for the sake of argument that there is a law wherein the penalty is short of death that you believe in. Maybe something like burglary to a home (which both residents of the home and police could legally shoot fleeing suspects within living memory) or even something more trivial like theft from a retail store.

The penalty for noncompliance is always death. Dont believe me? Go to Target. Steal a bunch of shit. When Loss Prevention tries to stop you, fight them. When they try to transfer you to police custody, fight them. When you are in jail, fight the jail guards. When they try to take you to court, fight more. Eventually, you will either die as a result of the response to your opposition to the law, or you will die in a cell for your infinite transgressions thereof (in a functional criminal justice system, in Minnesota you might get like a $12 million dollar jury award for biting off an officers nose, who knows at this point).

Non-compliance with the law always results in death unless you terminate your noncompliance. Its just a matter of time and place and manner.

The "death penalty" thing is just always stupid in these situations.

I basically agree. It's just rhetorical slight of hand. And ultimately it's a strawman argument, because no serious person is arguing that someone convicted of attempting to elude the police or whatever should be sent to the electric chair.

As a sort of counter-example, one could imagine a situation where the police capture a bona fide serial killer. Perhaps that person really does deserve the death penalty, but nobody believes it's okay for the arresting officer to simply execute the guy.

To put it another way, the question of what the proper punishment is for a crime is largely irrelevant to the amount of force appropriate to arrest or apprehend someone who is committing such a crime. And yeah, a situation is conceivable where it's fine for the police to use extreme violence against a shoplifter who won't submit to a lawful arrest. The alternative is that people are able to steal, rob, and resist the authorities with impunity.

This is a bit like suicidal empathy.

The left has gotten good at making these strawman arguments. Where nuance goes out the window. As to your question “no serious person”

Me.

If my choice is we can enforce immigration law but I have to say yes to executing some agitators it’s yes.

It’s the same with shipping 20k Haitians to small town. What are you racists for opposing. If my choice is dropping 20k cultural foreign people into my small town or being racists - I am choosing racists.

The right has moved in a direction of feeling the need to remove any empathy from decision making because if you show one ounce of empathy your cooked. When I was growing up some how we didn’t push things to those extremes. We could paper over issues and not push it that far.

The prototypical lefty in the aughts was I believe Sandy Cohen of the OC who do the do gooder stuff and make the world a better place. But he wouldn’t push things to breaking the social contract with the other side.

The right has moved in a direction of feeling the need to remove any empathy from decision making because if you show one ounce of empathy your cooked.

I think there are some agitators that understand this and are using it to reinforce the image of ICE (and the larger right in general) as heartless jackbooted thugs. Keep the pressure up and make martyrs for the cause. Force ICE to make mistakes and then hold the evidence up as confirmation of their narrative.

As an aside, my sibling and family came back today from a trip to the US. They called Trump Hitler for what they observed while they were there. Its unsettling to me that that's what they took away from their trip, but they're allowed to draw their own conclusions. I don't think they've thought through what would happen to a nation where a heckler's veto and emotional appeals can prevent border enforcement.

I think there are some agitators that understand this and are using it to reinforce the image of ICE (and the larger right in general) as heartless jackbooted thugs

The problem I have with that theory is that as far as I can tell, it's always been their tactic. If anything, they seem surprised it's not working anymore.

Much of the right has decided to switch tactics from the failing "No, they aren't jackbooted thugs" (which is defeated by the left's control of the media) to "YES, TRUMP STOMP!". I doubt this will work better politically but it does annoy the footsoldiers of the left.

I'll happily take suicidal empathy over homicidal antipathy.

As to your question “no serious person”

Me.

Do I understand you correctly? Hypothetically, suppose there is an ICE raid on a restaurant and a couple illegal aliens try to run out the back door; are tackled; and are arrested; booked; and sent to jail. Are you saying that under some circumstances, you would support capital charges and execution for such persons?

The "death penalty" thing is just always stupid in these situations. It logically devolves into anarchy in, actually, very few steps.

It's not stupid as a tactic, for those who think that lethal self-defense should never be permitted.

Steal a bunch of shit. When Loss Prevention tries to stop you, fight them. When they try to transfer you to police custody, fight them. When you are in jail, fight the jail guards. When they try to take you to court, fight more.

Sounds like Charles Bronson.

Somehow I assumed this was a Death Wish reference, and I was rather confused.

This wasn’t the death penalty but close enough to self defense that you can’t convict anyone.

He is also very close to “deserved it” by civilization standards. Insurrection while aligning with foreign agents is generally considered fine for “deserved it”. Yea you can call this an uncharitable take but he basically did that.

I am seriously, seriously disappointed that Trump did not invoke the Insurrection Act after saying outright he would. At this point I wouldn't believe him if he said the sun would rise tomorrow.

I know Nixon would often lose his temper and demand that such-and-such federal agency be immediately defunded, but he was venting his spleen to his closest advisors, not blasting his temper tantrums out to the whole nation.

He should resign. Perhaps Vance will be more level-headed and trustworthy.

Maybe Vance will take the throne by assassination after the mid terms. It would, if nothing else, be very interesting.

It’s unlikely, but we live in interesting times.

Insurrection while aligning with foreign agents is generally considered fine for “deserved it”.

Sounds exactly like what many people would say about the January 6, 2021 rioters.

Sure. Though there are actual foreign invaders being defended here. And this is more than one day.

But yes a lot of things just break down to whose the good guy and whose the bad guy.

I’ve also never said Babbit was a bad shot. George Washington is both a traitor and a Patriot. Whoever writes the history books gets to choose.

Got it. I think I misunderstood what you were saying. The way you phrased it, "foreign agents", made me think that you were implying that the protesters are working alongside of or at least furthering the aims of foreign governments. Which would parallel certain accusations against Trump and his people.

I've been trying to avoid the day by day of this argument, since overanalysing single incidents can't provide useful insights into a larger political context, but if we have to...

This is largely what I think. I think the OP is hypocritical - he's discovered a video that makes Pretti look like a horrible person, so he concludes that Pretti 'deserved it'. This is an instance of the behaviour he condemns, where 'feelings about ICE and Pretti and Good are mandatory'.

My opinion, held with low confidence, is basically: 1) Goode was probably a valid case of self-defense; Pretti was probably not, 2) Goode, Pretti, and others were behaving recklessly and foolishly, and 3) ICE is being deployed clumsily and without effective strategy, more as political theatre than as a plausibly effective method of slowing migration.

If I put on my very cynical hat, my reading of the broader situation is that there's a political battle going on, and the left are winning. The Trump administration has deployed ICE as a kind of show of force, hoping to encourage their supporters and demoralise opponents. This has not been very effective. The left-wing strategy is basically to follow ICE around and publicise ICE doing unsympathetic things, so as to undermine ICE's perceived legitimacy, and thus also the Trump administration's legitimacy. As such the left are putting sympathetic innocent people into situations where there is an elevated risk of chaos, perceived threat, and thus shootings. I do not think people on the left want ICE to shoot citizens, but they are contributing to situations with elevated risks of that, and from a purely cynical political perspective, every time ICE shoot an observer/protester/activist, the left wins.

My advice for the left would be to find a better way to do this, because chaos on the streets and people dying are bad things in themselves, and my advice for the right would be to become more effective. Deploying ICE to Minneapolis is thuggish theatre. There can be a place for theatre in border policy, insofar as it's a message to prospective illegal entries, but what they are currently doing is clearly not a well-considered, effective strategy to decrease migrant intakes and remove existing illegal aliens.

At any rate. You just can't draw conclusions from whether Pretti himself was a good or bad or anything else person - not about whether the shooting was justifiable, and not about larger political strategy either. It is just a red herring.

I think the video shows something else. The video is showing what ICE are going through minute by minute and hour by hour. The two shots are the numerator of bad encounters with cops. The denominator are probably countless interactions like the one in the new video.

Problem is when you have the countless interactions like the video, a small number of them will go sideways.

It is also interesting to me that we focus so much on this particular numerator and not on the inverse (ie thugs attacking ICE). There was in fact an armed ambush of ICE last year. Did that make national headlines? Did people talk about it for weeks?

The ambushers being insanely incompetent probably acted in their favor in terms of it not generating many headlines.

These can both be true, even though I think we don't have enough to conclude that the first is true or false:

  • Pretti never moved in a way that a reasonable officer could construe as a threat.
  • He was repeatedly playing a very dangerous game where his death was a likely outcome: picking fights with police while armed.

The second video supports the second point.

The second point may well be true, and I think I just made the case that 'the left', broadly construed, is encouraging people to do things consistent with that point.

It just seems to me that if the first point is true, the second point is immaterial to the case itself

Bad shoots are inevitable, they’re never going to be driven to zero. Even if we had Star Trek phasers eventually some guy will screw up and unintentionally use the kill setting.

ICE resistors are creating conditions that increase the probability of a bad shoot. According to them we’ve now had two, I would say we might have had one.

People who create these conditions don’t necessarily get what they “deserve” if one of them is a victim of a bad shoot, but their actions are necessary for the bad shoot. They do share in the blame, but they’ll never acknowledge as such or adjust their behavior.

I did say above that I think the protesters are behaving foolishly. That was my point 2, and my advice for the left was to find a better way to do this, because I think that throwing people into situations where shootings are statistically more likely is something they should avoid. I don't hold that it is categorically wrong to deploy people into situations with elevated risk of violence, but when you do so, that risk ought to be proportional to the good you hope to achieve, and in this case I don't think it is.

My overall position is that ICE (and other law enforcement agencies) should do all that is reasonably possible on their end to minimise the risk of bad shoots, that protesters and activists should behave prudently and avoid raising the probability of bad shoots, and that when bad shoots do occur, the agents responsible should be disciplined or punished.

One difficulty here is that it's possible to enforce professional standards for ICE, and it's possible to punish ICE officers who shoot, but it is not really possible to pass a law requiring that protesters always act in sensible, prudent ways. That part of my position can only be achieved voluntarily, through cultural change.

At first I thought you were being sarcastic, because by your logic ICE should just get M-16s and spray crowds of protestors. Or for that matter anyone who does anything to openly oppose or disagree with any government policy you personally agree with deserves to be shot. You may wholeheartedly agree with me, in which case, to paraphrase Lincoln, you should consider moving to a place like Russia or Iran, where they don't even pretend that the citizens have any rights.

Pretti was a bad man because he was an insurrectionist communist and because he made it his life's work to obstruct lawfully empowered federal law enforcement officials.

As much as I'm rather on "your side" in the big picture of the culture war, this is a terribly shortsighted and intellectually stifling judgement passed upon a person solely due to 2 videos of their very recent behaviour - and behaviour Pretti himself certainly saw as morally directed, no matter how wrong or deluded he was. We can ridicule and deconstruct the Left's misguided beliefs all the way down to the Rousseauian bedrock it builds itself on, it won't change the fact that people contain more complexity and ingrained incentive systems than their stated ideological affinity.

Looking at pictures of Pretti, he strikes me as one of those rather common male millennial leftists who feel a lot of inner resentment and bitterness towards their lives, yet are still to meek or calculating to express this inner rage on their own terms and must sublimate it through socially-approved political grievances. When I was a member of the Austrian Socialist Youth many moons ago, this type of male left-wing activist was already very commonplace: men that could not fit into any socially desirable mould of masculinity or youth and thus found a social space that not only allowed them to go on aggressive rants and lash out against property or people, but even lauded them for it and bestowed them with in-group status for their aggressive tendencies. Despite the explicit denial of meaningful same-sex difference within the Socialist Youth, this type of "male attack hound" was an unspoken model of traditional masculinity accessible for otherwise rather unmasculine men. (I might be totally off the mark here with my armchair analysis of Pretti, but everything I've seen so about him checks the list for this type of person. I'm also not saying "Pretti was ugly, therefore he was a self-loathing communist" - it's a more nuanced mix of physical, intellectual, and social factors.)

I very much doubt Pretti was a "bad man" to his colleagues, neighbours, or other people he interacted with regularly. Maybe he was easily irritable or smart-assed (would match the type), but I don't see someone like him, say, wantonly tossing trash onto his neighbour's lawn or stealing change from a colleague's purse. The actions you point at to designate him as such are both situations in which he probably felt that he could morally justify letting out his rage at a target that was anyway deserving of such. You say that "he made it his life's work to obstruct lawfully empowered federal law enforcement officials", but within his media/social ecosystem, he was operating off of the impression that current ICE tactics were an illegal overreach (and why wouldn't he, if his news bubble consists of NPR, the NYT, an Antifa Telegram group or any other media outlet partaking in the effort to smear and denigrate ICE at any cost), or at the very least would be legally overturned and near-universally condemned in the near future, à la Jim Crow laws. We can and should point out that he was wrong to do what he did, that his belief system was based on fables, conformist meekness, and a need to sublimate his resentment at the world, without immediately resorting to a complete moral condemnation.

Maybe I'm being overly sentimental, but I can't bring myself to feel any condescension or Schadenfreude at his death. I find it a tragic waste of life and a pathetic, misguided attempt of a man desperate for self-respect. Of course he was looking for a fight. Of course bringing a gun was provocation of the highest degree. Of course I don't blame ICE officers for how this went down (although I would appreciate if the White House wouldn't so blatantly pursue a strategy of "deny and defend at all costs before there's even clear documentation available"). But Alex Pretti was an intensive care nurse at a Veteran's hospital with a clean record - are we really going to reduce's a man's entire existence and character to the probably most irrational and emotionally charged moments of his life? There's alot of left-wing activists I have no trouble morally condemning rather fully (Hasan Piker comes to mind), but it feels unjust and shortsighted to do so here.

You could probably zoom in and say all this about many of the peasants who helped in Cambodia's great reset, but it doesn't matter, because the end result was piles of severed heads in ditches. The hour is getting late.

This is just a mirror image of annoying leftists being unable to entertain any rightwing belief or action without immediately comparing it to the Nazis. You've created a discursive padded cell in which kicking into a car's headlight and stepping between an ICE officer and a woman getting peppersprayed is morally indistinguishable or innately upstream of slaughtering people for wearing glasses.

I agree that there are plenty of leftists who can become ice cold killers in the proper context, but I would be ashamed of myself for judging a man by hypothetical actions he might do at some point in a certain situation rather than the things he actually did and that actually happened.

Pretti was a bad man because he was an insurrectionist communist and because he made it his life's work to >> obstruct lawfully empowered federal law enforcement officials.

As much as I'm rather on "your side" in the big picture of the culture war, this is a terribly shortsighted and intellectually stifling judgement passed upon a person solely due to 2 videos of their very recent behaviour - and behaviour Pretti himself certainly saw as morally directed, no matter how wrong or deluded he was. We can ridicule and deconstruct the Left's misguided beliefs all the way down to the Rousseauian bedrock it builds itself on, it won't change the fact that people contain more complexity and ingrained incentive systems than their stated ideological affinity.

None of us can directly tell what evil lurks in the hearts of men; we can only judge actions and make inferences from them. I don't know about "communist", but the evidence certainly shows that Pretti was engaged in direct action against federal law enforcement on multiple occasions. Pretti certainly saw himself as morally directed, but so does a spree killer who acts because the voice of God told him so -- that the voice was a real one on a Signal chat in this case makes it worse, not better.

Or, stated another way, you're being far too charitable.

I think you are showing far too little charity, and I write as someone who finds the activities of the anti-ICE protestors to be largely detestable. Allow me to explain.

First, I'm being serious about my feelings about the protesters: in my view, they are—for the most part—smug, shrill, deluded agents of chaos. The gulf between their conceptions of their own character, motives, and impact on the world, and the truth of these things, is vast, and not in a direction that is to their credit. I'm as little inclined to violence as it is possible for a rational man to be, but I must confess that even I sometimes wish to see the most insufferable of their number, whilst engaged in some strident, self-righteous tantrum against authority, receive as a reply a salutary spritz of pepper spray straight into their stupid faces.

Second, and critically, these people are not evil, and that extends even to the violent ones for the most part. I think we can establish this pretty reliably in a couple ways. One approach is the one that @StJohnOfPatmos used: look at their backgrounds. Using this lens, we find no indicators whatsoever that Pretti was evil. In fact, he seems to have been generally law abiding and respectable. Beyond his lack of a criminal history, I'd also note that becoming an ICU nurse requires a fairly high degree of consciousness and trustworthiness, and nursing as a whole selects pretty reliably for compassion. Turning to Renee Good, she similarly lacked any criminal history or clear signs of malevolent character. And while I don't think we have the data to firmly generalize about the entire population of anti-ICE protestors, my strong intuition is that they are probably similarly decent.

It is worth taking a moment to point out that the good character of people engaged in "activism" is hardly a given. Recalling the example of Kyle Rittenhouse, he seemed unable to fire his rifle without hitting a child molester, a wife-beater, or a criminal lowlife. Now you might counter that the people Rittenhouse shot were non-representative in the sense that, of all the people present, they showed a particular eagerness to assault a 17 year old boy, and an armed one at that. Indeed, on that basis I think it would be reasonable to conclude they were probably amongst the worst of the "protesters" in Kenosha on that night. But I would respond that Good and Pretti were also selected in a similar sense: they were also amongst the most violent of all the people present at their respective protests. And that is part of where that strong intuition of my mine about the general good character of the protestors comes from. If the most confrontational of the anti-ICE protestors were as clean as Pretti and Good seem to have been, it seems likely to me that the protestors who weren't violently resisting arrest, kicking police cars, etc, are probably at least as good (at least for the most part).

Why do we see bad people acting badly in some protests, and relatively good people acting badly in others? In his comment, @StJohnOfPatmos delivered a very convincing presentation of the social and psychological dynamics at work in the case of Pretti, and I think this goes a long way to explaining the general difference between Kenosha and the current situation in Minnesota. One core insight is that current ideological landscape is particularly warped.

During the height of the BLM madness, there was a widespread belief that the police were racist and bad, but the acceptable remedy was largely to "defund them" rather than direct violence towards them. Sure, elites would equivocate about how understandable it was that people were burning down cities in response (there were a lot of "riots are the language of the unheard" type quotes) but at the same time there were also many elites who were sympathetic to BLM who said, clearly and repeatedly, that violence was unacceptable. Here is an excerpt from a fairly representative Barrack Obama statement from the time:

On the other hand, the small minority of folks who’ve resorted to violence in various forms, whether out of genuine anger or mere opportunism, are putting innocent people at risk, compounding the destruction of neighborhoods that are often already short on services and investment and detracting from the larger cause. I saw an elderly black woman being interviewed today in tears because the only grocery store in her neighborhood had been trashed. If history is any guide, that store may take years to come back. So let’s not excuse violence, or rationalize it, or participate in it.

I'll grant that there were also statements that were less measured, but I don't think they represent the ideological center mass of the left during peak wokeness. Also—and this is crucial—no elites were telling the NPR-listening normies of the world to go out and loot their local Nike outlet. Maybe, in the view of some commentators, we could excuse a Black teen with an "unheard voice" for doing it, but that excuse certainly didn't extend to a normie with White privilege. As a consequence, ICU nurses were not typically present at the riots, and certainly they were not the ones doing the burning and looting.

Things are different now. To give you a sense of this, I've excerpted Obama's statement on the Pretti shooting:

The killing of Alex Pretti is a heartbreaking tragedy. It should also be a wake-up call to every American, regardless of party, that many of our core values as a nation are increasingly under assault... These unprecedented tactics—which even the former top lawyer of the Department of Homeland Security in the first Trump administration has characterized as embarrassing, lawless and cruel—have now resulted in the fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens. And yet rather than trying to impose some semblance of discipline and accountability over the agents they’ve deployed, the President and current administration officials seem eager to escalate the situation, while offering public explanations for the shootings of Mr. Pretti and Renee Good that aren’t informed by any serious investigation—and that appear to be directly contradicted by video evidence....In the meantime, every American should support and draw inspiration from the wave of peaceful protests in Minneapolis and other parts of the country. They are a timely reminder that ultimately it’s up to each of us as citizens to speak against injustice, protect our basic freedoms, and hold our government accountable.

According to Obama, the federal agents who have been "deployed" lack even a semblance of discipline and accountability; their tactics are lawless; they are assaulting our core values as a nation; and every American should support the "peaceful" protests to resist them. Notably there is no language in the statement explicitly condemning the violence of the protestors, or urging compliance with law enforcement. This is as close as you are going to get to Obama saying that you should go out and punch an ICE officer in the face. The craziest part is, while I don't have the patience to do an exhaustive survey of elite left sentiment, I expect Obama is, as usual, probably more moderate than many of his peers.

This messaging shapes participation in the "protests". This is how you get generally decent, well-adjusted people doing crazy shit en-masse. You have the authority figures they respect tell them repeatedly that they should be doing crazy shit, because freedom is on the line. In this media environment, I've seen people whom I generally respect (individuals whom I know to be highly intelligent, rational, kind and free-thinking in most contexts) basically baying for ICE blood. If they are vulnerable, what chance is there for left-orientied normies?

This also represents the second way I can tell that the anti-ICE protestors are not evil. If there are a bunch of people I know to be generally kind and well-calibrated who think ICE is a modern incarnation of the SS, it tells me the problem with the anti-ICE protestors is not their fundamental decency. People often find these kind of statements difficult because there is such strong urge to attach moral sanction to people who hold views we find repugnant, but I really mean it. I'm Jewish, but I'd say the same thing about the actual SS. The problem with the SS was not that the people in the SS were all evil. I expect they were less good, on average, than people like Hans and Sophie Scholl, but also probably better character-wise (kinder, less impulsive, more loyal) than even your run-of-the-mill wife-beater. The scary part of all this is that people who are not monsters can do things that are far more monstrous than most criminals will ever manage.

None of this is to say Pretti was without fault. I agree with @StJohnOfPatmos that he probably felt more inner rage than most, and once he had his socially sanctioned outlet for that rage, he was all too eager to use it. But the fact that he needed that the social sanctioning is key. He was decent enough that he could hold it together all his life until an authority figure came along and told him it was okay to let go. In this way, he was, ironically, probably a lot like many cops. Law enforcement has a reputation for attracting bullies who want permission to go out and hurt people, and while I think this stereotype is over-applied, it is not groundless. I've been on police ride-alongs were I've heard cops cheerfully regaling each other with stories of how they got to "beat the shit of a prisoner who was resisting".

At the start of this long comment, I said you showed too little charity, and now I will clarify. The charity you ought to show is in recognizing that a Pretti, or violence-enjoying cop for that matter, for all their flaws, are still possessed of the requisite self-control and pro-social impulses to do good and to not knowingly do bad. And this counts. There are plenty of people who have bad impulses and who can't control themselves under any circumstances, or who don't even care to try. Our prisons are full of them. Some of them need only the barest pretext to do bad: I looted the Nike store to protest white supremacy; I raped that girl because she secretly wanted it; et cetera. Many others don't need any pretext at all—their value function is to do whatever is good for them personally, and damn the consequences. In comparison, someone like Pretti was responding to extremely concerted messaging from many authority figures, and was engaged in actions that were plausibly proportionate and plausibly served the cause, all at risk to himself. Like I said, I still think Pretti is an agent of chaos, and I'd even agree his actions were far more damaging to society than most crimes (though this was not entirely for reasons he could have controlled). But there is a real moral difference between Pretti and his ilk and most criminals, and I think it is one we should be careful not to lose sight of lest we work ourselves up into a fit of righteousness where we become the ones doing the evil.

And an important point to note is that there are scenarios in which I legitimately would advocate for violent resistance to law enforcement. And the most extreme and exaggerated claims about ICE would probably qualify if true. If the President of a country literally threw together a bunch of armed thugs and attempts a genocide by rounding up everyone of a certain race and sending them to death camps, and the rest of the government was unable or unwilling to stop it, violence from civilians would be an appropriate response. If that was what was actually happening, I, and I expect most good Americans, would be in favor of the protests. Well, at that point protests wouldn't really be appropriate, it would probably be more efficient and effective to throw a coup (a counter-coup? Since the President would have had to done a coup to get to this point) and/or civil war.

The point being, there are worlds where good people fight against law enforcement against evil governments. If you are deluded into thinking you live in such a world when you don't, that doesn't automatically make you a bad person. Though it does suggest a lot of lack of humility and rationality. You should be extremely sure of what's going on and the justifications before resorting to violence, not just "the news told me". Motivated reasoning taken too far. I consider the protestor's crimes to be negligence, rather than malice. But it's still a moral failure.

Few people are truly bad people, but there are a lot of people who are bad at being good people.

Excellent comment here. I think the core of this is that essentially Good and Pretti were some variety of normies. When the criminal underclass acts out, it is easy to write it off as them being low-agency and their acting out is part of their general dysfunction. Normies however have the necessary degree of self-control and agency to respond to incentives, social status rewards and authority messaging. So when normies act out you can't dismiss it as a symptom of their general dysfunction, it tells you something about what incentives and societal messaging are directing them towards. By definition, normies are ones who "go with the flow." If you have normies in Minneapolis violently engaging ICE that tells us we have a messaging problem that is much bigger than whatever personal failings or bad judgments these people may have had.

I don't know about "communist", but the evidence certainly shows that Pretti was engaged in direct action against federal law enforcement on multiple occasions.

I'm sure we could both hypothesise many situations in which direct action against federal law enforcement wouldn't suffice to call someone a bad person or might even be the morally good decision depending on the circumstance. That alone isn't sufficient: the actual decisions he made, damaging an ICE vehicle lightly and needlessly stepping between an ICE officer and a woman said officer was pepperspraying for blocking their vehicle, are not particularly "evil" taken by themselves. They're more petulant and foolish - which is not to say I think they should be legal or that there shouldn't be consequences for that behaviour.

I do agree with you that I'm probably being a bit more charitable than I should - consider it as an avocatus diaboli response to your take, which maybe was a bit too lacking in charity.

That alone isn't sufficient: the actual decisions he made, damaging an ICE vehicle lightly and needlessly stepping between an ICE officer and a woman said officer was pepperspraying for blocking their vehicle, are not particularly "evil" taken by themselves.

Again, too much charity. By several orders of magnitude.

Agreed 100%.

But Alex Pretti was an intensive care nurse at a Veteran's hospital with a clean record

He probably did more good for the world in that role than he ever did wrong as a protestor, except to himself. I have no problem calling his death a tragedy, even if I don't think I can blame the officer for taking the shot (though that's from the limited information I do have). Defending ICE's goals and actions does not require celebrating or even attacking the character of Pretti (and Good) except in the specific actions they took before their deaths.

I think that adopting a policy that effectively says that it's okay to kill people if you think they're bad is, well, abandoning the concept of civilisation.

What is your position here? That you (or people, or the Trump administration, or some other group?) ought to kill leftists (however that is defined, for you?)? Can you imagine that going anywhere good?

Yes, which is why the reaction to Charlie Kirk's assassination was so demoralizing for people.

The left really does want me dead because they think I'm bad, and they aren't shy about it.

I can't imagine it going anywhere good, but I also can't imagine continuing to cooperate when everyone else is so obviously defecting.

This is the most extreme kind of political thinking that I’ve seen

You should not treat your political opponents as a homogenous group made of their most distasteful members

This (quite common) cognitive mistake becomes particularly egregious when the conclusion is: they all want to kill me

You should not treat your political opponents as a homogenous group made of their most distasteful members

You should recognize when thoughts, positions, attitudes or memes become sufficiently widespread within a group to be normalized, such that it starts showing up in your day-to-day interactions.

If you seriously think people in your day to day want you dead I think this is more indicative of a medical issue than a political philosophy debate.

Yes, which is why the reaction to Charlie Kirk's assassination was so demoralizing for people

I honestly don't understand what people are talking about here. As I said elsewhere in this thread:

I think that there is an extremely high level of agreement on the left that Kirk's death was both bad in its impact on the world and unjustified based on Kirk's actions. I think it's really irrational to read between the lines that the left don't "disapprove of the methods behind Kirk's removal" when this is directly contrary to all public statements and even on a private survey of random people you can only get 20% [of Democrats] to agree that it was justified.

I remember talking to my dad after Trump was shot. I thought it was insane that it was relatively quiet, that it wasn't a huge fucking deal that everyone was talking about.

His explanation? Not many people will say it, but the quiet ones wished the bullet struck true, him included.

Kirk was worse, most people took his death as a chance to shit on him as a person, to decry his work, and to remind everyone that he was racist, sexist, transphobic, and whatever other epithet du jour could stick.

Yeah, they want me dead, they want my leaders assassinated in public, they want my son to be a girl and they'll kidnap him if I resist, and by the way, I can't own weapons that might dissuade the government form overreach, since they've taken those away, too.

Oh, and in the meantime, they're also telling me I'm evil because of my race while importing foreigners who hate me, also for my race, with the intention of manufacturing a demographic advantage out of voter fraud and anchor babies.

Democrats need to stop being so uniformly evil if you want me to stop treating them as uniformly evil.

Me: "Every Democratic politician immediately condemned Kirk's assassination and in private opinion polls only 20% think it was justified"

You: "Democrats are uniformly evil and want me dead."

?????????????

I think that there is an extremely high level of agreement on the left that Kirk's death was both bad in its impact on the world and unjustified based on Kirk's actions.

Maybe amongs the higher ups and the normies. There was a hell of a lot of celebration (and "not celebrating, just selectively re-quoting the man in a way that makes him look maximally negative to my in-group") on social media. Certainly gives the impression that whatever may be said by others, there's a large and vocal contingent out there.

Of course, those people would say the exact same about the other side, and have plenty of nutpicking of their own to support their stance of "the other side wants us dead".

It takes some effort to exceed the already low level of charity in this thread, but you've done it. Thanks for serving up an example of what I was just talking about, I guess.

This post is nothing but culture war (and calling it "culture war" is generous) and "I hate my enemies." No matter how much Whining you do, you are still not allowed to just vent about how much you hate your enemies and look forward to making them suffer. You are still not allowed to just snarl "Boo outgroup!" You are still not allowed to make broad generalizations rather than talking about specific groups and people.

low level of charity in this thread,

Ugh, sorry about that. :(

Did the left disapprove of the methods behind Kirk's removal? (No.)

What are you talking about? Authority figures on the left universally condemned his assassination. Just 20% of Democrats think his death was justified. https://www.cloudresearch.com/resources/blog/justifying-murder/

Literally Dems shouted down a house proposal to honor Kirk (was merely symbolic). Ilhan Omar didn’t condemn — she in so may words said he had it coming.

It just isn’t true what you are saying. A lot of Dem politicians said something to the effective of “Kirk shouldn’t have have been shot BUT he was a bad dude.” That isn’t really condemning it (the but matters more) but gives enough for a post like yours allowing you to claim the dems decried it.

Literally Dems shouted down a house proposal to honor Kirk (was merely symbolic). Ilhan Omar didn’t condemn — she in so may words said he had it coming.

No they didn't. I remember this controversy. They honored him but rejected doing a prayer afterwards.

I believe this is the first thing Omar posted about it, and the only statement the day he died:

https://x.com/IlhanMN/status/1965866576206508255

I think this example is basically similar to that of every dem politician and prominent figure, I'm open to counter-examples.

I don't really know what you're asking for. That people lie and pretend they think Kirk was a good person or a positive force in the world for some unspecified period after he died, while the right gets to hagiographize him?

Yes that is generally the bare minimum of polite political discourse. The Overton window of Western democracy is quite narrow and acting like your ideological opponents are literally grand evil is not productive in the long-term.

I too wish we had more polite political discourse, I agree it isn't polite to be criticizing Kirk a couple of days after he died. I also think that many on the left genuinely see Trump and his cronies as the grand evil, it isn't an act. That's not really what this thread is about though.

I think that there is an extremely high level of agreement on the left that Kirk's death was both bad in its impact on the world and unjustified based on Kirk's actions. I think it's really irrational to read between the lines that the left don't "disapprove of the methods behind Kirk's removal" when this is directly contrary to all public statements and even on a private survey of random people you can only get 20% to agree that it was justified.

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The Overton window of Western democracy is quite narrow and acting like your ideological opponents are literally grand evil is not productive in the long-term.

It has worked for the left.

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"Just"???

It's roughly the number of people who will give the most trollishly partisan answer to a poll question regardless of what they actually think. Scott Alexander's post on the Lizardman constant in polling says 13% of Americans, including 5% of Democrats (so c. 21% of Republicans by elimination) told pollsters that they thought Obama was the antichrist - which was not a popular anti-Obama conspiracy theory at the time. Of course the 21% includes 4-5% of lizardman responders who are in effect engaged in for-the-lulz nonpartisan trolling. But "15% of respondents use polls for partisan trolling on top of the lizardmen" is pretty much correct.

Unless you think "Republicans who are so deep into politically-driven heresy that they think their political opponents are the literal antichrist" are a problematic group, I would treat "Democrats who support the Charlie Kirk assassination" with the same skepticism.

Composition matters. The 20% was a lot smaller amongst older dems; a lot higher amongst younger dems. Lizard man constant breaks down when you disaggregate the polling.

If you think that's high, you may have an overly rose tinted view of humanity.

Ok, I'll bite, what did the polls say about the victims of past assassinations? Did 20% of Republicans say "Kennedy had it coming" after he got shot?

I couldn't find any polls for that or any other historical assassinations. But 20% is about the number of Americans who claim to believe there are microchips in the COVID vaccine.

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Why are you comparing a highly divisive provocateur to a president like Kennedy?

Also I think opinions are more polarized now than back then. There's possibly less expectation of dignity now.

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Malcolm X did.

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This is largely what I think. I think the OP is hypocritical - he's discovered a video that makes Pretti look like a horrible person, so he concludes that Pretti 'deserved it'.

The new video doesn't change anything for me.

Nor have I landed on deserve it as you mean.

And - you can absolutely come up with the conclusion that he was a bad person. Just because you think you are right doesn't make you moral or right. Don't fight the police. Don't destroy public property. Those are pretty good standards for social vs. anti-social behavior.

Sure - I'm not claiming that Pretti was a good person, or pro-social, or anything like that. You are free to conclude that he was a person of poor moral character. I just don't think that matters to anything.

Right, so if someone attempts an assault with a deadly weapon in such a a way that if the crime was completed and if it resulted in death, would be a lesser degree of murder than capital murder, they wouldn't deserve to die if the would-be victim defended himself lethally and the defender should themselves be considered a murderer.

I definitely wouldn't say Pretti and Good deserved to be shot dead, but yeah. They weren't innocent passersby who just happened to wander into this situation by honest mistake.

We've been arguing over him having a gun, but I stick to my guns (as it were): if you bring a gun someplace, you expect that you might have to use it. If you're bringing it to a protest involving the cops, ICE, or whomever, that is going to get you shot.

This is not to excuse the agent who shot Pretti, it seems that he might have shot him anyway even if Pretti genuinely was unarmed because (going by reports floating around) said agent was an idiot. But having a gun on your person when you're fronting up to agents who then tackle you to the ground is a bad idea.

My brother posted some weird screed on Facebook about how handsome Pretti was compared to the ICE agent who shot him, how healthy Pretti looked, how educated Pretti was compared to the typical ICE agent. Basically implying it was dysgenic to shoot Pretti, except I think eugenics is still considered a no-no. I seriously tried to puzzle out if my brother was in the closet despite having a string of serious girlfriends.

I think it was bad to shoot Pretti. I also think Pretti did some stupid things and earned a stupid prize, and that was apparent even before this video came out.

For the, "Pretti is not a hero" argument:

He went to a protest while armed, which is apparently illegal in Minnesota. He wasn't wearing a comfortable weapon that would be typically worn in for a conceal carry. It was a several thousand dollar handgun that had several accessories making it bulky and likely uncomfortable to wear for extended periods of time. It's highly unlikely he just forgot that the gun was on him at the time.

If someone is conceal carrying and gets any kind of attention from a law enforcement officer, that person needs to keep their hands visible, clearly state, "I have a conceal carry permit, gun is on my (left/right)," and do exactly what the police officers say. Pretti had a right to self defense. So do LEOs. And they will exercise their right to self defense very quickly and broadly if they feel threatened.

Pretti did not act like someone should when conceal carrying in the presence of LEOs. He joined in a fracas. He shoved someone, then wiggled around while being held down by CBP. Now, the wiggling around is basically a human reflex, but it is one that must be suppressed if you find yourself in the position of being arrested.

On the flip side, no one should be shot for exhibiting a normal human reflex. Typically that does not happen in most arrests. My understanding of the situation, from the perspective of the CBP, is:

They were there to arrest a bad guy. A bunch of screaming people started getting in their way, blowing whistles in their faces. Again. They are trying to arrest their third bad guy of the day, after working 10 days in a row. Somehow, having to arrest child rapists isn't the worst part of their jobs. They haven't slept well for over a week, because these screaming whistle people are also banging pots and pans together all night outside every hotel they've tried to retreat to.

One of the screaming whistle women gets too close, pings some sort of danger radar, one of the CBP agents pepper spray her. Guess it's arrest time. Try to arrest her, a screaming whistle man comes and tries to push you off her. He just signed up to get arrested for assaulting an officer. He tries to fight you off, it takes four of you to try to hold him down.

One of your buddies sees a holstered gun. He reaches in, grabs it and says, "I've got his gun."

Unfortunately, you are still surrounded by the damned whistle people. You don't hear all that sentence. You heard the word "gun" because your ears are highly invested in hearing the word "gun." But the rest of it is drowned out by the drone of invectives being thrown your way.

The detainee's gun goes off in the agents hands. One of the infamous Uncommanded Discharges from a Sig. The bullet hits the ground next to an agent's foot. This created an imminent sense they were in deadly danger. There was a gun, they were being shot at. They shot the detainee.

Now, the dumb part is they shot the detainee while he was being detained by four of their own people. They were holding his hands. He wasn't facing them. He could not have possibly been the source of the shot. And shooting him risked the lives of the people trying to restrain him. This was a really bad shoot.

Legally, I don't know if they should be charged with murder, manslaughter, or just placed on leave and given a desk job. I think Pretti's family has standing to sue for a good amount of money. It was a bad shoot. And Pretty played stupid games and won a fatal prize.

My brother posted some weird screed on Facebook about how handsome Pretti was compared to the ICE agent who shot him, how healthy Pretti looked

Was this before or after Pretti’s portrait and the subsequent tail light video got released? Seeing Pretti’s actual face and athleticism (or lack thereof) in action may temper his mancrush.

Basically implying it was dysgenic to shoot Pretti, except I think eugenics is still considered a no-no.

Dysgenics are and have always been within the Overton window when it comes to discussing red tribe or religious whites reproducing. However, indeed, regarding any sort of whites reproducing as eugenic lies outside of the Overton window.

I seriously tried to puzzle out if my brother was in the closet despite having a string of serious girlfriends.

Let’s be open-minded about and supportive of your brother’s journey of self-discovery.

Before all the new information.

I think any chance of a criminal conviction is basically zero especially since I believe only the feds can charge.

While it was a bad shoot the current theory is his gun fired on its own. If be bought a cheap gun that malfunctioned and fired on its own then maybe he doesn’t have a civil claim. Obviously the cops are allowed to return fire. If his defective gun that he provided did the first shot then it was seem like liability is back on him. It’s reasonable for an officer to assume they are being shot at when they hear a shot.

While it was a bad shoot the current theory is his gun fired on its own. If be bought a cheap gun that malfunctioned and fired on its own then maybe he doesn’t have a civil claim.

This is basically the same as the left claiming Charlie Kirk's shooter was a Groyper/MAGA/Right and it is similarly embarrassing how persistent this theory is in right leaning spaces. Striking, really

I'm sure it'll be conclusively proven/disproven sooner or later. Has anybody involved categorically denied it happening?

The state can still charge. The defendant can remove the case to Federal court, but the state would still be prosecuting,. just with a Federal judge and Federal jury. The advantage is that the judge would theoretically be more neutral and the jury would be drawn from a larger geographic area, but this is more of a consolation prize than anything . For instance, there would be a better argument for change of venire with a Hennepin County jury than with a jury that would be drawn from the entire district.

the state can charge but there is a problem with the federalis claiming the 'crime' was part of his job and then there is a claim to federal supermacy

Yeah, they can do that, but it's an argument and it might not win. The issue is that if he wanted to make that argument he'd have to surrender to Minnesota authorities and potentially spend a long time in prison while he waits for a hearing, at which point the judge might reject the argument. If he wants to remove the case to Federal court he'd have to file that motion and wait for the case to get on a trial calendar before he could even file the immunity motion.

While it was a bad shoot the current theory is his gun fired on its own.

To my knowledge, the evidence that his gun fired on its own consists of:

  • His pistol being a SIG 320, which has a controversial reputation for uncommanded discharges
  • Some people thinking they see the slide move in a handful of frames in a very grainy video.

From what I've seen, the latter point is very shaky, and is very pointedly not a claim the agency has made, to my knowledge. Digital video of this sort is not good at capturing gun mechanics at long range, poor lighting and in a confused environment. This same problem came up with the Mangioni shooting when people claimed the gun was a station-six or "welrod", as opposed to a semi-auto malfunctioning because it wasn't set up to work with a suppressor properly.

Yes the gun fired itself narrative seems to be weakening. A civil settlement though I’m not sure on. I am about 50-50 that this was suicide by ICE. I would put it at 20% chance he would have shot ICE if he had not been disarmed as the video seems to show him reaching where his gun would have been.

It’s a bad shoot in that when the shot was taken he was not a threat. But if you do his behavior 100 times you probably end up shot twice. Pay out in those situations creates a bad precedent.

My brother posted some weird screed on Facebook about how handsome Pretti was compared to the ICE agent who shot him, how healthy Pretti looked, how educated Pretti was compared to the typical ICE agent.

Maybe your brother is into dudes and has a type.

Don't do this

From the op:

I seriously tried to puzzle out if my brother was in the closet

I'm a little confused here. Is extrapolating from a point made by the OP himself, in good faith, worth a warning now? Or is it just that it's not eight paragraphs long?

Personally speaking, I'd love to see the eight paragraph long essay on my brother's type. :D

It's Friday. Maybe I'll write something in the fun thread today.

Fair enough, consider the warning rescinded.

My brother posted some weird screed on Facebook about how handsome Pretti was compared to the ICE agent who shot him, how healthy Pretti looked, how educated Pretti was compared to the typical ICE agent.

Weirdly, I saw something online claiming that the images released (and being used) of Pretti in his scrubs had been tidied up by AI to make him look more appealing. I have no idea if this is right or just Internet conspiracy stuff. But it echoes all the admiration Luigi Mangione was getting, and I think for the same reasons: he's the Hero taking on the Bad Evil Wicked Horrible Guys, of course mm-mm he's so dreamy and smart and the rest of it.

Also, a lot of the protesters/resistance are heavily invested in "ICE, besides being evil and so forth, are all the dregs of society: dumb, stupid, violent, criminals or would-be criminals". They can't just be ordinary average Joes who maybe are not well-trained and a little bit incompetent, no, they have to be dumb trailer trash (and hence inferior in every way to us good people, even if I'm a Person of Hair Colour with multiple piercings and no steady employment since I finished my degree in Gender Studies Regarding Marginalised Folx in the Underwater Basket-Weaving Industry).

Why no similar feelings for Tyler Robinson, the guy who shot Charlie Kirk? Luigi Mangione packs court rooms with women who think he's dreamy. Tyler Robinson does not, nor does he even get a media air brushing.

Is it because Luigi obviously had sex with beautiful women, perhaps even threesomes, whereas Tyler was an apparent loser who could only hook up with trans women? Ick!

Let this be a lesson! If you're going to commit some high profile partisan violence, make sure you place tastefully brushed up pics of yourself all over your socials. Maybe also get some pics of yourself with cis women strippers.

Conventionally attractive males getting teen girl fanclubs despite being terrible people is… not a new phenomenon; Dzhokar Tsarnaev did, and nobody thinks the Boston marathon bombing was right.

This is more a datapoint in extended adolescence among leftist women than anything else. I suspect that if Dylan Roof had been employed as an underwear model you might have seen some of the same thing in the opposite direction.

Fair enough. I guess everyone would benefit from looksmaxxing before they do something heinous, but at the very least they should glow up their socials.

The AI-airbrushed photos thing did happen apparently:

https://www.thewrap.com/media-platforms/journalism/joe-rogan-ai-altered-alex-pretti-image-ms-now-video/

https://nypost.com/2026/01/28/us-news/photo-of-alex-pretti-altered-by-ai-to-look-more-pretty-was-originally-staff-portrait-at-minneapolis-va-hospital/

Ah well, you always tidy up and establish the symbolism of your saints for the iconography. The photo being used of Renee Good is allegedly an older one, not how she looked now.

But it echoes all the admiration Luigi Mangione was getting, and I think for the same reasons: he's the Hero taking on the Bad Evil Wicked Horrible Guys, of course mm-mm he's so dreamy and smart and the rest of it.

It's weird that this has happened twice, and it's doubly weird that Oracle's brother was the one doing it this time. I'm really not sure why it's a thing for some people on the left to talk about the physical attractiveness of their heroes like this -- I thought the left would be the ones saying that your values are more important than your appearance.

But also the pattern-noticer in me is considering that this has happened only in instances where white adult men have been the grand hero of the left. I can't recall George Floyd being praised for being a dreamboat. And bizarrely the American left types who might have venerated Thomas Matthew Crooks were convinced he was a Republican (?) false flag operation (?), and anyway I guess he radiated "loser teenage boy" energy rather than "big stronk warrior man" energy.

Actually, it's startling to me how little we know about Crooks, his motivations, and the failures of the Secret Service, but unfortunately there's no force that actually wants us to know more. Despite the historically-significant photo he got out of it, Trump seems incredibly embarrassed about his near-death experience and hasn't milked it the way he should have. He seems grateful for the Secret Service despite their failure. Given everything that's happened since, Crooks' assassination attempt is one of the most historically significant events of the past 20 years.

(?) EDIT: I did some research -- I guess Crooks had been searching various political figures in the months leading up to the shooting, it does seem like he was just kind of a loser who wanted to be historically significant by killing someone. I had merged this case with the Kirk assassination case in my head, that's a more clear instance of a shooter who grew up among Republicans becoming a convert to the left due to the internet and LGBT partners, and being radicalized into political violence. That many on the left were willfully ignorant of the fact that this was a guy who grew to share their values and acted on them in an extreme and violent manner is still wild to me. "LGBT liberal from a Republican family" is a stock character. Few people would say they "weren't really a leftie."

I thought the left would be the ones saying that your values are more important than your appearance.

If you (and the mods) will pardon Internet slang - ROFLMAO! That's only for the Persons of Hair Colour, don't you know? When it comes to your enemies, it is fair, correct, and accurate to say they're fat, ignorant, mentally retarded, criminals, but also useless, clumsy, incompetent, and every other bad quality, because you can tell they are bad people by how they look.

Human nature is ever-triumphant over principle, be that in religion, politics, or ordinary affairs.

And bizarrely the American left types who might have venerated Thomas Matthew Crooks were convinced he was a Republican (?) false flag operation (?), and anyway I guess he radiated "loser teenage boy" energy rather than "big stronk warrior man" energy.

History repeated itself with Kirk's assassin.

This gives me an idea!

Apparently in 1990, the KGB wanted to improve its image, so they held some beauty pageants and chose a "miss KGB" to represent the agency. Link. ICE could do something similar! A friendly, pretty, female ICE agent could make people realize that ICE are humans too!

Google "ice bae".

He went to a protest while armed, which is apparently illegal in Minnesota

First time I'm hearing that this is illegal in MN.

Well, damn. I fell prey to misinformation. 11 states forbid it, but not Minnesota.

How are the 1st and 2nd protected while the 1st and the 2nd can't be protected at once?

Kash Patel said it was. It isn't.

I am shocked, shocked to find a Trump administration official saying the thing that is not.

More than that, there were screenshots going around with a citation to a law, but it actually was for Illinois, not Minnesota.

My brother posted some weird screed on Facebook about how handsome Pretti was compared to the ICE agent who shot him, how healthy Pretti looked, how educated Pretti was compared to the typical ICE agent. Basically implying it was dysgenic to shoot Pretti, except I think eugenics is still considered a no-no. I seriously tried to puzzle out if my brother was in the closet despite having a string of serious girlfriends.

He was likely looking at the AI altered photo circulating that made Pretti look significantly more attractive than he did in the original, so I guess the person who made those doctored images achieved their goal with at least your brother.

The detainee's gun goes off in the agents hands. One of the infamous Uncommanded Discharges from a Sig.

It's highly highly questionable whether this actually happened -- certainly it's an appealing narrative in some kind of Chekhov's (unreliable) Gun way, but the guy carrying it away just does not act remotely like a gun just went off in his hand.

Also shouldn't we hear it go off at the right time in at least one of the videos? People keep point to a super grainy slowed down part of the video, when there should be much clearer evidence.

At the time of the solo beginning shot (which itself is weird, they seem to shoot in threes), I cannot for the life of me see who's shooting. The guy who got his gun out isn't really angled in a good way to shoot at Pretti. The Uncommanded discharge theory just seems to fill in a lot of gaps.

Yeah to me it explains both why the agents started shooting and why Pretti decided to reach for what was potentially his weapon. A random gunshot makes sense, otherwise it's hard to see the catalyst of the escalation both ways.

And it might not have been the Sig. I remember in the Rittenhouse case, it turns out that he didn't even fire the first shot. Someone else walking by on a nearby sidewalk fired a gun right when Rittenhouse was running away from the first guy who was trying to kill him. It's not impossible something else like that happened here. With Rittenhouse, we were lucky so much was caught on video. In this case, with the scene so contaminated, we might never know.

I saw a video where it visibly jumped in the guy's hand, but who knows if it was doctored. I think the rest of the description still works, just hearing someone say, "GUN!" in the loud chaotic environment could be enough to make some jumpy exhausted people shoot, even if the true statement was, "I grabbed his gun!"

After the shooting they were all looking around asking, "Where is the gun! Where is the gun!" so they clearly thought the gun was in play at the time.

I saw a video where it visibly jumped in the guy's hand,

That's not what I'm talking about though -- I've never had a gun go 'bang' when I was expecting a 'click' (or worse yet, nothing) but even an unexpected 'click' really get's your attention.

If the guy had just accidentally shot the ground next to his feet we wouldn't be doing a frame-by-frame analysis to see if the slide moved; he would have stopped what he was doing, looked at the gun in horror, etc. As it stands he just keeps running across the street; it's completely implausible that he would be this cool having just plucked somebody else's gun from it's holster and having it AD in his hand.

The agent grabbed the gun and ran away from the scuffle. Presumably he felt it is dangerous for the gun to remain in the vicinity of the scuffle so he wanted to get it away as quickly as possible. If the gun goes off in his hand, I think that a likely response is to take that as confirmation that he had to get the gun away from the scuffle as quickly as possible, and continue running.

Sometimes drivers, after trying to hit the brakes and accidentally hitting the gas instead, will mash the gas pedal into the floor as hard as they can to try to get the car to stop. When people are frightened, they often double down rather than pause and re-evaluate.

Sometimes people will freeze if they are startled or frightened. I think that’s an instinctual response to avoid attracting the attention of large predators. This “freeze” response won’t occur in a person who is already running, so it wouldn’t apply here.

I thought he looked back, towards Pretti, but also towards where the proposed shot would have gone. Would you be more likely to look at the gun or the direction it shot? I think a case could be made for either.

Pistols are really loud, like ‘agent is now temporarily deaf and probably has permanent hearing damage’ loud. Looking elsewhere doesn’t seem likely.

No dude -- guns are loud, when one goes off unexpectedly in your hand you do not look elsewhere first. Looking back is in fact much more consistent with the shot coming from some other gun in the area.

Now, the wiggling around is basically a human reflex, but it is one that must be suppressed if you find yourself in the position of being arrested.

I don't think this is a fair standard by any means but reminds me of the Gom Jabbar from Dune.

In the next line I said the opposite of "failure to control this reflex should be an instant kill shot." But there are plenty of people who are arrested for resisting arrest in basically this way, even if they weren't being charged with any other crime besides resisting arrest. I don't really agree with this, but it happens and people should be aware of what is expected of them if they're in that situation.

The bitter pill for people to swallow is that if Pretti had been arrested after this and given a week or month to cool down in a jail cell somewhere, he'd still be alive.

It's almost as if enforcing the law... saves lives. Even the ones breaking them.

Yes, I'm well aware that strict interpretation of the law opens up alot of holes to fall down. It's a thorny mine-field, and in my experience good law enforcement is all about adhering to the spirit of the law, as no one is perfect and everyone makes mistakes.

But I don't think it's all that crazy to suggest that maybe we need to be a little more strict about some things, such as what's shown in the video.

Yep. People who are obstructing or insulting LEOs deserve to be taken into custody, fined, etc.

The person involved deserved it - many here may think deserve applies in the traditional sense, but I think at minimum we see "deserve" here in the sense of "engaged in stupid avoidable behavior that necessitated the response or failing that represents a lifestyle that drastically increases the likelihood of a bad outcome."

Following that definition, would it be fair to say that you think a woman whose lifestyle involves walking around in the bad part of town at night in a miniskirt without male company deserves to be raped? Or that smokers deserve lung cancer, even?

I dislike politically motivated redefinitions of a word. "GWB is a Nazi[1] ([1]: where a Nazi is anyone to the right of Clinton). "Protesters deserve[2] to get shot ([2]: where deserve means to have a lifestyle which makes the consequences much more likely)". "Gas[3] the Jews ([3]: where gassing means to coordinate to cut back the influence of AIPAC)".

By design, the Motte does not do a lot of thought policing against ideas which most would find repugnant. If you want to argue that death is a fitting punishment for Pretti, you can do so openly. No need to torture the English language so that you can make a claim which sounds like that but acktually toootally means something much more harmless.

Also, I can not recall reading many people here who were arguing that people who are protesting by annoying ICE (through whistles, filming, blocking their cars etc) deserve (in the traditional sense) to be summarily executed, that it is an injustice that they are )mostly) suffered to live.

they think Trump is literally Hitler and that ICE is the Gestapo, they are seeking violence and finds it justified and at the same time don't seem to think what they are doing constitutes violence.

I think you would have to stretch the definition of violence to its breaking point to make the claim that most protesters are engaging in violence. If ten of the protesters in MN were serious about violence the way the IRA or the mafia in Sicily was, they would be able to murder ICE agents.

To judge the Pretti shooting, we do not need to milk his background for all its worth ("He was a nurse helping people" - "He had kicked out the taillight of an ICE car"). The people who shot him did not know either fact. The only case in which a jury would care about his character is if there was a dispute about what actions he was engaging in, and his character might make one version more likely than the other. (For example, if someone claimed that he fired shots at ICE, prior footage of him firing at a car with ICE people in it would be relevant in the absence of conclusive video evidence.)

From the videos, it seems to most (even here on the Motte) that there was insufficient justification for shooting him. This makes the shooting, morally if not legally (so far) manslaughter. The rest does not matter except for people trying to spin public opinion (e.g. everyone). If it turned out that he had been a serial killer or the reincarnation of Christ, it would still be manslaughter. (So far, he seems closer to the latter rather than the former, so on top of the shooting itself being unjustified, the left has been winning rather hard with this case.)

Was his behavior risky? Sure. But that is the miniskirt argument again. This case is not like a smoker getting lung cancer. We have a perpetrator who had signed up for a job which entailed scuffles with demonstrators, some of whom were armed, in a very stressful environment. If a truck driver runs a red light and kills someone, I would not give a fuck about his excuses for him being in a bad mental state (short of "someone drugged me"). You had a bad night of sleep, low blood sugar, migraine, anxiety, whatever? Too bad, by starting the ignition (or your ICE shift), you certified that you were of sound mind, so manslaughter it is.

Following that definition, would it be fair to say that you think a woman whose lifestyle involves walking around in the bad part of town at night in a miniskirt without male company deserves to be raped? Or that smokers deserve lung cancer, even?

Taking your second example first, I had a close family member die of lung cancer from smoking. I saw their struggles and failure to quit smoking. It's a horrible death. Did they "deserve" to die? No.

BUT.

I'm also seeing a lot of idiot online content (and some may well be AI generated, I have no idea) pushing the idea that cigarette smoking is Kewl and Rebellious and great. Maybe the people are just being teenagers doing what teenagers always do, pushing back against authority telling them "just say no". They may be too young, having grown up under the demise of smoking, to realise how bad it is. Do they "deserve" to die of lung cancer? If someone hears all the warnings, knows it's risky, and still insists on being Mr or Ms Rebel Rebel and want to play the odds on "but not everybody gets lung cancer, and besides today we have much better treatments and outcomes", then hell yeah if it turns out oops they lost the bet, then in a sense they do deserve it. And that's what Pretti was doing.

For your first example, let me quote the Kaiser Chiefs song in answer: well, if you insist on dressing provocatively, going to the bad part of town, and getting so drunk you're incapable... it's not very sensible

Girls scrabble 'round with no clothes on
To borrow a pound for a condom
If it wasn't for chip fat they'd be frozen
They're not very sensible

Indeed, for the Minneapolis situation:

Watching the people get lairy
It's not very pretty I tell thee
Walking through town is quite scary
It's not very sensible either
A friend of a friend he got beaten
He looked the wrong way at a policeman
Would never have happened to Smeaton
An Old Leodensian

Did they "deserve" to die?

Yes, every man has free will and free choice and is, ultimately, the master of his fate and captain of his soul.

Better question about the current situation is:

If Alex Pretti drew his gun first and shot the ICE agents, would you say: "If the agents were sensible, they would pick safe burger flipping or shelf stocking job. They volunteered for this work, well knowing it could be dangerous. They chose their fate. FAFO."?

Not exactly, but kinda? How much weeping, how many top level posts about how "Everything Is Not Fine" do you see for LEOs that got killed? Everybody sees it as part of their job.

Not exactly, but kinda? How much weeping, how many top level posts about how "Everything Is Not Fine" do you see for LEOs that got killed? Everybody sees it as part of their job.

Except Brian Sicknick. It's all who/whom.

Following that definition, would it be fair to say that you think a woman whose lifestyle involves walking around in the bad part of town at night in a miniskirt without male company deserves to be raped?

We call these women ‘prostitutes’ and getting raped is an occupational hazard of streetside prostitution.

Now that doesn’t mean they deserve it, but as the vice squad will tell you, they should get normal jobs to avoid it. Their lifestyle is, well, having sex with people who hire shady illegal prostitutes, a much larger percentage of whom are rapists than is normal for sexually active males in any culture.

They can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think @quiet_NaN is being literal with the hypothetical here.

As in, what if a normal woman literally decided, against common sense, to walk around in a bad part of town at night in a miniskirt alone? (Sometimes it is nice to go on a night walk, and she likes her miniskirt as an outfit)

So there is no crime or even unwholesomeness involved at all on her part (I don't think this is a good analogy for Pretti though)

If it turned out that he had been a serial killer or the reincarnation of Christ, it would still be manslaughter.

I made the same argument about the people trying to dig up dirt on Renee Good. Either it was a good shoot (no pun intended), or it wasn't. Her prior criminal record (or lack thereof) has nothing to do with it.

I think it's not so much any prior criminal record for Good, but rather that an early part of the narrative (and indeed it still is) that this was "an ordinary mother" who just happened to wander by mistake into the part of town where the ICE protest was going on (she was returning from dropping her kid off to school and didn't know the city well) and oh dear when she tried to get away the ICE guy deliberately leaned in and shot her (again, I'm quoting from reports from an alleged witness who claimed the ICE agent 'leaned on the hood of the car* and shot her').

When you find out that Good, by contrast, was an activist and involved in previous protests and was going to this one deliberately as an 'Official Observer', then that does change the context around the shooting. Maybe it wasn't a good shoot, but Good was not an innocent bystander, she deliberately put herself in that danger. That makes it less "evil Nazi thug deliberately murdered ordinary American citizen" and more "murky situation where person put themselves and others in danger".

*If the ICE agent had been hit by the car, then it's possible the impact made him bend over, and that would account for the impression that he 'leaned on the hood'. But if you want to gather evidence that this was deliberate murder, you can't go "okay this could be ragdoll physics from impact", you need it to be "he was fine, she never touched him, he in fact leaned on her car so he could get nearer with the shot to kill her".

But I wasn't criticising the people bringing up the fact that Good was a committed activist. I was criticising the people bringing up her prior criminal record, which had nothing to do with her political activism.

We have a perpetrator who had signed up for a job which entailed scuffles with demonstrators, some of whom were armed, in a very stressful environment.

I am guessing that was not the case when the perpetrator signed up for the job. That it is now such a job is the decision of the protestors, not of the perpetrator.

"We're going to follow you around make your job as stressful as we possibly can, what did you expect? You signed up for a stressful job!"

From Pretti's perspective, what he was doing was tantamount to wearing a miniskirt into a 1%er biker bar and dancing on the tables. It was past just "risky" and well into "inviting trouble". That he got into it through error rather than malice on the part of the "bikers" is a flaw in the analogy, certainly.

There's a difference between the prudential, , the ethical, and the legal. It would still be illegal for the bikers to murder the mini skirt wearer.

It depends on whether the woman was raped in self-defense.

Bizarrely as your phrasing is, in the context of the analogy I agree with you.

If it turns out that Pretti was shot in self-defense, then there is no obvious other party to blame.

The analogy would be of Pretti being a part of a community of very enthusiastic base jumpers who falls to his death. We can vaguely point at the rest of the community, but if you subscribe to the belief that adults should make their own decisions, the responsibility ultimately rests with the jumper. A base jumper still does not deserve to die and it is sad if they do, but there is also no injustice in them succumbing to gravity.

However, if Pretti was a clear-cut case of self-defense, it would not make good CW fodder.

Your honor, it was self defense. She called me a faggot.

Following that definition, would it be fair to say that you think a woman whose lifestyle involves walking around in the bad part of town at night in a miniskirt without male company deserves to be raped? Or that smokers deserve lung cancer, even?

Frankly, I'd say a (qualified) yes. I think many more conservative posters here would be willing to bite that bullet. Basically you're just saying that your actions have consequences, and it's important to be aware of those consequences. I'm not saying it's 'right' or that they 'deserve it' necessarily, but human nature being what it is, women who walk around in skimpy clothing in bad areas alone are dramatically increasing their likelihood of being raped. It's fine to tell them that they are increasing their risk, and also fine for them to take that risk.

Should we try to lower the risk as a society? Absolutely. Does that mean that the hurt person is totally blameless in the situation? No.

Was his behavior risky? Sure. But that is the miniskirt argument again. This case is not like a smoker getting lung cancer. We have a perpetrator who had signed up for a job which entailed scuffles with demonstrators, some of whom were armed, in a very stressful environment. If

This is a very different situation. These people are explicitly trying to provoke violence. That would be like if a super hot woman walks around a crime riddled area in a bikini repeatedly telling all the men how horny she is and that she bets they'd like to get some of this.

Should we try to lower the risk as a society? Absolutely. Does that mean that the hurt person is totally blameless in the situation? No.

I suspect sometimes people pattern-match to arguments of the form "Doing FOO causes thing BAR, therefore people who FOO deserve BAR, therefore we shouldn't try to lower the risk of BAR given FOO or ameliorate BAR when it happens to someone who FOO.", e. g. not prosecuting someone who raped a woman who walked through a 'bad' area in revealing clothing as vigourously as someone who raped a conservatively-dressed woman in an upscale neighbourhood.

These people are explicitly trying to provoke violence. That would be like if a super hot woman walks around a crime riddled area in a bikini repeatedly telling all the men how horny she is and that she bets they'd like to get some of this.

If a woman walked around anywhere and told men "how horny she is and that she bets they'd like to get some of this", then I think she should get in (mild) trouble for some kind of public indecency (and maybe she should also get in trouble for wearing a bikini )

If she got raped/assaulted/etc, then the blame would fall solely on the attacker(s). In fact, assuming she did get victimised (and not just a bunch of disgusted looks for being obscene), she would actually be acting virtuously.

When law-abiding citizens make the selfish (but completely understandable, given modern progressive attitudes to crime) decision to just avoid "crime-riddled areas", "no-go zones", etc, it helps hide how bad those places are: whilst an actual crime incident is objective and legible in statistics, it's much harder to quantify this sort of "latent" crime which would have hypothetically taken place if someone had walked down the street at night alone, but didn't happen because they predicted that and stayed away instead.

People should walk down the streets anywhere, at anytime, no matter how vulnerable and/or sexually alluring. And the police should come down hard when a criminal preys on said person. And if a criminal keeps doing the same thing, they should be permanently removed from society - they aren't Minecraft mobs who naturally spawn whenever there is a low population density.

I think the actual distinction between Pretti and the miniskirt hypothetical is that ICE fulfills a necessary role in society, so there is a tradeoff to be made in letting them do their jobs vs preventing overreach. There is no such trade-off for a criminal.

In fact, assuming she did get victimised (and not just a bunch of disgusted looks for being obscene), she would actually be acting virtuously.

How so? Just being bait for evil predators doesn't seem virtuous, unless there is a side of "getting said evil predators what they deserve"...it's analogous to walking around in a rough neighborhood with visible $100s, if you get mugged that doesn't seem virtuous; if you're carrying and shoot the would-be muggers it might be.

Both are virtuous in the sense that the problems would go away if most of society adopted the habit of exercising their right to walk around public spaces. There would initially be lots of rapes/muggings, but then there would be a backlash and something would be done to get rid of the evil predators.

When people instead opt to just avoid those areas, they cede those areas to the predators.

And on an individual level, the predators would now actually have committed a crime they could be charged for (instead of just being menacing but legal)

Perhaps we mean different things by virtuous. I use virtuous to mean pro-social behaviour - there is no requirement for some sort heroism or struggle (but it includes stuff like that too)

I mean, sure, fair. However, there has to be a way to get the predators, $100 Guy just enriches muggers by walking around in rough neighborhoods with his $100s unless the muggers face consequences, whether that's getting shot while trying to rob the dude or going to prison for robbing our hero. If muggers get away with it often enough it's no good.

It used to be an example of the previous Golden Age by contrast with our own depraved times, from Ireland to Mongolia and other cultures, that "in former days a beautiful maiden with a bag of gold could walk from one end of [the territory] to the other and be unharmed".

The unspoken part was a combination of "people were so virtuous due to proper social training and examples, and the guilty were swiftly and harshly punished, that nobody would even dream of committing a crime".

We've dropped the "swift and harsh punishment" part, and are chopping away at the "people are virtuous" part as hard as we can.

As I said, there will be some kind of backlash when lots of innocents are victimised, and their stories are told. I think somehow this would lead to the problem being solved (e.g. by increased police patrols in the area) - and I'm advocating we shouldn't blame the victims for this, because that makes society more accepting of the crime.

And I'm coming at this from the angle of how the whole of society should operate, as opposed to one-(wo)man operations where someone walks around as bait and executes street criminals.

I think the actual distinction between Pretti and the miniskirt hypothetical is that ICE fulfills a necessary role in society, so there is a tradeoff to be made in letting them do their jobs vs preventing overreach. There is no such trade-off for a criminal.

Fair, yeah I agree that rapists don't add anything to society. I still think that your 'should' is doing a lot of work here.

Everyone wants discrete categories. Deserve or not deserve. Good or bad shoot. Nothing in the world works this way, only in our mind do these categories exist.

So I wouldn't want to 'bite the bullet' on that yes. Smokers deserve lung cancer MORE than non-smokers. But only God can give us true justice.

I was vague because I am not sure if the word deserve applies and think it's a tough situation - the rational and emotional parts of my brain are both split.

As a more immediate note - if you wear a gun in front of cops you have certainly behavioral responsibilities that he did not meet on multiple occasions.

He didn't walk around the bad part of town wearing a miniskirt, he did it while wearing a miniskirt and making racial slurs and daring people to assault him. This certainly doesn't ethically clear any rapists in full, but it alters the calculus quite a bit.

People need to have accountability for behavior, especially when what not to do is obvious, clearly understood, and impulse control does not apply.

Echoing my comment to @ThomasdelVasto:

As a more immediate note - if you wear a gun in front of cops you have certainly behavioral responsibilities that he did not meet on multiple occasions.

Agreed. The cops are doing an necessary job, so there is a tradeoff between exercising your rights and obstructing them from their duties.

...he did it while wearing a miniskirt and making racial slurs and daring people to assault him. This certainly doesn't ethically clear any rapists in full

It doesn't ethically clear the rapists at all. Unlike LEOs, Criminals are not a necessary part of society, and no one is ever has "behavioural responsibilities" to avoid provoking them to commit crimes. Actually it would be especially important to make sure the rapists were prosectued to the full extent of the law, to make it clear to everyone that it is never okay to commit crimes, even if someone verbally offends you.

He would also be a guilty party for being hostile and antisocial (but his guilt would be dwarfed by the rapists')

My understanding is that the legal system draws a distinction between "move, I want that seat" and "hey nigger move your bitch ass or I'll rape your ugly retarded mother,"

Some behaviors have a clear, dangerous response. See: "fighting words."

The institutional loss of knowledge of these tensions is causing problems. Obviously wearing a miniskirt in public doesn't justify anything. Doing the same alone at a bar where date rapes happen and not monitoring your drink also doesn't justify anything, but it certainly is a sign of poor judgement.

Breaking into a private biker bar and shouting "rape me pussies." Yeah... that one is your fault.

Where to draw these lines is important and hard, but at some point people need to understand that their actions have consequences and they become part of the blame equation.

My understanding is that the legal system draws a distinction between "move, I want that seat" and "hey nigger move your bitch ass or I'll rape your ugly retarded mother,"

You've changed the hypothetical completely - originally it was someone being verbally offensive, and was talking about their own rape. Now your hypothetical person is trying to forcefully displace someone from their seat. Neither of these (not even the more banal "move, I want that seat") are okay to say - and I would be open to a self-defense argument there.

but it certainly is a sign of poor judgement.

Sure. But I disagree that poor judgement in this case amounts to any level of guilt. Even though we live in an imperfect world where crime occurs, we should avoid blaming people for being victimised to avoid legitimising crime.

Breaking into a private biker bar and shouting "rape me pussies." Yeah... that one is your fault.

If you break into a private establishment, then yes, things become grayer. I am okay with actual lethal violence in that case, and might even overlook rape - just on the principle that once you trespass you essentially forfeit all your rights.

But again, this doesn't map to the original hypothetical, because "the bad part of town" is not private property (not even at night), and the public has a (pro-social) right to be there.

...but at some point people need to understand that their actions have consequences and they become part of the blame equation.

Only if those actions are inherently bad (like breaking and entering, obstructing the duties of law enforcement, etc), if they are good/neutral, then the only people to blame are the criminals who enforce these wholly illegitimate consequences.

My point is that some behaviors are sufficiently bad that they cause a known reaction and it is in part your fault for causing that reaction.

This is an important point that is lost in many domains, and as others have pointed out - one of those is bullying.

The stance of many here is that this guy (and good) fucked around and found out. They made mistakes that anyway with any clear thinking would not because they are known to be both avoidable and potentially deadly.

Don't fight the police while carrying a gun is like the most basic thing you can think of (not that "don't fight the police at all" isn't one of the biggest pieces of advice everyone gives their kids). While many on the left don't understand guns, this is mostly equivalent to saying "don't attack the police with a deadly weapon or you might get dead."

The idea that "he wasn't going to use it" is not tenable in a real life situation because everyone claims they weren't or aren't including people actively shooting you...... I.... I don't think most people on the left actually understand how the world works anymore.

This is (modest) evidence that ICE are not all psychos: you can yell at them, spit at their door, smash their car light, and all they will do is push you down, and not even charge you. There were likely hundreds of similar instances in the Minneapolis area since the start of the year. [On an unrelated note, I think recent events are as evidence toward my thesis a month ago that humans naturally love engaging in the evolutionary Coalition-Trickery-Warfare repertoire of instincts. The anti-ICE folks love to engage in coalition-formation against a common enemy, they love harass the enemy “raiding parties”, they love to use Call of Duty -esque profane language against their enemies, they want to see them miserable and crying, they enjoy conspiring in secret on how to trick and subvert their enemy’s expeditions, and they are even using primitive war whistles. They have completely dehumanized ICE agents, which is also adds to the fun. I wanted them to activate these instincts against Somalis, but their ingroup / outgroup wiring is different, so they are having fun doing it against ICE, and investing many hours in it. Because it’s fun! These are people who would ordinarily call themselves non-violent pacifists; unfortunately for such people, they have the same exact instincts as the rest of us].

ICE are not all psychos

I believe that ICE is still mostly staffed by career civil servants who take their duties and their commitment to the nation seriously and are both highly trained and very professional. They are augmented by a huge influx of new hires who are inexperienced and undertrained and are being thrown into the front lines. Furthermore, some of the new hires (in particular those who do not come from a law enforcement background) might have questionable motivation for seeking the job, or so the story goes (e.g. claims that everyone who was once a Proud Boy is now a federal agent; probably not the case, but may have a glimmer of truth).

I would be fairly surprised if most of the ones who joined after January 2025 meet that description. Or, if it is most, it's cutting it close. I am basing that mostly on heuristics rather than strong evidence, but that's just how I'd lean.

I think the most dangerous part of wokeism is how ego-syntonic it is. It tells you all your worst instincts are completely appropriate (against them), it tells you are a good person and you have empathy.

It's is a scaffolding which permits so much bad behavior, just as the worst religions do.

Additionally I don't know how many of us here actually regularly interact with American black people

I didn’t date my first white woman until I was 35 years old - I’m now probably the most racist person I know.

I lived the ‘ we are all the same … some smarter some more athletic some nicer etc but fundamentally all the same ‘ for a while. Jon Stewart told me so.

But it just isn’t true. I feel bad for the portion of that population that is just like everyone else - just normal people with normal thoughts some smart some athletic some good cooks some bad friends whatever … but no where near the seething hatred I have for what America could be if the issues black Americans bring were sorted out.

I sometimes wonder if it’d have been better for everyone had my family and I just stayed in Poland. At least I’d have several weeks vacation every year and I could walk down every street I see. Have a national spirit and pride.

For actual ghetto black it’s going to be essentially zero for any one on this chat. Best I’ve got would be in sports or a buddies coke dealer. And those would still have a good deal of filtering and not be the dysfunction in West Baltimore.

I know the implication is you dated non white women but it would be funny if you just hadn’t dated anyone until you turned 35

Vacuously true statements about the empty set are one of the best things in life.

Indeed the first sentence suggests OP himself is black, when I think he's saying he's white (Polish) and dated non-white women until 35.

I wish I had a country I could consider going back to. Alas.

Does Poland allow any sort of returning expatriate citizenship/visa programs? Every now and again you see countries with that. Like if you can prove some sort of ancestry they'll grant you citizenship.

I’m still a Polish citizen - I can just apply for a Polish passport.

I think it’s called Citizenship by Blood or something equally cool sounding.

Issue with that is I enjoy America - I’m American!

My friends always teased me that I was the best American they knew.

But worst comes to worst … who knows?

Yesssss, one of us, one of us.

Pretti was the obnoxious child running up to much bigger kids, putting his finger 0.0000001mm away from their faces, and chanting "I'm not touching you" until the bigger kid punched him in the face. After which point, having accomplished precisely what he set out to do, Pretti cried that he was hit and demanded that the bigger kid be punished because technically he didn't deserve to be punched by the rules as he understands them1. And yes, technically we don't want to encourage children to punch other, smaller, more obnoxious children. But sometimes, as a parent, you have to play dumb. "I didn't see anything, just learn to get along."

We, as a nation, need to play dumb. Let however many of these adult children face consequences (even unfair ones) for the first time in their entire lives. I wasn't there, and neither were you. I didn't see anything. Now go learn to get along with ICE.

  1. Well, not literally. Pretti was dead, a far superior outcome for an adult engaged in such behavior.

Additionally doing the 0.0000000001m stunt whilst armed is just massively increasing the risk of something going off the rails even if you are actually 100% compliant and pleasant in your interactions with law enforcement.

Devils Advocate:

Can't we apply this to other killings? Charlie Kirk was engaging in calls to coordinate state violence against his out group (ie running on political issues that would negatively effect the alphabet folks). He was destroying the fabric of our society for profit and fame. He technically is allowed to do that by the first amendment, but it is rules-lawyering. We as a nation should "just play dumb" when his outgroup coordinates violence directly against him in response, because influencers profiting on division and tribal polarization of our society is bad. Let the adult children face the consequences of their rhetoric.

Charlie Kirk was engaging in calls to coordinate state violence against his out group (ie running on political issues that would negatively effect the alphabet folks).

How did his proposals amount to coordinated state violence?

I’ve discussed this up and down this thread and don’t feel like rewriting it.

"Technically was allowed" means "is very close to something which is disallowed". Calling for state violence is not very close to something which is disallowed. It's certainly not very close to something which is both disallowed and for which the proper response is to shoot you.

"Technically was allowed" is not the same as "allowed".

If you want to get into pedantic word-choice discussions I don't have the patience, interest, or inclination to join you. Speak plainly, make an argument on the content and we can have discussion. If not, your reputation is evidently of someone who abuses the report button on tribal issues so idk if its worth engaging with you.

Pointing out that "technically was allowed" means something and is not the same as just "is allowed" isn't pedantic word-choice discussions. The anti-ICE protestors did things that were only technically allowed. This was not true for Kirk.

In other words, would you say that Mr Coil's argument proves too much?

I'm going to need to read that and get back to you, 2013 Scott is wayy prior to my introduction to the Ratsphere.

He was destroying the fabric of our society for profit and fame.

Is this your devil's advocacy purposely hyperbolizing or do you believe this? Because it's certainly arguably both wild overstatement (the first part) and very presumptuously ascribing motive. I frankly don't see how your comparison here works. Unless you're trolling, in which case, well played I guess.

I'd be happy to double down on "he was destroying the fabric of our society", in that he was a major player in the campaign to delegitimise the 2020 election by telling blatant lies to his gullible co-partisans. I think the full adoption of his political programme (which was not moderate) would have done a lot of damage to the fabric of American society, but most people with strong, genuine political views think that about the other side. But I think the claim that Charlie Kirk was motivated by profit and fame is unlikely - there are a lot of pure grifters in politics, and they don't behave like Kirk.

The simplest explanation for Kirk's behaviour is that he genuinely believed that doing the work of politics (talking to voters, organising coalitions, training cadres etc.) was important and pro-social. I can snark about Kirk being the kind of Christian who thought that Republican electoral success was more important than the commandment against bearing false witness, but his faith was clearly sincere and was clearly driving his politics in a pro-social direction as well.

The world would be a better place if there was more room in politics for men like Charlie Kirk. The problem with Kirk's politics is that to make room for more men like Charlie Kirk, you need fewer men like Donald Trump.

I don't recall the blatant lies you're referring to, but I have no reason to doubt your sincerity in believing that he was the author to such. I'm going only off what I witnessed of him in the numerous videos I've been exposed to (all before his murder). I never saw him in any context except speaking to college students in various places, from Oxford union to Wherever, America. Until his death, when suddenly all the news coverage was about him, I had little knowledge of Turning Point USA, for example. So my knowledge of him is likely not complete. I'd add that I still don't see him as equivalent to Kulak (or more high profile agitators like Candace Owens, etc.) I'll end by saying that I didn't buy everything Kirk was selling, but I did agree with many of his ideas, so that does add a bias to my perspective. If I despised him as much as many seem to despise him (and often I do think he is just misrepresented) who knows, maybe I'd classify him differently. My public speaker, someone else's dangerous orator or whatever.

The problem with Kirk's politics is that to make room for more men like Charlie Kirk, you need fewer men like Donald Trump.

No, there was plenty of room for men like Kirk, until men who opposed Donald Trump shot him dead.

I fundamentally believe there are a class of influencers that sell tribal turmoil: Hatred of the out-group, Us-vs-them, Dehumanization, Crazy-highlighting. They create communities/followers around these manufactured identities, belief systems, narratives. In doing so they raise the political heat level, it sows division, and division sells, hatred sells, tribal fighting appeals to the basest of our human desires. Doing it torches the commons. It burns the social fabric of a society.

I have a coworker with a PhD in the cognitive science of radicalization. We talk about this topic at length and we both see it. Is it hyperbole? I don't think so. Its insidious, slow. Kirk isn't solely the perpetrator. He is part of an entire ecosystem of tribal influences, left and right. Describing motive is more nebulous, do I think Kirk and his ilk are mustache twirling villains? Absolutely not! Their incentives are the same as everyone else: personal enrichment, wealth, fame, status. But what sells better? Moderate takes, restrained discourse? Or provocative knuckle dragging, ape is stronk! content? Idk how anyone on the internet can fail to see that? People follow incentives, and incentives to exploit hard-wired human nature are undoubtedly the most profitable.

EDIT: Kulak is a very clear Motte-based example of this.

What do those with cognitive science of radicalization PhDs say about how much of this is driven by foreign interests? It seems to me, though I don't know much about this at all, that financing polarizing individuals with media reach to widen differences and distrust in a geopolitical rival is a very cost effective way to weaken them. It's sort of like dumping a lot of agents into neutral territories to "Sow Dissent" or "Cause Unrest" in a Total War strategy game and the like.

I think people should try to become more aware of who is served by the intensifying disagreements rather than just looking at the issues themselves and who agrees or disagrees with oneself. There's a lot of questions that you'll hate your neighbor's answer to. That doesn't mean it's wise to be debating the thorniest questions all the time.

It is actually his and mine’s active area of research. The interplay between domestic actors and foreign ones, engaging in the manufacture of narratives vs naturally grown ones. How much of this increased polarization is a result of cognitive warfare, how do you identify that, strategies for radicalization and deradicalization, etc.

I can’t really say more on a public forum.

I just typed out a lengthy reply then lost it by clumsy typing.

The gist is I think Kirk was, in fact, a good example of the restrained discourse you describe (if not moderate takes.) Candace Owens more neatly fits into the system you describe. And I still wouldn't advocate or nod at her murder.

I also suspect personally that Kirk was motivated by genuine conviction. My previous reply was better, apologies, cynicism vs naïveté, etc.

Edit bc of your edit: Kulak and Kirk are leagues apart.

And I still wouldn't advocate or nod at her murder.

I'm not advocating for nor nodding at their murder. I'm pointing out what I see as a very human reaction to heated tribal politics that I think Kirk contributed to.

Yeah, Candace Owens, Fuentes, Kulak are definitely more extreme than Kirk was, but its also unclear if they had his reach. I don't really think he was all that moderate. To me this is a class, Kirk could absolutely be on the lower end of the extremity scale but he's still in that class. I think that entire class of individuals is a problem.

I also suspect personally that Kirk was motivated by genuine conviction

I think that was part of his brand. Genuine conviction doesn't make you worth 12 million at 30y. You don't chance into that kind of wealth. History is ripe with people of genuine conviction who advocated for political change, are immortalized for it, and still died poor.

You have a reasonable view here, but my original dispute (apart from how we may classify Kirk on some spectrum of shit-stirring or snakeoilsmanship) is with your comparison of the Pretti killing to Kirk's murder. I think there is a fundamental difference in the two that makes any comparison specious. Namely that while Pretti was armed, waded on purpose into an escalating situation, and, if the recent video of him kicking the SUV is any indication, was gunning (cough) for a fight. Kirk didn't do any of that. He was--at least verbally--inflammatory, yes, and did not shirk from an (oral) conflict, but did not advocate violence (to my knowledge), and was squarely in the zone of "words can never hurt me" for his critics, one of whom nevertheless shot him dead.

My original disagreement is not in the details of the situation, they are absolutely distinct and incomparable at that level. My viewpoint is wholly on the symbolic or semantic level. In that what do they represent?

  • Kirk et al: No actual violence, no calls to violence directly. But coordination of violence through the intended effect of policy. Application of the Authority/State's MoV. I classify this as Mean Girl behavior, Feminine Violence, Exploiting the letter of the Law

  • Pretti et al: Physical violence, direct in your face aggression, not coordinating violence for the future, no subterfuge, honest, masculine violence.

Should these really be treated so distinct? We condemn masculine violence but does that mean we should allow feminine violence? Humans are social creatures. We can innately recognize when social violence is being enacted against us. Allowing for the only response to feminine violence to be more feminine violence just lets the best at it thrive. Balance is required.

Words are not sacrosanct. And the ability to use feminine violence is not either. Just because people who love to use words as their weapons scream and rage and call you all manner of names when you take them away doesn't mean you should stop, or that the comparison is not apt. And sometimes the only answer to feminine violence is masculine violence. That is natural law.

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No, because Kirk as you describe him is lot real - it’s a media lie.

Who you’re replying to is … I mean, almost verbatim what the video shows.

So one is real and one is fictional.

I think that should have meaning.

No, because Kirk as you describe him is lot real

Considering my media diet is pretty sparse (predominately here) and I know of Kirk/Crowder/Walsh from my MRA/Debate-Bro days, I find the insinuation that I am believing some sort of mainstream media lie pretty unbelievable. You are welcome to believe what you want of course.

If you want to do the effort of changing my belief, I am open to some evidence. My current stance is that he was a debate bro influencer who stirred tribal tensions and hate towards the outgroup for profit, while advocating for a return to traditional Christian conservative values. Should give you clear goal posts.

‘ I believe in Heaven and Hell - that should give you clear goal posts ‘

No thank you. You’re welcome to hold beliefs that are incorrect.

That's what I assumed, being asked to prove that something is a media lie is too much effort. It's much easier to sit on the couch and throw arguments in from the peanut gallery.

If you can find a clip of Charlie Kirk spitting on a woke snowflake and then roundhouse kicking her car causing enough damage that it is no longer street legal, then I will agree with this take.

The urge to create this in Sora is strong...

This is what I am talking about. In the OPs metaphor, Kirk is analogous those middle-school mean girls who go spread rumors, sick the teachers on you, maliciously turn people against you. All without actually personally inflicting violence on you. Their motives are to get fame, popularity, social cred, friends, all very banal human things. Are you the sort of person that when someone fights back violently, for being bullied, you punish them because those mean girls weren't physically violent? Or are you the adult that "plays dumb" because those mean girls need to face the consequences of their social violence?

If you are the former, then a lot of people on the right complain about this zero-tolerance fighting problem and how it punishes people for standing up for themselves. If you are the later then the Kirk situations is just that scaled up with far deadlier consequences.

Kirk is analogous those middle-school mean girls who go spread rumors

Even if this were true, "sticks and stones" is much more typical advice on dealing with meangirls than "it's OK if you want to shoot them in the neck"?

Probably because violence against mean girls has been so restricted that once something pops past the threshold it is insanely more violent than it should be. This is an argument that some earlier low level of violence probably would have prevented later lethal violence.

It is hilariously a very feminine argument that mean girls should just be ignored. You ever see the videos of female privilege to mouth off colliding with someone who doesn't recognize it? Maybe we really do live in a longhouse.

You are actually advocating for violence as a response to mean words?

Fascinating -- I do agree that men tend to be politer to each other because violence is always on the table -- but historically the accepted response to unacceptable speech is a challenge to violence, not skipping straight to the party.

If the dude had challenged Kirk to pistols at dawn in defence of his boygirl-friend's honour that would be fine with me -- but sneaking around to get yourself a sucker-punch opportunity is not in fact a masculine activity.

A challenge to violence is definitely the preferred approach but it is not always going to happen. Sometimes you just get punched. I'd argue that skipping straight to violence is because a challenge to violence is not legal and would be giving away the opportunity.

I'm openly unsure how to square this honor cultures being absolutely shit places to live.

You are actually advocating for violence as a response to mean words?

As a government policy? Absolutely not. As a social reality? Yes with caveats.

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And the result of following that advice was letting the mean girls run everything.

And wokies are mean girls in power

Kirk peacefully went and spoke with people in order to change their minds and promote his message.

You're equating that to someone interfering with federal officers while armed, multiple times, while shouting, "assault me."

It would be laughable if there were any humor in it.

There's humor in everything, you just need to look for it.

I am not claiming Kirk violently assaulted people, and I never have. There might be some sort of masculine honor in that at least. Instead, he advocated for the state to go inflict violence on people, he advocated for a return to laws and norms that would physically hurt his out group, he engaged in running political campaigns to do that. He knowingly kept the temperature of political discourse high and cultivated a following out of these efforts that provided him with a very very lavish lifestyle/worth. And he was effective in doing so. Apparently his out-group can predict the future better than you can, they felt this future violence, real or imagined. And they decided to act, to do something about it.

Act like a mean-girl, and maybe someone is going to violently attack you for it. Profit off of stirring tribal hate and division and maybe society should "Turn a blind eye" when some of that hate and violence finds you.

You started all this by saying “Devil’s Advocate”, so do you really believe it was fair to kill Kirk or is this still just a provocation to prove a point? Because it is sounding like genuine belief

It is an application of the original argument applied to a topic I've been thinking about. "Fair" is very load bearing and I am unsure if I believe it was "fair" to kill Kirk and it definitely wasn't morally right.

The idea I've been thinking about: mean-girl behavior in adult politics is not sacrosanct. Free Speech is wholly a more pure thing and tarnishing it by association with the afore mentioned behavior degrades it. Exploitation of words by mean girls to coordinate social/political violence does not make them untouchable just because they aren't directly engaging in violence.

The ramification of said concept are still being thought through.

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You keep saying that Kirk advocated for using state violence. Yeah, no fucking duh, that's called politics. You're making it out to be some sort of nefarious scheme when that's what all politics is about. That's why there are trannys in the first place, because of state violence threatening people.

You are not serious, and engagement with you is not in good faith.

You are not serious, and engagement with you is not in good faith.

I am and I'm sorry you feel that way.

That's why there are trannys in the first place, because of state violence threatening people.

So you understand what it feels like for activists to coordinate state violence against you and people like you then? You also understand the violent urge to respond to that? Yet you can't understand how your mirror, some lefty feels?

Not all politics is about abrogating negative rights of individuals via the state. Only tribal politics around radicalization and extremism.

Tell me, how advocating for relaxing zoning laws advocating for state violence? How does it remove your negative, natural law rights?

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Isn’t this a generalized argument against any civil discourse? If that guy wins, my team loses, therefore pew pew. Should we all just go gangs of New York style and hit the streets with shillelaghs and cleavers instead?

We are having civil discourse right now, have I threatened your negative rights? Have I sought to remove them or advocated for their removal via first or known second order effects?

If that guy wins, my team loses, therefore pew pew.

Pure conflict theory, extremely tribal, us-vs-them mentality. Politics doesn't require you to take from other people. If your view point was correct why don't we see one side genociding the other after every election? Afterall if all politics is existential then why even have an election if you can't afford to lose.

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It seems like it a generalized argument against civil discourse only if all politics can be interpreted as advocating for state violence against or in favor of X... which seems like quite a stretch.

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One was gunned down in completely cold blood whilst the other was deliberately trying to make an already hectic and confusing environment yet more stressful essentially entirely for the purpose of generating videos of bad activities by making them more likely.

"One was killed advocating and coordinating political action to remove the individual liberty and bodily autonomy of minorities while the other was executed in cold blood trying save a woman who was pepper sprayed and protect his neighbors from a violent authoritarian regime"

The inability to exercise some cognitive empathy or minimally some epistemic humility is a sign of being a tribal partisan.

  • -14

There is no possible argument for the Charlie Kirk killing being in anything but cold blood with an abundance of forethought. Even if you are maximally pushing the 'he was doing harm through espousing his ideology', you have to acknowledge that it was a planned assassination from somebody who sat down and rationally thought through the plan. I don't think the Pretti killing was necessarily good or justified, but it was a spur of the moment decision from somebody in an inherently stressful and chaotic situation.

I'm not disputing the details of a premeditated assassination vs a spur of the moment decision.

I'm arguing the meta level lens of the metaphor around turning a blind eye to immature child-like behavior in adults when it has deadly consequences and how it applies to both sides evenly in ways that gore both sides sacred cows/martyrs.

  • -12

But discourse about government isn’t child-like behavior. Go around kicking SUVs is child like behavior.

You seem to be making a category error.

But discourse about government isn’t child-like behavior.

I, at least in this thread, am not really discussing government behavior. Government is blunt instrument and this is a problem that requires a scalpel. I have no desire to put a loaded gun on the government's table for use in restricting speech.

Go around kicking SUVs is child like behavior.

Absolutely, Pretti/Anti-ICE movement acts like a child, deliberately attempting to toe the provocation line and claim injustice when they get punch back. WhiningCoil's argument is that we should should ignore it to teach the left a lesson. I think this idea can be applied to other behavior as well, that he might really hate. Like Kirk's mean-girl like behavior.

It is a meta-argument around people trying to abuse the rules-as-written but wanting to avoid the natural consequences of people recognizing that as defection and responding/punishing it.

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So Charlie Kirk is not entitled to his beliefs due to them potentially being against the absolute maximum freedoms for other people, or is simply not allowed to advocate for his beliefs in public if it may result in any modification of society that resembles that?

To be fair, Charlie Kirk said Biden was a "corrupt tyrant who should honestly be put in prison and/or given the death penalty for his crimes against America." He was generally pretty decent to people and was willing to agree to disagree, but there's evidence of him occasionally making a controversial comment that would concern moderates and really piss the left off.

There are no direct calls for violence, but I'm pretty sure he made a few comments that kept the political temperature nice and high.

The point here is that we see extralegal justifications from both sides. I still think the Pretti shooting wasn't justified, but the extralegal justification for his shooting gets more arguable when a video of him behaving like a leftist agitator surfaces. People hate this type of person, especially here.

He can advocate for what ever he wants. If his beliefs are around restricting the negative rights of others then he can also face the consequences of what happens when people don't want their rights restricted.

The government should not be in the business of restricting speech, but people are allowed to respond to coordination of violence with violence. To do otherwise is just letting the fantasy of rabbinically-inclined and wordcells to replace reality

  • -16
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Yes, we are currently in a civil war. Both sides have internally consistent moral claims for exterminating the other. The sooner you realize that, the sooner you can make more productive choices.

Yes, we are currently in a civil war.

Obviously it's a matter of semantics, but I would say it's more of an intifada than a war. In the sense that one side is attempting to get its way by means of sustained and systematic lawbreaking, violence, and the like. If both sides go that route, then yeah, it's a war.

The "one of us" post you link complains about the left using "lies" (your word for their exaggeration / selective reporting of facts). But then you go and say things like "we are in a civil war" which is so obviously not true. Maybe we're on the path towards one, but even that is super debatable (and regularly debated here).

I just want you to know that I can't take you seriously when you hypocritically call other people out for stupid-language-tactics and then do your own stupid-language-tactics. Again, I'm sure you have lots of justifications for this tactic (many of which are valid!), but as a tactic for achieving your goal of getting me on your side, your rhetoric is failing.

I might prove to be wrong (it happens, but rarely). I am not lying. I sincerely believe that from the very depths of my being. But radical truths often sound like inflammatory rhetoric, so I don't blame you.

I'm not claiming you are wrong or lying. I am claiming you are ineffective.

If you are correct, then a more effective communication style (i.e. more consistent/less inflammatory) will probably get you the results you want faster. At least with me and fellow mottizens if not the general public.

Would you find it surprising to know that only 20% of Democrats believe Kirk's killing was justified? https://www.cloudresearch.com/resources/blog/justifying-murder/

Or that only 40% of Republicans believe Pretti's killing was justified? https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/53972-what-americans-think-about-immigration-enforcement-and-the-death-of-alex-pretti

The 40% does not surprise me, Republicans are substantially less intelligent than Democrats and often drawn from the same plebian gene-pool as the police and military. It is reasonable to expect them to express some level of tribal sympathy or at least reserve judgment towards their compatriots.

What I find more concerning is that 1 in 5 of our ostensibly moral and intellectual "betters" see murdering a man in cold blood in front of his wife as not only a reasonable but laudable means of resolving a political disagreement.

I'm trying very hard here not to go full "doomer" but I'm finding it harder and harder to believe that this is something we are going to be able to talk our way out of.

If I take your words at face value, it looks like talking will fail because Republicans are tribal and their allies don't even expect then to be better, not because "only" 80% of Democrats have condemned political assassination.

As @ArjinFerman said "Didn't full-throatedly endorse" is not the same thing as "condemn". Per the survey, a near-plurality (44%) refused to condemn it.

"Didn't full-throatedly endorse" is not the same thing as "condemn". Yoi also make it sound like we're talking about taking out a high ranking official, rather than a dude accused of the high crime of "talking".

Also: are you sure those numbers aren't actually low? I'm pretty sure those numbers would have been appalling if we were talking about the Kennedy assassination (be it the president or the senator).

Not really; there's a lot of room for society-poisoning callousness outside of a strict justified, on both sides.

The poll offers us an interesting look into question framing 20% of Democrats who responded stated that the killing was justified and 44% stated that Charlie Kirk's killing had no negative effect on the discourse.

If we assume perfect overlap of the two groups that is 20% of Democrats who support the killing of one's political opponents and another 24% who don't see any downside to killing even if they wouldn't advocate for it themselves. In other words, close to 1 out of every 2 democrats who responded revealed that they are at a minimum "ok" not only with the idea of politically-motivated violence but with murder specifically.

Yet when asked directly to agree with the statement “I am okay with political violence against those I disagree with” only 4% actually did so which begs the question, which is the real preference?

Sounds like as a radical centrist my productive choice would the extermination of everyone that's a knuckle dragging ape who thinks we are in a civil war and can't get along.

Just looked out my window, I currently don't see a war going on. My left and right wing coworkers seem to get along just fine, as do my friends of various political persuasions. The only people who seem to think we are at war are the terminally online, mentally ill folks.

Sounds nice. I live nowhere near Minneapolis and protestors have been teargassed twice three times this week. They keep trying to break into/smash up the federal building, which is in the middle of town and on the way to a lot of errands, so I've been pinging subreddits and the news every time I go out to see what's up.

Businesses were pressured to close on Friday out of "solidarity", a good number did, with others sheepishly putting up signs explaining they're staying open because their employees need a paycheck, in the hopes they would not end up on the 'supports MAGA' shitlist.

Checking up on last night's carnage, it seems counter protestors showed up, open carrying and each side was recording the other promising to expose them all on social media.

The terminally online mentally ill folks have broken containment, it's just not very evenly distributed yet.

Yeah prettymuch the only thing that'd change my vibe on Pretti would be conclusive proof on whether or not his gun misfired whilst being confiscated. If it misfired and people reacted off that I think there's sufficient argument for it being a reasonable shoot, whilst if it didn't then it's essentially inexcusable.

Most of the Minneapolis Mounted Whistle Orchestra is coordinated and belligerent so Pretti having multiple contacts with ICE is pretty par for the course.

If it misfired and people reacted off that I think there's sufficient argument for it being a reasonable shoot

IMO it's still bad because they managed to shoot someone who wasn't shooting at them. Maybe a bit understandable to hastily assume Pretti was the one who fired, but still tragic. If the shot had come from elsewhere (another protester? A cop justifiably shooting a different protester nearby? A firework?), I'm uncomfortable generally excusing the death of any nearby suspects being apprehended.

Although with what I know today, I maybe wouldn't fault a jury for declining to convict in this situation.

I agree it's not perfect but I think a gunshot in close proximity moves it way closer to a good shoot than where it is otherwise.

It really should cause an update to see Pretti screaming "assault me motherfucker!" at police while he was concealing a handgun. Then when they disengage he chases after them, spits at them and breaks their taillight. This person was dangerous and out of his mind.

"assault me motherfucker!"

Humorously, this has me wondering if there is any jurisprudence in this regard: "The suspect asked to be assaulted. Like literally, we have it on the badge cameras."

I assume standards of professionalism disallow use of force in this circumstance (absent other details)?

"assault me motherfucker!"

Are the words in quotation marks here a quote? Could you link the source? The only copy I've found of the earlier video didn't have anything like that, but possibly because the clip was too truncated.

They left that part out. How curious.

He literally says that. Try this: https://x.com/EndWokeness/status/2016700958315593760?s=20

I don't think it was bias; the clip I ran across was focused on him smashing the tail light, and actually committing a crime is more damning than just running his mouth off.

But there is something to be said for dramatic irony, too. Thank you very much for the source!

(The clip I ran across wasn't from that APNews page - does that page actually publish any of the Pretti videos? You'd think a story headlined "New videos show..." would show new videos, but the only video player I can find on that page just gives me a mix of ads and unrelated headlines.)

Someone being an asshole yesterday does not change a shoot from "bad" to "good" today. It can change the perception of the victim, and perhaps mean that the police are more likely to interpret certain actions as hostile, but I do not believe that materially changes the circumstances in this situation. Now, if it were say, "this person attempted to drive a car into officers yesterday, so they thought that was happening again," that would change the context. But that doesn’t appear to apply in this shooting.

If we assume a fixed fact pattern for the encounter, yeah, it makes sense that prior encounters the officers weren't aware of can't change whether or not their reaction was justified. Of course, his being a ICU nurse or whatever is also irrelevant from that standpoint.

However, it seems like in a lot of situations like this, what the facts of the matter were (and which are important) is at least a little ambiguous. Our interpretation of events is colored by the purported character of the parties involved and the narratives at play. Was he a trained nurse trying to help a woman in need or an armed, repeated belligerent trying to 'micro intifada' a fellow insurrectionist and subsequently resist arrest?

There's also a broader question: much of the left's rhetorical framing around police violence is "it could happen to you & your loved ones." But, in point of fact, neither I nor any of my loved ones have made a hobby of harassing police. If violence is only dolled out to folks engaged in blatantly lawless actions or even just those ambiguously-right-at-the-boundary-of-protected protest, then I have absolutely nothing to fear from law enforcement, since I have never deliberately impeded the lawful discharge of their duties and, absent an open civil war or blatantly genocidal actions, can not imagine I'd ever do so.

The framing in that last paragraph is really important to understand the 'auth' reaction to a lot of this. If there are bright-line rules that serve a legitimate state interest, that are easy to know and be on the right side of, that rarely harm anyone but repeated, anti-social malfeasors... well, empathy is a limited resource — both psychologically and especially in terms of informing policy — and there are many who are more deserving.

It can change your priors about things like how threatening he was this time, if being threatening this time is correlated with being threatening last time.

And if they had just beaten him a bit too heartilly with their truncheons (yes, I know, no longer a thing due to bad optics), or shot him before he was disarmed and being restrained, I'd agree!

I interact with lots of minorities, but not ones selected for being woke. I’ve spoken to black small business owners who say ‘yeah, thé police kill unarmed black people all the time, but they’re thugs who have it coming even if they didn’t deserve it in that moment’. I’ve talked to people who became Republican for RFK’s health crusade- conspiracy theories about fast food controlling the population and stuff. I’ve talked to people who believe smoking is good for you and it’s being covered up by big pharma. I’ve talked to people who believe the flu shot is a conspiracy to spread the virus so the healthcare system can sell tamaflu. I’ve talked to people who think Amazon is manipulating the price of concrete as a 3d chess move to drive competitors out of business. There’s people out there claiming jet fuel is fake, so therefore 9/11 is too, that the US military runs a human experimentation program that’s already developed gene editing technology, that the government is secretly controlled by the British, It just goes on and on and on. And lots of dumb, crazy beliefs get results. The military human experimentation guy correctly predicted everything that went down with the border in Biden’s term.

Almost everyone believes a wide variety of stupid things all the time. When these are uncoordinated stupid things it doesn’t cause much problem. But a coordination mechanism for stupid things people believe, now those are dangerous. It could be used for good, sometimes. There’s a decent case civilization arose by coordinating stupid ideas around taboos into construction projects. But it can be used for evil, as well. That’s what woke is, and it’s why every society has a state ideology and represses, however softly, alternatives.

the government is secretly controlled by the British

If we're thinking of the same theory, it's no less the British empire that controls our government and nearly every government in the world. Came across that one for the first time recently. The folks making content around that idea seem quite bright and not at all loony, which is surprising.

Yeah, I deliberately steered clear of ‘as seen on H2’ conspiracy theories.

Thanks, this one helps - I see a wide swath of the population but what people say and espouse to their doctor/while at work isn't necessary the full run of thoughts and experiences. Good reminder.

that the US military runs a human experimentation program that’s already developed gene editing technology,

This one is actually true, but in a stupid and dumb way.

The amount of Monster Energy drinks and dip than an average Marine Infantryman consumes on a weekly basis does alter their genetic profile. That's sound as stone. This then lets them become super soliders in combat while weighing 165 lbs, failing to ever surpass a 3rd class PFT score, and paying 28% APR on their Dodge Hellcat, which they wrecked - twice - on a 72 hour libo.

paying 28% APR on their Dodge Hellcat, which they wrecked - twice - on a 72 hour libo

If that isn't proof you've served, I don't know what is. I would also accept, "barracks/dormitory parking lot full of brand new Mustangs on a Saturday night, instead of out with their stripper girlfriends (who they proposed to after knowing them for 4 days) because the young troops don't have enough money for gas after they've paid the note and insurance. "

Believe it or not, I was never in uniform. Did contractor stuff for a looooong time and was in the same age range as junior officers, so often got a glimpse into Real Life (TM) that the "adults" didn't.

Top (Bottom?) 10 moment of life was being in the backseat of exactly one of these kind of muscle cars while the driver - definitely not over the legal limit - was doing 110 mph on hwy 62 back to Twentynine Palms after having, in fact, visited a strip club near Palm Springs.

"It is a truth universally acknowledged that young single enlisted men get drunk, get into fights, hang around with loose women and in general have the brains of a doorknob" 😁

My father was in the Irish army, some of the stories he told me of shenanigans they got up to in the 50s when young and dumb made my hair curl. Things like driving those supply lorries around the barracks with their feet because yeah, they decided it was Big Fun to sit on top of the seats and use their feet to steer the wheel.

I was young when he told that story so I wasn't paying much attention. I think they were lorries. I hope they were lorries and not, you know, armoured cars 🤣

I'm having some trouble discerning what exactly it is you are arguing for here. That there should be no negative consequences for the ICE officers who killed him? That it is a good thing that he died? That the circumstance that he was killed should not make people update in the direction of a negative opinion of ICE, their mission, or the way they are implementing it? These are all different assertions, and a post that only amounts to a nebulous "boo Pretti, and boo all of the people who say yay Pretti too" does not do a particularly good job of defending any single one of them unless all you are doing is playing the Ethnic Tension game.

However antisocial or stupid he was seems irrelevant to the immediate charge which got so many people (including, seemingly, ones who are otherwise sympathetic to ICE and police shootings) riled up about the case, which is that his killing was unambiguously unnecessary for the safety of the ICE officers who did it. Whether this charge is actually true can be debated separately, with no reference to Pretti's character or past actions. If it is in fact false, his character doesn't matter anyway because you have as much of a right to self-defense against Mother Theresa as you have against Hitler. If it is true, I wish you would be more explicit about the actual contours of any right to performing summary executions you want to grant ICE if the target is a sufficiently bad person.

Consider the case of a woman who is raped by a man she met at a bar. It's a terrible crime, we should change the way we teach men to behave around women.

Then you learn that she had a weird hobby of wearing revealing clothing and shamelessly flirting with men at various bars, accepting drinks from them, following them home, coming in for a coffee, agreeing to look at their collection of etchings and then laughing at them and leaving.

Should we let the rapist go free? I say no.

Should we say she got what she deserved? I say no.

Should we condemn her behavior? I say yes.

Should we update our opinion of men away from them being vicious opportunistic rapists? I say yes.

I'm on board with the object-level counterpart to the first three points, but only partially with the last one, because I think standards for federal agents (who are supposedly a selected group) about killing should be higher than standards for men in general. Likewise, with the bar story, if you replace the generic man at a bar with, I don't know, a social worker involved with prostitutes, I would absolutely consider him not being able to resist the temptation to rape a slag a signal in favour of "male prostitute counselors are vicious opportunistic rapists".

But, I mean, if you want to match the metaphors, the woman in your scenario would've also literally been yelling "rape me! rape me!" at the man she met at the bar...

That there should be no negative consequences for the ICE officers who killed him?

Correct. Also, everyone involved in that riot should be charged as accessories to murder for creating the chaotic conditions where such law enforcement accidents happen. When criminals commit a robbery, and police accidentally shoot and kill civilians, the robbers get charged with those murders too for creating the conditions in which they happened.

When criminals commit a robbery, and police accidentally shoot and kill civilians, the robbers get charged with those murders too for creating the conditions in which they happened.

Yeah, that always struck me as stupid tough-on-crime porn that creates wrong incentives too. It's not like the people who do messy robberies have the executive function or maybe even just the value function (would you not just think caught = it's over in the US?) to be influenced by this additional threat, but for the police it would just strip away incentives to pursue even low-hanging fruit as far as proportionality or care for bystanders is concerned. US police already looks spectacularly unprofessional compared to other first-world countries; I'm familiar enough with all the structural arguments about their job being uniquely hard, but it seems to me that forcing them to shape up has never really been tried.

US police already looks spectacularly unprofessional compared to other first-world countries;

Lol what.

Here's the Mannheim police stabbing. This particular video does the shitty editing thing where they long pause during the gory bits and then zoom forward, but you can dig up the unedited footage if you like.

Notice how the police mostly stand back and shout instead of getting involved. Except for the biggest male police officer. Who then gets stabbed in the head. Because his colleagues aren't swarming the attacker. It was nice, and professional, though, of the police woman to put her hand on his shoulder at the end - "You alright, hon? Yeah, looks like you got stabbed in the head there."

Most other "first world" police are basically crossing guards. This is because most other "first world" countries are a) surveillance states that can prevent crime by violating civil liberties in ways that are cut-and-dry-illegal in the USA and b) either ethnically homogenous (Japan) or ethnically / socially caste like societies where the lowerclasses are allowed to murder each other so long as all that riff-raff stays out of the Nice Parts of Town.

American police actually, you know, police the worst areas of society instead of flatly ignorning them. Which means their job is fundamentally very difficult.

Pretti should not have been shot. He was disarmed and not a serious threat at that moment. Unfortunately, it was a highly chaotic situation with protesters doing their best to cause stress and confusion. Pretti was disarmed just a moment before he was shot, and it is unlikely the other officers present knew he had been disarmed. It's quite possible one of the officers called out something like "I've got his gun", but in all the chaos another heard "he's got a gun!"

It was not an execution. It was a panicked split-second decision that proved fatally mistaken. Shooting him multiple times in quick succession is actually evidence of this, since your goal is to quickly and decisively end the threat. You don't shoot once and then wait to see if he can still shoot back before resuming fire, because that's just a good way of getting more people killed. Executions are more deliberate and conservative with ammo.

The video evidence of prior days indicates that Pretti was repeatedly inserting himself into dangerous situations with police while armed. He was indisputably obstructing, not just exercising his first amendment rights. He was intentionally creating circumstances that would give officers a legitimate fear for their life and heighten the chances of one of those officers making a fatal mistake. If you keep playing Russian roulette, you will eventually end up with a bullet in the head.

While the new videos don't change the narrow question of whether the officer should have shot at that moment, it does a lot to change the whole narrative around the shooting and how much blame should be apportioned to the victim himself

It was not an execution.

By definition it was an extrajudicial summary execution, as it was a killing that was not sanctioned by the court and he was killed without the benefit of a free and fair trial. He was killed while restrained by multiple government agents.

It was a panicked split-second decision that proved fatally mistaken

This is just an attempt to spin a narrative to defend the in-group. Government agents killing people in "panicked split-second decisions" does not make it not an execution and does not engender the levels of competency that should/is required by agents of the state. If ICE agents cannot act competently in high stress split second situations then they shouldn't have guns and the power to exercise the state's monopoly on violence.

  • -22

extrajudicial summary execution

It was an accident, in all likelihood the claim from everyone will turn into "we thought he still had a gun."

That's accidental mutual combat, self-defense, a tragedy, whatever - not an execution or assassination as we see the media try.

Were all ten shots accidental?

I don't know how many times we have to explain "shooting to wound" isn't a thing and "shoot until the threat is eliminated" is standard practice.

It comes up every time, people don't get the message. That is nobody's fault but yours.

Once the mistake is made nobody is going to be able to abort the situation until afterwards.

I'm not sure how shooting a disarmed person in the back who is being restrained will ever be seen as "self-defense". A Tragedy, absolutely. An accident, sure I can grant that. But accidents that lead to death is manslaughter and the ICE agent should be tried for that. Mutual combat is far fetched.

I wrote about similar situations in one of my recent posts.

If you haven't been in a scuffle like this it is hard to convey.

Even if you do something (like disarm the guy), it takes awhile for everyone to be aware of that, even in a controlled environment. In a messy situation like this? Fuck no.

It looks bad, but if you had omniscient level understanding of everyone's moment to moment information and thought process you'd likely see that the thinking here was not the problem.

These things just aren't like the movies or how people think they are, which is one of the reasons why after the Good situation a lot of were like "no, stop doing this, no training and skill is enough, keep doing things like this and more unavoidable bad outcomes will happen. When not if."

A proper investigation would settle many of these disagreements of fact. Whether everyone now performing motivated reasoning for or against ICE will accept the results of such an investigation is unknown. But the last I heard, DHS has decided to investigate themselves and assigned the investigation to an org who has no training or experience in doing such a task and also doesn't have the equipment. That's troubling.

Lots of investigation and litigation did little to change any minds in the Rittenhouse case, even though it was immediately obvious it was one of the clearest self defense cases ever.

The Good case requires no investigation - all the necessary information was immediately available, it's obvious the shoot was fine. Further information only provided additional evidence Good was an idiot and may provide some rhetorical flourish.

This case is a tragedy, but again additional information isn't needed, it just might soften the view for some people who don't understand what is going on.

Most of the criticism is coming from people who don't have any understanding of how this works, in the context of a social milieu and lying media that lets this ignorance get passed around long enough to be fact.

Take a look at the Good case - you have a ton of armchair quarterbacking going frame by frame trying to find an excuse to blame Ice. People do not operate at those decision speeds. It's just attempts to retroactively justify outrage.

You can say that my clarity is false and you don't agree on the facts, but then we are just looking at a two screen world - any investigate is meaningless for truth seeking, it's just about rhetoric and propaganda.

More comments

He was in the process of being restrained, but he was not actually restrained. If he had a gun, which he did for the majority of the altercation, then he could have drawn it.

If you didn't know he had been disarmed and you had mistaken reason to believe he was/had drawing/drawn a weapon, then yes you can shoot in self-defense. Shooting him in the back is irrelevant, because once you decide he is an imminent threat, you don't wait for him to turnaround and get the first shot. You shoot and you keep shooting to decisively eliminate the threat. Self-defense has to do with the perceived threat. You are in no real danger if someone draws a replica gun on you and threatens to shoot, but you can still act in self-defense if you don't know that it's a replica. The question is how reasonable was the perception of threat, and that is unfortunately a kind of squishy concept where law enforcement is usually given the benefit of the doubt.

For me, the Pretti shooting is an edge-case, even moreso than the Good shooting. I think the officer who shot first needs to be reprimanded in some fashion, but exactly how depends on details that cannot be gleaned from the videos. Firstly, it has to do with how much danger the officer thought he was in at that moment, not whether his evaluation of the danger was correct. Secondly, presuming his evaluation of the danger was incorrect, does that error rise to the level of criminal negligence? These questions are not easily answered by watching the videos.

By definition it was an extrajudicial summary execution, as it was a killing that was not sanctioned by the court and he was killed without the benefit of a free and fair trial. ... Government agents killing people in "panicked split-second decisions" does not make it not an execution

This is not in fact how the word 'execution' is used in any other context. Your definition would include killing in justified self defense too. If a man kills a home invader rushing at him with a knife, do you think his defense attorney would call that killing an 'execution?' If you look up how many Germans were executed by the allies during and after WW2, you will get a number in the thousands, not the millions; the allies -- allied soldiers tasked with violence on behalf of the state -- killed millions of German soldiers in the war, but absolutely no one calls those deaths 'executions.'

'Execution' implies deliberation and, most critically, control over the situation. Killing in the course of an altercation can be (and is in this instance, I think!) manslaughter or murder, but it is never an execution. If your definition of 'execution' is co-extensive with 'killing,' why insist on the former? Is it because 'execution' sounds worse because no one else uses your definition?

(ETA: After considering it a little more, I think 'execution' particularly requires that you kill because you believe the victim deserves to die (as a necessary but not sufficient condition). Killing out of confusion or fear of someone's current behavior can't qualify. 'Extrajudicial summary execution' refers to cases like occupying soldiers hanging or shooting civilians on suspicion of sabotage, not those same soldiers firing into a crowd of rioting partisans.)

... does not engender the levels of competency that should/is required by agents of the state. If ICE agents cannot act competently in high stress split second situations then they shouldn't have guns and the power to exercise the state's monopoly on violence.

This sounds good, sure. Have you actually considered the implications? US (non-ICE) police have acted incompetently in high stress split second situations before -- I expect you're familiar with at least a few examples -- so should we abolish the police? US soldiers have absolutely made mistakes like this before; do we need to disband the military? Unfortunately, while 'no lethal mistakes, ever' is a laudable standard, it's one that no group tasked with exercising the state's monopoly on violence has ever met or ever will.

I certainly agree Pretti's shooter, specifically, shouldn't have a gun or the power to exercise the state's monopoly on violence, and in fact should be tried for homicide. The shooting is cause to update in the direction of ICE being incompetent thugs... but update how much?

Out of 50,000(? Organizers claim, anyway) protestors in Minneapolis, ICE has only actually killed two of them. I happen to think that Good's shooter would have been easily acquitted had it gone to trial, but allow that that was murder too: is the failure rate per violent encounter here actually worse than average? I'm not sure, but you haven't even tried to make the argument that it is.

If ICE agents cannot act competently in high stress split second situations

Define it.

Define "competently"

I need your full rubric, please.

Otherwise, this is just a weasel way of saying "ICE agents should only every make perfection decisions in all circumstances"

If I give you a rubric what's to stop you from rule-lawyering it as a bad faith actor? Written laws cannot fight back as they have no agency. I can definitely say that any LE shooting someone who is restrained and is not pointing a gun at someone is outside of it is outside of it. This is not restricted to ICE. FBI, ATF, Fed, DEA, DoE, anyone with the power of violence. Do you think the ATF were competent at waco/ruby ridge? Do you think the LEs were competent here: Daniel Shaver?

I'm willing to give you an effort post in what does a competent government agent look like, if you'll return the favor/effort and give me examples of government LE agents behaving incompetently in the past decade? People on the right here love to complain about the lefties acting incompetent in the gov Bureaucracy, shouldn't be hard.

I can definitely say that any LE shooting someone who is restrained and is not pointing a gun at someone is outside of it is outside of it.

By that rubric, if I yell "I'm going to shoot you!" and point something that is an exact facsimile of a gun at a police officer but isn't, and they shoot me, that is incompetent on their part, even though it would require psychic powers on their behalf to know the difference.

I think the problem here is that you seem to very much want to remove any subjectivity from the rubric, but this is just logically impossible without leading to absurd outcomes like the above. Subjectivity requires us to examine things like, even if there was no gun, did they believe there was? If so, why? Was that belief reasonable even if incorrect? If not, just how unreasonable was it? In this case, it hinges on factors like what the person may have said, how they may have acted, whether or not an accidental discharge took place, etc. These factors would determine whether criminal charges are appropriate, if so which ones, and whether and which workplace disciplinary actions would be appropriate.

I can definitely say that any LE shooting someone who is restrained and is not pointing a gun at someone is outside of it is outside of it.

What about law enforcement shooting someone who is not pointing a gun and who they are not even attempting to restrain?

I believe you are the big advocate for rules having no agency around here. Are you going to apply that same argument to your own arguments?

  • -11

Mu.

Human rules cannot constrain human will. This does not mean that rules are useless. It does mean that they are not a general solution to the problem of human evil. You appear to be doing an absolutely fantastic job of demonstrating this reality with your arguments, so my congratulations on that. I will certainly be quoting your arguments in the future.

Logic is not a human rule. If you are appealing to it, you must be bound by it. I believe I am doing a fairly good job of being bound by logic.

If the above is not a satisfactory answer, I invite you to elaborate.

More comments

Government agents killing people in "panicked split-second decisions" does not make it not an execution

Of course it does. "Execution" isn't a word that includes legitimate or illegitimate attempts at self-defense, involuntary manslaughter, or even anything covered by the felony murder rule. The etymology is a contraction from "execution of death" (i.e. a death sentence) which uses the general/original meaning of execution, "the carrying out (of a plan, etc.)".

If a killing was pre-planned, it might be described as an execution. If a killing happened unplanned because the killer was on a hair-trigger and "Someone said gun!" then, even if it was criminal, it wasn't an execution.

This has changed my view, it being an "execution" would have required some premeditation on the executors part. However do you grant that this has the optics of an execution? Where 5 agents dogpile a guy to restrain him and another draw and shoots him from behind while he is kneeling and being restrained (who wouldn't resist their "execution")

No, I don't grant that this has the optics of an execution. If we're being uncharitable, it looks more like a gang beatdown than an execution.

Were he being executed, he would've been unarmed, he would've been in control or not a threat to cops...shooting him in the back would have been executing him, and so would restraining him and then shooting him afterwards.

This seems like it was just a tragedy; a gun DID go off and confused agents might've then shot him in the chaos. Fog of war.

EDITED: fair, it seems like a bad shoot, but I maintain these officers were trigger scared and not trigger happy.

gun DID go off and confused agents might've then shot him in the chaos. Fog of war.

We must have seen some very different movies on the screen. "A gun did go off" Yes that happens when an ICE agent pulls the trigger on their service weapon. The initial shot is what matters and ICE is the one that did it.

I suppose? It's more like the optics of a street gang fight to me, honestly. A bunch of people on both sides who like to talk shit and throw hands, ready to smash things or deliver a beat-down to someone who they think earned it, none of them with any kind of faith that a judge might be able to deliver justice instead, going armed but still swinging and shoving and stepping up like they can't risk their pride or can't imagine the guns might add any weight to those choices, and then some point a gun flashes and someone's panicked and suddenly there's screaming and flying bullets.

This is just an attempt to spin a narrative to defend the in-group. Government agents killing people in "panicked split-second decisions" does not make it not an execution and does not engender the levels of competency that should/is required by agents of the state. If ICE agents cannot act competently in high stress split second situations then they shouldn't have guns and the power to exercise the state's monopoly on violence.

This strikes me as an opinion that is completely unaware of the standards and realities of policing, or more likely, is trying to obfuscate those realities and hold ICE agents to an entirely different standard. I don't think, to extend an olive branch, that this was a "good shoot". However, these things, as you can see if you watch any amount of body cam footage, do not fall in simple boxes of "good" or "bad". Those split second decisions that you seemingly think ICE agents are not up to the standard of are ones that cops are exposed to - and often call poorly - every day. Most of the time, if cops could have reasonably believed, in that moment, that the suspect had a gun, or was reaching for one, they are cleared, even if it turns out they made the wrong call.

If your opinion is that the level of organization of the ICE agents was overall poor, and there were things they could have done to reduce the amount of confusion (or even avoid the shooting all together); then great! I agree. If your opinion is that American policing is on the whole too protective of officers; that's an opinion I do not share, because I think it would bind police's hands in a lot of cases and get cops and innocent bystanders killed; but I think it's at least a consistent opinion to have. But the media circus and your adherence to it as an ICE-specific problem makes me think that's not your opinion. As I said, at best you are simply unaware of what is required of cops and what standards are applied to them after the fact. At worst, you're disregarding it to frame this as some kind of wild outlier because of the relevance to the culture war fight of the week.

I'm inclined to think it's the latter, right down to your framing. Your classification of it as an "extrajudicial summary execution" is both legally and morally weak.

Legally, the choice to call it an execution implies the intent was killing, even though in every American context (be it law enforcement or personal self-defense) it is a choice to use lethal force to stop a threat. Yes, that (often) leads to death, but it's not the intent! That's explicitly why the agents could actually be in legal danger here, as if they can't prove they thought he was a threat they were not allowed to use lethal force to stop him. Then the choice to call it "extrajudicial" implies that they are exercising some power that is illegitimate or otherwise not vested to them, which is just false.

Morally, it's weak because the word "execution" is an exceptionally loaded term, and you're doubling it up with "extrajudicial". It's an attempt to paint ICE agents as some kind of unprecedented perversion or conduction of law enforcement, when that explicitly is not so. So unless you're trying to sovcit chadyes at me and tell me that every form of police killing is an "extrajudicial summary execution" and that the cops should not have that ability, you're just talking up a very mundane (in the scheme of things) shitty police shoot as some sort of unique thing, and it's just not.

For what it's worth, if this shooting sparked some huge discussion about how American policing is conducted, I'd find it somewhat tiresome but at least internally consistent. There are things I don't like about the "rules of engagement" for law enforcement (Despite the bad implementations in cities like Chicago, there are certain crimes/potential criminals that can simply be dealt with after the fact, when they're less aware of police presence and more likely to be caught by surprise/when they're not amped up), but this was never the discussion. It's just another piece of manipulated evidence to hammer home how fascism is very obviously around the corner.

your adherence to it as an ICE-specific problem makes

I have never claimed this and don't agree its an ICE-specific problem. It's problem across LE agencies and executors of the Governments Monopoly on Violence (GMoV).

American policing is on the whole too protective of officers

I am more here. Police are given enormous power, prestige, respect and authority. And that level of authority needs to come with consequences when you fuck up big time. "Great power = Great responsibility". When a police officer fucks up, us citizens pay the bill, both in loss of rights, and loss of money as the government needs to settle with our taxes.

Those split second decisions

Nobody is forcing these people to become police officers, if they lack the temperament, or ability to react in a competent manner in split second decision making, even after training then they should either be confined to a desk or fired. I'm remined of the previous discussion on the Uvalde Police officers and how the neighboring police actually responded competently vs the local ones who just cowered and beat up parents.

I ignored the bottom half your post because I think you are tilting at windmills that aren't my position. I changed my opinion that "it is literally an execution" to it has "The optics of an execution", It's manslaughter, and if I was on a jury I'd convict on that charge. As I've said elsewhere this site is really my only media use, so charges of believing some MM propaganda are super hollow. I am able to develop an opinion via my own thoughts and senses even if you don't agree with the conclusion.

Nobody is forcing these people to become police officers, if they lack the temperament, or ability to react in a competent manner in split second decision making, even after training then they should either be confined to a desk or fired. I'm remined of the previous discussion on the Uvalde Police officers and how the neighboring police actually responded competently vs the local ones who just cowered and beat up parents.

Here's my issue. You have repeatedly talked about how cops who fail split second decision making shouldn't be cops. I definitely agree there, but that's such a vague statement that it needs to be defined. My position is "barring information and time to judge further, could this cop reasonably have made this call?" Given how chaotic and high stakes many of these situations are, that clears a lot of cops, and there needs to be some huge failing of in-the-moment judgment, or clear intent to be excessive or needlessly violent to make me think otherwise. The Pretti case is pretty endemic of that, where I don't think it is good or "right", but understanding the requirements of the work I'm not much more interested in going after the agents. It's too much an edge case.

My point here is that I suspect your requirement for "split-second decision making" is unreasonably high, if not impossibly so. There are many situations where people are explicitly trying to commit suicide by cop, the cop doesn't want to do it, and might even suspect a gun might be a fake, or that the person has no intent to shoot, or may not even have something that looks like a gun at all (quickdrawing a wallet or some other item in a pocket and aiming it like a gun is very common) but he shoots anyway because he can very, very reasonably assume in the time that he has that the person has the intent and capability to do lethal harm, and if he's wrong he or others could die. Many of these cases fall on the edge, where someone with slightly faster reaction speed could identify the silhouette of what the person drew, or make some very risky judgment call that "this guy doesn't really want to do it", but I find those to be wishful thinking at best.

And then you bring up Uvalde. Uvalde is the exact opposite of split second decision making. Uvalde was a whole police force (or rather, the people in charge of it - I recall that many officers wanted to go in and were held back by their own) that chose, given an agonizingly long amount of time, to do nothing. Had an officer had a 10 second freakout, or initially ran but turned back, or even the department made some bad call like assuming it was a prank or something but quickly corrected - I don't think people would be judging that very harshly. Uvalde stands out because it was such a bad choice maintained for so long. It is the absolute worst example to bring up in this debate where we're trying to determine what acceptable split second decision making is. Especially because there was no decision made at all! They did nothing!

Accuse me of tilting at windmills all you want but if I am it's because your argument is not well founded. If I'm not it's because you are indeed trying to wedge this issue behind the facade of principled outsider.

By definition it was an extrajudicial summary execution, as it was a killing that was not sanctioned by the court and he was killed without the benefit of a free and fair trial. He was killed while restrained by multiple government agents.

OP describes why it is not an execution by highlighting the difference between an execution and an accident. You claim it is a summary execution by describing what makes an execution "summary". You did not respond to OPs points at all, and this rhetorical tactic of ignoring what OP said makes you look weak.

You may very well be correct, but you are not arguing correctly.

My opinion has been changed. It is not premeditated enough to be an execution. It is manslaughter and gross negligence on account of the shooter. It's not an accident because the shooter did not "accidentally" unholster, point, and pull the trigger. He did all of those things very deliberately. His failure of situational awareness resulted in death.

I don't care about your opinion. I just want coherent rhetoric.

By definition it was an extrajudicial summary execution, as it was a killing that was not sanctioned by the court and he was killed without the benefit of a free and fair trial. He was killed while restrained by multiple government agents.

In other words, not an execution in the way any ordinary person uses that term.

This is just an attempt to spin a narrative to defend the in-group. Government agents killing people in "panicked split-second decisions" does not make it not an execution and does not engender the levels of competency that should/is required by agents of the state. If ICE agents cannot act competently in high stress split second situations then they shouldn't have guns and the power to exercise the state's monopoly on violence.

Then the state should not have a monopoly on violence. There is really no good evidence that ICE or CPB are particularly incompetent compared to other law enforcement agencies, because they are almost unique in being subjected to a very well organized protest and obstruction operation with the tacit (or perhaps even explicit) support of local authorities. Normally, they lean on local law enforcement for help in these kind of situations, but that help has been denied until recently. No matter how well-trained people are, there will always be mistakes, and the number of mistakes will increase in proportion to the number of risky and dangerous situations. This is an isolated demand for competence.

If we applied this logic to the Babbitt shooting, then we should also be disarming and standing down the U.S. Capitol Police. Babbitt was unarmed and, though acting aggressively and belligerently, she was not an immediate deadly threat. She should not have been shot for much the same reason that Pretti should not have been shot. However, with all the chaos and danger of the Jan 6th riots, it was likely that someone somewhere would get shot. For that reason, I don't have much sympathy for Babbitt. Although Lt. Bryd should not have shot, she also bears a lot of responsibility for putting him in a difficult situation. We could just demand more competence from Byrd and hold him entirely responsible, but that only incentivizes more reckless behavior by people like Babbitt.

Unfortunately, I suspect that is the ulterior motive behind these argument. If you can demand infinite competence from law enforcement, if the officer is always held 100% to blame for every bad shoot, then you can exploit that to further your agenda. It creates more incentive for these "protest" groups to insert themselves into dangerous situations to get what they want, because they will never even be held even a little bit accountable should an officer make a mistake. Of course, the alternative where we hold people like Pretti 100% at fault is also unworkable, because it gives too much power to officers that can and will be abused.

Then the state should not have a monopoly on violence.

If you keep talking like that I might just vote you into political office.

This is an isolated demand for competence.

It is not, I demand competence from all government agents who exercise that monopoly of violence. Sword of Damocles, or "With great power comes great responsibility" take your pick. If you can't remain calm under stressful situations that you have no right being a ICE agent, Police, Law Enforcement, etc. If your negligence or incompetence leads to someone dying you should be punished for manslaughter.

If we applied this logic to the Babbitt shooting,

Acceptable, put Lt. Byrd in a trial and determine if he was negligent in shooting when he did.

she also bears a lot of responsibility for putting him in a difficult situation.

Morally yes, and Pretti bears responsibility for putting himself in these situations, As does Rittenhouse, and so on down the line. Legally no, we don't punish the woman for dressing skimpily walking through the ghetto even if common sense should dictate that is a dumb idea.

Unfortunately, I suspect that is the ulterior motive behind these argument. If you can demand infinite competence from law enforcement

My agenda is that I think our current elites are grossly incompetent and attempting to hold them accountable for their fuck-ups, mistakes, and errors is how we get more competent elites. Apparently that is a radical idea. But I guess the tribal instinct to protect insiders from the consequences of their mistakes is too strong to have functional governments.

Acceptable, put Lt. Byrd in a trial and determine if he was negligent in shooting when he did.

You're too late for this. The chance to do so, and prove you had actual principles instead of partisan instincts, was five years ago. The opportunity has passed, and so now the one side will learn from the other and protect their own.

I am only human and have only recently awakened the urge to post online. My position hasn't changed, I'm just going to shrug. As for partisan instincts, mine are squarely in the libertarian section, entirely orthogonal to this left vs right divide.

Yes, of course the facts of use of force in a complex dynamic scenario are irrelevant here, that's not the game being played. The left never wants to play that game, you can see it with Rittenhouse, they'll rewrite the entire scenario so that they never have to play that game. The game being played, by the left, is "innocent mother who just confusedly found herself there" or "kind medic" shot by "fascist jackboot thugs". With no control over the media, the right can't chose the game to play, they can't reframe this on "let's just let the professionals do their job and we'll see if it was justified". So in the game we actually are playing, pointing out that Good was actually not accidentally there but willingly interfering, and that Pretti has a history of belligerent behavior towards ICE is fair.

With no control over the media, the right can't chose the game to play, they can't reframe this on "let's just let the professionals do their job and we'll see if it was justified".

Which professionals? State police working for Tim Walz? Federal cops working for the Trump administration, who immediately slandered the victim? Do you think that Kash Patel would piss of Trump by releasing a report recommending indictment? Or that in the current climate, any politically savvy state cop would say "totally justified shooting, would have done the same" (immunity aside)?

There are certainly cases when it is important to wait for the professionals to collect the facts. Forensic analysis can solve a lot of crimes. If there was body cam footage which would exonerate the shooter (e.g. of Pretti pulling a gun), Trump would release it in a heartbeat. So we must either conclude that there is no body cam footage (faintly damning in itself), or that it would not make us update from the other videos.

Eyewitnesses are terribly unreliable compared to cameras, even if they are not actively malicious. In this case, both sides would have every incentive to agree on a story each. In the Good shooting, if there was no video evidence, we would still be disputing if her car was moving when the first shot was fired -- not so much because of lying evil leftist demonstrators but because of human nature.

What evidence, exactly, do you expect the professionals to rely on then which we have not already seen online? Personally, I would trust a trial jury slightly more to get to the bottom of the facts than someone just watching the videos, but from the looks of it we will not get a trial jury before the next presidential election.

You can trust professionals only if you can reasonably believe that they do not start by writing the conclusion of their report. In cases so politically charged as this one, the chances of that are slim, Trump has not exactly made a big show of keeping federal forces and DoJ independent.

If four years ago, some SJ guy had written here "don't worry about people who committed crimes during the BLM riots getting charged, just Trust The Professionals(TM)", most here would have dismissed this as laughable, and been proven right. I think that the FBI investigating the ICE killings is no less laughable.

must either conclude that there is no body cam footage

According to DHS, there is bodycam footage from multiple officers.

Speculating is always dumb - and so am I.

After discovery Pretti had his past violent altercations with ICE today, I am now capital-w Just Wondering if the bodycam will show him;

a) clearly reach for the gun in the scuffle b) say something similar to "Fucking shoot me, bitch" or "I'll fucking kill you" etc.

The bodycam vid would be released already if it was that juicy.

With no control over the media, the right can't chose the game to play

What definition of media are you using that does not include the most-watched cable news channel, several of the most prominent social media sites, and a large ecosystem of right-wing podcasts, youtube channels and so forth?

To a first approximation, a supermajority of all journalists and editors, a supermajority of newspapers and TV news stations, A supermajority of the people and companies making "professional" books, music, movies, TV shows, video games, a supermajority of celebrities...

Right-wing media consists primarily of podcasts, youtube channels and streamers, and as of a couple of years ago nation-state actors were openly coordinating blanket censorship against them.

That's fine, if that's all that is being pointed out. OP was not clear about that, and either way it's pretty pointless to point it out here where approximately everyone participating in the discussion is in agreement about the basic facts of what happened.

Ok, let's put it this way. The nitty-gritty of use-of-force is mostly irrelevant. Innocents being summarily executed by the state deserves wide social reaction and reevaluation of the politics of those supporting it in a way that "person plays stupid game, wins stupid prize" doesn't. What the OP is doing is pointing that Pretti's shooting matches the second characterization better than the first.

Whether this charge is actually true can be debated separately, with no reference to Pretti's character or past actions.

This is not correct. If you're trying to assess the reasonableness of an officer's belief that someone's actions created an fear of imminent death or great bodily harm, you would have to take into account knowledge about that person's behavior and past actions that the officer actually possessed at the time of the decision point.

Did any of the officers involved know that Petti was the same guy in this video?

I don't know, but that's at least relevant information.

Okay, but given that even the DHS is not saying that the agents knew that he was a repeat instigator and the DHS has claimed just about everything possible to justify the shooting including a bunch of bullshit about him planning to massacre the agents, I think it's a safe assumption that they didn't know he was the same guy. Happy to hear evidence to the contrary.

I don't see how it matters. Even if they did, the shooting was a mistake, and even if they didn't, the protests were still designed to cause chaos, and increased the chances of a situation like that.

If knowledge of his past behaviors doesn't matter. you should take it up with the guy who said it matters.

Question - do you respond to comments from the new queue, or do you actually read the thread?

I mostly do it from the new queue, and it does occasionally happen that I step on a rake this way. Oops.

I'm having some trouble discerning what exactly it is you are arguing for here.

That every single time there was major culture war drama trying to frame the red tribe as authoritarian istophobes, it was based on a lie. That people shouldn't jump in with massive finger-wagging screeds because we don't uncritically accept the latest Blue narrative about fascists killing people. In fact, given the track record, any such narrative should be dismissed by default, and only accepted when overwhelming evidence is presented.

That there should be no negative consequences for the ICE officers who killed him? That it is a good thing that he died?

No one on the Blue side is arguing merely "there should be some negative consequences for thr officers that killed him", or "it's bad that he died", and no one on the Red side argued the opposite, so I have no idea how these questions are relevant.

However antisocial or stupid he was seems irrelevant to the immediate charge which got so many people (including, seemingly, ones who are otherwise sympathetic to ICE and police shootings) riled up about the case

If it was irrelevant people wouldn't expand so much energy on claims about "peaceful protesters" "legally observing", and "cowering in their homes".

That it is a good thing that he died?

No one on the Blue side is arguing merely "there should be some negative consequences for thr officers that killed him", or "it's bad that he died", and no one on the Red side argued the opposite, so I have no idea how these questions are relevant.

@Throwaway05 on the top level post:

The person involved deserved it - many here may think deserve applies in the traditional sense

I would argue that people getting what they deserve (in the "traditional sense", e.g. what is their moral due) is generally something which is considered good.

"She totally deserved to go to prison for her crimes, but it is good that she got acquitted" does seem incoherent to me.

Or is this a Red hivemind thing? That @Throwaway05 can know that "many here think" he deserved to get killed, but nobody "argued" that openly?

The person involved deserved it - many here may think deserve applies in the traditional sense

I would argue that people getting what they deserve (in the "traditional sense", e.g. what is their moral due) is generally something which is considered good.

Why don't you quote the rest of the paragraph?

No one on the Blue side is arguing merely "there should be some negative consequences for thr officers that killed him", or "it's bad that he died"

I'm arguing those things (and not particularly much more, except perhaps that ICE is just engaging in accelerationism rather than acting rationally towards their declared aim, because I actually am against illegal immigration). I'm surely more "blue" than "red", so there, you're wrong.

I'm arguing those things

And how much pushback are you getting?

From whom? I'm not surrounded by enough Americans in real life nowadays to actually get organic interactions about this stance, and on this forum I certainly get the sense that a lot of posters think there ought to be zero negative consequences for the agents. I wasn't sure if OP was in that class, which is why I responded asking for clarification (as should have been made clear by the very first sentence of my post).

I'm having some trouble discerning what exactly it is you are arguing for here.

That CNN and the legacy media in general is lying through its teeth about his character and the nature of his activities, I guess.

I think this context adds some ambiguity.

It also speaks to the character of the protesters in general, especially the ones who interfere with ICE directly like our two casualties.

you have as much of a right to self-defense against Mother Theresa as you have against Hitler

He interfered with ICE arresting someone else. There's no self-defense for him to appeal to. He could have simply done nothing and be alive today. It was his choice to involve himself in an arrest that set in motion the events that lead to his death.

any right to performing summary executions

If you fight cops while armed, then you risk being shot. This is not a summary execution, because it wasn't an execution at all. He wasn't dragged up and shot in the head. He wasn't put against a wall. He wasn't accused of anything, because calling this an execution is disingenuous and hysterical.

He fought cops and died in the fight. That's not an execution, it's poor judgement.

He fought cops and died in the fight. That's not an execution, it's poor judgement.

You might even say he fought the law...

...and the law won.

He interfered with ICE arresting someone else. There's no self-defense for him to appeal to. He could have simply done nothing and be alive today. It was his choice to involve himself in an arrest that set in motion the events that lead to his death.

The putative self-defense argument is for ICE, not him. There is no law that says police can just shoot you if you annoy or obstruct them; either they justify their choice to kill him by arguing that he was an active threat to their safety and they acted in self-defense, or this was a summary execution (definitionally, because it was not preemptively sanctioned by the legal system).

summary execution

If an execution is to be characterized as summary, isn't it necessary that the execution be carried out specifically because of an (illegal) act? No one in this thread knows with 100% confidence why the ICE guys shot him, though a reasonable guess IMO is because they were scared shitless by the presence of a gun. "Because he was a criminal agitator engaging in criminal agitation" is the least likely reason, in my view.

I'm not sure you really appreciate how this looks and feels for someone like me. I would say the current equilibrium on illegal immigration is weird and it isn't desirable to have large numbers of people without proper rights and responsibilities in society nor to select for people who are willing to break or skirt rules. But my genuine honest opinion is that the impact of illegal immigrants is net positive even if you ignore the utility of the immigrants themselves in your calculus (which I don't), and most of the negative effects are the result of NIMBYism and problems in policing and the court system that should be fixed regardless.

From that perspective, what I see is that the right has created a scapegoat in illegal immigrants (and in the farther reaches of the right, non-whites), and has decided that removing them is the fundamental cause that will fix all of the problems in society (much as 2020-era wokeism decided that prejudice is the fundamental problem with society). The administration clearly cares more about increasing deportations than respecting constitutional rights, following court orders, upholding freedom of speech, and otherwise maintaining the things that have made Western society prosperous while also mostly treating citizens and people around the world morally. I find this really, really scary.

In Minneapolis, what I see is an administration sending in an unaccountable paramilitary force to intimidate its political opposition and frog-boil the country into authoritarianism. Yes, they ARE deporting illegal immigrants including many people I am glad to see deported, but that is not the ultimate goal. What I see in Pretti is someone who was rightfully mad about this, and got slightly carried away during an honorable protest and spit on an officer and damaged their car. I would not be opposed to him facing minor criminal charges for this. But that doesn't change my perspective of his death. We have it on video and what I see is that the federal agents were repeatedly the ones who escalated the situation into violence. I'd be interested to see more footage from before what we have seen, I wouldn't be surprised if there was some level of minor violence by a protestor, but I don't expect it to change my views significantly.

As you say, it is unarguable that Pretti was taking actions that increased his risk of being killed. You'll certainly see plenty of coverage on the left claiming false things about his actions (e.g. that he was not seeking confrontation), just like we are seeing people on the right claiming obviously false things (e.g. that he was trying to kill agents). But we can look past the bullshit, and what I see is a courageous man trying to defend someone from being assaulted by thugs.

I don't agree with much of this comment but I appreciate you sharing it.

I was mostly indifferent to immigration in the US. I am quite surprised that Trump could run on a fairly stomach turning immigration policy and win the election. My attitude is that it's now time for the people to get what they wanted, good and hard, as fans of democracy might put it.

This is all to say I mostly don't care for what Trump is doing.

But we can look past the bullshit, and what I see is a courageous man trying to defend someone from being assaulted by thugs.

I see something much more tragic. A courageous, probably mentally unwell man (and woman, in the case of Good), being unwittingly deployed as probabilistic martyrs, radicalized by stories that are mostly fictional.

I hope a few deaths will bring down the temperature, but signs are worrying. A lot of people in my city's subreddit are talking about getting guns, which is the absolutely wrong lesson to take from this weekend.

I have to wonder if disinfo managers at the Russian FSB are watching and saying "hot damn, did we do that?"

I hope a few deaths will bring down the temperature, but signs are worrying. A lot of people in my city's subreddit are talking about getting guns, which is the absolutely wrong lesson to take from this weekend.

Deaths will only bring down the temperature if people feel that the risk of death is worse than the thing they are fighting. I think a pretty large contingent of the left is well beyond that point. With nobody in charge, the only way I see the left backing down is if there is some tragedy that is unambiguously the fault of protestors. Or maybe the threat of the midterms gets the administration to actually back down. But I think mounting civil unrest is probably the way this goes. It's pretty interesting to see from a historical perspective even if I'm genuinely worried and come down squarely on one side of the conflict.

In Minneapolis, what I see is an administration sending in an unaccountable paramilitary force to intimidate its political opposition and frog-boil the country into authoritarianism.

This sentence is full of sound and fury signifying nothing. "Paramilitary force" here is just used as a snarl term; pretty much all uniformed law enforcement, except that which is part of the military, consists "paramilitary forces". ICE is not "unaccountable"; they have a defined chain of command (goes along with being paramilitary), and are additionally accountable at least to Federal courts. ICE does not appear to be confronting the administration's political opposition -- just the opposite, the opposition is confronting them -- so intimidation seems quite unlikely. And enforcing immigration law is an established thing; if it's authoritarianism it isn't NEW authoritarianism so there's no frogs being boiled here.

"Paramilitary force" here is just used as a snarl term; pretty much all uniformed law enforcement, except that which is part of the military, consists "paramilitary forces".

The (non-)uniforms, the masks, the limited training, the recruiting efforts for people of a specific ideology, the mass deployments, feel like qualitatively different things to me. Perhaps paramilitary is not a useful word here but that's what I'm talking about.

ICE is not "unaccountable"; they have a defined chain of command (goes along with being paramilitary), and are additionally accountable at least to Federal courts.

That chain of command stops with Donald Trump and his people, and they seem to be the only people whose opinion matters. For example, the state of Minnesota has been actively blocked from involvement in investigating these incidents.

ICE continues to deny members of Congress their legal right to inspect detainment facilities: https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/article/judge-is-asked-for-emergency-hearing-after-congress-members-blocked-from-ice-facility-in-minneapolis/

ICE is routinely ignoring court orders: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-administration/judge-threatens-hold-acting-ice-director-contempt-flouting-court-order-rcna256107

ICE does not appear to be confronting the administration's political opposition

Intimidation does not require that you have been directly affected. The reason they are in Minneapolis in such quantities is because the president resents Tim Walz and Minnesota in general, and because of a news story about fraud that has little relation to illegal immigration.

And enforcing immigration law is an established thing; if it's authoritarianism it isn't NEW authoritarianism so there's no frogs being boiled here.

Sending thousands of masked agents to roam around a city and stop people based on their race is absolutely a new thing.

This is a step change from what we've seen before, under a president who continues to support an insurrection done in his name, continues to muse about third terms and cancelling elections, uses the legal system as a cudgel against people he doesn't like like Powell, etc. I'm sure you could quibble with all of these things too. I don't expect to convince you, but surely you can see why people are worried?

The (non-)uniforms, the masks, the limited training, the recruiting efforts for people of a specific ideology, the mass deployments, feel like qualitatively different things to me. Perhaps paramilitary is not a useful word here but that's what I'm talking about.

Words have meanings. Using them just to indicate something bad that you have in your head is not useful.

On the court stuff, I am sure the administration is of the opinion that they are indeed following the laws; that will get worked out in court (the Supreme Court if necessary) and has no real bearing on what ICE is doing on the ground in Minneapolis.

Intimidation does not require that you have been directly affected. The reason they are in Minneapolis in such quantities is because the president resents Tim Walz and Minnesota in general, and because of a news story about fraud that has little relation to illegal immigration.

Again, words have meanings. Even if ICE was sent to Minnesota because the president resents Tim Walz, that does not mean they were sent there to intimidate him.

Sending thousands of masked agents to roam around a city and stop people based on their race is absolutely a new thing.

Fortunately, this isn't actually happening; it's just a lie.

Apologies if someone has brought this up already, but new video of Pretty is out from days before he died.

https://apnews.com/article/minneapolis-ice-alex-pretti-videos-immigration-809506eb23f44a3e8f6e53b9fda7b700

He appears to be caught on video at least one other time engaging violently with the police while armed (for some definitions of violent) and is alleged by some sources to have been spitting at the cops.

Pretti likely felt like such a badass after managing to land a crit on a tail light with two kicks. Then he gets manhandled like a toddler roughhousing with his father the moment an ICE agent exits the car and grabs him by the coatty. Pretti tries running away but is clamped by the ICE agent just holding onto his coat from behind; he goes almost completely airborne, knee flying up from his attempt to run away. Pretti gets reversed back into the street as the agent yoinks him around, before getting thrown down into the tarmac.

When the first few videos were coming out, Pretti's supporters were hoping they had a tall bearded Chad martyr. However, then his photo circulated and he looked like a Reddit user who submitted a "fellas, is it time?" post on /r/bald, which took some wind out of their sails. Now this video will cause even further posthumous aura loss.

Additionally I don't know how many of us here actually regularly interact with American black people but it's a core feature of my job and I have some in my extended family. They (and their woke allies) are absolutely convinced they are liable to be killed for no reason at all at any time by police. This includes the guy from the ghetto, this includes the well behaved upper class by birth Harvard educated chair of surgery who walks to and from work in a suit more expensive than most cars.

Unsurprising, given high black racial ethnonarcissism and robust black victimhood complexes, despite them being the vastly disproportionate source of violent crime. Lebron James embodied this nicely with his Tweet: "We’re literally hunted EVERYDAY/EVERYTIME we step foot outside the comfort of our homes". In contrast are whites, who don't appear to exhibit any racial in-group preferences on net, with white liberals exhibiting racial out-group preferences.

I do criminal defense work. It is probably a toss-up whether the defense community (which includes all kinds of NGOs) or the medical community is more woke or interacts more with minorities.

I can't disagree with anything you've written. There is no quality discussion of anything. It is all Big Feels about Trump being Hitler, ICE being the Gestapo, white supremacy and institutionalized racism persecuting minorities, and viewing law enforcement, immigration controls, and prisons as inherently unjust. Attorneys who deal with the worst of the worst and come away saying, "the real problem is that society has not tried enough Progressive solutions." Where graphs of the racial breakdown of prisons vs society at large is uncritically presented as proof that America is irredeemably racist.

There is no chance of me breaking through any of it with critical analysis of the issues. If I were to attempt it, I'd be shunned at best. The only reason I'm somewhat insulated is because I'm in Red flyover country. It was suffocating back when I worked in a Blue city, and my friends who work in those cities now repeat all the usual talking points when I see them. It's not possible to avoid the topics or talk about real life things instead; it's all politics all the time, except of course it's not politics, it's called being decent fucking human.

For what it's worth I think attorneys have it worse. :/

This is always the case in history. The agitators and revolutionaries or whatever you want to call them are not the most shelf-stable individuals.

Sam Adams was a perennial business fuckup. He could barely make money smuggling. Thomas Jefferson was terrible at running a plantation (he was more interested in rewriting the bible). Patrick Henry was a firery lawyer living on daddy's money. Those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head.

Politics in general is not for people who have their life together. But also many people just routinely don't have their life together all that well. I've been lucky enough to say that my life has never been in shambles. But my father had his life in shambles for what sounds like a ten year stretch when I hear the stories.

As much as the people involved seem like fuckups I think it is still important to have good policy and procedures for handling situations. If only 5% of the population is career criminals and fuckups, the police will be spending most of their time dealing with that population, and they should know how to handle them as best as possible.

I said with the Good shooting that I don't think there was a policy that would have prevented her shooting. With the Pretti shooting I'm not so sure. I haven't watched the videos and evidence enough to be certain, but I feel like it was a communication failure on the part of the officers that led to the shooting. You'll see police officers sometimes calling out the situation to other officers as they restrain an individual, or giving commands to the individual that let other officers know where in the process of the arrest/restraining they are at. You'll also see police officers only have two or three officers close to a person they are restraining, and additional officers will stand back and keep other people at bay. But also keep an eye on the situation. I think either of these tactics employed with Pretti might have prevented him from being shot. Either they would have known he was restrained, or the officers standing back would have seen that he had not pulled a gun. Bad training on the part of the ICE agents involved, but I get that is not really their specialty area. So some of the responsibility loops back around to "why are they not getting backup from local law enforcement that does know how to handle these people".

I feel the need to be against any kind of policy that just casually wastes the lives of people who are fuckups. I owe my existence to someone who was a temporary fuckup. People can improve their lives. They can have kids that are better than them, etc.

I feel the need to be against any kind of policy that just casually wastes the lives of people who are fuckups.

I'm reminded of one of the observations of @Corvos (emphasis mine):

In practice, most of these are 'virtuous circle' things. People with more career opportunities have more career direction, people with more social experience have better social antennae, people pick up hobbies from friends, people who are sought out by the opposite sex understand the opposite sex better. And everyone else, sooner or later, finds themselves outside the circle of lamplight eating chicken tenders or browsing tik-tok makeup videos in a messy apartment because they're not going to manifest 1-5 into being by sheer force of will and they know it. They no longer have access to the virtuous circles, and from where they are (tired from working 9 hours at a bad job, shy, or poor) the activation energy is higher than anyone can reasonably ask of them.

This state of affairs results not particularly from a lack of male-only spaces but from modern society being mostly opt-in. There are no longer mandatory social occasions like church, balls, or village meetings, there is no longer a mandatory social group (extended family living nearby) and there is no longer mandatory (arranged) courtship. We could resurrect these things, and I think we should resurrect these things.

The old social structure functioned in a way that propped up people with low levels of agency in various ways so that men who were otherwise likely to end up as failsons turned out to be doing-mostly-OK-sons. This was based on the unstated assumption that their labor and investment was needed in society. Now this assumption is no longer there.

Yeah, no, we're not getting them back. There's no available course of history through which we retvrn.

Us low-agency fuckups are just outmoded. A formerly marginally usable resource, made obsolete. Time to die.

It's still possible for modern civilization to collapse though.

Sure. But there's little reason to believe that what comes after will be some traditionalist arcadia.

Thomas Jefferson was terrible at running a plantation (he was more interested in rewriting the bible).

Oh Thomas Jefferson was interested in his plantation alright. He just wasn't interested in the farming, the harvesting, or the marketing.

Good reminder, thank you.

Well blind soldier for the cause here, I guess, because your post seems tantamount to saying that everyone who does dumb and risky things should be killed.

How do we feel about repeat drunk drivers who get killed in car wrecks that were someone else's fault?

Pretty strongly. We should try and do something about it on both sides. Warn your friends not to drink and drive. But also, create institutions and road safety infrastructure that reduce the probability of drunk people at the wheel getting in accidents.

Okay, presume we've done that already, but some people still get in accidents and die. How do you feel about the repeat drunk driver who dies in a car wreck that wasn't their fault (or at least mostly not their fault)?

If we've done that already, I think it's sad but inevitable. If we haven't done it, and there is, say, an unsigned cliff edge, I think it's worth kicking up a fuss and lobbying for someone to put up a sign.

In the case of ICE, it seems apparent that we haven't done this work. It is not currently minimising risk nearly as well as it could.

Edit: I'm not sure I entirely understand the stipulation that the wreck wasn't their fault, can you elaborate?

In the case of ICE, it seems apparent that we haven't done this work. It is not currently minimising risk nearly as well as it could.

Right, and the absolutely lowest hanging fruit is the cooperation of local authorities and law enforcement. In fact, this alone would likely be enough to satisfy your concerns, since the majority of controversial ICE incidents are occurring in jurisdictions that are not cooperating. Not only are they not cooperating, but local authorities have been encouraging and allegedly even coordinating the chaos. Perhaps ICE still need better training, but that is a longer-term project that is likely to only produce marginal improvements to performance, and it does not necessarily mean they should stop what they're doing. (I suspect higher quality recruits would be better than more training, but that presents other challenges. I suspect the left would heap shame upon any highly competent people who decided to join ICE, because they don't want immigration enforcement to be done better).

Our willingness to tolerate mistakes in law enforcement is proportional to the extent of the criminal problem they are responding to. Personally, I am fine with relaxing standards to address the illegal immigration problem. The "Biden wave" was enormous, and it came after decades of lax enforcement. Making a dent in that problem means acting swiftly, and unfortunately that comes with trade-offs. Up to a point, a per capita increase in mistaken detentions, deportations, or deaths is an acceptable outcome, albeit one that is not welcome. The blame here must land squarely on the people who created the mess in the first place.

Of course, if you don't think illegal immigration is a big problem, or perhaps not a problem at all, then any enforcement is a net negative and no increase in mistakes is acceptable. That is an entirely consistent position.

Please quote the part where he says, or implies, "should".

"Deserve" implies should. (OP dances around that a bit but, then, I only said his post was tantamount to saying such people should be killed.)

many here may think deserve applies in the traditional sense, but I think at minimum we see "deserve" here in the sense of "engaged in stupid avoidable behavior that necessitated the response or failing that represents a lifestyle that drastically increases the likelihood of a bad outcome."

This is exactly where OP equivocates. This passage fails to deny the 'traditional' reading of 'deserve'. (In addition it also implies that Pretti necessitated his own killing, which obviously many people think is not the case, even if it wouldn't have happened were it not for high-risk decisions that he took.)

I don't see it as equivocation, but as drawing a distinction. He also didn't say "necessitated his killing", but precisely what you said at the end - his behavior drastically increased the chances of "a bad outcome".

Doesn't sound that way to me at all, it sounds like he's saying we shouldn't be shocked when a disproportionate fraction of these fuckups get themselves killed while behaving in ways that generally only fuckups do.

I don't think it was a shocking event at all so on that level I agree. It was a dead cert that something like this would happen. That's one of the reasons they should have better policing practices, training and comms in the first place.

I spent an extremely long time this past week arguing with a Chomskyite about how this stuff isn't evidence of neofascist white nationalism and could not make a dent. Rittenhouse came up and we couldn't even concur that he was attacked by rioters, not shooting into a protest.

It didn't matter if I cited Wikipedia instead of usual wrongthink sources.

Stories are more important than facts.

I'm pretty blackpilled that outside of quant finance, maybe half of the judiciary, and a few other jobs, absolutely no one has skills or an interest in trying to understand the world.

I know people on the right are also attached to their narratives, but as an urbane white person who mostly talks to other urbane whites, the right's craziness is common ground. But I just take reputational damage if I observe hypocrisy or craziness on the left.

I had to stop posting about this stuff to socials because people were contacting my wife and asking her if she was safe with me. She even got in my face and said "what are you doing posting this shit to Facebook, this isn't Lesswrong. Are you autistic or something?"

She's right, of course. I should know better.

Holy based, your wife really said that to you?

what are you doing posting this shit to Facebook, this isn't Lesswrong. Are you autistic or something?

Thank you for this, made my day =)

I know people on the right are also attached to their narratives, but as an urbane white person who mostly talks to other urbane whites, the right's craziness is common ground. But I just take reputational damage if I observe hypocrisy or craziness on the left.

This kills me on the daily. I am so willing, desperate even, to throw the people I talk to a bone, but I'm still looked at like a crazy person when I ask for even the tiniest concessions. It's led me to the point where I am explicitly against the left due to the amount of narrative control they have. If Trumpism becomes the de facto political movement in America (fat chance) I would likely flip the script as I would find myself getting shit on for pointing out dumb policies or excesses in this theoretical world.

More than that, I get very sick of the "oh are you both sides-ing?", as if reducing my own ability to recognize separate but still-true issues to some kind of waffling is a winning argument. The sides are very different, their excesses affect people in much different ways, but they often rhyme because it turns out humans lie, overreact, and punish their opponents in very similar ways! And if I point that out, I'm trying to fence sit.

I am happy that I have fostered real life friendships with left leaning people that will at least politely allow me to voice my concerns, even if I get troubled looks and "I don't agree". I have become very tired of politics in general, and I'd probably have taken the grillpill a while ago, but unfortunately unplugging doesn't fix the problem, so I might as well do a modicum of trying to get a clear picture of things so I can at least push back when I get told about fascism for the umpteenth time in a week.

Unfortunately that's the mad logic of war. We must enforce discipline to force our side to fight together at maximum strength. Anyone who dares to criticize our side, even if it's true (especially if it's true!) is either an idiot who needs reeducation, or a traitor to be eliminated. The neutrals will be seized for their resources. Those who just want to grill will end up on the menu!

taken the grillpill a while ago

Wait, what is this philosophy of life? Just becoming the "man that's crazy bro, catch the game last night" guy in the meme?

/images/17697046983660092.webp

Yes. It's adjacent to "hiding one's power level", as even if you have some political beliefs, you understand there's nothing positive that can be accomplished by talking about them in social situations. And in many cases, simply choosing to talk about it less actually causes you to care less, and happiness increases as a result.

I had to stop posting about this stuff to socials because people were contacting my wife and asking her if she was safe with me.

So I'm not a Social Media bird, and I've talked about this before, but my experience has been incredibly similar in the sense that my wife sometimes checks in because she's afraid that I might be an in-the-closet Fascist White Supremacist Neo-Nazi (and I'm talking genuine uncertain fear here, not performative) because in the past, I've had the gall to point out existing precedents engage in whataboutism sometimes when she wants to conversate in the vein of, "ZOMG Trump/The Republicans did a thing! Outrage!"

Frankly, my wife is too right-wing for this place. She'd think ya'll are a bunch of pussy liberals.

So you've got that going for you. Which is nice.

Sounds familiar, yes.

The irony in all this is my goal in my posts to socials isn't to own the libtards! My goal is to try to help people see that we're not living in a fascist dystopia. Billionaires don't matter! Things are improving! The economy is relatively good! Don't believe the hype about declining longevity and health care! Stop despairing all of the fucking time.

And people get so mad about it.

My wife knows a bit better but I think her deal is that she mostly feels like she lives in a sick society and wants to escape to Europe, where she had fond memories of doing an exchange program as a teenager and a semester of school or two. She knows Europe has problems, but they're not constantly blasted across media. Indeed, the problems her friends in Europe worry about are mostly problems in the US.

I get it. Even though she mostly avoids media (we're the usual no TV in house, no subscriptions, she minimizes screen use herself) she still can't help catch politics contagion from her friends and the few times a week she checks FB to see what her local mom's affinity group is up to.

I agree with your linked post. The correct, healthy response to all of this is (a) almost all of this shit is fake to start with but (b) of the things that are real, you mostly can't do anything about them anyway so you should not disproportionately spend your time worrying about it.

My wife knows a bit better but I think her deal is that she mostly feels like she lives in a sick society and wants to escape to Europe

In this respect, my wife has similar feelings. She now agrees with me that America is in decline and she, too, would love to live elsewhere. (ETA: I'm not necessarily so sanguine on the living elsewhere bit.) However, she has never been out of the country and has yet to experience actual culture shock, let alone any sort of negativity or hostility directed at her for being American.

I get it. Even though she mostly avoids media (we're the usual no TV in house, no subscriptions, she minimizes screen use herself) she still can't help catch politics contagion from her friends and the few times a week she checks FB to see what her local mom's affinity group is up to.

And in this respect, we differ. My wife is informed by her reading of NPR, which she does daily, and her political podcasts of similar vein.

The irony in all this is my goal in my posts to socials isn't to own the libtards! My goal is to try to help people see that we're not living in a fascist dystopia. Billionaires don't matter! Things are improving! The economy is relatively good! Don't believe the hype about declining longevity and health care! Stop despairing all of the fucking time.

And people get so mad about it. (emphasis added)

And this is precisely the part where long experience has taught me not to engage.

She now agrees with me that America is in decline and she, too, would love to live elsewhere.

I think everyone's realizing this. Left, right, and center. The debate is over who's causing it and what we should do about it. On that note I think there are things that most parts of the political spectrum have a good point about, because they notice elements of the decline that others don't, or don't want to notice.

I think the left is broadly correct about social mobility being down, and the benefits of productivity being increasingly centralized, and normal people losing economic power and agency, and the right is broadly correct about social cohesion being down, and people being unwilling to contribute to the common good, and people being more motivated by personal expression and self-actualization than participation in society. (And centrists for their part are right about social mood being elevated, and political anger being out of control, and political intensity causing mental distress.) The issue is these things are all connected.

But I do think the root cause is that productivity increases have declined in the past 10-15 years, so there's less pie to distribute, meaning that there's a drive to centralize and cut down on waste rather than spread treasure, which is why store closures and layoffs have accelerated. The economic incentive is to extract more value from each individual customer or employee while providing less real value in return. It was easy for America to feel great and happy and joyous in the midst of economic good times during the baby boom or the 80s/90s deregulation capitalism fun fest, but now that lean times are here, the knives are coming out.

I had to stop posting about this stuff to socials because people were contacting my wife and asking her if she was safe with me.

And then @Amadan will wonder why someone might consider a good chunk of left wingers to be actually evil.

Oh, such a zinger. How many times have I talked about having to censor myself on social media? I have had similar experiences to those of @dr_analog. You know why I don't talk about my personal life here much? Because a good chunk of right-wingers are also crazy and evil, and I have received literal death threats. I don't feel particularly threatened by a few mentally ill cheeto-inhalers, but I am mindful that if the crazies are saying it directly, other people are thinking it, so I should not widen the attack surface. Sure, leftists who cancel family members for having the wrong opinions about trans people and BLM are "evil," I guess, but I would submit that so are the people who eagerly express what they want to do to their political enemies in the coming civil war they can't wait to break out.

I'm sorry to hear all that, but how does it have anything to do with the conversation? The argument comes from you expressing disbelief that WhiningCoil's in-laws could be evil. Your objection is carried nearly entirely on it being unlikely for someone to throw away a personal relationship in order to score a few political points (mostly in their own heads, rather than in any tangible way, by the way), I'm pointing out that the core assumption of your argument is false.

Sure, leftists who cancel family members for having the wrong opinions about trans people and BLM are "evil," I guess, but I would submit that so are the people who eagerly express what they want to do to their political enemies in the coming civil war they can't wait to break out.

Bad comparison. The world is full of blowhards. It's one thing to fantasize about what you'd do during the glorious revolution, it's another to actually do it. Your death threats example is a more fair comparison, since these were actually sent to you, though the missing element there is them coming from a friend or family member. And even then I wouldn't gaslight you about the person sending them not being evil.

I'm sorry to hear all that, but how does it have anything to do with the conversation

I'm sorry this is not evident to you. I'm resigned to the fact that we're mostly beyond the moral event horizon.

That's odd, I'm pretty sure I said what happened to you was evil too. I guess thinking that your argument was not relevant is past redemption.

Your inability to see relevance means we (or you, rather) have reached a stage at which I can only seek to not be accused of further "gaslighting" you.

If it’s comforting, thé historical pattern in hegemony holding democracies is very clear- real or imagined security threats drive deviations from normal business, which drives polarization that turns inwards(we are here), butchers a good chunk of the political class on both sides, and results in a decidedly not democratic center right government that does a lot of corruption but doesn’t really hold grudges and keeps the economy going. In the long run, we’ll be OK.

Because a good chunk of right-wingers are also crazy and evil, and I have received literal death threats. I don't feel particularly threatened by a few mentally ill cheeto-inhalers, but I am mindful that if the crazies are saying it directly, other people are thinking it, so I should not widen the attack surface.

Echoing this, I recently posted a deadpan joke right before the election and it was signal boosted by a right-wing influencer, essentially calling me a vile democrat and many people took it seriouisly. People found my phone number and I started getting phone calls threatening me to delete the tweet if I know what's good for me (and I'm sure a bunch of people who share my name also started getting them, not knowing what the fuck was going on).

I was being followed around the internet for a bit. All of my content was starting to collect dozens of deranged, threatening comments.

I posted a pic of myself shooting an AR-15 and it seemed to chill out markedly and I was soon forgotten. But I was definitely looking outside of my front window every few minutes the first two days there.

So, I'm sorry to say, I agree with you that it's not only the left that's fond of this kind of cancel-violence.

Echoing this, I recently posted a deadpan joke right before the election and it was signal boosted by a right-wing influencer, essentially calling me a vile democrat and many people took it seriouisly.

That sucks and all, but we weren't talking about a mindless mob going after someone because of poor reading comprehension, we're talking about people who now someone personally staging an intervention with their wife, over a minor political disagreement. There's several things here that should have raised alarms and stopped them in their tracks, that aren't expected when it's just about mouthing someone off on Twitter.

What's the difference? The intervention with the wife is so much more personal and less ad hoc than randos (hypothetically) calling up my employer and trying to get me fired?

That this is not just random Twitter psychopaths but otherwise normal friends of my wife becoming inhabited by Agent Smiths?

That this is not just random Twitter psychopaths but otherwise normal friends of my wife becoming inhabited by Agent Smiths?

My wife noticed that phenomenon in 2020.

Depends on your definition of "evil". I generally require malice, and a malicious actor probably wouldn't try to confirm the situation with the wife before spreading rumours or making false reports to the police.

Not saying there aren't malicious people on that side of the aisle, of course - I'm not an imbecile - but this behaviour isn't something I'd take as evidence of it. With that said, severe delusion without malice clearly can suffice to produce major problems for others; the meme example is of course the Pyro.

a malicious actor probably wouldn't try to confirm the situation with the wife

That’s the malice.

There’s no confirmation - there’s a false question of safety.

I have limited experience with Machiavellian manipulation, but my understanding is that the normal pattern is for the cackling villain to tell everyone that X is abusing Y except Y. This is because Y is the one person who has the knowledge and the credibility to publically debunk the false accusation, and it's in the villain's interest for that to be delayed as long as possible.

I suppose it's entirely possible there was such a villain upstream of the people calling.

These people are successfully suppressing right-wing discourse by harassing family members. Whether they literally have a tail and horns, that's evil.

I'm not disputing that this is a state of affairs that's a major problem in need of solution. The fact that the Pyro thinks he's helping does not remove people's right to avoid being incinerated - in that case, if perhaps not this one, lethal force in self-defence is perfectly acceptable.

But "know thine enemy" is a basic principle, and there's a difference between some loon who thinks you're an evil alien out to eat his brain and a Mary Ann Cotton.

I generally require malice

I don't. There aren't a lot of mustache-twirling villains in real life, and it doesn't take a lot of creativity to come up with a story where you're the good guy, actually.

I think I saw someone on Substack claiming that, with Pretti being caught on video violently engaging with police officers twice in the space of a week, it's possible that he was depressed and attempting to commit suicide by cop. Would that strike any of you as a plausible hypothesis?

Suicide by cop probably isn't the word I'd use. Probably something more along the lines of pursuing martyrdom/ascension to protestor Valhalla

I don't think so, these people really feel like they are saving the country from the Nazis. At the same time they have some dissonance and feel safe and don't understand that you don't do bad shit while armed.

Nobody in their social groups or in the media tells them what they are doing is a bad idea.

It’s possible to be both, right? I’m not a mental health expert, but ‘suicidal ideation’ ‘delusions of grandeur’ and ‘group persecution complex’ are frequently co-occurring.

This situation makes all of this quite complicated - you can't really call something a delusions if a good third to half the country believe it for instance.

Social pressures and informational pressures making unsafe (and maybe even evil) behavior not seem that way isn't a psychiatric issue, hell it isn't even a personality issue, that is what makes it so dangerous.

You break healthy people and make them do worrying shit.

This is why I think the left are the real Nazis. These are the people would be happily killing jews back in the day.

You break healthy people and make them do worrying shit. This is why I think the left are the real Nazis. These are the people would be happily killing jews back in the day.

This is one of those cases where I would be tempted to gong the Godwin bell but I think you're circling something real.

I try to imagine what it would be like if Pretti was my son and I saw this first video. I would say "Son, what the fuck are you doing? You're going to get killed! Stop it!" I would have said the same to Good if she was my daughter and I saw her harassing police from her car.

I'm guessing Pretti's loved ones never quite saw this video. But the people around him knew. Did anyone say anything? Or did they just think of him as nothing but a foot soldier?

I consider it very dangerous to harass law enforcers in this way and I think this without believing they're The Gestapo! What's going through the mind of someone that believes they're murderous thugs looking for any excuse to drop someone yet they're still trying to provoke fights with them? And they have nobody by their side concerned enough for their safety to stop them?

It's so incredibly sad. And disturbing. And insane.

I'm trying to steelman this. Maybe they truly believe they're laying down their lives to stop innocents from being deported, and want their deaths to be a martyring spectacle. But why like this? It's so sloppy. Why not open fire on The Gestapos? Why not do more grandiose suicide by cop? Why this sloppy awkward dying on your knees shit during a chaotic scuffle? Or getting shot in your car kind of just awkwardly trying to speed away from an arrest? If you are truly expecting to die I could imagine a thousand better ways to go.

It's so confused. I think they sign up to take the risks but don't truly expect to die. As they die, I don't imagine they feel triumph, but rather regret.

Related: I had an intensely black pilling moment during Trump's loss. I have family members in politics who (before and after) would be willing to admit that they would do things, including illegal things, to prevent Trump from getting reelected. Including tampering with the election.

No engagement with how anti-democratic that is, how concerning. Everything was justified to oppose Trump. Everything.

Associated Press:

In a recent conversation with [Alex Pretti], his parents, who live in Colorado, told him to be careful when protesting.

“We had this discussion with him two weeks ago or so, you know, that go ahead and protest, but do not engage, do not do anything stupid, basically,” Michael Pretti said. “And he said he knows that. He knew that.”

(It appears that statements allegedly made by them regarding his "unusual behavior" are fabricated.)

Wow. I guess either he was more interested in the approval of his revolutionary homies, or just too mentally ill to reign it in.

Sans-cullottes, Red Guards, Khmer Rouge, they may have been as murderous as the Nazis, but they were leftists and Nazis were (and are) rightists.

but they were leftists and Nazis were (and are) rightists.

Even if I conceded the premise that it matters, I would have to disagree.

Otherwise see @Throwaway05's comment below.

I think my point there is more about people blindly following a hateful ideology while not realizing the ideology is itself very hateful.

This is not a problem specific to the left or the right.

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