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Notes -
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:
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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?"
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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.
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