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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:
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 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".
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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...
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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.
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.
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.
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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.)
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.
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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.
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.
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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?
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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In other words, not an execution in the way any ordinary person uses that term.
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.
If you keep talking like that I might just vote you into political office.
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.
Acceptable, put Lt. Byrd in a trial and determine if he was negligent in shooting when he did.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
If it was irrelevant people wouldn't expand so much energy on claims about "peaceful protesters" "legally observing", and "cowering in their homes".
@Throwaway05 on the top level post:
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?
Why don't you quote the rest of the paragraph?
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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.
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).
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That CNN and the legacy media in general is lying through its teeth about his character and the nature of his activities, I guess.
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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.
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.
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.
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).
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