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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 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.
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.
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