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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.
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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