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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.
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.
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.
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I made the same argument about the people trying to dig up dirt on Renee Good. Either it was a good shoot, or it wasn't. Her prior criminal record (or lack thereof) has nothing to do with it.
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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!"
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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.
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It depends on whether the woman was raped in self-defense.
Your honor, it was self defense. She called me a faggot.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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:
Agreed. The cops are doing an necessary job, so there is a tradeoff between exercising your rights and obstructing them from their duties.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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