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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.
My brother posted some weird screed on Facebook about how handsome Pretti was compared to the ICE agent who shot him, how healthy Pretti looked, how educated Pretti was compared to the typical ICE agent. Basically implying it was dysgenic to shoot Pretti, except I think eugenics is still considered a no-no. I seriously tried to puzzle out if my brother was in the closet despite having a string of serious girlfriends.
I think it was bad to shoot Pretti. I also think Pretti did some stupid things and earned a stupid prize, and that was apparent even before this video came out.
For the, "Pretti is not a hero" argument:
He went to a protest while armed, which is apparently illegal in Minnesota. He wasn't wearing a comfortable weapon that would be typically worn in for a conceal carry. It was a several thousand dollar handgun that had several accessories making it bulky and likely uncomfortable to wear for extended periods of time. It's highly unlikely he just forgot that the gun was on him at the time.
If someone is conceal carrying and gets any kind of attention from a law enforcement officer, that person needs to keep their hands visible, clearly state, "I have a conceal carry permit, gun is on my (left/right)," and do exactly what the police officers say. Pretti had a right to self defense. So do LEOs. And they will exercise their right to self defense very quickly and broadly if they feel threatened.
Pretti did not act like someone should when conceal carrying in the presence of LEOs. He joined in a fracas. He shoved someone, then wiggled around while being held down by CBP. Now, the wiggling around is basically a human reflex, but it is one that must be suppressed if you find yourself in the position of being arrested.
On the flip side, no one should be shot for exhibiting a normal human reflex. Typically that does not happen in most arrests. My understanding of the situation, from the perspective of the CBP, is:
They were there to arrest a bad guy. A bunch of screaming people started getting in their way, blowing whistles in their faces. Again. They are trying to arrest their third bad guy of the day, after working 10 days in a row. Somehow, having to arrest child rapists isn't the worst part of their jobs. They haven't slept well for over a week, because these screaming whistle people are also banging pots and pans together all night outside every hotel they've tried to retreat to.
One of the screaming whistle women gets too close, pings some sort of danger radar, one of the CBP agents pepper spray her. Guess it's arrest time. Try to arrest her, a screaming whistle man comes and tries to push you off her. He just signed up to get arrested for assaulting an officer. He tries to fight you off, it takes four of you to try to hold him down.
One of your buddies sees a holstered gun. He reaches in, grabs it and says, "I've got his gun."
Unfortunately, you are still surrounded by the damned whistle people. You don't hear all that sentence. You heard the word "gun" because your ears are highly invested in hearing the word "gun." But the rest of it is drowned out by the drone of invectives being thrown your way.
The detainee's gun goes off in the agents hands. One of the infamous Uncommanded Discharges from a Sig. The bullet hits the ground next to an agent's foot. This created an imminent sense they were in deadly danger. There was a gun, they were being shot at. They shot the detainee.
Now, the dumb part is they shot the detainee while he was being detained by four of their own people. They were holding his hands. He wasn't facing them. He could not have possibly been the source of the shot. And shooting him risked the lives of the people trying to restrain him. This was a really bad shoot.
Legally, I don't know if they should be charged with murder, manslaughter, or just placed on leave and given a desk job. I think Pretti's family has standing to sue for a good amount of money. It was a bad shoot. And Pretty played stupid games and won a fatal prize.
Weirdly, I saw something online claiming that the images released (and being used) of Pretti in his scrubs had been tidied up by AI to make him look more appealing. I have no idea if this is right or just Internet conspiracy stuff. But it echoes all the admiration Luigi Mangione was getting, and I think for the same reasons: he's the Hero taking on the Bad Evil Wicked Horrible Guys, of course mm-mm he's so dreamy and smart and the rest of it.
Also, a lot of the protesters/resistance are heavily invested in "ICE, besides being evil and so forth, are all the dregs of society: dumb, stupid, violent, criminals or would-be criminals". They can't just be ordinary average Joes who maybe are not well-trained and a little bit incompetent, no, they have to be dumb trailer trash (and hence inferior in every way to us good people, even if I'm a Person of Hair Colour with multiple piercings and no steady employment since I finished my degree in Gender Studies Regarding Marginalised Folx in the Underwater Basket-Weaving Industry).
It's weird that this has happened twice, and it's doubly weird that Oracle's brother was the one doing it this time. I'm really not sure why it's a thing for some people on the left to talk about the physical attractiveness of their heroes like this -- I thought the left would be the ones saying that your values are more important than your appearance.
But also the pattern-noticer in me is considering that this has happened only in instances where white adult men have been the grand hero of the left. I can't recall George Floyd being praised for being a dreamboat. And bizarrely the American left types who might have venerated Thomas Matthew Crooks were convinced he was a Republican (?) false flag operation (?), and anyway I guess he radiated "loser teenage boy" energy rather than "big stronk warrior man" energy.
Actually, it's startling to me how little we know about Crooks, his motivations, and the failures of the Secret Service, but unfortunately there's no force that actually wants us to know more. Despite the historically-significant photo he got out of it, Trump seems incredibly embarrassed about his near-death experience and hasn't milked it the way he should have. He seems grateful for the Secret Service despite their failure. Given everything that's happened since, Crooks' assassination attempt is one of the most historically significant events of the past 20 years.
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This gives me an idea!
Apparently in 1990, the KGB wanted to improve its image, so they held some beauty pageants and chose a "miss KGB" to represent the agency. Link. ICE could do something similar! A friendly, pretty, female ICE agent could make people realize that ICE are humans too!
Google "ice bae".
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