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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.
Some of us still think that "deserve it" means "commit a crime that would normally attract the death penalty".
This is a confusion or equivocation about a word that can be used in multiple, similar senses.
Imagine a man goes to a bad part of town. He gets very drunk, flashes around his expensive watch and wallet full of cash, and then passes out in a gutter.
You wouldn't say he "deserves" to get robbed in the sense that the robbery is an actively good thing, or an act of justice.
But you might say that he "deserves" to get robbed in the sense that he was willfully stupid to an inexcusable degree, and the misfortune that befell him was meaningfully downstream of his own deliberate choices - choices where he has no viable excuse for not being able to predict the likely outcome.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. If you scuffle with the police while armed in a situation that you have deliberately engineered to be as stressful and confusing as possible, sometimes you are going to get shot even if your scuffling doesn't appear to rise to the level of morally deserving to get shot. An ostensible adult who is not capable of comprehending that chain of logic should probably be in some sort of conservatorship where they are not allowed to own guns or vote or interact with the public unsupervised.
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Would it be better if I said he earned his death, instead of deserved it?
I think of it as like a gestalt 'whilst his death was probably illegitimate him and his peers have essentially accumulated sufficient chance of something going wrong during an interaction with fatal consequences that it was somewhat earned'
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I really do not understand this argument. Let's take the case of someone deciding to go for a run on a busy highway at night. Let's also say that the person about to run him over decides not to swerve or do a full break because they consider the risk to themselves or any passengers too great. This results in the runner's death.
If I now think that the driver's behaviour is acceptable or that he should not be punished, hell, even if I take a FAFO stance towards the runner's fate, that is a far cry from saying that the runner "deserved" his death. And even further from the usual polemic that "running on a highway at night should be punishable by death". I am just taking a blasé attitude towards the death of somebody who took stupid risks. In the words of Norm MacDonald: He was 44 years old, I say that's a ripe old age for a crocodile hunter.
Edit: I now see that OP did, in fact, play the strawman straight. Oh well.
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Yeah, but in reality it just means "we don't care because even if he was a victim of injustice, he was so costly to society it doesn't matter".
The idea that you can assault police officers because they're not allowed to "execute" people for assault is ridiculous. Stupidity always carries the death penalty.
Especially if you're deliberately generating as many contentious situations as possible.
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I am tempted to respond merely with, "go on", but, being in a charitable mood I will explain why I think this reply is very stupid.
The "death penalty" thing is just always stupid in these situations. It logically devolves into anarchy in, actually, very few steps.
Let me assume, for the sake of argument that there is a law wherein the penalty is short of death that you believe in. Maybe something like burglary to a home (which both residents of the home and police could legally shoot fleeing suspects within living memory) or even something more trivial like theft from a retail store.
The penalty for noncompliance is always death. Dont believe me? Go to Target. Steal a bunch of shit. When Loss Prevention tries to stop you, fight them. When they try to transfer you to police custody, fight them. When you are in jail, fight the jail guards. When they try to take you to court, fight more. Eventually, you will either die as a result of the response to your opposition to the law, or you will die in a cell for your infinite transgressions thereof (in a functional criminal justice system, in Minnesota you might get like a $12 million dollar jury award for biting off an officers nose, who knows at this point).
Non-compliance with the law always results in death unless you terminate your noncompliance. Its just a matter of time and place and manner.
I basically agree. It's just rhetorical slight of hand. And ultimately it's a strawman argument, because no serious person is arguing that someone convicted of attempting to elude the police or whatever should be sent to the electric chair.
As a sort of counter-example, one could imagine a situation where the police capture a bona fide serial killer. Perhaps that person really does deserve the death penalty, but nobody believes it's okay for the arresting officer to simply execute the guy.
To put it another way, the question of what the proper punishment is for a crime is largely irrelevant to the amount of force appropriate to arrest or apprehend someone who is committing such a crime. And yeah, a situation is conceivable where it's fine for the police to use extreme violence against a shoplifter who won't submit to a lawful arrest. The alternative is that people are able to steal, rob, and resist the authorities with impunity.
This is a bit like suicidal empathy.
The left has gotten good at making these strawman arguments. Where nuance goes out the window. As to your question “no serious person”
Me.
If my choice is we can enforce immigration law but I have to say yes to executing some agitators it’s yes.
It’s the same with shipping 20k Haitians to small town. What are you racists for opposing. If my choice is dropping 20k cultural foreign people into my small town or being racists - I am choosing racists.
The right has moved in a direction of feeling the need to remove any empathy from decision making because if you show one ounce of empathy your cooked. When I was growing up some how we didn’t push things to those extremes. We could paper over issues and not push it that far.
The prototypical lefty in the aughts was I believe Sandy Cohen of the OC who do the do gooder stuff and make the world a better place. But he wouldn’t push things to breaking the social contract with the other side.
I think there are some agitators that understand this and are using it to reinforce the image of ICE (and the larger right in general) as heartless jackbooted thugs. Keep the pressure up and make martyrs for the cause. Force ICE to make mistakes and then hold the evidence up as confirmation of their narrative.
As an aside, my sibling and family came back today from a trip to the US. They called Trump Hitler for what they observed while they were there. Its unsettling to me that that's what they took away from their trip, but they're allowed to draw their own conclusions. I don't think they've thought through what would happen to a nation where a heckler's veto and emotional appeals can prevent border enforcement.
The problem I have with that theory is that as far as I can tell, it's always been their tactic. If anything, they seem surprised it's not working anymore.
Much of the right has decided to switch tactics from the failing "No, they aren't jackbooted thugs" (which is defeated by the left's control of the media) to "YES, TRUMP STOMP!". I doubt this will work better politically but it does annoy the footsoldiers of the left.
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I'll happily take suicidal empathy over homicidal antipathy.
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Do I understand you correctly? Hypothetically, suppose there is an ICE raid on a restaurant and a couple illegal aliens try to run out the back door; are tackled; and are arrested; booked; and sent to jail. Are you saying that under some circumstances, you would support capital charges and execution for such persons?
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It's not stupid as a tactic, for those who think that lethal self-defense should never be permitted.
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Sounds like Charles Bronson.
Somehow I assumed this was a Death Wish reference, and I was rather confused.
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This wasn’t the death penalty but close enough to self defense that you can’t convict anyone.
He is also very close to “deserved it” by civilization standards. Insurrection while aligning with foreign agents is generally considered fine for “deserved it”. Yea you can call this an uncharitable take but he basically did that.
I am seriously, seriously disappointed that Trump did not invoke the Insurrection Act after saying outright he would. At this point I wouldn't believe him if he said the sun would rise tomorrow.
I know Nixon would often lose his temper and demand that such-and-such federal agency be immediately defunded, but he was venting his spleen to his closest advisors, not blasting his temper tantrums out to the whole nation.
He should resign. Perhaps Vance will be more level-headed and trustworthy.
Maybe Vance will take the throne by assassination after the mid terms. It would, if nothing else, be very interesting.
It’s unlikely, but we live in interesting times.
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Sounds exactly like what many people would say about the January 6, 2021 rioters.
Sure. Though there are actual foreign invaders being defended here. And this is more than one day.
But yes a lot of things just break down to whose the good guy and whose the bad guy.
I’ve also never said Babbit was a bad shot. George Washington is both a traitor and a Patriot. Whoever writes the history books gets to choose.
Got it. I think I misunderstood what you were saying. The way you phrased it, "foreign agents", made me think that you were implying that the protesters are working alongside of or at least furthering the aims of foreign governments. Which would parallel certain accusations against Trump and his people.
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I've been trying to avoid the day by day of this argument, since overanalysing single incidents can't provide useful insights into a larger political context, but if we have to...
This is largely what I think. I think the OP is hypocritical - he's discovered a video that makes Pretti look like a horrible person, so he concludes that Pretti 'deserved it'. This is an instance of the behaviour he condemns, where 'feelings about ICE and Pretti and Good are mandatory'.
My opinion, held with low confidence, is basically: 1) Goode was probably a valid case of self-defense; Pretti was probably not, 2) Goode, Pretti, and others were behaving recklessly and foolishly, and 3) ICE is being deployed clumsily and without effective strategy, more as political theatre than as a plausibly effective method of slowing migration.
If I put on my very cynical hat, my reading of the broader situation is that there's a political battle going on, and the left are winning. The Trump administration has deployed ICE as a kind of show of force, hoping to encourage their supporters and demoralise opponents. This has not been very effective. The left-wing strategy is basically to follow ICE around and publicise ICE doing unsympathetic things, so as to undermine ICE's perceived legitimacy, and thus also the Trump administration's legitimacy. As such the left are putting sympathetic innocent people into situations where there is an elevated risk of chaos, perceived threat, and thus shootings. I do not think people on the left want ICE to shoot citizens, but they are contributing to situations with elevated risks of that, and from a purely cynical political perspective, every time ICE shoot an observer/protester/activist, the left wins.
My advice for the left would be to find a better way to do this, because chaos on the streets and people dying are bad things in themselves, and my advice for the right would be to become more effective. Deploying ICE to Minneapolis is thuggish theatre. There can be a place for theatre in border policy, insofar as it's a message to prospective illegal entries, but what they are currently doing is clearly not a well-considered, effective strategy to decrease migrant intakes and remove existing illegal aliens.
At any rate. You just can't draw conclusions from whether Pretti himself was a good or bad or anything else person - not about whether the shooting was justifiable, and not about larger political strategy either. It is just a red herring.
I think the video shows something else. The video is showing what ICE are going through minute by minute and hour by hour. The two shots are the numerator of bad encounters with cops. The denominator are probably countless interactions like the one in the new video.
Problem is when you have the countless interactions like the video, a small number of them will go sideways.
It is also interesting to me that we focus so much on this particular numerator and not on the inverse (ie thugs attacking ICE). There was in fact an armed ambush of ICE last year. Did that make national headlines? Did people talk about it for weeks?
The ambushers being insanely incompetent probably acted in their favor in terms of it not generating many headlines.
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These can both be true, even though I think we don't have enough to conclude that the first is true or false:
The second video supports the second point.
The second point may well be true, and I think I just made the case that 'the left', broadly construed, is encouraging people to do things consistent with that point.
It just seems to me that if the first point is true, the second point is immaterial to the case itself
Bad shoots are inevitable, they’re never going to be driven to zero. Even if we had Star Trek phasers eventually some guy will screw up and unintentionally use the kill setting.
ICE resistors are creating conditions that increase the probability of a bad shoot. According to them we’ve now had two, I would say we might have had one.
People who create these conditions don’t necessarily get what they “deserve” if one of them is a victim of a bad shoot, but their actions are necessary for the bad shoot. They do share in the blame, but they’ll never acknowledge as such or adjust their behavior.
I did say above that I think the protesters are behaving foolishly. That was my point 2, and my advice for the left was to find a better way to do this, because I think that throwing people into situations where shootings are statistically more likely is something they should avoid. I don't hold that it is categorically wrong to deploy people into situations with elevated risk of violence, but when you do so, that risk ought to be proportional to the good you hope to achieve, and in this case I don't think it is.
My overall position is that ICE (and other law enforcement agencies) should do all that is reasonably possible on their end to minimise the risk of bad shoots, that protesters and activists should behave prudently and avoid raising the probability of bad shoots, and that when bad shoots do occur, the agents responsible should be disciplined or punished.
One difficulty here is that it's possible to enforce professional standards for ICE, and it's possible to punish ICE officers who shoot, but it is not really possible to pass a law requiring that protesters always act in sensible, prudent ways. That part of my position can only be achieved voluntarily, through cultural change.
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At first I thought you were being sarcastic, because by your logic ICE should just get M-16s and spray crowds of protestors. Or for that matter anyone who does anything to openly oppose or disagree with any government policy you personally agree with deserves to be shot. You may wholeheartedly agree with me, in which case, to paraphrase Lincoln, you should consider moving to a place like Russia or Iran, where they don't even pretend that the citizens have any rights.
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As much as I'm rather on "your side" in the big picture of the culture war, this is a terribly shortsighted and intellectually stifling judgement passed upon a person solely due to 2 videos of their very recent behaviour - and behaviour Pretti himself certainly saw as morally directed, no matter how wrong or deluded he was. We can ridicule and deconstruct the Left's misguided beliefs all the way down to the Rousseauian bedrock it builds itself on, it won't change the fact that people contain more complexity and ingrained incentive systems than their stated ideological affinity.
Looking at pictures of Pretti, he strikes me as one of those rather common male millennial leftists who feel a lot of inner resentment and bitterness towards their lives, yet are still to meek or calculating to express this inner rage on their own terms and must sublimate it through socially-approved political grievances. When I was a member of the Austrian Socialist Youth many moons ago, this type of male left-wing activist was already very commonplace: men that could not fit into any socially desirable mould of masculinity or youth and thus found a social space that not only allowed them to go on aggressive rants and lash out against property or people, but even lauded them for it and bestowed them with in-group status for their aggressive tendencies. Despite the explicit denial of meaningful same-sex difference within the Socialist Youth, this type of "male attack hound" was an unspoken model of traditional masculinity accessible for otherwise rather unmasculine men. (I might be totally off the mark here with my armchair analysis of Pretti, but everything I've seen so about him checks the list for this type of person. I'm also not saying "Pretti was ugly, therefore he was a self-loathing communist" - it's a more nuanced mix of physical, intellectual, and social factors.)
I very much doubt Pretti was a "bad man" to his colleagues, neighbours, or other people he interacted with regularly. Maybe he was easily irritable or smart-assed (would match the type), but I don't see someone like him, say, wantonly tossing trash onto his neighbour's lawn or stealing change from a colleague's purse. The actions you point at to designate him as such are both situations in which he probably felt that he could morally justify letting out his rage at a target that was anyway deserving of such. You say that "he made it his life's work to obstruct lawfully empowered federal law enforcement officials", but within his media/social ecosystem, he was operating off of the impression that current ICE tactics were an illegal overreach (and why wouldn't he, if his news bubble consists of NPR, the NYT, an Antifa Telegram group or any other media outlet partaking in the effort to smear and denigrate ICE at any cost), or at the very least would be legally overturned and near-universally condemned in the near future, à la Jim Crow laws. We can and should point out that he was wrong to do what he did, that his belief system was based on fables, conformist meekness, and a need to sublimate his resentment at the world, without immediately resorting to a complete moral condemnation.
Maybe I'm being overly sentimental, but I can't bring myself to feel any condescension or Schadenfreude at his death. I find it a tragic waste of life and a pathetic, misguided attempt of a man desperate for self-respect. Of course he was looking for a fight. Of course bringing a gun was provocation of the highest degree. Of course I don't blame ICE officers for how this went down (although I would appreciate if the White House wouldn't so blatantly pursue a strategy of "deny and defend at all costs before there's even clear documentation available"). But Alex Pretti was an intensive care nurse at a Veteran's hospital with a clean record - are we really going to reduce's a man's entire existence and character to the probably most irrational and emotionally charged moments of his life? There's alot of left-wing activists I have no trouble morally condemning rather fully (Hasan Piker comes to mind), but it feels unjust and shortsighted to do so here.
You could probably zoom in and say all this about many of the peasants who helped in Cambodia's great reset, but it doesn't matter, because the end result was piles of severed heads in ditches. The hour is getting late.
This is just a mirror image of annoying leftists being unable to entertain any rightwing belief or action without immediately comparing it to the Nazis. You've created a discursive padded cell in which kicking into a car's headlight and stepping between an ICE officer and a woman getting peppersprayed is morally indistinguishable or innately upstream of slaughtering people for wearing glasses.
I agree that there are plenty of leftists who can become ice cold killers in the proper context, but I would be ashamed of myself for judging a man by hypothetical actions he might do at some point in a certain situation rather than the things he actually did and that actually happened.
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None of us can directly tell what evil lurks in the hearts of men; we can only judge actions and make inferences from them. I don't know about "communist", but the evidence certainly shows that Pretti was engaged in direct action against federal law enforcement on multiple occasions. Pretti certainly saw himself as morally directed, but so does a spree killer who acts because the voice of God told him so -- that the voice was a real one on a Signal chat in this case makes it worse, not better.
Or, stated another way, you're being far too charitable.
I think you are showing far too little charity, and I write as someone who finds the activities of the anti-ICE protestors to be largely detestable. Allow me to explain.
First, I'm being serious about my feelings about the protesters: in my view, they are—for the most part—smug, shrill, deluded agents of chaos. The gulf between their conceptions of their own character, motives, and impact on the world, and the truth of these things, is vast, and not in a direction that is to their credit. I'm as little inclined to violence as it is possible for a rational man to be, but I must confess that even I sometimes wish to see the most insufferable of their number, whilst engaged in some strident, self-righteous tantrum against authority, receive as a reply a salutary spritz of pepper spray straight into their stupid faces.
Second, and critically, these people are not evil, and that extends even to the violent ones for the most part. I think we can establish this pretty reliably in a couple ways. One approach is the one that @StJohnOfPatmos used: look at their backgrounds. Using this lens, we find no indicators whatsoever that Pretti was evil. In fact, he seems to have been generally law abiding and respectable. Beyond his lack of a criminal history, I'd also note that becoming an ICU nurse requires a fairly high degree of consciousness and trustworthiness, and nursing as a whole selects pretty reliably for compassion. Turning to Renee Good, she similarly lacked any criminal history or clear signs of malevolent character. And while I don't think we have the data to firmly generalize about the entire population of anti-ICE protestors, my strong intuition is that they are probably similarly decent.
It is worth taking a moment to point out that the good character of people engaged in "activism" is hardly a given. Recalling the example of Kyle Rittenhouse, he seemed unable to fire his rifle without hitting a child molester, a wife-beater, or a criminal lowlife. Now you might counter that the people Rittenhouse shot were non-representative in the sense that, of all the people present, they showed a particular eagerness to assault a 17 year old boy, and an armed one at that. Indeed, on that basis I think it would be reasonable to conclude they were probably amongst the worst of the "protesters" in Kenosha on that night. But I would respond that Good and Pretti were also selected in a similar sense: they were also amongst the most violent of all the people present at their respective protests. And that is part of where that strong intuition of my mine about the general good character of the protestors comes from. If the most confrontational of the anti-ICE protestors were as clean as Pretti and Good seem to have been, it seems likely to me that the protestors who weren't violently resisting arrest, kicking police cars, etc, are probably at least as good (at least for the most part).
Why do we see bad people acting badly in some protests, and relatively good people acting badly in others? In his comment, @StJohnOfPatmos delivered a very convincing presentation of the social and psychological dynamics at work in the case of Pretti, and I think this goes a long way to explaining the general difference between Kenosha and the current situation in Minnesota. One core insight is that current ideological landscape is particularly warped.
During the height of the BLM madness, there was a widespread belief that the police were racist and bad, but the acceptable remedy was largely to "defund them" rather than direct violence towards them. Sure, elites would equivocate about how understandable it was that people were burning down cities in response (there were a lot of "riots are the language of the unheard" type quotes) but at the same time there were also many elites who were sympathetic to BLM who said, clearly and repeatedly, that violence was unacceptable. Here is an excerpt from a fairly representative Barrack Obama statement from the time:
I'll grant that there were also statements that were less measured, but I don't think they represent the ideological center mass of the left during peak wokeness. Also—and this is crucial—no elites were telling the NPR-listening normies of the world to go out and loot their local Nike outlet. Maybe, in the view of some commentators, we could excuse a Black teen with an "unheard voice" for doing it, but that excuse certainly didn't extend to a normie with White privilege. As a consequence, ICU nurses were not typically present at the riots, and certainly they were not the ones doing the burning and looting.
Things are different now. To give you a sense of this, I've excerpted Obama's statement on the Pretti shooting:
According to Obama, the federal agents who have been "deployed" lack even a semblance of discipline and accountability; their tactics are lawless; they are assaulting our core values as a nation; and every American should support the "peaceful" protests to resist them. Notably there is no language in the statement explicitly condemning the violence of the protestors, or urging compliance with law enforcement. This is as close as you are going to get to Obama saying that you should go out and punch an ICE officer in the face. The craziest part is, while I don't have the patience to do an exhaustive survey of elite left sentiment, I expect Obama is, as usual, probably more moderate than many of his peers.
This messaging shapes participation in the "protests". This is how you get generally decent, well-adjusted people doing crazy shit en-masse. You have the authority figures they respect tell them repeatedly that they should be doing crazy shit, because freedom is on the line. In this media environment, I've seen people whom I generally respect (individuals whom I know to be highly intelligent, rational, kind and free-thinking in most contexts) basically baying for ICE blood. If they are vulnerable, what chance is there for left-orientied normies?
This also represents the second way I can tell that the anti-ICE protestors are not evil. If there are a bunch of people I know to be generally kind and well-calibrated who think ICE is a modern incarnation of the SS, it tells me the problem with the anti-ICE protestors is not their fundamental decency. People often find these kind of statements difficult because there is such strong urge to attach moral sanction to people who hold views we find repugnant, but I really mean it. I'm Jewish, but I'd say the same thing about the actual SS. The problem with the SS was not that the people in the SS were all evil. I expect they were less good, on average, than people like Hans and Sophie Scholl, but also probably better character-wise (kinder, less impulsive, more loyal) than even your run-of-the-mill wife-beater. The scary part of all this is that people who are not monsters can do things that are far more monstrous than most criminals will ever manage.
None of this is to say Pretti was without fault. I agree with @StJohnOfPatmos that he probably felt more inner rage than most, and once he had his socially sanctioned outlet for that rage, he was all too eager to use it. But the fact that he needed that the social sanctioning is key. He was decent enough that he could hold it together all his life until an authority figure came along and told him it was okay to let go. In this way, he was, ironically, probably a lot like many cops. Law enforcement has a reputation for attracting bullies who want permission to go out and hurt people, and while I think this stereotype is over-applied, it is not groundless. I've been on police ride-alongs were I've heard cops cheerfully regaling each other with stories of how they got to "beat the shit of a prisoner who was resisting".
At the start of this long comment, I said you showed too little charity, and now I will clarify. The charity you ought to show is in recognizing that a Pretti, or violence-enjoying cop for that matter, for all their flaws, are still possessed of the requisite self-control and pro-social impulses to do good and to not knowingly do bad. And this counts. There are plenty of people who have bad impulses and who can't control themselves under any circumstances, or who don't even care to try. Our prisons are full of them. Some of them need only the barest pretext to do bad: I looted the Nike store to protest white supremacy; I raped that girl because she secretly wanted it; et cetera. Many others don't need any pretext at all—their value function is to do whatever is good for them personally, and damn the consequences. In comparison, someone like Pretti was responding to extremely concerted messaging from many authority figures, and was engaged in actions that were plausibly proportionate and plausibly served the cause, all at risk to himself. Like I said, I still think Pretti is an agent of chaos, and I'd even agree his actions were far more damaging to society than most crimes (though this was not entirely for reasons he could have controlled). But there is a real moral difference between Pretti and his ilk and most criminals, and I think it is one we should be careful not to lose sight of lest we work ourselves up into a fit of righteousness where we become the ones doing the evil.
And an important point to note is that there are scenarios in which I legitimately would advocate for violent resistance to law enforcement. And the most extreme and exaggerated claims about ICE would probably qualify if true. If the President of a country literally threw together a bunch of armed thugs and attempts a genocide by rounding up everyone of a certain race and sending them to death camps, and the rest of the government was unable or unwilling to stop it, violence from civilians would be an appropriate response. If that was what was actually happening, I, and I expect most good Americans, would be in favor of the protests. Well, at that point protests wouldn't really be appropriate, it would probably be more efficient and effective to throw a coup (a counter-coup? Since the President would have had to done a coup to get to this point) and/or civil war.
The point being, there are worlds where good people fight against law enforcement against evil governments. If you are deluded into thinking you live in such a world when you don't, that doesn't automatically make you a bad person. Though it does suggest a lot of lack of humility and rationality. You should be extremely sure of what's going on and the justifications before resorting to violence, not just "the news told me". Motivated reasoning taken too far. I consider the protestor's crimes to be negligence, rather than malice. But it's still a moral failure.
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Few people are truly bad people, but there are a lot of people who are bad at being good people.
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Excellent comment here. I think the core of this is that essentially Good and Pretti were some variety of normies. When the criminal underclass acts out, it is easy to write it off as them being low-agency and their acting out is part of their general dysfunction. Normies however have the necessary degree of self-control and agency to respond to incentives, social status rewards and authority messaging. So when normies act out you can't dismiss it as a symptom of their general dysfunction, it tells you something about what incentives and societal messaging are directing them towards. By definition, normies are ones who "go with the flow." If you have normies in Minneapolis violently engaging ICE that tells us we have a messaging problem that is much bigger than whatever personal failings or bad judgments these people may have had.
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I'm sure we could both hypothesise many situations in which direct action against federal law enforcement wouldn't suffice to call someone a bad person or might even be the morally good decision depending on the circumstance. That alone isn't sufficient: the actual decisions he made, damaging an ICE vehicle lightly and needlessly stepping between an ICE officer and a woman said officer was pepperspraying for blocking their vehicle, are not particularly "evil" taken by themselves. They're more petulant and foolish - which is not to say I think they should be legal or that there shouldn't be consequences for that behaviour.
I do agree with you that I'm probably being a bit more charitable than I should - consider it as an avocatus diaboli response to your take, which maybe was a bit too lacking in charity.
Again, too much charity. By several orders of magnitude.
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Agreed 100%.
He probably did more good for the world in that role than he ever did wrong as a protestor, except to himself. I have no problem calling his death a tragedy, even if I don't think I can blame the officer for taking the shot (though that's from the limited information I do have). Defending ICE's goals and actions does not require celebrating or even attacking the character of Pretti (and Good) except in the specific actions they took before their deaths.
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I think that adopting a policy that effectively says that it's okay to kill people if you think they're bad is, well, abandoning the concept of civilisation.
What is your position here? That you (or people, or the Trump administration, or some other group?) ought to kill leftists (however that is defined, for you?)? Can you imagine that going anywhere good?
Yes, which is why the reaction to Charlie Kirk's assassination was so demoralizing for people.
The left really does want me dead because they think I'm bad, and they aren't shy about it.
I can't imagine it going anywhere good, but I also can't imagine continuing to cooperate when everyone else is so obviously defecting.
This is the most extreme kind of political thinking that I’ve seen
You should not treat your political opponents as a homogenous group made of their most distasteful members
This (quite common) cognitive mistake becomes particularly egregious when the conclusion is: they all want to kill me
You should recognize when thoughts, positions, attitudes or memes become sufficiently widespread within a group to be normalized, such that it starts showing up in your day-to-day interactions.
If you seriously think people in your day to day want you dead I think this is more indicative of a medical issue than a political philosophy debate.
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I honestly don't understand what people are talking about here. As I said elsewhere in this thread:
I remember talking to my dad after Trump was shot. I thought it was insane that it was relatively quiet, that it wasn't a huge fucking deal that everyone was talking about.
His explanation? Not many people will say it, but the quiet ones wished the bullet struck true, him included.
Kirk was worse, most people took his death as a chance to shit on him as a person, to decry his work, and to remind everyone that he was racist, sexist, transphobic, and whatever other epithet du jour could stick.
Yeah, they want me dead, they want my leaders assassinated in public, they want my son to be a girl and they'll kidnap him if I resist, and by the way, I can't own weapons that might dissuade the government form overreach, since they've taken those away, too.
Oh, and in the meantime, they're also telling me I'm evil because of my race while importing foreigners who hate me, also for my race, with the intention of manufacturing a demographic advantage out of voter fraud and anchor babies.
Democrats need to stop being so uniformly evil if you want me to stop treating them as uniformly evil.
Me: "Every Democratic politician immediately condemned Kirk's assassination and in private opinion polls only 20% think it was justified"
You: "Democrats are uniformly evil and want me dead."
?????????????
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Maybe amongs the higher ups and the normies. There was a hell of a lot of celebration (and "not celebrating, just selectively re-quoting the man in a way that makes him look maximally negative to my in-group") on social media. Certainly gives the impression that whatever may be said by others, there's a large and vocal contingent out there.
Of course, those people would say the exact same about the other side, and have plenty of nutpicking of their own to support their stance of "the other side wants us dead".
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It takes some effort to exceed the already low level of charity in this thread, but you've done it. Thanks for serving up an example of what I was just talking about, I guess.
This post is nothing but culture war (and calling it "culture war" is generous) and "I hate my enemies." No matter how much Whining you do, you are still not allowed to just vent about how much you hate your enemies and look forward to making them suffer. You are still not allowed to just snarl "Boo outgroup!" You are still not allowed to make broad generalizations rather than talking about specific groups and people.
Ugh, sorry about that. :(
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What are you talking about? Authority figures on the left universally condemned his assassination. Just 20% of Democrats think his death was justified. https://www.cloudresearch.com/resources/blog/justifying-murder/
Literally Dems shouted down a house proposal to honor Kirk (was merely symbolic). Ilhan Omar didn’t condemn — she in so may words said he had it coming.
It just isn’t true what you are saying. A lot of Dem politicians said something to the effective of “Kirk shouldn’t have have been shot BUT he was a bad dude.” That isn’t really condemning it (the but matters more) but gives enough for a post like yours allowing you to claim the dems decried it.
No they didn't. I remember this controversy. They honored him but rejected doing a prayer afterwards.
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I believe this is the first thing Omar posted about it, and the only statement the day he died:
https://x.com/IlhanMN/status/1965866576206508255
I think this example is basically similar to that of every dem politician and prominent figure, I'm open to counter-examples.
I don't really know what you're asking for. That people lie and pretend they think Kirk was a good person or a positive force in the world for some unspecified period after he died, while the right gets to hagiographize him?
Yes that is generally the bare minimum of polite political discourse. The Overton window of Western democracy is quite narrow and acting like your ideological opponents are literally grand evil is not productive in the long-term.
I too wish we had more polite political discourse, I agree it isn't polite to be criticizing Kirk a couple of days after he died. I also think that many on the left genuinely see Trump and his cronies as the grand evil, it isn't an act. That's not really what this thread is about though.
I think that there is an extremely high level of agreement on the left that Kirk's death was both bad in its impact on the world and unjustified based on Kirk's actions. I think it's really irrational to read between the lines that the left don't "disapprove of the methods behind Kirk's removal" when this is directly contrary to all public statements and even on a private survey of random people you can only get 20% to agree that it was justified.
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It has worked for the left.
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"Just"???
It's roughly the number of people who will give the most trollishly partisan answer to a poll question regardless of what they actually think. Scott Alexander's post on the Lizardman constant in polling says 13% of Americans, including 5% of Democrats (so c. 21% of Republicans by elimination) told pollsters that they thought Obama was the antichrist - which was not a popular anti-Obama conspiracy theory at the time. Of course the 21% includes 4-5% of lizardman responders who are in effect engaged in for-the-lulz nonpartisan trolling. But "15% of respondents use polls for partisan trolling on top of the lizardmen" is pretty much correct.
Unless you think "Republicans who are so deep into politically-driven heresy that they think their political opponents are the literal antichrist" are a problematic group, I would treat "Democrats who support the Charlie Kirk assassination" with the same skepticism.
Composition matters. The 20% was a lot smaller amongst older dems; a lot higher amongst younger dems. Lizard man constant breaks down when you disaggregate the polling.
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If you think that's high, you may have an overly rose tinted view of humanity.
Ok, I'll bite, what did the polls say about the victims of past assassinations? Did 20% of Republicans say "Kennedy had it coming" after he got shot?
I couldn't find any polls for that or any other historical assassinations. But 20% is about the number of Americans who claim to believe there are microchips in the COVID vaccine.
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Why are you comparing a highly divisive provocateur to a president like Kennedy?
Also I think opinions are more polarized now than back then. There's possibly less expectation of dignity now.
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Malcolm X did.
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The new video doesn't change anything for me.
Nor have I landed on deserve it as you mean.
And - you can absolutely come up with the conclusion that he was a bad person. Just because you think you are right doesn't make you moral or right. Don't fight the police. Don't destroy public property. Those are pretty good standards for social vs. anti-social behavior.
Sure - I'm not claiming that Pretti was a good person, or pro-social, or anything like that. You are free to conclude that he was a person of poor moral character. I just don't think that matters to anything.
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Right, so if someone attempts an assault with a deadly weapon in such a a way that if the crime was completed and if it resulted in death, would be a lesser degree of murder than capital murder, they wouldn't deserve to die if the would-be victim defended himself lethally and the defender should themselves be considered a murderer.
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