This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
What's the argument here?
Sure you can. Pretti was a bad man because he was an insurrectionist communist and because he made it his life's work to obstruct lawfully empowered federal law enforcement officials. Therefore, he has it coming. Efforts from the right to punish his killers are wrongheaded and will make it more difficult to find the loyalists to help us through the ugly days to come.
Who cares what Pretti did in the last moments of his lif. He was bad. He's no longer on the stage. What else matters? You might disapprove of the methods behind his removal, but so what? Did the left disapprove of the methods behind Kirk's removal? (No.) If you're not fully "who, whom"-pilled by now, will you ever be? Pretti was on the wrong side. One of the bad guys. Enemy combatant. If you're too squeamish to deal with enemy combatants, what are you even doing?
I used to buy into this whole moral framework built from game theory, moral imperatives, and veils of ignorance. Now I don't. I've lost no explanatory power. Now I believe the left, including its foot soldiers like Petti, deserve everything they're going to get in the coming struggle. I feel more for cows slaughtered inhumanely than I do for egalitarian idealists organized around punishing the successful to achieve their unachievable dream of materials equality.
Leftists deserve what's coming to them and I can't much care about the details of their karma delivery packages
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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.
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'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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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. :(
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
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.
It has worked for the left.
Has it?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
"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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
And the hardcore conspiracy theorists are a non-negligible percent, although ‘microchips in thé vaccine’ may not be 100% literal all the time.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
Is it your belief that Kennedy was not divisive? He was a papist!
More options
Context Copy link
I'd say killing someone who's main job is talking on college campuses is, if anything, more egregious than killing a president or a politician.
Yeah, that would be my point.
I disagree completely.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Malcolm X did.
I was under the impression that hew was a fringe radical at the time, and didn't come close to representing the views of 20% of either of the major parties.
Sorry, I didn't mean that as a refutation, more as a 'people did, but not from where one might expect'.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link