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Apologies if someone has brought this up already, but new video of Pretty is out from days before he died.
https://apnews.com/article/minneapolis-ice-alex-pretti-videos-immigration-809506eb23f44a3e8f6e53b9fda7b700
He appears to be caught on video at least one other time engaging violently with the police while armed (for some definitions of violent) and is alleged by some sources to have been spitting at the cops.
This generates two thoughts for me:
Don't do crimes. Hell, don't be a career criminal doing multiple crimes. Don't engage in unethical and illegal protests. Don't attack the police, however well intentioned. Rarely - don't date people who commit serious and violent crimes.
I can think of a very small number of cases where this sort of thing didn't turn out to be true and while those are tragedies we have a large population with a large criminal underclass, if our ratio is a hundred million to one then we are doing okay.
These are simple rules - don't be a criminal asshole, even if you are convinced of your own virtue unless you can accept the consequences. And perhaps we shouldn't burn down our society for anti-social criminals.
As corollaries-
I am now essentially convinced you can dismiss most defenses of these individuals reflexively. This is probably not good intellectual hygiene but every single time (every one!) you see a lot of lies put forth without evidence that don't make sense and often contradict available information. People later acknowledge the error or follow-up. People still don't know the undisputed facts about Rittenhouse, or the issues with the Arbery narrative (as seen in this weeks thread).
Additionally I don't know how many of us here actually regularly interact with American black people but it's a core feature of my job and I have some in my extended family. They (and their woke allies) are absolutely convinced they are liable to be killed for no reason at all at any time by police. This includes the guy from the ghetto, this includes the well behaved upper class by birth Harvard educated chair of surgery who walks to and from work in a suit more expensive than most cars.
The beliefs many people have are just completely untethered from reality and unchallenged. If knowledge is a justified true belief then these people know nothing.
My social network is unsurprisingly riddled with healthcare professionals, as Pretti was. To fully describe what I see in most of them in full would likely get labeled as a straw man, so I won't, but most of the accusations seem to be trivially true for me - they think Trump is literally Hitler and that ICE is the Gestapo, they are seeking violence and finds it justified and at the same time don't seem to think what they are doing constitutes violence.
Perhaps most importantly - everyone seems to have big opinions and feelings about politics but at the same time has no quality information, consumed no quality analysis and doesn't know agreed upon facts, much less the ones that aren't agree upon. Nothing has ever been engaged with critically, analyzed, discussed, pushed back on.
This includes the highly intelligent and educated and the guy who pushes the food carts.
Feelings about ICE and Pretti and Good are mandatory. Informed opinions are absent.
In truth I am not sure why I wrote this, some if it is surely cover to point out that Pretti appears to be an idiot. Some of it is processing my feelings. I don't think much of what I'm saying is novel, but I can tell those who don't have the experience that as someone working in an environment with a lot of minorities and a lot of institutionalized wokeness...well people have been lobotomized.
Perhaps I'm hoping someone will say something that gives me hope, but even here our left leaning posters mostly seem to be blind soldiers for the cause.
Some of us still think that "deserve it" means "commit a crime that would normally attract the death penalty".
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.
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
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/
"Just"???
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?
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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