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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 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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