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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".
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
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 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 themselves—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, their 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.
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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