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 -
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.
This is totally retarded. The standard that best protects officers from being second guessed in the courts is the "moment of threat" rule (although it was dialed back a bit in Barnes) in which plaintiffs and courts cannot go back indefinitely into the encounter. That sort of thing is abused a lot in State civil courts that don't need to follow federal precedent -- for example in a civil suit in CA, you'll see arguments that officers precipitated the conditions for deadly force by standing in the way of a vehicle.
You really really don't want to open the door to evaluating these kinds of things based on what anyone did in the minutes up to the use of deadly force, let alone days before or just general "this guy is a thug" vibes. Even if it's true, it undermines the entire analytic structure and that structure is by far the most beneficial to law and order more generally.
This was not "dialed back a bit" in Barnes. It was completely overturned and throughly repudiated in Barnes. (And rightly so -- imagine the Good case, only no Ross and the cop who was at her driver's door jumps up on the doorsill as she's driving away and shoots her because he's now in danger)
From Barnes
(Omitted inline citation)
In this case, if those prior interactions were known to the officer, they may well be relevant.
It should be noted that SCOTUS didn't rule directly on officer-created jeopardy, just said that the "moment of threat" doctrine is wrong and totality of the circumstances is correct and sent the case back to the lower court for them to make the ruling with the proper standard. Does anyone know if the ruling has come out yet or if there are rulings for other cases with officer-created jeopardy made under the totality of the circumstances?
The Fifth Circuit reaffirmed, without any new argument, the summary dismissal on remand. Apparently they've been learning from the way the First, Second and Ninth circuits managed SCOTUS on gun cases. I imagine it will eventually go back to to the Supreme Court and (because this isn't a gun case) the Supreme Court will tell them that no, you do have to actually consider what we told you.
Officer-created jeopardy, on the other hand, is an untenable doctrine on its face... a similar thing doesn't even exist for civilians, and part of the job of police officers is sometimes to put themselves in jeopardy. Affirming that doctrine is basically making heroes of the Uvalde cops.
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