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The general public does not care about statistics. Both sides of the CW play that game. MAGA wants you to think of the median illegal as a rapist, murderer and gang member, while SJ wants to think of them as a 6yo wearing a Pokemon hat.
The protesters breaking the laws more frequently than cops is to be expected. They are not getting paid by the taxpayer, though. There have been two people killed in MN. Both were protesters who were objectively (with the benefit of hindsight) not going to kill ICE agents. There are certainly situations where I would expect that outcome. If protesters had also murdered three ICE agents in MN in the same time span, that would justify ICE having a high prior that someone wants to murder them, making their snap judgments more understandable.
The other problem is that the Trump administration by trying to take control of the narrative and slandering the victims before their bodies were cold effectively endorsed the killings. SOP for a shooting which looks bad would be to say that the agent involved has been put on paid leave and that it is under investigation, and that it would be premature to comment on it. The Trump admin message to the ICE agents seems to be "if you need to break a few eggs to make our omelette, that is fine. We will shield you from consequences and tell bald-faced lies in our press conferences to provide cover for you."
I'll admit, that got under my skin more than anything else. It took the typical trump lying from tiresome bullshitting buffoonery to, well, hackneyed villainy.
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“ MAGA wants you to think of the median illegal as a rapist, murderer and gang member, while SJ wants to think of them as a 6yo wearing a Pokemon hat.”
Maybe the median MAGA wants you to think this but I feel like the median MAGA has instincts that the intellectual MAGA could express better and with data. Assimilation doesn’t happen. Twitter recently had a thread showing Italian American have a 60% higher criminality rate than Scandinavian Americans. Ellis Island was a long time ago. I am Italian American. We are different. If Nancy Pelosi wasn’t constrained by a larger majority her politics wouldn’t be New Deal it would be Evita Peron since Italians are the dominant force in Argentina. https://x.com/garettjones/status/2018766833134751869?s=46
I came across some writings by Wang Hunig whose basically the chief ideologue and theorists for the CCP and when he has a quote that struck me, “ all political power runs downstream from shared values, culture, and tradition”. Then I bought his book and will work on it this weekend.
I don’t believe Amerindians will assimilate into America. We have multigenerations now an education gaps remain quite large. Criminality is a little more mixed. I don’t believe you can bring in a population group whose descendants will be stuck in a servant class and not change the culture and politics of a country. If they are non-competitive for becoming elites in a country then they will vote for communism.
I think Indian Brahmins and Asians are more mixed. The current debate seems to be on striver culture. And heritage Americans seem to think the country has the right amount of striving. Certain immigrant groups strive less than whites and certain groups strive more than whites. For people like me America had the perfect amount of striving so why would I want it to change.
MAGA doesn’t want the other side to believe every deportation is a rapists. They want the other side to be racists like us. It’s a dog whistle. They want the other side to realize that if you import a lot of Amerindian your country will turn into Brazil or Mexico. Mexico now has a shared culture with its people but all the rich people are European or Lebanese. Their servant class is brown.
And yes my background is a typical urbanite with a lot of highly filtered black, brown, and yellow friends who sometimes play the token Nazi role. The elitists city of highly selected globalists can function. I don’t think it works once you get past the top 5%.
I tend to believe America’s original sin is the primary reason we developed suburban culture and we can primarily only build walkable urban environments in areas with extreme wealth is because of an intense desire to prevent the social dysfunction in schools and public spaces associated with our Origional Sin. To this day any progressive with money who flies all the correct flags will do anything in their power to make sure the bottom 50% of blacks can’t be in their neighborhood or in their schools. If America didn’t have black people private schools would basically disappear.
Centuries later group differences and favoritism never disapear. Bias in juries to favor your own race still exists. A recent interview with an OJ Simpson juror said they voted him innocent despite thinking he was guilty because of Rodney King. A black man can butcher two white people and a black juror won’t convict him. The more you start to see that group differences between populations that evolved in different areas are permanent the more anti-immigration you become.
What MAGA wants you to believe is to be racists like us.
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The problem is that Minnesota and co. believe that these officers are illegitimate by default, and they treat ICE like an occupying force. That framing alone will undoubtedly make incidents more likely to occur.
The plan for the anti-ICE crowd is to continue with their current formula, because current the incentive structure encourages escalation. If I as an indignant protestor can blow whistles, shout profanities, follow and block ICE vehicles with my vehicle, and then have some other indignant protestor record the exact moment an ICE agent crosses the line or arrests me, then I win no matter what. I either get to disrupt your operation (which is supported by state and local government) or you arrest me and I can access one of probably hundreds of civil rights attorneys and a local politician or two to oversee my case and ensure no real harm or deterrence comes to me. Obviously anything that results in me being injured on video by an ICE agent is almost certainly good for the cause.
The comments and tweets from Noem and Bovino were politically disastrous, and that plays into the strategy employed by the anti-ICE crowd. You just need one or two optically terrible missteps by the other side to negate tens of thousands subtler, yet intentional provocations. As long as you can continuously point to isolated incidents that look bad, you can endlessly recapture the narrative.
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It's somewhat callous, but I can't help but think similarly overall. The Renee Good shooting was imo somewhat understandable, since she was spinning on the ice with her wheels pointed forward. That would have scared the shit out of me as well and shooting her before she gets grip is objectively a plausible way to stop being run over. But it still also was a bad shot, in the sense that, as you say, with the benefit of hindsight we know he wouldn't have gotten run over. Pretti was arguably the kind of guy who gets shot, and the left usually has no problem with this if they don't agree with their politics. But again, it was a bad shot in the sense that no ICE agent was factually under threat.
And while there has been a lot of questionable behaviour by obstructors, ICE agents generally rarely get injured and it is claimed that literally not a single agent has been killed in the line of duty in the past few years. Unless we assume superhuman competence for the ICE agents, that does point in the direction that the obstructors do not intend to seriously hurt or kill ICE agents, no matter how little one may like their other goals and/or their rhetoric.
And this simply matters a lot for PR. If you want to convince a normie that ICE agents are in sufficient danger to allow these shootings, you need to be able to provide examples of at least some of them actually being killed. Yes, this sucks, I don't really like it, but I also see little way around it.
If it was a bad shoot only if the shooter had precognition, it was a good shoot.
Not for lack of trying.
Nothing would change if a few ICE agents had been killed. The Twitterati would lie and say they weren't, and the actual media would ignore and downplay it.
If the officer could reload a previous save game and redo that event knowing what he does now, I'm pretty sure he wouldn't shoot. It may have been a justified shoot in the moment, but that doesn't mean it was a good shoot in a more general sense. Perhaps on a better day, or maybe if the same officer hadn't been dragged by a car recently, then he would not have shot. I don't think he could honestly answer the question "if you could do it over again, would you do the same?" with an unqualified "yes", though he may be advised to do so for legal reasons.
Which is equivalent to precognition. There was no way for him to know at the time he made the decision to shoot that the car would hit him but not seriously injure him. Making judgements based on knowledge that nobody at the time had is a completely unreasonable standard.
To steelman in the point, in a Bayesian sense, the fact that in this case it turned out to be unjustified should update future officers away from shooting in similar situations with similar levels of uncertainty. That makes whether it was a "good shoot" or "bad shoot" in an absolute, hindsight-is-20/20 sense a meaningful, useful question, even if it doesn't impinge on the legality or morality of the event of Good's killing as it actually occurred.
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Yeah I was just thinking that. If the recent Minneapolis kerfuffles had been two ICE deaths I feel like they'd have made a far smaller dent narratively than what occurred.
Like even if Good had legitimately run down one of the ICE guys obstructing her I can't picture it generating much interest.
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