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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   23592 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026

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The point of this proposal, in case it didn't occur to you, is so that people can hold individual officers to account when they misbehave. This is an obvious good.

No, in fact it did not occur to my tiny, cramped, suspicious, cynical mind. Not when we have things like the church incident where a mob turned up after identifying (as they think and perhaps in fact) an ICE manager as one of the pastors. Not when people are sharing online lists of "This is the home addresses of ICE agents". Not when you get malicious compliance of this sort:

All of us stare in the direction of a parking lot just past a chain-link fence, through which we can see many cars and the occasional agent. Sometimes a robot voice comes from that direction. “This is the federal protective service,” the voice will say. “Get off federal property and stop obstructing.” The man with the dog puts his hand to his ear performatively. “What’s that?” he says. “Hmmm?”

...Protesters are supposed to stay off the street in front of the Whipple Building, but sometimes they step into the street.

You really can't imagine that, for instance, a group of "citizen observers" wouldn't mob an ICE agent demanding his ID? Pretending they couldn't hear the answer? "What's that, hmmm?" "No, no, who are you, how do we know you're legit? What's your badge number?" "Sorry, what was that?" "Can you repeat that?"

And if said agent tries to arrest them or push past them? "Help, help, I'm being assaulted! Vicious unprovoked attack! State violence!"

Watch my brilliant policy mind at work... "ICE does not have to identify themselves during an active arrest." Or how about this one... "ICE only has to provide a badge number to someone they are detaining or officially interacting with."

Well, how nice to know all the protesters will be well-behaved, law-abiding, and will not be screaming abuse and frothing at the mouth. Oh, wait:

When the agents walk toward us, when the void behind the police tape is replaced with a line of masked, armed men in vests, the crowd unleashes an extraordinary level of invective. It is a chorus of jeers that rises and falls with its own internal rhythm. A woman yells with her entire body, “GO BACK TO TEXAS MOTHERFUCKERS. WE HATE YOU. GO HOME. FUCKING GO BACK TO PRISON WHERE YOU FUCKING BELONG. NAZI. WE HATE YOU. TRAITOR! GET OUT!” The crowd rides this river of catharsis. A white woman in a beanie points as she yells, each statement crisp and cold: “ICE ATTACKS PREGNANT WOMEN.” A white man points both his middle fingers and releases a teeth-baring yell, and it seems as if he were drawing a current from the pavement straight out of his mouth. “YOU LITTLE BITCH,” yells a Black woman. Against the wail of distant whistles, the crowd passes from one character to another and comes together: “SHAME. SHAME. SHAME.”

No way this could turn nasty, with a bunch of self-appointed vigilantes deciding to turn up and 'encourage' the presumed ICE nark to leave.

If the whistle is the sound of resistance, the sensation is the never-ending vibration of a half-dozen chats on the phone in your pocket and all the anxiety that suggests. There are Signal chats for every neighborhood, chats devoted to finding out about other chats. ICE vehicles are often unmarked; there are chats where locals type in license-plate numbers and other residents check the numbers against a database of ICE vehicles. Idling in her rental car scrolling Signal, New York’s photographer came upon a photo of a Nissan Rogue with California plates: her car.

In other words, rather than rebutting what I'm saying, you point to instances of protestors behaving badly and sarcastically imply this means ICE should not be held to a standard for their behavior.

This is what-about-ism at its worst.

I'll cop to sarcasm because that is my besetting sin in commenting, but I've been burned one time too many over "this will NEVER, EVER, happen AT ALL IN ANY WAY so shut up shut up shut up with the objections" and then we get "that thing that never happens just happened again".

So I don't expect a random mob of protestors who think they are the White Rose but are, in fact, misery tourists (see our pal who did some light protesting in the morning with his missus then they toured the museums in the afternoon) to behave like sensible, disciplined groups when they're high on hysteria over "we are fighting the Nazis!!!" and I don't expect well-meaning regulations to be workable when the rubber (bullets) hit the road. Some bunch of activists are going to spend a lot of time finding loopholes in the regulations that will let them engage in "I'm not touching you!" provocation.

And then somebody else is going to get shot. Just like Good and Pretti. For the same stupid reasons on both sides.

Sure. A standard. Not these unreasonable-on-their-face ones, which have obvious failure modes which you're trying to pooh-pooh away as if the anti-ICE side will be at all reasonable, which it is clear from their behavior they will not.

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