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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   19816 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026

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Two culture war bombs in the upper midwest this week

In May 2025, a woman in Rochester Minnesota uttered the N-word at a child who tried to steal from her, and then again at an adult who confronted her about it while recording with his phone. Both the child and adult are Somali. The video, uploaded to Youtube, went massively viral.

The woman was charged with three counts of disorderly conduct. One of the charges was dropped, the other two just went to trial. After a four day trial and 10 hours of deliberation, the jury found a guilty verdict for one of the charges.

The defendant's lawyer is claiming misconduct by the court and intends to appeal.

Our nation's few remaining principled free speech advocates do not approve of this. This verdict will likely be appealed and may, at minimum, result in Minnesota's disorderly conduct statute being nullified with regard to offenses that are limited to speech and no other disruptive behavior.

In a somewhat ironic twist, apparently the guy who recorded the viral youtube video at the center of all this, was arrested for gang raping a child in 2022, and had those charges dropped "in the interests of justice" by the same prosecutor's office that this year thought it was in the interests of justice to throw the book at somebody for saying a naughty word. What a funny world we live in.

Bomb number two: Police in Madison, WI, responding to reports that someone was casing vehicles to break into, confronted a suspect, who fled, resisted arrest, and finally attacked one officer with a knife, causing that officer to respond with lethal force.

Activists are very clearly trying to turn this into a reprise of the George Floyd moment, including transporting the raised fist monument from Minneapolis' "George Floyd Square" to Madison. The area around the shooting has been barricaded by activists. Activists stormed a police press conference, seizing the podium to deliver a rant about Zionism.

State representative and gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong has thrown her lot fully in with the activists. Whether this helps or hurts her electoral chances will remain to be seen.

Madison's "Independent Police Monitor", who has also thrown her lot in with the activists, is confused about why the Madison Police Department are not involving her in their investigation of the incident.

Attorney Ben Crump, whose list of cases is a who's who of law-enforcement-related racial grievances, is representing the family of the deceased.

And the deceased? Over 40 arrests, multiple felony convictions, including a history of assaults on police officers. (No way to link directly to this, but go here and search for Corey Ruiz).

It never ceases to amaze me how the left is so consistently able to mobilize itself in the defense of the worst people in the world.

The Shiloh Hendrix case is the "free speech freshman year debate" hypothetical come to life.

"We should protect free speech!"

"Well, what if someone started shouting 'the n-word' at a child!"

And it was handled in the worst way possible. A trial over a disordery conduct charge. I really, really want to know why the prosecution decided to go to trial over this instead of dropping the charges. I believe, IIRC, the consequences are a $1000 fine and a few months of probation? In return, Hendrix has raised nearly a million in a go fund me because she has received credible death threats. The rare combination of libertarians and everyone right of center will make this some sort of cause as well.

Oh, and she's an attractive white woman. The self owns on all sides just seem insane!

I mean, what's next? A white, female muslim candidate gets into hot water for being too muslim to be gay?

Disorderly conduct for saying a word someone asked you to say.

I'm sorry, I thought this was America.

Shiloh isn't even that hot but she got the right pr team to turn her into a martyr. Purged all her socials. Always showing up in long sleeves to cover her degenelate tattoos and otherwise having a professionally done outfit

I mean she's not a supermodel but anybody who's been on a dating app in the last 10 years will tell you that 'Blonde white woman of a healthy BMI who is smart enough to cover up the doodle tattoos' makes you a 7+ by default these days.

I'm extremely sensitive to faces but I do think Shiloh is a sweet name.

result in Minnesota's disorderly conduct statute being nullified with regard to offenses that are limited to speech and no other disruptive behavior.

This is "as applied", so it would only cover specific applications.

There is also, perhaps unfortunately, the "fighting words" doctrine in which speech that any reasonable person would anticipate to imminently cause affray can be criminalized, at least as to directly uttering them in public (as opposed to, say, on a podcast). It's not totally beyond reason to imagine that racial slurs could be considered in that frame.

The FIRE link mentions that, actually. Last time Fighting Words was upheld, the words were "god damned racketeer" and "damned fascist". Somehow, I doubt there's much overlap between "people who want slurs included as Fighting Words" and "people who want 'fascist' to be a Fighting Word."

It isn't even the current test, but I doubt every quote of "shouting fire in a crowded theater" comes from someone who thinks distributing anti-draft pamphlets is doing so.

Claiming that "the left" mobilizes itself in defense of such people is misleading.

It's not the left as a whole, it is particular subsets of the left.

This judge is a Democrat. So is the prosecutor choosing to pursue Hendrix, the same prosector who let the kidnapping rapist off in the interests of justice.

If you don't want it to be all the left, then it can't be only Democrats, and it can't be professional partisans doing it.

It is the left, and the entire left gets to own this, first for bringing the rapist into the country, second for letting him rape with impunity, and third for protecting him from the native Americans who want him gone.

Yeah, these are professionals and elected officials with paid-up party membership, not a bunch of crazy kids on college campuses or activist e-outrage-chasers.

The social activism left has much, more more political power than the labour left (which the labour left claims is due to the capitalists hijacking actual leftism to replace it with this caricature which poses no threat to them.)

The labour left IS the social activism left. Every Pronoun Person also hates capitalism and billionaires.

Do the unions over there actually split from the rest of the left in this case or no?

No, they're the same, they vote the same, and there's no difference. None of the labor left are defending her because it's all the left, it always is.

It's a particular subset of the left that is also gunning for the other half of the left.

I claim it remains to the benefit of the nation (not to mention the median mottizen) that they not succeed at shivving the institutional left. I guess we'll see in Michigan how it goes with AES, although I heard Gretch is going to line up against him.

Most of the Democratic party is a subset of the left. See 2020 for examples of the left mobilizing itself in defense of such people.

Whether I like it or not, about half the country raise up mental defenses just like this to go on voting for this to continue.

Yeah, they'll agree these people are violent (they may even go so far as to admit they should be punished by the law), but it's not as big a deal as the fact that e.g. our hospitals are still not nationalized, which they want, so they will keep voting alongside these activists for the politicians who are sympathetic to both violent crazy criminals AND nationalizing hospitals.

Presently, there's not much to do about that.

If you've got 10 people seated around a table, and a Nazi violent dirtbag leftist sits down, and nobody gets up, you've got 11 Nazis violent dirtbag leftists. The simple truth is that activists can forcefully occupy territory in downtown Madison, a jurisdiction controlled entirely by the left from the city council all the way up to the governor, because they have enough political power within the left coalition to make it politically infeasible to send in riot cops or the national guard.

If you've got 10 people seated around a table, and a Nazi violent dirtbag leftist sits down, and nobody gets up, you've got 11 Nazis violent dirtbag leftists.

This is not true whether we're talking about Nazis or about violent leftists.

The simple truth is that activists can forcefully occupy territory in downtown Madison, a jurisdiction controlled entirely by the left from the city council all the way up to the governor, because sending in the national guard to break it up is not politically feasible.

There are leftist activists in all parts of the US. However, leftist territory occupations that are permitted by the local leftist authorities are extremely rare. And the overwhelming majority of the time, leftist violence is met with police reaction.

It's never been true. It may be necessary, however, to act this way.

leftist territory occupations that are permitted by the local leftist authorities are extremely rare.

Yet when it happens literally not a single leftist or democrat speaks out against it

I seem to recall left-wingers and Democrats criticising CHAZ, for instance, while it existed. There were people who praised it, and plenty more who were willing to tolerate it, and I think that is worthy of condemnation, but you set the bar at literally zero, and there were more than literally zero who criticised it.

Were there not enough? Certainly. Did the incident show the weakness and timidity of the party? Absolutely. But - more than zero.

I seem to recall left-wingers and Democrats criticising CHAZ, for instance, while it existed.

Name a single elected official at the federal level or high ranking unepected party member that did this.

(And to preempt the accusations of moving the goalposts obviously I didn't mean twitter randos, it's possible to find some of those saying nearly anything no matter how zany)

Yes, it's of course trivially easy to find left-wingers in general criticising it at the time. Plenty of outright communists, even, criticised it as bad praxis. So in the broadest sense, the statement that I made is correct.

You've now narrowed the claim. I don't think that's bad faith, since setting goalposts is necessary, but you did just narrow it to federal elected official, which is a significantly narrower category than 'Democrat'. I do not have an example of a federal elected Democrat who took a strong stance opposing it. My read is that this was mostly polarisation - Republicans were strongly condemning it, and Democrats generally don't want to say the same things as Republicans. Since in this case they had the option of dodging the question by saying it's a local matter, they took it.

For local Democrats, well, they eventually sent in the police and shut it down, but I'm guessing you wouldn't count anything from Jenny Durkan or any of the police?

She certainly shut it down eventually but this was after months of supporting it. I don't believe any of her actions showed any opposition to the movement itself, just that the fact that the bad optics of weekly murders threatened to make her look bad.

For local Democrats,

I'm certainly open to hearing of any other democrat officials strongly against it, preferably in the highest positions of power possible.

We have a prosector and a judge in the Hendrix case, so I think it's fair to hold you to at least that level of participation and prominence.

m guessing you wouldn't count anything from Jenny Durkan or any of the police?

Not unless it came before the murders. Not unless it was the unwavering and unchanging stance expressed consistently throughout.

I remember, they gave up the police station because they didn't want to police the rioters. They might even have mouthed something about how bad this was, but they let it happen in the first place.

Local democrats called it the summer of love until there were multiple murders so…yeah they don’t get much credit.

Yes, it's of course trivially easy to find left-wingers in general criticising it at the time. Plenty of outright communists, even, criticised it as bad praxis. So in the broadest sense, the statement that I made is correct.

Are you sure about this? That's not how I remember it. From what I recall mainstream Democrats circled the wagons around it, and the only communists that criticized it as bad praxis were /r/stupidpol types that routinely got called nazis themselves.

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This is not true whether we're talking about Nazis or about violent leftists.

Why do you recon not a single leftwinger stood up and said that, back when it was a fashionable thing to say, even on our forum?

When are you talking about? 2020 or thereabouts? That was when the Motte was still on Reddit, right? How many left-wingers did the Motte even have then?

No, somewhere between 2016 and 2020. Back on /r/ssc.

Either way people tend to undersell thr amount of left wingers that are present even now. We have more left wingers here now than there are right wingers on any subreddit.

I think that would only be possible with a pretty idiosyncratic definition of left and right-wing.

Why? We literally did have people saying "If you've got 10 people seated around a table, and a Nazi sits down, and nobody gets up, you've got 11 Nazis.". They were somehow magically right wing? Apolitical?

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The trick however, is that the other subsets absolutely NEVER police or rein in the subsets doing the ridiculous stuff, and will, on occasion, throw their weight behind them. Can you find me a SINGLE prominent lefty who denounced the general celebratory reactions to Charlie Kirk's murder? Just one!

This is so obvious that I don't feel I have to provide supporting examples but believe me I CAN DO SO.

Meanwhile, the right is vociferous and active about expelling those who might be too Nazi-esque. Graham Platner would have been shot out of a trebuchet had he run as a Republican the moment the tattoo issue arose. But since he's a Dem, the hemming and hawing continued until literal forcible rape allegations surfaced.

You tell me how we should differentiate between the hard lefties and the moderates when the hard lefties get to operate unfettered where-ever the moderate lefties have power.

If you tacitly approve of them, I don't see any reason to let you distance yourself from them. The 'subsets' in question are far more cohesive on one side, so they operate more like a single set. Heuristically is much simpler to treat them as one unit, and apply accountability to it as a whole.

Cenk Uygur?

What happened to Charlie Kirk is one of the worst things that has happened in American politics. My heart goes out to his family. FUCK WHOEVER DID THIS! Not only is it deeply tragic by itself, but we are now all in danger. Violence is always wrong and it's intellectual surrender.

The Turkish communist?

Can you find me a SINGLE prominent lefty who denounced the general celebratory reactions to Charlie Kirk's murder? Just one!

To give credit where credit is due, Gavin Newsome and Bill Maher both took a hard line against Kirk's killing. At the same time I feel like the degree of push-back and reputational damage they appear to have incurred for doing so, kind of proves your point.

Can you find me a SINGLE prominent lefty who denounced the general celebratory reactions to Charlie Kirk's murder? Just one!

Most prominent Democrats condemned the murder. It is tricky to find specific cases of one condemning people who celebrated the murder, but that's particularly because there are so few prominent people who celebrated it. I notice college Democrats and Republicans collaborating, and their statements seem to imply, to me, that celebrating political violence is bad. Sometimes Democrats have opposed attempts to crack down on and punish people who celebrated his death, but that's a free speech issue, much the same way that defending the vulgar woman in the top-level comment does not mean you support swearing at black people.

However, in that interview, Chris Murphy said this: "First, it is important for us to recognize and say that political violence is unacceptable. We don't yet know the full motives of this shooter, but there have been political assassinations and political assassination attempts that are due to right-wing radicalism and left-wing radicalism, and there should be no one in this country and no one on the left that is celebrating what happened here."

I take that as a clear denunciation of people who celebrate Charlie Kirk's murder.

Meanwhile, the right is vociferous and active about expelling those who might be too Nazi-esque.

How do you define 'Nazi-esque'? Does, say, Tucker Carlson interviewing Darryl Cooper, and remaining an influential figure on the right, count? Cooper certainly seems Nazi-esque.

(I should say that I don't think that's an issue unique to the right, and it seems to me to be isomorphic to tankies on the left. Darryl Cooper defends the Nazis, Hasan Piker defends Mao, you can see the same pattern working out regardless of side.)

Somewhat infamously the house Dems shouted down a resolution to condemn the killing of Kirk.

I don't blame them for that, same as I don't blame them for not applauding during Trump's SotU address. It's a pointless move to score political points, and I wouldn't blame Republicans if they didn't follow along were the Dems to do something similar.

Once again, it's always all of them.

Can you find me a SINGLE prominent lefty who denounced the general celebratory reactions to Charlie Kirk's murder? Just one!

I'm not sure how prominent you would consider her, but...

She's not lefty?

Quite prominent, but your argument would be better served if you found an example of someone who isn't regularly called a Nazi.

Do people accuse Philosophy Bear of being a Nazi?

Dunno, never heard of him.

You tell me how we should differentiate between the hard lefties and the moderates when the hard lefties get to operate unfettered where-ever the moderate lefties have power.

This seems untrue to me:

  • ChatGPT says that 24 people received prison time in connection to the Kenosha riots, and not all were federal charges.
  • You can't expect to throw a brick through the front window of a bank in San Francisco next to a cop and just walk away.
  • The NYPD arrested more than 70 anti-ICE protestors at the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building on September 18, 2025.
  • If you murder a rich person in Boston because you are a communist, the cops are actually going to try to arrest you.
  • CHOP/CHAZ in Seattle was shot down by police after 3 weeks, not allowed to continue.

Etcetera.

ChatGPT says that 24 people received prison time in connection to the Kenosha riots, and not all were federal charges.

I like the weasel wording "not all were" in here.

Google gemini tells me that "Most of these state dispositions resulted in probation, community service, or local jail time under a year, rather than extended state prison terms... Overall, fewer than 20 people overall received formal prison or significant jail sentences, with the longest and most severe sentences coming directly from the federal convictions."

The NYPD arrested more than 70 anti-ICE protestors at the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building on September 18, 2025.

Yeah, arrested, and what happened to them?

CHOP/CHAZ in Seattle was shot down by police after 3 weeks, not allowed to continue.

You're writing as if the three weeks was just them preparing to do something, like an army bringing in forces. No, the three weeks was because they deliberately refused to do anything about it and left it alone on purpose.

CHOP/CHAZ in Seattle was shot down by police after 3 weeks, not allowed to continue.

It was allowed for three weeks in the first place, which was itself an act of insane leftism. Leftist mayor ordered CoP to abandon the precinct.

The city leadership also intentionally and illegally deleted text messages to avoid any culpability. https://mynorthwest.com/local/judge-evidence-thousands-texts-top-seattle-officials-deleted-text-messages/3786557

CHOP/CHAZ in Seattle was shot down by police after 3 weeks, not allowed to continue.

Oh man. This little clip was BURNED into my memory. Cops literally just pack up and leave an area they are in theory charged with patrolling. "Bye folks, good luck, hope you didn't think we had any cognizable duty to protect you or anything."

The Mayor of Seattle said we might have a Summer of Love. I cannot tell you how quickly that particular quote led me to conclude that moderate lefties are I-D-I-O-T-S with their mindsets stuck in the freaking '60s.

I still remember Raz of the Chaz walking around with firearms.

And it ended because a teenager died. The NEXT day the cops returned, showing they could have stopped this all along. How can you conclude anything other than the leadership allowing it on purpose?

If the Moderate lefties had reined in the extremists at the start that might have been avoided. They did not. I feel no problem with holding them accountable for these outcomes.

Or, you know, Occupy Wall Street, which went on for like Two Months. Obama was cool with that bunch.

This is the whole point, the Democratic Socialists of America openly say they're looking to infiltrate the party and these are guys that basically supported the October 7th attacks against Israel. If the Dems haven't clocked who they're in bed with they never will. Or they don't care.

Just a small taste of Why I do not want to share a country with these people. They tolerate extremist, violent behavior to the extent it is instrumental to their preferred goals, and act ignorant of second order effects.

Jordan Peterson used to talk about how he would ask liberals what it would look like for the left to go too far and very few could ever answer. Conservatives rarely had an issue with explaining what too far right would look like.

Its largely my point about why I personally prefer red tribe to blue tribe because red tribe is much more genuine.

If they think throwing alleged communists out of helicopters is a cool thing, they'll usually just say it.

Blue Tribers will circumlocute forever rather than admit to any particular hard limit to lefty activism, even if they might not themselves support a given action.

Because, as I learned a LONG time ago, "no bad tactics, only bad targets" is a lefty mantra for a reason.

It's one of the main things that codes the conflict style of the right as masculine and the left as feminine.

I think the story of CHAZ shows that Democratic cities will not, indeed, let leftist activists get away with whatever they want to. Which is what you claimed in your previous post ("operate unfettered").

I agree that Seattle allowed them to get away with too much in that case.

They did let them get away with everything up to murder. They let them get away with it, they allowed it to happen in the first place because they did not have the will to stop it.

Is your position now that the limit of tolerance for left wing extremism is teenagers dying?

Just want to make that as clear as possible.

And it ended because a teenager died.

I don't know if it was the same incident, but I also recall a story about a black kid dying because a bunch of lefties filled his car with bullets, and immediately went on twitter to brag about how they killed a fascist (and then promptly purged the tweets). Though I thought that happen earlier in the zone's existence, and it went on for a week or two more after that.

There's probably hundreds of little incidents in that vein that it would be all but impossible to find a record of.

Occupy Wall Street, with all those tent cities, was allegedly a hotbed for rape

Can't draw a HARD conclusion either way, the incentive to propagandize is large, but it was happening.

Didn't CHAZ learn the hard way how it's not easy to run even a few blocks without shooting some unarmed black kids for acting suspicious, and thence lose the mandate of heaven, before anyone thought to shut them down?

3 weeks!! Seems to counter your argument

gang raping a child

From the article:

Investigators say the two men had sex in January 2022 with an underage female who had run away from her foster care placement. Court documents state when the victim was examined by a nurse, she was sleep deprived, dehydrated, and had nothing to eat recently.

This reads more to me like men having consensual sex with a runaway teenager (in exchange for housing and drugs?), not gang rape. Still should be clearly worse from a legal standpoint than saying the n-word, but gang rape seems like it obscures more than it describes.

These two men should be shot for their crimes and you should be suspect for saying otherwise.

It was kidnapping in addition to rape.

Given how quickly the same elements would claim rape in equivalent-or-more coercive situations in other contexts, I think it's reasonable here.

A runaway teen that they didn't feed or allow to sleep? Uh, hate to break it too you, but that's kinda a shitty way to treat someone for being a consensual sex partner. It sounds a lot more likely that she ran away and then they took her home and abused her. I have no doubt that she expected to have to sleep with him for housing and food, but it sounds like her treatment was unusually poor even by the low standards of minors trading sex for housing in a trailer park.

Should they be called Pedophiles, then, if one wanted to use technical terms that veer towards the misleading?

A minor whom they did not bother giving food or water? Yeah, that sounds to me more like "sex slave" than "consensual sex with two adults where nobody was coerced and there were no strings attached".

Can't believe I'm turning into "to the right of Attila the Hun" when it comes to recent court cases cited on here, but it's something I really would like to know the fine details of why these charges were dropped in "the interests of justice". Probably because "well we can't prove that she didn't consent to fucking the two adult men, after all she did agree to go home with the first guy":

Sharmake Beyle Omar, 29, and Mohamed Hussein Omer, 41, are both facing felony charges of third- and fifth-degree criminal sexual conduct in Olmsted County District Court.

Both men are accused of raping and sexually assaulting a 16-year-old female in a Rochester trailer home.

According to their criminal complaints:

The juvenile told a man who she had previously been in foster care with that she had been sexually assaulted multiple times by Omar and Omer over the course of two days in Rochester. The man reported the assaults to the Rochester Police Department shortly after taking the juvenile to Children's Minnesota Hospital in Minneapolis for a sexual assault nurse examination.

The man reported that the juvenile called him Jan. 20, 2022, and asked him to pick her up at a gas station.

The juvenile told the man she had run away from her foster home in Farmington and had hitched rides heading south until she met Omer at a gas station where he offered to let her stay at his Rochester residence.

During that time period, there was a call for service at the gas station involving the juvenile as a missing person. When officers arrived at the gas station, she was gone.

Once the juvenile arrived at the trailer home, both men raped and sexually assaulted the teenager, the juvenile told an investigator with RPD.

Omer had tried to ply the juvenile with alcohol before asking the teenager to perform sexual acts saying that "she needed to take care of him because he was taking care of her."

Omar arrived a short while later, and the juvenile was told by Omer to "take care of" Omar since Omer was doing things for her.

Both men were identified by the juvenile in a photo line up.

During a search warrant, law enforcement found the juvenile's glasses in one of the men's vehicles and a towel at the Rochester residence that had been used by the juvenile.

Along with the sexual trauma, the juvenile reported she had foot pain because she left the trailer in rain boots that did not fit because the men took her shoes so she could not run away.

This has nothing to do with calling people "niggers", by the way, and a grown woman who yells insults like that at a child should be getting disciplined for that.

The nigger child was 9 years old and already known to the police for stealing.

Oddly, she wasn't convicted for yelling at the kid, presumably because the fighting words doctrine would be especially inapt there.

She’s ironically got a better case there. If the kid was trying to steal her property, she was arguably using a reasonable amount of force to prevent that (yelling and scolding). Where she gets into trouble is continuing the altercation past where the threat of theft has passed.

"Consensual" sex with a teenager is still statutory rape. Two men committing statutory rape with a teenager is gang rape. Statutory gang rape, if you will.

Per google, age of consent in Minnesota is 16.

When I posted the comment, I didn't know she was 16 at the time.

The actual statute says the same thing (16, or 14 with a Romeo-and-Juliet span of three years).

Gang rape is a vernacular term, not a legal term. And no one thinks of "gang rape" as anything except a bunch of men violently raping a woman.

It's particularly relevant here, because people are wondering how anyone would let gang rapists off. The answer is that it would be a hard case, with an unreliable witness who might not even show up, for a statutory rape charge. It's not a case where there is a group of men waiting in the park at dusk who grabbed a random jogger.

None of this is me nominating the guy for man of the year, or even saying he shouldn't be punished: he should. But police and the criminal justice system are underfunded, and officials need to triage for where they're likely to get wins.

And no one thinks of "gang rape" as anything except a bunch of men violently raping a woman.

Or a group of men plying a woman with drink and drugs, then raping her after she passes out. And you were the one suggesting she might have agreed to have sex with them in exchange for drugs.

Ahh yes - the consensual sex with foster care escapee, before she is fed and hydrated. Because that is how women work.

A foster care escapee is almost certainly well aware of the strings attached to a grown man willing to take her in- but if they didn't feed her and took her shoes away so she couldn't leave, well, this is the kind of thing that statutory rape charges exist to be filed over.

Plus after taking her shoes away so she can't run off. This is what every consensual sexual encounter is like, right?

Yep. Before it gets really hot, I always take away my wife’s shoes. Really turns her on. /s

"in the interests of justice"

I don't know to what extent one is allowed to fed-post anymore, it's been a while. But... Why do Americans have guns?

The same thought occurs when the British folk are getting wrangled through their activist court system. But they don't have guns or if they do they certainly lack the bravado of the online American that would like to maintain that things like grooming gangs could never happen on his watch. Despite very similar things already being a thing, like Aurora Avenue in Seattle.

But even then, how on earth can these judges get away with this stuff? The injustice is just off the charts

It's hard to mobilize people who believe in the rule of law into doing extralegal things.

The key insight here is that sufficiently inconsistent "rule of law" is no longer rule of law. "I would prefer rule of law. Let me know when it's available again."

"In the interests of justice" isn't a judge thing, it's prosecutor-speak. That's the language they use when they file a motion to dismiss a case. It's intentionally vague because it can mean many different things.

It could be "there is new evidence indicating this defendant is innocent and we fucked up badly by charging him," "this case is going to fall apart because the victim is no longer cooperating," "the victim disappeared so we need more time to try to locate them and maybe we'll refile if they're found," "there is now a newly elected DA who doesn't want to waste time on a case this small," or "this case is now politically toxic and we want it to go away." Or dozens of other options.

Judges don't question the motion because regardless of the true reasons, if a prosecutor doesn't want to pursue a case, then practically speaking it's dead because there has to be a prosecutor for the case to proceed. The judge grants the dismissal (usually without prejudice meaning it can be re-filed if necessary) and everyone goes to work on other cases.

Right, I should add judges and lawyers.

Do we know why the rape charges were dropped? Was there evidence the perps didn’t commit the crime?

Rape charges (and this is rape, not statutory rape - she was 16 in a state where 16 is legal) are dropped more often than they are pressed to trial. You need a victim-witness who is able and willing to stand up to cross-examination, and rapists tend to target the kind of woman who isn't. This is the whole reason why feminists want to replace criminal justice for rape with kangaroo courts (at least for favoured groups of women like undergraduates living on campus) and criminalise even consensual sex in situations which are high-risk for rape - rape is a very hard crime to prosecute unless you have one of the rare fact patterns that make it easy like "man jumps stranger in the street and rapes her"

"Victim doesn't want to go to trial" and "victim is so messed-up she can't keep her story straight on the stand" are the most likely stories here, as in every other such case.

"Runaway mentally ill teen has what may have been consensual sex-for-housing and may have been kidnapping and rape" is an absolutely classic unprosecutable case. It's probably rape, but the main piece of evidence you need to get to the "beyond reasonable doubt" threshold is the uncorroborated testimony of someone who will read (fairly or not) to the average juror as a mentally ill crack-whore.

On the other hand, they could’ve charged with unlawful detention alongside all that- it seems like if she showed up consensually(and I don’t believe she didn’t understand the strings attached up front) they still tried to prevent her from leaving.

I have been somewhat following the protests around the Madison, WI shooting. There is a lot of disagreement about the protesters tactics. They are doing things like shutting down a free orchestra concert, blocking traffic, getting a local music festival cancelled because they were planning to protest at it, a balloon release.

There are a lot of other democrats/progressives that are raising objections like:

  • The protests are causing collateral damage to the community (impacting local workers/small businesses ability to earn income).
  • Ruining events that provide joy and financial support to the local community when they could be collaborating with them.
  • Damaging the environment with balloons.
  • These tactics won't convert anyone and are just agitating people who were already for a more restrained use of force by the police.
  • Not having clear/viable outcomes that they are trying to achieve as a result of their disruptive actions.
  • Some of the protest leaders are just attention seeking to gain social status.
  • Let's wait for the investigation to find out more about what happened with the knife.
  • The bad optics of the protests and how that will ultimately be detrimental to getting progressives elected.

This feels like a way different vibe than 2020 when it was less social acceptable for people on the left to raise common-sense objections like these.

Is there a bodycam video of the shooting?

Madison police don't currently have bodycams. Part of the reason for that is community pressure from left-wing groups that don't want them implemented for reasons such as, "don’t want police to have more funding for a tool they said further criminalizes Black and Brown people."

It makes sense if someone is an extremist accelerationist. A few times now police bodycam footage has completely exonerated a cop who shot someone. People want to turn a police killing into the next big thing, but reviewing the footage the cop was clearly justified. A first person view of someone charging with a knife makes the shooting look very defensive from the cops point of view.

A bystander video is available here.

  • Three officers struggle to subdue the kneeling suspect. It looks like they've got his legs and his left arm. From the camera's perspective, his right arm is hidden behind his body, and whether it is restrained is not clear.

  • Multiple officers shout, "He's got a knife" (presumably in his right hand).

  • The first three officers back off, making room for a fourth officer to arrive and use a Taser. The suspect has risen to his feet with the weight of the first three officers removed, but now stumbles back to the ground (lying on his side).

  • Of the first three officers, two get back on top of the suspect, but the third instead pulls out his gun and fires three shots.

So it's not totally unreasonable to question whether the gunshots were necessary when the Taser already seemed effective in taking the suspect to the ground.

Tasing someone and then shooting them on the ground is never acceptable professional policing. The video isn't playing for me in the UK, but from @ToaKraka's description this was not a level of threat where immediate lethal force (i.e. shoot for the centre of mass and keep shooting until the threat has visibly ceased) was appropriate. I wouldn't normally try to second-guess a cop being threatened with a knife on this point, but the cop who pulled out a Taser clearly agrees with me here. And "Dangerous clown with knife but not actively attacking anyone" is precisely the sort of situation that less-lethal weapons were developed for.

Criminal prosecutions of cops in close cases (and "shot a perp brandishing a knife" is close enough for me) creates bad incentives, so I wouldn't. But the guy who pulled the trigger should never work in law enforcement again, and if a better video reveals that the threat level was high enough to justify lethal force then the guy with the Taser should probably be kicked off the force for dangerous incompetence.

Oh buddy that's not the cleanest shoot.

I think there's a tell as one of the other cops (male, to the left of the center of the frame) is pretty obvious giving the "mother_FUCKER" body language towards the end of the clip.

This reminds me of the kind of shoot that, 15+ years ago, the Police Union would huddle around the cop hard and find a way to keep him out of jail .... but also probably produce a non-official deal where he gets medically retired within 6 months.

I'm not a big fan of this shoot. That being said, if someone is resisting so persistently and they do have a knife then I think the theoretical line to justify the shoot has been crossed.

What makes this look bad is that the guy seemed incapacitated right before the shooting. Almost as if the officer was using the opportunity given by the taser to pull out his gun and shoot. So the officer could plausibly have done something different to save that mans life. But at the same time I think it's a hard sell to tell anyone to get in a wrestling match with someone armed with a knife.

So all in all, knife accounted for, I'm not sure the cops could have done much to make themselves look good given they seemed incapable of apprehending the suspect without risking their lives to an extent which would, in my view, be hard to justify. Maybe if they had collectively been in better shape?

So it's not totally unreasonable to question whether the gunshots were necessary

It's easy enough to answer: Just consider how the police would have reacted in a bunch of other western countries in similar situation. If they're all "Yeah, there's no fucking way they'd have shot the tasered guy", that's pretty clear answer.

The problem with comparing policing between rich western countries is that the USA is the only rich western country with a substantial population of violent and antisocial people. The raw rate of crime in the USA is multiple times that of the other countries you want to compare us to, and police doctrine must necessarily accommodate this. If you dropped a European police officer into the south side of Chicago they would get eaten alive, because for all the alleged superiority of European policing, they have the outcomes that they have because European police just have to police Europeans. American police have to police Americans.

European cops in Chicago would just put knife wielding thugs in the hospital with multiple broken bones. That's what they do in the continent- the UK is not synonymous with Europe and Europe is not synonymous with the UK, Las Grisas or the Gendarmerie would be quite capable of dealing with south side Chicago before they were sued out of existence for use-of-force.

Memphis had something called the Scorpion Unit for a short time. They garnered a reputation for being rough like this. They eventually beat some guy to death and were disbanded in 2023.

The US Supreme Court says otherwise.

1989:

The "reasonableness" of a particular use of force must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight. The Fourth Amendment is not violated by an arrest based on probable cause, even though the wrong person is arrested, nor by the mistaken execution of a valid search warrant on the wrong premises. With respect to a claim of excessive force, the same standard of reasonableness at the moment applies: "Not every push or shove, even if it may later seem unnecessary in the peace of a judge's chambers [or a Redditor's bedroom]", violates the Fourth Amendment. The calculus of reasonableness must embody allowance for the fact that police officers are often forced to make split-second judgments—in circumstances that are tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving—about the amount of force that is necessary in a particular situation.

2025:

That inquiry into the reasonableness of police force requires analyzing the “totality of the circumstances”. There is no “easy-to-apply legal test” or “on/off switch” in this context. Rather, the Fourth Amendment requires, as we once put it, that a court “slosh [its] way through” a “factbound morass”. Or said more prosaically, deciding whether a use of force was objectively reasonable demands “careful attention to the facts and circumstances” relating to the incident, as then known to the officer. For example, the “severity of the crime” prompting the stop can carry weight in the analysis. So too can actions the officer took during the stop, such as giving warnings or otherwise trying to control the encounter. And the stopped person’s conduct is always relevant because it indicates the nature and level of the threat he poses, either to the officer or to others.

It is well known that drugged-up suspects sometimes shrug off Taser applications and continue to pose a threat to officers. It seems from this Redditor's bedroom that this particular suspect did not shrug off the Taser application, so the officer was overzealous in shooting. But the prosecutor or the jury may think otherwise.

Unsure of the provenance but here's an angle that shows control of the kitchen knife at the time of or right after the taser. The officer who had partial control of the suspect's hand with the knife is the one who shoots him. Plausibly, the taser rips zapzapzap, and officer loses his hold on the knife as suspect falls. Only one officer has hands on the suspect as he hits the ground and previous knife restrainer now-shooter cop draws and fires in, seemingly, one motion. Could be he couldn't go back in on the knife hand safely at that point-- the remaining officer on the camera side looks like he's about to try as shots are fired in your video. Could be he had the best intention to prepare for escalation to lethal force since he lost control of the weapon and it just so happened that knife looked stabbier as he decided to draw. Could be he was frustrated, tired, and made a bad decision.

Based on the video alone, I tend to agree with you. It doesn't look very clean or justifiable. Given that the additional context provided in that thread is true, like this individual having 34 prior incidents, this is yet another example of a repeat offender remaining on the street until something catastrophic happens. If it technically wasn't a good shoot we'll watch them create more racial bias workshops or additional training mandates and/or everything else that goes with kneecapping law enforcement and enabling career criminals. Meanwhile, the legal and ideological failures that repeatedly allowed this turd to run around committing crimes will get brushed under the rug.

I think fumbling melees with multiple officers and multiple implements (gun, knife, taser) have a high chance of tragic results.

Also, I thought all black people have gotten The Talk. My ex-friend who always talked about The Labor of his Oppressed Black Body had a performative fear of the cops even when they were in line at the taco truck, like he was going to get popped for Walking while Black.

Cops shoot people who keep holding knives after being told to drop them, this is well-known to everyone, no matter what color they are.

Even if this specific shoot doesn't look technically pretty, I have zero sympathy for the felon who could have just dropped the stupid knife.

I think fumbling melees with multiple officers and multiple implements (gun, knife, taser) have a high chance of tragic results.

This seems so blindingly obvious to me that my only explanation for people not understanding it is because they are too ideologically committed to hating cops to acknowledge when the use of force is reasonable.

Exactly. It's like the ICE situation where having belligerent protestors deliberately walking up as close to the line of 'peaceful protest' as they can en-masse is going to produce occasional flash points.

Wisconsin, police confront a suspect, suspect brandishes knife, police shoot him, activists create media frenzy

Time is a flat circle. I thought it was absurd the first time around, and it's no less so on the second pass.

I remember when Biden and Kamala visited Blake's family and talked to Blake himself on the phone.

Basic anarcho-tyranny. They want maximum leeway to use the legal system for things they like and against people they don't like (charging a white woman with being mean to a rapist), while obtaining maximum freedom for their own people under that legal system (50-time felonious loser with knife should be handled by therapists, not cops). There's no mystery here, it is what it says on the tin.

They like criminals and dislike people who resist/arrest criminals. Speech is violence and violence is speech, depending on who is speaking/stabbing. Kto-kogo. There is no internal contradiction. This has always been the plan, this has always been the strategy, for over a century.

It never ceases to amaze me how the left is so consistently able to mobilize itself in the defense of the worst people in the world.

I think it goes like this: the left's ability to project power relies on a co-ordinated, hair-trigger response, a sort of Blitzkrieg doctrine. The problem is that a) they aren't fully in control of that response because the coordination relies on nutty Redditors/Tweeters and b) each individual taking a minute to decide whether a specific case deserves this response wrecks the coordination that makes it powerful. So in practice they end up subordinating their decision-making to criminals and slowly weakening the system's power over time as people learn left-wing outrage has really nothing to do with the strength of the case.

I believe the Unions were somewhat like this in the UK, and suffered the same gradual hemorrhaging of support and the majority of normies realised Union outrage had nothing to do with the sympathy of the case.

I wonder if just once the response was brutal if that would stop the blitz. That is, it’s one thing to cosplay when it costs you nothing. It’s another when you could be maimed.

Anti ICE people are a lot quieter after the Pretty Good affair... so I guess your answer is yes.

ICE has mostly moved to places that aren't Karen central, though, right?

So is ICE, though.

I think this is kind of key. Pre-Minneapolis, ICE was going for the aesthetic of "This is a kinetic military operation against Blue jurisdictions who shelter illegals" and they have mostly shifted towards an aesthetic of "This is a paramilitary force but one taking a fundamentally law enforcement approach to arresting and deporting illegals". This generates fewer banger memes for right-wing social media, but probably more deportations, and definitely a better chance of co-operation from Democratic state and local administrations in purple states.

Yeah, but... every single time, though. Like I can't think of a single one of these left-wing martyrs who didn't make me go "wait a second, this is the guy you want to spend political capital on?"

Trayvon Martin wasn't someone you would want marrying your daughter, but he was well within the range where the non-idiotarian left would consider him salvagable and want to spend political capital on him - particularly because of the unusual fact pattern with no hard evidence that Martin was criming at the time he was shot. Nobody knows who started the fight that ended up with Martin smashing Zimmerman's head against the curve and Zimmerman shooting Martin, both participants were dumb and hot-headed enough that them could plausibly have done so, and if Zimmerman had died Martin would have had a self-defence claim sufficiently plausible that he should have been acquitted under Florida law for the same reasons Zimmerman was.

Breonna Taylor was an obviously innocent victim (she was shot by mistake while police were executing a no-knock warrant at her address but targetted at her ex who no longer lived there) and got the full BLM left-wing martyrdom operation.

The whole left-wing martyrdom apparatus was hauled out and ready to go in the Ahmad Arbury case - they only reason why it wasn't deployed (as per @07mk's Toxoplasma point below) is that the McMichaels' behaviour was sufficiently outrageous that the mainstream right wasn't willing to defend it.

So I think it is more "genuinely innocent victims of police violence are rare so BLM don't normally have the chance to take up those cases" than "BLM preferentially defends the worst of the worst".

This is just classic Toxoplasma of Rage thing, though. The most effective way to project your power to get your preferred way over that preferred by your enemies is to have your way even when having your way is clearly unjust, because that shows that your side is so powerful that even having justice on their side doesn't give your enemies enough to defeat you.

Philando Castile?

I don't remember anybody doing a civil unrest over Philando Castile.

The wiki page has a section on protests and civil unrest, so your memory may be faulty.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Philando_Castile

My memory is indeed faulty

Kind of an old one, but would Eric Garner qualify?

That's what I'm saying. Structurally I think it's a compulsion not a choice - literally, given the dynamics of how activists exert pressure on each other.

a suspect, who fled, resisted arrest, and finally attacked one officer with a knife, causing that officer to respond with lethal force.

And per the toxoplasma hypothesis, I'll bet you a hundred quatloos both sides focus on the 'fleeing and resisting arrest' part.

How so? For the anti-police folks, anything that might hint at the notion that the police officer didn't just shoot a random guy for no reason whatsoever is radioactive to their cause, they ignore it to the greatest extent practical.

It's not that simple: anti-police cause celebres that draw national attention have a strong tendency to be the least sympathetic possible subjects.

But I think the mechanism is a bit different than toxoplasma. Pledge fealty to someone who tries to stab a cop, and you show that you're a true believer in the cause, unlike all those half-hearted people who only object to ambiguous cases not involving violence. And publicly the worst parts are ignored or censored: fights over those parts, although something that happens, don't seem to be their primary vector of spread.

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