WandererintheWilderness
No bio...
User ID: 3496
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
Fair point. Still not a great thing to say about someone you may have just shot in the head on instinct, but admittedly more excusable on sheer adrenaline grounds.
Repeating some of my positions from the other thread: I agree that the claims that Good was somehow actively malicious, or that her death is anything else than a tragedy that shouldn't have occurred, are disgraceful. However, circumstances being what they were, I do have some sympathy for Ross's position. She wasn't actually trying to run him over, and shooting her wouldn't have helped even if she had, but I am prepared to believe that in the context of a split-second life-or-death decision, he sincerely got both of these things wrong. I don't buy that this was some sort of premeditated, cold-blooded murder-by-loophole. I don't think he's guilty of murder, I'm not even sure his tragic mistake was foreseeable enough to warrant internal sanctions. If there are actions worth taking here, I would think they have more to do with revising training and procedures so this sort of thing is less likely to happen again.
Of course, I would expect a decent person in his situation - a man who shot a mother of three for what, in hindsight, he ought realize were probably spurious reasons - to be, like, torn up about it. Remorseful. To release some kind of statement, say his heart is with the kids and the widow. Which AFAIK he hasn't. And he loses still further sympathy points if it was him who said "fucking bitch", to say the last. But then again… being an asshole about having committed manslaughter doesn't make you a murderer. It would make me less likely to shake his hand and offer my sympathy for the tough hand Fate has dealt him if I should chance to meet him (as I would with, say, a driver who'd accidentally killed a pedestrian through circumstances that mostly weren't his fault); but I don't think that lack of remorse should affect his case at the judicial level. Nor do we know for a fact that he isn't privately grieving and just staying silent for legal/institutional reasons.
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
I doubt pressing this point will get us anywhere, but "civilization" and indeed "good" don't "exist in nature" either. Why do you "think of what's good for civilization"? What is it to you whether civilization lives or dies, if you are a cold nihilistic Darwinian machine? And anyway, can't "I just think of what's good for civilization" easily be rephrased as "I just consider things which hinder the flourishing of civilization to be evil"? Either you have 'arbitrary' preferences about world-states that don't entirely depend on your own survival and genetic fitness, or you do not. If you are going to plant your flag in a concept as woolly as "civilization" then you have already accepted the idea of a value system not rooted in nature; we're simply haggling over price.
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
I didn't ask what the average person wanted, I asked what they would consider evil. It is perfectly routine to want things which could (only?) be achieved by means which you know would be immoral. Whether or the average person wants the train to run on time, I don't think that they would consider murdering random women in order to terrify people to be an acceptable price for that.
What are some things you would consider "evil", if not this? Is there any foul deed which you think would be too far, if it could magically remove all Somalis from Minnesota and restore train schedules to their platonic ideal?
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
Right, well, that leaves us with very little disagreement between us, if any! Fancy that on the Motte. Miracles do happen.
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
First of all, I'd say you're definitely counting your eggs before they hatch here. It is plausible that Good's death will have the chilling effect you hope for, and anti-ICE obstructionists will vanish overnight, but we're rather far off from that being a certainty, and it could certainly go a lot of different ways.
Nor would I call murder a "new technology". People have been bashing their brothers' skulls in with jawbones since before humans developed language, often to secure the chieftain's authority. Some of us had rather hoped that we were in the process of outgrowing that sort of thing.
And I would never be so insulting to my political opponents as to say that "nobody cares" who wasn't a political ally of Good's. I do in fact believe that an overwhelming majority of human beings are generally against killing people, and especially against arbitrarily killing people to create a state of terror. This is, I repeat, an evil thing to do. Wicked. Wrong. Sinful. There may be millions of people who will buy the idea that Good actually had it coming, or that Ross's actions were otherwise justified in context; but, thankfully, I think there are very few people in America who would endorse your view that making an example of her would have been fine and dandy regardless of how much of a threat she actually posed to Ross.
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
How do you propose to describe a woman who has performed particular ceremonies to join herself to another woman, and obtained a certain legal status as a result, which entails certain rights and obligations? I'm not totally unsympathetic to the view you espouse (pun not intended), but substituting "partner" or "lover" wouldn't fit the bill. By Good's "wife" we do not simply mean a woman she loved very much and had sex with, we mean a woman who is legally entitled to her inheritance etc. The terms are not interchangeable.
Oh, I don't take anything you say here to constitute "arguing against me", really. I was very much reacting to Opt-out's premise that it would have been a good shoot even if the specific circumstances did not objectively require lethal force specifically because it would have a chilling effect on other would-be obstructionists. That is the position which seemed to me to be ghoulish, extremist, and impractical. I happily recognize that this is not what the average defender of the shoot believes, and certainly, I would find the notion that Jonathan Ross shot Good for anything even resembling that reason to be farcically unlikely.
(As to the facts of the case: we part, slightly, in that I am somewhat less convinced than you that this was a situation where, in hindsight, lethal force was in fact warranted. Or to put it another way, it seems very likely to me that in the world where Ross doesn't shoot, no one dies at all. Of that, I am something like 70% confident. With a much lesser threshold of confidence, let's say 30%, I suspect that there are lessons to be drawn from that first observation, which, if taken to heart by LEOs going forward, may save lives should similar incidents occur. Even if I'm right about both those points, however, I still wouldn't call this a "bad shoot" in the sense that Ross should be disciplined for it. Some percentage of split-second judgemental calls will be wrong in hindsight, that doesn't make the cops in question murderers.)
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
America doesn’t have the technology to run a process (…)
Even accepting that premise, it doesn't really matter what percentage of arrests would lead to actual convictions for obstruction. The process is the punishment. Even making suspects spend a night or two in jail before letting them off with a warning would have significant deterrent value for dilettante protestors, never mind the prospect of a court-case-shaped millstone around their neck for the next two years. If they want to obstruct lawful operations through childish inconveniences like blocking roads with their cars or shouting "SHAME!" very loud, then inconveniencing them back, only harder, seems like the proper response.
Mrs Good may not have been some innocent bystander who wound up at the protest by mistake 'on the way' to picking her children up from school - but it is AIUI seemingly absolutely true that she casually thought she could maintain a schedule that went "3 p.m. - obstruct ICE raid, 3.15 p.m. - pick the kids up from school". This is the kind of attitude that you are up against. The prospect of handcuffs and a night in the slammer would be enough to cool down many tempers.
Even if you want to be meaner - even if you absolutely insist that extrajudicial violence is needed to get the point across - things like deploying tear gas into a rioting crowd still seem like a good bet that's far more ethically justifiable, and far less likely to result in a loss of perceived legitimacy for the regime, than jumping straight to murder.
Yes, well, ask Robespierre how that went. He might find it difficult to answer without his head, but you could ask. Ruling through fear - through actual fear, as opposed to reliable justice where punishment is meted out to the guilty in a predictable and orderly way - has not historically produced stable, long-term outcomes. If you make your government out to be made up of loose cannons who just might go nuts and kill you for sneezing at them, so watch it… you will only succeed in incentivizing the population to stay out of your way in the short term while plotting their very best to remove you ASAP.
If you want to solve the obstruction problem, you can actually arrest and prosecute people for obstruction, en masse, in an orderly, lawful, consistent way. A government which gives in to the temptation to murder random dissidents pour encourager les autres loses its mandate in a way that one which simply prosecutes crimes that are actually on the books in a scrupulous way does not.
(Of course, all of this is without getting into the thing where killing random people to create a state of terror, you know, falls petty squarely within what 99% of human beings would consider evil. I don't feel like getting into that would be a useful direction for this conversation, but it bears repeating.)
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
Perhaps they think that ICE are paper tigers - not actual Stormtroopers but wannabe-Stormtroopers who are in truth no better than schoolyard bully, and will fall apart if someone is on hand to puncture their delusions of grandeur? Perhaps they take the "white privilege" stuff a little too literally, and genuinely believe that although they have no scruples about assaulting innocent blacks and Hispanics, ICE's own white-supremacy forbid them to ever lay a finger on a white blonde?
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
Not taking the dark road means 1% of the population deciding they don’t want something can cancel the ability of the government to do anything.
This is a very silly false dichotomy: you are assuming the conclusion that "kill Mrs Good, possibly unjustly" is the only way to curb the problem of excessive obstructive protesting, creating a binary choice between human sacrifice and anarchy run amok. In fact, I don't believe that killings intended to create mass terror are the only way to curb obstructionism, if that is what you want to do - let alone that it is the most effective one. That's the whole crux of the debate, and you just whizz past it.
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
I am not, but I don't feel I have a duty to do so, because the post you were responding to is not the one I was defending in the first place. If you want more than that, take it up with Amadan.
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
I will grant you that this post, taken out of context, was very easy to interpret as straight bulverism. It's Amadan's original, longer reply to 2rafa which I believe can be more charitably interpreted as a more valid argument.
It comes down to whether you think obstructing ICE is good.
Well, no. By "analogous situations in the future" I meant things of the shape "armed LEO thinks that a hitherto-non-murderous civilian is suddenly about to ram them with a car", whatever the identity and motivation of the civilian (and indeed, whichever law-enforcement unit the officer belongs to).
Also, with respect, you reasoning seems like a textbook example of terrorism in the original French Reign of Terror sense. "At the end of the day, it doesn't matter if the state was justified in killing this particularly citizen; so long as the killing frightens other civilians away from non-lethally obstructing state action in the future, then it was justified" is a very dark road.
That's also true, but I still don't think it's a deciding factor in the differing attitudes towards immigration. Right-wingers, IMV, aren't wrong to view left-wing rhetoric about "skilled immigration" as broadly disingenuous. The average leftist would certainly recoil from a positive claim that immigrants are on average less efficient economic actors than natural-born citizens - but their support for immigration is not downstream of an earnest belief that immigrants are good for the economy.
Arguing that immigrants will turn into valuable workers is not germane to the left-wing worldview, but rather, an attempt to speak the Right's language. Having formed a model of right-wing voters as totally unmoved by moral arguments, they resort to claims that immigration is in the nation's economic self-interest. Those claims might be more or less strained, and more or less sincere, depending on the particulars, but they are never the ultimate root of pro-immigration sentiment; at best, for people who earnestly believe them, they are simply a sign of the moral order of the universe ("helping immigrants is the right thing to do and it pays for itself besides, so there's really no reason not to do it short of sheer wickedness").
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
This is true; but then one might argue that the ability to pursue terrible ideologically-driven policies absolutely unconstrained is a key danger of tyranny, not something else that various tyrannies happened to do by coincidence.
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
Well, hang on, now, now you seem to be saying that neither ICE's presence in Good's neighborhood nor the hypothetical Pride March should be considered legitimate; as opposed to saying that both of them would be legitimate. Which is it?
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
Bulverism is only bulverism if it side-steps the speaker's argument entirely. Arguing that the speaker's motives caused them to make a reasoning error at a particular step in the chain is not bulverism. As I understood it, @2rafa argued that "so-called 'tyranny' short of North Korea isn't worthy of the name, because in practice it's very easy for ordinary people to live with unless they actively go out of their way to antagonize the regime"; and @Amadan retorted "no, in fact you are over-generalizing from the experience of a privileged few; living under USSR-style tyranny is very disruptive to actual ordinary people's everyday lives even if they keep their heads down, it's only the upper-middle-class who might get by alright if they're apolitical enough".
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
If asked why they were going into someone else's neighborhood, then they would almost certainly take the position that they are Americans and they have a right to go into any neighborhood they want.
I think more intelligent ones would argue, cogently enough, that the point of a Pride march through a Mormon community is to show solidarity to closeted Mormons suffering from the oppression of their own community - i.e. that they're doing it to make the Mormon neighborhood a better place to live for its own inhabitants.
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
I think there are two separate value disagreements at work, one of which is susceptible to factual resolution. There is certainly a Left-wing position that freedom of movement is a human right in itself, and that there is simply no moral legitimacy to wanting to keep anyone out of the country, whatever the circumstances.
But this maximal open-borders-ism seems less common than the humanitarian argument - the one that goes: sure, in an ideal world where everyone's basic needs were seen to, countries would be entitled to setting whatever immigration policies they like - but there is a moral duty to help those in need which trumps this right. You normally have the right to decide who comes onboard your boat, but that does not apply if you sail past a drowning child and refuse to fish him out. America is ludicrously wealthier and safer than the Third World, therefore ~any immigrant is a de facto refugee who would have a substantially lower life expectancy if we didn't let them in. There's nothing wrong with restricting immigration from Canada or Germany, but restricting Somali immigration is tantamount to murder by inaction, so faced with the dilemma, any halfway-decent person would take their preferences and stuff them in favor of doing the right thing. And you are a halfway-decent person, aren't you? You do have a heart, right? Right?
This second framing seems much more widespread among left-wing pro-immigration normies than open-borders radicalism for the sake of it - see the focus on "refugees". Nor I do I think so lowly of the average right-winger as to think that this boils down to a "fundamental mismatch of values" where they disagree with the principle that if you want to call yourself a good person, you should let the drowning child onboard your boat whether or not you'd be prepared to say that anyone in the world can use your boat if they feel like it. (Though there are certainly a few people like that; indeed I think they tend to be disproportionately represented on forums like this one.) This position is simply one that is fundamentally naive about the facts - about the feasibility of alleviating all the world's suffering without destroying the wealth and security which gives us the power to alleviate some of it in the first place.
For my money, the primary divide is that left-wingers and right-wingers have opposite intuitions about how much inertia there is to work with. Partly, this is because the obvious fact that we cannot feed every pauper in the world is simply too grim to contemplate, so people stick their heads in the sand. But I suspect there's also a form of the overfitted absurdity heuristic familiar to x-risk advocates at play: progress and abundance are so taken for granted that right-wing doomsday prophets' ravings about economic, demographic, and/or civilizational collapse feel too melodramatic to be remotely believable; they seem so absurd that they feel as cartoonish, and as readily dismissed, as aliens, killer robots, and the Rapture.
And frankly, I also think that in recent years, excessive bullet-biting from the right about fundamental value differences has worsened this divide. Because they don't see right-wingers saying "Obviously we should help everyone in the world if we had infinite money and housing to gift to them; but we don't, and trying would only ruin us" nearly as often as "Well whoever said we had to be kind to people anyway? whoever said charity was better than selfishness? whoever said good was better than evil? fucking bleeding hearts", of course they think that the Right is simply made up of selfish, privileged assholes who won't spare a coin for Tiny Tim, and that this is the only reason why anyone would ever oppose immigration. It's an easier story to believe than the bitter pill of the dream simply not being achievable at that kind of scale.
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
How was he supposed to have perfect hindsight in the moment it was happening?
He wasn't, but the point of discussing whether what he did was optimal in hindsight is, IMO, to come up with a consensus that can be drilled into other LEOs so that they act more optimally if they ever find themselves in an analogous situation in the future. This is a high-profile case; whether the consensus emerges as "it was a good idea to shoot Good" or "in an idea world he should have jumped out of the way/whatever" can be expected to have some influence on cops' gut reactions when they find themselves in similar predicaments.
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
‘under constant, totalitarian absolute surveillance with extreme penalties for the tiniest stepping out of line’
This doesn't seem like a germane definition of "tyranny". We get the word from the Ancient Greeks, while your definition would imply that it was more or less impossible for a pre-modern state to be a real tyranny, for lack of adequate surveillance technology. There is a reason that "surveillance state", "totalitarianism" and "tyranny" are all different words, and just because a triple-whammy is appreciably worse than each in isolation, doesn't mean I want to live in a "pure" tyranny (or for that matter a "pure" surveillance state).
WandererintheWilderness
11d ago
The answer is: because Greenland is cheerfully taking Chinese money and our current options are "do something about that" or "don't do something about that."
If all China's doing is trading with them, couldn't we simply try to outbid China? Why is annexing the place the only form that "do something" can take?
My concern is not offensiveness; my concern is excusability on the basis of survival instincts kicking in. Shooting at the threat as a split-second reaction to a belief that you are in sudden, life-threatening jeopardy is not necessarily a poor reflection on someone's character. Insulting someone you have just killed, who is no longer a threat to you and about whom, if you have any kind of conscience, you should be starting to wonder whether or not your knee-jerk survival instincts were justified - that is a more intellectual process, and as such, one that can be more readily judged. (Though less so the closer to the event, and thus, the more spontaneous/unreasoned, it was.)
More options
Context Copy link