Zephyr
5hr ago
It definitely seems a lot less defensible than Good did from the footage - having watched both angles of this shooting, I'm going to say that unless footage comes out of the arrestee drawing/firing a weapon, this was an awful shoot. From the footage, it isn't possible to tell if he drew a weapon; to my eyes, he seems unarmed in both (but to be fair, I also can't see which officer shot him).
The only reason I'm putting this caveat in place at all is due to around ~1:00 in the video; from what I can tell, there is a gunshot, all agents recoil, then two more gunshots and the arrestee drops. If the first gunshot was from the arrestee, that provides an adequate excuse for the officer(s) to shoot him in self defense.
To steelman this position - there are certain situations (which bear a passing resemblance to this one) in which failing to act (and actively restraining others from doing so) could be the right decision. For example, in a situation where someone has rigged the school with lethal traps, not entering (and preventing parents from entering) would be the right decision, even if you can hear him actively executing the children within. Likewise, a situation where the shooter has hostages (and is being negotiated with) is a fairly well known one, and one where it would make sense to keep bystanders away even when it seems like the cops are doing nothing. Likewise, a situation where it is guaranteed lethal or nearly so to enter (I'm thinking the hallways flooded with a poison gas or similar) would also justify not acting. I'd also say that a situation that falls far outside normal training and expectations is one in which the cops should be given the benefit of the doubt on not acting (like, hypothetically, if sorcerers took children hostage, I don't expect police to throw their lives away against literal magic that they have no idea how to handle).
I think the problem here is that this situation doesn't come close to falling into those buckets - it's a situation we expect cops to handle routinely (aka, armed person attempting to threaten harm to innocents). And the solution of firing them and giving them a dishonourable discharge feels inadequate to the magnitude of the action. So in addition to feeling like they had a gross dereliction of duty, we also feel like they betrayed the societal covenant of "you are given the right to use violence, but in exchange you must protect us."
And more personally, I know that this would never be respected in any other situation; if I'm a nuclear plant engineer, and I decide to not check up on the error code that I'm seeing and the plant explodes causing a second Chernobyl, there is no chance in hell that I'm getting away with just a firing. If I also lock the error manual away and physically restrain my coworkers from checking on it, I'd be lucky to get away without treason charges, let alone life in prison/the death penalty.
Zephyr
3d ago
Definitely "many" as opposed to "all". Of the channels I watch, only 3 of them have it enabled (out of about 15).
Zephyr
3d ago
Nah, this was back when it came out - I hated that ad so much that it sticks out in my mind.
Zephyr
4d ago
I mean, ideally I'd be able to pay the individual channels that I like watching money, based on my usage, and have YouTube take some percentage of that.
Given that my only option though is to pay $13.99 directly to YouTube, I think I'll pass.
Zephyr
4d ago
I mean, given that I go out of my way to not buy anything I see advertised to me, and I use adblock as much as possible outside of that, I'd say it's not me either way.
More seriously, I don't think it should be regulated out of existence; I was just opining that a lot of advertising is annoying as shit and if I could make it all go away with a sweep of a magic wand, I would.
So I am someone who hates ads, and I use adblock on my main browser. However, I like to watch YouTube on my TV, which means I get ads.
I despise these ads, and wish I could make them go away; however, I have a fundamental dislike of paying for people to unshittify their services. There are a few reasons why:
- I find it encourages people to keep making things shittier in exchange for more money (see Netflix adding an "ad-supported" tier). If I've already expressed that I'm willing to pay them to undo their damage, they can damage it in new and inventive ways in order to extract more money from me. Following that logic, most things with ads get gradually shittier over time as more of their revenue comes from said ads. I'm willing to see an ad on the sidebar when I read a news story; what I don't like is when they have an ad in the sidebar, an ad in the header, the content is broken up by ads, there's a giant video ad that takes over 40% of my screen, and when I go to click on something a random popup takes over my screen. Paying them to get rid of this rewards them for being garbage people. It doesn't help when I hate both parties in the transaction; some advertisements are so incredibly annoying that I want to inflict real violence against the person who made them (thinking of you, IE10).
- There are a lot of things I'll use once in a while, as opposed to every day; like, if I'm reading a wiki for a video game I'm playing, or I'm reading some news articles, that may be the only time I engage with that particular system. I'm not willing to pay $10.99 to remove that when I'm going to stop caring 3 days later (especially when it involves getting out my credit card, entering it into some shady payment system that may decide to make it impossible to cancel, etc.)
(I feel like I should include a #3 there, but oh well).
In addition, I find that advertising is very much a thing where more of it makes it shittier for everyone. Like, there are a lot of services where I'm price sensitive, but the quality of the thing is not going to matter much. Take Uber vs Lyft vs a taxi - if all 3 of them are going to cost me approximately the same, take the same amount of time to show up, then I don't really care which of the 3 I get. However, if Uber is aggressively advertising, they're going to show up first when I google "taxi (my city)", which means that Lyft and the taxi services are going to have to pay to advertise, which means all 3 of them have to raise their rates to pay for advertising.
I don't think it's realistic to ban them; however, I'd be in favour of having a national vote for the most annoying ad of the year, and the person who made it being forbidden from ever going on the internet again (/s, probably).
Edit: I think one of the reasons that I find advertising so annoying is that it is inflicted upon me in a way that a lot of other stuff just isn't. Paying to not experience something is fundamentally irritating - it feels a lot like someone decided to make my day worse, and is requiring money to stop doing so. Like, if Apple or whatever made a deal with spam callers so that the "Hang Up" button on my phone is disabled unless I listen to their whole spiel, or pay them $20, I think most people would rightly decry this as insane.
Zephyr
4d ago
Canada was looking towards China for diversifying their options
If you are at all familiar with Canada, this wouldn't come as a surprise. We've had consistent allegations that the LPC has had China intervening on behalf of them, and we've been signing a lot of treaties that empower China to access our resources.
Zephyr
5d ago
So China literally has a "department of propaganda*" (at least, according to an individual I know who lived in China for about 8 months). They'd come by every month and everyone would have to line up and take photos that presented China as a good place to live/work in. The individual in question was in a place that was specifically foreigner-focused (as in, I think they had native Chinese people running the place, but all of the people there were from foreign countries).
*Not a euphemism - they literally called themselves that in English.
Zephyr
6d ago
I agree that certain false positive rates are acceptable when enforcing the law (up to but not past the point of conviction/sentencing at least).
And past it too - in a lot of cases, we won't have definitive proof, and part of that means that we will occasionally put the wrong person in jail.
Zephyr
6d ago
What you have to understand about Canada is that we are (the dumbest of) the liberal stereotypes, on average. We pride ourselves on not doing what the US does, even if it’s insanely destructive.
The US requires people to pay for healthcare? Well, we’ll forbid that (unlike European nations which usually offer both a public and private option, we only offer public - as such, we have serious brain drain to the US and wait times that exceed years).
The US is anti immigration? Well, we’ll bring in more immigrants (as an absolute number) than them, even though our population is approximately 10% of theirs.
We elected Carney on a campaign of “elbows up” against the US - despite his party basically ruining our economy over the last 10 years, we decided that rather than appease the giant superpower next to us and the source of most of our trade, we’d rather be prickly about it and make everything worse. Because we hate Trump.
Hell, go to /r/Canada on Reddit and look at any thread about immigration - you’ll see lots of people talking about how badly we need to remove people who overstay their visas, but we can’t do ICE because it’s facist.
Zephyr
8d ago
And better still that we work on removing the stupid and pointless work as much as possible.
To clarify more on what I mean; if you have a glut of people in a certain profession, then the wages for that profession will be lower (aka, it's a buyers marker). One thing that we saw here in Canada was that we had a lot of positions that were unable to be filled (at the current wage) shortly after the pandemic; this obviously leads to companies competing to get workers into them, which is good if you are a worker. I do acknowledge that increasing the size of industry will provide more jobs overall - the issue becomes when immigration is used as a "depress wages" button. I had the exceeding misfortune of doing job applications shortly after Canada got 5m+ new immigrants (as in, roughly 2.5% of our population); it was a nightmare as every position I applied for had 150+ applicants in the first 30 seconds. Eventually, the industry will be able to absorb them; but it won't be fast, and I only have these 80 odd years on earth. If the industry supports it in 5 years, I'll have lost 5 years where I could've been earning better wages (and as everyone knows, investing makes earlier money grow much more than later money).
The same logic would also argue for cutting birthrates (after all, those children will want jobs in 18 years) and even eliminating fellow natives who also compete for your job.
To be fair, in an ideal world (for me, personally) I'd be the only person providing the service that I'd do, and I'd be able to name my price. In reality, I have a lot of sympathy for not driving people out of their home because they can't get a job there. People who were born in a country don't really have the option to leave and go elsewhere - especially when they're middle class. What this ends up being is a situation where businesses hire from the immigrant pool, knowing that they are less willing to pursue labour and employment code violations (as that may get them kicked out), which saves them money. The people who lived there before can no longer do so because the businesses have done a form of gentrification to them, pricing them out of the market. And the wealth inequality grows worse and worse.
Specifically with regards to birth rates, there is an upper limit to how quickly women can produce children - and once a country has reached a place where children don't often die young, there are also resource constraints on them. I think it's unreasonable to assume that women would suddenly jump to producing 8 children per woman when our current TFR is around 1.5 or so; even if they did, this still behaves very differently than having a similar number of immigrants pumped into the system. Women can only produce 1 child every year or so (give or take); there is time to see the developing trend, and build more housing, add more jobs, etc. as the children reach maturity. By comparison, dropping the immigrants in at around 1m per year leaves no time to expand; there are physical limitations on how quickly a business can build a new factory, or new houses can be built. As we've seen up here in Canada, the government inviting the immigrants in took no care in making sure we had space for them.
Edit: Sorry, I wrote this while I was super tired, so a lot of the points blended into each other - if you want me to write it up a bit better, let me know and I'll re-do it.
Zephyr
10d ago
One great example of this being Reagan's whole speech where he basically says that immigrants of the time are in some sense more American than actual native born citizens with the argument that the immigrants (especially the ones fleeing the communist countries) understood this and held a love for the US and our economic freedoms and embrace of working hard for yourself and your family.
This is eminently reasonable; immigrants ... embrace of working hard for yourself and your family are not really what most people are upset about.
Most people are upset with immigrants who:
- Break the law (or otherwise act in an antisocial manner).
- Absorb resources (see Somali daycares, but also like, food-bank Indians)
- Act in favour of their country of origin instead of their country of choice.
- Undercut local labour so that everyone (except big businesses) is poorer.
If you eliminate (or even harshly cut back on) the number of immigrants, legal or otherwise, exploiting the above, I bet you'd see a lot more positivity towards them.
Zephyr
10d ago
Big scandal in NYC recently after a state hospital cut someone loose and they immediately went and stabbed someone in a Macys.
In the US, this is a scandal; in Canada, this is Tuesday.
Zephyr
11d ago
Okay, so I think I understand where our disagreement is coming from (thank you for the clarification on your position); I have been operating under the belief that the officers were attempting to arrest Good, and the action of being in front of the vehicle was as part of the arrest. If I understand your position correctly, you believe that the officer being in front of the vehicle was somewhere in the range of "being extremely negligent" to "deliberately there in order to justify shooting Good if she attempted to flee." As such, (I believe that) you believe that the officer should not be permitted to use the vehicle accelerating into him in his defense, as it was due to his own actions that it happened. Is that correct? (If it's not, please correct me; I'm trying to phrase this in a maximally "I am trying to understand" way, not in a "I am putting words in your mouth way", but I understand that may not come across via text).
Zephyr
11d ago
Either let them shoot you for fleeing, or don't. Don't say "they can't shoot you for fleeing" and then let them game fleeing into looking like a threat so they can shoot you for that.
The issue is that (as someone who does not want to be arrested) I can game-theory them into letting me flee under your rules. That means they literally can't do their job, as anyone who does not want to be arrested can force the issue by engineering a situation in which the officers can must choose between:
- Let them flee; or
- Get into a physical alteration with them
You have stated that #2 is not permissible - so it collapses back into #1, of every criminal must be allowed to flee.
Zephyr
11d ago
I feel like this is untenable, and would simply lead to no one at all being arrested. If officers are forbidden from physically stop me from fleeing, why wouldn't I just flee? Under your rules, they cannot put themselves in a situation where they could be in danger regardless of what decisions I made.
Zephyr
11d ago
The decision to speed off was not set up by the officer, but the inability to distinguish between two types of speeding off (fleeing and attacking the officer) was set up by the officer.
Does it matter at all that she actually struck the officer?
Imagine a hypothetical where I am on foot, and under arrest. The cops surround me (to arrest me). Would you say that in this situation that the inability to distinguish between "me fleeing" and "me having to attack an officer to flee" was set up by the officer, and as such, they do not have any reason to be afraid when I attack an officer to escape?
Zephyr
11d ago
I feel like there needs to be a name for the steelman that like, obviously isn't true and is a fig leaf for the money grubbing that the company wanted to do anyways. Like, does anyone actually believe that advertising is "connecting people to goods and services that will better their life"? Or that price discrimination isn't immediately used to capture all the excess value of a transaction*?
* So in theory, every transaction has two winners; both people only made the trade if they believe that the trade is worth more for them than what they're giving away (tautologically - would anyone voluntarily make a trade that they thought was all downside?) The issue with price discrimination is that instead of both parties capturing some excess value from the trade, one party captures almost all the excess value, while the other captures epsilon (as in, just enough to make the trade worthwhile, but no more).
Zephyr
11d ago
So I understand, you are saying that Good's decision to speed off when an officer is in front of her was set up by the officer in the same way as if he'd handcuffed a knife to his hand?
Zephyr
11d ago
Why? Under that logic, any arrest can negate fear for their life. An arrest is placing themselves into a situation with people who have not been following the law, who may decide to react violently to losing their freedom. If we followed your statement, then any arrestee has carte blanche to behave as violently as they want, as the arresting officer placed themselves into danger, so is not permitted to defend themselves.
I also think that your rules would make Good forfeit her right to behave in panic, if we followed them through. She chose to put herself in a situation that was deliberately antagonizing ICE, which (by your logic) means that it should negate or at least seriously make harder whether [Good] can claim fear for [her] life.
I mean, given that I was all over the Good thread defending the shoot, I wanted to at least leave my impression of this one. I can't see if there was a weapon on the arrestee, but it doesn't appear so from my viewing. If evidence comes out that shows a weapon, I've pre-committed to changing my mind, but as it is now, I think the ICE officers were wrong.
Maybe a better way of phrasing it would be something like this:
Given that I attempted to analyze the evidence presented and form an opinion of it based on the videos, I find your statement kind of rude; I tried to clearly indicate what I could definitively tell and what I could not, so people could understand where my opinion came from and understand where I was uncertain, and what would change my mind on it. I suppose next time I should just say "lol ICE obviously evil" and leave it at that.
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