quiet_NaN
6hr ago
Non-violent resistance and civil disobedience are things, actually.
A few people might believe that their government is always morally right, axiomatically. Most believe otherwise.
A lot of people will concede that a government can become so evil that it is imperative to violently oppose it. I think that is a popular idea in America, in the abstract.
But what if government does evil, but not on a scale were you feel justified waging total war against it?
Then people often employ methods to hamper the goals of the government, especially the goals they find morally objectionable, without resorting to violence. Perhaps you just 'forget' to add the fuse in half of the bombs you build for the Nazi war machine. Perhaps you use your privileged status as a white person to help slaves escape to the northern US. Perhaps you give aid to civilians persecuted by a regime. Perhaps you just decide that you did not see a petty theft.
The specifics vary widely over axes such as personal risk, effectiveness, cause. Morality being subjective, some causes you will agree with and some you won't. I don't share the world view of anti-abortion activists, so I would view the attempt to sabotage an abortion clinic by welding their front door shut as property damage. However, I will vastly prefer an activist who employs such tactics to one who has decided to just blow up doctors instead. The former is an annoyance, but at the end of the day we are merely disagreeing about some details how civilization should work. With the latter, there can be no peace or common ground.
Nor is non-violent resistance necessarily ineffective. The underground railroad freed a lot more slaves than John Brown did (debatable indirect effects like the ACW aside).
Good was obviously believing that using her plot armor as a white US woman to hinder ICE was moral. (Like whenever a human does something, there were also signaling considerations involved, but to pretend every action is just caused by them is too cynical by half.) She was likely willing to deal with fines and the like for her cause, but probably did not expect to be shot.
I have criticized her rather harshly for her fatal decision, but on reflection I think I was wrong to characterize her as 'cosplaying #LaResistance'. Her beliefs are not my beliefs, I would have preferred for her to work and donate to some EA cause area (not that I am one to talk, there). But for all these differences, she was faced with something she considered morally wrong in her society and did not react by mashing the defect button as much and as fast as possible, e.g. planting IEDs against ICE.
TL;DR: 'She should just have stayed at home, and nobody would have shot her' only works if either you believe your government to be infallible or your own moral beliefs to be fundamentally true while every other belief is just a silly error.
quiet_NaN
8hr ago
Cars are not toys. They are about equal with guns in terms of killing people in the US each year
Come on, this is a false equivalence. Try parking a truck into the parking lot of your local police department, then walk in while carrying a shotgun. Carefully observe which of these actions will cause more concern. Try to convince them that the real danger is your truck.
Cars kill a lot of people because they are ubiquitous. The majority of adult Americans are drivers, and drivers spend around an hour per day driving. The average American definitely does not spend half a hour every day shooting or even handling guns. There is a reason while there are few mafia movies where the cleaners rely on cars to kill their victims.
If she had pointed a gun at Ross, I would completely concede self-defense immediately. The main purpose of a gun is to kill or incapacitate soft targets, and given the low frequency of mountain lions in urban Minnesota, it is 100% reasonable to assume that she was in fact going to shoot Ross. Even if her gun was later found to be unloaded.
But cars (even bloody SUVs -- that is another CW angle) are rarely used in intentional or even depraved heart homicides, most car deaths are accidents, negligent manslaughter.
So Good driving in the general direction of Ross is a lot more ambiguous than her pointing a gun at him, because cars have plenty of uses besides killing federal agents. There was of course a chance that she was absolutely going to murder him. There was also a chance that she was going to drive over him because she had decided that ICE lives don't matter (depraved heart), or that she had not realized that he was standing in her path. There was also a chance that she was merely going to graze him either from a motivation of depraved heart or because she had misjudged the turn radius of her car. Possibly there was also a chance that she was going to miss him entirely.
Now, if she either intended to run him over or did not give a fuck about killing him, I will concede that he was entitled to self-defense in an unlikely attempt to stop her. (Though the risk of hitting bystanders would still need to be weighted against the probability of stopping her car.) Even then, it was not a good tactical move compared to getting out of the way, but that would not have been a legal issue.
For the injuries she actually inflicted on him, a headshot was clearly an overreaction, I think most people will agree that letting people grazed by cars shoot the driver is generally a bad idea.
These probabilities do matter if we evaluate a claim of self-defense. Basically, if you see a 6yo (-15) in Germany (-20) on Fasching (-20) point a gun-shaped object which looks like plastic (-15) at you, it is not reasonable to conclude that you are about to be shot by a live firearm and kill the kid. If you see a drug addict in Central Park point what looks like a firearm in your direction, that conclusion would be different.
In this case, a good prosecutor might make the case that you had someone who was distracted by filming with a mobile phone getting startled by a car which was suddenly moving towards him and then decided to compensate his lack of situational awareness through deadly force.
quiet_NaN
9hr ago
My exact compromise suggestion was "let the Minnesota authorities carry out the arrests safely" so we don't get Feds in the neighborhoods.
If Trump was giving ICE the same mission in every state, asking local PDs to assist them might be reasonable. Instead, he is sending ICE into cities which voted against him, and agricultural workers in rural areas are not deported at all.
What Trump is doing here is clearly selective enforcement, alike to pardoning Hernández while kidnapping Maduro. I do not feel that local PDs are obliged to help with enforcement action whose purpose it is clearly to annoy the local taxpayer.
quiet_NaN
9hr ago
However, there is a population whose goal is to terrorize ICE agents, which is why ICE wears balaclavas now.
I am sure it is a reason, but also sure that it is not the only reason.
I assume that perhaps 1% of the population believe in their heart of hearts that it is good if cops are killed on general principle, and perhaps 5% believe the same about Trump's ICE. Luckily, most of these people are also cowards not willing to die or go to prison for their moral beliefs. I am sure that there is some story somewhere of an ICE agent being identified by violent anti-ICE activists and then tracked down and murdered while off duty, just like some criminals will id and kill the cop who arrested them, but if there was a general trend of catfishing and murdering ICE agents, I think we would have heard about it.
I think the bigger reason is that a third of the population despises Trump's ICE without actively plotting to murder them. To be fair, they are easy to despise: sent into states not selected for their high fraction of illegals, but for voting for Harris in 2024 (because Trump is vindictive af), arresting kids in schools, sometimes arresting foreign-looking citizens by mistake, etc pp. (A further third believes that ICE is doing the most important job in the country, and a further third is mostly meh, I guess.)
Some of the despisers might actually commit minor illegal acts towards identified ICE agents, like spitting in their coffee, but most will probably just treat you like if they had seen your blood group tattoo -- refuse to do business with you, shun you socially (and invite their friends to do likewise), perhaps offer your liberal parents their condolences on Facebook for having a child with such a career. Entirely legal.
With the number of protesters (legally) filming ICE on the job, virtually every ICE agent working in public would be identified in short order. And the SJ left can be just as petty and vindictive as Trump. With ML, programming a website 'iceassholescanner.example' which takes random snapshots of civilians and tells you if they have worked for ICE during Trump II is easily within the capabilities of the wokes.
The relatively high salary (considering the length of the training) is definitely meant as a compensation for 'a third of the country will shun you'. But if you operate masked, you can have your 100k$/year cake and eat it too, all for the low cost of matching some Daesh aesthetics.
I am sure that most ICE agents delude themselves into thinking that they are hiding their face to foil murderous Antifa terrorists who would otherwise try to murder them in their sleep, but realistically, most of the utility is in the woman you will be dating in five years not getting urged by her girlfriends to dump you for having been ICE.
**
This leaves the moral question which life choices should be made public and which life choices should be kept private (if the individual desires that). I will admit that I have a bit of trouble fitting my liberal sentiments into general principles here, so the following is more ad hoc than a long held deep belief system. E.g. frequenting a gay night club should be probably kept confidential (excepting sex partners, and possibly excepting extreme cases of hypocrisy), medical records (including abortions, births, gender surgery) should be kept private, as should be membership in less political religious organizations (e.g. the RCC). For more political organizations, e.g. the KKK (also religious in a way, I think), the John Brown Gun Club, the GOP, the Dems, the DSA, I think outing members is not immoral.
For professional careers, I tend to think that putting people on lists is generally morally permissible. So the person who shot one porn home video which got leaked to the internet is not on the list, but if someone wants to make a list of all porn models which have produced lesbian/fetish/interracial content, I don't think it violates their privacy. Or if someone wants to make a list of lawyers who have ever defended a cop or an accused rapist or worked for big oil for some reason. I guess this means that the anti-abortion radicals can have their lists of gynecologists.
Additionally, I strongly believe that people who employ violence, either particularly (accused criminals, people acting in self-defense) or professionally for the state (cops, soldiers) or third parties (security services) should be a matter of public record. Social disapproval is a useful tool to deter immoral violence, after all.
quiet_NaN
16hr ago
That seems to expand the word terrorist beyond all usefulness.
X is on their way to a demonstration or political convention. X misses a red light and hits a pedestrian. Violence? Check. Political motive? Check. Ergo: terrorist.
Outside of Trump's mind, in what we might call the real world, not even every political motivated violence (which Good's behavior is almost certainly not -- she was politically motivated and reckless, but her obviously politically motivated actions were not reckless and her reckless actions were not politically motivated beyond reasonable doubt) is considered terrorism. Someone who throws a rock at cops in riot gear during a political demonstration (despicable as that is) is generally considered a rioter, not a terrorist.
Terrorism commonly involves serious, generally premeditated violence (most often murder, but arson or maimings would likewise qualify) for the purpose of causing general fear to further some policy. That sick fuck who throws rocks will generally hot hope to cause enough damage to cause widespread fear. If he decides to throw a hand grenade at the cops instead of a rock, then that could well be called terrorism.
In short, there is applying a strong spin to statements (see "the media very rarely lies") and whatever Trump is doing. The press might call the Moon "the brightest celestial body" (implied: visible at that time and place), but Trump will just go out and call what is obviously the Moon 'the Sun'. And then some will come along and try to argue that technically, he is not 100% wrong, after all, most of the light we get from the Moon is ultimately sunlight, and would it not make sense to expand the definition of 'the Sun' to also cover the reflected sunlight from other celestial bodies such as the Moon or Mars -- which would be almost invisible if the Sun went off, after all -- in a blatantly motivated argument.
quiet_NaN
16hr ago
I am with @ToaKraka here. You just threw in "sympathy for traffickers" as a Boo-light.
Nobody (so far) seriously claims that the reason MN is soft on migrants is that they are feeling sorry for pimps who are importing sex slaves. You know fully well that the left is primarily sympathetic to the illegals, probably indifferent towards smugglers and probably hostile towards people trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation.
This is the same thing, except it's women wanting cheap men to use and throw away.
Even if I grant you for the moment that everyone who supports turning a blind eye towards illegal migration is motivated by using the male illegal immigrants as fuckbois (which seems a very far-fetched claim in itself), that is not trafficking. Consider: if I supported letting in a million hot single Latinas, in the hope that they will enter the dating market and make that market more favorable for men, that is not trafficking. I would have to add "... and then these Latinas will have no choice but to find a sugar daddy or starve" to even come close. Even then, this is not the central case of a trafficker, which is someone who gets paid for providing victims of exploitation.
quiet_NaN
17hr ago
This is so obviously a murder.
Let me stop you right there.
I would, based on what I have seen so far, be inclined to convict Ross of manslaughter if I was on his jury (which I won't be, as a foreigner). I don't know the law well enough to say if the prosecution could sell me on murder 2, and there is always the possibility that the defense could convince me of their story, of course.
However, if you are saying that this is "obviously a murder", you are distorting the truth, almost as much as the bloody Trump administration.
I do not think that anyone will be able to prove that what went through Ross head was "finally that bitch made my day and gave me an excuse to cap her". It seems entirely possible that Ross was unaware that she was not aiming the car for him before he fired his shots and was under the impression that she was going to run him over with her SUV unless he stopped her.
In that case, even a manslaughter conviction would hinge on messy little details of the case. Would a reasonable officer in his situation (who was not previously physically harmed by cars, and not distracted by making his little movie on what was presumably his private mobile phone instead of relying on his body cam) have concluded the same thing? Did he forfeit his right to self-defense by recklessly placing himself in a situation where he would be forced to resort to lethal violence, possibly in violation of tactical rules how to behave around a suspect's vehicle?
If the car had been in neutral while Ross shot, I would agree that it looked like straightforward murder. But it was moving forward, and reasonable people could disagree over the interpretation of all of these messy little details -- many here did disagree with me, in fact.
I have seen nobody here claim Trump's version, e.g. that she was a domestic terrorist, presumably because she was trying to kill Ross (but weirdly incompetent at driving over a person just in front of her car). Sadly, this makes your version "obviously murder" the most outlandish claim I have seen argued here. (Though my the trophy for maximum disagreement still goes to "I would acquit ICE no matter what the facts were", but you could still get a tie if you were willing to unconditionally convict ICE regardless of the facts.)
quiet_NaN
21hr ago
That is plausible. Still, what does Israel gain by loudly backing Pahlavi? Presumably, the Ayatollah regime would crack down as hard on "we want to install the Shah" as they do on "we want to install the Shah, who is btw best buddies with Israel".
Plus, there is a general value to not announcing your astroturfing campaigns because it will make people who claim that a campaign is taking place look like delusional paranoids. 'Actually, Mossad was pretty open about their social media campaign against the Mullah regime' is not an argument you would your critics for free.
Then there is the signaling aspect towards both Pahlavi and future allies. "Oops, we leaked this by mistake" is not something anyone is likely to buy from them. They can have great opsec if they want to have it.
One thing which might explain their behavior is that it might be much more expensive to run an operation with good deniability. But in a world where the Trump administration calls Good a 'Domestic Terrorist', e.g. where statements are made for the sake of the most gullible 5% of the population, one would expect that any threadbare denial would be beneficial.
Perhaps the calculation is that the regime is much more likely to kill its opponents if they believe they are Mossad agents. Opposing the Ayatollah will probably earn you a long prison sentence, but being paid by Mossad will reliably get you executed. So telegraphing "btw, the protests are our doing and all the protesters are our agents", they are egging on the regime to kill them in large numbers, which will in turn force Trump to act, as you observed.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I think that having a leader who is not fundamentally hostile to Israel would be an upgrade, yes.
However, most of the population in Muslim countries have long expressed some hostility towards Israel, and Bibi's war/peace in Gaza has done little to win their hearts and minds.
Any leader who is seen as a Mossad stooge will start with a 50 point penalty to stability, basically.
Given these circumstances, I now wonder a bit what Mossad is playing at. If they were serious about installing Pahlavi, one would think that they would keep their involvement non-obvious. They can keep a secret if they want to, so it appears they want the world to know that the Shah has their support. I do not have the context to know what their play is here, though.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
As for the "Evil Empire", regardless of what they did or didn't do to the US, the USSR was that; ask the Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Hungarians, and the survivors of the Prague Spring, among many others.
Oh, I am not doubting that. I am not some Holodomor denier.
I am also not saying that the net effect of the US is as atrocious as the net effect of the Ayatollah regime. FWIW, I consider the net effect of the US to be strongly positive from a global point of view. However, I would claim that if we only consider the territory of Iran, then the effect of the US seems pretty clearly net negative. The Ayatollah has certainly be worse from my PoV, but Iranians have little reason to like the US.
While I am sure that the Iranian hostage crisis was in some ways "unprecedented", I don't think it will even make the top 50 atrocities committed in the ME. Presumably the perception of the revolutionaries was that the Shah was basically a stooge, and the US the puppet masters. The people in the US embassy were working very hard to keep the Shah in power and Iran under the thumb of the US. Sure, the Shah had guaranteed them diplomatic immunity, and violating their embassy would be a defection from diplomatic norms, but it does not read to me as an act of pure evil. (With the benefit of hindsight, it was also very stupid on part of the revolutionaries. They gained nothing, antagonized a global superpower and also set themselves up for becoming a diplomatic pariah.)
quiet_NaN
2d ago
Given that our resident antisemites appear to be on vacation, I guess it falls to me to mention two relevant facts about the Iranian protests.
(1) Protesters are calling for the installation of Pahlavi as the Shah.
(2) There exists a Mossad operation to make Pahlavi the Shah (paywalled, Haaretz seems to be a mainstream Israeli newspaper.)
From an Israeli perspective, it makes a bit of sense. It seems highly unlikely that any democratically elected Iranian president would ever be as Israel-friendly as Pahlavi is, so why risk it?
For the West, supporting the Pahlavi dynasty over Iranian democracy is at least historically consistent. In 1953, CIA and MI6 backed the Shah's coup because the democratically elected government wanted to nationalize the oil industry.
Iran was then run for 26 years by a pro-Western autocrat until the Shah became deeply unpopular, at which point the Ayatollah took over, creating the Iran we all know and love.
Given that history, I would be surprised if Iranians wanted to go for a monarchy again. I would be even more surprised if they wanted a Pahlavi again. It would be like Germany saying "maybe we should give the Hohenzollern another chance", if the guy in question was also Putin's best buddy.
Of course, this is a result of the theocrats being stupid. Everyone knows that once you have disposed a hereditary monarch, his descendants will form natural rallying points for counter-revolutionaries. The Soviets certainly knew how to avoid having to deal with someone who would have a claim to the tsardom later on.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
hostility to the US itself ("The Great Satan")
To be fair, from the perspective of a random ME country, it is not clear to me that that assessment is categorically wrong.
If a foreign country half a world away backed a coup to install some autocrat, then a few years later offered broad support to your regional enemy while said enemy attacked you with chemical weapons, hammered you with sanctions for decades, broke treaties, invaded your neighbor and made a complete mess of things, and generally provided cover for a client-state who would freely bomb your military installations and murder your nuclear weapon scientists, then bomb your military installations themselves, you would likely also not like that country a lot.
Hell, when Reagan called the USSR an 'Evil Empire', they had done far less to the US.
major sponsor of terrorism
The price for being the biggest sponsor of terror attacks on American soil clearly goes to Saudi Arabia for their links to Bin Laden.
have long been engaging in a (mostly) proxy war against a US ally.
That conflict is very much a two-way road. My considered opinion nowadays is that the Ayatollah and Nethanyahu richly deserve each other, and there is no reason for civilized countries to become entangled in their beef.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
I think most mainstream media linked the Iranian regime to the Hamas attacks and the Assad regime. If I were to search for op-eds on Iran in the Guardian or the NYT, do you predict that the general consensus would be "Iran is a peace-loving democracy, and we should definitely trust them to enrich uranium as much as they want"?
quiet_NaN
2d ago
From what I understand, Iran has democracy, and has in fact had a very long-running democracy, it's just that it has a theocracy stapled on top of it – sort of like how the Constitution restrains US democracy, the Ayatollahs restrain Iranian democracy.
That is a bit of a vacuous definition of democracy. It is alike to asking a prisoner to pick between the noose and the firing squad, then reporting that the government granted his request to get hanged, as if it was MAID instead of an execution. A lot of countries are democratic on paper and have elections, but are effectively dictatorships. Take the former German Democratic (!) Republic (!), for example. Sure, they had elections. Perhaps sometimes the vote even decided which SED candidate would get elected. But without broad freedoms of speech and the freedom of running for office, their system was very far away from what anyone would consider a functioning liberal democracy.
I also disagree with you on basing an Iranian democracy on a continuation of the institutions of the Ayatollah regime. There is always the danger of backsliding. The theocrats had 45 years to entrench themselves. If you simply remove the Ayatollah from their parliament, it seems likely that during the next depression, people will vote for the fundamentalists and they will install him again.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
I am fine with admitting that there are worthy human endeavors where the scientific method and mathematical models are not the best way to tackle the question. If someone wants to study fairy tales or Greek mythology, I will not insist on them adding p-values to their publications.
But if a field pretends scientific rigor while just cargo culting, that will reliably enrage science geeks like me. I do not have a strong opinion on how much funding there should be available for studying the character of the wolf in Grimm's fairy tales. I do have a strong opinion on how much funding there should be for torturing statistics to 'scientifically prove' that the wolf is a negative character (p<0.05): the amount is zero.
I will grant you that the revealed preference of the funding agencies is different, though.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
Another thought:
Greenland is weird because it is very much a noncentral example of a country. It has a population density of just 0.028/km^2. (For comparison, Montana is 3/km^2, even Alaska is 0.5/km^2. A reasonably densely settled European state (e.g. Belgium) gets to ~400/km^2.)
It is halfway between a country and SpaceX placing a hundred colonists on the Moon who then incorporate as a state with all of the Moon as their territory.
In Europe, every square meter of usable land was fought over hundreds of times, most borders drawn in blood. With Greenland, it seems that most of the territorial claim is more "That icy wasteland which can not sustain human life? Well, nobody is contesting it, so I guess it is ours."
So if the US or China would build a time machine and establish undiscovered colonies in Greenland in 1900, they could likely get Denmark to cede a part of Greenland to them, because most sane people do not want to die for some icy wasteland far from their home country, and even the small population of Greenland will probably feel little patriotic urge to die to protect their inhospitable hinterlands.
That being said, "the international rule-based order results in a tiny population of some inhospitable part of the earth nobody cared enough for to even contest before the IRBO came into effect becoming filthy rich" is hardly without precedent. Some thinly populated areas in the Middle East made it big thanks to fossil fuels. Denmark, the US, Canada and Russia getting to keep their mostly unpopulated territories in the arctic seems like a small price to pay for keeping the IRBO.
Not that from a geographical point of view, the US has any good claim to Greenland in the first place. Ireland claiming Northern Ireland, Canada claiming Alaska, Italy claiming the Vatican, even Putin claiming Ukraine are all more plausible from geography.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
I think Puerto Rico (and the other US territories) are a bit of a cautionary tale for any Greenlanders looking to join the US. In Denmark, Greenland is represented roughly proportionally to its population (which to be fair, is rather small, about 1%).
The smallest US state by population is Wyoming. I do not see Congress granting two senators to an island with 10% of the population.
And the way the US system works, no statehood means no federal representation whatsoever. So while it would be in the interests of whomever gets to exploit the natural resources to just pay every resident of Greenland 100k$/year for their trouble, this is something which would be hard to enforce. (Of course, if the US gov does pay that, that will probably attract other US citizens. Probably half of Alaska would move there.)
Once you are a territory, your concerns are not the concerns of the US politics. Who cares about Puerto Rico? (Compare and contrast with the Cuban exiles in Florida, who despite being a smaller group have shaped US Cuba relations for decades simply by virtue of being a relevant demographic in a battleground state.)
If Trump takes Greenland, the US loses Europe, and most of their allies.
I don't think that we would get a full-on war of loyalist NATO vs US. In the end, the US has the military capabilities to conquer Greenland. I would welcome it if my government dropped a few billions on whatever people might be willing to fight the US in the arctic, though, just as I am fine with my government dropping billions on Ukraine. Paying to hurt defectors is the least we can do to strengthen the rule-based order.
But at the end of the day, Greenland is 578 times less populous than Ukraine. Eventually the US would win.
But for the rest of NATO (Europe, but also Canada), that would radically change our strategic situation. Not only could we no longer depend on the US to defend us from other large powers, we would have to treat the US as one of the conquering hostile powers itself. Step one would be to politely ask US troops to leave Europe. Step two would be to get our retaliatory capacity up to speed. This means building a lot of nuclear weapons and delivery systems, so we can credibly threaten to turn most US cities into rubble.
We probably would not want a defensive alliance with Canada or Mexico (because the risk for Canada to become the next target of Vance's territorial ambitions in 2028 is obviously higher than for Belgium), but should probably cooperate with them in developing ICBMs. Colombia also looks like a country which might be interested in buying a few nukes, personally I would take their dollar bills despite the powder sticking to them.
For the Major Non-NATO Allies (e.g. Australia, Japan, South Korea), their strategic landscape would likewise change: if Trump will attack NATO countries, he will certainly also be willing to take a slice of Australia by force. Probably all of these would suddenly become very interested in nuclear weapons programs. (The MNNA which will have to do the least updating of their strategic picture is Colombia, as the US is already the prime military threat for them. In general, in South America and Muslim countries, the US does not have the same reputation as a steadfast ally as they do in European-origin countries.)
I can not say I would like such a development over the status quo. The pax americana was a win-win-win for the US, its western allies and the world. The US became the leader of the free world. Western allies like the Netherlands gained great security guarantees. The world got some reprieve from the security dilemma as western allies were not incentivised to build their own ICBMs to keep each other in check.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Things that are safe in the parking lot of a grocery store are not necessarily safe during the apprehension of a suspect. I have seen people argue here that we can not conclude from the fact that Good was a middle-aged woman who engaged in what appeared to prefer non-violent, if annoying and illegal actions to impede ICE that she was not going to suddenly to draw a gun to kill as many ICE officers as she could.
We know from the videos that Ross shooting her did very little to slow down her car. If she had aimed for him, even if he had managed to shoot her, he would have been severely injured.
So objectively speaking, standing too close to dodge in front of suspect's car is in fact reckless, even if you do not have reason to believe that that suspect might consider you Gestapo, or might be panicking or might be distracted and not even have seen you. This is why for example the CBP has explicit rules about not doing that.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
I can’t see a situation where I would vote to convict an ICE agent.
To me, this is a very weird thing to say.
For me, the American I probably respect most is probably Scott Alexander, my rightful caliph. And yet I can think of plenty (if unlikely) situations where I would definitely vote to convict him of a crime. Even in the middle of a civil war (Grey Tribe versus the rest of the world?), I can still imagine a lot of possible behaviors I would not let slide.
That is because just like him, I am a big fan of civility, and breaking civilizational norms is generally bad.
I will charitably interpret your statement as implying 'for anything he did on the job', and hope that you would still consider convicting someone for killing his girlfriend or raping kids.
But even on the job, I can think of plenty of behaviors I would not want to see from ICE even if I was 100% convinced that they were doing god's work. Gunning down suspects fleeing on foot. Blowing up protesters' cars to dissuade others from blocking them. Torturing people to find out the whereabouts of their targets. Raping detainees. Like every other group of humans, there are likely people in ICE who need to be dissuaded from such defections against humanity by threat of punishment. Saying categorically that you would not punish them basically means endorsing all of that.
I have no problem with "I would not convict Ross for the shooting of Good". It is not a position I share (based on my impression so far, I could be persuaded either way by new evidence emerging in a trial), but for that case it is at least one of the positions within the civilizational Overton window.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
I am sure the blue-tribers say that. Personally, I would prefer to have a gun brandished toward me or even trained at me by a cop 20 times to being shot without warning even once.
If someone is standing in front of a vehicle wants to signal "I will treat you moving forward at any angle as a deadly assault and blow your brains out", then I would very much prefer that threat to be made explicitly.
Not letting suspects know when they are one sudden movement away from getting shot will greatly reduce stress for the median case, but it will also result in unfortunate failures of communication when they try to get their papers from their glove compartment a little too fast.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
So standard police procedures are to stand in front of a car, relying on your quickdraw skills to be able to shoot the driver if she starts to accelerate towards you before get run over (which would empirically not prevent you from getting run over -- if she had aimed for him as he had aimed for her, then he would be lucky to be in a wheelchair)? Do you have any citation to back that up?
I have already quoted the CBP guidelines about "do not block the path of a vehicle with your body" elsewhere in this discussion. I see this as clear evidence that the shooters behavior is not "standard police protocols". If you want to argue that for ICE it is, please provide evidence.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
You can’t profile this woman as the average member of the general class of women, because she belongs to a very small class of people trying to illegally impede the law. I imagine those who go out of their way to impede ICE have a much higher risk of carrying a weapon.
I think that your concept of "lawbreaker woman", which includes Ulrike Meinhof, Bonnie Parker and Renee Good, does not really carve reality at its joints.
While Good was engaged in illegal activity intended to impede ICE, it is notable that her planned way of impeding them was non-violent. Anyone willing to murder a few ICE agents in the process of impeding their progress would not waste their time on non-violent resistance. Anyone planning at shooting ICE will likely not engineer a situation where their car is surrounded by ICE agents as a starting point.
I will grant you that there is a tiny probability that contrary to tribal (and gender) cultural norms, she was a gun enthusiast and a crack shot, and had also stupidly taken her pistol along 'for self defense' on her non-violent resistance, and would in a panic try to shoot her way out of getting arrested.
But realistically, the probability of her starting to shoot was still lower than for a 20yo white dude at a routine traffic stop.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
I was not not saying that I did not understand it, or I thought it was bad. Obviously we allow cops to use violence which would land civilians in jail. Someone has to execute the arrest warrants, after all.
I am also fine with them getting a bit more leniency when claiming self-defense (which was what I was going for here specifically, and where cops are not intrinsically privileged over civilians as a matter of law, afaik). In particular, we can generally skip the question what poor life choices on your part may have led to you having to wield deadly force to defend your own life -- dealing with people who might be unstable or violent (so the rest of us won't have to) is their job.
On the other hand, I would also hold them to a higher standard than civilians (in pretty much the same way you would hold a physician rendering first aid to a higher standard). "I panicked, and just acted on autopilot, and was not even aware that the aggressor had long been incapacitated and the need for self-defense was over" for example is an excuse I would be much more likely to buy from a civilian.
This is purely waging the culture war. If you have some information that Good was specifically trying to hamper the deportation of a specific murderer or rapist (who for some reason was not in prison), please share it with the class.
Also, can you back up the claim that she was consciously and willingly risking her life, that would be helpful.
Finally, your claim makes her actually sound impressive. Rare is the human willing to risk her life for the sake of a stranger, still rarer the one trying to help the lowest of the low. Keep talking like that, and the pope might canonize her.
Even people who agree with you that her cause is insane might be impressed at her level of dedication.
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