quiet_NaN
16hr ago
I think Don Lemon should be charged with trespassing, maybe criminal mischief, etc, particularly since he remained in the church after the pastor asked him politely to leave and told him that he was contributing to the disruption of their worship service. But I don’t know if it’s appropriate for him, personally, to be charged with civil rights offenses.
There is a trope of journalists standing in front of some perfectly innocent-looking building reporting on some Breaking News while the news is happening somewhere within that building. They generally do that because they are not allowed to enter the building and get footage of the event itself.
If Lemon had been reporting from the street outside the church, reasonable people would not blame him for anything, even if he had been tipped off by anti-ICE rioters.
Entering together with the rioters makes him look like what is called an "embedded journalist". While I am sure that embedded journalists will claim that they are actually totally neutral and independent an in no way beholden to the party in whose unit they are embedded and who sponsored their kevlar west (and whose PR people possibly get to sign of any publications they might write), I am equally sure that their opponent will not be very inclined to buy that if they are captured and instead treat them as PoWs.
Lemon being a TV person, I presume that he was recording video from within the church. Here in old Europe, we believe that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Now that is not an absolute thing, if your worship involves sacrificing kids to the Outer Gods, then there would be a public interest a journalist fulfills in violating your privacy of worship.
Frankly, I fail to see any public interest for life video coverage here. If schoolchild A is bullying schoolchild B, and then schoolchild C pulls out their mobile and openly lifestreams that to the internet, I am much more inclined to call C a bully than a journalist. I do not need to see the footage to know that some of the anti-ICE protesters are total assholes, a textual summary of what happened suffices for that. There is no Pulitzer to be won here.
So I am fine with letting the jury figure out if he was intentionally violating civil rights or not.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Using Paul Fussell's nomenclature, there are two very different classes near the top.
The upper middle are the ones who generally use their brains to pay for their lifestyle. Professors, lawyers, doctors, engineers and so forth.
Above them is the upper class, which as a class does not value education (especially not education in things which allows you to earn a living, like some pleb).
It seems to me that Epstein was really successful at passing as upper class, and that this was how he made money. Some of the filthily rich trusted him with their money not because he was the most brilliant quant in New York, but because they perceived him as one of them.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I do not think there is a huge overlap in guys who bang Daniel’s (big breast) and into underage girls.
I think that Stormy Daniels (and his wives) do put to rest any claim that Trump is an exclusive pedophile.
However, knowing one of his sexual tastes does not rule out the possibility of him having additional sexual tastes. If you know that someone restaurant critic is famous for his love of Italian seafood, do you conclude that he will never eat an Argentinian steak, but have seafood for three meals a day?
From an evo-psych PoV, the obviously advantageous path for a man is to fuck any fertile-looking woman his society lets him fuck. Being exclusively into teens or MILFs would really limit reproductive success, especially in monogamous societies where your marriage partner will likely start as a teen and age into a more mature woman later on.
We know that Trump was big time into running Miss contests (and allegedly walking into their dressing room). To my knowledge, he did not run any Mister contests, so it seems plausible to conclude that sexual attraction was one of the things which got him into that. Now, I am very much not into these contests, but it appears to me (starting from the label, a 'Miss' is a woman on the marriage market) that they are rather about young, nubile women than mothers with big breasts. A 16yo selected to appeal to Trump would be much closer to a Miss winner than Stormy Daniels is.
If the allegations were that he had sucked off underage boys, then I would be with you in finding that implausible, bisexuality seems to be relatively rare and there is no indication that Trump likes dicks.
And of course, there is Trump's creepy birthday message to Epstein. It could be about the both of them enjoying hunting federally protected birds on his island, but somehow I doubt it is.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
One interesting aspect would be how much we can trust the emails on Epstein's account who appear to have been sent from other people.
I think it depends on the technical specifics. If they scraped the data from his computers, then (unless the senders are the technical geeks who gpg-sign their mails) there is no proof that the sender ever wrote that. Epstein was obviously not the person who would be beyond falsifying mails for the purpose of insurance.
If they scraped them from Google (I think they did that), then the odds of him having messed with the mails sink. It might be that anything in the inbox, header and all, is still trivially writable via IMAP though. Ideally, one would want the mail server logs, but I am not sure if Google even keeps hashes of the mails they received. This still leaves the defense "that mail was sent from my mail server, but it was hacked", but with Epstein that seems a bit far-fetched, Epstein was clearly not some uberhacker.
Of course, if Epstein had messed with his inbox, one would expect that we would find things a lot more juicy in there.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Bizarrely as your phrasing is, in the context of the analogy I agree with you.
If it turns out that Pretti was shot in self-defense, then there is no obvious other party to blame.
The analogy would be of Pretti being a part of a community of very enthusiastic base jumpers who falls to his death. We can vaguely point at the rest of the community, but if you subscribe to the belief that adults should make their own decisions, the responsibility ultimately rests with the jumper. A base jumper still does not deserve to die and it is sad if they do, but there is also no injustice in them succumbing to gravity.
However, if Pretti was a clear-cut case of self-defense, it would not make good CW fodder.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Okay, I stand corrected. It seems that I overestimated how well social security info sent by employers to federal agencies is verified. (Illegals not getting any social security benefits for their payments still sucks for them, but it hardly seems fair to blame the employer for that. I still feel that if sanctuary industries are so important that even Trump does not dare touch their illegal workers, the saner approach would be some sort of legalization (perhaps a new visa category, "can work in agriculture, etc only, visa expires after six months of unemployment", just down call it brown card).)
Under the circumstances you and @hydroacetylene described, I will retract my original statement. There is still a point to be made that employers collectively benefit from a different equilibrium of the supply demand curve, but it would be false to suggest that illegals are more exploited than their legal colleagues.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
That it is a good thing that he died?
No one on the Blue side is arguing merely "there should be some negative consequences for thr officers that killed him", or "it's bad that he died", and no one on the Red side argued the opposite, so I have no idea how these questions are relevant.
@Throwaway05 on the top level post:
The person involved deserved it - many here may think deserve applies in the traditional sense
I would argue that people getting what they deserve (in the "traditional sense", e.g. what is their moral due) is generally something which is considered good.
"She totally deserved to go to prison for her crimes, but it is good that she got acquitted" does seem incoherent to me.
Or is this a Red hivemind thing? That @Throwaway05 can know that "many here think" he deserved to get killed, but nobody "argued" that openly?
quiet_NaN
2d ago
With no control over the media, the right can't chose the game to play, they can't reframe this on "let's just let the professionals do their job and we'll see if it was justified".
Which professionals? State police working for Tim Walz? Federal cops working for the Trump administration, who immediately slandered the victim? Do you think that Kash Patel would piss of Trump by releasing a report recommending indictment? Or that in the current climate, any politically savvy state cop would say "totally justified shooting, would have done the same" (immunity aside)?
There are certainly cases when it is important to wait for the professionals to collect the facts. Forensic analysis can solve a lot of crimes. If there was body cam footage which would exonerate the shooter (e.g. of Pretti pulling a gun), Trump would release it in a heartbeat. So we must either conclude that there is no body cam footage (faintly damning in itself), or that it would not make us update from the other videos.
Eyewitnesses are terribly unreliable compared to cameras, even if they are not actively malicious. In this case, both sides would have every incentive to agree on a story each. In the Good shooting, if there was no video evidence, we would still be disputing if her car was moving when the first shot was fired -- not so much because of lying evil leftist demonstrators but because of human nature.
What evidence, exactly, do you expect the professionals to rely on then which we have not already seen online? Personally, I would trust a trial jury slightly more to get to the bottom of the facts than someone just watching the videos, but from the looks of it we will not get a trial jury before the next presidential election.
You can trust professionals only if you can reasonably believe that they do not start by writing the conclusion of their report. In cases so politically charged as this one, the chances of that are slim, Trump has not exactly made a big show of keeping federal forces and DoJ independent.
If four years ago, some SJ guy had written here "don't worry about people who committed crimes during the BLM riots getting charged, just Trust The Professionals(TM)", most here would have dismissed this as laughable, and been proven right. I think that the FBI investigating the ICE killings is no less laughable.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
The person involved deserved it - many here may think deserve applies in the traditional sense, but I think at minimum we see "deserve" here in the sense of "engaged in stupid avoidable behavior that necessitated the response or failing that represents a lifestyle that drastically increases the likelihood of a bad outcome."
Following that definition, would it be fair to say that you think a woman whose lifestyle involves walking around in the bad part of town at night in a miniskirt without male company deserves to be raped? Or that smokers deserve lung cancer, even?
I dislike politically motivated redefinitions of a word. "GWB is a Nazi[1] ([1]: where a Nazi is anyone to the right of Clinton). "Protesters deserve[2] to get shot ([2]: where deserve means to have a lifestyle which makes the consequences much more likely)". "Gas[3] the Jews ([3]: where gassing means to coordinate to cut back the influence of AIPAC)".
By design, the Motte does not do a lot of thought policing against ideas which most would find repugnant. If you want to argue that death is a fitting punishment for Pretti, you can do so openly. No need to torture the English language so that you can make a claim which sounds like that but acktually toootally means something much more harmless.
Also, I can not recall reading many people here who were arguing that people who are protesting by annoying ICE (through whistles, filming, blocking their cars etc) deserve (in the traditional sense) to be summarily executed, that it is an injustice that they are )mostly) suffered to live.
they think Trump is literally Hitler and that ICE is the Gestapo, they are seeking violence and finds it justified and at the same time don't seem to think what they are doing constitutes violence.
I think you would have to stretch the definition of violence to its breaking point to make the claim that most protesters are engaging in violence. If ten of the protesters in MN were serious about violence the way the IRA or the mafia in Sicily was, they would be able to murder ICE agents.
To judge the Pretti shooting, we do not need to milk his background for all its worth ("He was a nurse helping people" - "He had kicked out the taillight of an ICE car"). The people who shot him did not know either fact. The only case in which a jury would care about his character is if there was a dispute about what actions he was engaging in, and his character might make one version more likely than the other. (For example, if someone claimed that he fired shots at ICE, prior footage of him firing at a car with ICE people in it would be relevant in the absence of conclusive video evidence.)
From the videos, it seems to most (even here on the Motte) that there was insufficient justification for shooting him. This makes the shooting, morally if not legally (so far) manslaughter. The rest does not matter except for people trying to spin public opinion (e.g. everyone). If it turned out that he had been a serial killer or the reincarnation of Christ, it would still be manslaughter. (So far, he seems closer to the latter rather than the former, so on top of the shooting itself being unjustified, the left has been winning rather hard with this case.)
Was his behavior risky? Sure. But that is the miniskirt argument again. This case is not like a smoker getting lung cancer. We have a perpetrator who had signed up for a job which entailed scuffles with demonstrators, some of whom were armed, in a very stressful environment. If a truck driver runs a red light and kills someone, I would not give a fuck about his excuses for him being in a bad mental state (short of "someone drugged me"). You had a bad night of sleep, low blood sugar, migraine, anxiety, whatever? Too bad, by starting the ignition (or your ICE shift), you certified that you were of sound mind, so manslaughter it is.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
First They Came is a pretty good showcase of how this happens. The Enemy List of the authoritarian power abusers grows alongside their growth in power, until everyone is sitting around scared of being declared an enemy. You'll slowly lose your own freedom as your "enemies" get purged and you'll cheer it on smug and certain it could never come for you.
I was just going to link that in reply to your post. Happy 27th January.
Of course, Niemoeller is hardly the closest friend of the regime the Nazis murdered, that dubious honor likely falls to the SA leadership around Ernst Roehm, whose loyalty to the cause only bought them a quick death.
Nor is it uniquely the Nazis, power accumulated through violence has a tendency to not stay contained. The median victim of Robespierre was not an aristocrat or royalist, but (I think) a proponent of the revolution who simply was a bit more moderate, or a commoner who just got picked up by his goons when they were looking for an enemy to behead.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
I find the pretense of caring about employers a sanewashing exercise
Employing illegals likely also involves financial crimes. After all, they do not have a social security number, so how are you paying social security for them? Even making sure they pay income taxes would create a paper trail most employers would likely avoid.
I would argue that the median case of illegal employment is not the woke Starbucks owner who employs an illegal out of her kindness of heart and spends as much money on him as on her legal employees.
Rather, it is some farmer or hotel owner who systematically employs illegals at wages which would not attract legal workers.
I am enough of a classical leftist to believe that freedom of contract should not be unlimited. There are cases where both parties agree to a transaction, and it is still exploitative. Sex work, selling your kidney, renting your womb, indentured servitude, or working with dangerous machines or chemicals are all fields where governments restrict the freedom of individuals to make contracts (sometimes beyond what is appropriate) with the aim to protect one party, and possibly also to protect society from the negative externalities of the transaction. (For employing illegals, these externalities certainly exist -- if an illegal working as a farmhand in Texas needs urgent medical care, the costs of that will be paid by the US society, not by him or his employer.)
I have read here the argument that tolerating illegals will create an underclass without rights which can be exploited by others, and I find it sound. Of course, the efforts of the Trump administration have not changed this situation for the better, now people being exploited in certain industries will be exempt from deportation while their exploitation continues, which gives their employers more power.
"Form a farmhand union you say? You're fired. Now watch me as I call the DHS tipline to report an illegal not employed in a Sanctuary Industry."
And Trump's abortive attempt to get rid of birthright citizenship can be best described as looking at the status of servitude and thinking "what is wrong with that is that it's not hereditary". I mean, they have not said that they have nothing against illegals as long as they know their place (working masta's fields), but from their priorities this seems to be their revealed preference. The pearl-clutching of "but the Blue cities will not enforce our immigration laws" would be a lot less pathetic if Texas enforced immigration laws consistently.
If your business can not compete with others without relying on illegal exploitation, I have zero sympathy. Sell your business, do something non-evil with your life. I am sure a lot of hard-working Americans lost their sugar cane or cotton businesses after the civil war due to increased labor costs too, and I have little sympathy for them either.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
This failure dilutes the voting power and saps the taxpayer resources from everyone else in the nation.
I do not understand your point. Are you saying that some illegal committing violent crimes in MN will harm the union by making MN less well run, which in turn will lead to them paying less federal taxes? This seems like an extremely indirect effect, and could be used to have the feds crack down on whatever crime they dislike.
I also do not think that the median violent crime changes the voting power of MN relevantly. If there is census fraud happening, that is likely not related to violent crime.
There is strong evidence, illegals aside, the last census was highly fraudulent and sent lots of extra political power to Democrats. There is also lots of evidence illegals compounded that.
NB: the obvious fix for census fraud is to bring back the 3/5th rule to elect the president by popular vote, and assign the number of Representatives based on the people who voted in the last election.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
That is an entirely coherent position. The point I made was entirely against the argument "the people we are deporting are really bad people" made by the DHS and some posters here.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
I don't think its total bullshit, they probably are picking up more rapists and murderers than just the general population.
I am not contesting that, in fact, I think I was conceding it explicitly. Naturally they have a higher crime rate than the native population. For the illegal immigrant laborer trying to get hired for anything at Home Depot, the idea "or perhaps I could just spend today stealing smartphones and wallets" sounds a lot more attractive than for someone working as a teller in a bank. Nor do I dispute that lower classes are generally more likely to solve an argument using violence. (In July 2019, the last month for which a detailed record exists on your site, about 2/3 of the deportees were male. That alone is sufficient to get a higher rate of rapists and murderers than the general population.)
A quarter of them have charges and another quarter have convictions (see below).
"ICE classifies an individual as a convicted criminal if they have been convicted of any criminal violation. Violations can range from serious felonies all the way down to a purely immigration violation (such as illegal entry which is a petty offense under the U.S. Code), or a violation which results in only in a fine such as not keeping a dog on a leash, fishing without a permit, driving a vehicle with a tail light out, etc"
They point to the historical data, which shows the most serious conviction for July 2019:
Most Serious Criminal Conviction (MSCC) Total
All 55,654
No Conviction 38,978
Illegal Entry (INA SEC.101(a)(43)(O), 8USC1325 only) 2,938
Driving Under Influence Liquor 1,703
Assault 977
Traffic Offense 858
Larceny 457
Illegal Re-Entry (INA SEC.101(a)(43)(O), 8USC1326 only) 443
Domestic Violence 390
Burglary 382
Drug Trafficking 381
Robbery 279
Sex Assault 246
...
Homicide 123
...
Various specific kinds of homicide 57
Various manslaughter 47
Generally, homicides are a great anchor in criminology because the dark figure is thought to be rather small compared to the reported cases. Here, I will presume that the US is very unlikely to deport murderers to their countries of origin instead of charging and sentencing them, and that it is unlikely that homicides will have a worse crime on their rep sheet.
(There are nits to be picked in either direction, sure. Some people will commit an involuntary manslaughter and an armed robbery on separate occasions, and thus not show up in the homicide category. And some homicides are rather far from the central example of a homicide. The mother with three kids in her car who is distracted, oversees a red light and gets into an accident in which one of her kids is killed is a homicide, after all. And likely one of the 381 people whose MSCC is drug trafficking is also responsible for some gang-related killing for which he was not caught, just like there are murderers at large in the broader society.)
Still, this means that 0.4% of the deported were homicides, or 1.3% of the deported who were convicted of an offense were homicides. So much for Trump's murderers and rapists -- they are clearly part of the deported, at much higher rates than in the overall population, but still only a tiny fraction.
USC1325 (the most prominent one) for example is a 'duh' charge. Yes, most illegals from Latin America cross the borders illegally rather than overstaying a student visa they would be very unlikely to get.
In the current statistics, "Pending Criminal Charges" is even more wishy-washy. In the unlikely case that you want to deport an immigrant where Thiel's computer systems can not even find a single citation for jaywalking, you can just charge them with a trivial offense. Google AI thinks the statue of limitations for USC1325 is 5 years, so you can try to slap this on anyone who popped up on your radar in the last five years. The other ones likely filled out some form at some point, so you just charge them with some federal petty crime to that affect. The point is not that you would have to make the charges stick before a judge, after all. Just to have something so that you can tick "pending criminal charges", then deport them. You could just charge every one of them with desecrating the corpse of Lincoln, if you wanted.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
At what point is this no longer just people exercising their first amendment rights? At what point is this a conspiracy to undermine the laws of this country resulting in the deaths of two people ?
I am not sure there is a statue against annoying and frustrating law enforcement. Perhaps if they coordinated to prevent the arrest of anyone specific, that could be an obstruction charge.
Looking out for feds and reporting them seems to be covered by 1A. Coordinating protesters also seems fine as long as you have an expectation of them not engaging in violence. (I would argue that for the most part, the protesters do not want to break the bones of ICE agents. This is wise, because ICE carries guns, and getting overwhelmed by a mob would likely cause them to shoot their way out without even the benefits of me calling it excessive force.)
The license plate checkers are clearly abusing their access, but likely providing license plates to them is covered by 1A. Commuters should also be fine, if there was a law against following strangers then a lot of divorce detectives would be out of work.
Medics are fine if they say their role is to provide aid to people who got injured, and leave the question if they were trying to impede anyone open. I can't imagine them going "yes, you were pepper sprayed, but sadly, you did nothing to provoke it. As you did not actively try to impede law enforcement, we will not help you", so I guess they are in the clear. Donors likewise.
I am sure that the Trump administration has access to some competent lawyers, and if there was a nice big federal law all the protesters were breaking, they would get arrested and charged.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
I agree, it is uncommon usage.
The normal term would be "lookout". Just like someone is not "sneaking in place", but "hiding".
quiet_NaN
5d ago
The feeling I get from reading acoup (e.g. on "battle pulses") is that there was more of a clash of steel on steel than that.
In many cases, one of the parties is under time pressure (because other conditions are turning to their disadvantage, they are under archery fire, etc). "Stand there and insult your opponent" seems not a good strategy, and and army which can actually coordinate and make contact will outperform one who can not in the long run.
Of course, any infantryman who advances in bloodlust without checking what the rest of the line is doing will unlikely to fight more than one battle.
But I would expect at least the Romans (whose tactics were cutting edge, and whose swords had a reach disadvantage over spears) to be able to advance into reach.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
Some grandma staying in the US illegally is very much not a central case of what people think by "criminal" (the directional opposite of "law abiding"), any more than an elderly hippie who grows some pot for personal use is.
I think there are circumstances where 99% would be willing to violate the law of their host country (e.g. if the alternative was to get deported to Afghanistan). I will grant you that there are illegals for whom going back would not be a matter of life and death, but 'merely' an inconvenience.
I also am generally doubtful that Republicans are really as much into obeying the law as they claim they are. Rolling coal seems to be very much a Red Tribe thing, after all.
(Or hypothetically, suppose that a liberal SCOTUS ruled that 2A only applied to weapon designs existing in 1791, and Congress banned all newer guns. "Too bad, but the constitution says what SCOTUS says it says, so I better get all my guns neutered and buy a nice flintlock pistol for home defense. After all, the law is the law, even if I do not agree with it. I certainly would not want to own an illegal firearm, after all!" is what a law-abiding person might think. I think plenty of Republicans would instead break this law or condone others breaking it, and red states would simply decide that enforcing it is not a policing priority.)
quiet_NaN
6d ago
I will add that the whole "ICE is going after criminals" argument for their big operations in Blue cities is absurd.
Legally, states and municipalities have a lot of levers to affect crime rates. Most violent crime is judged under state laws, after all. Some have the death penalty, some don't. Some have strict gun laws, some don't. Some have legalized pot. Some make enforcement of laws against sex work a priority, some don't. Some have three strike laws. Some let well-connected people prostitute minors. Some criminalize abortion.
The basic idea (supported traditionally very much by the Republicans, e.g. in regard to Dobbs) seems to be that state governments are much better at creating a criminal justice system accommodating the preferences of their local population, be they Utah Mormons or California hippies, than a far-away federal government in DC would. Of course there are Federal guard rails (you can't legalize slavery, or raping kids, or hanging Blacks), but for the most part it is the locals who decide if an offender gets probation or a lifelong prison sentence.
Suppose for the sake of the argument that the bleeding heart liberals in Minneapolis do not deport any violent criminals, thereby endangering their local population.
Why should the tax dollars of women living in Amarillo, Texas be spent to keep women in in Minneapolis safe just because their local state and municipal government has (hypothetically) decided not to invest in keeping them safe? How often do illegals get on a greyhound bus and go on a rape trip in the next state, really? If California abolishes all police tomorrow, will Trump send in federal agents to direct the traffic in LA?
There is certainly an argument to be made that immigration is federal policy, and illegals living in one state may affect the union in the long run (due to birthright citizenship, if nothing else).
There is also an argument to be made that getting rid of all of the illegals will also reduce crime rates (no HBD needed, illegals are generally poor, and poor people are more likely to commit violent crimes). (It would also wreck the sectors which are based on illegal's labor, which is why Trump is not doing it.)
But the framing that ICE is busy catching rapists and murderers in MN is bullshit. They are there to fill their quotas. Number go up. Rapists make the number go up. Sick 70yo women make the number go up. 6yo's make the number go up. Trump needs to tell his base that he has deported more people than the Democrats, and the job of the DHS is to make the number he will claim less of an obvious lie.
Of course, whenever the WH issues a press release about an incident, their ERO men were hot on the heels of a violent criminal. But this is about as believable as their claims that anyone their goons shoot is a domestic terrorist.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
If someone is intent to make a snuff video of them murdering ICE, they would spend 24h to acquire a GoPro or a barrel mounted camera for livestreaming from Amazon.
Walking up to ICE while being visibly armed and pre-occupied with a mobile phone does not seem like a very effective way to go about it when you could also climb to a rooftop with a hunting rifle.
Of course, you can add more epicycles to your theory. "He did not just want to shoot ICE and film his murders, he also wanted to make it look like he was acting in self defense."
Or even "his real goal was to trick ice into shooting him, and due to his malicious open carry he managed to deceive poor innocent ICE agents into eliminating him. Truly the perfidy of Antifa knows no bounds!"
Protesting while armed is not illegal in the US. Plenty of people have done so with zero intention of murdering anyone. So far, I have seen zero video evidence that he was drawing his gun.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
as DHS law enforcement officers were conducting a targeted operation in Minneapolis against an illegal alien wanted for violent assault
Let us stop right there.
Assault is a crime. (I would have thought that the violence is an inherent part, but I do not know the specifics of MN state law, so maybe I am wrong and 'violent assault' is a thing.)
Also, it is the type of crime typically handled on the state level.
So the DHS is claiming that a MN judge signed off an arrest warrant (or a MN PD decided they wanted him arrested in connection to some assault), and it fell to the DHS to catch him so that he could answer for his crimes in court?
Anyone believing that is also likely to believe that Trump will send them their tariff dividend check really soon now.
At least when the leadership of the left lies, they are subtle. Not breaking the truth where bending and distorting it will suffice, spinning narratives, framing events, etc.
When the Trump administration lies, it feels like something an IQ 100 conman might come up with to fool an IQ 80 mark. No need to worry about keeping your lies straight, your mark will not remember them in a day anyhow.
Less charitably, their objective is the destruction of what Arendt calls the distinction between fact and fiction. If your side is disadvantaged in the jungle, you use agent orange to destroy the jungle to create a more favorable battlefield. If your side is disadvantaged in logical debate, you destroy the concept of a coherent object reality and face them on the more advantageous battlefield of name-calling.
I mean, it could be that DHS was looking for a specific illegal who was a high priority because he had served for violent crimes before, and acted on new intel. I can't rule it out, their mandate is to get rid of all of the illegals (except for the ones Trump needs to keep the economy running), which includes both hardened criminals and six year olds. (A nice thing about the motte is that the right wingers here are pretty open about that.)
But likely ICE was just fishing for illegals by IDing random people in the street, or going after a target without a violent past, and lied about that part just like they lied about the 200 rioters and all the other stuff.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
This is an oversimplification. Are there supporters who downplay the role of Antifa? Sure. Are many of them denying that the label Antifa (or antifaschistische Aktion) refers to anything in the real world at all? Doubtful, though the strategy of calling the sky pink when it suits your needs has recently had some success, and the left might borrow it.
I would argue that it is normal to make a big deal of the mainstream-unappealing fringes of your enemy while downplaying the importance of your own fringes. So Antifa is not a big deal, but White supremacists are, or vice versa.
That some unsavory connection gets downplayed does not in itself tell you how important it is. A supporter of Gazan Palestinians would certainly downplay Hamas when trying to convince normies (even though they were kinda important), and a MAGA supporter would downplay the right-wingers who sometimes shoot up synagogues as isolated crazies (which seems pretty correct from what I can tell).
If you believe that anyone who downplays the importance of an organization $X is secretly a supporter of $X, it will reliably lead to a trapped prior. "Even the FBI, the CIA and CNN are not talking about the lizard people. This thing must be big!"
quiet_NaN
7d ago
"right-wingers think Antifa is like ISIS, whereas in fact Antifa is more like Jihadis in general"
While this seems very true, it is even messier. At least international Jihadi terrorists roughly agree on the acceptable means (killing infidels in countries which mess with Muslim countries) and broad ideological world view, even if they differ on concrete strategy and priorities.
Within the left, you would be hard-pressed to find two people who agree on the political theory. Some are anarchists, communists, others are likely more moderate. And SJ did not make that any simpler.
Basically, anyone who subscribes to "fascism should be violently resisted where required" can adopt the label Antifa. (Indeed, I myself subscribe to that, though I do not consider myself Antifa. I just do not see any fascism which could be effectively neutered by me violently resisting anyone.)
The devil is in the details. What counts as fascism, now that Hitler and Mussolini are dead? Paleoconservatives? MAGA? Nethanyahu? Putin? Any Western capitalist society? Neo-Nazis?
And what violence is required? Smashing the state to bring about a communist utopia or stop the colonial exploitation? Beating up a few Neo-Nazis? Celebrating the traditional riots on the first of May in Kreuzberg? Spraying ACAB on a cop car, or a wall?
A lot of it is armchair activism. Certainly subject to the usual signaling spirals. You don't convince anyone that you are the hot shit by being a moderate on the internet. There is probably three to five OOMs more people willing to endorse deadly violence in memes and comments than there people willing to even commit property damage personally. Still, it can give the odd homicidal member the impression that the community endorses their violence. Which it does, verbally, just not by revealed preference.
The other group identity one might liken Antifa to is Anonymous. Both are very much grass root things. There is no Antifa pope who consecrates or excommunicates bishops (who then consecrate priests (who then baptize believers into Antifa)).
Exploit some shitty website, post about it on 4chan using the Anonymous logo: congratulations, you are now Anonymous. Buy a button with the red and black flag, go to a protest wearing a black hoodie, or commit some petty property crime and upload a picture on indymedia (or whatever kids use this century): congratulations, you are now Antifa.
It is more a category than a group, really.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
There is a lot of behavior which is a Bad Idea which might get you killed but still no excuse for murder.
We do not let the guy who kills his ex get off the hook because her decision to date a guy with a criminal record and anger management issues.
In this case, if the body cam of the cop (which was clearly on, right?) shows that from his perspective, it looked like the suspect was going to reach for his gun, then I will file this under "sometimes people do risky things and tragedy ensues". If it does not show that, I would be inclined to convict on murder 2 from the videos I saw.
The days of the Old West are gone, and they are not coming back.
Nor is shooting someone fleeing (without your property) in the back considered self-defense anywhere.
I think even in the US, only a small fraction of churches would be willing to worship with their AR-15s by their side, waiting for some interloper to make their day. On the other hand, every criminal gang would declare their headquarters a place of worship.
If you legalize individual violence, you are selecting for people willing to commit violence for their own benefit. Generally speaking, these are not the people a civilization wants to select for.
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