The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
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User ID: 174
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1hr ago
This is totally retarded. The standard that best protects officers from being second guessed in the courts is the "moment of threat" rule (although it was dialed back a bit in Barnes) in which plaintiffs and courts cannot go back indefinitely into the encounter.
This was not "dialed back a bit" in Barnes. It was completely overturned and throughly repudiated in Barnes. (And rightly so -- imagine the Good case, only no Ross and the cop who was at her driver's door jumps up on the doorsill as she's driving away and shoots her because he's now in danger)
You really really don't want to open the door to evaluating these kinds of things based on what anyone did in the minutes up to the use of deadly force, let alone days before or just general "this guy is a thug" vibes.
From Barnes
Most notable here, the “totality of the circumstances” inquiry into a use of force has no time limit. Of course, the situation at the precise time of the shooting will often be what matters most; it is, after all, the officer’s choice in that moment that is under review. But earlier facts and circumstances may bear on how a reasonable officer would have understood and responded to later ones. Or as the Federal Government puts the point, those later, “in-the-moment” facts “cannot be hermetically sealed off from the context in which they arose.” Taking account of that context may benefit either party in an excessive-force case. Prior events may show, for example, why a reasonable officer would have perceived otherwise ambiguous conduct of a suspect as threatening. Or instead they may show why such an officer would have perceived the same conduct as innocuous. The history of the interaction, as well as other past circumstances known to the officer, thus may inform the reasonableness of the use of force.
(Omitted inline citation)
In this case, if those prior interactions were known to the officer, they may well be relevant.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1hr ago
He hasn't lost yet; he can go to Federal court to have the indictment quashed, if the judge is willing.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1hr ago
Would be the peak of irony if a leftist protester raised this challenge now and won, demonstrating that all the harassment of pro-life folks for decades was never legal.
What would happen is they would raise the challenge and win. Then Congress would pass a substantially similar law with some tweak to make it technically different. That law would continue to be used against right-wingers and survive all challenges, right up until someone managed to use it against a leftist again.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1hr ago
ICE don't have to be competent and there is no fear of The Revolution happening so long as this is the level of unity amongst the comrades.
It was never about The Revolution. It was about electing Democrats.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
6hr ago
It was a bone thrown to the right, but it was done in bad faith -- no one ever intended it to be used and I think so far, only Trump has even attempted to use it, and the courts are resisting because they know it wasn't supposed to be used.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
10hr ago
The main answer to this is having vague enough laws and leaving it to the police to enforce it at their discretion
The result of this is a police state.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
10hr ago
But it isn't (and you don't). The judicial system understands that these laws are only supposed to be used against the right, so they refused to even approve charges against Lemon.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
12hr ago
That alone isn't sufficient: the actual decisions he made, damaging an ICE vehicle lightly and needlessly stepping between an ICE officer and a woman said officer was pepperspraying for blocking their vehicle, are not particularly "evil" taken by themselves.
Again, too much charity. By several orders of magnitude.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
13hr ago
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
13hr ago
And this is why FCFromSSC is right; there is no way for this situation to be resolved other than violence, and lots of it. Talking won't work; it is just met with violence, and considered justified.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
13hr ago
The Overton window of Western democracy is quite narrow and acting like your ideological opponents are literally grand evil is not productive in the long-term.
It has worked for the left.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
13hr ago
I don't know why Trump wants lower rates. That seems stupid given that he just won an election due to high inflation.
Perhaps he does not believe that lowering rates causes higher inflation. I don't either. Anyway, the jobs situation is pretty dire at the moment (job growth is ~0) and that's the other half of the misery index.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
13hr ago
The problem with Kirk's politics is that to make room for more men like Charlie Kirk, you need fewer men like Donald Trump.
No, there was plenty of room for men like Kirk, until men who opposed Donald Trump shot him dead.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
13hr ago
Not exactly, but kinda? How much weeping, how many top level posts about how "Everything Is Not Fine" do you see for LEOs that got killed? Everybody sees it as part of their job.
Except Brian Sicknick. It's all who/whom.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
13hr ago
Pretti was a bad man because he was an insurrectionist communist and because he made it his life's work to >> obstruct lawfully empowered federal law enforcement officials.
As much as I'm rather on "your side" in the big picture of the culture war, this is a terribly shortsighted and intellectually stifling judgement passed upon a person solely due to 2 videos of their very recent behaviour - and behaviour Pretti himself certainly saw as morally directed, no matter how wrong or deluded he was. We can ridicule and deconstruct the Left's misguided beliefs all the way down to the Rousseauian bedrock it builds itself on, it won't change the fact that people contain more complexity and ingrained incentive systems than their stated ideological affinity.
None of us can directly tell what evil lurks in the hearts of men; we can only judge actions and make inferences from them. I don't know about "communist", but the evidence certainly shows that Pretti was engaged in direct action against federal law enforcement on multiple occasions. Pretti certainly saw himself as morally directed, but so does a spree killer who acts because the voice of God told him so -- that the voice was a real one on a Signal chat in this case makes it worse, not better.
Or, stated another way, you're being far too charitable.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
13hr ago
The "death penalty" thing is just always stupid in these situations. It logically devolves into anarchy in, actually, very few steps.
It's not stupid as a tactic, for those who think that lethal self-defense should never be permitted.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
13hr ago
The world is full of such judges. And when they run into someone whose bad behavior was through error that the person regrets, they'll consider that person insincere and throw the book at them.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
But I'm still of the impression that the administration wants all of us to believe they are acting in an untethered way.
Someone wants you to believe that. It's not the administration. It's the people posting (and in some cases staging) these videos. It's the people making up atrocity stories.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
Right, so if someone attempts an assault with a deadly weapon in such a a way that if the crime was completed and if it resulted in death, would be a lesser degree of murder than capital murder, they wouldn't deserve to die if the would-be victim defended himself lethally and the defender should themselves be considered a murderer.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
The bodycam vid would be released already if it was that juicy.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
The (non-)uniforms, the masks, the limited training, the recruiting efforts for people of a specific ideology, the mass deployments, feel like qualitatively different things to me. Perhaps paramilitary is not a useful word here but that's what I'm talking about.
Words have meanings. Using them just to indicate something bad that you have in your head is not useful.
On the court stuff, I am sure the administration is of the opinion that they are indeed following the laws; that will get worked out in court (the Supreme Court if necessary) and has no real bearing on what ICE is doing on the ground in Minneapolis.
Intimidation does not require that you have been directly affected. The reason they are in Minneapolis in such quantities is because the president resents Tim Walz and Minnesota in general, and because of a news story about fraud that has little relation to illegal immigration.
Again, words have meanings. Even if ICE was sent to Minnesota because the president resents Tim Walz, that does not mean they were sent there to intimidate him.
Sending thousands of masked agents to roam around a city and stop people based on their race is absolutely a new thing.
Fortunately, this isn't actually happening; it's just a lie.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
· Edited 1d ago
When I wrote that, I was thinking specifically about the Mexican-American teenager who was working at Target when ICE or CBP tackled him and dragged him out of the store in cuffs. Evidently he was repeatedly shouting that he was an American citizen. They ignored that, threw him in a van and drove off. They quickly figured out that he was in fact a citizen, but not before they beat the shit out of him and dumped him bleeding and crying in a Walmart parking lot a mile from where they picked him up. Evidently the person who found him posted a video of the boy shivering and weeping in the parking lot. I did not see that video, but I did see a clip from the video where he was led from the store.
You can find a clip of the arrest. It seems to be a fairly professional arrest. No clip of any beating. No clip of him bleeding in a Walmart parking lot a mile away (or 8 miles away, as that tweet claims). The same clip shows SOMEONE crying later who might be the same guy, it's not clear where, and the clip avoids showing his face clearly, and doesn't show bleeding either. You can find another clip showing why he was arrested, though; the ICE agent was entering the store and Garcia ran in and tried to physically prevent him. He wasn't arrested because he was brown or because they thought he was an illegal alien; he was arrested because he deliberately interfered with their work.
There's tons of stuff like this -- atrocity stories where the key events are not actually backed up by the videos.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
That they're ineffectively violent does not make them not violent.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
That's not a stretch at all.
My wife noticed that phenomenon in 2020.
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