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Surely this (tortured, in my opinion) line of argument can be applied to both sides. Do cops ever think "if I act paranoid and kill the weird person here, (...)", or do they only think about their own personal peril? Well, they obviously think they have a +2SD spidey sense and are very valuable individuals, but they still shouldn't have shot for the sake of all of us.
If anything, the cop version strikes me as rather more justifiable, because cops signed up voluntarily for a job whose description involves something about keeping the peace and protecting society, and random weirdos did not.
[puts on libertarian fedposting hat]
Now, I was told we live in a society. Us random weirdos have obligations to each other: if I refuse to give my money to the Feds and hole up in a cabin in the woods bothering nobody (and maybe sawing off shotgun barrels, it's not quite clear), they'll happily show up with guns to shoot my family to make sure that I pay my
income taxespound of flesh. I didn't sign up for that! I didn't sign up for the violence inherent in the system![takes off hat]
It is at least interesting to me that many of the same folks that have very strong opinions on what the very wealthy (most consistently defined as "wealthier than the speaker") owe to the rest of us also seem to think that everyone other than the very wealthy owe basically nothing to each other. You know, like not initiating physical violence.
On the gripping hand, I haven't watched the full video, but I don't understand why police have, in several instances like this, seemingly avoided just extracting themselves from the situation: as far as I can tell, nobody (else) was thought to be in danger, and just leaving (maybe coming back in the daylight) would have de-escalated.
With the anti-libertarian hat on, the cabin scenario doesn't sound like anything as collectivist as "obligations" to me, but like a trade: you pay your taxes, I don't show up at your cabin to do something about the lack of animal protein in my diet (and passively/actively support a system that will stop others with more hunger for protein than me from organising to do so, reporting them to the authorities rather than cheering them on). Playing with metaphors aside, even, it always struck me as very self-serving how libertarians question every piece of conventional wisdom about society and morality except the one that there is an objective, non-socially-constructed notion of "property" or "someone's" money. No, you see, the right to levy tariffs and taxes is just an instance of theft that humans have gaslit you into accepting; the right to not have me use a thing that you consider yours, though, is part of the moral fabric of the universe.
Leaving aside the circumstance that even the pro-police claims here only seem to assert that the person who was shot would counterfactually have initiated violence if she hadn't been shot, I really think that police are a special case here. What do we get from them in return for all the money, status and authority we pay them, if not some degree of surrendering the right to avoid danger and violence that we accord to normal people? If the present police force aren't willing to take a deal that looks like "you get a salary, uniform and the right to order your fellow men around, but in return you have to accept the risk of taking the occasional pot of boiling water if the person throwing it hasn't been accused of a crime yet", maybe they should be laid off and replaced with people who are. I have few doubts that after an initial stage of kvetching we would find plenty of takers, considering how even the US military (<2x the active duty personnel relative to active LEOs, ~5x the annual deaths?) has little trouble finding recruits.
TheMotte truly has a Leviathan-shaped hole. I suppose one could say that the only solution to the state of nature is a particular conception of a governmental authority with particular properties. I don't know if that conception and those properties are things you'd be "willing to trade" for or not.
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You have a point. I'm not going to go too far out of my way to defend American cops, who in my opinion do often tend to be lawless yahoos. Even I got threatened with a shooting by them once being a boring White man doing nothing.
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