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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   36940 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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This is quite the thread. I won't watch the video since I really don't want to see a video where someone dies. Depending on how it's shown that sort of thing can be horribly haunting, and I wouldn't expect real police bodycam video to be pulling any punches.
So all I have to go on are people's descriptions from this thread, and I keep going back and forth. People can't seem to come to consensus on whether it's extremely obvious that she was just joking and thus did not deserve to be shot or whether it's obvious she was acting weird and threatening. Same for the timing of the water being thrown vs the shots fired. Then, on top of all of that, there's more philosophical disagreements about whether it's more or less okay to endanger officers, or the degree to which officers should defend themselves.

If the mostly reasonable people here are this split on the interpretation of events, then I'm afraid it'll be 100x worse in the general public.

I am surprised how obnoxious I'm finding this topic. Maybe selective, or maybe I no longer have patience, with war and AI looming, for endless, careful dissection of such a mundane event obviously pulled into attention for political aims. More assassinations, please.

Me too. Why are a bunch of supposedly intelligent rational people spending dozens of hours watching a video of a random tragedy and trying to dissect the relative value of blame of each individual involved? Pointless. Should I post some dashcam vids so we can argue about who had right of way?

Because it has the possibility of taking a narrative like Floyd did. This is a culture war thread. This is what we do here. What’s the confusing part?

I can’t imagine being a cop right now in the US.

Because I expect better from us. It's true that humans have a common flaw where they respond more strongly to one death than they do to thousands. If you want someone to give money to a nature conservancy, you don't say "1 million ducks were killed", you say "look at this one duck who was killed".

In theory, rationalists are supposed to be better and different. We don't overupdate on a single event. At least in theory. But then we have lots of people on this very thread saying, "at exactly 2:14 you can see where she throws the water", etc... I don't care. You shouldn't care. None of us should care.

The only interesting thing about this shooting is the meta-topic of why we care and how human brains are so easily hijacked by this garbage.

I can’t imagine being a cop right now in the US.

I agree there. Kamala is willing to throw a whole profession under the bus to win an election, damn the consequences. As a former prosecutor, it can't be just ignorance either. She knows exactly what she's doing.

We have some pretty good threads going of people analyzing the bodycam video, and a number of people arguing about how justified the shoot is. What I'm curious about is, which previous examples of famous police incidents do you think are more or less justifiable than this one?

From the bit of the video I watched, it looks considerably more justifiable than Arbery, and somewhat more justifiable than Floyd or McGlockton. Significantly less justifiable than the shooting of Jacob Blake, Quite a bit less justifiable than Lil Homicide, and Ma’Khia Bryant is pretty much the gold standard of justifiable.

I'd say the cops screwed up, but were maybe technically within the law. They were dealing with a crazy lady, reacted poorly to weird behavior, and escalated things off the rails. I'd definitely be happy with the shooter losing their job, and can certainly live with murder charges, though I am curious about the contribution to the lingering unintended consequences of our last attempt at "police accountability".

Go into somebody’s house.

Tell them to go get a pot of water

They go get the pot

Hey I feel threatened

Don’t worry I’m not threatening you, lol, I a devout pacifist. I disagree strongly with your reaction in the name of Jesus, a famous pacifist you are likely familiar with

Don’t use this opportunity to leave.

Use this opportunity to take out a loaded gun and point it at a woman and tell her you’re going to shoot her in the fucking face.

She cowers on the ground

Don’t use this opportunity to leave

Continue not leaving or retreating from the woman who’s house you are currently in pointing a gun at her head while she cowers on the floor in front of you after you said you’d shoot her in the fucking face but instead walk towards her while your friend, also in possession of a loaded gun, watches.

She throws the pot of water you told her to go get at you.

You shoot her in the face

This seems like such a clear cut case of aggressive anti social cops looking for reasons to kill somebody.

This is a perfect example of bad cops.

  • -10

This is a bad summary, and I’m not sure who you think you’ll convince by it. This:

Don’t worry I’m not threatening you, lol, I a devout pacifist. I disagree strongly with your reaction in the name of Jesus, a famous pacifist you are likely familiar with

is reading a lot into her words that isn’t there.

What do you think she meant when she said this? “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus”?

As others pointed out, that phrase is used quite a lot in evangelical/Pentecostal circles, and not to convey “I’m a pacifist.” I don’t know if she was trying to make a joke or whether she was serious, but I can understand why the cops might be nervous either way. I still think the cops’ reaction (or at least one of the cop’s reactions) was extremely poor, though the second video is starting to make me think it might not rise to the level of first degree murder.

I saw an interesting claim down some Reddit cesspool that in certain Black churches it's commonly used as sort of a mild epithet when things are getting frustrating -- not sure the veracity of that, the Reddit conversation was truly horrendous CW, but it would explain quite a lot if she was saying "THESE PRETZELS ARE MAKING ME THIRSTY" and he heard "YOUR ARE LITERALLY A DEMON, GET BEHIND ME SATAN".

It's a well-known, specific exorcism and warding against evil spirits phrase in certain religious community. And these exorcisms would often include holy water. Even assuming it was meant jokingly - which I don't, it sounds to me more like crazy person rambling - , the "joke" here is something like "I'm gonna throw this scalding water in your face like a demon lol".

I don't know much about biblical stuff, but to me, that sounds like the sort of thing someone would say before going on a holy war, or before trying to kill a demon. It reminds me of the Exorcist:

I cast you out! Unclean spirit! In the Name of our Lord Jesus Christ! It is he who commands you! It is he who flung you from the gates of Heaven to the depths of Hell!

It sounds pretty threatening to me, but I haven't watched the video, so I don't know her tone.

Dramatically less justifiable than Michael Brown, very slightly more justifiable than Daniel Shaver (but only just).

If she was dead serious about rebuking them in the name of Jesus so what? I watched the video and it's damning (cough) of the officers. Just outrageous. I would imagine regardless of political outcome a large number of people will think twice before calling the cops for any reason whatsoever now (which is the only reason these guys were at her house.) In the footage I watched there is a break where it seems they're all done, couldn't find anyone prowling around, and then suddenly an officer is asking for her ID. In her own home. Then break again and they're inside. These break/cuts may turn out to be significant. For the sake of the police I certainly hope so.

American police manuals usually instruct them to check ID at a house call.

Yes I remember that from the Cornel West Henry Louis Gates, Jr. brouhaha several years back, and I sided with those officers. Of course they didn't shoot him.

Likewise when Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., was arrested after getting belligerent when cops asked him to show his ID during a burglary investigation. That was the incident that led Obama to state that he didn’t know the details, but that it was obvious that the police “acted stupidly.” He also strongly implied that the arrest was due to racism from the police.

Apparently I'm an idiot. You're right, that's the event I was referring to.

It always feels like there are so many offramps to tragedies like this that by the time the actual incident occurs there is nothing useful left to learn. Whatever happened in those last ten to twenty seconds is basically inconsequential.

This whole thing could have not happened if:

  1. A lady didn't call the police for something she could have checked herself with a powerful enough flashlight.
  2. The police checked the backyard and then left.
  3. The police did not enter her home.
  4. One police officer remained outside with the lady while the other entered to check (if anything really needed to be checked).

And none of these necessarily need to be policy changes for the police department (aside from maybe the second one, no need to stay around after you've resolved a call). But they were all reasonable offramps where the tragedy might not have occurred. These many offramps mean that the likelihood of this happening in the first place must have been really low, but also the likelihood of it happening again is now even smaller.

@ulyssessword linked a fuller video, here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=HFun2GydGyU

There are no breaks in that video.

For what it’s worth the video is not at all graphic, in fact she’s basically totally obscured at the critical moment (a major source of argument/confusion)

That's good to know. I still may not risk it, though, I have pretty low threshold for stuff like this getting to me.

understandable, I had the bad fortune of crossing paths on X with a video of the murders of Louisa Vesterager Jespersen and Maren Ueland, the two tourist women raped/killed on Morocco in 2018. My bad luck I had autoplay enabled on the app at the moment.

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