I've watched video of the shooting of Alex Pretti, from two angles.
I saw no justification for this shooting.
Based on what I saw, and my mind could change if I saw evidence to the contrary, I believe the agents who killed him should be prosecuted. The Trump administration is claiming they were the victims.
And far too many people will watch that video and decide whether they agree with the killing or not based on who is President.
If this were a conservative filming agents enforcing lockdowns or some other progressive thing, the people who are outraged and the people who are justifying it would almost completely swap places.
This shooting, amd the reactions of so many, are just symptoms of a much bigger problem:
Too many of you literally do not care about right and wrong anymore. You care about red and blue, and pretend those are synonymous with right and wrong.
But team red and team blue are wrong far more often than they're right.
Too many of you are actively participating in your own subjugation.
Stop and think. Please.
As for those of you who aren't falling for this, please pray for America. Too many of her citizens want people they hate to suffer slightly more than them, much more than they want a constitutionally-limited republican form of government.
Even if you take the conservative defense of each ICE killing, you’re left with “We haphazardly scaled up a poorly trained police force to storm into neighborhoods that voted against the president, where we antagonize the local population until someone resists arrest, and then we kill them,” which is morally horrendous on top of being an absurd way to do immigration policy.
Many people believe the legal threshold for self-defense is lower for government officers than for ordinary citizens. It’s not.
There’s one simple test for evaluating whether an officer’s use of force was unlawful or justified as self-defense.
Ask yourself: If you, an ordinary citizen, did the same thing the officer did, how would your actions be assessed?
If someone were obstructing a street in your neighborhood, and you demanded they move, and everyone were in the same physical positions and took the same actions, would you be justified in shooting the driver of the vehicle?
I can say, unequivocally, that if you did the same thing the ICE officer in Minneapolis did, you would be found guilty of a crime, and your claim of self-defense would be rejected outright.
I explain why the accusation that Israel is committing "genocide" is blood libel.
Me:
The application of the word genocide to refer to tens of thousands of war deaths is, I mean, I think it is a kind of blood libel. It's trying to import the moral opprobrium that we associate with genocide to a designated enemy, in this case, Israel. I think because I alluded to my side bias, the sides in this case being the sides that a lot of hard left critical theory has defined, namely white oppressors against everyone else's victims.
Moynihan:
It's pretty strong to say this is like a blood libel.
Me:
Well, it is a blood libel in the sense that it is an accusation of deliberate murder, ill-founded in that the, and one could disagree with Israel's campaign against Gaza, one could say that this is not justifiable, it's not a just war. It's still different from deliberately murdering as many people as possible, as in, and we know there have been genocides. I think it really is a terrible blood libel, and it's a sign of how people's moralizing in the service of demonizing and dichotomizing, dividing the world into good and evil can just flatten their ability to analyze and to think clearly.
I think it’s unfair for biological men to compete in women’s sports. I also think this is classless. Simone Biles said she was sorry. The desire to turn apologies into culture war dunks is exactly why public remorse is dying. Humility is admirable, actually.
@billybinion Is ICE incompetent, or do they just hate these people? The excessive simplicity of these tattoo identification guidelines belies common sense.
If you accept that non-citizens have no right to due process, you are accepting that citizens have no right to due process. All the government has to do is claim that you are not a citizen; without due process you have no chance to prove the contrary.
@politicalmath I think the dwarf thing is the bigger controversy. It's a great example of the absolute absurd positions that "progressive" reasoning too often leads to.