My late wife Grace’s favorite target was P.F. Sloan‘s fatuous “Eve of Destruction,” which was, come to think of it, the musical equivalent of the Doomsday Clock. She really went on a roll when a grizzled Barry McGwire growled his single hit to an antediluvian PBS audience of Depends-wearing hippies. “How can these idiots sing along with that song as if it wasn’t nonsense, 50 years after the “eve of destruction” never took place?” she shouted, before making me turn the channel to a re-run of “Sanford and Son.”
Maybe Bruce was emulating Eve…” I especially liked the extravagant jibberish of..
And think of all the hate there is in Red ChinaThen take a look around to Selma, AlabamaAh, you may leave here for four days in spaceBut when you return, it’s the same old placeThe poundin’ of the drums, the pride and disgraceYou can bury your dead, but don’t leave a traceHate your next door neighbor but don’t forget to say grace…
Rhyming “China” with “Alabama’ was particularly ambitious.
“Victory Girls” asks, “Where is his song for Laken Riley, the young Georgia nursing student murdered by an illegal immigrant who should have never been in the country. There is no verse for Rachel Morin, a Maryland mother of five brutally killed while jogging on a trail. And there is no chorus for Jocelyn Nungaray, the TWELVE year old Texas girl whose life ended in a brutal crime committed by illegals…”
Of course not. A song like that would be condemned as xenophobic hate-mongering, and an attempt to spark racist violence against peaceful “migrants” who “just want a better life.” But promoting hate against hard-working law-enforcement officers enduring abuse and missiles as they try to enforce the law (‘or so they say”—asshole)…that noble and fair.
Ethics Alarms 
This combat expert seems to make a solid case that the shooting of Alex Pretti was completely indefensible, no matter how much adrenaline the shooter was experiencing. What do you make of it? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjN73-gn90Q
He must have gone to the William Shatner school of line delivery.
I didn’t get much further than “Irrefutable”. My assumption is, if you have to tell me that, it’s not.
Point about the line delivery, although it’s still crisper than mine.
If it were just a random video you came across, then I wouldn’t fault you for clicking away after “irrefutable.” However, I, who watched the whole video, posted it here with the assessment that the creator appears to back up his claim, and that the video is not full of empty reasoning as you might guess from an opening making such strong statements. What information do you have about Pretti’s death, and where did you get it?
practicing self defense lawyer breaks down the shooting
Thanks, this adds information. I don’t think I saw the part where Pretti puts hands on an ICE officer in the earlier videos. The lawyer also raises a good point that once that happens, they’re looking at him as a threat rather than looking for reasons to decide they can safely assume he’s no longer a threat. I may need to find more footage to see if Pretti was doing anything else besides recording.
As a general note for the people in this discussion, I’m not emotionally invested in the idea that ICE is primarily at fault, or that Pretti is. What I’m trying to accomplish here is to equip people to present their cases in a cogent and respectful manner. If you’re right, that does no good unless you’re conveying the most important points in a way that people will listen to and understand. If you’re wrong, then expressing the basics of your position clearly and matter-of-factly is the best way to find out as soon as possible without burning any bridges.
When I’m trying to get an idea across to a stupid person, I break it down into the simplest, most relevant concepts and find ways to illustrate them. It’s much more effective than just insulting them. I look for things they do right and praise them. I apologize when I speak unclearly, so they know I don’t assume I’m always right. The same principle applies to political disagreements.
I might argue that a combat veteran is not an I.C.E agent or a police officer. Different training, different skill set, different job parameters.
If you watched the video, the creator of the video addresses that specifically: In wartime, he is not allowed to shoot disarmed enemy combatants. ICE and police are supposed to be held to a higher standard of preventing civilian deaths, not a lower one. What part of this explanation does not satisfy you?
Do you believe that the ICE training and job parameters include shoving people and pepper spraying them for standing nearby filming (and stepping in front of the person they just shoved for no visible reason)? If so, do you believe those are acceptable training and parameters for law enforcement?
Most importantly: Just how far are you willing to trust an authority figure who says that the only people who can question their decisions are the people who have gone through the same training?
Democracy can only work if people can learn to recognize the difference between good ideas and bad ideas in order to hold experts accountable. They don’t need to be able to come up with those ideas on their own or follow all the details. They only need to be able to critique the basic reasoning.
If we throw up our hands and say “the executive branch are trained professionals; they must know what they’re doing!” then we have no accountability. How is that any different from “trust the science”? Do you defer to the scientists and expert elite authorities on climate change and COVID when they tell people all the things that need to be shut down? If not, why should we automatically assume ICE is blameless when someone dies, regardless of what the videos show?
“What part of this explanation does not satisfy you?”
This: per my father, who was there, American troops shot unarmed combatants fairly frequently when it was a choice of doing that or failing in their mission, winning the war. And most veterans of any war will have the same accounts to relate.
Fair point; it does depend on what the mission is and what you expect the people to do if you don’t kill them first.
My question is, was Pretti doing anything to indicate that he was an enemy combatant and not merely a concerned citizen? How did the ICE officers think that Pretti was going to make them fail in their mission if they a) didn’t push him (and the other people nearby), b) pepper spray him, and then possibly c) shoot him? (See my response to Alizia for why the shooting might have been an understandable accident/misunderstanding, pending further investigation, which I would expect the administration to be obligated to do.)
He was obviously not just a concerned citizen because he was hostile and creating a difficult working environment deliberately! Law enforcement should not have to guess about motives: Res Ipsa Loquitur applies. He was in the way. That’s what got him killed….the chaos he intentionally escalated.
I’m assuming that the actions that he took that were hostile and created a difficult working environment were him getting too close, right? Or did he do something else that caused you to apply that label to him?
At the point Pretti was pepper sprayed, was there anything he could have done that would have kept him alive? Dropped the phone, maybe? Left the gun at home? I ask because if there is no off-ramp between getting pepper sprayed to the ground by ICE and getting shot, then I have serious complaints about ICE training. They should be able to keep incapacitated people alive better than that, hostile or not.
“What do you make of it?“
What I make of it is that people will conclude things based on feelings rather than on evidentiary facts. Rather similar to the George Floyd video that, frankly, just looked really bad even though, when more closely examined, and with all the factors taken into consideration that came out later, what it ‘looked like’ was happening, was not in fact happening. None of this can now help Chauvin who sits in jail of course (a bad conviction IMO), and not much can change how “people’s perception” has been formed and now stands in people’s minds.
What I think can be taken away from the entire incidents of Minnesota is that the popular perspective is winning out and will continue to win out. For the mass of people observing — as you and I ‘observe’ by what comes to us through our cellphones (I guess that most people have their world presented to them through their phones?) — they cannot bear the sight of men dressed in military gear carrying out operations in neighborhoods that look like their own. Also, you have to take into consideration that when the majority of women see these things their sensitivity makes it impossible to see through the emotions and to discern the ‘rational facts’. (It is perhaps easier in my own case since I live now in a country that had to use military force, technology and intelligence provided by the US to attack and at least partially defeat armed radical militancy.)
See for example Helen Andrews who links female POVs with ‘wokeness’. Make of it what you will:
If you were to ask my opinion of almost everything that Trump has done and is doing — sending military dressed police into a radically occupied state and expecting successful results really has to be seen as a bad choice! — none of it NONE OF IT is going to play out to his advantage. And what this means is that his policies are failing and they will continue to fail. With this, we have to consider Trump’s failing psychology. That is, a psychology where he sets himself up for failures. Unfortunately for ‘saving America’ or ‘restoring America’ the outlook does not look good.
Within the existing structure of ‘democracy’ and the way that public relations and ‘propaganda’ works, the defined battle against ‘wokism’ (meaning radical transformations of popular culture and popular ideology) is definitely not over. These people (i.e. masses of people and opinion) will soon surge back against the alternative will that manifested itself in Donald Trump. It certainly did not help in any degree that Trump chose such belligerency on the world stage. That crude Americanism is not at all well-received. Read some of the comments under Springsteen’s recent video.
My view is that to actually get to the real bottom of what is going on in our present will require far more careful analysis about ‘what went wrong’ and why than that which MAGA has been able to conceive. It was presented to them like a TV show with a ridiculous swaggering Trump carrying on with that crude American attitude so outmoded.
Well, the whole argument is about whether the shooter was justified in feeling that the best option was to shoot the guy, right?
Pretti did bring a weapon to the situation. The weapon was removed, but there might have been more. He was pepper sprayed, but he could still get a lucky shot in blind. However, he was hunched over, kneeling on the ground, hands probably either by his face or on the ground, surrounded by several ICE personnel. Was there any possibility of him drawing another weapon even if he had one, without immediately being stopped?
Most importantly, why are these ICE people not being held to the same standards that the police are? There should at minimum be an investigation of the circumstances behind any death, same as with the police. That way we can see if there are somehow any mitigating factors that the cameras on site didn’t show, since you believe we must allow for that possibility. If you watched the video, you’d see that the evidence indicates that an ICE officer shot a defenseless man, and it’s your feelings that lead you to assume something else must have happened. Can you at least admit the possibility that what we saw on the video was what actually happened?
(The video I linked was made by a male veteran, so no, I don’t have to take into consideration that “the majority of women are too sensitive to see through emotions to rational facts”. How do you recognize when something is a “rational fact”, anyway, and not just a feeling?)
An investigation would also answer questions like, “Why did ICE escalate the situation by pepper spraying him?” If they had just treated him like a regular person recording, they could have gone about their business.
If ICE were professional, they’d be welcoming the opportunity to be recorded behaving in a courteous and responsible manner. As it stands, they are not trustworthy.
Honestly, EC, this comment would prompt me to ask, “What color is the sky on your planet?” if it were not, in your case, an honest question.
That’s not helpful. I’m asking questions in good faith, here. Alizia actually brought up a good point, which is more than you did. She said that Pretti’s weapon went off as it was being removed from him. I don’t know if that’s true, but I remember having heard someone say that, and then I had forgotten, so that’s on me. That would change the situation in a way that the creator of the video I linked doesn’t acknowledge. Maybe he didn’t realize the first shot was from the confiscated gun? I don’t know.
I do know that if it is true, it certainly changes the equation. I wouldn’t expect a law enforcement officer to immediately realize that the first shot came from one’s coworker rather than from the civilian, or that the shot was an accident instead of in response to a genuine threat. In that case, opening fire when hearing a gunshot is an understandable response in the moment.
If true, it would also mean that Pretti would have been carrying a gun without the safety on.
It would be really nice if we had an investigation to figure out whether Pretti’s gun was discharged and whether it was an accident or on purpose. That way we could arrive at a shared understanding of how each person present contributed to the outcome and agree on how to hold people appropriately responsible, instead of just arguing about the correct assumptions to make as we interpret the video evidence available to us.
It should be helpful. You are addicted to examining issues in the abstract, when this, like most others, is not an abstract issue. Who cares what the formal stated, frequently ignored in the heat of battle, abstract ideal is in the military when it isn’t observed routinely in reality? The war analogy is apt, the conclusion you reach from it is not.
To everyone posting these “play by play” videos. Stop. It’s a bit ridiculous to arm chair quarterback a 30 second interaction in a 30 minute frame by frame play back. If only these ICE agents had 30 WHOLE minutes to think about what was happening maybe we could convict them of murder!!!!
Get a grip guys.
These were not protestors – these were people encouraged to impede to the best of their ability the lawful pursuit of constitutional law. There is proof that these people consistently show up to harass and impede federal law enforcement doing things that they never showed up for when “their guy” was the president.
These ICE agents probably could’ve handled this situation a little better but they were in a situation they are NOT trained to handled – *NOR* are they supposed to be trained to handle rioters and agitators. They are there to arrest suspected illegal immigrants. Other state/federal agents are trained for riot control.
But guess which progressive administrations told those entities to stand down – leaving guys not trained for this mission set to do THAT as well as seek out suspected illegal immigrants. In the conditions of these harassers and rioters these guys have operated now for months. It was inevitable one of these interactions would end with someone being shot.
And no laborious frame by frame evaluation of the last 30 adrenaline filled seconds of Pretti’s life is going to do anything to describe what *SHOULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED* for weeks before he died that shows who is really culpable for his death.
About the only valid complaint this “combat vet” has is that the agents do need to have some sort of more readily recognizable uniform.
Could ICE agents have a little more training on disarming and arresting rioters? Maybe. Still not their mission set though. What seems pretty obvious here is the officers discovered a gun, did not understand that the gun had been taken away, perhaps believed there was still a gun, faced a guy who had been harassing them and was now struggling with them on the ground (even if it doesn’t look like it when you go at the rate of 1 frame per minute), and came to the mistaken conclusion that he was a lethal threat.
This is one big mistake that could have been avoided and final acts of responsibility (perfect execution of an arrest by ICE agents) would NOT have prevented these episodes from continuing to happen until someone got shot in a different instance of this. The first acts of responsibility (not encouraging ordinary people to impede law enforcement) WOULD prevent these episodes from ever happening.
No, that’s backwards. I’m trying to get concrete details on what you think happened to justify the outcome. Instead, I’m being met with abstractions like “he shouldn’t have been there with a gun” and “you weren’t there; you don’t know what it was like”.
You’re right, we’re all armchair-analyzing this. With that in mind, what is a concrete example of something that could have been going through the officer’s head in a few seconds of adrenaline-fueled panic that justified firing on a guy on the ground, surrounded by other officers? It’s not enough to say that it looks worse than it is; you need to provide an example of a realistic alternative interpretation, or at least point out an assumption that we’re making that unreasonably excludes an alternative that excuses ICE.
For example, Alizia pointed out that I was assuming that the first shot was from the ICE officer who drew his gun. If he heard a gunshot and then fired, that would seem to absolve him of a lot of blame here.
Michael West also provides the sort of concrete answer I’m looking for. Sure, ICE isn’t trained to deal with interference because that’s not their job. They push Pretti away, tell him to keep a safe distance from their activities, and that’s fine. I would have expected it to end there, unless there’s something else I’m missing.
In the video I saw an ICE officer standing very close to another person who didn’t appear to be doing anything other than maybe talking, and he shoved them to the ground. That seemed inappropriate. Then Pretti stepped up to the officer and was pepper sprayed; that’s excusable, because he closed the distance to the officer. The officer continued to pepper spray him, and then multiple officers surrounded him and searched him for weapons. That seemed unnecessary, but I’m probably missing something here.
Michael points out my assumption that Pretti had not been interfering prior to the recorded moments that showed him just recording on his phone. I also don’t know what Pretti or the other person were saying to ICE that led ICE to physically escalate the situation. Were they making threats?
I’m concerned that we aren’t getting an official explanation that at least matches up with what we see on the videos. When a law enforcement officer kills someone, we want to be able to trust that they had a good reason. It is the government’s obligation, not the people’s, to maintain that trust, and one way it does so is through transparency. That would address the assumptions that I and others may be making.
What happened? A well-meaning but misguided and completely in-the-wrong guy interfered with law enforcement in a stressful and chaotic situation thus making it more chaotic in the process. That chaotic situation, for a confluence of reasons that may never be determined, resulted in the man’s death. This occurred only because so many on the political Left have been convinced, or foolishly believe, that enforcing a valid, important law is somehow cruel and unfair, and have set out to demonize both the policy of enforcement and the lawful enforcers.
Since not enforcing the law isn’t a rational options, and not addressing immediately the consequences of the previous administration not following the law (as it was obligated to do), the enforcement process is necessarily difficult and upsetting. Because of the rhetoric being used to inflame hysteria and hate, it is also needlessly dangerous to law enforcement, and is generating tragic scenarios like the ones that ended up with the deaths of Good and Pretti. ICE had to be in those situations, Pretti and Good did not, and should not have been
Whether or not he was correct in disapproving of ICE’s goals or methods doesn’t automatically excuse them shooting him. The reason he was there, and whether or not you personally agree with his political opinions, are ethically irrelevant. He could have been there to protest Area 51, and it wouldn’t justify ICE shooting him. Videos seem to indicate that unless he was making some threats that we couldn’t hear, ICE escalated the situation unilaterally. Just showing up and recording law enforcement is every citizen’s right, as long as they keep a safe distance and don’t interfere with the operation. Did you see any interference on the videos?
“That chaotic situation, for a confluence of reasons that may never be determined, resulted in the man’s death.”
Gee, this seems kind of abstract. If you’re not satisfied with the evidence provided on video, maybe an investigation would help. You might not care about the reasons ICE shot Pretti, but people who have to walk around in cities with active ICE operations care, and they have a right to the truth about how law enforcement operates. “May never be determined” is not a good enough answer when it comes to law enforcement killing people.
You’re concerned about the Democrats leaning towards authoritarianism. If a conservative was recording Democratic law enforcement officers arresting someone for, say, disobeying an order to leave a private business unless they put on a mask, and the officers shoved the conservative, pepper sprayed them, discovered a concealed firearm, and shot them, would you not demand answers? Or would you say, “oh, well, these things happen”?
They didn’t set out to shoot him, and you have been using this cheat repeatedly. A guy on the ground with a gun got shot as a result of the confusion the gun and his conduct created. Maybe the gun went off. Maybe some one who knew he had a gun thought his cellphone was a firearm: that has happened before. Maybe an agent shouted “Gun!” and an agent over-reacted. There is literally no chance an ICE agent thought, “This asshole is a pain in the butt, let’s kill him!” But that’s how many narratives are slanted.
Thank you, this is the sort of thing I was looking for. Actual reasons to consider alternative explanations, rather than a blanket benefit of the doubt to law enforcement and a blanket “brought it on themselves” for someone filming law enforcement. Those are abstracts that not everyone buys. You have to back them up with something concrete.
Maybe the ICE officer who shot him wasn’t aware he had been carrying a phone, and so thought the phone was a weapon. Maybe the gun went off. That should be easy to ascertain.
You seem exceedingly certain of this. Would you mind telling me how you know, or do you want to walk back that certainty a bit, for the sake of intellectual honesty? Are you being hyperbolic there? Because when people don’t trust ICE, they’ll going to want you to admit that there’s a possibility that their mistrust may not be wholly unwarranted, or they have literally no reason to take anything you on the matter say seriously.
“That chaotic situation, for a confluence of reasons that may never be determined, resulted in the man’s death.”
Not abstract at all. That’s FACT. No combination of random camera angles and testimony can possibly tell us with certainty what the shooters saw, heard and thought in the second this encounter happened.
If you have a legitimate point in here, it’s buried behind what appears to be a hyperbolically hand-waving abdication of responsibility.
I’m going to charitably seek clarification, though: When you say “no combination of random camera angles”, are you allowing for the possibility that a more comprehensive array of camera footage could refute at least some statements law enforcement might make, like “it looked like he had a rocket launcher!”, or at least establish that anyone who did perceive such things is not closely enough attached to reality to be in law enforcement?
Just trying to establish some bounds on when you think video evidence is useful for holding law enforcement accountable, and when we should ignore all the videos and take the official statement at face value.
“If you watched the video, you’d see that the evidence indicates that an ICE officer shot a defenseless man, and it’s your feelings that lead you to assume something else must have happened. Can you at least admit the possibility that what we saw on the video was what actually happened?“
No, not quite. But I suppose that what you might suggest of me is indeed how other people will react to the video. As you know they say it is like a Rorschach test, right? People look at it and ‘project’ into it.
I will only say that in the heat of a moment, and under lots of pressures, that a situation occurred and there was a bad result. I strongly suspect that if reviewed by a committee of qualified officials that they will decide in favor of the officer.
Still I will give you my moment by moment assessment: a man provoked officers who were aggressive and ready and willing to pounce on anyone interfering with their operations. The fool carried a weapon AND chose to fight with police. (They say that if you carry a weapon visible or invisible that your responsibility to act correctly must increase, not decrease, so what he did was ‘on the face’ completely irresponsible).
He was disarmed and his weapon went off by accident (first shot). The man continued to struggle and the other officers, who may or may not have known that the weapon was removed, and could not have had the ‘distance’ that you and I have now and then possibly when he was reaching near his waist area they made a quick ‘interpretation’ (that their life was in danger) and in the excitement and uncertainty of the moment shot him many times. That seems about right to me.
“If ICE were professional, they’d be welcoming the opportunity to be recorded behaving in a courteous and responsible manner. As it stands, they are not trustworthy.“
Again I see things from a different angle and perhaps from more distance than you (or from a different historical perspective). I see the agents as acting out of a slowly developing intolerance for the entire program of the Left Radical Progressives. That intolerance was previously very tolerant. There will come a time when there will be a moment of decision. This does mean open civil conflict. If it is a question of keeping power out of the hands of that sector or segment that advocates for (what looks like) revolution (toward socialistic or communistic forms and perhaps a great deal of what is meant by “woke”), then what I say (again from my experience in Latin America, Venezuela and Colombia) tis hat ‘rational people’ will have to make consequential decisions. So my ideas tend toward what this man is saying:
https://youtu.be/IgMfBosrsCc?si=l8ZcptZ4EOXLB7Gn
In my view what we see developing, or unfolding, will not and perhaps cannot be resolved through traditional democratic debate. But I will confess that I do not believe that you (“one”) can give any ground to the communistic-oriented radicals.
Further, I believe that Donald Trump had a “mandate” and if he would have been much more intelligent (crafty, subtle) that he could well have initiated the reversals that are necessary. But it is himself that gets in his own way. It must be a psychological complex.
(You should keep in mind that I am “an observer from far away” and my object is really just to see things clearly. And a big part of that is being honest, which is not easy given the pressures).
“Maybe the ICE officer who shot him wasn’t aware he had been carrying a phone, and so thought the phone was a weapon. Maybe the gun went off. That should be easy to ascertain.“
It might contribute to your assessment to know that some who watched the video noticed that at a certain point he seemed to move his right arm back toward his belt area. That is when many shots were fired. I am uncertain what happened to the phone. I do not think it was in his hands. But I am unsure.
https://www.youtube.com/live/rPpylyOZQhg?si=TSaLMl9Q5mmYvNin
Ugh. “Born to Run” and “The River” were brilliant. He had swallowed the kool-aid and bought into this own PR. That lyric is something truly sophomoric and pathetic.
jvb
Maybe Bob wrote that line to appeal to Joan Baez. It does stick out like a sore thumb.
Maybe Bruce Springsteen ginned up this doozy to try to get people to watch his flopped bio pic? Maybe he should re-release the bomb as “Deliver me from Minnesota, eh?” A really pathetic publicity play. And would the Springsteen demographic be for or against illegal immigration?
Bruce’s first 3 albums were such classics – All about coming of age and going to the shore and not having any money, but being so in love and being innocent and so full of shit and rebelling for nothing other than wanting summer to last forever!!
THAT I can/did relate to.
But now…What the hell? Springsteen, you’re deranged? WAKE UP?
I must say, TDS is sick powerful. PDR Volume 1.
Hey, The Boss, stay in your lane. You’re blowing my high.
Like Jimmy the Cheese Man said to Pauly in “The Pope of Greenwich Village”:
“Waiting tables is what you know. Making cheese is what I know. Let’s stay with what we know here.”
I stopped paying attention to him after “American Skin.” Like many performers he started believing his opinion meant more than other people’s.
I agree with Bruce about Minnesota, and I don’t like the song. It’s just so…banal. There is, fortunately, a far more gifted songwriter who has dealt with the subject with wit and artistry. https://youtu.be/OjGHf7OvglM?si=A4zM_e6J1oMV7Kuw
“Occupiers”? Private army? ICE isn’t enforcing the law? Justice is ignoring Federal law and letting criminals free? “Left to die”? Mercy for what?
Honestly, JD, I have no idea what you could possibly agree with. It’s sentimental fantasy.
AND banal.
Left to die–they denied a doctor access to Good’s body for 7 minutes. There’s video. Try to keep up.
Private army–well, put it this way–ICE is being supported by a president in a way no White House has ever gotten behind a law enforcement agency. Here’s an example. Prior to this, if ANY federal officer was involved in a questionable shooting, they were placed on leave, the investigation would be handled by the FBI, under the supervision of the attorneys at the DOJ most familiar with use of force law, training, and procedures. The top people in the agency and the White House would not, literally hours after the event, proclaim the evil nature of the shooting victim, and how they were a “domestic terrorist” intending to “massacre” officers. The innocence of the officers would not become a talking point because, if the leadership is immediately proclaiming your innocence, it kind of makes a neutral independent investigation of the facts…um…hard? So yeah, private army isn’t FACTUAL in the sense that ICE isn’t being paid by Trump (which is lucky for them, given his long record of stiffing vendors!), but it is closer than any president has ever come to having his own private goon squad. BTW–one more lovely example–career folks in the US Attorneys office resigned when they were told by DOJ to NOT investigate the shooting but DO investigate the partner of the dead woman. That’s courage. That’s ethics.
So in other words, it’s not true, but it feels true.
Exactly.
To quote “Taggart” in “Blazing Saddles,” “I am depressed.” I was really hoping you, as someone with functioning brain cells and demonstrated critical thinking skills, might be able to supply me, and everyone, with the first credible, legitimate, fair argument that ICE in Minnesota is in the wrong, and that “ICE Out” isn’t just as indefensible as attacks on “the pigs” from the Left have been for 60 years. And the best you can do is this? Recycled biased talking points from BLM and worse?
1. Good was almost certainly dead already. She was left in her car for 7 minutes? That’s leaving her on the street to die? Is ICE supposed to have rolling MASH unit with them? That’s not their job, and they can’t just stop operations because of kamikaze attacks Plus it was a single messed up incident, again, irresponsibly catalyzed by the words of Democrats calling law enforcement the Gestapo, or worse. Too bad her body had to sit there for 7 whole minutes, but then that’s why you don’t risk getting shot because you interfered with law enforcement. Yeah, BLM went on and on about how the already dead Mike Brown was left on the tarmac for quite a while. Again, sing “Feelings.” Non-substantive. Just because it can be exploited by anarchists doesn’t mean its important.
2. So it is not Trump’s private army, but it kinda sorta feels that way. Got it. Good one, JD.
3.And now you are focusing, not on what ICE is doing, but that its policies when law-breaking citizens prompt violence giving them martyrs! Tangential, and classic collateral cherry-picking. ICE is out-manned and surrounded in Minnesota, because local police is deliberately allowing these clashed to happen. Verdict on #3: weak and desperate.
4. Again, as is typical in criticism of Trump and Team, words rather than actions and reality are always the issue I agree that the administration Big Mouths should have kept their mouths shut until they had the facts, but the dilemma posed by assholes like Frey getting on TV and announcing that Goode was “murdered” and that there was no threat to the agents means that the proper command decision is to support the agents, much as the chain of command did with the Capitol Police during that riot. They screwed up significantly, but they have a narrative to counter. That has zero to do with the necessity to forcibly remove millions of illegal aliens.
5. They are not “hunting minorities,” they are hunting illegals who happen to be almost all minorities, and whose fault is THAT? Not ICE! This is the old anti-profiling Catch-22, except that the justifications for law enforcement conduct is even stronger. Outrageously and dangerously, sanctuary cities allow criminal illegals to mix in with the general populations, and it’s like looking for needles in a stack of needles. Law enforcement has no choice but to search using the characteristics haye have to go on. Don’t you have any pangs at all when you engage in the reflex “Racist!” fallback of the Left on every policy argument? I think it should cause a light bulb to go on…
6. Oh. Partisan, biased, prosecutors resigned, so that means their position must be valid! What kind of logic is that? Wait, wait, I know: it’s pure Cognitive Dissonance manipulation. Except I KNOW, literally know, that the legal profession on both sides of the adversary system is wildly Left-biased and anti-Trump inclined. They were right to resign rather than try to sabotage policies they don’t like, which was a game plan in Trump I, but the action is irrelevant to assessing ICE conduct.
Well, come to think of it, I am encouraged by your valiant but lame effort, which, in your defense, was only because ya got nothin’, like the whole open borders cult. I was really hoping I was missing something, but if this is the best you can muster, I am secure that I’m not. These are all rationalizations, deflections, and logical fallacies.
I am genuinely grateful that you made the effort, JD, and that’s not sarcasm.
Now do DEI….
OH! I almost forgot! Courage isn’t ethics. It’s what I call an enabling virtue. Courage is neutral ethically. It can help one be more ethical, or to do something that is completely wrong, like, to pick an example out of the air, interfering with law enforcement because you feel sorry for illegal immigrants. Lots of Hitler’s soldiers were courageous, you know. What matters is the purpose and the intended results. The ICE agents are being incredibly courageous.
I agree that “Join ICE’ is better than Bruce’s song, just as ear wax-flavored jelly beans are better than the vomit-flavored ones. Good satire and protest songs don’t cheat: ICE isn’t “hunting down minorities’ any more than it’s hunting people who have 10 toes. If most illegal immigrants are minorities, it’s despicable to use that as a criticism.
It’s simply playing off the widely accepted idea that conservatives hate black and brown people for no reason at all and want them out of this country for any reason or no reason by any means necessary. Private army? That’s been knocking around since the ’80s, when the left said that the CIA was the private army of the president. It’s just another way of the left saying that anything they don’t like is illegitimate.
The fact is it would be very easy to take a lot of their rhetoric and turn it around on them at this point. I could very easily say that if you get your head split open by a baton or you get a face full of tear gas, or if you get shot, sometimes it just plain sucks to be a domestic terrorist. It’s also very easy for me to say if you don’t belong here you don’t belong here and this isn’t that hard to comprehend. It would also be very easy for me to say that if you sympathize more with those who break the law then with those who obey the law and keep this country actually working, then you are basically a traitor.
The fact is that the left isn’t interested in anything other than getting more power for themselves until they have all the power and no one can disagree with them. That chance went out the window in 2016 and they have never recovered from that.
If you think ICE isn’t hunting minorities, ie, asking Brown folk or folks with accents for their papers, then you live in a separate world from reality. Sorry. There’s video. And press reports. Think of the 56 year old Laotian American, a citizen, who was pulled almost naked from his home, frogmarched to a police car, in 7 degree weather, and interrogated for an hour before they finally BELIEVED what he, and his entire family, had been saying–he was an American citizen. that wouldn’t ever happen to you, Jack. You’re white. You can get very angry about what people say about ICE, and not everything that is said about it is true. But much of it is.
https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/ice-elderly-hmong-american-citizen-arrested-st-paul/
Mistakes are sometimes made. So what?
Rationalization 19. The Perfection Diversion, or “Nobody’s Perfect!” and “Everybody makes mistakes!”
Pending more information about why they arrested that guy, since the reason they gave (that he lived with two legitimate targets) was apparently a lie, I’m going to provisionally conclude that the “mistake” and the lie are signature significance. Trustworthy and competent law enforcement doesn’t ever do things like that. They certainly don’t go into someone’s house and arrest them without a warrant.
Of course, like about 75% of the list, “nobody’s perfect” has valid applications and this is one of them.
wrongful arrests happen all the time, and not only to “brown-skinned” people.
Learned of this particular case yesterday.
https://ij.org/press-release/innocent-mother-jailed-for-three-days-over-mistaken-identity-files-federal-lawsuit-against-florida-police/
That sounds like a problem worth fixing.
Alright, pasting the wrong picture I can understand. Someone was researching all people by that name and compiling their photos, and they accidentally pasted the wrong photo.
Here’s what I don’t get:
First, if they only had the wrong photograph, how did they know to have someone waiting to arrest the wrong person when she got back from a cruise? Were both of the people with similar names on the cruise, and they were watching all the people disembarking to see who matched the photograph? Otherwise, they should have been tracking the other person by name, located her, and then gotten confused when she didn’t match the photograph. Or did they not realize the two different names referred to two different people?
Second, why are we tolerating the torture of prisoners, let alone prisoners, let alone prisoners who haven’t actually been convicted of a crime yet? Is the loud music to try and keep prisoners from whispering to each other or something?
Third, if this person’s family hadn’t had contacts in the system to reevaluate the process behind her arrest, at what point in the process would they realize they had the wrong person, and how long would that have taken?
Is there a way we can hold people accountable for being sure they’re arresting the right person, without discouraging them from making arrests that are justified?