I have about as much faith in the courts ability to actually walk any of this back as I do in their ability to return the families they have kidnapped from my community.
You might not be aware of it. It was there though. I had friends going to support families in detention in San Antonio in 2010/11.
Consider that it might be possible you're the one who is actually ignoring stuff based on a political position? And that rather than ignoring it on a Dem/GOP line, the line is between "normal, real adult electoral politics" and all the folks actually doing work to oppose these evil things directly.
A lot of my Democrat-voting friend easily forget Standing Rock or Furguson, but I doubt the people who were there do. By the same token, those same things have oft been forgotten or dismissed by the GOP-identifying friends of mine.
The problem is once you start opening a history book (that's not, say, published for teaching children in Texas) it gets really hard to thing to say "the law is static and started 15 years ago" or even "it's a law so it has ethical weight", and those things are hard to track for most folks and the implications are almost traumatic.
I get that your question is real and a struggle, because that's how it is for many folks in my life, well-intentioned and smart folks who were raised in a system that didn't seem like a problem to them because it fit them well enough, or they were so circumcised by it at an early age that they don't even notice what they've been cut away from.
But for a lot of us, the fact that a bunch of yall got together and decided to vote on who to kick out of the places where we live doesn't hae a lot of moral ethical weight.
Consider that one reason half the folks in the us don't vote is because we know that neither side is going to do anything resembling a good outcome and signing our names to things we don't agree with isn't just a lie but makes us complicit in our own expolitation.
And as yall have gotten ever more violent in practicng yalls "democratically produced" decision, those of us who have, like, an actual moral position are moving ever close to emulating John Brown.
At the same time it's neat to live in a separated reality from the people thinking that "In my opinion the ICE unrest is a smoke screen."
The federal gov disarmed a protestor and executed them on the street.
That doesn't seem like a "distraction"... that seems like -the literal thing that you're worrying about- happening in a highly obvious and direct way.
As a left-wing gun owner, a pretty common conversation is about how limited the right wing gun owners understandings are, because this is, like, literally the thing they have been fantasizing about all along.
Wild times for sure.
I hope the world many of us live in never actually enters yours and you can keep enjoying your fantasy of government oppression while some of us are out here being physically assaulted by the state.
Same video, two movies. Presentation, pace, timing, narrative all designed to reinforce your existing biases, even if you aren't aware of them. You look and think you've seen. You're nudged and put into a bubble with people offering up comments that validate and verify what you think, and what you know, and what you believe.
Anything outside your bubble is framed as a conspiracy theory or the ramblings of deluded, even evil people on "the other side".
The media streams you watch end up being a rorschach test - carefully crafted and deployed to different bubbles, A/B tested, cynically manipulative and deliberately framed and intended to evoke specific reactions. The language is carefully used so two people can watch the exact same clip or newscast or soundbite and hear what sounds like a reasonable reinforcement of what they already believe. Sometimes things will even technically be 100% factual, but it'll be just as manipulative and as much of a "lie" as if they'd made it up entirely.
I don't think bubbles is the right paradigm, anymore - these are deep, deep pits, and every piece of media that reinforces your model, where that model is the one intended for you to have by some of the big influences, brings you another shovelful deeper, and you've got to put that much more effort in to dig your way out.
Trying to talk to anyone who hasn't worked their own way out of digging out of a media pit ends up being a team sport or a tribalistic conflict - the facts and the stories don't mesh, and if you're 100% certain of your facts, and your "opposition" concedes to the facts, then you're going to think your story is the right one. The cognitive dissonance and the effort required to update your model to match reality - to recognize the manipulative, malignant influences deploying these conflicting storylines, and to figure out how to identify what actual reality is - is too much for most people, and way too much for any casual online interactions.
Not sure how you fix that without forbidding some actors from doing what they do at a legislative level, and that gets into hairy freedom of speech territory.
You saw a video that might have been murder. It might have been an accident. We know the gun he carried was notorious for unintended discharge. It might have been dropped and gone off, it might have fired accidentally in the agent's hand after being taken away, prompting the trained, legitimate response of law enforcement. It could have been a cold, deliberate execution if one of the CBP agents knew Pretti from previous conflicts and was antagonistic towards him. It could have been a heated, spur of the moment killing way outside the bounds of the law.
You certainly don't know - none of us have all the facts, and the investigation into it will reveal it. It's that both sides present the same facts, the same video, and tell two starkly different narratives, either of which are reasonable conclusions based on the facts that can be proven from the available evidence. What doesn't get talked about is that even with multiple videos, from multiple angles, nobody has sufficient evidence to definitively prove what actually happened.
What I do know is that it's extraordinarily stupid to get into a heated conflict with any sort of law enforcement, especially when armed, because any sort of accident or exceptional circumstance or misinterpretation of events is not going to go your way, legally and sometimes with regards to you losing your life. Pretti was in the wrong - you cannot physically interfere with and antagonize federal law enforcement. We have legal remedies to hold officers to account for overstepping or violations. He was well within his rights to record and then report the mistreatment of the woman he was stepping in to "protect", and the proper place and time to remedy that wrong is in court. If the officer was in the wrong, he'd have been held to account. Getting physical and up in the officers face and space was either stupid and ignorant, or a deliberate act intended to elicit additional violence. There's protest "training" out there that teaches people to do that sort of thing, with the intent of escalating violence deliberately, specifically for agitprop and convenient political narrative purposes.
The government has the sole and absolute monopoly on violence, for better or worse, and if you intrude on that in the slightest, you will lose.
They want the nebulous, uncertain, rorschach test incidents where they can spin an event to tell the story they want to tell, regardless of whether that story is actually true. That doesn't mean the CBP agents were in the right, nor that Pretti was responsible or did it on purpose, or that anyone involved in the whole series of events had ulterior motives. The only thing we know, until an investigation is finalized, and due process is enacted, is that we lack critical information that explains the full context and nuance of the incident. There are a metric shit ton of ways the actual story might have gone, ranging from schizophrenic break (by an agent, or Pretti) to suicide by cop, to tragic accident caused by a notoriously flawed weapon, to some other asshat, currently unknown, throwing a firecracker after the officer announced "gun", and so on. We don't even have enough information to know what's a "likely" outcome and make some reasonable Bayesian projections.
The videos we saw aren't proof of anything. They're evidence of dozens of different possible scenarios, with a wide range of likely possibilities, and dozens more we don't even know to consider without having the information that investigation will bring to bear.
Hoss, you can rashomon yourself into any position.
That tactic is almost always an excuse to not realize some hard truth about the world.
Most of us look at your position and understanding you're literally just trying to gaslight yourself.
The kind of radical moral relativism indicated by your position was appealing to me when I was a sophomore philosophy student, in the same way that I found solipsism to be an interesting idea to entertain.
For instance, you know for a fact that "The government has the sole and absolute monopoly on violence" is a) not true, and as the gov becomes ever more violent it's not even "legitimate", which is the word you've gaslighted yourself into forgetting in your thinking here.
But I'm an adult now, and I have spent enough time questioning my beliefs. I have been around enough folks who think they are rational but who haven't done the "work" that I can smell it when I do it, and I can smell it when other folks do it.
> The federal gov disarmed a protestor and executed them on the street.
He was shot after disobeying lawful orders and the man who disarmed him possibly negligently discharged the victim's firearm while the other officers were wrestling him and the other officers didn't have the information that he was disarmed. This wasn't intentional, this was an accident. There is also another angle showing him kicking an ICE vehicle and breaking its tail light the week before. This is no bystander. It is delusional to believe that it is possible to deport millions of convicted criminal illegal aliens without an incident while thousands interfere with police operations as they deport criminals. The bills being passed are far more relevant to Americans' civil liberties because they make the average American who is NOT currently a criminal into one for possession and manufacture of plastic and metal parts. This is an untenable position.
> some of us are out here being physically assaulted by the state
Yeah, I'm not belligerently protesting the deportation of illegal aliens.
He was shot while being dog piled by 6 officers dude. There was no way for him to defend himself when they already had taken his weapon. It was murder. Was he intentionally out there protesting? Yeah, he probably was. Was he filming ICE and giving them verbal hell? Absolutely he was. Was he interfering? He absolutely wasn’t. They just let him get under their skin because they aren’t professional. They murdered him because they got scared that he had a gun. One of the officers was on video saying “I got the gun…” sighing as he stood up.
So yeah, tensions are high. Minnesotans feel violated. ICE sees a battleground, not a state. That’s an issue.
”There's a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people” - Admiral Adama
I mean, depends- if I steal from my employer I go to jail, if my employer steals my wages they get a fine.
If I murder someone in cold blood on the street, I might not make it off the scene before getting gunned down; if a government agent summarily executes a protester, they might get a couple days vacation and a heft goFundme payout.
Nothing new there, though... if, for instance, in 1955 a random black kid has some white guys think he looked at the wrong woman in the wrong way, he might get violently killed that day; the men who do that killing might never face -any- consequences.
So the answer to your question is highly variable and has been for all of the time that anyone I know has been alive. The application of law in the US is and has always been mostly determined by class and race.
One of the pleasant things, though, is that if that kind of thing is on the table you probably have some kind of moral imperative to start doing something about it.
Previously I felt like a hyperbolic nerd, and now I have a whole lot of new friends all working on the same stuff. Wheee. Go team. I hate it.
Fortunately it feels very much the other direction, lately- more folks seeing the dangers, more willingness to take the long bet. Fewer folks at brunch.
That's a bet some of have been taking for a while, though it's oftent felt dumb, and we haven't needed a great shocking occasion to do it.
It's been this way for a while, though. It's just that the stakes of the things they are willing to tell folks to "2+2=5" about seem to have dropped substantially. It used to be about the goodness of US foreign interventions and, say, "imperial capitalism" in general, and they made plenty of fun propaganda to support it: "Red Dawn" or "First Blood"- quality and fun propaganda.
When they started kidnapping folks from our communities who've been peacefully chilling and being community members for decades, it got a lot less abstract, I think.
If it helps, understand that it becomes ever easier to get folks to disbelieve the government when they can see it; it's far harder to get the average brunch-enjoyer to care when they are doing a central american coup... much easier to care when they are shooting yt wmn in the streets.
Famously, there are plenty of stories in the west about eastern-bloc countries and propaganda, where everyone knows that that the papers don't tell the truth but the truth circulates regardless.
So maybe don't worry about the false narratives- worry about the recouperative powers of capital to pull all those radicalized liberals back into the fold instead of using a mass line of organization to force structural changes.
In addition to this, using the search feature is a much easier way to surface content. I find the site pretty useless, but I have a couple sets of title and then comment terms that work ell for me- that's how I found this thread.
Honestly, the long term effect that I've felt of pepper spray is that it's made me decidedly more radical in my politics. Like, I went from just wanting to hold my opinions and play my music to actively organizing with my local anarchist collectives.
I believe a lot of folks feel that way- I know a lot of folks who were pretty moderate in their actions and outlooks that have experienced the state using chemical weapons on them and who are now much, much more radical in their outlook.
Yeh, the poster should have also at least name checked the administrative detention system of CIA's Phoenix program in Vietnam, which seems like a reasonable test-bed for many of the recent and horrific systems and a kind of common ancestor to both of the US ICE agency and its cousins in the Levant.
Leaving that bit of history out certain seems like a missed point of history, and absent that your parent post's point might indeed seem a little reach-y.
When going back into history, examples become too abstract, a thing that other people did, in different times. The example I used is not only recent, it is still ongoing. It is right there in front of domestic authoritarians, showing them how it can be done in this day and age. And it is right there in front of the general population, showing them what can and will be done to them if they do not make it clear to their governments that they will not tolerate such conduct. Therefore I insist that I used the correct example.
think of ELF/Earth First in the 90s with "ecoterrorism"... plenty of stops between that and, say, the Haymarket affair. Or hell, much of the anti-indigenous genocide could probably be described using the term "counter-insurgency", which is closely related to how the US gov. thinks of terrorism.
Sorry if I'm skeptical.
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