Comment by Amezarak
8 days ago
> One does not need slow-mo to see she wasn't trying to kill anyone.
She accelerated her car before turning the wheels knowing people were in the path of her car. (Even if you argue that the wheels spinning before the wheels turn doesn't count, cars do not turn rotate on their central axis, so accelerating while turning still endangers people in front of the car.) Nobody can read her mind but the possible consequences of that action are obvious. Legally that constitutes intent, regardless of what we might want to project on her state of mind.
Further, if you do want to talk about state of mind, you cannot argue that any person behaving rationally would choose to commit a felony and flee from LEO in a vehicle in the first place. This is an extremely high-risk move for zero benefit and the video confirms it didn't even take place out of panic, which was my original thought. On the ground in that situation there can be no analysis of "what is she thinking" because she abandoned the reasonable course that anyone there would have expected her to take.
> that shooting her in the head
No confirmed gunshot wound is in her head. Where did you hear this? It appears the ICE officer fired center of mass, as two confirmed gunshot wounds are in her chest and one in her arm.
I realize that arguing these technical issues will not change your mind, because for you the emotion of "people dying is bad" trumps all the reasons it happened. But I hope it will get you to consider what other people are thinking.
> tactically unnecessary, but objectively made the situation worse
That isn't clear at all because you cannot know what the counterfactual is. There were armed people who could have shot James Fields before he accelerated into a crowd. If they had, Heather Heyer would be alive today. If they had shot him, then people would be making the same argument you're making. Hitting the gas while your car is surrounded by people is no different than firing a gun randomly. In the very best case, your are operating a deadly weapon with a total disregard for human life. In some situations (self-defense), that may be justified. But it is not innocent.
The way to stop this from happening is to stop encouraging people to commit crimes by interfering with law enforcement. There are other effective ways to protest. Another good start would be winning elections. Encouraging people to get into violent encounters with law enforcement is risking peoples' lives for nothing. Once you choose violence you don't know where it's going to go.
I highly disagree with your analysis. And yes, some of my perspective is based on the ideology that the ICE agents are largely incompetent, racist, hateful human beings led by people of the same quality.
You are correct, she didn't get shot in the head, she was shot in the chest and lived for 20 minutes while she was denied medical attention.
Any resistance to tyranny will involve disobedience of varying levels of severity. This administration is fascist in the true meaning of the word. A woman blocked the street, got killed then called a f*cking b*tch by the cop after he shot her, and a domestic terrorist before her body was cold by the DHS secretary and president and vice president.
You say she shouldn't have been there. I say ICE shouldn't have been there, shouldn't have issued conflicting orders, shouldn't have gotten in front of her car, and should have kept going around her like they had been. I say her demeanor before she left meant she clearly was not trying to harm anyone. Period.
Authority is not ipso facto moral.
> shouldn't have issued conflicting orders
There were no conflicting orders, unless you mean ICE telling her to get out of the car while Good's partner yells "drive, baby drive!"
> shouldn't have gotten in front of her car,
It certainly would have been smarter for the ICE agent on a personal welfare level, but the idea that the cops have to leave you an escape route is silly. It's policy mostly for police safety; from everyone elses' standpoint, you don't get to say "the cops have stopped me and I don't have a way out so I have no choice but to run them over."
> Any resistance to tyranny will involve disobedience of varying levels of severity. This administration is fascist in the true meaning of the word.
Right, well, I think it's pretty clear that anyone who is out protesting and resisting the incompetent, hateful, and violent thugs of a fascist regime should absolutely, 100% expect to be killed. I mean, that's what fascist thugs do. Instead, Good and her partner appear to have been caught totally off guard, with her partner demanding to know why they had real bullets. There's a disconnect somewhere.
Anyway, I guess one of my overarching points is that this is not actually unusual police behavior, even by international standards. It's getting so much attention because of its political salience. I don't know (and doubt) there is any coordination going on, but in these situations I think people should always ask themselves why: a) this event, like many others, is incorrectly being treated as unprecedented or beyond the norm and b) why it is so emotionally charged when similar past events were not, c) whether the emotionality is productive at all personally and d) whether the outrage is likely to lead to desirable political consequences. For a closely related example in the lattermost question, I am no lover of cops, but it appears the actual political results of the BLM protests were highly mixed, at best, and in some cases made things worse. So, for example, returning to a situation where we have immigration laws and minimal enforcement is clearly not a desirable end for anyone except maybe some classes of businessmen.
>There were no conflicting orders
Factually incorrect. Now then,
It got a lot of attention because it is death, because it was avoidable, because it was the responsibility of ICE to make it avoidable, and because popular tension breaks at unpredictable moments. Hers happened to be on video from a thousand different angles.
Your rhetoric waffles between support of the actions of the authorities, and you seem to drift between satire and reality. "I'm no lover of cops" while you victim blame a woman for getting killed.
>I think it's pretty clear that anyone who is out protesting and resisting the incompetent, hateful, and violent thugs of a fascist regime should absolutely, 100% expect to be killed
Given the amount of energy you are expending to defending the actions of officers in this instance, I assume you are a supporter of this administration and their actions.
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