Comment by ninkendo

Please, please, please tone it down. Really. This is the amplification I’m talking about. You say “I don’t hate you” and then spew a bunch of hate at me. I’m having a lot of trouble not getting extremely angry right now at your reply because you’re taking the least charitable possible interpretation of every fucking thing I’m saying. This is so fucking maddening. I’m going to reply but please understand this is fucking killing me.

> You are laying the deaths of these people squarely on the left for how they react to abhorrence

> Please outline what bait you think the left took that caused the death of Renee Nicole Good

> Explain what "Hatred" was leading us to this moment.

> The idea that the choice is up to us whether we get brutalized

> The idea that the best thing for us now would be to bury these deaths as 6th page news

I am going to reply to all of this in a chunk. And I want to picture in your mind that I’m someone in your life that you respect (friend, neighbor, loved one, doesn’t matter) talking. Because otherwise I’m just a handle on a forum, and faceless, like the car driving in front of you when you have road rage. It’s so easy to forget we are human beings having a conversation here. Please remember that.

The hate amplification is not causing these deaths. I never said that. I’m saying it leads to them, in a sense that it puts people in the position where it’s going to happen. A death can have nearly infinite things that can lead to it, in the sense that if any one of those things didn’t happen, things could have gone differently.

This is a very important distinction to make. It’s the difference between giving your daughter advice for “don’t dress like that when you go out, there are a lot of dangerous people out there” and saying “it was her fault she was raped”. The former is practical advice you might give to someone you care about, and the latter is the abhorrent victim blaming you’re casually accusing me of doing.

The hatred leads to deaths because there are armed men who are itching to kill liberals, and the hatred makes people think “I ought to go put my car in the way of them.” (I’m not referring to how Renee moved her car in obvious compliance with the officer telling her to, I’m talking about the fact that she had her car there in the first place.) Renee herself probably didn’t have any hatred in her heart at that moment, but I can nearly guarantee she had a lot of conversations just like the ones others are having here, where they look at what’s happening and, in an echo chamber, escalate the rhetoric they’re using. It may go from “ICE is wrong” to “ICE is kidnapping people” to “ICE is the gestapo” to “We need to stop them” to “let’s stop them” to “ok I’ll bring a gun just in case” in the blink of an eye (the gun part being something that’s more relevant to yesterday’s story than the Renee one.)

No, it’s not the left’s fault they’re getting brutalized. It’s the brutalizer’s fault. It’s not fault I’m referring to, it’s “if things would have happened differently this death may have been avoided.” One of those things that could have happened differently is for people to choose a different avenue than directly interacting with the armed men.

No, I don’t have a better alternative than that in mind at the moment, I’m sorry. I know people have to do something, but there has to be something that is less likely to result in deaths than directly interfering with the armed men themselves (yes, filming isn’t interfering, but I dunno, get a zoom lens and maybe do it from farther away. Because if you’re standing right in front of them it very much does seem like interfering. Or in Renee’s case, maybe don’t intentionally park your car in front of the ice agents.)