I. I recently had the displeasure of reading two frustrating posts on the Renée Good shooting—Stochastic martyrdom by @kittenbeloved and Courting death to own the Nazis by @Eugyppius.
This is a very long post so I will respond at greater length when I have a moment, but for now I simply want to state that I find it very odd that you and other people seem to be upset that I wrote a different article than you wanted me to. My article is exploring the concept in its title, it is not a recrimination of ice officers and their behavior. I studiously avoided that topic because it wasn't what interested me and I didn't want it to distract from the main point I was examining. To the extent this is your criticism, it fails to engage with what I wrote. (Yes I know you have other criticisms as well) Other people have exhaustively cataloged the misdeeds of immigration enforcement ad nauseam, I'm not interested in adding to that stream for my own idiosyncratic reasons. If you want to think that I am a bad person for writing about what I chose to instead of what you would rather I have written, that is your right but I don't feel obligated to respond. Better yet, write your own article that addresses the topics you wish I had from the perspective you wish I had. It looks like you just did.
Harjas and others aren't upset at you for not writing an article on ICE misconduct. We're upset at you for writing an article the entire point of which is to shift the blame off of ICE and Ross in particular, all while condemning anti-ICE protestors, by portraying the victim as an idiot, conjuring up a conspiracy of left-wing activists to blame instead, falsely equating nonviolent resistance with mikitia action, and refusing to even discuss the possibility of any wrongdoing on the part of ICE, treating them like a force of nature with no active control over events. We're also upset at you for applying a double standard - your own argument that dangerous protests are "stochastic martyrdom" because doing enough of them will eventually lead to someone getting killed would also imply that ICE enforcement tactics are stochastic state terrorism, since it was inevitable that they were going to end up killing civilians (a much more severe charge than stochastic martyrdom), and yet you never acknowledge this or give even the slightest hint that you condemn ICE's tactics. Neither of these are just "not writing the article we wanted you to". You're actively ignoring things relevant to your case and acting as if the obvious counterarguments don't exist. Then, when people point this out in the comments and ask you to address these issues, you're extremely evasive, as Harjas has documented, and as you're once again being here. Even if you had some legitimate reason not to mention ICE misconduct in the post, even just to make a counterargument against it, there's no reason to continue to evade the point when people continue to press you on it unless you know that you don't have a good response. But I guess you think citing your vague "idiosyncratic reasons" for not responding is good enough.
I disagree what "the entire point" of my article was as the person who wrote it, and I disagree with your characterizations above. I didn't include these obvious counterarguments because my articles are already too long and I'm always struggling to keep them shorter, because it would be a distraction from my main point I was interested in exploring, because people are already very familiar with them, and because it would make the essay weaker while in no way satisfying my critics. If you want me to acknowledge that ICE tactics are more brutal and thuggish than necessary, that they have applied unnecessary force against peaceful individuals, that their training and hiring practices leave much to be desired, then sure. I hereby acknowledge these facts. They still weren't what I wanted to talk about in my essay.
If you want to read a longer reply to similar criticism, you can do so here:
What I described as the main point of your essay was what the entire essay consisted of. Do you deny that you blamed the shooting on left-wing activist groups while saying absolutely nothing about the blame that ICE itself, or even the agent who shot Good, deserves? Do you deny that you portrayed Good as an idiot and demonized anti-ICE activists by equating them to a militia? You can't write something like this and then act clueless when people point out exactly what you're doing. And your excuses about how you just didn't want to talk about the blame ICE deserves aren't excuses at all - if you didn't want to talk about it, you shouldn't have written an essay that necessitates talking about it.
I have explained my reasoning and motivations at length, you're either not listening or you're calling me a liar. Either way I don't think this is productive and I don't wish to continue this conversation.
Hi guys, please stop quoting the things I wrote and engaging in debate with me. Just because I chose to publish something online doesn't mean I wanted anyone to read it or criticize it. Sincerely, cat pfp
I’m very firmly in the camp of “play stupid games win stupid prizes” and “mess with the bull and you get the horns.” I can’t really care about the woman because of that, since she was very clearly treating confronting an armed group like a game, which has pretty obvious potential consequences.
That said, I am reasonably sure a trained police officer would definitely not have shot her. If she was running over him with her car, could the ICE agent have really pulled out his gun, one-tapped her, all in that half a second she was accelerating, and would that have stopped the car if it was already going to run him over? (Getting shot in the head does not apply the emergency break).
I’ve read enough about the under-training of ICE to believe it, so we’re basically putting heavily armed, poorly trained men in charge of a national police action to arrest millions of people. The inevitable consequence of that seems to be that someone gets shot, where they wouldn’t have if there was better training.
I think a lot of people get trapped in supporting ICE because they (legitimately IMO) did not support the massive amount of illegal immigrants under Biden, they want a portion of them deported, but they know any critique of ICE won’t be used to have a safer, more just, or more effective deportation force, but will be used to argue for dismantling ICE altogether. So you either justify the shooting, disarming the argument that will be used to try and dismantle ICE, which has a mission you support, or you don’t justify it, and give unencumbered force in the opposition to dismantle ICE.
That’s at least how I understand the situation. I think it’s very clear that the woman was stupid for confronting ICE in the way she did, and better trained police would not have shot her.
I think the rhetorical trick being played here is to treat legal, constitutionally-protected and *necessary* civil behavior as "a game". It's not a game. It's something incredibly brave and important.
As citizens we have the right to expect our police to be a professional force that abides by the rule of law. We also expect to be able to stand near them and film them without danger to ourselves, because those are the guarantees that the US system of laws provides us. But those guarantees don't enforce themselves. When our leadership becomes corrupt and the police can't self-police, then citizens have to avail themselves of our Constitutional rights or we won't continue to have them. There is nothing "fun" about this. I'm certain that both Renee Good and Alex Pretti would rather have been doing different things with their weekends. Instead they were doing an important and difficult thing, something I'm not sure I would have had the courage to do myself.
And yes, there's an element of risk when you do this. With a normal police force, the risk would be that you step too far or disobey an order or a cop oversteps his authority, and you get taken down to the station and charged with obstruction or impeding an agent. That's *supposed* to be the worst possible case. In the past month, we've learned that the risk is much higher with an untrained and lawless force like ICE, who have been told (by the President) that they can kill with impunity and the law will be used to ensure they never see the inside of a courtroom. But this doesn't make it less necessary to practice your Constitutional rights: it makes it *more* important to do so. That's why more people came out after the killings: they understood what was at stake, and how dangerous cowardice would be in that moment.
As far as ICE and anyone's preferred immigration policy goes: this is entirely your problem. If you (hypothetically) felt that large numbers of deportations were important, it was on you to elect leaders who would ensure this was handled in a reasonable, decent, professional manner that was compatible with the rule of law in this country. To the extent that you did not do that, this was a major unforced error on your part. You can dig in on ICE and lose the public on your whole political outlook. Or you can admit that the way ICE is being used is not compatible with a peaceful deportation policy, and try very hard (up to the point of voting for a different party) to deal with the fallout in a way that leads to better outcomes. I'm skeptical that the second option is even open to you now, but that doesn't make the first option moral or (frankly) particularly smart.
Why are you saying “your problem” and “your part”? I literally have nothing to do with ICE. You’re projecting an entire identity on me that isn’t there. I’m honestly not sure your comment isn’t a copypasta because of that, which would warrant no response.
She was treating it as a game because of her attitude. She was smiling, and mocking ICE in the videos. If you think it’s something incredibly brave and important (and I would add, self-evidently dangerous) the carefree and almost joking attitude is what causes me to not care. The attitude reveals a complete mismatch between the seriousness of a situation, and how serious she takes it.
The phrasing I used was "if you (hypothetically) felt..." That 'you' is the generic (impersonal) ‘you’ in a hypothetical conditional, not 'you' as in "Substack commenter Sol Hando."
As a first-amendment observer you want to be extremely nice and non-threatening, not "serious". The goal is to smile and be polite and open so that no reasonable police officer could possibly conclude that you're a threat. I genuinely cannot imagine how any officer operating in good faith could look at those harmless women in their SUV full of stuffed animals and think "these people are clearly going to deliberately attack me, I must now deploy lethal force against them."
I'm sorry this approach fails to make you "care" about her, but your caring isn't the point. The standard you're applying is the wrong one.
I think we'll have to agree to disagree here. I can very easily imagine a person who logically knows what kind of danger they're getting into smiling and mocking ICE agents because they're anxious and don't know what else to do, or because they have instincts about "how to deal with bullies" that they're falling back on under pressure, or any other number of reasons. People behave weirdly when stressed out. I still care about Good's shooting because I think that non-violent protestors should be arrested and not shot, and because her probably not ideal protestor behavior was motivated by a desire to stand up for immigrants in her community.
> The inevitable consequence of that seems to be that someone gets shot, where they wouldn’t have if there was better training.
I mean, this is probably true in the abstract. But Jonathan Ross wasn't a random ICE agent: he had over 10 years of experience in law enforcement, which included several annual trainings, which probably puts him towards the top of the bell curve as far as ICE agent competence goes. If the average ICE agent is *worse* than him at this point in time, abolishing ICE and replacing it with a new interior immigration enforcement agency seems like a reasonable move to me.
I also think border security is way more important than interior immigration enforcement tbh—I'm fine with letting normal police arrest criminals and deport them if they're here illegally, but I think pursuing immigrants who have already largely integrated into their communities is kind of a waste of time, especially since it's less of a deterrent then actually securing the border—but this is a separate issue.
Great piece! I would add that the idea that the protestors were ‘asking to be shot on aggregate’ because it was inevitable given their tactics that something like this would happen, is unintelligible. Only individuals can ask to be shot. It’s trivial to say that if enough interactions between protestors and ICE occur something bad will happen, but what matters is whether in the individual case a protestor acts in a way that is not unlikely to get that shot and whether this is so because their actions pose a threat to the agent or because the agent is poorly trained or just violent. Talk of the likelihood of something bad happening eventually is just not relevant.
When I follow the links to your comments on Kitten's post, it just takes me to the comments section of his post, rather than your comments specifically, and I can't find them anywhere in the comments section. Did your comments get deleted?
Hi Harjas, looks like you deleted a bunch of comments here. I believe you were under the impression that my comment "was a copypasta"? Which it was not. But it's your blog and you can delete what you don't agree with.
Protest by obstruction was not legitimate on Jan 6 and is not legitimate in Minneapolis. These anarchists are trying to overturn the result of a legal election, where the people voted for mass deportation. It is sad that anyone should suffer the fate of an unarmed Ashli Babbit or Renee Good. Maybe better trained cops would have realized these small women were not actually a mortal threat to them and found another way. (Although Good, unlike Babbit, was wielding a deadly weapon with uncertain intent.)
But maybe protesters should not try to obstruct federal agents. They could protest in a park if they don't like the policy their country voted for. But they chose to make it physical. They bear the risk and the responsibility. I'm not going to blame the cops. And I'm not going to grant protesters a veto on the election.
I don't agree with calling people like Babbit and Good "terrorists." They are not targeting the general population. They are directly going after government agents. They are insurrectionists, pure and simple. They should be arrested and tried. It is unfortunate but foreseeable that when they get aggressive and have numbers, they will be perceived as a threat, and some may be killed. Oh well.
Winning one election doesn't give you blanket permission to do whatever you want. We have a Constitution and a system of checks and balances. And it certainly doesn't mean that no resistance against your agenda is legitimate. Comparing getting in the way of ICE agents (who by the way, do not have any sort of democratic mandate, since the majority of the country opposes their actions and a plurality thinks they should be abolished entirely) to trying to overturn an election is patently absurd.
Trump primarily won the election because people were mad about inflation and other economic problems. There were certainly some people who voted for him because of his promise of mass deportation, but the majority of his voters just wanted the price of eggs to go down. Even voters concerned about immigration seemed more interested in him securing the southern border and deporting violent felons than him sending armed agents to the literal other side of the country to arrest people who weren't hurting anyone.
Trump won a little less than half the popular vote. I am sick of politicians and their supporters treating such victories as popular mandates for their entire agenda. If half the country voted for you that's a mandate for gradual and incremental change, not sweeping reform. If you get 75% of the popular vote maybe you can say you have a mandate. If half the country thinks your agenda stinks you should have the humility to not rock the boat too much.
I won't pretend that immigration was the only issue in the election, but it was very front and center. Trump campaigned on mass deportation specifically, and he wasn't subtle or equivocal about it. You don't get to overturn an election just because you don't like the policies the winning side ran on.
The immigration laws Trump is enforcing are decades old and were passed by large bipartisan majorities. It's not rocking the boat too much to faithfully execute the law. What a crazy turn we've come to when people think it is.
This is a common misconception. The actual relevant law here is the Refugee Act of 1980, which was signed by Jimmy Carter and ratified by a bipartisan majority in Congress. It says that if someone comes here and applies for asylum they can stay here until their claim is processed and accepted of rejected. Because the immigration bureaucracy is underfunded and understaffed, this often takes months or years, even for blatantly frivolous claims. However, until their claim is rejected, every single person who applies for asylum is a legal immigrant. Trump is breaking the law by deporting them, Biden was following it by letting millions of them in.
Republicans have successfully promoted a Big Lie that the law isn't what it is and convinced the American public that all those people are illegals. They were so successful at this that when Biden tried to pass a new law capping the amount of people who could apply for asylum to 4,000 a day, Republicans were able to kill it by pretending that it was letting 4,000 additional people a day in! Why did Republicans kill the bill? Probably because if Biden reduced the amount of people coming here it would be harder for Trump to run on deporting them.
In a functioning society, this would not be a big problem. Congress would simply appropriate more money for the immigration bureaucracy so that it could hire more staff and reject frivolous asylum claims in weeks instead of years. People would stop making bogus claims once they realized they no longer worked. But that is not the society we live in.
Even if you were right and Trump was merely enforcing the law, it's well known that there are many laws that are not strictly enforced and that would create chaos if they were. If the police pulled over everyone who went one or more miles per hour over the speed limit, there would be a revolution the next day (even though traffic accidents kill and injure far more people than illegal immigrants). How strictly a law should be enforced and how many resources should be devoted to enforcing it is a legitimate area of policy debate.
Many of the people Trump is deporting have not applied for asylum. They have snuck in or simply overstayed their visas. In the rare cases where ICE has tried to deport people with unadjudicated claims, the courts have intervened. Those are the few specific cases you read about in the news.
The rest are deportable under the law.
If the highway patrol suddenly started enforcing the speed limit as posted, people would slow down a few miles per hour. It would be no big deal. There might be political pressure to raise the limits, but there would be no chaos.
This is a very long post so I will respond at greater length when I have a moment, but for now I simply want to state that I find it very odd that you and other people seem to be upset that I wrote a different article than you wanted me to. My article is exploring the concept in its title, it is not a recrimination of ice officers and their behavior. I studiously avoided that topic because it wasn't what interested me and I didn't want it to distract from the main point I was examining. To the extent this is your criticism, it fails to engage with what I wrote. (Yes I know you have other criticisms as well) Other people have exhaustively cataloged the misdeeds of immigration enforcement ad nauseam, I'm not interested in adding to that stream for my own idiosyncratic reasons. If you want to think that I am a bad person for writing about what I chose to instead of what you would rather I have written, that is your right but I don't feel obligated to respond. Better yet, write your own article that addresses the topics you wish I had from the perspective you wish I had. It looks like you just did.
Harjas and others aren't upset at you for not writing an article on ICE misconduct. We're upset at you for writing an article the entire point of which is to shift the blame off of ICE and Ross in particular, all while condemning anti-ICE protestors, by portraying the victim as an idiot, conjuring up a conspiracy of left-wing activists to blame instead, falsely equating nonviolent resistance with mikitia action, and refusing to even discuss the possibility of any wrongdoing on the part of ICE, treating them like a force of nature with no active control over events. We're also upset at you for applying a double standard - your own argument that dangerous protests are "stochastic martyrdom" because doing enough of them will eventually lead to someone getting killed would also imply that ICE enforcement tactics are stochastic state terrorism, since it was inevitable that they were going to end up killing civilians (a much more severe charge than stochastic martyrdom), and yet you never acknowledge this or give even the slightest hint that you condemn ICE's tactics. Neither of these are just "not writing the article we wanted you to". You're actively ignoring things relevant to your case and acting as if the obvious counterarguments don't exist. Then, when people point this out in the comments and ask you to address these issues, you're extremely evasive, as Harjas has documented, and as you're once again being here. Even if you had some legitimate reason not to mention ICE misconduct in the post, even just to make a counterargument against it, there's no reason to continue to evade the point when people continue to press you on it unless you know that you don't have a good response. But I guess you think citing your vague "idiosyncratic reasons" for not responding is good enough.
I disagree what "the entire point" of my article was as the person who wrote it, and I disagree with your characterizations above. I didn't include these obvious counterarguments because my articles are already too long and I'm always struggling to keep them shorter, because it would be a distraction from my main point I was interested in exploring, because people are already very familiar with them, and because it would make the essay weaker while in no way satisfying my critics. If you want me to acknowledge that ICE tactics are more brutal and thuggish than necessary, that they have applied unnecessary force against peaceful individuals, that their training and hiring practices leave much to be desired, then sure. I hereby acknowledge these facts. They still weren't what I wanted to talk about in my essay.
If you want to read a longer reply to similar criticism, you can do so here:
https://www.adorableandharmless.com/p/stochastic-martyrdom/comment/201207959
What I described as the main point of your essay was what the entire essay consisted of. Do you deny that you blamed the shooting on left-wing activist groups while saying absolutely nothing about the blame that ICE itself, or even the agent who shot Good, deserves? Do you deny that you portrayed Good as an idiot and demonized anti-ICE activists by equating them to a militia? You can't write something like this and then act clueless when people point out exactly what you're doing. And your excuses about how you just didn't want to talk about the blame ICE deserves aren't excuses at all - if you didn't want to talk about it, you shouldn't have written an essay that necessitates talking about it.
I have explained my reasoning and motivations at length, you're either not listening or you're calling me a liar. Either way I don't think this is productive and I don't wish to continue this conversation.
Hi guys, please stop quoting the things I wrote and engaging in debate with me. Just because I chose to publish something online doesn't mean I wanted anyone to read it or criticize it. Sincerely, cat pfp
Thank you for understanding
I’m very firmly in the camp of “play stupid games win stupid prizes” and “mess with the bull and you get the horns.” I can’t really care about the woman because of that, since she was very clearly treating confronting an armed group like a game, which has pretty obvious potential consequences.
That said, I am reasonably sure a trained police officer would definitely not have shot her. If she was running over him with her car, could the ICE agent have really pulled out his gun, one-tapped her, all in that half a second she was accelerating, and would that have stopped the car if it was already going to run him over? (Getting shot in the head does not apply the emergency break).
I’ve read enough about the under-training of ICE to believe it, so we’re basically putting heavily armed, poorly trained men in charge of a national police action to arrest millions of people. The inevitable consequence of that seems to be that someone gets shot, where they wouldn’t have if there was better training.
I think a lot of people get trapped in supporting ICE because they (legitimately IMO) did not support the massive amount of illegal immigrants under Biden, they want a portion of them deported, but they know any critique of ICE won’t be used to have a safer, more just, or more effective deportation force, but will be used to argue for dismantling ICE altogether. So you either justify the shooting, disarming the argument that will be used to try and dismantle ICE, which has a mission you support, or you don’t justify it, and give unencumbered force in the opposition to dismantle ICE.
That’s at least how I understand the situation. I think it’s very clear that the woman was stupid for confronting ICE in the way she did, and better trained police would not have shot her.
FWIW I roughly agree with this
I think the rhetorical trick being played here is to treat legal, constitutionally-protected and *necessary* civil behavior as "a game". It's not a game. It's something incredibly brave and important.
As citizens we have the right to expect our police to be a professional force that abides by the rule of law. We also expect to be able to stand near them and film them without danger to ourselves, because those are the guarantees that the US system of laws provides us. But those guarantees don't enforce themselves. When our leadership becomes corrupt and the police can't self-police, then citizens have to avail themselves of our Constitutional rights or we won't continue to have them. There is nothing "fun" about this. I'm certain that both Renee Good and Alex Pretti would rather have been doing different things with their weekends. Instead they were doing an important and difficult thing, something I'm not sure I would have had the courage to do myself.
And yes, there's an element of risk when you do this. With a normal police force, the risk would be that you step too far or disobey an order or a cop oversteps his authority, and you get taken down to the station and charged with obstruction or impeding an agent. That's *supposed* to be the worst possible case. In the past month, we've learned that the risk is much higher with an untrained and lawless force like ICE, who have been told (by the President) that they can kill with impunity and the law will be used to ensure they never see the inside of a courtroom. But this doesn't make it less necessary to practice your Constitutional rights: it makes it *more* important to do so. That's why more people came out after the killings: they understood what was at stake, and how dangerous cowardice would be in that moment.
As far as ICE and anyone's preferred immigration policy goes: this is entirely your problem. If you (hypothetically) felt that large numbers of deportations were important, it was on you to elect leaders who would ensure this was handled in a reasonable, decent, professional manner that was compatible with the rule of law in this country. To the extent that you did not do that, this was a major unforced error on your part. You can dig in on ICE and lose the public on your whole political outlook. Or you can admit that the way ICE is being used is not compatible with a peaceful deportation policy, and try very hard (up to the point of voting for a different party) to deal with the fallout in a way that leads to better outcomes. I'm skeptical that the second option is even open to you now, but that doesn't make the first option moral or (frankly) particularly smart.
Why are you saying “your problem” and “your part”? I literally have nothing to do with ICE. You’re projecting an entire identity on me that isn’t there. I’m honestly not sure your comment isn’t a copypasta because of that, which would warrant no response.
She was treating it as a game because of her attitude. She was smiling, and mocking ICE in the videos. If you think it’s something incredibly brave and important (and I would add, self-evidently dangerous) the carefree and almost joking attitude is what causes me to not care. The attitude reveals a complete mismatch between the seriousness of a situation, and how serious she takes it.
The phrasing I used was "if you (hypothetically) felt..." That 'you' is the generic (impersonal) ‘you’ in a hypothetical conditional, not 'you' as in "Substack commenter Sol Hando."
As a first-amendment observer you want to be extremely nice and non-threatening, not "serious". The goal is to smile and be polite and open so that no reasonable police officer could possibly conclude that you're a threat. I genuinely cannot imagine how any officer operating in good faith could look at those harmless women in their SUV full of stuffed animals and think "these people are clearly going to deliberately attack me, I must now deploy lethal force against them."
I'm sorry this approach fails to make you "care" about her, but your caring isn't the point. The standard you're applying is the wrong one.
It’s not about appearing non-threatening, but clearly a case of not understanding the seriousness of the situation from what I’ve seen.
I think we'll have to agree to disagree here. I can very easily imagine a person who logically knows what kind of danger they're getting into smiling and mocking ICE agents because they're anxious and don't know what else to do, or because they have instincts about "how to deal with bullies" that they're falling back on under pressure, or any other number of reasons. People behave weirdly when stressed out. I still care about Good's shooting because I think that non-violent protestors should be arrested and not shot, and because her probably not ideal protestor behavior was motivated by a desire to stand up for immigrants in her community.
> The inevitable consequence of that seems to be that someone gets shot, where they wouldn’t have if there was better training.
I mean, this is probably true in the abstract. But Jonathan Ross wasn't a random ICE agent: he had over 10 years of experience in law enforcement, which included several annual trainings, which probably puts him towards the top of the bell curve as far as ICE agent competence goes. If the average ICE agent is *worse* than him at this point in time, abolishing ICE and replacing it with a new interior immigration enforcement agency seems like a reasonable move to me.
I also think border security is way more important than interior immigration enforcement tbh—I'm fine with letting normal police arrest criminals and deport them if they're here illegally, but I think pursuing immigrants who have already largely integrated into their communities is kind of a waste of time, especially since it's less of a deterrent then actually securing the border—but this is a separate issue.
Great piece! I would add that the idea that the protestors were ‘asking to be shot on aggregate’ because it was inevitable given their tactics that something like this would happen, is unintelligible. Only individuals can ask to be shot. It’s trivial to say that if enough interactions between protestors and ICE occur something bad will happen, but what matters is whether in the individual case a protestor acts in a way that is not unlikely to get that shot and whether this is so because their actions pose a threat to the agent or because the agent is poorly trained or just violent. Talk of the likelihood of something bad happening eventually is just not relevant.
Thanks for writing this!
Apologies for this, but since you quoted me, FYI I buried a long comment on the Kitten thread. Though it is still far less comprehensive that this post. https://open.substack.com/pub/kittenbeloved/p/stochastic-martyrdom?utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=200990930
When I follow the links to your comments on Kitten's post, it just takes me to the comments section of his post, rather than your comments specifically, and I can't find them anywhere in the comments section. Did your comments get deleted?
My comments are somewhere in the main thread. Does this link work? https://open.substack.com/pub/kittenbeloved/p/stochastic-martyrdom?utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=200294797
Kitten is a horrible human being and everyone should add her to their Blocked list.
Her? Huh. I always assumed Kitten was a guy.
Them? I dunno their gender, but just a look at what they’ve published was enough to know they earned a Block
Hi Harjas, looks like you deleted a bunch of comments here. I believe you were under the impression that my comment "was a copypasta"? Which it was not. But it's your blog and you can delete what you don't agree with.
To the best of my knowledge, I haven’t deleted anything. Your exchange with Sol still appears to be up, if that’s what you’re referring to?
Protest by obstruction was not legitimate on Jan 6 and is not legitimate in Minneapolis. These anarchists are trying to overturn the result of a legal election, where the people voted for mass deportation. It is sad that anyone should suffer the fate of an unarmed Ashli Babbit or Renee Good. Maybe better trained cops would have realized these small women were not actually a mortal threat to them and found another way. (Although Good, unlike Babbit, was wielding a deadly weapon with uncertain intent.)
But maybe protesters should not try to obstruct federal agents. They could protest in a park if they don't like the policy their country voted for. But they chose to make it physical. They bear the risk and the responsibility. I'm not going to blame the cops. And I'm not going to grant protesters a veto on the election.
I don't agree with calling people like Babbit and Good "terrorists." They are not targeting the general population. They are directly going after government agents. They are insurrectionists, pure and simple. They should be arrested and tried. It is unfortunate but foreseeable that when they get aggressive and have numbers, they will be perceived as a threat, and some may be killed. Oh well.
Winning one election doesn't give you blanket permission to do whatever you want. We have a Constitution and a system of checks and balances. And it certainly doesn't mean that no resistance against your agenda is legitimate. Comparing getting in the way of ICE agents (who by the way, do not have any sort of democratic mandate, since the majority of the country opposes their actions and a plurality thinks they should be abolished entirely) to trying to overturn an election is patently absurd.
Trump primarily won the election because people were mad about inflation and other economic problems. There were certainly some people who voted for him because of his promise of mass deportation, but the majority of his voters just wanted the price of eggs to go down. Even voters concerned about immigration seemed more interested in him securing the southern border and deporting violent felons than him sending armed agents to the literal other side of the country to arrest people who weren't hurting anyone.
Trump won a little less than half the popular vote. I am sick of politicians and their supporters treating such victories as popular mandates for their entire agenda. If half the country voted for you that's a mandate for gradual and incremental change, not sweeping reform. If you get 75% of the popular vote maybe you can say you have a mandate. If half the country thinks your agenda stinks you should have the humility to not rock the boat too much.
I won't pretend that immigration was the only issue in the election, but it was very front and center. Trump campaigned on mass deportation specifically, and he wasn't subtle or equivocal about it. You don't get to overturn an election just because you don't like the policies the winning side ran on.
The immigration laws Trump is enforcing are decades old and were passed by large bipartisan majorities. It's not rocking the boat too much to faithfully execute the law. What a crazy turn we've come to when people think it is.
This is a common misconception. The actual relevant law here is the Refugee Act of 1980, which was signed by Jimmy Carter and ratified by a bipartisan majority in Congress. It says that if someone comes here and applies for asylum they can stay here until their claim is processed and accepted of rejected. Because the immigration bureaucracy is underfunded and understaffed, this often takes months or years, even for blatantly frivolous claims. However, until their claim is rejected, every single person who applies for asylum is a legal immigrant. Trump is breaking the law by deporting them, Biden was following it by letting millions of them in.
Republicans have successfully promoted a Big Lie that the law isn't what it is and convinced the American public that all those people are illegals. They were so successful at this that when Biden tried to pass a new law capping the amount of people who could apply for asylum to 4,000 a day, Republicans were able to kill it by pretending that it was letting 4,000 additional people a day in! Why did Republicans kill the bill? Probably because if Biden reduced the amount of people coming here it would be harder for Trump to run on deporting them.
In a functioning society, this would not be a big problem. Congress would simply appropriate more money for the immigration bureaucracy so that it could hire more staff and reject frivolous asylum claims in weeks instead of years. People would stop making bogus claims once they realized they no longer worked. But that is not the society we live in.
Even if you were right and Trump was merely enforcing the law, it's well known that there are many laws that are not strictly enforced and that would create chaos if they were. If the police pulled over everyone who went one or more miles per hour over the speed limit, there would be a revolution the next day (even though traffic accidents kill and injure far more people than illegal immigrants). How strictly a law should be enforced and how many resources should be devoted to enforcing it is a legitimate area of policy debate.
Many of the people Trump is deporting have not applied for asylum. They have snuck in or simply overstayed their visas. In the rare cases where ICE has tried to deport people with unadjudicated claims, the courts have intervened. Those are the few specific cases you read about in the news.
The rest are deportable under the law.
If the highway patrol suddenly started enforcing the speed limit as posted, people would slow down a few miles per hour. It would be no big deal. There might be political pressure to raise the limits, but there would be no chaos.