This is a linkpost for https://lifeimprovementschemes.substack.com/p/the-chaos-defense
You are not telling the truth.
Per reports, agents gave contradictory commands. Some told her to leave. Others demanded she exit the vehicle.
As per the actual events, documented in multiple videos from multiple angles, Good was not given contradictory commands. She was instructed to "Get out of the (fucking) car" three times in a row.
That doesn't mean that ICE is right. That doesn't mean the shooting was acceptable. It means that what you said was untrue.
Were there "reports" of the incorrect narrative you describe? Yes. Does that matter, now that we know that's not true? No.
Saying "per reports" doesn't absolve you from a responsibility to accurately report what actually happened, and suggests you're trying to lean on that ambiguity deliberately.
From the video, I can only hear officers demanding that she get out of the car. Whether there were other commands that didn't get captured in the video audio, I don't know. Still, going by the video, you are correct. Would it change your view of the incident if the officers were indeed shouting conflicting commands? Or is this particular point not relevant?
Yes, it would change my view; it's an important point, though not the sole one.
25Hour's description of the incident with Good is strategically misleading in multiple ways. I picked this specific point because it was the most unambiguously false. In the counterfactual world where it was true, it wouldn't fix the other points, but it would (and should) shift how I think about the incident.
Whether there were other commands that didn't get captured in the video audio, I don't know
I think this is a bit too charitable. First, we have multiple videos, and the audio from Ross's video is pretty comprehensive and clear.
Second, if we're speculating, isn't it possible that Good herself said "I'm going to deliberately run you over and kill you", and it just wasn't caught on the audio? (Obviously she didn't; that's my point.) Like, if we can invent possible dialogue options in the face of actual video/audio, then it's hard to see what evidence could ever be convincing.
Again, just to be clear: none of this means anyone has to conclude "ICE is good/bad!; I'm purely arguing about false factual claims in the article. If 25Hour's thesis is "ICE is manufacturing chaotic situations as an excuse", and then supporting that with events that literally did not happen, then that's not a good thesis and needs to be identified as such.
There’s a framing problem with how we talk about the ICE shootings.
The conversation keeps centering on the moment of the trigger pull. Was the agent justified? Did he reasonably fear for his life? It was so chaotic! Was Pretti reaching for his gun? Did Good’s car actually hit the agent? Was Good's goal actually to hurt the agent, and was he reasonable in believing it was? These are the questions everyone argues about, and I think they’re mostly the wrong questions.
Here’s my thesis: the chaos that supposedly justified these shootings was itself manufactured by a series of bad discretionary choices made by ICE at leisure, each of which escalated the situation without obvious necessity. Asking “was the shooting justified given how chaotic things were” is like asking whether it was reasonable to crash your car given how fast you were going. “The jury claims I shouldn’t have mowed down that pedestrian, but in my defense I was going like 100 miles per hour in a school zone! YOU try not making driving mistakes under those circumstances! Human reaction times are only so fast! It could’ve happened to anyone!”
The link above attempts to make this argument at length and demonstrate that it applies to the last two ICE shootings in Minneapolis