Redbrickbear said:
Osodecentx said:
Redbrickbear said:
Osodecentx said:
Redbrickbear said:
Osodecentx said:
Redbrickbear said:
Osodecentx said:
Redbrickbear said:
muddybrazos said:
Bestweekeverr said:
muddybrazos said:
FLBear5630 said:
Redbrickbear said:
whiterock said:
Frank Galvin said:
whiterock said:
FLBear5630 said:
Mothra said:
Redbrickbear said:
I've always found the Ashli Babbit "murdered" logic a bit absurd. She was no more murdered then if I shot an intruder entering my home.
I agree, do not get the murder part. She was part of the crowd pushing into Congress coming in through a broken window. If she followed the Capitol Police orders, she would be alive.
Fact: Deadly force was used against an unarmed woman climbing thru a broken window that few protesters would have been able to fit thru. She posed no threat of harm to anyone at the moment she was shot.
That is the standard which would be used in a court of law for a shooting anywhere else, i.e. it would not likely have been ruled a justified shooting. Is it reasonable to apply a different one here? Reasonable people can look at the context and see aggravating circumstances. And also not. She was inches away from (possibly touching) a federal officer when she was shot. That officer was not alone (other officers with him) and was not being attacked.
The officer who shot Babbitt clearly made a determination that anyone who penetrated that barrier would be shot. Subsequent investigation effectively ratified that decision. Whether it was justified or not......? He did not HAVE to do it. He had less-than-lethal options. Had he chosen less-than-lethal (a choice made everywhere else), physical restraints, etc...he would have been successful. But was that the "last line of defense?" Had Babbitt penetrated the "safe room?" Answers to these questions are never clearly a yes or no. Always a maybe, probably, apparently, etc.... And none of that that wouldn't be terribly controversial had it not involved use of deadly force.
The controversy is justified.
The officer was aware the Babbitt was part of a mob. He wasn't concerned that Babbitt by herself would breach the perimeter they were trying to establish, he was concerned that she would be the first of thousands to do it.
she was perched in an approx. 24" wide by 36" high sidelight. She was unarmed. She posed no threat to him. He had options. She was not at the head of a mob. The crisis moment at the door had clearly passed, given the cracked glass, barricades at the doorway, the very small number of people at the doorway, and the officer calmly walking in the background.....circumstances do not suggest a life/death scenario for the officer. The officers outside on the capitol steps engaged in hand-to-hand combat were arguably at greater risk.
The video: https://nypost.com/2021/01/07/videos-show-shooting-of-ashli-babbitt-during-capitol-siege/
Not saying officer was a murderer. Circumstances clearly suggest he had determined to shoot anyone who came thru the window. Whether that was a policy, or an on the spot determination is not clear. Internal review cleared him. I can see the reasons why many would think he was justified. I can also see the reasons why many would think he is not.
The controversy is justified.
Particularly when compared to the circumstances of the previous summer.
Amen....great post
It was a bad choice to shoot.
She should not have been engaged in the actions she was...I admit that...and others should admit that he should NOT have shot her dead when he had pepper spray, tasers, and back up
I will defend that interpretation
Sorry, I respect both of you as posters but I don't see a controversy here.
She was coming through the window after being told to disperse. It was one way in, one way out and members of Congress were there. Have any of you read the Officers account? Sorry, can't second guess the line officer making the decision in the heat of battle, especially watching the video.
typical bootlicker repsonse that you think it was justified that a 275lb man was somehow afraid for his life of a 130lb woman that he needed to shoot her in the neck rather than just throw her to the ground.
A 130lb woman that could've had a gun and had dozens of people trying to get in with her. She died because Trump made her believe in a fantasy.
So cops should just open fire on everyone that could have a gun. Sounds like a good policy.
Well these guys (and our Media system) think its ok as long as the suspects are part of the red tribe....its blast away...ask questions later.
Other wise the police need to act with extreme caution.

Trying to follow your "logic"
If these folks forcefully break into the Capitol and force evacuation of Congress, we know they are peaceful?
If some Leftists occupy the building for a few hours over Palestine....so what?
They were arrested. Is the OK with you?
You think I care if Leftists get arrested? No
I don't particularly care if Leftists even live or die...since they want nothing but death and destruction for me and my family.
Its hard to summon up any emotional support for Marxists who make excuses for Stalin and Mao
But as American citizens they have a right to protest....and they have a right to protest at government buildings...buildings owned by the Taxpayers and the people.
And they have a right to protest without being shot dead by the police.
Now I follow your logic. If folks disagree with you, it's okay to kill them.
Your folks get access to all public buildings 24 hours a day with our limitation or restrictions
I have no idea what you are talking about.
I just said above that even though I don't like Leftists at all...they have a right to protest and NOT be shot dead by police for being in a government building.
Did you just not read what I wrote....or did you have a senior moment?
You're one of those "by any means necessary guys". Don't you understand what you're saying? It's very leftist jargon. You think citizenship gives you rights above others. You don't equal treatment under the law, you want special treatment.
I don't even know what that means.
I have said that both sides (Left or Right) have a right to protest at the National Capitol and not get shot dead for it.
I think that's actually a pretty consistent and logically position.
I don't think you are consistent. I don't believe you've thought through the implications of your statements. You are sure you are right and those expressing other views are wrong. There certainly a lot of wrong opinions out there, but your assertion of rights makes me wonder how far you woul
The following is dense reading, but you are intelligent and I'm sure can follow it.
Dostoevsky Knew: It Can Happen Here
Some people who cheer Hamas's atrocities would surely be capable of committing similar acts if given an opportunity.As I read about Harvard students demonstrating in favor of Hamas and educated people proclaiming that "decolonization" should be pursued "by any means necessary," I thought of Dostoevsky's reaction, a century and a half ago, to atrocities committed by the Ottomans as they suppressed uprisings among their Slavic subjects. This was a case, apparently unknown to today's "decolonizers," in which a Muslim empire persecuted colonized Christians.
The European press was then filled with reports that now seem familiar. Whole families were wiped out; women raped and tortured; living people humiliated and corpses abused; children slowly murdered before their parents' eyes; and, in one case that particularly shocked Dostoevsky, a young child forced to watch her father being flayed alive "completely." The child, Dostoevsky reported, was being cared for in Russia, where she repeatedly fainted as she recalled what she witnessed.
If it seems that only uncivilized people could be such sadists, Dostoevsky cautions, know that the same thing could happen among civilized Europeans as well. "For the moment it is still against the law," he writes, "but were it to depend on us, perhaps, nothing would stop us despite all our civilization."
For the time being, "people are simply intimidated by some sort of habit," Dostoevsky continues, but if some progressive expert were to come up with a theory showing that sometimes flaying skins can benefit the right cause because "the end justifies any means," and if that expert were to express his view "using the appropriate style," then, "believe me," there would be respectable people among us "willing to carry out the idea." Despite our sophistication and professions of compassion, "all that's needed is for some new fad to appear and people would be instantly transformed." Not everyone, of course, but the number of adherents of the new fad would grow while others would be afraid, or embarrassed, to cling to old ideas. And then, "where would we find ourselves: among the flayed or among the flayers?"
After 9/11, it turned out that terrorists were often well-off and well-educated. Cruelty often thrives among the sophisticated. Dostoevsky recalls the French terror, when people were humiliated and murdered in the name of the highest principles "and this after Rousseau and Voltaire!" We know, as Dostoevsky could only suppose, that during the Stalinist terrors millions were routinely tortured in the most degrading way possible; and that during the collectivization of agriculture, millions more were deliberately starved to death, with young Bolshevik idealists brought in to enforce the famine and take bits of food away from bloated children. In the West, intellectuals justified such behavior because it was done in the name of socialism and anti-imperialism.
Dostoevsky adds that there is no need to resort to examples from the past because the same dynamic can occur in any place at any time that allows the dark side of human nature to show itself, clad in the language of whatever passes for progressive and enlightened. "Believe me," Dostoevsky addresses his readers, "the most complete aberration of human hearts and minds is always possible."
It is a terrible mistake to imagine that thuggish deeds are performed only by thugs. Recalling his own early career as a revolutionist, Dostoevsky maintains that his group, which could readily have performed the most terrible acts, was composed of sophisticated people with the Russian equivalent of Ivy League educations. But despite regarding themselves as a cultured eliteor perhaps because they didfew "of us . . . could resist that well-known cycle of ideas and concepts that had taken such a firm hold on young society." Then it was "theoretical socialism," but it could have been anything, and there is no good reason to "think that even murder . . . would have stopped usnot all of us, of course, but at least some of us . . . surrounded by doctrines that had captured our souls."
Dostoevsky recalls that in his novel "The Possessed," he showed how even the most innocent hearts can be drawn into committing monstrous deeds and feeling proud to have committed them. "And therein lies the real horror: that . . . one can commit the foulest and most villainous act without in the least being a villain! And this happens . . . all over the world, since time began." "The possibility of considering oneselfand sometimes even being, in factan honorable person while committing obvious and undeniable villainy," he adds, is a possibility we overlook at our own peril.
A century later, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, contemplating the idealist Russians who joined in torture and the enlightened Western intellectuals who whitewashed it, asked why Shakespeare's villains murdered only a few people while the Bolsheviks killed millions. To answer this question, he reflects, one must grasp that no one thinks of himself as evil. To perform evil deeds a person must discover "a justification for his actions," so that he can regard stealing, humiliating and killing as good. "Macbeth's self-justifications were feeble," and so conscience restrained him. He had no ideology, Solzhenitsyn observes, nothing like "anti-imperialism" or "decolonization" to allay pangs of guilt. Solzhenitsyn concludes: "Ideologythat is what gives evil-doing its long-sought justification and gives the evil-doer the necessary steadfastness and determination . . . so that he won't hear reproaches and curses but receive praise and honors."
I have heard commentators worried that cancel culture and suppression of diverse opinions might lead to a "soft totalitarianism." If only. We need to recognize that some of those who justify Hamas's atrocities would be ready to perform them against their designated enemies. And unlike Dostoevsky's Turks or today's Hamas, they would have high-tech means at their disposal to extend their reach. I fear that the horrors of the 20th century may prove only a foretaste of much worse in the near future.
[url=https://www.wsj.com/articles/doestoevsky-knew-it-can-happen-here-hamas-palestine-progressive-radicalism-a7d196d6?mod=opinion_lead_pos6][/url]
https://www.wsj.com/articles/doestoevsky-knew-it-can-happen-here-hamas-palestine-progressive-radicalism-a7d196d6?mod=opinion_lead_pos6