Americans have the right to carry a pistol. But carrying a pistol while heckling police officers and touching a police officer who is performing their duty, sounds deadly to me.

Can we agree that the deceased had a right to carry a pistol? Can we agree that the deceased had been heckling police officers? Can we agree that the deceased had touched a police officer?

Nothing he did warranted death. But he did choose to put himself in an extremely dangerous position, moreso by touching a police officer than by carrying a pistol. But in any case don't carry a pistol when you are out looking for confrontation, especially with police. Even if you're right, you're still dead.

Note though, I do not agree with this particular right (that of bearing arms, visibly so, at a protest), but the so called right leaning people are very enamored by this one and were very vocal about it just yesterday. Suddenly those same people seem to be equivocating about it now.

The people who were supportive of bringing assault rifles to contentious public rallies are now falling over themselves to blame Alex Pretti.

Touching a 'police officer' had nothing to do with the killing. Had he touched his own behind the same thing could have transpired. What killed him is the political support for ICE to be beyond accountability and the license for violence.

In this atmosphere anyone killed by ICE is automatically a homegrown terrorist, if by nothing else, by presidential fiat.

I still think, in general, when going out looking for confrontation (whether that be against the police or even just a bar fight) that the firearms should be left at home.

How do you exercise your 2A rights without your firearms? If you leave them at home, then you aren’t exercising the right, and if you show up in public with a firearm staying out of the way of law enforcement with your hands visible the entire time, then you are exercising those rights i.e. “looking for confrontation”.

In general, I think it’s nonsensical that people can exercise their rights but not in a way that a tyrannical regime might persecute them for—by definition, that’s not exercising rights it’s yielding them to the government.

Yes, this is the entire point: the left is saying "the government shouldn't murder citizens for exercising their legal rights", and the right is saying "if you exercise your legal rights, it's your fault if the government murders you" (or at least "that's the risk you run").

If American patriotism has anything at all to do with valuing freedom from tyranny and oppression, then the right-wing mindset ("you might have the 'legal right' to film an officer, but the state might murder you for it") seems aggressively un-American. Specifically, if you have "the right to do X but the government might murder you for doing X" then you don't really have the right to do X by definition.

For what it's worth, I don't even see this specific incident as government persecution. It looks like plain murder. Murder by a government employee, but murder nonetheless.

I think we are disagreed about whether someone can safely assert their rights before a tyrannical regime. If you could do it safely, the regime wouldn’t be tyrannical. If you “assert your rights” but only in a way that is safe from reprisal by a tyrannical regime, then you aren’t asserting your rights, you are letting the government infringe on your rights.

Meanwhile, it's possible to favor free enterprise, (genuinely) smaller government, low taxes, free trade, and other so-called "right-leaning" perspectives without joining a slack-jawed personality cult that demands that you deny the evidence of your own eyes.

> If you were a cop would you take chances

I wouldn't be a cop if I was afraid that every person with a cell phone might shoot me with a gun, or if I was afraid that every soccer mom in a car might try to run me over. And while American policing is riddled with accountability problems, it's important to emphasize that the crushing majority of American police can manage much riskier circumstances without murdering anyone--it seems to be exclusively the agencies under the Department of Homeland Security that behave like secret police on a regular basis.

You are demanding that the victim maintain a clear head under stressful conditions, while holding his attackers to no such standard. But you knew that.

As usual, it's not hard to tell who the bad guys are: they're the ones who initiate violence.

Glancing at your user page, this should be an exercise in preaching to the choir. You do understand that the only reason the Republicans in the US support Israel is because embracing fundamentalist Christian eschatology gets them votes they don't have to work for. Right?

How can you say this, out loud, and not immediately hear yourself as the villain? This is such a cartoonishly deluded and paranoid belief, it truly boggles the mind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houthis

To provide some additional context to an often over-(ab)used quote:

I often see it used as a "thought-terminating cliché". Applying it this way would likely meet his definition of intolerant at least half-way:

Popper defines what he means by 'intolerance'. According to his definition, it requires both (A) the refusal to participate in 'rational discourse', and (B) incitement to and use of violence against people with different views.

You will find 'intolerant people' on all sides of the political spectra. (I don't see how dumbing it down to 'left' and 'right' really serves any rational discourse.)

> "I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies ; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force ; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument ; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal." (The Open Society and Its Enemies, 1945)

https://ia800100.us.archive.org/10/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.5...

(It's well worth to read as a whole, given how often it is used and abused out of its surrounding context in the book.)

> "Conscience could be defined as the intuitive capacity of man to find out the meaning of a situation. Since this meaning is something unique, it does not fall under a general law, and an intuitive capacity such as conscience is the only means to seize hold of meaning Gestalts. […] True conscience has nothing to do with what I would term “superegotistic pseudomorality.” Nor can it be dismissed as a conditioning process. Conscience is a definitely human phenomenon. But we must add that it is also “just” a human phenomenon. It is subject to the human condition in that it is stamped by the finiteness of man. For he is not only guided by conscience in his search for meaning, he is sometimes misled by it as well. Unless he is a perfectionist, he also will accept this fallibility of conscience. It is true, man is free and responsible. But his freedom is finite. Human freedom is not omnipotence. Nor is human wisdom omniscience, and this holds for both cognition and conscience. One never knows whether or not it is the true meaning to which he is committed. And he will not know it even on his deathbed. Ignoramus et ignorabimus—we do not, and shall never know—as Emil Du Bois-Reymond once put it, albeit in a wholly different context of the psychophysical problem. But if man is not to contradict his own humanness, he has to obey his conscience unconditionally, even though he is aware of the possibility of error. I would say that the possibility of error does not dispense him from the necessity of trial. As Gordon W. Allport puts it, “we can be at one and the same time half-sure and whole-hearted. *The possibility that my conscience errs implies the possibility that another one’s conscience is right. This entails humility and modesty. If I am to search for meaning, I have to be certain that there is meaning. If, on the other hand, I cannot be certain that I will also find it, I must be tolerant.* This does not imply by any means any sort of indifferentism. Being tolerant does not mean that I share another one’s belief. But it does mean that I acknowledge another one’s right to believe, and obey, his own conscience. […] Suffering is only one aspect of what I call “the tragic triad” of human existence. This triad is made up of pain, guilt, and death. There is no human being who may say that he has not failed, that he does not suffer, and that he will not die." (Viktor Frankl, The Will to Meaning, 1972)

> "For tolerance, rightly understood, has not the slightest thing to do with indifferentism. And if we finally ask ourselves: how can I, being one hundred percent convinced of my own faith, possibly accept another's faith, another's conviction? Do I not, by that very act, become unfaithful to my own faith and my own conviction? We must answer this question in the negative. For I do not respect another's faith because I can share it, but because I must respect the other person himself. Note: Tolerance does not consist in sharing another's view, but only in granting the other the right to be of a different view at all. On the other hand, tolerance is also misunderstood if one goes so far as to grant the other the right to be, for his own part, intolerant." (machine translated from the German original)

The armed and belligerent government agents who killed Alex Pretti and Renee Good certainly meet both criteria, as do the Trump administration personnel who repeatedly and maliciously lied about the events in question. History tells us that societies that tolerate such actions eventually pay a terrible price.

The rest of your wall of text doesn't seem relevant, unless I'm missing something.

I don't think parent commenter is saying that leaning right is sociopathic, but that some people try to pass their sociopathy as a simple act of being right leaning.

To be clear, those aren’t facts, that’s delusion. Pretti objectively did not interfere at all. He was carrying a gun—that’s a fact—but he didn’t interfere. The federal agents approached him and pushed him back, and he retreated the entire time.

Moreover, a right leaning person wouldn’t delude themselves in this way except that they had previously coded the federal agents as “their side” and Pretti as “the other side”—if Pretti was a J6er and the ICE agent was a Capitol Hill police officer, our hypothetical right-winger would have been outraged at the killing as would everyone else (assuming it was equally as unjustified as the Pretti murder). We don’t even need a hypothetical, because the right was outraged that the J6ers were prosecuted and sentenced, and then jubilant when Trump pardoned them.

I’m also obligated to point out that I’m painting with a broad brush here. A small share of the right have, however reluctantly or timidly, spoken out against the mainstream right-wing claims that Pretti was doing something wrong. For example, Rand Paul gave an interview stating that Pretti was clearly retreating and there was no cause for the killing, and even MTG said that the right would be up in arms (no pun intended) if the roles were reversed. Kudos to those on the right who have the bravery to say obvious truths in times such as these, I guess.

I mean why do people even post something like that? It takes 2 seconds to look up the definition of abnormal. It's it really not knowing, it's is it (what I believe) trying to sneak in their moral judgements behind a veneer of supposed "neutrality"?

> Abnormal - deviating from what is normal or usual, typically in a way that is undesirable or worrying.

Yes, that's precisely what it is. Moral judgements based on outdated ("conservative", especially clerical) understandings of the world, wrapped in some delusional sense of "objectivity". Only the scientifically and philosophically illiterate fall for it. In German, we call it Bauernfängerei (swizzling, duping; lit. "pawn catching").

If the topic is about whether homosexuality is non-normative and heterosexuality is normative (with the actual, common meanings of the words), we can have a philosophical discussion on that.

But it wasn't 1:1, so you would have lets say 100 homes connected to a local exchange, and that local exchange would have say 20 lines to the next exchange in the network. That placed limits on the amount of concurrent connections you could have from one area - if 21 homes all tried to call people in the next city over, at least one of them would get a signal that all circuits are full and they would have to try again later. It drastically reduced the amount of lines you need between local exchanges though.

I guess it helped that phone calls were quite expensive, so people generally made very short calls. I haven’t really thought about this before but one of the main reasons for the pricing system could have been the facts that you mentioned.

In Sweden, the pricing system was tiered. Same area code (roughly: same municipality) = lowest rate. Neighbouring area codes = higher rate. Outside of that = highest rate. The rate was halved after 6pm. A reason for lowering the rates in the evening might have been that there were far less business users calling after 6pm.

One of the reasons I remember the pricing system is that my parents would not be happy if I dialed in to a modem pool before 6pm :)

Before I was born, the telephone company in Sweden (Televerket, later Telia) started to upgrade their system to use digital telephone exchanges (AXE). But there were of course still some kind of hard limit for how many concurrent calls they could handle, so I guess that’s why they kept the pricing system for a while.

This is partly speculation on my part, so feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_old_telephone_service

I can't see them changing this in the foreseeable future, major parts of their userbase run the cheapest phones one can buy, and they're much more interested in as much data as possible, so near 100% device coverage has to be important for them.