killing

I came across this observation of the killing of Ms Good.

ICE is Trump's Gestapo or SS. They have no proper function, no constitutional authorization, and are loyal to Trump personally.

In Minneapolis on Wednesday, an ICE agent murdered a woman in her car.

The next day another shooting by federal border patrol agents (not ICE) occurred in Portland.

Trump and Vance have stated palpable untruths about what happened, to defend their goons. Both the videos of the incident and an eyewitness, less than 10 feet away with a good vantage point, make it clear that the ICE agent was gratuitously approaching, and trying to enter, the car. Trump and especially Vance have claimed the ICE goon shot in self-defense. Against what? You approach the driver-side of a car that is (apparently) trying to leave the area, you pull on the door handle, which doesn't open, then you fire three shots at the driver through the window, killing her—and that's somehow you defending yourself?! [Later edit: the killer was not the one who tried to open the door; he was standing in front of the front left edge of the car.]

Trump has claimed that the victim was part of a "far Left" network. Even if true, which I've heard no evidence to support, how does that justify killing her? If far Left organizations are protesting ICE and deportations, good for them.

The two young people shot in Portland were not killed and are in the hospital. The Trump line is that they were part of a criminal drug gang and were here illegally. Drug gangs exist only because of the drug Prohibition. There are no Gatorade gangs, no chocolate bar cartels. Why not? Because these things are not illegalized and their prices are such as earn an average rate of profit.

The federal border agency was stopping vehicles in a "targeted" manner---meaning: stopping drivers who looked Hispanic.

All of this crime, violence, and now government goon squads, is due to the widespread fear of foreigners.

And it's a perceptual-level mentality: there would be no ICE and no immigrant hysteria if the people entering this country were solely from Canada, the UK, and Scandinavia. Sure, the labor unions would still be yelling about lost jobs, but that is not sufficient to galvanize a group as large as MAGA.

The public's wrong view of immigrants and wrong ideas regarding drugs are enabling a power-mad low-life to change America into a police state.

The public's wrong view could not have happened without the destruction of the concept of individual rights. That destruction began in the ivory towers of Europe in the early 19th century. The Progressive movement brought the anti-rights view to America at the turn of the 20th century.

The anti-rights view didn't have to win. The reason that it won is that "rights" are a very abstract normative concept, and until Ayn Rand no one was able to defend the relation of abstractions to concretes or to ground morality in the facts.

The ultimate reason that ICE exists and that they murder is the lack of a theory of concept-formation, of free will, and of objectivity---including objectivity in ethics.

That ignorance, played upon by Berkeley, Hume, and Kant, permitted Jeremy Bentham to proclaim 20 years after Kant's Critique that rights are "nonsense upon stilts." And that has been the "settled science" about rights ever since.