I never said that she wouldn’t have been justified in running a cop over if he drew a gun on her depending on the situation. She could be completely, 100% justified.

“Police in the USA regularly shoot and kill people who pose no threat.”

Evidence for this claim? I am a scientist and researcher by profession, as well as a formally trained, collage educated researcher. My own past research does not support this claim. Quick current searches can find data that contrasts your proposition:

In 2025, 1,201 people were killed by police in the US. 90% of those killed by on-duty police are armed with a firearm or other weapon, according to data compiled by Everytown Research. Only 98 are from cases where an individual is completely unarmed.

https://everytownresearch.org/graph/percent-of-deaths-of-civilians-caused-by-police-are-with-a-firearm/

And even if we were to argue that half of all police killings are completely unjustified, we’re talking about 601 deaths.

Over 4,500 people die from unintentional drowning each year. 450 people die each year from falling out of bed. 72 die each year from hornet, wasp, and bee stings.

The “solution” proposed in this thread is “more training”, but what training, exactly? Current “quality” training is noted to reduce the tendency for violence used by police by roughly 30%, but that doesn’t mean it reduces killing by 30%. Not all violent altercations end in a shell discharge. So what are we talking about for a fix here? This ethereal training that will reduce physical altercations by 30% that reduce killings by 20%, dropping the number from 1,201 to 961. So you maybe save 241 lives at the cost of what, exactly?

Enhanced police training programs are primarily funded through local property taxes, state sales and income taxes. The total cost to recruit, equip, and provide advanced field training to a single officer can exceed $100,000 in their first 18 months. This excludes their salary.

Municipal budgets tend to go over capacity for salaries and overtime as it is today. Large-scale training updates also require physical equipment upgrades which cost multi-millions in costs. Such trainings often require simulation infrastructure. And keep in mind that there is no such thing as universal federal law on policing, policing conduct, rules, structure, hiring practices, and training are rooted at the state and local levels, so everywhere you go they have different criteria. So how do you make these trainings a universality? How do you get people to pay for it in Las Angeles vs. say, New Square New York, a village known for its high poverty rate and a low average family income near $20K? Is the proposed answer just to, “eat the rich”?

So again what is your ACTUAL proposal? You can’t just raise taxes, that will not work. You also can’t mandate that training changes happen universally across the country. Nobody has that authority. Districts hold their own authority independent of one another. And even if you could get the funding AND make it universal, the average American will not vote for it. You propose a cost of say, 3 billion to give all officers in the US enhanced training and tell them this is estimated to save 241 lives annually and they will scoff at your proposal and assume 75% of those people saved are likely hardened criminals anyway, so why exactly are we putting 3 billion to save the lives of known felons?

If you want to make change, you have to convince your fellow man to live righteously, which is no easy task. Change doesn’t happen overnight because some government mandate was put in place or because some money was thrown at some police districts for “enhanced training”.

Hell, simply removing laws that have no victim would reduce all police altercations by anywhere from 20-80% (impossible to strictly judge this with any available data). Don’t arrest someone for drug possession for example because there’s no need to. Let people live their lives the way they want and put into their body what they want because its their life and their body and these things would organically reduce anyway. The government IS a HUGE part of the problem alone.

I am discussing in good faith.

I agree completely. Police should use their best judgement and not immediately gravitate to force.

My argument unfortunately is coming from a place of not understanding the whole situation. I would need to investigate far further. For example, was she driving in a way meaning to escape police custody where she was almost running over innocent people? I don’t know. Did a cop simply leap in front of her car stupidly? I don’t know.

I remember a big debate on Reddit some years ago about a couple of Mexican men in a shootout with police where there were thousands of posts all bashing cops. I was very interested (and I believe police are fundamentally just thugs of the state, and I am anti-government, keep in mind) so I investigated further and found videos where police had instructed the men to do certain things something along the likes of 27 times before they open fired.

I felt like nobody took the time to actually know what happened. They heard a quick article in some liberal or conservative news network who only shared what they wanted to share and then listened to some people on Reddit and Tiktok and made entire assumptions of what clearly happened.

And it wasn’t much different of a discussion than what I’m seeing in this thread except that I haven’t viewed any recordings or other information (don’t know what information there is in whole) yet. I’m simply playing devil’s advocate because I’m not one to jump to conclusions assuming all cops are evil racists who just want to murder babies. I mean, that’s absurd. Then these same people are saying we should make laws/changes to stop this.

OK so the solution to I hate evil thugs of the state is to use the state? There’s a cognitive dissonance that I feel goes on too readily in societies today.

“Your home invasion part created a lot of unnecessary arguments. In most states, if you shot someone fleeing in their car when they were no longer threatening your life, you’d be convicted of murder.”

But it doesn’t matter what the government says. Just because something is set into law does not make it moral nor even logical/rational. If the government made rape legal tomorrow, should we accept that?

If someone breaks into my home and tries to murder my family I am wholly justified to end their life, even if they fled and I hunted them down. There is no government, keep that in mind. The notion of government is illusory. It’s propaganda that the ruling class has entire swaths of people believing that they can enact control over their lives and that this control is legitimate because they slapped a stamp on a piece of paper that looks official.

What’s the difference between a cop killing a fleeing murderer, or me? Nothing. There is no such thing as a civilian - that’s more government propaganda, just like the notion of public property. You cannot take money from me, buy a lawn mower, tell me who gets to use that lawn mower, then say you didn’t rob me because that mower is public property. All of that is sheer nonsense. You robbed me, used the money on something I didn’t consent to, then tried to trick me into thinking it’s legitimate because you have my best interest at heart and you did it for me.

There are no government officials, there are only people. If it would be patently insane/immoral for your neighbor to do it, it’s just as patently insane/immoral for your neighbor to do it if he’s given a badge. The badge is the brainwashing. It isn’t legitimate and it never has been.

A good person cannot suffer the ongoing threat of the murderer. If you can cage the murderer, so be it, but even then morally it depends on who is agreeing to pay for the murderer’s incarceration. What if I tell you I am not? Well, then you can either set them free or forcibly take my money to pay for it. So you have to be evil to cage evil or you have to commit to inaction and set the murderer free. And what exactly do you think I’m going to do if you do that and I see them in my neighborhood again, near my kids? I will kill them. I won’t give them a trial. I won’t ask them questions. I won’t see if it’s “ok” with anyone else. This person tried to kill my family once and other people decided they didn’t want to pay to keep them imprisoned and nobody else was strong enough to kill a murderer.

Yes, you are a boot licker. No, you are absolutely not an anarchist. Sticking feathers up your ass doesn’t make you a chicken. It takes more than just saying that’s what you are, Javert. You are applying legalist morality as justification. Do you not understand why multiple people keep calling you Javert, Javert?

It should always be stopped. There’s a difference between what is objectively moral and what is subjectively moral.

Theft is objectively immoral.

Stealing to feed your children is subjectively moral and objectively immoral.

Both can be true at the same time.

The reason why theft is objectively moral is because you would never want anyone to violate your will and thus, you should never want to violate the will of another.

You’re an anarchist but you’re against shoplifting???

I am against theft, that is correct. Theft is immoral, yes.

Can you tell me when theft is not immoral? When you want it bad enough?

That isn’t theft.

The notion of a minimum wage is both arbitrary and authoritarian. It is no business of the third party to tell two adults how they can trade. There is no such thing as, “losing money annually because of minimum wage laws”. You’re not cheated because someone with a badge they created themselves tells you you’re owned something because they claim to be the authority.

Authority is fake. Government is an illusion. You’ve been brainwashed.

Replying just to remind myself to check what dumbfuck shit that moron spouts in response to this.

I don’t know who that is. I’m not a Nazi. I am anti-government, in fact.

Theft is theft. What theft is, fundamentally, is when a person enacts an action upon another in which violates the will of the other within a logical order of operations as it pertains to their property.

For example, if you find a diamond in the woods that nobody else even knows exists and you desire exclusive authority over it then you own it. You don’t own it because I say so, you own it through a logical system because it literally cannot exist in any other feasible structure that isn’t wholly arbitrary. You own it because you did not violate the will of another in order to own it, and you own it because you desire to own it.

If someone else came along and picked up a rock that was lying next to that diamond and you do not care at all about it, then you did not own that rock to begin with and thus, the other person did not rob you in order to claim ownership over that rock.

But if you are with that diamond and someone else comes along and thinks they deserve that diamond more than you but the only way they can manifest their desire of exclusive authority over the diamond is to engage in an action of which violates your will, they would need to steal it from you, and you cannot own that in which you’ve stolen, nor can you steal that in which you own.

No other claim can be made rationally that dictates who should own that diamond. It doesn’t matter if the other person has 10 other diamonds and you have none. It doesn’t matter if that other person has food and you do not and that diamond could get you food. None of that matters, and you actually agree that it doesn’t matter because you already understand and act out in this world per a cardinal rule that you could never suffer another to violate your will, whatever it might be.

This is like the golden rule but ‘The Golden Rule’ is the ethical principle of treating others as you would want to be treated, but that concept is wholly flawed, because it does not take into account that humans have conflicting wills. Maybe I want to be punched in the fact, so the golden rule would then stipulate that I get to punch you in the face. Or what if you want a beautiful woman to have sex with you, do I get to rape her, then?

This principle is similar to the golden rule except that you have to understand that it is go unto others as THEY would want you to do to them, plus a little extra. More or less, human conflicts of wills are always contradictory and there are only two ways to resolve a will conflict, either arbitrary, or logically.

We both want X but only one of us can have X. How do we figure out who gets X?

Well I can murder you and take X, and that’s arbitrary because I just decided I want X more which is not a quantifiable stance. OR we understand that if I had X first I would not want you to take it from me and since you have X first, realizing this, I choose not to take it from you. That is the fundamental principle of ownership vs. theft.

Theft is when will is violated as it pertains to ownership. Ownership is a desire to own where you did not violate the will of another to obtain exclusive authority over. it’s that simple.

Everything else is nonsense.

Theft is never acceptable, no. There is an objective and logical reason as to why this is. Morality simply is the concept of actions we - meaning people - should or should not commit to. Morality does not apply to nature, simply meaning that in which sits outside of the frame of those with personhood - it only applies to people.

So the question becomes, how do we know which actions we should or should not commit to? Well, you can answer this logically, and quite simply, actually.

You already understand that you never want anyone else to violate your will. It is in fact logically impossible to desire the violation of your own will because that in which you will is what you want. If you say one minute that you don’t want me to punch you in the face but then the next minute you’re OK with it, it is not that your will is such that you wish it to be violated, it is that your will has changed.

And since it is not objectively possible to place the subjective in a structure of hierarchy without that hierarchy being utterly arbitrary, you cannot set value to will. For example, say there is a diamond and both of us desire exclusive authority over it. I cannot make any claims of my desire over this diamond that objectively supersede your desires. Thus, there is no way for us to mandate who deserves the diamond as predicated solely on our feelings.

That being said, because you understand that it would never be permissible to you that I violate your will, it can never be permissible for you to violate mine. So at this juncture all we need to set is the logical standards for how a system of human conflict must work.

Think of it like this - I’ll set up a thought experiment example:

You are the only human being on earth and are walking through the woods. You find a diamond on the ground and pick it up. Immediately your will is to hold exclusive authority over that diamond. You want to be the one who decides what happens to it and you would be upset if the diamond became lost, damaged, or otherwise out of your control.

Who has ownership over that diamond? Well, you do. Not because anyone said so, but because it is the only possible outcome in this scenario. You desire exclusive authority over it and there is no other human will of which to contest your will. Those are actually the two logical criteria for ownership. Anything else is just referring to some level of authoritarian justification to mandate that your desires supersede the desires of another. Basically, arbitration through might.

Now imagine I pop into the world and see you with that diamond and I also manifest a will desiring exclusive authority over it. Now how would I obtain my will? Well, I would need to violate your will, which preexists mine. This is actually the logical order of operations of which manifests the idea of theft, mind you. If you had passed by that diamond without a second thought and it wouldn’t bother you one bit had I come along later and coveted it as my own, then you never desired ownership and thus, did not hold ownership over the diamond in the first place and as such, I did not need to do anything to another will in order to make mine manifest.

This is why you can own something and gift it, sell it, trade it, or discard it, and the next person to hold ownership over it obtained it through moral means. Keep in mind that it is impossible to own that in which you’ve stolen just as it is impossible to steal that in which you already own. The constructs of ownership and theft require one another for the other to exist as ideas. If you can own something you’ve stolen then the very ideas of ownership and theft become arbitrary, and now we’re arguing semantics, not ideas.

I can take something from you (like taxes, let’s say), and tell you that isn’t theft because I have a uniform on, wear a badge, have some kind of formal sounding title, or because I tell you it’s legitimate, but none of that renders the act either legitimate nor moral. Taxation is theft not because I say so, but because the cardinal essence (see Aristotle) of the idea itself mandates it.

It does not matter if you’re starving to death for instance and you steal food from me, even if I have so much food that I could feed the both of us for 1,000 years, the act of stealing the food itself is an act of theft and every act of theft is objectively immoral because it is logically so. You would never suffer another to violate your will as it pertained to any of your possessions either, including but not limited to food.

What you are likely doing is misconstruing your personal, subjective views of morality. You are allowed to FEEL that someone with food for both of us for 1,000 years who won’t give some to a starving person is a bad person, and there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with that. I would agree with you on that front (though there may be exceptions, such as say, someone asking for you food who already tried to murder you or your family.)

But personal feelings do not mean it is morally correct to rob them. The logic of that sentiment is extremely nefarious and can be used to mandate literally anything, because it’s wholly arbitrary. To use the funny, silly, and stereotypical example of Hitler here, if Hitler decided that the Jews all needed to be destroyed, he is using a similar argument of emotion without logic. He is mandating that his personal, emotional, arbitrary views hold more value than the will of those he means to slaughter because he believes himself to hold greater wisdom then his victims, which is not objectively true.

There is no such thing as the wiser man or the lesser will. To even say that you are entitled to my food for example because you are starving is to stipulate that life itself holds a level of value that is absolute, and it doesn’t. A man for example can value anything over the value of life, and all of us actually already do this. If given the choice that a random stranger die, or your child, who would you choose? Let’s make the situation even simpler, what if it were a child rapist’s life, or your child? So you already agree that life itself has arbitrary value.

With what respect might be owed to you as a stranger on the internet my estimate is you’ve never thought high enough level about any of this as you’re still at a low-level of thinking which is predicated principally on emotion. I do not mean offense in saying that, mind, but you might want to take a step back and think your positions through carefully first.

I agree with you. If I have more than enough food and a good family is starving, I would share. We both agree here, great!

But the problem is it isn’t just that simple, is it? What happens if someone tried to invade my home and take from my family? What if the last time I let someone into my home because they told me they were in need they tried to kill my children? Am I not also entitled to be extremely wary of those I do not know? What do I know of your motives, your world views, etc.?

If life were this simple the world would be a wonderful place devoid of victims and perpetrators, but it isn’t. I believe wholly that virtually all human conflict arises due to a differentiation on how differing parties view the same reality we’re all apart of.

I mean, if you believe that you have a god who wants you to kill non-believers then if I’m a non-believer how can we coexist in peace? You don’t even believe this world runs on the same constraints that I do. It’s like if one of us felt that jumping off a cliff wouldn’t not only not kill us, but would grant us boons, yet the other of us just believes jumping amounts to suicide. How do we both exist in this same space then? We cannot even agree on how reality is.

Remember George Floyd? The man was convicted of many felony offenses, one being when he held a gun to a pregnant woman’s stomach while his companions robbed her home. He was later martyred as a shining example of black sub-culture. They’ve made statues showcasing him in angel wings in his honor.

The man was evil. How can I coexist knowing what he did with the fact that there are people out there who believe he was good? This isn’t just a different opinion, it’s a fundamental viewpoint of righteousness and morality itself. If we cannot even agree on what’s good and what’s not, how can I trust that every person who claims they are starving is deserving of my food? EVEN if I have more than enough to go around. Maybe I want to save ample amounts for my family. Maybe I want some so I CAN give it to those in need, but I have my own ways to vet who those people are. There are roughly 10 billion people on this planet and billions of them believe the world holds some kind of “magic” - be it some kind of god, ghosts, or other form of supernatural, and no amount of evidence changes those minds at any rapid pace.

So again, I agree with you, but it just isn’t that simple. What I DO know is this: I am a good person who wants to help GOOD people in need and condemn those who are evil. I am not religious, I am anti-government, and I believe all people deserve to be treated equally under any moral laws we might enforce. I want you to be able to live your life however you like so long as you are not harming the innocent, but you are not entitled to what I have as if you are wise and just and I am petty, stupid and cruel. EVEN if I have LOTS more than you.

But what’s the situation here?

What if we know a famine is coming and so I create a food stand and sell burgers at $5 a burger to everyone and 1 billion people buy a burger from me when they could have bought something else to eat pre-famine. Now I’ve made 5 billion dollars (we’re going to greatly simplify this thought experiment) and I buy up tons of food.

How did I obtain all of that food? Well, 1 billion people consented to a trade with me for burgers in exchange for money. So now what if those people all get together and say, we want you to give us 50% of your food!

Well, why the hell did you all consent to $5 a burger then? You could have literally negotiated it at $2.50 a burger and then saved the other $2.50, couldn’t you? Or why didn’t you all buy $1.00 salads at the other shop instead and save up the remaining $4.00? Do you understand that to demand what I have now is to simply say you consented to $5 then decided to show back up with a mob and threaten me unless I sold it for $2.50? And what if I wouldn’t have consented to $2.50 so I stopped selling burgers and went out of business? Then everyone could have just got that $1 salad instead and saved that money for future food.

So now we’re in a famine and people are without food and I’m to blame because I have food? I need to give everyone back because everyone changed their mind due to future circumstances?

And hell, I would personally be more than happy to help GOOD people in need, but how do I know who’s good? Would you feed the child rapist if you had the food? Would you let them into your home and feed them? Or just expect someone else to do all of that for you and assume you’re playing your part because you vote and get taxed?

So some people don’t deserve your food even if you have an abundance, do they? And what if I let someone into my home and they don’t just take what I offer, but they try to take all of it? What if they try to kill me and my family? Should I trust the next person who comes by asking for food? If a mob shows up at my door with pitchforks and demands - the same ones who CONSENTED to pay me for my burgers before, do I just open my doors happily?

You’re simplifying a hugely complex construct. Life isn’t as simple as this and people aren’t as trustworthy as this. I’d see all rapists and murderers dead. The ONLY reason I am actually NOT in favor of the death penalty is because I do not want a single innocent person murdered for something they did not do. If we had an unequivocal way of knowing rapists and murderers committed the acts, I would say immediate death penalty for each and every one without question.

Not all human life has the same value. We all know this and we all live this way, we just don’t want to think about it and certainly don’t want to talk about it in public because it’s not the politically correct thing to talk about.

But this is only your opinion, not an objective fact of life.

Do ALL humans deserve food and water? What about child rapists? And if you say yes even to that, what about child rapists who are not incarcerated? Does the child rapist who is currently raping a child right now deserve life? If you had a gun and you were there to stop it and you couldn’t stop it without the gun, would you kill that rapist?

I hope so, and if so, then what you’re declaring there is that you DO have limits on who deserves what and it has nothing to do with being human and everything to do with what KIND of human you are. We all do this all the time, but most people haven’t given it any level of high-end thought, so it defaults to this generic idea of “human life has value”, which is nonsense.

SOME human life has value. Did Hitler’s life have value? Did it when he was 1 years old? How about 10? 20? Pre Nazi Germany? Post? Where’s the line? When does he stop being deserving of life? You know the answer, or at the very least you’re likely not so stubborn or stupid to think you don’t have some idea.

And therein lies the rub. You’re saying that you - the wise and just ruler - will take from me - the sinister and selfish barbarian - because you see me as such as see yourself as ordained to make decisions you believe me incapable of making. This just makes you an unjust and unethical tyrant.

You are entitled to NOTHING from me unless I agree, and therein lies your fundamental problem in this argument. You are not all wise and understanding of all that which is just and moral. You are a human, possibly not even as moral or educated as I am. For all we know, YOU are the barbarian in this conversation but your ego will refute that until our last typed words.

Being able to accept that you do NOT have all the answers and that other people are NOT the barbarians so long as they don’t do as your worldview pervades is a step closer to understanding how to live an actually just and moral life. There are other ways to see and live a human life and one of those does not intrinsically have to be that other people value what you value in the manner in which you value them.

I can see for instance, my life’s work as having more value than the life of a rapist. But it’s just work. But it’s also my life. So we’re comparing the fruits of one life to the fruits of another. Maybe my life’s work is a cure for cancer, or maybe it’s just a new alternator for a Toyota. It isn’t for you to choose how I value - my property can hold more value than a human life if I want it to, because it’s MY value.

And you’re free to disagree with me, and so be it! So give up your money and feed and water whomever you like. I will do the same, and maybe I’ll feed more than you will, or less, but the bottom line is you do not have the right to tell me what is valuable and what isn’t. That notion is nonsensical, not to mention irrational.

I don’t know if this is true but it might be. I wouldn’t really be that surprised. But why pizza? These days almost all restaurants will delivery through mobile app businesses like Uber Eats.

Making what change, exactly? You and I cannot control the choices that other people make, we can only control our own choices. I flex my control by teaching my children how to live a moral life, by myself, living by that example and living a moral life. I come to boards like this one and try to convince people through well thought out and articulated arguments what is objective, logical, rational, and moral, without dodging to emotion.