by zahlman | 2026-01-25 18:24:49+00:00
> Have you considered the potential bias that people are dragged out of their cars before they can start recording video?

All such video has been third-person perspective, so no.

> Perhaps the dragging out of the car happens while nobody is recording them, then people see and start recording for posterity.

In the cases where video shows events prior to the arrest, it shows justification for the arrest. Activists have a clear incentive to hide that justification. So why would I take claims at face value about the existence of unjustified arrests where nobody started recording before the arrest?

> Do you have reason to think otherwise such that you can dismiss others' reports with intellectual honesty rather than motivated reasoning?

The repeated prior experience of seeing people make reports, look them up, and find that they've been misrepresented, yes.

> For example, maybe others watched the videos and think there is no way to justify what they saw. To such an individual, seeing someone try to justify it might look like trolling

I disagree that this is a legitimate reason to flag a comment, according to my reading of the guidelines.

"The videos" doesn't refer to a specific set of videos. I'm talking here about cases where people claimed that something (not the incident that OP is about) had happened in a specific way, and I had already seen video that disproved the narrative. If they saw a different video, or a clip of the video, or a social media rumour, and their emotions are running high because they can't imagine a justification, that isn't my fault.

(For example, a sibling comment is pushing the "kidnapping and arresting" narrative for the child taken directly back to his home. We already saw during Trump's first term that the activists will raise hue and cry about "families being separated" by ICE; now they can't put the family together either.)

And I'm talking about cases where people bring up some other random thing that they totally know happened, that I haven't heard of at all, and they don't proactively bring evidence but how dare I not know about it. Always described with a flurry of emotionally charged language. My priors are that all of this will evaporate under scrutiny, because of what I have experienced before when trying to look into things. This extends generally to protests of this nature before the current administration's use of ICE, too.

And I'm talking about cases where people seem to have entirely wrong ideas about what the law actually permits. I get flagged, for example, when I make posts that consist of nothing but the evidenced truth about ICE's legal powers and what is or isn't a legitimate protest action. See e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46750452.

It's hard for me not to perceive that I get flagged for no reason other than being on "the wrong side" of a contentious political issue, because people can't fathom that an honest person who tries to research claims could possibly disagree with them so starkly in good faith.

But I do research these claims (although there's only so much time I'm willing to put into them).

I did research this story.

And I already previously reported back (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46750401) that I now generally agree that this specific shooting looks unjustified (certainly it at least requires an investigation, which I would have said anyway, like for any high-profile LEO use of lethal force).

I'm just not going to continue a direct chain of replies with people who openly insult me. I'm still human.

Meanwhile, comments where people just openly go "Nazi, Nazi, Nazi", "fascist, fascist, fascist", spewing outrage without substance, stay visible incognito.

> You will get nowhere merely complaining about the flags and downvotes; they will keep coming (on this topic) until you start to comment more thoughtfully (on this topic), or not at all.

This is effectively intimidation.