How about backing up the vehicle, and getting out of there by taking a cross-street, a gas station, a parking lot, or similar; so as to de-escalate the situation, and when you are safe, calling police?
:dubious: You can choose to describe any inconvenience or irritation as the “reason” for you losing your head and deliberately assaulting somebody.
That doesn’t mean that the person who caused that inconvenience or irritation is the one principally at fault in the situation. It’s your responsibility not to have a rage meltdown and deliberately assault people just because they’re inconveniencing you.
This is the part we disagree about, at least as it applies to the situation depicted in the video.
Well, you need to decide whether the point you’re trying to make is (a) that illegally blocking roads while protesting justifies drivers in deliberately driving their vehicles into you, which is what you seemed to be arguing a couple posts ago;
or (b) that hitting vehicles with a stick justifies drivers in beating you up, which is what you seem to be arguing now.
I think (b) is a somewhat more defensible position than (a), although if the hitting-with-a-stick was in fact provoked by the driver deliberately driving their vehicle into you, then that substantially weakens your argument.
I’m not arguing about the legal justification at all. People here love to claim that they have a reality-based worldview. Here’s the reality: if you deliberately act like an ass, blocking traffic or doing other stupid shit to annoy people, some of those people, in reality, will beat your ass for it. In this age of cameras everywhere, the chances are high that your ass-beating will be caught on camera and your poor decision-making skills will be the basis of much mockery on the internet.
And if, for example, you deliberately act like an ass to your classmates in school, for example, teasing them or making fun of them, some of those classmates, in reality, will bring a gun to school and shoot you and your friends for it. And your poor decision-making skills will be the basis of much mockery on the internet. Right?
Oh wait, that’s not actually how it works. In situations not involving short-tempered drivers with a huge sense of entitlement and no self-control, we tend not to believe that doing some annoying “stupid shit” makes it okay to respond with violence. Or that the party we should be chastising on the internet in such situations should be the annoying one rather than the violent one.
Gosh, dude, I didn’t think you were actually going to double down on the massively stupid Position (a). :rolleyes:
I’d encourage you to read the first sentence of post #45 again.
How does that change anything? You’re not talking about “legal justification” and neither am I.
Ahhh, excellent then. I thought what you’ve labeled “Position (a)” was about what justifies the actions seen in the video.
Assault’s ok if you don’t like what the assaulted person was doing?
There’s a current right-wing propaganda movement to foster this very attitude, as long as what the assaulted person was doing was blocking a road in a street demonstration for some liberal cause or other.
Conservative lawmakers don’t like the optics of mobilizing law enforcement to repress peaceful left-wing protests, which saw a resurgence under GW Bush especially during the Iraq War. But they don’t like the protests happening either, because people might start to notice. So they have not un-shrewdly enlisted the natural road-ragey tendencies of non-protesting drivers to shift the focus of discussion from “What are these protestors angry about?” to “Should you be able to run down protestors with impunity when you’re angry at them for blocking the way of your car?”
It ought to be a no-brainer that of course you’re not entitled to deliberately drive your car into pedestrians in your way, even if the pedestrians’ blocking the road is annoying, stupid and/or illegal. But the combination of the short fuse and sense of entitlement that our car-centered culture fosters in drivers with the propaganda movement against left-wing protest has proved very effective at blurring that principle.
Conservative drivers in particular are being encouraged to consider a traffic impediment a literally intolerable frustration, and to believe that blocking roads for protest is worse than deliberately driving into pedestrians. So in this view the people who deserve to be mocked in that situation are the violently assaulted road-blockers, not the drivers who violently assault them.
And you think he was less vulnerable when he stopped the car and allowed the assailant to get closer to him. OK buddy. This must be a special kind of gun that gets less accurate when people get closer and move slower.
Did you close your eyes during the part where he rammed his car into the dude?
Because that part happened before the stick was used, when the only thing the pedestrian was guilty of is blocking traffic.
Blocking traffic is really annoying, but if someone is blocking traffic you maybe shouldn’t run them over with your car.
Hey, pal, you can dress anyway you want when you post. Sometimes I’m just back from a run wearing sweat pants and a sweat shirt.
Your clothing choices are your own & we won’t judge.
If this were posted to Reddit’s Am I The Asshole subreddit, I’d go with ESH.
Thanks to OP for introducing us to his impartial news source. Here are their five trending stories:
1. Watch: John Stossel Destroys Climate Change Myths In Terrific Video
2. An Antifa Member Tries to Block a Car and Assault Someone, It Doesn't Go Well (Seriously)
3. With Less Than a Year in Office, How's the Squad Doing? Here's a Look Into the Freshmen's Senior-Level Alleged Corruption
4. Reports: Since Dems Haven't Proven Their Case, Pelosi Might Not Do an Impeachment Vote
5. Cough it Up, California: The State's AG Has Charged You $21 Million for His Lawsuits Against President Trump. So Far
But I agree that it’s a real shame the Left is overrun by so many untold thousands of bloodthirsty antifas. The Right should be proud that Trumpists and neo-Nazis direct their political impulses in the finest traditions of MLK and Mahatma Gandhi.
Moderating: there is an argument happening but it doesn’t seem to be much of a great debate. More rant-y less debate-y. Off to the Pit.
Before clicking through to the article, without reading another post in the thread, I made a bet with myself: “this involves an antifascist attacking someone who is closely affiliated with neo-nazis or far-right militias. Probably in or around Portland, Oregon.”
So… okay, not totally right.
The reality was somehow even dumber than this. It’s a random livelink video shared by someone named “BasedPoland” (no points for guessing that this guy flirts with the far right fringe, as nobody else uses language like that and most of his posts are about nationalism, including nationalism in other countries), and the only information provided apart from the video is dismissed in the article. Instead they insist that he’s “antifa” based on…
Fuck, dude, I dunno what I expected from fuckin’ Red State, but it wasn’t any better than this, I’ll tell you that much. We have literally zero information or context on this, beyond “probably in the US” and “the dude was wearing a mask and hoodie”. And from that, you want to say… what, exactly?
Glad this got moved to the pit, because otherwise I would have to mince words. You’re a fucking idiot, dude. I’d elaborate on that, but I’d hate to put more work into my insults than you put into your OP.
Man, apparently al-Qaeda didn’t need to fly planes into skyscrapers to terrorize us, all they needed to do was come over here and block traffic. If only they’d known! 
And if he had a grenade (he might have), that would absolutely justify the driver bodily throwing him off a bridge.
We can make up all kinds of insane hypothetical scenarios for why lethal force may have been justified, but in none of them is it necessary, especially since there’s no evidence the guy has a gun.
Not enough blood for the death cultist over here.