Rittenhouse Trial

[Clinamenic]

They can both be true, but what I was seeing on Twitter was people saying stuff like the verdict should have been different because a verdict of not guilty emboldens the far right.

I get the frustration, but I think putting the potential political implications of a certain verdict above the facts of a case would be incredibly dangerous and undermine the whole concept of a fair trial.

There were also people saying things like this;

"The Rittenhouse verdict will be remembered as the moment american fascism turned into Nazism proper, and there was no turning back from the path of Holocaust."

It just seems to me that the people in the Reddit thread were actually discussing the trial whereas the people on Twitter had already made up their minds along ideological lines and felt that that should override everything.

Of course, there are some right wing wankers bigging him up as some sort of hero now too, who are clearly just as wedded to an ideological agenda, and a particularly unpleasant one at that.

Yeah I see your point about ideology compromising assessment of the case. It's an ideology I'm more inclined to support than oppose, i.e. I get the frustration too, but yeah it just isn't the place for ideology.

Was the defense case centered around self-defense? Self-defense, by way of leaving the safety of your home and transporting weaponry to an active protest site? C'mon.

Assuming I have the facts straight, that would seem obviously proactive, whereas self-defense would seem definitively reactive.

 

[william kent]

The respective platforms play a part in the type of responses I was seeing too; the knee jerk response is Twitter's bread and butter.

 

[Clinamenic]

The respective platforms play a part in the type of responses I was seeing too; the knee jerk response is Twitter's bread and butter.

Do you think on reddit there is less social/reputational incentive to have a good take?

 

[william kent]

Do you think on reddit there is less social/reputational incentive to have a good take?

Absolutely.

It's still pretty bad on there, but there isn't the same sense of everyone's account being a personal brand or of everyone feeling as though they're addressing their own personal audience. It's much less personality driven as it's closer to a forum or comment section.

 

[Clinamenic]

Yeah and I get the sense that reddit users are more hivemind-friendly than twitter users, i.e. less individualistic.

 

[william kent]

Was the defense case centered around self-defense? Self-defense, by way of leaving the safety of your home and transporting weaponry to an active protest site? C'mon.

Assuming I have the facts straight, that would seem obviously proactive, whereas self-defense would seem definitively reactive.

Yeah, they were arguing self-defense. The gist of it seems to be that he didn't actually break any laws being there, even with the weapon and despite it being incredibly stupid, and that he was attacked by three people, one of whom pointed a gun at him first.

 

[Clinamenic]

I see, so he was given the benefit of the doubt then? At least, that would seem to be the subtext.

And this is exactly how ingroup/outgroup bias would seem to function at its more subtle end: whether or not to grant someone benefit of the doubt, whether or not to exercise discretionary judgement in someone's favor, etc.

 

[william kent]

As I understand it, the charge thought most likely to stick was to do with the firearm but it turned out he didn't carry it across state lines, so that went out the window.

Apparently there's also footage of him trying to put out a fire prior to the altercations with the people he ended up shooting, so that bolstered his claims of being there to help. There's also footage of him being chased and attacked by the people he ended up shooting, the guy who survived admitted on the stand that he pointed his gun at Rittenhouse first and there was another witness who described one of the people shot as threatening to kill Rittenhouse and reaching for his gun.

It seems as though once the argument over whether he broke any laws by being there was settled then the case was pretty much over as there wasn't enough there to successfully argue it wasn't self-defense once the actual altercations came under scrutiny.

 

[Clinamenic]

Yeah I can see where those points can make a successful case, from my very limited understanding of all this.

 

[thirdform]

It was interesting seeing the response on Reddit in comparison to the response on Twitter. I was scrolling through a thread on /r/news and most of the comments I saw were about how much of a mess the prosecution was and how it was unsurprising he wasn't found guilty; Twitter was full of people talking about fascism and how the far right have now been given carte blanche to shoot anyone they like.

Yes because chaz/chop wasn't full of antiblack activisty cultists facepalm.

 

[thirdform]

Idk dude I'm not saying anything a million ppl haven't really said on Twitter or IG or whatever, but I live in a city where the police have, within the last few years, killed multiple teenagers of color for doing a whole hell of a lot less than Kyle Rittenhouse. It's fucking surreal. It's America.

Agreed but where does this put white radicals? Do we just give them a free pass because they spout the right shit about liberation?

 

[thirdform]

more on seattle.



If people want to talk about police killing people of colour then objectively what this chop lot did was worse than Rittenhouse. and for a fairly adolescent crime, joyriding. Fuck rittenhouse, he's a cop fetishising chode, but shit like this makes me hate white progressives far more than white conservatives.

Like, I appreciate that ops thread was probably done in bad faith to own the libs, that much is obvious from the comments later. But we're talking
about use of disproportionate force here. It doesn't help that most of the videos have now been removed (perhaps for good or not so good reasons.)

But then when you get comments like this:

The thing is, the SPD insisted their salaried military police stand down, presumably because they’re useless pigs. They could have responded but chose to pout and avoid protestors.
They could have taken chop in the chaos and even won protestors’ respects, but they fucking baited these attacks. The union put out a letter saying they would until protestors were nice to them.

Alright, fine, but if the pigs are pigs in which world would one expect them to behave ethically? Surely if you make a hoo-ha about abolishing the police then to ask them to cooperate with more effectiveness is part of the problem.

From myu admittedly removed vantage point there seems to be little actual social movementist energy for this stuff, be that CHAZ/CHOP and even Rittenhouse. Both sides seem to be delusional fantasists and activists.

 

[Mr. Tea]

The speakers can barely sentences together

Oops

I don't see the problem here - looks like a perfectly good @suspended sentence to me.

 

[sus]

why can't they both be true

I'll bet good money we don't see a statistically significant leap in white killings of nonwhites. That shit has been predicted since 2015 and it's never happened, and yet like a Messiah whose doomsday never arrives, libs keep pushing the dates back. The numbers in the late 2010s are the same as the numbers as the early 2010s for white on non-white killing; all this "carte blanche" stuff is a Boogeyman.

 

[sus]

They can both be true, but what I was seeing on Twitter was people saying stuff like the verdict should have been different because a verdict of not guilty emboldens the far right.

Of course they think this

The left cares all about symbolism. What emboldens what, what stands for what. See their obsession with language. And the nice thing is, symbolism can be totally ungrounded from real consequence. Like conceptual art, you can distort almost anything into symbolic violence without a burden of proof that it actually makes the world worse. So e.g. our language around homelessness in urban coastal US has treadmilled from bum to hobo, eventually "person's without housing." Meanwhile homelessness is higher than ever. Topical ointments on broken limbs. For a second example, see this "carte blanche to whites" line and its complete untethering from/lack of predictive power for actual white-on-minority homicides.

What the left used to care about but have bizarrely forgotten, as soon as inconvenient, is constitutional protection and slippery slopes. There is a hole in their head where the concept of precedent goes. They speak constantly of coming fascism, but start salivating for actual, foundational civil liberties and legal protections to be undermined.

 

[sus]

There were also people saying things like this;

"The Rittenhouse verdict will be remembered as the moment american fascism turned into Nazism proper, and there was no turning back from the path of Holocaust."

It just seems to me that the people in the Reddit thread were actually discussing the trial whereas the people on Twitter had already made up their minds along ideological lines and felt that that should override everything.

Of course, there are some right wing wankers bigging him up as some sort of hero now too who are clearly just as wedded to an ideological agenda, and a particularly unpleasant one at that.

Hysterics. News addled. All of them. Take em out back like kennel dogs.

 

[Mr. Tea]

I'll bet good money we don't see a statistically significant leap in white killings of nonwhites. That shit has been predicted since 2015 and it's never happened, and yet like a Messiah whose doomsday never arrives, libs keep pushing the dates back. The numbers in the late 2010s are the same as the numbers as the early 2010s for white on non-white killing; all this "carte blanche" stuff is a Boogeyman.

"Racist mass shootings have remained at the same acceptable level instead of increasing, haha suck it libs!" might be the most Gus take of all time.

 

[sus]

"Racist mass shootings have remained at the same acceptable level instead of increasing, haha suck it libs!" might be the most Gus take of all time.

You're so clueless lol. Mass shootings in this country are basically always white on white or white on mixed. And are basically never racially motivated. Sigh.

And homicides != Mass shootings.

And when the claim being advanced is specifically that there will be an increase, yes, 7 years of no increases damages the claim's credibility.

 

[sus]

Muting this thread because (1) it's toxic (2) I'm obviously right.

 

[sus]

BTW—don't you lads have your own racist establishment/police force to slam? I can take it from Padraig, but Tea where does your suburban furor come from? You know there are ongoing genocides closer geographically to you than Kenosha. You could join UNICEF or something?