Rittenhouse Trial

[version]

Someone in the Reddit thread said watching the way the prosecution behaved actually dissuaded them from their pro-death penalty position as they wondered how many other people like them were operating within the legal system.

 

[Murphy]

Gus abuses dogs

 

[sus]

Reddit is pretty liberal, and the twitter circles I'm in lean toward the r/news direction, which makes me wonder what scenes you run in on Twitter Version

 

[martin]

how much of a mess the prosecution was

It was, they were all over the place. The bit where they brought up the fact he'd once played Call of Duty was ridiculous, and am sure all the squabbling over pixel quality and claims that video clips 'shrink' if you email them (which all took up a whole day) pissed off the jury.

The car dealer interviews were funny though, contradicting every statement they'd previously made and getting reprimanded for just guessing what happened and backtracking.

 

[version]

Reddit is pretty liberal, and the twitter circles I'm in lean toward the r/news direction, which makes me wonder what scenes you run in on Twitter Version

I don't have a Twitter account. I just read the responses under the NYT, AP News and a few other liberal sources' tweets about the verdict.

 

[martin]

Wouldn't be too surprised if Tucker had him on.

Gone one step further:

 

[IdleRich]

The speakers can barely sentences together

Oops

 

[version]

Gone one step further:

Urgh.

 

[sus]

The rNBA takes are surprisingly cool headed I think that's a good sign

 

[sus]

Did you know rNBA is the most popular website among men age 12-34 internationally im positive about this it's a fact

 

[sus]

It's very weird. People who don't use Reddit and don't watch basketball nonetheless go on rNBA.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

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.

why can't they both be true

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

The prosecution was a total mess and the verdict was unsurprising to anyone even halfway (in my case, very halfway) paying attention

Also not v hard to see it further emboldening far-right shitbags (+ their teenage fanbois). If people are carrying guns into volatile situations, sooner or later someone or ones is getting shot. It's virtually inevitable. The less deterred they feel by the threat of legal consequences, the more likely they are to shoot people.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

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.

 

[Clinamenic]

Yeah I suspect Rittenhouse functions as a hero/avatar for alienated young men, mostly white obviously, who wanna LARP call of duty, but instead settle for LARPing vicariously through Rittenhouse.

 

[Clinamenic]

I'd say it is natural for tribes to favor insiders, but how do we square that with our situation of multiple "tribes" existing in the same society, without the same levels of institutional representation, i.e. perches from which to exercise their favor, e.g. judges?

 

[Clinamenic]

I wish I saw this approach taken more often by progressives, an approach of reckoning with and remediating tribalist adversity, people consciously or unconsciously favoring people with whom they relate.

 

[Clinamenic]

Yeah I suspect Rittenhouse functions as a hero/avatar for alienated young men, mostly white obviously, who wanna LARP call of duty, but instead settle for LARPing vicariously through Rittenhouse.

But it's only LARPing if the guns are fake, I suppose. Anyway my kneejerk suspicion is that Rittenhouse's course of action was a LARP fantasy that went overboard.

 

[Clinamenic]

That said, I have been less than halfway paying attention, hence my wording "suspicion" instead of "opinion"

 

[version]

why can't they both be true

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.