Rittenhouse Trial
- Thread starter IdleRich
- Start date
WashYourHands
Cat Malogen
Gus abuses dogs
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.
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.
IdleRich
IdleRich
Oops
Urgh.
padraig (u.s.)
a monkey that will go ape
why can't they both be true
padraig (u.s.)
a monkey that will go ape
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.
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.)
a monkey that will go ape
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
Binary & Tweed
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
Binary & Tweed
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
Binary & Tweed
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
Binary & Tweed
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
Binary & Tweed
That said, I have been less than halfway paying attention, hence my wording "suspicion" instead of "opinion"
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.