For some reason, the Georgia Legislature has very recently 1) rescinded the Civil War-era "citizen's arrest" law and 2) passed its first Hate-Crime law not larded with poison pills designed to kill it on constitutional challenge. Unanimously. Lead by Republicans. At the speed of light.
As soon as Kyle Rittenhouse is acquitted, Right-Wing nitwits will be pouring out of the woodwork to shake AR-15's in people's faces, while being filmed by buddies, so they can gun down whoever loses their minds and rushes them. See, the bloodbath will be bad for business. And Georgia is all about business. Stay tuned.
When my relative was murdered by their spouse. The judge said that the murder was premeditated. Even tho the culprit grabbed their guns moments before the final shots. The judges stated that premeditation does not need to occur in days or hours. It can occur in seconds too. Here in Omaha. A white bar owner (that I knew some) killed a black protestor outside his restaurant after a brief altercation. The bar owner obviously induced the confrontation by approaching the men over them assaulting his father. Whom was standing outside the bar heckling protestors under the guise of defending a rented property. The bar owner was initially released but then charged after a grand jury found the prosecutor to be lacking in his discovery of evidence. You see, the bar owner had Facebooked moments before the incident, "I am going to need to go defend my bar and pull fire duty" (something close to this effect). The judge's words stuck in my ears. This bar owner obviously premeditated murder by giving himself a reason to shoot somebody over property that was not his. Kyle Rittenhouse did exactly the same in both instances. Kyle is obviously going to go free because he was in self-defense. However, he perpetrated self-defense. By our nation's laws, he will go free but don't ever tell me he is a hero (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, loyalty). These are marks of a hero because they require more courage than pulling a trigger. You will go free Kyle. But you will never be free. You will forever be enslaved by the ungodly actions you premediated on that night and I shall pray for you.
I am greatly concerned re: Kyle Rittenhouse. He repeatedly said at trial he did nothing wrong. He was defending himself. He cried about being cornered and chased. He admitted killing and using lethal force. He was well rehearsed.
Did he ever express remorse? If I ever killed someone in self-defense, I would question myself: Did I do right? Could I have prevented it? It would haunt me. I would regret what I had done. Feel bad for the VICTIMS families.
But, Rittenhouse afterwards, initially took the fifth with law enforcement. He wore a t-shirt declaring his freedom with an f-bomb. He flashed the white supremacist ok sign.
His “community” has declared him a hero.
He injected himself into this mess. Why? Why did his mother drive him across county lines with an AR-15 he possessed illegally? To protect property? To help with medical needs? He had no riot control/police training. No triage/medical training. He was a 17 year old for goodness sakes.
What did his mother think? His father? What was their cultural influence to suggest to him that he was doing a great service? Who invited him? Or did he take it on to himself?
What did the police do when they saw him there? Did they welcome him? Did they tell him to go home? He was able to leave the scene?
This whole thing, given our current climate, is deeply disturbing.
Get ready for armed militia men patroling around *any* major left-wing protest in the future, because the courts are about the green-light armed vigilantism in defense of *other people's property* all the way up to killing people who break things or light them on fire. This is how we get to pre-Hobbesian territory, where the rule of law and monopoly on the use of force by the state gets dissolved. Because as soon as we say that "it's okay for gun-owners to defend property *outside of their castle*" we are essentially telling the cops that it's okay for an armed militia to be out on the streets defending someone else's private property. One can go to a protest of the opposing political party strapped with an AR-15, start taunting and antagonizing protestors, and as soon as one of them throws a punch you are allowed to execute them because "I was scared that he was going to take my rifle away from me and kill me with it!" One can start antagonizing a proud boy for lighting a BLM flag on fire via Aubrey-esque "citizen's arrest", and if that proud boy tries to fight you for it you can blast him and claim "self-defense" from the hostile crowd of proud boys around the guy and claim they were going to mob you. This is the society we're quickly leaning toward via courts and bad legal precedents. These justices aren't thinking about the secondary or tertiary effects tomorrow. Things are going to get more politically violent this decade the way the courts and legislators are asleep. We're going to sleep walk into *real* political bloodshed. Get ready to party like it's the 1850's in Kansas.
In response to the whole both siderism and not taking issues seriously....hear me out for a second: looking at what twitter pundits or normal folks on twitter think of an issue is stupid and worthless and the basics of failing at journalism or understanding what real people think of an issue. Stop it and do some basic journalism if you really want to know something.
I agree that twitter is not a representative example of public opinion. However, opinions widely held on twitter are widely represented in the public, and therefore need to be understood and addressed. If you find 99/100 people in a neighborhood are Jewish, that doesn’t mean the city is 99% Jewish. But it does mean there are enough Jewish people in the city that we can’t proceed assuming they aren’t here.
I don’t think that anyone who is thinking critically and choosing their words carefully will generalize it to a whole political party. But I do think there is a valid observation that on twitter one party has a larger set of members who are engaging in the logical fallacy with more frequency and to a more absurd extent than the other party.
Is every Republican therefore guilty? No. Is every Democrat therefore innocent? Of course not.
But it’s reasonable to extrapolate that twitter is representative in this particular way of what non-twits are thinking. Right now it’s happening a lot on the right, in extreme and ridiculous ways. And we don’t see the same thing to the same degree from the left.
And now for the schools. The recall in SF, of both school board members and the DA, bring out the usual claims that "dark money" is behind it all. Baloney. I live next door to Gordon Lau School in Chinatown and the mothers who circulated petitions did so not because some shady Svengali pressed, but because they want their children to have the advantages that only serious schooling will bring. Grass roots. At Lowell, the chickens are already coming home to roost in the first year of diminished expectation as the student body now seems more interested in protest and grievance than classes and homework. Oh, well, students have been protesting since the age of pedagogues. But, the curriculum is already changing -- with the elimination of Latin in particular, and classical studies generally. So this now means that no SF Public school will offer Latin. This while classics seems to thrive in some of the area prep schools (I interviewed several over the last decade for college admissions). Those who champion "equity" in schooling should consider the diminished opportunity here. There is no better argument for school vouchers.
Princeton, yes Princeton, is eliminating all Ancient Greek and Latin language requirements from its undergraduate Classics program in order to encourage diversity among their Classics majors. You can now graduate from Princeton with a Classics degree without knowing what quid pro quo means. All of this is well intended, but it's typical lefty condescension; the idea is that we'll attract more students by not requiring them to gain proficiency in skills that don't interest them, but the message is: minority students aren't bright enough to handle the onerous requirements of the program, so we'll water down the requirements. Maybe, it turns out, minority students generally aren't that interested in learning about a bunch of old dead white guys.
Across America we have expanded the law to permit the use of deadly and non-deadly force in self defense in far too many ways. We now are routinely confronted with situations where both parties have a lawful self-defense claim, since both parties were legally permitted to be there and to be armed, and both were reasonably afraid that the other would kill them, either can claim justification of the other. We have created a legal regime where you can choose to bring deadly force, to put yourself into a violent confrontation, and to kill someone, and still have the legal justification of self-defense.
One of the fundamental limits on self-defense as a legal justification to the use of deadly force is that the justification is not available to someone who provokes the confrontation. But because in many places we insist on allowing people to wander the streets with assault weapons, regardless of the social context, the definition and scope of “provocation” has become increasingly narrow.
It is clear that Rittenhouse provoked the violence not just by his armed presence, but also by his specific conduct. There is even evidence he intended to be a provocateur (evidence excluded at trial, arguably contrary to the law). Whether or not it was intentional, because his provocation was foreseeable, he bears moral culpability for the consequences of his actions. This is true even if the specific altercation was initiated by the decedent, and even where Rittenhouse reasonably feared he was in danger.
To translate his moral culpability into criminal culpability, we need a self-defense doctrine that can mitigate, rather than exonerate, people who intentionally put themselves in a situation where they know or should know they’re provoking violence, and then do in fact provoke it by their very presence. This revision would need to be complex and subtle, since there are infinite variations of these kinds of situations.
One aspect is to firm up the legal presumptions that apply where deadly force is intended or used in defense of property. It is not, in most cases, lawful to use deadly force in the defense of property (except under the castle doctrine, which covers the home). Even police are not authorized to use deadly force in defense of property. While it often occurs that criminal interference with a property interest rapidly escalates to where police fear a threat to life and are legally permitted to use deadly force, that represents a different justification than the property itself.
Therefore, it should as a matter of law be unreasonable to bring deadly force for the purpose of protecting property. By coming to Kenosha armed with a rifle with the professed intention to protect property, Rittenhouse had an unreasonable intention to use deadly force in an unlawful manner. That should form the basis of a draw back on the availability and force of the self-defense justification. A display of deadly force for the purpose of protecting property is a provocation to the use of deadly force. When the violence escalated perhaps he was justified in protecting his own life; but by bringing the gun for an improper purpose, he recklessly set the stage for its use without lawful justification or excuse. He should not have the benefit of full exoneration by self-defense. He should be held criminally accountable for his role in the unnecessary and tragic killing, even if in the very moment it occurred his decisions were understandable.
I regret that my analytical frame above bounces back and forth between law, justice and the facts of the case. It’s a bit muddled. What I am trying to get at is that the current contours of law are too permissive for deadly force, and also that the law of self-defense is too binary to capture the subtleties and varieties of human actions and the attendant moral culpability.
I think Rittenhouse’s moral culpability falls somewhere between first degree intentional homicide and reckless endangerment. I don’t know the facts well enough—neither do any of us, since media coverage and even law enforcement investigations rarely capture the true scope of the human incidents—so I can’t say where it falls in that range. But I feel confident he is not free of moral culpability.
But the permissive law for the use of deadly force, and the tragically binary outcome of it’s application in those facts, is likely to end with a dissonance between his moral and criminal culpability. He is not innocent, and should not be acquitted of those deaths. But if he was genuinely afraid for his life in that moment, he may not be morally guilty of murder either. And so the jury should have the opportunity to mitigate, rather than exonerate, based on the facts as they come out at trial.
*Correction: juries don’t “exonerate,” they acquit.
I am, of course, eliding the existence of “imperfect self defense” as a legal defense in some cases. Imperfect self-defense arises where a person believed they needed to use deadly force, but their belief was unreasonable or wrong. It typically arises in an intentional killing, where the defendant thought the victim was armed, but the victim was not.
I don’t recall whether Wisconsin has this defense, but typically it mitigates a some murders to manslaughter. Each State will have their own variants.
But the impairment on Rittenhouse’s moral self-defense claim in this case is not that he was wrong about the threat (though it appears he may have been). His moral self-defense claim is impaired by the fact that without a good justification he chose to provoke violence, and then when it was provoked he claims it as a justification to use deadly force.
So the extant “imperfect self-defense” claim is not a proper vehicle to allocate criminal culpability commensurate with his moral culpability based on any judgment that he provoked the violence by his presence. Something else is needed.
It is worth the effort to search the Wisconsin newspapers as to the details on how Rittenhouse arrived at that moment of death. Someone with greater understanding and literary skills will have to parse this out, perhaps not for years hence, as the story continues to unfold.
Charlie, what does "Morning Shots" mean? Does it mean taking verbal shots at your political enemies? Or is taking on a even more confrontational meaning as our politics seems to be moving ever closer to violence? The usual effect on me is to want to take a couple shots of bourbon, so I probably shouldn't read it in the morning.
“I'm really worried about a return of Donald Trump this time, because this time, the Velociraptors have figured out how to work the doorknobs." - @davidfrum on why Trump's second term would be even worse.
WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO ABOUT IT? WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT IT? WHY DOES IT ALWAYS FEEL LIKE THE WHACK-A-DOODLE, MALIGNANT, DANGEROUS GQP AND THEIR TRUMPANZEES ARE WINNING THIS WAR?
Stop yelling, I can hear you just fine. They're 'winning' in the short-run because lizard-brain, which they have in abundance, is violent and immediate. I'm skeptical we *can* do anything about it. Lizard-brained cretins (No-Nothings, the 'Monkey Trial' victory, Newt Gingrich) have risen, bellowed into the gale, and faded away repeatedly throughout our history. Wait for it.
A bristle a bit at the discussion re crime. It is superficial at best. For example, the so called liberal media have widely reported it. And as someone who works in NYC, what make me angry is not the discussion of the crime numbers but the reporting that makes it seem as if crime is rampant or has anything to do with policing. Having lived long enough to see NYC in the 60s - 80s, i suggest that it ain't rampant. Nor do we believe that it had anything to do with policing - the numbers suggest that the increase started with COVID. The numbers also appear to be reversing.
But truth to tell, it is hard to know why crime increased earlier - so after the 50s and why it peaked in 1990.
So the media are not hiding the story, just as they don't hide the numbers at the border. But the why is a different matter.
The right wing press presents democratic cities as being trashed, burned etc. And there were a few cities that were (and riots have long been a part of our history) but the black live matter protest in Paterson NJ did not even deface the statue of Christopher Columbus.
I have long been concerned that the twin phenomena of (1) perceiving a collection of anecdotes as data, and (2) failing to understand the data in the context of what it does not measure, are aggravated by our new media landscape in which we’re perpetually immersed.
What you’re getting at is the second. I hear over and over again about this or that terrible trend. But outside the window the sun is shining, and when I go to pick up my kid nobody’s going to tear off my mask. I’m not going to get confronted by an armed man at the grocery store, and the clerk’s not going to castigate me for wishing them a “Merry Christmas.” If I misgender you and you correct me, I’ll apologize and do better. If we get in a fender bender, I’m going to do what I can to make it right.
These are the daily lived experiences for most Americans.
But we’re perpetually immersed in someone else’s narrative, which ignores the 100,000 peaceful holiday greetings that occur for each vague grumble about the war on Christmas. By spending hour upon hour in that narrative environment, we lose sight of the world we actually experience. We need to turn off the goddam phone, close the laptop and go out to the park for a walk.
The flip side is the erroneous concept captured by the cliche, “who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes.” The truth is, often your eyes are lying. We can’t rely on our handful of experiences to be accurate and to tell the whole picture. We need adequate doses of other people’s experiences, and a systematic collection of data, to make sure we have the full picture.
The media can aggravate this when it focuses on anecdotes—crime stories are the worst. But it’s a mistake to think the antidote is immersion in current affairs coverage. The true antidote is a broad reading in history, culture, art and science. Where we can learn the context for our experiences in a medium which is not pressing us for immediate decisions about the allocation of power and money.
We struggle in this country to ever get to the "root" of a problem. We continue to gloss over how we arrived at where we are and then clutch our pearls when the shit hits the fan....again and again.
Rittenhouse is the result of truly crappy parents, (which, imo, recieves far too little attention in this country) ignorant politics, a culture that has NO nuance around anything military, and very easily accessible handguns.
The idiots that can't process what CRT actually is and have instead used it as a stand in for "I don't want my kids learning that some of their ancestors may have been on the wrong side of history" are too numerous to count. Again, ignorance. (How can you possibly want to preserve the honor of your long dead ancestors if they were slave owners?)
The left partisans that are unable to see anything except through a victim's lens.....again, ignorant.
The close minded, team oriented, zero sum game, players have taken over the field and they sadly, won't be easily moved.
Unfortunately, we don’t have empirical data to draw broad definitive conclusions about what makes good parenting. While clearly some parenting is terrible, so much is unknowable and uncontrollable, that any effort to systematize and — god forbid — enforce it is bound to result in coercive excess and woeful unintended consequences.
The truth is, we don’t know why some people do bad things and others don’t. Kids in idyllic homes turn into serial killers. Kids who are abused and neglected can become doctors and humanitarians. We can’t understand how and why these things happen so as to prescribe a better way.
One of the major revelations I had as a Peace Corps volunteer was that our system of schooling is a radical historical experiment, and we’re blind to it. In a traditional, non-migrant culture, kids are not sequestered for extended periods of each day among a cohort of their age peers. In a village of Nicaragua, kids spend 80-90% of their lives surrounded by people of all ages: elders, teens, adults, babies. The time they spend with people their own age is minimal, except near family such as siblings and cousins.
But we take an eight-year-old and stick her in a room with 29 others for 6 hours a day, five days a week. If she doesn’t have a large, close extended family, she may never have sustained interactions with a variety of older or younger kids, adults, elders or babies. This is radically different from how 99.9% of humans throughout history were raised. And we haven’t even considered the possible unintended consequences.
Traditional communities provide kids with wide variety of people to teach them a diversity of ways of living. They see kids a little older who give them ideas about what they can be; they see kids a little younger to help them understand how they’ve grown. The boys spend hours a day in the fields with their brothers and cousins, fathers and uncles, and even grandpa. The girls are in the home with their sisters and mothers, grandmothers and aunts, and the little babies. (I’m not extolling the gender roles here; I’m describing the diverse age exposure on a day-to-day basis).
But for a kid in an American nuclear family, all she has for a frame of reference are mommy, daddy, Ms. Teacher and the other 29 kids in her class. When does a sixteen-year-old get to spend time observing and relating to a 25-year-old, so as to have a role model for maturing? When does a 12-year-old learn what babies are like? How can an American child perceive her own maturity compared to younger kids if she has one or no siblings? If one of the adults in her life are deficient, who can she look to for a different vision of how to live a good life?
Our bizarre nuclear family and industrial child-rearing are so radically different from how most people in history were raised, and haven’t even stopped to look at what it means for the humans they (we) grow in to being. We fail to even acknowledge how new and unique it is. I think because we’re blind to even the existence of the experiment, we have no idea at all what its consequences have been. Maybe it’s been overall beneficial, maybe not. But we aren’t even asking the questions.
There really is no question to ask. We don't work in the fields for the most part. We work in factories or offices. So it may be a relatively new way to raise humans, but we can't reverse it.
Decades ago I read Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society. It made sense then but I was a 24 year old with no children. By the time I had a child, I worked 55 hours per week running a restaurant. In a few years, I was working in an office with a part time gig on weekends. So what to do? Well we sent our boy to school and he did fine. We were a 2 income family and not too far above the poverty line till my mid 30s.
So boys in the fields is no more applicable to us than living in an igloo. The idea that we can live is a different way is a bit dreamy.
I’m not proposing a return to agrarianism. Nor am I suggesting individual families have the ability to opt out. I’m not even taking the position that the current system is bad.
I’m saying it’s remarkably new, and we don’t understand what it may or may not be doing to our society. I am suggesting we need to consider whether the industrial warehousing of kids, and the fragmenting of the extended family and networked communities, have had unintended consequences which could be ameliorated by different social policies.
If warranted to make a better society, we can create an environment more friendly to labor, so that families can remain rooted in place and grow into a broad network. We can rethink age-based cohorts in education, and the resources we put into how we raise our kids. One-room schoolhouses may not be resource efficient, but they might be a remedy for some of the unintended consequences of the current system. We don’t need to be single-mindedly focused on efficiency as the outcome—efficient mobility of labor, efficient storage and education of children—so as to sacrifice quality. That’s a choice we need to consider if the research and evidence suggests it is creating a problem.
The current social order is so new, we should be trying to see what these methods have wrought, so as to better target what we might do to improve them.
All fine but it sounds like something based on words - so like the world as understood by Plato or Aristotle. I suggest looking at the real systems that exist. Like an engineer would look at a manufacturing process. So.. can we have ungraded classrooms? Sure. Can we allow home schooling - ok. But I see the entire modern world as schooled and divided up - and has been so for more than a century.
It has not been so “for more than a century” for most people. It was only in the 1950’s that the majority of Americans attended school full-time until the age of 16.
And even then, a century in middle America is an infinitesimal section of the human population through history.
I am not offering a policy prescription for solving a problem. I’m not even claiming that there IS a problem. It’s an observation that we have no idea what we’ve done, and might benefit from taking a look.
We need to recognize and acknowledge how remarkably unusual and new this social order is, and ask if there have been unintended negative consequences. If there have, we need to consider whether there are ways to ameliorate those consequences without sacrificing whatever benefits have been gained.
Sure we have no idea but let's not play word games. So while everyone may not have attended school in the form you mention - in fact schooling was widespread in the North and West at least, so even folks like Larry Doby (Paterson NJ) attended H.S. And we see schooling among urban folks in places as different at Japan and Germany or California and Massachusetts.
At 70, I have watched all manner of arguments and so forth. But I don't see it useful to speculate about the impossible. I prefer to look to smaller ideas. So i am interested in ideas like how (supposedly) in Japan the classroom is set up to bring all along together - whereas our system let the better students leave the slow pokes behind.
I also remember "modern math" and "Pscc Chemistry and Physics" in the mid 1960s.
There have been shitty parents as long as there have been families, but what could have stopped Kyle is if those who are thought leaders stopped encouraging the cult of the gun. But these folks (by and large Republicans) like to portray themselves as gun owners and so on.
I cannot imagine John Adams today being other than embarrassed by what pretends to be conservatism.
Yes yes yes. Rittenhouse’s mother drove him and his rifle to the protest. He said he wanted to protect businesses and provide medical aid. This is a delusional kid, and he’s been encouraged in his delusions. Thousands of people were there, only 2 died. They were the ones who ran into Kyle
That his mother did NOT drive l him there was admitted into evidence and accepted as fact by both sides of the case. Kyle drove to the scene with Black, who procured the gun for him. What his mother didn't do was open a can of whupass on him when she found out he had an assault rifle, and force him to get rid of it. I really don't think the Rittenhouses are actively criminal, just weak and stupid.
Rittenhouse is guilty of criminal stupidity. A person who could not buy the gun he used (so someone bought it for him) and that had to commute a long distance to the scene of his overt, criminal stupidity. IIRC his mom drove him there.
The real criminals here are the person who bought a teenager an Ar-15, provided his transportation and, most importantly allowed him to think that doing what he was doing was smart or heroic or necessary.
There are good reasons why law enforcement is left to state agencies and why the state has a decided interest in controlling what is essentially vigilante violence. Doing otherwise is NOT conducive to civilization. Creating a running (often false) narrative that excuses such action as necessary (especially when aimed at political opponents or the Other) is destructive to law and order (something that the people pushing the narrative CLAIM to be all for).
At it's bare essential, State = monopoly of legitimate force, with few and rare exceptions. In situations where this is not true, you end up with anarchy and warlord-ism. See Afghanistan. See Somalia, see any number of third-world failed states.
These idiot militias are under the impression that they would be the top dogs in a situation of anarchy and there is this persistent right wing violence pornography around the whole idea. Just look at the Claremont Institute "study" that came to light a few days ago as a prime example.
I have owned guns for most of my life. I served in the US military. Sport shooter, hunter.
I have never felt the need to be armed during my normal, daily life. I have never felt the need to own the types of weapons that many of this wingnuts believe are necessary for their "self-defense." Most of these people do not live in locations where endemic violence is a problem... they don't live in a gang-ridden neighborhood in the inner city or even get near one.
Remember that the primary focus of militias in their heyday was in the south as a defensive measure against slave rebellion. I think that says a lot.
"But what non-gun owners may not understand is that these men are not your average gun-owning Americans. They are people who have fallen into a cult where it is normal to organize your entire culture around weapons of war." It looks like a lot of gun owners don't understand this either.
There is a large number of people who own a gun or two--and then there is a smaller number of people who own a LOT of guns. A lot of people who think that the zombie (or some other kind of) apocalypse is coming and have wet dreams about it.
But they will tell you they are just "well-prepared."
There are, perhaps, a few dozen people in the country who are "prepared" (for something really bad). In addition to fire-power, they are inside a tall fence far out in the wilderness, have their own sources of water and power and a means for sustained food production. They are also fortunate if they don't need medication for chronic conditions. For practical purposes, the portion of the country's 20 million assault weapons owned by such people is negligible. The "prepared" having those fantasies are prepared only to take what they need by force, until they are, too, gunned down.
The problem is that the line between the two is always blurred and shifting. A person is a law abiding gun owner until the moment they’re not. And then it’s too late.
For some reason, the Georgia Legislature has very recently 1) rescinded the Civil War-era "citizen's arrest" law and 2) passed its first Hate-Crime law not larded with poison pills designed to kill it on constitutional challenge. Unanimously. Lead by Republicans. At the speed of light.
As soon as Kyle Rittenhouse is acquitted, Right-Wing nitwits will be pouring out of the woodwork to shake AR-15's in people's faces, while being filmed by buddies, so they can gun down whoever loses their minds and rushes them. See, the bloodbath will be bad for business. And Georgia is all about business. Stay tuned.
When my relative was murdered by their spouse. The judge said that the murder was premeditated. Even tho the culprit grabbed their guns moments before the final shots. The judges stated that premeditation does not need to occur in days or hours. It can occur in seconds too. Here in Omaha. A white bar owner (that I knew some) killed a black protestor outside his restaurant after a brief altercation. The bar owner obviously induced the confrontation by approaching the men over them assaulting his father. Whom was standing outside the bar heckling protestors under the guise of defending a rented property. The bar owner was initially released but then charged after a grand jury found the prosecutor to be lacking in his discovery of evidence. You see, the bar owner had Facebooked moments before the incident, "I am going to need to go defend my bar and pull fire duty" (something close to this effect). The judge's words stuck in my ears. This bar owner obviously premeditated murder by giving himself a reason to shoot somebody over property that was not his. Kyle Rittenhouse did exactly the same in both instances. Kyle is obviously going to go free because he was in self-defense. However, he perpetrated self-defense. By our nation's laws, he will go free but don't ever tell me he is a hero (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, loyalty). These are marks of a hero because they require more courage than pulling a trigger. You will go free Kyle. But you will never be free. You will forever be enslaved by the ungodly actions you premediated on that night and I shall pray for you.
Spot on.
I am greatly concerned re: Kyle Rittenhouse. He repeatedly said at trial he did nothing wrong. He was defending himself. He cried about being cornered and chased. He admitted killing and using lethal force. He was well rehearsed.
Did he ever express remorse? If I ever killed someone in self-defense, I would question myself: Did I do right? Could I have prevented it? It would haunt me. I would regret what I had done. Feel bad for the VICTIMS families.
But, Rittenhouse afterwards, initially took the fifth with law enforcement. He wore a t-shirt declaring his freedom with an f-bomb. He flashed the white supremacist ok sign.
His “community” has declared him a hero.
He injected himself into this mess. Why? Why did his mother drive him across county lines with an AR-15 he possessed illegally? To protect property? To help with medical needs? He had no riot control/police training. No triage/medical training. He was a 17 year old for goodness sakes.
What did his mother think? His father? What was their cultural influence to suggest to him that he was doing a great service? Who invited him? Or did he take it on to himself?
What did the police do when they saw him there? Did they welcome him? Did they tell him to go home? He was able to leave the scene?
This whole thing, given our current climate, is deeply disturbing.
He and his mother also have voluntarily and repeatedly consorted with a fascist street gang, the "Proud Boys."
Amen
Get ready for armed militia men patroling around *any* major left-wing protest in the future, because the courts are about the green-light armed vigilantism in defense of *other people's property* all the way up to killing people who break things or light them on fire. This is how we get to pre-Hobbesian territory, where the rule of law and monopoly on the use of force by the state gets dissolved. Because as soon as we say that "it's okay for gun-owners to defend property *outside of their castle*" we are essentially telling the cops that it's okay for an armed militia to be out on the streets defending someone else's private property. One can go to a protest of the opposing political party strapped with an AR-15, start taunting and antagonizing protestors, and as soon as one of them throws a punch you are allowed to execute them because "I was scared that he was going to take my rifle away from me and kill me with it!" One can start antagonizing a proud boy for lighting a BLM flag on fire via Aubrey-esque "citizen's arrest", and if that proud boy tries to fight you for it you can blast him and claim "self-defense" from the hostile crowd of proud boys around the guy and claim they were going to mob you. This is the society we're quickly leaning toward via courts and bad legal precedents. These justices aren't thinking about the secondary or tertiary effects tomorrow. Things are going to get more politically violent this decade the way the courts and legislators are asleep. We're going to sleep walk into *real* political bloodshed. Get ready to party like it's the 1850's in Kansas.
In response to the whole both siderism and not taking issues seriously....hear me out for a second: looking at what twitter pundits or normal folks on twitter think of an issue is stupid and worthless and the basics of failing at journalism or understanding what real people think of an issue. Stop it and do some basic journalism if you really want to know something.
I agree that twitter is not a representative example of public opinion. However, opinions widely held on twitter are widely represented in the public, and therefore need to be understood and addressed. If you find 99/100 people in a neighborhood are Jewish, that doesn’t mean the city is 99% Jewish. But it does mean there are enough Jewish people in the city that we can’t proceed assuming they aren’t here.
And those viewpoints should be analyzed and understood. Not, generalized to entire political parties representing tens of millions of people (R or D).
I don’t think that anyone who is thinking critically and choosing their words carefully will generalize it to a whole political party. But I do think there is a valid observation that on twitter one party has a larger set of members who are engaging in the logical fallacy with more frequency and to a more absurd extent than the other party.
Is every Republican therefore guilty? No. Is every Democrat therefore innocent? Of course not.
But it’s reasonable to extrapolate that twitter is representative in this particular way of what non-twits are thinking. Right now it’s happening a lot on the right, in extreme and ridiculous ways. And we don’t see the same thing to the same degree from the left.
And now for the schools. The recall in SF, of both school board members and the DA, bring out the usual claims that "dark money" is behind it all. Baloney. I live next door to Gordon Lau School in Chinatown and the mothers who circulated petitions did so not because some shady Svengali pressed, but because they want their children to have the advantages that only serious schooling will bring. Grass roots. At Lowell, the chickens are already coming home to roost in the first year of diminished expectation as the student body now seems more interested in protest and grievance than classes and homework. Oh, well, students have been protesting since the age of pedagogues. But, the curriculum is already changing -- with the elimination of Latin in particular, and classical studies generally. So this now means that no SF Public school will offer Latin. This while classics seems to thrive in some of the area prep schools (I interviewed several over the last decade for college admissions). Those who champion "equity" in schooling should consider the diminished opportunity here. There is no better argument for school vouchers.
Kurt Vonnegut was a prophet.
Princeton, yes Princeton, is eliminating all Ancient Greek and Latin language requirements from its undergraduate Classics program in order to encourage diversity among their Classics majors. You can now graduate from Princeton with a Classics degree without knowing what quid pro quo means. All of this is well intended, but it's typical lefty condescension; the idea is that we'll attract more students by not requiring them to gain proficiency in skills that don't interest them, but the message is: minority students aren't bright enough to handle the onerous requirements of the program, so we'll water down the requirements. Maybe, it turns out, minority students generally aren't that interested in learning about a bunch of old dead white guys.
Across America we have expanded the law to permit the use of deadly and non-deadly force in self defense in far too many ways. We now are routinely confronted with situations where both parties have a lawful self-defense claim, since both parties were legally permitted to be there and to be armed, and both were reasonably afraid that the other would kill them, either can claim justification of the other. We have created a legal regime where you can choose to bring deadly force, to put yourself into a violent confrontation, and to kill someone, and still have the legal justification of self-defense.
One of the fundamental limits on self-defense as a legal justification to the use of deadly force is that the justification is not available to someone who provokes the confrontation. But because in many places we insist on allowing people to wander the streets with assault weapons, regardless of the social context, the definition and scope of “provocation” has become increasingly narrow.
It is clear that Rittenhouse provoked the violence not just by his armed presence, but also by his specific conduct. There is even evidence he intended to be a provocateur (evidence excluded at trial, arguably contrary to the law). Whether or not it was intentional, because his provocation was foreseeable, he bears moral culpability for the consequences of his actions. This is true even if the specific altercation was initiated by the decedent, and even where Rittenhouse reasonably feared he was in danger.
To translate his moral culpability into criminal culpability, we need a self-defense doctrine that can mitigate, rather than exonerate, people who intentionally put themselves in a situation where they know or should know they’re provoking violence, and then do in fact provoke it by their very presence. This revision would need to be complex and subtle, since there are infinite variations of these kinds of situations.
One aspect is to firm up the legal presumptions that apply where deadly force is intended or used in defense of property. It is not, in most cases, lawful to use deadly force in the defense of property (except under the castle doctrine, which covers the home). Even police are not authorized to use deadly force in defense of property. While it often occurs that criminal interference with a property interest rapidly escalates to where police fear a threat to life and are legally permitted to use deadly force, that represents a different justification than the property itself.
Therefore, it should as a matter of law be unreasonable to bring deadly force for the purpose of protecting property. By coming to Kenosha armed with a rifle with the professed intention to protect property, Rittenhouse had an unreasonable intention to use deadly force in an unlawful manner. That should form the basis of a draw back on the availability and force of the self-defense justification. A display of deadly force for the purpose of protecting property is a provocation to the use of deadly force. When the violence escalated perhaps he was justified in protecting his own life; but by bringing the gun for an improper purpose, he recklessly set the stage for its use without lawful justification or excuse. He should not have the benefit of full exoneration by self-defense. He should be held criminally accountable for his role in the unnecessary and tragic killing, even if in the very moment it occurred his decisions were understandable.
Well said! Thank you
I regret that my analytical frame above bounces back and forth between law, justice and the facts of the case. It’s a bit muddled. What I am trying to get at is that the current contours of law are too permissive for deadly force, and also that the law of self-defense is too binary to capture the subtleties and varieties of human actions and the attendant moral culpability.
I think Rittenhouse’s moral culpability falls somewhere between first degree intentional homicide and reckless endangerment. I don’t know the facts well enough—neither do any of us, since media coverage and even law enforcement investigations rarely capture the true scope of the human incidents—so I can’t say where it falls in that range. But I feel confident he is not free of moral culpability.
But the permissive law for the use of deadly force, and the tragically binary outcome of it’s application in those facts, is likely to end with a dissonance between his moral and criminal culpability. He is not innocent, and should not be acquitted of those deaths. But if he was genuinely afraid for his life in that moment, he may not be morally guilty of murder either. And so the jury should have the opportunity to mitigate, rather than exonerate, based on the facts as they come out at trial.
*Correction: juries don’t “exonerate,” they acquit.
I am, of course, eliding the existence of “imperfect self defense” as a legal defense in some cases. Imperfect self-defense arises where a person believed they needed to use deadly force, but their belief was unreasonable or wrong. It typically arises in an intentional killing, where the defendant thought the victim was armed, but the victim was not.
I don’t recall whether Wisconsin has this defense, but typically it mitigates a some murders to manslaughter. Each State will have their own variants.
But the impairment on Rittenhouse’s moral self-defense claim in this case is not that he was wrong about the threat (though it appears he may have been). His moral self-defense claim is impaired by the fact that without a good justification he chose to provoke violence, and then when it was provoked he claims it as a justification to use deadly force.
So the extant “imperfect self-defense” claim is not a proper vehicle to allocate criminal culpability commensurate with his moral culpability based on any judgment that he provoked the violence by his presence. Something else is needed.
Thanks!
Thank you Dylan. Quite well done and very likely more thoughtfully presented than anything the jury will hear.
It is worth the effort to search the Wisconsin newspapers as to the details on how Rittenhouse arrived at that moment of death. Someone with greater understanding and literary skills will have to parse this out, perhaps not for years hence, as the story continues to unfold.
Charlie, what does "Morning Shots" mean? Does it mean taking verbal shots at your political enemies? Or is taking on a even more confrontational meaning as our politics seems to be moving ever closer to violence? The usual effect on me is to want to take a couple shots of bourbon, so I probably shouldn't read it in the morning.
“I'm really worried about a return of Donald Trump this time, because this time, the Velociraptors have figured out how to work the doorknobs." - @davidfrum on why Trump's second term would be even worse.
WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO ABOUT IT? WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT IT? WHY DOES IT ALWAYS FEEL LIKE THE WHACK-A-DOODLE, MALIGNANT, DANGEROUS GQP AND THEIR TRUMPANZEES ARE WINNING THIS WAR?
Stop yelling, I can hear you just fine. They're 'winning' in the short-run because lizard-brain, which they have in abundance, is violent and immediate. I'm skeptical we *can* do anything about it. Lizard-brained cretins (No-Nothings, the 'Monkey Trial' victory, Newt Gingrich) have risen, bellowed into the gale, and faded away repeatedly throughout our history. Wait for it.
A bristle a bit at the discussion re crime. It is superficial at best. For example, the so called liberal media have widely reported it. And as someone who works in NYC, what make me angry is not the discussion of the crime numbers but the reporting that makes it seem as if crime is rampant or has anything to do with policing. Having lived long enough to see NYC in the 60s - 80s, i suggest that it ain't rampant. Nor do we believe that it had anything to do with policing - the numbers suggest that the increase started with COVID. The numbers also appear to be reversing.
But truth to tell, it is hard to know why crime increased earlier - so after the 50s and why it peaked in 1990.
So the media are not hiding the story, just as they don't hide the numbers at the border. But the why is a different matter.
The right wing press presents democratic cities as being trashed, burned etc. And there were a few cities that were (and riots have long been a part of our history) but the black live matter protest in Paterson NJ did not even deface the statue of Christopher Columbus.
I have long been concerned that the twin phenomena of (1) perceiving a collection of anecdotes as data, and (2) failing to understand the data in the context of what it does not measure, are aggravated by our new media landscape in which we’re perpetually immersed.
What you’re getting at is the second. I hear over and over again about this or that terrible trend. But outside the window the sun is shining, and when I go to pick up my kid nobody’s going to tear off my mask. I’m not going to get confronted by an armed man at the grocery store, and the clerk’s not going to castigate me for wishing them a “Merry Christmas.” If I misgender you and you correct me, I’ll apologize and do better. If we get in a fender bender, I’m going to do what I can to make it right.
These are the daily lived experiences for most Americans.
But we’re perpetually immersed in someone else’s narrative, which ignores the 100,000 peaceful holiday greetings that occur for each vague grumble about the war on Christmas. By spending hour upon hour in that narrative environment, we lose sight of the world we actually experience. We need to turn off the goddam phone, close the laptop and go out to the park for a walk.
The flip side is the erroneous concept captured by the cliche, “who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes.” The truth is, often your eyes are lying. We can’t rely on our handful of experiences to be accurate and to tell the whole picture. We need adequate doses of other people’s experiences, and a systematic collection of data, to make sure we have the full picture.
The media can aggravate this when it focuses on anecdotes—crime stories are the worst. But it’s a mistake to think the antidote is immersion in current affairs coverage. The true antidote is a broad reading in history, culture, art and science. Where we can learn the context for our experiences in a medium which is not pressing us for immediate decisions about the allocation of power and money.
Amazing. The same people who claim Ashley Babbitt was wrongly killed because “she didn’t do anything” are cheering this dumb kid on as a hero.
We struggle in this country to ever get to the "root" of a problem. We continue to gloss over how we arrived at where we are and then clutch our pearls when the shit hits the fan....again and again.
Rittenhouse is the result of truly crappy parents, (which, imo, recieves far too little attention in this country) ignorant politics, a culture that has NO nuance around anything military, and very easily accessible handguns.
The idiots that can't process what CRT actually is and have instead used it as a stand in for "I don't want my kids learning that some of their ancestors may have been on the wrong side of history" are too numerous to count. Again, ignorance. (How can you possibly want to preserve the honor of your long dead ancestors if they were slave owners?)
The left partisans that are unable to see anything except through a victim's lens.....again, ignorant.
The close minded, team oriented, zero sum game, players have taken over the field and they sadly, won't be easily moved.
Unfortunately, we don’t have empirical data to draw broad definitive conclusions about what makes good parenting. While clearly some parenting is terrible, so much is unknowable and uncontrollable, that any effort to systematize and — god forbid — enforce it is bound to result in coercive excess and woeful unintended consequences.
The truth is, we don’t know why some people do bad things and others don’t. Kids in idyllic homes turn into serial killers. Kids who are abused and neglected can become doctors and humanitarians. We can’t understand how and why these things happen so as to prescribe a better way.
One of the major revelations I had as a Peace Corps volunteer was that our system of schooling is a radical historical experiment, and we’re blind to it. In a traditional, non-migrant culture, kids are not sequestered for extended periods of each day among a cohort of their age peers. In a village of Nicaragua, kids spend 80-90% of their lives surrounded by people of all ages: elders, teens, adults, babies. The time they spend with people their own age is minimal, except near family such as siblings and cousins.
But we take an eight-year-old and stick her in a room with 29 others for 6 hours a day, five days a week. If she doesn’t have a large, close extended family, she may never have sustained interactions with a variety of older or younger kids, adults, elders or babies. This is radically different from how 99.9% of humans throughout history were raised. And we haven’t even considered the possible unintended consequences.
Traditional communities provide kids with wide variety of people to teach them a diversity of ways of living. They see kids a little older who give them ideas about what they can be; they see kids a little younger to help them understand how they’ve grown. The boys spend hours a day in the fields with their brothers and cousins, fathers and uncles, and even grandpa. The girls are in the home with their sisters and mothers, grandmothers and aunts, and the little babies. (I’m not extolling the gender roles here; I’m describing the diverse age exposure on a day-to-day basis).
But for a kid in an American nuclear family, all she has for a frame of reference are mommy, daddy, Ms. Teacher and the other 29 kids in her class. When does a sixteen-year-old get to spend time observing and relating to a 25-year-old, so as to have a role model for maturing? When does a 12-year-old learn what babies are like? How can an American child perceive her own maturity compared to younger kids if she has one or no siblings? If one of the adults in her life are deficient, who can she look to for a different vision of how to live a good life?
Our bizarre nuclear family and industrial child-rearing are so radically different from how most people in history were raised, and haven’t even stopped to look at what it means for the humans they (we) grow in to being. We fail to even acknowledge how new and unique it is. I think because we’re blind to even the existence of the experiment, we have no idea at all what its consequences have been. Maybe it’s been overall beneficial, maybe not. But we aren’t even asking the questions.
There really is no question to ask. We don't work in the fields for the most part. We work in factories or offices. So it may be a relatively new way to raise humans, but we can't reverse it.
Decades ago I read Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society. It made sense then but I was a 24 year old with no children. By the time I had a child, I worked 55 hours per week running a restaurant. In a few years, I was working in an office with a part time gig on weekends. So what to do? Well we sent our boy to school and he did fine. We were a 2 income family and not too far above the poverty line till my mid 30s.
So boys in the fields is no more applicable to us than living in an igloo. The idea that we can live is a different way is a bit dreamy.
I’m not proposing a return to agrarianism. Nor am I suggesting individual families have the ability to opt out. I’m not even taking the position that the current system is bad.
I’m saying it’s remarkably new, and we don’t understand what it may or may not be doing to our society. I am suggesting we need to consider whether the industrial warehousing of kids, and the fragmenting of the extended family and networked communities, have had unintended consequences which could be ameliorated by different social policies.
If warranted to make a better society, we can create an environment more friendly to labor, so that families can remain rooted in place and grow into a broad network. We can rethink age-based cohorts in education, and the resources we put into how we raise our kids. One-room schoolhouses may not be resource efficient, but they might be a remedy for some of the unintended consequences of the current system. We don’t need to be single-mindedly focused on efficiency as the outcome—efficient mobility of labor, efficient storage and education of children—so as to sacrifice quality. That’s a choice we need to consider if the research and evidence suggests it is creating a problem.
The current social order is so new, we should be trying to see what these methods have wrought, so as to better target what we might do to improve them.
All fine but it sounds like something based on words - so like the world as understood by Plato or Aristotle. I suggest looking at the real systems that exist. Like an engineer would look at a manufacturing process. So.. can we have ungraded classrooms? Sure. Can we allow home schooling - ok. But I see the entire modern world as schooled and divided up - and has been so for more than a century.
It has not been so “for more than a century” for most people. It was only in the 1950’s that the majority of Americans attended school full-time until the age of 16.
And even then, a century in middle America is an infinitesimal section of the human population through history.
I am not offering a policy prescription for solving a problem. I’m not even claiming that there IS a problem. It’s an observation that we have no idea what we’ve done, and might benefit from taking a look.
We need to recognize and acknowledge how remarkably unusual and new this social order is, and ask if there have been unintended negative consequences. If there have, we need to consider whether there are ways to ameliorate those consequences without sacrificing whatever benefits have been gained.
But until we look, we’ll never know.
Sure we have no idea but let's not play word games. So while everyone may not have attended school in the form you mention - in fact schooling was widespread in the North and West at least, so even folks like Larry Doby (Paterson NJ) attended H.S. And we see schooling among urban folks in places as different at Japan and Germany or California and Massachusetts.
At 70, I have watched all manner of arguments and so forth. But I don't see it useful to speculate about the impossible. I prefer to look to smaller ideas. So i am interested in ideas like how (supposedly) in Japan the classroom is set up to bring all along together - whereas our system let the better students leave the slow pokes behind.
I also remember "modern math" and "Pscc Chemistry and Physics" in the mid 1960s.
There have been shitty parents as long as there have been families, but what could have stopped Kyle is if those who are thought leaders stopped encouraging the cult of the gun. But these folks (by and large Republicans) like to portray themselves as gun owners and so on.
I cannot imagine John Adams today being other than embarrassed by what pretends to be conservatism.
Yes yes yes. Rittenhouse’s mother drove him and his rifle to the protest. He said he wanted to protect businesses and provide medical aid. This is a delusional kid, and he’s been encouraged in his delusions. Thousands of people were there, only 2 died. They were the ones who ran into Kyle
That his mother did NOT drive l him there was admitted into evidence and accepted as fact by both sides of the case. Kyle drove to the scene with Black, who procured the gun for him. What his mother didn't do was open a can of whupass on him when she found out he had an assault rifle, and force him to get rid of it. I really don't think the Rittenhouses are actively criminal, just weak and stupid.
Loved “Can of whupass”
Rittenhouse is guilty of criminal stupidity. A person who could not buy the gun he used (so someone bought it for him) and that had to commute a long distance to the scene of his overt, criminal stupidity. IIRC his mom drove him there.
The real criminals here are the person who bought a teenager an Ar-15, provided his transportation and, most importantly allowed him to think that doing what he was doing was smart or heroic or necessary.
There are good reasons why law enforcement is left to state agencies and why the state has a decided interest in controlling what is essentially vigilante violence. Doing otherwise is NOT conducive to civilization. Creating a running (often false) narrative that excuses such action as necessary (especially when aimed at political opponents or the Other) is destructive to law and order (something that the people pushing the narrative CLAIM to be all for).
At it's bare essential, State = monopoly of legitimate force, with few and rare exceptions. In situations where this is not true, you end up with anarchy and warlord-ism. See Afghanistan. See Somalia, see any number of third-world failed states.
These idiot militias are under the impression that they would be the top dogs in a situation of anarchy and there is this persistent right wing violence pornography around the whole idea. Just look at the Claremont Institute "study" that came to light a few days ago as a prime example.
I have owned guns for most of my life. I served in the US military. Sport shooter, hunter.
I have never felt the need to be armed during my normal, daily life. I have never felt the need to own the types of weapons that many of this wingnuts believe are necessary for their "self-defense." Most of these people do not live in locations where endemic violence is a problem... they don't live in a gang-ridden neighborhood in the inner city or even get near one.
Remember that the primary focus of militias in their heyday was in the south as a defensive measure against slave rebellion. I think that says a lot.
"But what non-gun owners may not understand is that these men are not your average gun-owning Americans. They are people who have fallen into a cult where it is normal to organize your entire culture around weapons of war." It looks like a lot of gun owners don't understand this either.
There is a large number of people who own a gun or two--and then there is a smaller number of people who own a LOT of guns. A lot of people who think that the zombie (or some other kind of) apocalypse is coming and have wet dreams about it.
But they will tell you they are just "well-prepared."
There are, perhaps, a few dozen people in the country who are "prepared" (for something really bad). In addition to fire-power, they are inside a tall fence far out in the wilderness, have their own sources of water and power and a means for sustained food production. They are also fortunate if they don't need medication for chronic conditions. For practical purposes, the portion of the country's 20 million assault weapons owned by such people is negligible. The "prepared" having those fantasies are prepared only to take what they need by force, until they are, too, gunned down.
The problem is that the line between the two is always blurred and shifting. A person is a law abiding gun owner until the moment they’re not. And then it’s too late.