When the NZ rugby and cricket teams can't win, well there's always the soccer team. It's a great effort for a little nation to qualify directly for the soccer world cup, especially at the expense of Italy...a word of thanks to our Northern Ireland friends for their contribution.
Big Garda presence around the entrance to Stephen’s Green. For what turned out to be about 30 idiots with placards. Who couldn’t even manage to make enough noise to drown out a busker. Thankfully these anti vax protests are diminishing to the point of non existence,
I have no idea how much Richie believes of what he posts but I'm 100% sure he lives under a bridge
I'd like to think you are correct alas you're not.
Every one of ye hook, line and sinker lads...
On this level the US has always fallen apart. A massively underexplored phenomenon is the white mob in American history, the posse going after Native Americans and Mexicans (Texas and the borderlands), and the Lynch mobs who were active up until the 1940s. Its role has always been to patrol the colour line and enforce white supremacy, and it never went away, it was just formalized into the police force. Those guys who murdered Arbery live in a county that is majority black but in a white neighborhood, they're basically out enforcing segregation at the point of a gun. The Trayvon Martin case is the same story, black kid walking in a mostly white neighbourhood is confronted and ultimately murdered by a white vigilante just because he is black. Rittenhouse fits into a distinct tradition of this stuff.
There's not much point in an argument that pits morality against legality.
Of course the guy shouldn't have gone to another state armed to the teeth but there's nothing illegal about doing that in the US so there's nothing to charge him with in that respect.
Look at the Ahmad Arbery case as the perfect example of certain people weaponising self-defence laws to basically just commit murder.
There is no defence for travelling great distances to attend a demonstration armed. I suspect he'll get away with it, but its just indicative of the US genuinely starting to fall apart.
Funny when I was younger I grew up in the height of the troubles. At the height of the riots in Belfast or Derry I never thought to myself "must jump into the car and drive 40 miles to have a look at what's going on".
If there is something called a riot taking place somewhere then most sane people would be of the "I'll stay at home" persuasion.
He'll probably walk. The fact that the judge is a cracker helps him but if the trial only considers the narrow time line around the shootings he has a good case.
But your other points are disingenuous. The right have for years been showing up armed at left wing demos attempting to provoke situations and to shoot people under cover of self defense. It happened in Seattle, in Portland, in NYC, LA and several other cases. On right wing media and podcasts there are discussions about his strategy and legal experts outlining what's legal and illegal. Right wingers at these demos wear Pinochet shirts showing people being thrown out of helicopters, a reference to Pinochet's habit of murdering activist young people in this manner. On right wing media expressions of murderous loathing for leftists are routine, and Rittenhouse's showing up at that BLM demo is a direct result of this sort of politics and propaganda. These guys are obsessed with violence and Trump and republican stand your ground laws encourage them to think they are right. Rittenhouse is a classic loan wolf not very smart inadequate who went out to prove something, armed with an extremely dangerous weapon. In any sane society that would be enough to lock him up.
Yeah, that seems to be what we’re dealing with. Or used to be dealing with.
I'm not contesting those facts? But they don't mean he's going to be convicted of murder.
There's no point, molloy. He was calling Covid "the China virus" yesterday.
Or he could have been at home at no risk at all. This is nothing short of pathetic. Falling back on technicalities and obfuscation to absolve an individual of any form of personal responsibility. I’m often the one to talk about grey areas. There aren’t any here. He went there when he didn’t need to. He brought a dangerous weapon when he didn’t need to. If he chose to do neither of those things he never would have been at risk and he never would have killed anyone. But sure you chose to ignore those facts because you don’t want to hold him to account. Christ knows why, and in all honesty I don’t care. I’m done.
A very black and white view, and not really how it works, I don't think. He's not going to be convicted of murder because he took a deadly weapon to a dangerous situation. He was seen talking to police before the shootings. Presumably you think he should have been arrested then and there?
He will be convicted of murder of the prosecution can show he didn't act in self defence. I can't see it. He could have been badly beaten, possibly even to death, if he hadn't defended himself.
Going into a violent situation with a gun is asking for more violence. I mean it really isn’t any more complicated than that. He didn’t need to engineer a situation where someone could die. But he did. Nobody asked him to. It wasn’t his job. He did so on his own volition. So what happened as a result is on him. People can try and obfuscate all they want. This is one of those few cases that are actually pretty clear cut. He was asking for trouble and armed to kill if he got it. He could have just done what the vast, vast, vast majority of others did and stayed at home. He created a situation where he was likely to shoot and kill someone. Nobody else did. The end.
I don't know whether he had any connection to the places he's claimed he was protecting. And I'd wager neither do you. He says he had a med kit, and was seen on video offering medical assistance to injured people, or so I've read.
The whole thing is so politicised over there. Maybe he thought it was his civic duty to try to prevent general lawlessness?
If he wanted to kill people he could have started popping of shots from hundreds of metres away. But all the people he shot were right on top of him, and, respectively, tried to grab his gun, kicked him in the head while he was on the ground, hit him with a skateboard while he was on the ground, and pointed a handgun at him.
I don't disagree with your points about him travelling there. I'd ask where were the parents when you've got a 17-year old travelling to a situation like that with an AR-15.
"As far as I'm aware, his argument is that he was there to stop a car dealership from being vandalised, and to provide medical aid."
I've been saying it for years, with the hospital bed shortage in this country, we really need to invest in more... semi-automatic weapons.
Ah stop. He armed himself with a weapon, not medical supplies. And are you really so naive as to believe that he went to a different state to protect a car dealership he had no connection to and likely had never even heard of before? Please.
You believe that once he was attacked he behaved reasonably yet you don’t question what the bloody hell he was doing there in the first place? Serious gap in critical thinking there. If you walk into a violent situation with all the signs of wanting to be violent, what exactly do you think is going to happen? It’s beyond stupid not to realise that he created the situation where he was at risk and did so with a weapon that would kill anyone who threatened him. There was only 1 realistic outcome to what he chose to do. Someone was going to die. And there was absolutely no reason for him to create that situation. None.
I thought the narrative was that they were "mostly peaceful" protests, not riots?
Going to something like that with a deadly weapon isn't something I'd do, but once he was under attack, I think he behaved reasonably.
As far as I'm aware, his argument is that he was there to stop a car dealership from being vandalised, and to provide medical aid. Maybe he thought having an AR-15 would be an effective deterrent? I mean, if I see someone with a semi-automatic rifle, my thinking would be that it would be extremely dangerous to lunge at him and attempt to grab his gun.
It's America. It may seem foreign to us, but patrolling the streets with a rifle isn't illegal in certain circumstances over there.
I thought one was black. Any way, I believe he went there with the intention of acting the hard man and shooting somebody.
This is a really twisted post. A civilian with no training and no reason to be there armed themselves with a weapon designed to do nothing but kill people and inserted himself into a tense and violent situation. The only things he was ever going to accomplish was either (a) getting himself hurt or (b) escalating already serious tensions. What did he think was going to happen? A “yes sir, sorry sir” response? An armed civilian entering a riot like he’s some form of authority isn’t going to make anything better. And especially given America’s history with gun violence how can anyone be surprised that people reacted violently towards him? Nothing about what he did was reasonable, responsible, restrained or safe. Staying at home would have been all of those things. And it confuses and scares me in equal measure the lengths some people will go to excuse that behaviour. He killed people because he went there with a weapon. Had he not done that he wouldn’t have killed those people. It’s just that simple.
Rittenhouse is the poster child for the broken state of American political discourse. He was 17, he had no business at all in having access to an arsenal of that nature and his motivations for being there are highly questionable and to my mind a good example of radicalisation. If he wasn't seeking conflict, he wouldn't have brought an automatic rifle with him (semi for the pedants) and he wasn't there to protect anyone, he was there because he was against the protests and wanted confrontation with it's participants. A reminder of how those protests are framed as against reality - 93% of BLM protests are entirely peaceful, and the remaining 7% are primarily understood to be criminal or other elements not related to the protests using them as cover. Rittenhouse was radicalised, certainly with a racial element albeit probably much more broad than that and you only need to have a look at how the likes of Fox cover the protests to see why.
I'm forever glad that we don't have a weird cultural obsession with the military and guns in this country. It feeds into a certain mentality that is unhealthy, aggressive and too easily manipulated into nationalism and supremacy.
Even the UK's obsession with the military and things like the poppy brings this out. The Denis Hutchings funeral was quite frankly deplorable given the crimes he was almost certainly guilty of - yet the fact he was even being held accountable is an outrage to so many (including high profile Government Politicians). Warped mentality.
Finally figured out how to add someone to your ignore list if they've made their profile private.
Click your own avatar in top right, then Edit profile, then bottom right should be a link for 'Ignore List'. You can manually add people's names there. There's a limit of 50 though, and I'm already at 10 people.
I don't know if it's relevant, but the constitutional right to have a gun is not for self-defence or defence of your own property, it's so that people can defend the security of the state.
If I was his lawyer, I'd be saying that the police had lost control and it was up to dutiful citizens to help maintain the rule of law.
Absolutely f*cking bat-**** crazy
Just a semi automatic then. Grand. Nothing wrong with watching a riot with a semi auto on you, you know, just in case.
There is a lovely American couple who have a holiday home near to us. Nice people until politics and guns and race come into the conversation. He bought her a gold colt pistol when they got married. I mean nothing says 'love you' more than weapons that can kill.
Weird old place the USA.
Rittenhouse undoubtedly went to Kenosha looking for a fight. His testimony about going there to act as an "auxiliary police officer and medic", is utter rubbish. Personally, I do think he went there to shoot somebody.
However, from the evidence we've heard in court, I think he has a pretty good defence of self-defence. He wasn't the aggressor in the incident which led to the shootings.
The people he shot were white and were attacking him?
I believe his father lives in Kenosha. And also I think the AR15 is semi-automatic, not automatic.
If I remember correctly from watching the footage, one of the people he shot comes in as if to attack Rittenhouse, Rittenhouse trains his rifle on him, but doesn't fire when the other guy puts his hands up and backs off. But then the other guy draws a handgun when he thinks Rittenhouse's attention is on something else. Rittenhouse then shoots him in the arm, not in the body (which presumably would have been easier). All of this while Rittenhouse is on the ground after tripping and falling and being hit and kicked.
Have you watched any of the footage?
It's crazy to me that it's legal in the US to arm yourself with an assault rifle and insert yourself in a riot. He may be found not guilty of murder according to US law, but I can't get past that point. What was he planning on doing with the gun. He should have just stayed at home.
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