Off Topic Thread 5.0

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.

I'm not contesting those facts? But they don't mean he's going to be convicted of murder.

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.

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.

I'd like to think you are correct alas you're not.

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,

You’re going for citizenship ?!

Good luck with that. Be prepared for some very arcane Qs. Also the good people of Geneva city, Geneva canton and Switzerland itself must all agree you would be a good little Swiss man.

It's not a surprise though. I think he went into those protests looking to pick a fight and shoot somebody. But the prosecution was weak from the very beginning with their own witness hurting their case when being cross examined.

Wisconsin's self defence laws being opaque hurt the prosecution. From what I understand about the law in America, they had to prove beyond reasonable doubt that he wasn't acting in self defence and that he was the initial aggressor. If a person instigates aggression from another party and then claims self defence after killing that person, the original aggressor will still be guilty as he initiated the events.

But there's a further caveat to that in Wisconsin there's case law to suggest that even if you're an aggressor and instigate events, you can still claim self defence if you can prove you feared for your own life even though you are at fault for triggering the series of events. Which appears to have been the Rittenhouse defence.

I think the case in Georgia is more clear cut! Guilty will be the outcome. Deservedly so.