Now that Kyle Rittenhouse has had a month to relax after his year of being targeted for what turned out to be, at least in the eyes of the unanimous jury, a meritless prosecution, I wonder what he will do next.
Although I did not follow the trial closely, I remember that Gaige Grosskreutz testified that young Kyle did not shoot him until Mr. Grosskreutz actually pointed a gun at him (NYT):
“So when you were standing three to five feet from him with your arms up in the air, he never fired, right?” Corey Chirafisi, a defense lawyer, asked.
“Correct,” Mr. Grosskreutz answered.
“It wasn’t until you pointed your gun at him, advanced on him with your gun — now your hands down, pointed at him — that he fired, right?” Mr. Chirafisi said.
“Correct,” he said.
Imagine if 33-year-old Mohamed Noor had shown the same restraint as the 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse. Justine Damond would have lived to enjoy her 41st birthday and Minneapolis taxpayers wouldn’t have had to pay $20 million (George Floyd turned out to have a higher value than Ms. Damond; his survivors received $27 million from the City of Minneapolis). What if Michael T. Slager had received training from Mr. Rittenhouse? Walter Scott would be alive today and North Charleston (S.C.) taxpayers would be $6.5 million richer.
Should cities ask Kyle Rittenhouse to come in and train officers on how to recognize when it is time to shoot?
On a separate topic, the Ministry of Truth at Facebook recently lifted a ban on writing anything positive about Mr. Rittenhouse or searching for him by name (CNN), but the Ministry “will continue to remove posts that glorify the deaths involved in the Kenosha shooting.” Illustrating the limits of artificial intelligence, a Deplorable friend of a friend managed to post regarding Joseph Rosenbaum, who unwisely singled out the kid with the AR-15 as an appropriate person to attack. Background from an Arizona newspaper:
Rosenbaum had multiple convictions in Pima County, spending just over 14 years in prison. He served the first 10 years on his first rape charge. However, for the two other rape charges he only received sentences of 30 months.
WRN Investigates reported that Rosenbaum was charged by a grand jury with 11 counts of child molestation and inappropriate sexual activity around children, including anal rape. The victims were five boys ranging in age from nine to 11 years old.
According to Yahoo News, “Hours before the fatal encounter, Rosenbaum had been released from a local hospital in the wake of a suicide attempt. He had pending charges in Wisconsin for alleged domestic abuse and jumping bail at the time of his death.”
This kind of information would certainly be forbidden by the algorithms and humans at Facebook. But the Ministry of Truth did not flag the following from the above-mentioned Deplorable:
Not many people get to die doing what they love. Those who do are truly fortunate.
Jojo Rosenbaum was one of those fortunate souls. He died chasing an unwilling minor.
Readers: What do you think Kyle Rittenhouse will do next?
The Rittenhouse jury was not told those facts about Rosenbaum. Maybe they heard outside of court.
Rittenhouse’s gun handling skills, under high pressure, were remarkably good. Especially for an untrained 17-year-old boy.
“Dr” Phil:
Were you at the convention last night when the crowd was chanting Kyle’s name? https://twitter.com/az_rww/status/1473084860004593666?s=20
Maybe when the Fox News host suggested the crowd ambush Fauci and arrange a kill shot? https://www.staradvertiser.com/2021/12/21/breaking-news/fauci-says-foxs-jesse-watters-should-be-fired-for-kill-shot-comments-on-him/
Here’s a 17 year old who shot people dead in a misguided attempt to make things better. Why is he being lionized by the right (and you)? You consume right-wing media and actually believe the propaganda. (“Dr” Phil: “No, no, I get my news from Facebook, and I don’t realize it is all algorithm fed to keep me enraged…”)
This is my last comment for a while. I’ll check back in a year, after the midterm, to see if you are supporting the overthrow of legitimate elections to install more orange-man-supporting, red-hat-wearing politicians. Democracy will be dead, but you’ll be happy that we’ll have more vigilante justice and less true freedom. The US experiment will be over. You might or might not have jetted off to Portugal.
To you and all the right-wing folks that threaten to leave the country: what first-world country do you think you are going to go to that has MORE freedom with guns than the US?!? That doesn’t have universal health care? That ignores climate change more than the US? That supports Putin and his regime? That wants to arrest women and doctors for a 6-week abortion? That doesn’t like the post office? That thinks billionaires should be pitied for paying 10% tax? That think a woman’s place is in the home? That think gerrymandered districts are ideal? That think democratic elections should be overthrown because you just don’t like the result? That buy into the right-wing media mantra: “The main stream media sucks, only listen to our admittedly skewed view. The main stream media sucks, only listen to our admittedly skewed view. The main stream media sucks, only listen to our admittedly skewed view.”
Hint: the rest of the civilized world thinks the US is already a right-wing nutjob’s utopia! And somehow the right-wing nutjobs (you included) still aren’t happy!
Mike: “Dr. Phil” is a compliment, since he is a white TV psychologist who worked in a subordinate position to the Black multi-millionaire Oprah Winfrey!
> Hint: the rest of the civilized world thinks the US is already a right-wing nutjob’s utopia!
Not any more! It may have been partially true during George W. Bush’s reign, but thanks to the Internet and “social” media we have seen the new American left in action in the last decade, and they have a stronger claim to the “nutjob” title. Many Europeans would be quite happy if someone like Reagan were to be the next president.
@Mike – it does look like you should take a break from commenting and reading this blog. May be a break from CNN as well? And a visit to a therapist?
You do sound a bit unhinged and still suffering from TDS one year into the reign of awesome Biden admin.
“Democracy will be dead, but you’ll be happy that we’ll have more vigilante justice and less true freedom. The US experiment will be over. ” Indeed. But who is new Hitler? You do not mention …
Mike: I don’t agree that you should stop commenting, but I am confused at your millenarian language. An American who wants to live in a scientifically governed paradise and get a state-funded abortion every month can move to California, New York, or Massachusetts. In terms of available government handouts, when has there ever been a better time or place to be alive? It sounds as though you’re objecting that not every state provides all of this good stuff, but there is no wall preventing migration to the good states from the bad states. Indeed, currently there is no practical barrier to migrating from anywhere in the world to the states of awesomeness.
There are at least 83 Federal welfare programs and then each state has additional programs. See https://singlemotherguide.com/federal-welfare-programs/ for a partial list.
So much rage. You won dude, your guy is in the big house, have a little gratitude.
One point I will take on is I have never heard any right wing folks ever threaten to leave the country. That has always been a threat from leftist individuals. What I have been hearing a lot of is right wing folks saying they are going to stop fixing the cars, plumbing, electricity, etc. of left wingers. But that should be OK there must be plenty of left wing plumbers in America.
PS If you think the controlled opposition gaslighting alleged right wing media represents majority deplorable opinion you would be terrified to know what the deplorables really think.
PPS God wins
“This is my last comment for a while”. Good riddance too bad garbage!
I think what Mike is upset about, Phil, is that “the civilized world” by which I guess Mike means Belgium or Holland or France or Germany or Austria, you know, those enlightened places that managed to wipe out all of their pesky Jews by shipping them off to Auschwitz and Treblinka and Dachau, don’t respect us. So how is Mike moving to Maskachusetts or NYC or Marin County going to alleviate Mike’s awful feeling of being disrespected by the enlightened Europeans? And to top it off, they are going green by buying all of their energy from Moscow (to help finance Russia’s upcoming annexation of Ukraine) while we dance to the tune of a coal baron? It is your website, Phil, but I don’t think your answer will comfort Mike.
I think Mike’s position is not factual but rather moral with associated rituals, revelations, sacrifices, sinners, saints, etc. With this mindset, facts are mere ornaments that may (or may not be used in which case they are simply discarded) to advance the new religion. E.g. it does not matter what really happened in the Rittenhouse case, what does matter is that he was labeled a “white supremacist” by high priests of Mike’s church. A moral position in which California, New York, or Massachusetts are the “Shining Cities Upon a Hill” leads to a natural revulsion towards deviants from such morality. Therefore, a rational argument here is rather pointless.
It is a pity Mike is gone, though, because he has been a constant reminder of how most people “reason” about the world around them, a reality check as it were. Fortunately, Anon arrived on the scene to keep tabs on the infidels so not all is lost.
Mike: As you see, conservative people not only allow you to post dissenting opinions without censorship, but encourage you to stay.
On a woke blog or discussion site dissenting opinions are censored, shadow-banned, and accounts are deleted. Given the totalitarian nature of the woke, I would not be surprised if they share IP addresses of heretics with other corporations and try to build blacklists (sorry, deny-lists) of regime critics.
I see that the preferred notation for Ph.D. has now become ‘quote-Dr-unquote’. Well, it figures doesn’t it.
Well at least we still have Senorpablo !
With Mike gone, have any of you considered crowdfunding a new lib in the comment section?
I thought about opening a business along these lines with the tagline
“A lib you can literally own”.
You’ll get to win 75% of the encounters (90% if you’re really, really insecure). After all, you’ve paid for it.
You know it’ll be boring without some diversity.
Steven: Are you sure that it makes sense to talk about one side “winning” an argument between what today in the U.S. is called a “liberal” and what today in the U.S. is called a “conservative”? The two sides have completely different goals and are explicit about it. It is not that there is agreement about a goal and someone can “win” an argument about the best way to achieve that goal.
On coronaplague, for example, liberals say that they want to minimize the number of COVID-19-tagged-deaths. The number of people who die from other causes, the cost in years of education lost, etc., is irrelevant. Conservatives say that they wat to minimize the number of life-years lost due to all causes, including lockdown-induced obesity, drug overdoses, unemployment, etc.
On immigration, liberals say that it is a human right for anyone who comes from a violent society to permanently inhabit the U.S. Conservatives say that this is not a human right. That’s not a logical argument that one side can “win”.
Liberals say that the debt-to-GDP ratio is irrelevant and therefore they want to maximize government spending. It is not like the old days when liberals and conservatives agreed on a balanced budget and one side could “win” a debate about whether a budget actually would balance.
Liberals want every pregnant person to have access to state-funded abortion, potentially up to 37 weeks of pregnancy as in Maskachusetts (“on demand” up to 24 weeks; single doctor’s discretion after that). They don’t disagree that babies born at 21 weeks can survive (see https://www.thebump.com/news/guinness-world-records-premature-baby ). They just say that they want to do abortions beyond that 21-week point. Conservatives, by contrast, would probably mostly agree that abortions should not be done beyond the point where medical tech can keep a baby alive. There is, again, no logical argument that could be “won”.
Similarly, on means-tested public housing, it is not a logical argument that someone can “win” as to whether an able-bodied individual who prefers not to work has a right to 100 years of taxpayer-funded housing. Nor can logic determine whether the means-tested public housing should be in high-value neighborhoods within Manhattan, San Francisco, Cambridge, Boston, etc., or in cheap out-of-the-way areas.
Around the edges there might be the occasional disagreement, e.g., does low-skill immigration make existing residents of the U.S. richer or poorer (Harvard answer: It makes rich Americans richer and working class Americans poorer; see https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/trump-clinton-immigration-economy-unemployment-jobs-214216/ ). But I don’t know that the disagreement is relevant. If you convinced a liberal that admitting the next 30 million low-skill migrants from violent societies would make the U.S. poorer, he/she/ze/they shouldn’t change his/her/zir/their position. Migration is a human right, after all, from the liberal’s point of view.
Mike has a point. When all the right wing objectives are accomplished in sufficient jurisdictions to govern the country indefinitely, is that the country we (imperial”we”) really want to live in and pass to our grandchildren? I oppose a lot of the Democrat agenda, but collectively they don’t seem to me actually dangerous. A clear majority of House Republicans, batshit crazy!
personally, if I never see another Trump flag (think about that, a Trump FLAG for God’s sake) it will be soon enough. We need to turn off the screens and walk around a little before it’s too late.
Can we have millenarian Mike back instead of millenarian Anon? Mike is clearly disturbed and confused as is Anon but Mike’s language structures show two standard deviations higher IQ
Seriously f’up logic right here. He showed restraint? He lost restraint merely by showing up as an armed “home guard” provoking a confrontation with a rifle no matter who escalated the tension in what followed.
This is restraint: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zolg2DLMEAg
or this: https://youtu.be/OZSGNf-hTJc
How many seconds would the US police/coastguard wait until they fired a bunch of holes in those boats and people on them? No need to guess, here’s an example: https://youtu.be/mm5XWvcmClU
Mr. Rittenhouse provoked late Mr. Rozenbaum by wearing a mini in a wrong place at a wrong time? Rifle was is the only firearm that Mr. Rittenhouse could legally carry for self-defense after his life was threatened, see trial records on youtube.
Rittenhouse may be fast but that doesn’t mean he is not young and foolish for hauling a firearm to a late night “peaceful protest” hosted by the rabble, peppered with thrill seekers and criminals. Johnny Cash wrote a song some 50+ years ago that seems apropos, “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town”.
I think Rittenhouse is a young, patriotic and very brave (and foolish) guy who is also too idealistic and immature. There could have been a lot more death, especially if he had lost the gun to his assailants or been confronted by a larger number of them. He needs to sit back for a few years and reflect carefully on what he did, stay out of politics to the greatest extent possible, get a good education in whatever subject he chooses – maybe seek out some conservative mentors at College – there are still a few! – and most of all keep his nose clean. In the end, he fired a rifle that took someone’s life. He should live with that decision for the rest of his life and reflect on it carefully, particularly the circumstances that led him to be there with a loaded AR-15 in the middle of the mayhem. I understand to some extent his desire to protect Kenosha and so forth, but it was a very bad scene and I think he could easily have wound up dead, with the gun taken from him and unloaded into a bunch of other people who also would have died.
Self-defense is a last resort. Kyle Rittenhouse was not defending himself in his home or on his property. He was engaging in the mini Civil War, and it I don’t think it was his place to be there at that time, fighting that battle with an AR-15.
I also think the jury’s decision was correct in terms of the law.
He’s a young man with a brave heart and an immature mind. He needs to spend a few years working on the mind part, and then mapping out a good strategy for the rest of his life. He shouldn’t succumb to the easy “low hanging” exploitative fruit hung by people who just want to exploit his name and the terrible circumstances he found himself in.
Maybe in the fullness of time he could become an instructor. In them meantime, though, he should leave that up to people like Massad Ayoob and get himself an education.
I don’t want to see Rittenhouse in the news of his own making again, at least until it has nothing to do with firearms. The police are aware of good instructors that are available for hire. I know several of them, even though a lot of police still don’t know lethal force law as well as Rittenhouse apparently did. There’s no excuse for that.
I mostly agree and I think that the most important acquittal for Kyle Rittenhouse would be from God but we can not run our freedom promise society as a police force or any other unit with subordination hierarchy. After watching the trial I concluded that Kyle Rittenhouse did nothing wrong in the eyes of the law and whatever wishes I or someone else has for him are totally irrelevant.
@LSI: Oh, believe me, I support his right to own an AR-15 completely. This was a very bad situation and I don’t think he thought through the possible consequences.
The Kenosha story is more or less over.
Quite a few people got the Rittenhouse Afffair right in November of 2020
https://www.bullshido.net/anatomy-of-a-catastrophe/
https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/here-are-my-contemporaneous-articles
And thus this year’s verdict was not that surprising
https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-medias-verdict-on-kyle-rittenhouse
https://www.blockedandreported.org/p/episode-91-a-barpod-musical-milestone
Rittenhouse will probably not end up teacing incompetent US police anything. He seems destined for greater things
https://twitter.com/az_rww/status/1473084860004593666?s=20
But my guess is he’ll wish to fade into obscurity again.
And the US will chug along with upstanding members of society
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10229443/Armed-father-daughter-carrying-AR-15s-march-alongside-anti-Rittenhouse-protesters.html
learned discussions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRpjdrFCYT8&ab_channel=Vito
and awful people getting their news from awful media
https://twitter.com/ryanlongcomedy/status/1272534112327393288
Oh look, another case of absolutely irresponsible, unnecessary and unprovoked use of firearms by the police https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjcdanUhmSY