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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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I think that you need to qualify the first by a careful parsing of the facts, and the second by widening the aperture to an adjacent claim, really speaks to the core of the matter here.

careful parsing

This is only necessary if you consider "knowing the full context, like by for example watching the freely-available video" as "careful parsing". But by this logic, every instance of self-defense though requires "careful parsing" beyond "A shot/stabbed/punched B", which always naively means A is in the wrong.

To me, "careful parsing" is trying to figure out if ivermectin is effective against the 2019 Chinese coronavirus and by how much. (I'm now inclined to believe that it is, but even that required a lot of informational intake and analysis and even at that I'm still not all that sure exactly how effective it is.) "Careful parsing" is understanding the argument as to why George Floyd's death was (as I and many others believe) most likely mostly self-inflicted by drug abuse in spite of the infamous and horrific-looking but misleading video.

Watching a video where somebody is attacked in a possibly fatal fashion and retaliates against those attackers, and only those attackers, and only those attackers for the duration of the immediate threat that they present, doesn't seem to require "careful parsing" to me to conclude self-defense. Really, considering the heavy media bias against Rittenhouse, the fact that he still got off at all would heavily indicate his actual innocence to me even if I were blind and literally couldn't watch the video. No "careful parsing" needed.

the second by widening the aperture to an adjacent claim

I admit this but I don't see the relevance to the argument. "Literally, 100% true" and "probably not literally, 100% true but suggestive of broader/deeper truths and in a reasonable ballpark" have both been recognized gradations of truth for a long time and equivalently that the latter is still more correct than "blatantly wrong and in contradiction of simple evidence". "The core of the matter" is the reasonableness of both claims. The second claim being in a slightly broader category of reasonableness-via-implication as opposed to in the category of pure, absolute truth does not invalidate it at all in regards to "the core of the matter".