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Have we considered that the article may not be telling(or may not have) the whole truth as to what this crazy homeless guy was doing?
I'm the "don't believe anything you haven't seen with your own eyes" guy -- so yeah.
But given that this is clearly going to court and likely to be a cause celebre, if the grappling was in fact preceeded by a significant assault we will hear about it soon enough. There would probably be a verbal altercation as some part of this, which may be bad for the Marine in terms of claiming self-defense.
Maybe. But maybe that doesn't matter. "Hands up, don't shoot" was a blatant lie. It was known to be a lie almost immediately. It was authoritatively proven to be lie some time later. Neighborhoods still got burned to the ground, and people still believe it to this day.
The flag has been planted at this being an unprovoked lynching. Now, even if a hypothetical video shows the violent felon literally inches from shanking a defenseless woman on that subway, people will be quibbling over whether that really entitles a marine to "murder" him. That we don't know, not for certain, that he would have actually shanked that woman. The woman probably would have survived, the punishment for a survivable stab wound shouldn't be death. People survive stab wounds all the time.
Once upon a time I would have thought that exaggeration. Except it already happened. So yeah. There is no possible provocation that man could have done, up to and including actually physically harming another passenger, which would justify to these activist the subsequence events. Their claims that he didn't do anything preceding the events is not a statement of fact. It's an ontological statement of orthodoxy. Anything he did, no matter what, counts as nothing.
It won't matter to the mob, but it will matter to me.
The court, maybe.
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See this absolute masterpiece of a Tweet from Valerie Jarrett, for example:
As you point out, this is in the context of Bryant being in the process of attempting to disembowel another unarmed black teenage girl. So it's not just that some protestors got carried away, top level Dem officials unironically argue against shooting someone that is in the process of attempting murder.
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