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Notes -
The trial of Darrell Brooks is set to start this coming Monday, October 3. Brooks is accused of running over 77 people at the Waukesha Christmas Parade.
Brooks will be representing himself. His motion to do so was granted today. There have been a few entertaining / exasperating videos of Brooks and the Judge going back and forth on this matter.
Brooks believes himself to be a sovereign citizen. In one of the videos he's crossed out the words "I understand" and replaced them with "I have been informed of." These were on a form he had to sign that warned him of the perils of self-representation. It turns out this is a sovereign citizen thing. They believe that to say "I understand" means that they "stand under" the court and are subject to its authority. In the video granting his motion the judge finds that "I have been informed of" is functionally equivalent to "I understand" and Brooks objects, saying he never said those words.
Culture war angle: this was a big culture war story last year as people perceived the attack as both under-covered and when it was covered, downplayed. The Rittenhouse case got many orders of magnitude more coverage and had an order of magnitude fewer victims.
Additionally, on the videos I discovered that YouTube tacks on a link to the sovereign citizen movement page on Wikipedia, giving it the same treatment as COVID-19 misinformation.
Indeed--there was only one victim, and he didn't even die!
One fascinating aspect of the sovereign citizen "movement" is that, while it is certainly fringe, it's wildly all over place in terms of "nearest point of more mainstream thought." You get people that would otherwise be considered extreme libertarians, extreme leftists, extreme traditionalists, whatever, that have all decided to pick up this particular collection of unusual beliefs. One example is the Moorish sovereign citizens, if you prefer the black-separatist flavor.
Am I misremembering or are you speaking figuratively? Didn't Rittenhouse kill 2 and wound one?
I would venture that he's denying victim status to the two people Rittenhouse killed and the third he wounded - Rittenhouse being the victim. From the conservative perspective, they were aggressors who happened to aggress someone holding a loaded weapon.
I find this a strange statement. What about this is particular to the conservative perspective? I wasn't under the impression that someone's perception of the physics of an altercation was all that defined by someone's political perspective. E.g. I'm not a conservative, and having watched a video of the encounter, from my perspective, they were aggressors who happened to aggress (upon) someone holding a loaded weapon.
In theory, it shouldn't be. But self-defense law contains some statements that are open-ended (really all laws contain such statements, because natural languages are ambiguous). And one's political view could influence how you read and interpret these phrases. Now, some people seem to go much further and just don't know what the law says at all, and seem to think that you can (and should) only use a gun in self-defense against someone who doesn't also have a gun if you already have been stabbed or beaten and are imminently going to die. AFAIK this is not the law in any US state. However, the actual principles behind self-defense will include phrases like "reasonable belief." What is reasonable? Different people could disagree. One person might say that if you are a minor, and an adult is running after you, yelling at you, and throwing things at you, that you reasonably believe they are trying to (and able to) harm you, while another might say that isn't a reasonable belief. Or the law will contain terms like "reasonable means to escape." Again, what is reasonable?
Indeed, but none of this seems conservative to me. Just knowing basic scientific facts about biology and physics, my conclusion is that the video I saw of Rittenhouse shooting and killing someone was an example of self-defense in the face of aggressors aggressing upon someone who was holding a loaded weapon. What about this is specifically conservative?
In my opinion, nothing (and it's not limited to conservatives either--I'm libertarian and it looks to me like Rittenhouse was fairly clearly acting in self-defense). Self-defense is a basic human right. But even basic human rights are politically charged these days. While I don't think I can steel-man the case that Rittenhouse was definitely guilty of murder, let me offer a few observations:
From the liberal point of view, carrying a gun is itself an aggressive act. There was a lot of this at the time, people desperately trying to make legal (or debatably technically illegal, but not in a way that is relevant to self defense) open carry into a provocation. This is one of those things that is just invented and has no basis in law.
2 of the people Rittenhouse shot were not carrying guns. If you are not familiar with guns except from movies and think of a gun as a magical death machine that mows down all opposition no matter what, and don't realize the damage that a blow to the head with a skateboard (or being jumped on while on the ground) can do, then using a firearm in such a situation is a substantial escalation. I think this is mostly a factual mistake, supplemented by tribally targeted sympathy. Relatedly...
There was probably a lot of tribalism. AFAIK, no one who thought Rittenhouse was guilty also thought that the McMichaels engaged in reasonable self-defense against Ahmaud Arbery, even though in my opinion Arbery and Rittenhouse were in fairly similar circumstances. Again, much was made of Rittenhouses's alleged connections to "militia groups" and his alleged political opinions were supposed to be evidence that he went looking for protesters to shoot. So they assumed, based on those things, that he was more likely to be the aggressor.
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