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Peter Nissen Weltner's avatar

Set aside the legal questions, as resolved by the court case, that remain troubling. There are also the moral ones that arise when someone brings a gun to a protest, however violent it may have become, on their own self-deemed authority alone to control it or subdue it or to put it down, however that might be done, even violently, too, if the person so self-authorized deems it right. Such an act is inevitably provocative and is meant to be provocative. It also strikes me as one definition of vigilantism.

Rittenhouse has been deemed not guilty by a jury in a trial. Singal asserts that it is a just verdict in a legal sense, even though some of the laws upon which the argument depends themselves are not clearly good laws, at least from some legal perspectives. But Rittenhouse, by intervening as he did, by his own choices and acts, has killed two men and wounded another. There is no way in the world, in a moral or ethical sense, he is innocent of those deaths and the consequent suffering he caused others. This is not an instance of an otherwise innocent person confronted by something dreadful in which he has to respond, though no moral fault of his own, in a dreadful way. (The problem is that to a just man even such a just act might be troubling; that is the considerable matter of some tragedies.)

It simply will not suffice to consider these terrible events, all of them, not just Rittenhouse's part in it, from a legal point of view alone. In fact, the moral questions might be the far more important ones to confront, especially since, in many ways, legal systems, even the best of them, are so often flawed, as surely this trial demonstrates from numerous points of view.

I am not suggesting I have a clear answer, merely that I think the questions posed are far more complex that seem to be acknowledged in Singal's essay. Many heinous things happened the night Rittenhouse killed two men and seriously wounded another. His acts are among them.

(By the way, some of the comments below I find appalling, for precisely the self-righteousness and -certainty they are decrying in the left wing press. It may be often flawed, but compared to the deliberate, malicious, neofascist power-grabbing lying on the part of the right it is relatively trivial. I say this even though I have a great disliking for post-modernism and all its various sins and the conformity, so often enforced, of the left's responses to language and culture.)

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Craig Knoche's avatar

"partisan news coverage and punditry on the left is becoming a serious problem in its own right." My goodness, partisan left-wing news BECOMING a problem??? Who knew, as if Russian collusion, Steele dossier, Jussie Smollett, Covington Catholic, UVA Phi Kappa Psi fraternity rape scandal, et al, never happened.

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