> “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.
Huh? What does archiving have to do with anything? What seems to have happened is someone is confusing the Washington Post for the New York Times in a way that leaves a misleading impression in this thread. It's like if you're talking about your software engineer friend Denny, and someone responds with a criticism of some software engineer named Eric like he's talking about the same person.
The parent comment to the subject of my response established the scope of this discussion as including legacy media in general, one comment invoked the NYT, and I can bring up another publication as well.
The general point is that there are plenty of subtle ways to present/disseminate new that allows bias to seep through.
In this example the WP reported it in the least effective way possible - as an edit to an existing article that most people would never revisit. Even then, they choose to keep the first half of that head line - as opposed to at the forefront presenting a piece of update that will have actual material impact on the case, which to an unbiased/oppositely-biased publication would be a separate headline. Instead, it’s more important that you know Grosskreutz “feared for his life”, which is even more subtly manipulative.
Edit: Just to harp on this point of how ridiculous Grosskreutz fearing for his life is as a headline by that point: his friend, who posed for a photo with him together in the hospital, had posted an deleted on facebook a post stating that Grosskreutz had said that his only regret was not emptying his mag into Rittenhouse. And the fact that there has always been video of the incident showing Grosskreutz approaching a downed Rittenhouse and drawing his handgun as he was shot - even before his corroborating admission. And their headline emphasizes that Grosskreutz had feared for his life without mentioning any of the evidence contrary to this narrative.
I bring this up to support the argument in the parent comment to the one I responded to, this example betrays a blatant and willful intent to misrepresent the facts on the part of at least this one member of the mainstream media.
> The parent comment to the subject of my response established the scope of this discussion as including legacy media in general, one comment invoked the NYT, and I can bring up another publication as well.
I suppose you can, but your comment needed a better transition to make it clear what you were doing. The original comment brought CNN's coverage of a topic (in an unverifiable way) to make a general claim that "mainstream media lies, constantly and blatantly." Someone responded that the NYT article is a counterexample to that claim, and you quoted that link but started randomly talking about a Washington Post headline without even mentioning the publication's name, which made it seem like you were talking about the NYT's headline.
> In this example the WP reported it in the least effective way possible - as an edit to an existing article that most people would never revisit.
What else would you have them do? I see this kind of criticism often, but when I actually think about what would satisfy the critic vs. the other users of the product, it seems like a situation where one users wants the product tailored to their unusual wants in a way that would degrade user experience for the bulk of other users or would require an investment that would be hard to justify, e.g.:
1. Headlining errata on the front page: that would be annoying and take space away from what 99.999% of users are actually looking for (today's news as of now).
2. Featuring errata prominently in the actual article: again, it's annoying because 99.999% of users want to read today's news as of now, not errata.
3. Article version control accessible to the users: relatively expensive, and 99.999% of users don't care and would never use it. Even if they have some internal version, my guess there's all kinds of unpublishable or unpolished stuff in the history that they're now going to have to edit for publication.
4. Issuing corrected articles, keeping the erroneous ones online: now you have different links flying around for more-or-less the same stuff, but the most popular ones are likely the early ones with errors. Even if you put a link to the correction, most people want to read the best version, and the links aren't taking them there.
5. Etc.
> I bring this up to support the argument in the parent comment to the one I responded to, this example betrays a blatant and willful intent to misrepresent the facts on the part of at least this one member of the mainstream media.
That's obviously false, since the claim is incoherent when applied to your example. If it were true, why would they have bothered to correct the headline? If they had a "blatant and willful intent to misrepresent the facts" wouldn't they have kept the initial headline because it "misrepresented the facts"? In reality, the corrected the headline, which is evidence that they don't indent to "misrepresent the facts."
The video was public well before Grosskreutz admitted to drawing his weapon at Rittenhouse as he approached him, the Facebook post after the incident was known about. They should’ve informed their audience of these facts more so than they were informed of Grosskreutz’s fear of his life, however the latter was the most broadly disseminated piece of info by being a headline item. “Video shows Kenosha shooting victim drawing gun as he was shot” was not a headline, “Kenosha shooting victim testifies” was not the headline and would’ve been a less blatantly biased choice.
It’s very simple. A WP reader is more likely to find out from being their audience that Grosskreutz feared for his life than the other facts that I’ve mention that are much more interesting and critical to the case, and it’s by design
> and you quoted that link but started randomly talking about a Washington Post headline without even mentioning the publication's name
I did not quote the NYT link. The name of the WP is in the url that I posted. Sorry I didn’t make clear the context
> That's obviously false, since the claim is incoherent when applied to your example. If it were true, why would they have bothered to correct the headline?
It would’ve been worse had they been completely silent of that part of the testimony, I agree. It would’ve been harder for me to verify though, that a publication mentioned it not even once, so I choose this example to save time. But no, your response completely missed my main point, they don’t have to not update it, dissemination of a certain piece of information in terms of its reach can be diminished without it reaching zero. Statements can be used push a false narrative without being outright untrue. There are more tactful ways to mislead than simply lying, obviously. Edit: To answer your question, to enable the defense that you’ve just made
> The video was public well before Grosskreutz admitted to drawing his weapon at Rittenhouse as he approached him, the Facebook post after the incident was known about. They should’ve informed their audience of these facts more so than they were informed of Grosskreutz’s fear of his life, however the latter was the most broadly disseminated piece of info by being a headline item.
> It’s very simple. A WP reader is more likely to find out from being their audience that Grosskreutz feared for his life than the other facts that I’ve mention that are much more interesting and critical to the case, and it’s by design.
I'm obviously not following this story as closely as you. However, I think the issue here may be that you wished you read a different story than the Washington Post was actually writing. What it looks like they were writing was an account of this Grosskreutz's testimony, and his accounting of his mental state at the time may have been the most newsworthy part of that. It seems like you want something more like a Wikipedia article offering a definitive account of the event based all known sources (e.g. "the video", "the Facebook post"), which is not what the article you linked actually was. If I want a hammer, but have a screwdriver, it's not the screwdriver's fault for not being a hammer.
Furthermore, you're almost exclusively focused on a headline, which can never tell the full story. Usually there are multiple legitimate possibilities for a headline, and there's no perfect one that will satisfy everyone.
>> That's obviously false, since the claim is incoherent when applied to your example. If it were true, why would they have bothered to correct the headline?
> But no, your response completely missed my main point, they don’t have to not update it, dissemination of a certain piece of information in terms of its reach can be diminished without it reaching zero. Statements can be used push a false narrative without being outright untrue. There are more tactful ways to mislead than simply lying, obviously. Edit: To answer your question, to enable the defense that you’ve just made
That's getting into paranoid conspiracy territory. It's pretty unbelievable that the Washington Post would be trying to mislead, but then fix it to "enable the defense that [I've] just made." The actual evidence here is pointing to a different theory that better fits the evidence than that one (i.e. the Washington Post headline writer is trying to get it right, but it's an iterative process).
Now, don't get me wrong. It's totally believable that they have good intentions to report the truth, but, being human, also have biases and other constraints that subvert those intentions to a degree (and may be particularly irksome to those with different biases), but it's going way too far to attribute malicious intent to them.
It's also worth noting that the statement you quoted from GP is objectively incorrect without the qualifier that Rittenhouse did not fire at Gaige until Gaige's Glock 17 was pointed at Kyle's head, because Rittenhouse had just opened fire on two unarmed men, killing one of them.
Keep that in mind while we're talking about omitting information to manipulate the narrative.
How is it objectively incorrect, if he pretty much quoted a direct speech verbatim? At least one of them hit Rittenhouse with a skateboard, so he was armed.
Yeah, and a knife can kill just as well as a gun. Except it can’t. A medium build woman can break one’s skull with 2-3 swings of a skateboard, especially if it lands on the edge or on a sticking metal part. To achieve the same damage with fists, it would take years of training and would also cause a significant damage to one’s hands.
If hitting with just the right angle on a hard bit is good enough to count then half the things on my desk are deadly weapons. I can't get behind that definition.
Then don’t. You can continue denying common sense. But if someone threatens to assault you with a skateboard, bare hand or an item from your desk, then will intuitively discover the difference.
If you started using your desk items as a weapon and swung them at a person in a manner that could reliably kill them then the court would consider you to have a deadly weapon as well.
If you use an item in a manner that can reliably kill people then you use a deadly weapon even if it wasn't intended to be a deadly weapon. Is a pair of scissors a deadly weapon? Yes. Is a heavy hard blunt object (like a statue) a deadly weapon? Yes.
Well, noted I guess. I probably dismissed the idea in the wrong way then. Next time I'll just say "'deadly weapon' is a very low bar and doesn't mean much".
It's not productive to argue about definitions, even if they don't make sense to me. My intent wasn't a semantics argument.
The requirement is that you be in fear for your life or the life of another in your vicinity. Let's say you grabbed a Bic pen, and went for someone's neck with it: in this situation the courts would favor the persons right to self defense given the credible threat to their life. The same counts for something that is a risk to incapacitate them, because courts have historically favored the argument that what happens after you are disarmed or incapacitated could result in death.
I'm not saying it's right, I'm just offering my observations of precedent.
We don't have to argue about it, you can look at the Wisconsin law for it.
> “Dangerous weapon" means any firearm, whether loaded or unloaded; any device designed as a weapon and capable of producing death or great bodily harm; any ligature or other instrumentality used on the throat, neck, nose, or mouth of another person to impede, partially or completely, breathing or circulation of blood; any electric weapon, as defined in s. 941.295 (1c) (a); or any other device or instrumentality which, in the manner it is used or intended to be used, is calculated or likely to produce death or great bodily harm.
I would say a skateboard, wielded as a weapon, is likely to produce death or great bodily harm. Getting hit in the head with a skateboard even once seems likely to cause a concussion or maybe even internal bleeding.
You probably do have a good number of items that could be classified as deadly weapons on your desk, depending on how they were used.
You must be joking or have not done many things where people swing things at you. 100% of the time in a random “get hit in the head taste test” I would choose a fist.
Aluminum bats don’t weigh much either but I’m not going to go out of my way to have my head in the path of one.
They're about as long medieval maces, with a similarly heavy bit of metal on the end. And when either is held in the hand and swung, they have substantially more leverage than the hand itself. Unless you think he was swinging a skateboard from his armpit?
> And when either is held in the hand and swung, they have substantially more leverage than the hand itself. Unless you think he was swinging a skateboard from his armpit?
A skateboard held in your hand can't use much of the mass of your arm to help, it's mostly impacting with its own weight. Your hand can impact with a lot more weight behind it even though the swing radius won't be as big.
People die if you hit them with in the head with a fist sized rock, that is what is required for something to be a deadly weapon. A metal rimmed skateboard can deal more damage than a rock so it is a deadly weapon.
But if someone charged at you holding a rock ready to swing it high, would you fear for your life? Almost surely, yes, you should fear for your life in that situation.
This isn't about possession but about a confrontation. A person with a rock wont get caught by police and taken to court over owning a weapon. But a person swinging the rock around and charging at people will get charged for attacking people with a deadly weapon. And in this situation the question is "Was it reasonable to fear for your life?", then the second definition is used.
If it's about confrontation, I'd fear for my life if someone came at me hard enough even if they were empty-handed or holding something tiny.
And I'll point out that the original post I responded to was saying that they were armed. To me that implies the object needs to be a weapon in a vacuum.
Yeah, I agree that the person wasn't armed. Armed typically means weapons made to kill like firearms, I just object to the deadly weapons discussion since that is a much more lax term.
But sometimes things get interpreted in ways that really stretch the meanings of words. I think anyone that has looked at legal history can agree with that.
And sometimes legal definitions are dumb, which isn't even a court thing.
Also even if it's correct inside its realm, if enough objects count as deadly weapons then "he had a deadly weapon" loses most of its impact and gets misleading. I'm reminded that technically a bare receiver is a gun...
But as a general rule, if we think about all this in aggregate, we should agree that the literal legal experts are way way more likely to get this stuff correct than you are.
If we were evaluating how valuable someone's opinion is on all this stuff, your opinion would be way down the list, compared to legal experts.
And if we compared a random ununiformed opinion, such as from you, and compared it to the opinions of the legal system, it is way more likely that you don't really know how any of this works, as opposed to the actual legal experts.
I think you’re being hung up on the literal meaning of the words a little bit. It seems reasonable to have more severe consequences for someone attacking someone else with a rock compared to somebody just using their fists. We decided to call the former “assault with a deadly weapon”. This doesn’t mean that a rock is a “deadly weapon” under all circumstances. You can’t get charged with “possession of a deadly weapon” for simply walking around with a rock without intent of hurting anyone.
A skateboard, when used as a weapon, is a deadly weapon.
weapon, n: a thing designed or used for inflicting bodily harm or physical damage.
Does a skateboard have other innocent purposes, to which it is generally put to use? Of course — that’s generally why skateboards are brought to riots.
It provides plausible deniability during the times when you’re not using it to hit people in the head with a deadly weapon.
If we go with that definition, and nothing else, then imagine "one of them threw an ice cube at someone, so he was armed". It's a thing used to inflict bodily harm in that context, but calling it "a weapon" seems crazy to me.
If you have large enough ice cube — or any other object — that is capable of inflicting serious bodily harm, and you use it to physically attack someone, you’ve committed assault with a deadly weapon.
Why is this crazy to you? This is why someone can be charged for assault with a deadly weapon while trying to run someone over with their car.
Do you think that’s crazy just because cars are usually meant to be used for driving?
I'm talking about normal ice cubes. They can inflict bodily harm. With 'serious', does that mean you're suggesting a different definition from the one you quoted?
> This is why someone can be charged for assault with a deadly weapon while trying to run someone over with their car.
A car is at least in a medium category where it's not a generally safe object.
Remember that my original objection was saying someone was "armed". If we used the definition you gave to figure that out, I think almost everyone is armed. Or they transform from unarmed to armed when they smack someone??
> I'm talking about normal ice cubes. They can inflict bodily harm.
If you used it as a weapon, it's a weapon. There aren't generally enhanced criminal charges for non-deadly weapons, however — that's usually just charged as assault.
> With 'serious', does that mean you're suggesting a different definition from the one you quoted?
No, I'm tying this question back to the actual law.
> Remember that my original objection was saying someone was "armed". If we used the definition you gave to figure that out, I think almost everyone is armed.
You're treating the law like it's some sort of extremely idiotic expert system that implodes anytime someone grabs their child's baseball bat with the intent of murdering someone — or actually does so.
Google "mens rea". You're not going to beat a charge with the argument of "It was a little league baseball bat!".
If this still isn't clear, maybe it'd help to see how Colorado defines a "deadly weapon":
> (I) A firearm, whether loaded or unloaded; or (II) A knife, bludgeon, or any other weapon, device, instrument, material, or substance, whether animate or inanimate, that, in the manner it is used or intended to be used, is capable of producing death or serious bodily injury.
If you can figure out how to use your ice cube as a deadly weapon, then congratulations, at the moment you picked up an ice cube with the intent to use it as a deadly weapon, you armed yourself with a deadly weapon.
> Or they transform from unarmed to armed when they smack someone??
They transform from unarmed to armed when they arm themselves with an object they intend to use as a weapon.
You know you could just google this stuff, right? This is very simple, well-established law.
> They transform from unarmed to armed when they arm themselves with an object they intend to use as a weapon.
That makes sense if they intended to use it as a weapon.
What if they didn't?
> This is very simple, well-established law.
Mens rea makes sense for certain crimes.
I would not say someone is 'armed' or 'not armed' based on intent.
> Google "mens rea". You're not going to beat a charge with the argument of "It was a little league baseball bat!".
> (II) A knife, bludgeon, or any other weapon, device, instrument, material, or substance, whether animate or inanimate, that, in the manner it is used or intended to be used, is capable of producing death or serious bodily injury.
A baseball bat at least is pretty dangerous when used as intended. So is a car. A skateboard isn't, and an ice cube isn't.
> You're treating the law like it's some sort of extremely idiotic expert system that implodes anytime someone grabs their child's baseball bat with the intent of murdering someone — or actually does so.
The legal system wouldn't implode if it was just 'assault'.
> A baseball bat at least is pretty dangerous when used as intended. So is a car. A skateboard isn't, and an ice cube isn't.
If you claim to not see the similarity between a skateboard and a baseball bat in terms of the potential for serious bodily harm, you're either lying to us to keep this tepid, boring argument on life-support, or just lying to yourself.
> The legal system wouldn't implode if it was just 'assault'.
You don't think assault with a deadly weapon is a more serious crime than simple assault?
So you'd charge and punish a shove identically to hitting someone with a skateboard?
> If you claim to not see the similarity between a skateboard and a baseball bat in terms of the potential for serious bodily harm, you're either lying to us to keep this tepid, boring argument on life-support, or just lying to yourself.
It says "intended to be used" right there in the law.
> So you'd charge and punish a shove identically to hitting someone with a skateboard?
Would you charge a shove exactly the same as stomping on someone's face?
Same crime category doesn't mean same punishment. I would charge a big skateboard swing as worse than a shove, and I would also charge a solid punch as worse than a shove.
You're extrapolating from my posts in an extremely uncharitable way.
> It says "intended to be used" right there in the law.
It also says "in the manner it is used or intended to be used".
> Would you charge a shove exactly the same as stomping on someone's face?
In Colorado, a simple shove would be third-degree assault, while stomping on someone's face would be first-degree assault.
> Same crime category doesn't mean same punishment. I would charge a big skateboard swing as worse than a shove, and I would also charge a solid punch as worse than a shove.
Guess what? Both a fist and a skateboard can be classified as assault with a deadly weapon!
> You're extrapolating from my posts in an extremely uncharitable way.
You don't need a law degree to wrap your head around any of this. Even the most basic googling would suffice, but you're clearly not even doing that. What you are doing is ignorantly pontificating about something you clearly know nothing about, while making not even a modicum effort to learn.
> Cool, then saying someone was 'armed' is extremely meaningless.
‘Armed’ means they were carrying a weapon. That’s not meaningless. How have we come full circle here?
You’re welcome to disagree with the dictionary, the law, and the rest of the world, but there’s absolutely zero point in us debating your unique, novel, pedantic, and most likely disingenuous position further.
If fists count as a deadly weapon, which makes someone armed, then calling someone armed is misleading and meaningless because 99% of people are armed.
Pointing that out is not disingenuous!
And it's not disingenuous for me to earnestly use the definition of weapon I'm being told to use, right? Nobody seems to like my definition of weapon.
The target audience for the "MSM is evil and brainwashing you" line also is fooled because they do not read more than headlines, based on the dialogue right here.
The NYT still provides quality reporting. But most of their readers stop after the sensational first couple paragraphs and never make it to paragraph 23 where they actually say what really happened.
It’s a clever example of what Mark Rosewater calls lenticular design. The low information crowd gets their emotional fix from the headlines and early text and quits there while the Times’ more thoughtful readers get the full picture. Given the paper’s financial success in the Internet age I think we can say they’ve found a good business model.
This is weird to me, 'challenge to disprove self defense' - since the accused was retreating towards law enforcement, and in general you have a duty to retreat if possible, I don't quite get the leap necessary that the pistol wielder was scared for their life. I can, however, believe that post-incident introspection would color the encounter this way, to the person with the pistol.
If there's an active shooter the general thing to do is hide, not go after anyone that is carrying a weapon.
I don't think there's a snowball's chance that any verdict will be accepted as is, though. I know most of my acquaintances have already made up their minds, trial outcome be damned.
It may be weird to you, but that's the law in Wisconsin and, as I understand it, every state other than Virginia[1]. The defendant gets the presumption that he acted in self-defense and the prosecution has to prove otherwise.
I've more or less read that fact on NYT though.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/08/us/kyle-rittenhouse-gaige...
> “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.