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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   20676 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 21, 2025

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It's worth noting that in at least one place (https://old.reddit.com/r/AskALiberal/comments/1jzgmzs/please_explain_karmelo_anthony_support/), the response to this from self-professed liberals has been pretty uniformly, "stabbing people is wrong."

Even there there's a fair bit of listless whataboutism in those responses, even attempting to No True Scotsman the people donating to the GSG and saying it's ze Russians, the Kochs and secret false flag conservatives.

that is worth noting, but it's also worth noting that their fundraiser was allowed to operate, in contrast to those of, for example, Gardner and Rittenhouse. This is a concrete way in which our society observably treats red-tribe lawful self-defense as strictly worse than blue-tribe lawless murder.

It's really not that concrete at all. In the rittenhouse case, rittenhouse claimed to be provoked into acting in self defense (credibly) but his opposition claims (also credibly) that he deliberately created a situation such that that provocation would happen and he would have an excuse to commit violence. In this case, the stabber also claims that he was acting in self-defense (unknown credibleness), but no one (so far) claims that he was looking for an excuse. Plus there's the additional matter of him using a knife, rather than a gun, and killing one person instead of many. The situations at hand are neither symmetric nor complementary.

Personally speaking, I do martial arts, and I would consider pulling a knife on someone who wants to throw hands a reasonable, proportionate act. There are far too many ways to get permanently injured or killed from blunt trauma. I would not consider it reasonable to then attack them with that knife if they backed off-- but maybe the football player saw the knife, assumed there was going to be some stabbing, grabbed for it-- and as a consequence, got Rittenhouse'd. Is that what happened? I don't know. But I'm content to say, "stabbing people is bad" and let the rest sort itself out through the legal system.

(I don't know anything about the gardener case. When I look up "gardener murder" I get a convict who committed a bunch of rapes and murders.)

There's a pretty big difference in the plausible threat between a random guy charging you in the middle of an active riot and/or protest versus 'I have sat down in the wrong team's section of an athletics carnival with a plethora of people around and somebody has laid hands on me whilst trying to move me away'.

Using this logic if say Nikola Jokic got confused during an NBA Playoffs Final game today and sat down on the Clippers Bench, prompting Kawhi Leonard to shove him whilst trying to get him to leave, it would be fine for Jokic to escalate to lethal force and shiv Kawhi in front of America? Your argument tracks if it's a one-on-one unprompted interaction in a dark alleyway with uncapped potential consequences for losing, but is pretty blatantly insane in this circumstance unless you think the local track meet participants were going to form a lynch mob.

The defendant is alleging a history of bullying from the person who got stabbed. I don't know if that's true, but if it is it would substantiate claims of self-defense.

It'd make them substantially weaker in terms of escalating to lethal force.

'Here is the guy who is mean to me occasionally and has not murdered me on previous iterations, TIME TO START SHIVVING' is not a defense.

The situations at hand are neither symmetric nor complementary.

I'm on the record as saying that Rittenhouse shouldn't have been there but his acquittal was correct. That said, c'mon, while no two situations are exactly equivalent, they seem close enough to me. At least close enough that arguing that a fundraiser for Rittenhouse's legal defense was illegitimate while fundraising for Anthony is legitimate sure makes me raise my eyebrows, and I'm not an accelerationist.

Personally speaking, I do martial arts, and I would consider pulling a knife on someone who wants to throw hands a reasonable, proportionate act.

I do martial arts also, and I predict you'd be facing an unsympathetic DA and a very tough jury if you did that. "People can be killed with bare hands!" Yes, but it's very uncommon, and pulling a lethal weapon is an obvious escalation and most courts will see it that way.

Talking about fundraisers is comparable but peripheral. Central to the rittenhouse controversy is a scissors statement about "is it reasonable to walk around with exposed guns." Central to this controversy are facts that are yet undisclosed-- that being, what exactly lead to the stabbing. It's possible that the two cases might start looking more alike, if during witness examination the prosecution makes a credible case that stabber was in some way looking for trouble (regardless of what the stabee what up to), but it also might start looking less alike, if the defense can establish a history of bullying and negative interpersonal interactions between the stabee and stabber. At this point, I think it's too early to tell, and people drawing connections are being pointlessly inflammatory.

I do martial arts also, and I predict you'd be facing an unsympathetic DA and a very tough jury if you did that. "People can be killed with bare hands!" Yes, but it's very uncommon, and pulling a lethal weapon is an obvious escalation and most courts will see it that way.

Of course it's an escalation. But it's very rare that situations begin perfectly even. If I was having a heated argument with a five-nothing woman, by the very nature of my size, sex, and training I have already pre-escalated. If I even unconsciously clenched my fists, her bringing out a knife would be a reasonable response. Neither of us would necessarily want a fight here-- but then events might conspire to put us in conflict. I'd prefer to run, but if my back was against the wall, I might instead make a grab for the knife. Under those circumstances, it would be perfectly reasonable for her to try to stab me. Regardless of which of us comes out the victor, either of us could be plausibly at fault.

Talking about fundraisers is comparable but peripheral.

It's not peripheral to what we're actually talking about here. I really don't care to relitigate the Rittenhouse case. What @FCfromSSC pointed out was that the legal defense fund for Rittenhouse was shut down, whereas the legal defend fund for Karmelo Anthony was not.

No matter how wrong or guilty you think Rittenhouse was, would you not agree that he was entitled to a legal defense? And that people who sympathized with him had the right to donate to it? And that it would be wrong to decide whose legal defense funds people are or are not allowed to donate to?

Regardless of which of us comes out the victor, either of us could be plausibly at fault.

Yes, of course the facts of the case are going to matter a lot, and we can construct hypotheticals where pulling a knife when being threatened by fists would be considered justifiable. But most of the time, it's not.

I am not rushing to judgment on the Karmelo Anthony case, because often some details emerge over time that change what everyone thinks they know, but based on what I've heard so far, if a teenager pulls a knife and stabs another teenager who was threatening, or even shoving him, I would expect him to have a hard time making a convincing case that it was justified.

To be fair, Anthony is fundraising on GiveSendGo, the same place Rittenhouse eventually got shoved to. To be less naive, I'll notice that GiveSendGo has not lost credit card processors for it (nor for the Luigi fandom), nor has a Harvard-backed organization hacked into GSG and doxxed contributors such that any have been fired.

but his opposition claims (also credibly) that he deliberately created a situation such that that provocation would happen and he would have an excuse to commit violence.

Seems to me that the rioters were the ones that "created a situation such that provocation would happen". It's fascinating to me how it always gets ignored by Rittenhouse haters that showing up from out of town to burn a community down is a far more sinister intent than showing up to defend it.

Characterizing them all as "rioters" who wanted to "burn a community down" is a credible, but not unimpeachably true claim. I suppose it maps onto the (again, credible, but not unimpeachably true) argument that the black kid in this case was being bullied, but I think the difference here is that assigning an intent to a group does not assign an intent to the individual people Rittenhouse shot, while at least an in principle a claim about bullying is a claim about a history of negative interactions between particular individuals that let them predict how the other will act.

Personally speaking, I do martial arts, and I would consider pulling a knife on someone who wants to throw hands a reasonable, proportionate act. There are far too many ways to get permanently injured or killed from blunt trauma. I would not consider it reasonable to then attack them with that knife if they backed off-- but maybe the football player saw the knife, assumed there was going to be some stabbing, grabbed for it-- and as a consequence, got Rittenhouse'd. Is that what happened? I don't know. But I'm content to say, "stabbing people is bad" and let the rest sort itself out through the legal system.

What? What martial arts do you do where it's acceptable or proportionate to pull a knife? Kali?

Martial arts are sports and he's obviously not pulling a real life in a sparring match.

He'd talking about pulling a knife in a real fight, one in which you have no guarantee that the attacker will stop kicking once you're unconscious - and in that case pulling a knife or a firearm is obviously completely proportional. The defender has no moral obligation to risk his life to increase the safety of the attacker. If you don't want to get stabbed, don't attack people. Simple as.

It's absolutely shocking to me how effeminate our culture has become, that anyone can consider use of a knife or gun to be proportional self defense to an offer of fisticuffs.

I wouldn't call it effeminate when most women seem to be absolutely averse to carrying a gun/knife, let alone ready to stab a motherfucker.

The statement: he threatened to punch me and I was scared for my life is effeminate.

I suppose "I didn't care to fight this guy and I didn't see anything wrong with killing him if he insisted" wouldn't go over so well with the jury.

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Except when the culture was more masculine they solved the problem by simply allowing the use of both.

...Sorry but what the fuck are you talking about? Your link described a gunfight that turned into a knife fight. No one is mentioned as punching anyone!

Bowie would have never drawn his knife to "protect" himself from a shove.

Bowie would have never drawn his knife to "protect" himself from a shove.

The Bowie knife was a dueling knife intended to settle such disputes, yes. What are you talking about? If you are referring only to a self defense situation, pulling a knife or gun is a reasonable response. You aren't obligated to stop a knife attack only with another knife, nor are you obligated to stop an unarmed attack only with your fists.

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Right, but every country stopped allowing duels because loads of healthy young men died.

I think there's a difference between 'I would pull a knife in order to deter an attacker' which is excessive in the vast majority of interactions but may be the quickest way to defuse something and 'I would actively stab an attacker who's shown no overtures towards violence beyond wanting to remove me from a tent'.

Was Karmelo Anthony under any realistic lethal peril beyond 'yaddayadda he trips whilst being defenestrated from the tent and has a massive coronary heart attack'? Like if this was just 'a bouncer put his hand on a patron who then pulled a knife and then stabbed the bouncer to death' it would be the most open-shut murder case possible. Even trying to defend Karmelo is tiresome. It's essentially impossible to do in good faith.

I think I could beat up the "average" person (inclusive of women, I'm not good enough that I can confidently claim I would beat up the average guy.) But if I got into a heated argument with someone weaker than me, it would be ridiculous to expect them to just concede to my physical prowess. Therefore, I would consider it a proportional act for them to pull a knife on me. Similarly, if I'm in a reversed situation, where I'm facing a black belt or prizefighter in their prime, I would rather pull a knife than let them give me brain damage. In full space of hypotheticals, I think the fight would de-escalate from there the vast majority of the time-- few martial artists are stupid enough to actually fight someone who'd afraid and has a knife, including myself, but I can't strictly exclude the chance of conflict.

I do not know of any place on Earth where a woman or a weaker guy pulling a knife in response to someone bigger "unconsciously clenching their fists" would be seen as anything but an unstable psycho as opposed to "acting proportionally". It is not in fact ridiculous to expect people to prefer being slightly intimidated rather than go for mortal threats.

It would be a context-dependent response, and I'm not convinced that it was the right context in this exact case, even if the defendant's claims of bullying were true. But it's really not that hard to imagine scenarios were even motivationally innocent behavior from a physically threatening individual can be reasonably perceived as a threat.

Human imagination is a wellspring that flows eternal. Can you point to actual cases of knife use against bullies, even non-fatally, where the knife-wielder was considered in the right?

If it was one-on-one in a dark alleyway and prime Mike Tyson is coming at me, I may pull a knife to attempt to de-escalate. But Karmelo Anthony was the one trespassing to begin with, with no real threat of any meaningful physical harm beyond his removal from the premises, and he chose to massively escalate the situation by pulling a knife and then to actually use the knife.

GBRK is saying that based on his martial arts experience, he's aware it would be all too easy to get killed or gravely injured in no-holds-barred hand-to-hand combat. Not that pulling out a knife in a formal martial-arts fight where both fighters follow the rules and no one is going in for a kill would ever be appropriate.

Well what he actually says is he does martial arts and if someone started shit he would consider pulling a knife proportionate. Either he does Kali or he is waiting for the bus on the way to school. Those are the only times anyone should say that and not expect to be ridiculed, because it is ridiculous. Knives are a shit ton more dangerous than any body part or fighting technique. That's their purpose.

FC is presumably referring to Jake Gardner

GiveSendGo hosted Rittenhouse's fundraiser; it was GoFundMe which banned it. They ended the ban after the acquittal, pretending the issue was that they never allowed money to be raised for defense of alleged violent crime.

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