Woozle/2021/11/13/1

Note

This is cross-posted from Nextdoor.

Post

subject: a definitive example of "crocodile tears"

2021-11-13 Kyle Rittenhouse isn’t crying for those he hurt. His tears, tellingly, are for himself.

...vulnerability and common conceptions of manhood, especially among conservatives, have not traditionally been bedfellows.

[..]

And yet conservative white men’s emotions are increasingly coming to the forefront of political life, and they seem to animate much of the Trumpist right. In practice, such men express their emotions all the time. They express them at Trump rallies, when they jeer at the mention of perceived enemies and cheer for lines of chauvinism and anger. They express their feelings when they picket abortion clinics, screaming at women walking inside and threatening the staff. They express their feelings when they fly Confederate and “Blue Lives Matter” flags; they express their feelings when they vote, and when they pick petulant fights with the service workers who ask them to wear their masks inside stores and restaurants. The common thread in these rightwing expressions of masculine emotion is that when conservative men express their feelings, they don’t do so as a gesture of humility or need. Instead, they wield their feelings as a threat.

...but when women show the slightest sign of feelings, of caring about something, we're described as being "too emotional" and therefore not to be taken seriously.

Funny how that works.

...actually, it's kind of not funny; it's really just another illustration of the key philosophical difference between Left and Right:

• LEFT: dialogue is for sharing information towards a mutual search for the most likely truth, premised on an understanding that we may be wrong and that beliefs must be consistent with the best available evidence
• RIGHT: dialogue is a form of combat where we try to bludgeon the enemy into submission via whatever arguments support our views, and loyally defend our own positions against any evidence that throws them into question

The question of his legal guilt or innocence hangs on whether he *felt* endangered at the time of the shootings – a subjective experience that, conveniently, only Rittenhouse himself can speak to.

I still want to know how the [censored] he could have thought he had any justification for going into a volatile situation and shooting people.