Midrange Weekly Nov 22

Your Weekly Round Up On What’s Got The Midrange Staff’s Attention

Hello friends and welcome back to Midrange Weekly. For those of us in BC and especially the Frasier Valley, what a hell of a week it’s been. As torrential rain and flooding have bisected much of Abbotsford and Chilliwack we are once again faced with the bewildering and immediate consequences of climate change. Just as we had to learn what a heat dome was in the summer, now we must assimilate terminology like atmospheric river into our acumen. What? It’s starting to seem like we are alternating between the heat death of the universe and something analogous to Noah’s Flood with increasingly regularity. Meanwhile the housing market somehow skyrockets with inflation and people wonder why millennials aren’t having kids. So looks like we are all doing pretty well for ourselves. If this all seems egregiously grim, the English Bay Barge Twitter is at least pretty funny, so that’s something? Let’s get to it.

 

Some Thoughts On The Rittenhouse Verdict

There’s been a rhythmic, almost lyrical variation of the same general phrases being uttered throughout the various corners of the internet. Things like “Not surprised, just disappointed”, or “Outraged, but not shocked”. Once the vividly raw and prodigious miscarriages of justice can be responded to with mostly pre rendered bouts of poetic symmetry, you know we’ve gone through this dance before. Kyle Rittenhouse is not the first white male to receive a damn near obsequiously biased favour by our criminal justice system while black people suffer its draconian excesses and over reactions. He won’t be the last either. We have seen over and over again anecdotal examples of minorities facing the most severe of punishments for the most benign of legal trespasses while a neophyte white supremacist is exonerated because of some truly questionable on the stand crying. More importantly we are seeing the legal repercussions of the noxious alchemy of open carry laws and stand your ground laws in certain states. Unless these are the intended outcomes.

We’ve moved past cries for reformation, even past saying the system is so fundamentally broken that it is beyond saving; irredeemable. In the broader ontological sense of what America is we’ve all mostly come to understand the truth in one shape or another. The system is not broken; it is working exactly as designed. The ambient, but no less immutable, propagation of white supremacist and fundamentalism for one part of the population, and for the other, mass incarceration as a supplication of traditional enslavement as a means of oppression to supress social and economic mobility. The byzantine rules morph and evolve to curate mitigating circumstance in all cases, just as the media will portray a white child with a documented propensity to violence as someone misunderstood but meant well, whereas even black victims are eulogized with the archetypal derision, “Well he was no angel”. Also if you think I’m jumping to conclusions on pre-textual factors, here’s this. 

No one needs me- yet another white person- to interrogate the schematic malignancy encoded into America and Canada’s criminal justice system. The broader observational discourse has been pretty thoroughly exhumed by just about every relevant publication out there. Everyone’s opinions are more or less hardcoded at this point, like an ossified shell shaped by their overt ideological leanings. Liberals decry this is a ridiculous acquittal of a person that killed two people that really, truly did not have to die. Conservatives, at least the ones that are attempting some kind of good faith analysis, argue that self-defence is self-defence regardless of whether or not the person who exercises it is clearly a piece of shit loser kid. No one is really able to consider the merits of either side such as they are, not while the enmity between our sectarian political factions is so palpable and salient. Meanwhile professional troll Ann Coulter is posting shit like this, so I of course digress on the point of good faith arguments from certain sides of the political spectrum. That being said, there’s a few granular points that I think are worth highlighting, if for some reason your blood isn’t boiling enough.

 

The Mock Jury

If Rittenhouse’s dramatic and superlative crying on the stand seemed suspiciously performative, that’s because he had already gone through rehearsals. Documentation reveals that the Rittenhouse defense team staged multiple mock trials with mock juries to test the response both to him taking the stand or electing not to. In their practice runs they found the mock jury that observed the boy on the stand much more receptive and malleable to the defenses arguments. The team put him on the stand knowing it was at least theoretically a smart tactic. Any defense or prosecutorial expedition is well within their right to observe and implement whatever strategy they see fit, but none of this is free. Fake trials, actors to play fake jurors, all of this costs money. Rittenhouse’s indictment became a lightening rod for fundraising, taking the form of a particularly cynical marketing ploy. How many black defendants, or poor ones, in similar legal jeopardy are able to build a war chest through fox news evangelizing on their behalf to juice their defence prospects? This is what people mean when they say two systems exist. One with a menu of accommodations and amenities, and another that functions as nothing more than a pipeline to incarceration.

 

Clashing Narratives

Many on the right want to celebrate and elevate Rittenhouse as a heroic saviour, or altruistic defender of others property; ready to make the hard choices with sturdiness and alacrity. This is admittedly a tough narrative to affix to the child considering he looks like Humpty Dumpty’s somehow more lame cousin or something. Such an assertion is also a dead end from a jurisprudence perspective. Rittenhouse’s defence team went to considerable lengths, and were evidently successful, to convince the jury that he was scared, in over his head, and had no choice but to fire on the protesters that he killed. Such insights are pretty incongruous with this notion of him being a wandering bad ass, ably dispatching some pioneering kind of vigilante justice that conservatives fetishize so much. You don’t get it both ways- it’s either the legal narrative that saved the pubescent little twerp, or he’s the hardened vanguard of of conservative heroism, in which case ya he’s a murderer.

 

How Does This Fit Into 2nd Amendment Arguments?

Advocates of the 2nd Amendment, namely the NRA sycophants have broadly celebrated Rittenhouse’s acquittal as a huge win for their agenda. It’s easy to understand why. By setting legally excused precedents for Rittenhouse’s actions, it normalizes the idea of strolling into a protest with an AR-15 and pretending you are The Punisher. This is a precipitously efficient way to erode the 5th amendment (the right to assembly/protest) and generally sink the world further into the nadir of unnecessary gun violence, but it would be certainly be a profitable one for their ilk. The problem once again comes to ham-fisted narratives. If Rittenhouse was acquitted on the bases of self-defence in a situation that got out of hand by parties pointing guns at each other during a protest, does his responses seem emblematic of proficient gun ownership? He obtained the AR-15 illegally, traveled over state lines with it stored in a bag while loaded, which is unbelievably stupid, and was generally ill prepared because of course he was: he was 17 at the time. Do they really want their propagandistic exemplar of gun proliferation to be a child? It’s not exactly a demographic that generally has a lot of free money to spend. How could they possibly suggest that children with stull incubating hormonal developments and remedial cognitive faculties should be armed? Unless this is some kind of narcotic-esque ‘get em while they are young’ kind of campaign, which seems sufficiently evil for them I suppose. 

 

Acquittal On All Charges?

If one wants to dissolve the debate around his actions in Kenosha into an abstract morass where one can’t quite decide where aggression ends and self-defence starts, that’s fine. But where is the confusion or competing arguments on carrying an unlicensed firearm over state lines? Is there any debate that that didn’t happen with intent? How on earth was he found not guilty on that count, which carries a sentence of something like 5 years? I don’t have any kind of rhetorical point here, I’m just stunned. 

 

I Don’t Care What The Protesters Were Doing And Neither Should You

This is the rankest of infantile whataboutism at play here when defenders of Rittenhouse try to redirect blame to the protesters. Insistences that they were damaging property, or that one of them had a history of mental instability and was behaving erratically are uttered as if that is somehow absolving or mitigates Rittenhouse’s culpability. If any of them allegedly broke the law or did anything dangerous, then they deserved to be arrested and get a fair trial just like Rittenhouse got. The notion that their actions warranted a response along the lines of being summarily executed is a garbage position. Even the notion that they were directly threatening him seems fairly incredulous once you resign to the unavoidable fact that Rittenhouse absolutely didn’t have to be there and shouldn’t have been. 

 

The Biden Angle

He had to know he was going to get asked about this at some point after the verdict, and oh wow did he ever botch it. When questioned about the, let’s say questionable verdict Biden absent mindedly sputtered, “I stand by what the jury said, the jury system works and we have to abide by it”. This is a stark contrast to then candidate Biden who in 2020 was decrying Trump for not doing enough to condemn killings catalyzed by protests against white supremacy and police brutality, both of which are formative tenants in Rittenhouse’s pathology. He sure is singing a different tune now that key demographics have already turned out and voted for him. This is a pretty myopic thing to say from a purely strategic sense, with the midterms a year away and fears of voter entropy and depression abound in the Democratic Party. 

 

Tucker Carlson Is Making A Documentary On This Because Of Course He Is

I’m sorry but this one here is pretty fucking rich. Just a few days ago trial judge and possible cartoon villain Judge Schroeder suspended NBC’s access to the courtroom because he thinks they may have been trailing a bus with the jury. So much for verification. Meanwhile this whole time sentient mop rag Tucker Carlson has had a crew embedded with the Rittenhouse defense team to film a documentary on the entire affair. The hypocrisy of who does and doesn’t get access matters in how media narratives permeate our ecosystems and such blatant bias skews things considerably. Carlson posted a brief snippet of his opus so far. This is what people mean when they say Republicans are not a serious party. 


One More Thing

This pretty much sums things up. Who needs a drink? -Tristan

 

The American Judicial System Just Sucks

Sheesh what a week for the law in the US. Two major cases left to the mercy of politics over justice, with both being settled poorly. The first and definitely the more high profile was the Kyle Rittenhouse case. His “claim” of self defence is total horse shit. He chose to be there, with guns. He knew exactly what he was doing. Needless to say, he was acquitted because he’s white. It’s that simple. I could say more, but I believe my colleague Tristan has given ample time on this subject for the both of us. 

The second case up for decision this week was that of Julius Jones, a man convicted of murder over 20 years ago in Oklahoma. He was to be executed on Thursday evening only to be granted clemency by the state Governor, Kevin Stitt mere hours before his slated execution. Governor Stitt chose to commute his sentence to life without parole, quite the opposite of what his attorney’s have been fighting for all these years, as they’ve maintained his innocence the entire time. Whether he is or not, both these cases highlight the fragility of the courts as they showcase the flawed rhetoric that justice is indeed “not blind” but at the mercy of the eyes and ears of whom she presides for. 

A few statistics of note.

From The High Court:

Erroneous convictions are among the worst cases in which the social contract between the state and citizens is broken. As a result, an innocent person is sent to serve time for something they didn’t do.

Wrongful convictions statistics show that the main reasons many end up behind bars are misidentification, official misconduct, false testimony, perjury, false accusation, and false confession.

  • Between 2% and 10% of convicted individuals in US prisons are innocent.

  • 2,666 people have been exonerated in the US since 1989.

  • Proven innocent people have served more than 23,950 years in prison so far.

  • Out of 100 sentenced to death, 4 are likely innocent, but only 2 get exonerated.

  • 69% of wrongful conviction cases happen due to eyewitness misidentification.

  • False confessions account for 29% of wrongful convictions.

  • Official misconduct plays a part in 31% of murder exonerations.

  • False accusations are present in 70% of wrongful convictions.

I rest my case. — Jamie

 

The Genius Of Stephen Curry Resides Not With His Shooting Prowess, But With How He Cuts

I mean, this is really nice. Absurd, actually. 

He’s the greatest shooter ever and it really isn’t even close. He’s about to pass Ray Allen for most 3’s all time and he’s on pace to break his own single season record of 402 3’s in a season. He’s 33. He should not be getting better. But alas, such is the life of someone with his capabilities. 

Athleticism fades as players get older, just ask Blake Griffin. Shooting, however, does not. Michael Jordan knew this. So did Kobe, as does LeBron. It’s why they were and are able to play at such high levels well into their thirties. But for all the merits of what Steph marvels us with each night he lets loose, how he gets there is really what gives him his edge. The man runs and cuts like no other, safe for maybe Reggie Miller of Richard Hamilton. He curls, he screens, he sets pin downs. His ability to dart through the lane, come out underneath and over two screens, receive the ball and then fling a perfect shot is incredible.

This innate drive (or Steve Kerr’s prodding) to constantly move gives him such an edge over his counterparts, specifically Russell Westbrook or James Harden. Most great players hang around when they don’t have the ball. Curry does the opposite and his movement is what creates so much space and opportunity for his teammates, as well as himself. He’s the new Tim Duncan — the guy you most certainly would pick to play with first if this were your YMCA pickup league. I’m in awe of him for his shooting, but I admire him even more for what he brings when he’s on the move. 

Just watch this.  - Jamie

 

Things From The Internet We Liked

 

Jessy Lanza Is A National Treasure

Not nearly enough things are said or written about electronic pop artist and Ontario native Jessy Lanza. Over the last decade or so she has exhumed the mostly defunct chill wave genre, excising it of its arid pretension and imbuing it with wonderful curiosities and just a touch of capriciousness. Her mixture of ambient pleasantries and florid superlatives are all rendered through a casual insouciance that is just undeniably cool. Lanza is the latest in a long line of respected producers to release her iteration of DJ Kicks, a series of DJ sets curated by the artist that include their work as well as other artists, highlighting their own take on what’s interesting in the broader sphere of electronica. Her’s is one of the best of the bunch so we are linking to the whole thing. Check it out and relax or get your freak on; either way works when it comes to her.

 

Kim Quindlen Is The Next Twitter Comic To Keep Your On

What is it about Twitter comedy that’s so addictively fun? Is it the low fi production values, the liberal abuse of superfluous camera cuts, just the general absurdity of it? Probably all of that and more, and Kim Quindeln has it figured out. The Chicago comedian is a natural at cringe and bizarre humour with a wit so dry it makes parody just seem kind of like real life. Check out some of her work below.

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MIDRANGE WEEKLYdavid mcleod ringuetteKyle Rittenhouse, Jessy Lanza, Kim Quindlen, Twitter, Julius Jones, Stephen CurryComment