I mean are we just ignoring the robbery, the assault, the grabbing the gun, etc, etc? You guys seem to be engaging in the sort of "truthiness" that conservatives are so often mocked for; you built a narrative about what happened and you're just ignoring or rejecting any sort of evidence (i.e. most of it) that goes against it.
Is this modern liberalism? Proclaiming violent thuggish criminals to be martyrs and his assaulted victim to be a cold-blooded bigoted murder? If so, as it sadly seems, Rawls was wrong about liberalism, dead wrong. As I said:
I am a person who sees no reason to believe that a literal and indisputable robber and assaulter, perhaps even a committer of hate crimes (he said some nasty things to the South Asian shopkeeper, if I recall correctly), was somehow the innocent victim of a bloodthirsty bigot who just happened to coincidentally be in the area as the aforementioned assailant and robber was fleeing the scene.
Somehow the rest of you are privy to a completely different series of facts, apparently.
Let's go back to this. I've never actually seen a realistic accounting of the initial confrontation between Brown and Wilson. Wilson says he told Brown and Johnson to get off the street, "words were exchanged," he tried to block them with his car, Brown assaulted him, dove into the car, tried to get his gun, etc.
Do we view this as entirely realistic? Or do we totally take it at face value? When Wilson says "words were exchanged," is it not reasonable to believe that those words may have been something like, "You two a**holes better get the f**k out of the road"? Is it not reasonable to believe that when Wilson says he tried to block them with his car, that he may have slammed open his door into Brown, who pushed back at it?
I'm not saying that's how things happened, but that's exactly the kind of thing that an adversarial process would investigate and draw out. But instead we're only left with Wilson's neutered account of the "demon" charging at him like a bull.
