In fact since WWII we’ve been aware that only a small percentage of us can get past our killing bad instincts to shoot at other infantry in combat. We humans are really against killing each other.
But we’re totally fine when the choices we make kill people offstage, or someone is willing to do the killing for us. Based on a 2015 tally, law enforcement kill four people a day – most of those not resisting and not armed – and the number has gone up with each year. And those are the ones that NGOs track via news, obits and coroner reports. Then we have precinct coroners who will fudge so that a police bullet was not a cause of death, erasing one. We estimate up to 75% of the incidents are not detected or reported, similar to unreported sexual assault cases.
And then there’s elite deviance. It used to be called white collar crime but when Brian Thompson was doing it, it wasn’t actually criminal, but perfectly legal according to the state. (He may have committed some crimes, but the ED included far more than that.)
Elite Deviance, when our ownership class engages in revenue-enhancing shenanigans such as private equity finance, kills more people, causes more destruction and costs more than all the petty crimes combined by multiple orders of magnitude.
That is to say, if we actually prosecuted our industrialists and capitalists, and (hypothetically) completely ignored every mugger, every serial killer, every shoplifter, and heck every corrupt police officer, we would still be saving lives by far. We might also reduce crimes of desperation, given precarity or scarcity informs most petty crime anyway.
But the society we live in does not grant personhood to everyone, and in fact most of us are beneath the interests of the owners and their corporate machines. And then there’s the more obvious unpersoning, such as women with complex pregnancies, trans kids, non-whites and immigrants, or families of immigrants.
So it’s not so much about whether killing is icky, but the narrow scope of specific cases in which killing is icky, because our society already tolerates an awful lot of it when we don’t have to watch a specific incident unfold.
When given due process of law, convicted by a jury of peers, and when it becomes obvious there really is no other way. That’s justice. One guy with a gun is just a murderer.
Unironically, though. When you’re killing “The Terrorists” or “The Drug Dealers” or “The Evil Foreigners” or whatever, murder is incredibly cool and good.
Slap a “Generic Bad Guy” label on a human and you’re free to go full Rambo, because killing Bad Guys is awesome. We love it. Especially when the Bad Guy doesn’t look like us.
The folks screaming the loudest about a guy in a North Face fleece getting got are the same ones who couldn’t be picked out of a lineup with Brian Thompson’s pre-ventilated flesh suit. The folks clapping the loudest over bombs dropped on the perfidious cartels or the insidious Hezbolmas or the vile Asian Menace Of the East also have interchangeable LinkedIn profiles with the ex-CEO of UHC.
Which is precisely why vigilante justice is so dangerous. Do I need to be worried because I said something that some asshat with a gun who was having a really bad day misinterpreted as transphobic, or in case I happen to look like somebody who raped somebody else’s sister?
You raise a point that is not only valid but really rather pertinent in the US in 2024, that yes, it’s super easy to paint groups as generic enemy, at which point it’s acceptable to do anything to them.
Demonizing Arabs and Muslims became conspicuous in the aughts after the 9/11 attacks. The US was soon in Afghanistan (still with memories of where empires go to die since USSR was there a decade earlier) and the US was back in Iraq due to Weapons of Mass Destruction (e.g. nukes) that never materialized. Hate crimes surged against both Arab and Muslim communities (with the assumption that all of one category was in the other)
Then Abu Ghraib scandal became public in 2003. We Americans soon found out it wasn’t isolated, rather there’s a whole CIA extrajudicial detention and torture ( enhanced interrogation ) program. Apparently it was okay to torture terrorists. Also we learned we couldn’t rely on local news agencies, since they were too beholden to the White House Press Office. Only foreign news agencies were willing to talk about extraordinary rendition and waterboarding.
(Eventually we’d be able to look up on Wikipedia that torture was obsolete when it came to interrogation of the enemy, as this guy, a WWII Luftwaffe interrogator, showed that being nice works far better. We were torturing Arab Muslims because some rich people wanted to know brown people were suffering for 9/11 even if it wasn’t anyone actually involved, but I digress)
Pretty soon, any media person or activist that challenged the policies of the George W. Bush administration (including torture and the use of PMCs to massacre villages) was called a terrorist, and dismissed by the rapidly growing conservative media establishment.
In the 2020s, as the United States is being taken over by a literal dangerous cult (the white Christian nationalist movement centering around Donald J. Trump) talk of demons, of possession and exorcisms and ways to justify calling other people demons or associated with Satan is rising.
And the cool thing about Satan, if you’re a Christian fanatic, is you can do anything you want to Him because he’s the enemy by fiat.
So literally demonizing folk (accusing them of being demons, being possessed by demons or in league with demons) is the first step before deciding they need shooting or lynching or packed into detention centers.
/🤓 (Sorry about the rant. I’ve been specifically studying this stuff since Waco)
In the 2020s, as the United States is being taken over by a literal dangerous cult (the white Christian nationalist movement centering around Donald J. Trump)
I mean, I’d go so far as to argue the US has always been a government of, by, and for religious extremists of one strip or another. Occasionally, those extremists break in a favorable way (abolitionism, environmentalism, anti-war movements). But by and large, its been the 30 Years War for nearly 250 years around here.
Trump is the latest incarnation of Christian Radicalism. But you can find guys just like Trump echoing through every banana republic governorship and tin-pot mayoralty going back to the Mayflower landing. The flip side of the coin is just Obama’s Moderate Rebels - the Black Baptists and Unitarians and Reform Jews and Liberal Catholics - who think Trumpism on paper is fine (immigrants bad, LGBTQ weird, education not sufficiently privatized, young people music makes me angry, brown foreigners are an existential threat), he just took things too far / executed them too sloppily.
This all stems from the font of infinite money - the big banks and the federal treasury - ultimately resting in the hands of religious leadership. Big Protestant/Catholic run banks like Blackrock and JP Morgan and Bank of America earmark billions toward their religious institutions and bankroll a host of sectarian social services to create a patronage network of millions.
Meanwhile, actual elected officials are all products of their religious communities. Mitt Romney is literally a Mormon Bishop, Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley and Ron DeSantis are inducted members into Opus Dei, big chunks of the House are ranking members in their local Christian mystery cults, even the “good ones” like Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib are ultimately just proxies for their local mosques.
“Murder is only bad because other people think it’s icky” --you
Oh, I think it’s icky too.
In fact since WWII we’ve been aware that only a small percentage of us can get past our killing bad instincts to shoot at other infantry in combat. We humans are really against killing each other.
But we’re totally fine when the choices we make kill people offstage, or someone is willing to do the killing for us. Based on a 2015 tally, law enforcement kill four people a day – most of those not resisting and not armed – and the number has gone up with each year. And those are the ones that NGOs track via news, obits and coroner reports. Then we have precinct coroners who will fudge so that a police bullet was not a cause of death, erasing one. We estimate up to 75% of the incidents are not detected or reported, similar to unreported sexual assault cases.
And then there’s elite deviance. It used to be called white collar crime but when Brian Thompson was doing it, it wasn’t actually criminal, but perfectly legal according to the state. (He may have committed some crimes, but the ED included far more than that.)
Elite Deviance, when our ownership class engages in revenue-enhancing shenanigans such as private equity finance, kills more people, causes more destruction and costs more than all the petty crimes combined by multiple orders of magnitude.
That is to say, if we actually prosecuted our industrialists and capitalists, and (hypothetically) completely ignored every mugger, every serial killer, every shoplifter, and heck every corrupt police officer, we would still be saving lives by far. We might also reduce crimes of desperation, given precarity or scarcity informs most petty crime anyway.
But the society we live in does not grant personhood to everyone, and in fact most of us are beneath the interests of the owners and their corporate machines. And then there’s the more obvious unpersoning, such as women with complex pregnancies, trans kids, non-whites and immigrants, or families of immigrants.
So it’s not so much about whether killing is icky, but the narrow scope of specific cases in which killing is icky, because our society already tolerates an awful lot of it when we don’t have to watch a specific incident unfold.
“Depending on how you define mruder, there are hundreds of murders happening every day. What’s one more? gunshot” --you
You seem eager to jump to conclusions while putting no thought into them. Why don’t you share your moral philosophy opinion with the class?
When, in your opinion, is it right and proper for someone to kill someone else?
When given due process of law, convicted by a jury of peers, and when it becomes obvious there really is no other way. That’s justice. One guy with a gun is just a murderer.
deleted by creator
Unironically, though. When you’re killing “The Terrorists” or “The Drug Dealers” or “The Evil Foreigners” or whatever, murder is incredibly cool and good.
Slap a “Generic Bad Guy” label on a human and you’re free to go full Rambo, because killing Bad Guys is awesome. We love it. Especially when the Bad Guy doesn’t look like us.
The folks screaming the loudest about a guy in a North Face fleece getting got are the same ones who couldn’t be picked out of a lineup with Brian Thompson’s pre-ventilated flesh suit. The folks clapping the loudest over bombs dropped on the perfidious cartels or the insidious Hezbolmas or the vile Asian Menace Of the East also have interchangeable LinkedIn profiles with the ex-CEO of UHC.
It’s Identity Politics all the way down.
Which is precisely why vigilante justice is so dangerous. Do I need to be worried because I said something that some asshat with a gun who was having a really bad day misinterpreted as transphobic, or in case I happen to look like somebody who raped somebody else’s sister?
🤓:
You raise a point that is not only valid but really rather pertinent in the US in 2024, that yes, it’s super easy to paint groups as generic enemy, at which point it’s acceptable to do anything to them.
Demonizing Arabs and Muslims became conspicuous in the aughts after the 9/11 attacks. The US was soon in Afghanistan (still with memories of where empires go to die since USSR was there a decade earlier) and the US was back in Iraq due to Weapons of Mass Destruction (e.g. nukes) that never materialized. Hate crimes surged against both Arab and Muslim communities (with the assumption that all of one category was in the other)
Then Abu Ghraib scandal became public in 2003. We Americans soon found out it wasn’t isolated, rather there’s a whole CIA extrajudicial detention and torture ( enhanced interrogation ) program. Apparently it was okay to torture terrorists. Also we learned we couldn’t rely on local news agencies, since they were too beholden to the White House Press Office. Only foreign news agencies were willing to talk about extraordinary rendition and waterboarding.
(Eventually we’d be able to look up on Wikipedia that torture was obsolete when it came to interrogation of the enemy, as this guy, a WWII Luftwaffe interrogator, showed that being nice works far better. We were torturing Arab Muslims because some rich people wanted to know brown people were suffering for 9/11 even if it wasn’t anyone actually involved, but I digress)
Pretty soon, any media person or activist that challenged the policies of the George W. Bush administration (including torture and the use of PMCs to massacre villages) was called a terrorist, and dismissed by the rapidly growing conservative media establishment.
In the 2020s, as the United States is being taken over by a literal dangerous cult (the white Christian nationalist movement centering around Donald J. Trump) talk of demons, of possession and exorcisms and ways to justify calling other people demons or associated with Satan is rising.
And the cool thing about Satan, if you’re a Christian fanatic, is you can do anything you want to Him because he’s the enemy by fiat.
So literally demonizing folk (accusing them of being demons, being possessed by demons or in league with demons) is the first step before deciding they need shooting or lynching or packed into detention centers.
/🤓 (Sorry about the rant. I’ve been specifically studying this stuff since Waco)
I mean, I’d go so far as to argue the US has always been a government of, by, and for religious extremists of one strip or another. Occasionally, those extremists break in a favorable way (abolitionism, environmentalism, anti-war movements). But by and large, its been the 30 Years War for nearly 250 years around here.
Trump is the latest incarnation of Christian Radicalism. But you can find guys just like Trump echoing through every banana republic governorship and tin-pot mayoralty going back to the Mayflower landing. The flip side of the coin is just Obama’s Moderate Rebels - the Black Baptists and Unitarians and Reform Jews and Liberal Catholics - who think Trumpism on paper is fine (immigrants bad, LGBTQ weird, education not sufficiently privatized, young people music makes me angry, brown foreigners are an existential threat), he just took things too far / executed them too sloppily.
This all stems from the font of infinite money - the big banks and the federal treasury - ultimately resting in the hands of religious leadership. Big Protestant/Catholic run banks like Blackrock and JP Morgan and Bank of America earmark billions toward their religious institutions and bankroll a host of sectarian social services to create a patronage network of millions.
Meanwhile, actual elected officials are all products of their religious communities. Mitt Romney is literally a Mormon Bishop, Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley and Ron DeSantis are inducted members into Opus Dei, big chunks of the House are ranking members in their local Christian mystery cults, even the “good ones” like Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib are ultimately just proxies for their local mosques.