Comment by culi
5 days ago
> Intent is a key element in criminal culpability.
There are plenty of illegalities based on neglect.
> it shifts from "the system produces unjust outcomes" to "violent personal retaliation is understandable or even laudable"
There's something unsettling to me about how quickly Americans are to explain white collar wrongdoings by talking about "the system" but how slow they are to take that same attitude towards crimes like burglary, murder, etc despite the abundance of scholarship we have arguing for social forces driving those actions.
I'm not against applying the sociological imagination in both instances. I think it's almost always more useful than a narrow personal perspective. I'm just pointing out the obvious inconsistency.
> they are abandoning all respect for democratic and due process
This "democracy" has clearly produced a result where poor people crimes are heavily policed and rich people crimes are heavily underpoliced. All robbery, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft amounts to about $12 billion a year while the total amount lost due to wage theft each year is over $50 billion. Yet one version of this crime is much more heavily policed than the other.
I never called for a "right to kill", I'm calling for fair application of justice. I don't think we individual citizens should have the responsibility of carrying out this justice. Instead I think a properly running representative system would be carrying out the justice. But it's simply not.
Nothing in my original comment was prescriptivist. I'm just describing the state of matters as I see it. And I predict we will continue to see a rise in this sort of vigilante acts of justice until we have a valid alternative to it
Once again:
The reference to white collar crime is an extremely provocative assertion, because it smuggles in a tenuous allegation that Thompson committed white collar crime.
More generally, I said there is a major difference between structural harm, white-collar crime, and deliberately killing someone. Your answer was to fixate only on general claims about inequality, underpolicing, social causes, etc, which insinuates that maybe Brian Thompson deserved to be murdered while maintaining plausible deniability.
Yes, the system is unfair, but in what ways it's unfair is up to debate, unlike whether the child predator in the Jeffrey Doucet case abused a child. You are trying to connect the fact there is injustice in the world to how justifiable it is to deliberately kill someone, by using this analogy.
You can deny that you are endorsing it, but your comment still does the same thing: it takes a personal act of violence and places it inside a moral story that makes it sound less straightforwardly wrong. That is exactly the problem.
Also in no moral universe, do you shoot someone in the head in cold blood because they were negligent, let alone negligent in some abstract way related to structural social forces. That is a blanket justification for all sorts of political violence.
On democracy, you are using disappointment with democratic outcomes to erode respect for democratic process. By your standard, every single political faction would argue against respecting the democratic process.
If your argument amount to saying that white collar crime isn't actually proven beyond a doubt for certain people who are the lead images for organizations that result in millions of people suffering, then you have lost the public's support even if you may win a debate.
The axioms for a majority of people right now are 1. Person X is doing bad things or leading an organization that does bad things 2. The government is refusing to address it and is actively abetting it 3. There is no way to stop this evil from occurring besides extrajudicial murder. The only thing you can suggest without breaking one of those axioms is that we must let evil happen because the alternative is worse, and frankly i'm not sure that argument is a good universal standard.
Which white collar crime did Brian Thompson commit?
As for letting bad things happen, every time the party we don't like wins the election, we let what we personally view as "bad things" happen instead of use violence to overturn the election. That's the whole point of democracy. We show some humility and respect the majority will. We respect the process.
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