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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28299 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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Because they sympathize with murderers far more than the murdered.

Remember, these are the same people who thought rittenhouse should have let himself be beaten and shot rather than have the gall to defend himself, all because he decided that rioting and looting were wrong

Are they, though?

Rittenhouse haters insisted he was a murderer, and that didn’t earn him any sympathy.

The "crime is good" crowd makes an exception for self-defense, which is only valid when used against cops.

There is no “crime is good” crowd. There’s a “crime is better than this” crowd, which is disgusted with the state of policing.

Said group assumed Rittenhouse was a provocateur looking to play cop. They probably also assume the state cuts corners and commits injustices in cases like this one. Neither of these is an endorsement of crime.

I remain unconvinced that morally or practically the distinction matters, though in tone-policing forums such as this it may be worth distinguishing.

There is no “crime is good” crowd.

Criminals are a "crime is good" crowd, including Seth Rogan and Chesea Boudin's entire extended family.

There’s a “crime is better than this” crowd, which is disgusted with the state of policing.

I do have a hard time accepting the positions of people who are thoroughly insulated from the consequences of their beliefs or immune to the logical conclusions of their beliefs.

I believe it's Chesa Boudin.

Friend/enemy distinction

and my guess is that Rittenhouse hatred would correlate strongly with belief that this guy was innocent.

The comment would make more sense if you interpret it as "they sympathize with actual murderers" rather than "they sympathize with people they believe to be murderers". That is to say, there appears to be a significant population whose assessment of murder and indeed of justice generally is nearly perfectly inverted from what one might, optimistically, describe as "actual reality".

I think you’re applying too much charity to a sneer at the outgroup.

It's possible, and the naked phrase alone is certainly low-effort. On the other hand, I think there's a point there that deserves more than you're given it. If the problem is how that point is expressed, fair enough, it should be expressed better. But if "better" is undefined, then it becomes a fully general counter-argument. Hence why I'm replying, trying to tack away from arguments over the phrasing, and toward what appears to be the underlying issue.

I think that if we go to reddit, we can find an arbitrarily-large number of people who believe that Rittenhouse is clearly a murderer, and that this guy is clearly innocent. These people will be disproportionately likely to care about Rittenhouse's "victims", and they will be disproportionately likely to know little, and to have little interest in learning, about this man's victim, or indeed his previous, non-murder victims. Further, I think these same peoples' views on a lot of other questions of justice will strongly correlate: they will reliably treat people provably guilty of multiple violent felonies as though they are entirely innocent, and they will treat people provably innocent of any crime at all as though they are crazed murderers. Likewise, they will consider moderately questionable uses of lethal force by the authorities as clear murder, and entirely unjustifiable uses of lethal force by the authorities as obviously good and correct, based entirely on tribal logic.

If I'm correct about the existence and general views of the above cohort, "they sympathize with murderers far more than the murdered" seems like a reasonable encapsulation of the problem. Further, if I'm correct, it seems to me that this is a pretty important problem that certainly bears discussion, because it would seem to imply that our justice system isn't going to get better, and in fact is going to get worse, with consequences that flow through to a whole lot of other flashpoints in the culture war.

I think this is mostly a result of sanitized coverage of the murders themselves. They simply don’t deal with the particular crime as brutal, in fact it’s usually pretty common to downplay those details in public. If the public saw the crime scene full of blood, gore, splatters of brain etc. they’d be in favor. Instead the victim was shot (passive voice), and didn’t suffer, and the scene was not that bad.

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