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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   34374 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 3, 2025

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The desire for justice is often sadistic.

It’s a pretty common societal failure mode.

What do you mean when you say “sadistic”? The textbook definition would be something like “sexual gratification gained from inflicting pain to others”. Do you mean that the desire for justice, which seems to be a human universal (even monkeys seem to desire justice) is often a source of sexual gratification? I doubt that’s what you meant, since that clearly isn’t the case. I suspect that by “sadistic” you meant “evil”, and that you believe desiring justice is usually an evil desire. I would disagree strongly with that. Or perhaps you only meant that people often are pleased when justice is served; yet, why shouldn’t they be?

I've never known sadistic to have a definitionally sexual component. I always understood it to mean taking pleasure from seeing others be harmed, somewhat similar to schadenfreude but more intense.

So what I mean is that the desire for justice often has a component where people want to see the perpetrator be harmed as retribution, sometimes severely.

Like, beheading thousands of people during the French revolution, that was justice steeped in sadism.

Sadism by definition has a sexual component. People use is a bit broadly these days, but that's what the word means.

And of course justice has a component where people want to see the guilty harmed in proportion to their crimes. Calling that sadism makes the word meaningless. It is good and right to be pleased when justice is done, and displeased when justice is not done.

I would disagree that the Great Terror during the French revolution was justice steeped in sadism because it was not justice at all. People were killed who committed no crime and deserved no punishment. Justice is people getting what they deserve, and nobody deserves to have their head lopped off because they disagree with you politically.

Well, different people disagree on what is justice and what isn't.

Another example is "mob justice", or any form of "cruel and unusual" punishment.

It's something that humans often do, that's all I wanted to say.

I think the healthy, measured response to what’s been done to the modal US citizen in the last eight years or so is nothing short of white hot, borderline murderous rage.

Sometimes that’s truly the appropriate response. Many people and institutions have spent incredible amounts of money, time and energy gaslighting people into not believing this.

I was fooled for a very short amount of time, but I know in my heart what’s right.

What’s been done to the modal citizen exactly?

I’m often just deeply surprised at what feels like absolutely nothing to me to other people they seem to take as some existential life defining offense.

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