There’s a little wine shop in downtown Ballston Spa, New York with rainbow-colored bottles lining the shop’s front window. The village is small, about 5,000 people, and attracts tourists from all around the world.
Last summer, the owner of the wine shop, Jes Rich, noticed a group of masked men in the street. “As soon as I saw them I ran out the door,” said Rich, who is openly queer and sees her shop as a safe and welcoming space for other queer people.
The men in the street were wearing black and yellow face coverings and T-shirts identifying themselves as members of the Proud Boys, a violent, far-right extremist group. A yellow truck drove alongside the group, blasting the provocative country song “Try That in a Small Town.”
We have this now but worse because it’s organized against specific groups.
We are simply propagandized to think this is the right way and every other way is wrong. Humans have been around for 2-300,000 years, 99% of that time with no state and it was sustainable. Now we have state and shit is being destroyed in a few generations. The state is the problem, not a few lynch mobs.
EDIT: I want to add, if you don’t defend yourself from fascists, you end up in their world. This world of fascists will certainly grant effective judge, jury, and executioner status (i.e. they won’t get in trouble) to any privileged person over any unprivileged person. Choose your future.
I’m curious what you define as “the state.” Government? Government essentially evolved with writing, in Sumer (that we know of historically)
Sure
State - An organized group of people who claim exclusive acceptable use of violence within a claimed geographic region and use violence to ensure this monopoly continues.
Within a state most self-defense or community-defense is denigrated as “vigilante justice”.
A government typically is also a state but it’s not necessary for a polity that is focused on say community coordination to claim exclusive legality to the use of violence.
I don’t disagree with a lot of that, but that doesn’t make it right to murder people just because you felt threatened by them. This isn’t a kill or be killed society, there are alternative means to deal with threatening. If those means are insufficient for you, then you should want to create better ones long before you want the state to start sanctioning vigilante executions without any form of trial. You also seem to have missed this part of my comment
That’s just the nature of being part of a minority. It’s a lot more difficult to organize a mob, and even if you manage to do it you’re just going to be met with a bigger mob on the other side cause you decided to go and kick the hornet’s nest of bigotry.
Edited - reworded
Totally depends on the threat. If the threat is real and mortal, I’d say it sure does give one the right to defend themselves in a way that eliminates the threat. On the other hand, a vague feeling of being threatened does not give one the right to harm others. If it’s not your life or something critical to your life being threatened a lesser response is probably more appropriate. I’m not saying shoot someone for stealing your Amazon package. Like every other situation, there is nuance.
Also, your quotation is not from me.
lma fuckin o. No. No, its not. It’s from me. Two comments ago. In reference to lynch mobs.
Now I KNOW you don’t read my comments very thoroughly.
And no, when you usurp due process and leave it to individuals to decide when a crime worthy of execution has been committed against them, you are inherently throwing any and all nuance out the window. Nuance in these situations is quite literally the reason we have due process in the first place. Punishment in general, but especially the punishment of death, is just not something that any one person or private group should be allowed to enact at their sole discretion.