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This past Sunday in Chicago, a 32 year old man killed three people. What made this much more notable than the typical Chicago weekend killings:
The man was caught on video (extreme violence warning) executing his victims in cold blood at close quarters.
The victims didn't seem to be gangbangers, but rather family and friends of a 25 year old girl celebrating her birthday at a nearby bar where the dispute took place. One unscientific hint: the moment gunshots rang out, the victims' instinct wasn't to run or hide, but to attend to the earlier victims, gesture disbelief, and generally show no survival instincts.
The suspect was recently paroled after just 4 years in prison from a 2009 double murder in a home invasion. My quick search seemed to suggest that the 2009 case had some issues, either because he wasn't the one who pulled the trigger, or there was insufficient evidence to prove that he did. So he was allowed to plead down to home invasion and was sentenced for just 8 years.
The judge who sentenced the suspect for the 2009 case himself resigned in 2020 over allegations of sexual harassment. The linked article contains bonus culture war fodder, like how the ex-judge claimed that his "[unwanted] gestures of physical affection" were "part of his Colombian heritage".
IL's SAFE-T Act goes into effect Jan 1, 2023, and among other provisions, eliminates cash bail.
I'm curious how much national attention this will receive. My guess is not much. Chicago has had 660+ murders so far in 2022, or 13+ per week, so one man killing three isn't by itself remarkable. The aggravating factors above should light a match, but that they also go against the narrative will probably douse it instead. And now that we're just done with the 2022 midterms, there is no immediate political urgency to act.
My main point though is that I think society will trend toward more law-and-order as video surveillance becomes ever more ubiquitous. If this video didn't exist, no one outside of the victims' families will think twice about it. But because it does, it will surface and resurface across social media until the end of time, and no amount of narrative from academics and pundits will compete with the visceral viewer reaction that some people are simply evil and need to be locked up for life or executed. Perhaps one day we'll all be effectively wearing body cams if/when AR glasses become mainstream. I believe that future will spell a permanent end to the political expediency of criminal justice reform, at least in the way that opponents label it as being weak on crime.
I think it says something incredibly dire about our civilization that we stopped publicly executing people such as this guy. I truly believe that the vast majority of people who watch this video and learn about this man’s history experience a powerful atavistic desire to see him humiliated and then hung from a tree in a public square. This is the healthy, normal human impulse that drove approaches to criminal justice in, as far as I’m aware, nearly every human society in history until practically yesterday. Maybe this is just me projecting - I’ve been the victim of a crime and very nearly the victim of several more, so my desire to see these people violently dispatched is overwhelming - but it seems to me that the level of cognitive dissonance that most people feel living in soft-hearted Western countries who treat irredeemable human detritus with kid gloves will necessary boil over in the near future, producing a law-and-order backlash like we haven’t seen in centuries.
Yes, people like this murderous burgler should be publically executed, but I really do not want people like you driving a "law and order backlash" so much so that my internal reaction to you in particular advocating for it is to defend the other side, even though rationally I can not justify that position to myself. In my opinion people like you, because of your moral and political ideological inclinations are more dangerous over the long run as a group than these psychopathic criminals and should be among those being killed, and yes this is basically me admitting that I want certain segments of my outgroup killed.
So, just to clarify, you want me executed for… impotently posting on an obscure internet forum? Perhaps you imagine that my comments are part of a larger pattern of violent or discriminatory behavior, having tangible negative effects on the lives of real flesh-and-blood individuals. But, no, it really is just impotent posting. I have perfectly normal, functional, positive relationships with people of wildly different backgrounds, none of whom are aware of, or affected by, my Motte-posting. So precisely which specific charges would you have me executed for?
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Unfortunately, I am quite certain you're not the only person here who feels that way, but we draw a pretty hard line when it comes to stating outright that you want your outgroup (to include other posters) to be killed.
1-day ban. Consider taking a break from the Internet. This kind of thinking goes nowhere good.
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