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Notes -
Turning to some good news:
Article link
This is a WSJ article about the rise in justified homicides in the US in recent years. Much of it is about "Stand Your Ground Laws." I'd be interested to hear the thoughts of the more lawyer-brained Mottizens on those kind of laws and their proliferation over the past decade or so.
On the culture war angle, this article is maybe the starkest example of "erosion of trust in society" that I've come across. A few of the anecdotes are pretty hair raising. They're cherry picked, I know, but the idea that a kid loses his father over an argument about a a fence and a property line made me sad. The "road range" incident they cover in detail seems like it was unfortunate but when one guy levels a gun at another, there's only one reasonable reaction.
Violence must be tightly controlled for a society to function. This is something that's bone deep in humans. We've developed methods of conflict resolution that fall short of violence for our entire existence as a species. Even within the context of violence, there are various ways of controlling it. Duels and so forth. Even informal ones; basic Bro code dictates that when one guy falls down in a fight, the other one backs off.
But this article hints at the idea that people are zooming past any of that to full lethality. It's impossible to compile the stats to determine if that's actually the case or not, but the larger point remains; in a society with plunging basic trust, you're going to see levels of interpersonal violence spike. How should state laws governing violence respond to this? Stand Your Ground is something I generally still support, but my mind could be changed if simple Bad Neigbor fights end up with more orphans.
The first one to begin distrusting is the Perfidious Journalist.
Potentially-justifiable homicides in 2019 were adjudicated in the mass hysteria of 2020-21 BLM courts. 2021-22 courts were more likely to be biased against justifiable homicide claims when the assailant is Black, ie a large portion of the total homicides where justification claims are likely to be made. Even 2019 courts had social justice sympathies. As such, a higher rate of justifiable homicides when compared to 2019 tells us nothing on its face. The Journalist needs to take this into consideration or else clarify if they are talking about cases adjudicated in 2019 or cases occurring in 2019. They would also need to look at the number of gang-related shootings. According to Grok, there were 20% fewer gang-related homicides in 2024 than 2019. Given that almost no gang-related homicide is justifiable (and the clearance rate is hilariously low, and the perpetrators can’t mount a good legal defense), this fact on its own would make the increased rate of justifiable homicides seem larger even in the absence of an increase in justifiable homicides. As, if the total number of unjustified homicides have decreased, but justified homicides stay the same, then justified homicides will make up a higher percentage of total homicides — telling us nothing except that we got better at combatting gangs. Maybe due to deportations?
Yes, the laws are written this way because justice is written this way. Take it up with God. It’s unjust to jail people without evidence. This is a settled matter of justice. For most of civilizational history we didn’t even have DNA or recording devices, and no one freaked out about this. Perhaps the Journalist inhabits a social world filled with other journalists where everyone is constantly lying for gain and no one has honor. In such a world, it is assumed a priori that someone is lying, as a kind of default way of life; they are actually more likely to lie than otherwise. Or maybe this Journalist constantly wants to kill us but lacks the courage to do so, and consequently they imbue this urge on the common flock. But normal people aren’t like this. And even if they were, this assumption defeats the journalist’s own logic. If there are evil people constantly looking to kill others and get away with it with legal standing, then we would want to make it easier to make a justifiable homicide claim, because there’s a bunch of people constantly trying to kill us. Remember the fact of justice that it is better to let nine killers go than jail one innocent person as a murderer. This was Blackstone’s Ratio, Blackstone being the most important legal writer at the time of America’s founding.
I hate the
AntichristJournalist.More options
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