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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24467 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026

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Also, lynching people is wrong even if they did do something that deserved the death penalty. It deprives the lynched of due process, it is true, but it also deprives the injured of having their injury validated and redressed. Lynchings forever throw doubt on the validity of the victim's injury.

I will entertain arguments for vigilante justice in a circumstances where there is no lawful way to achieve redress but that wasn't the case with Till (and really the vast majority of vigilante justice) so there's no point in reaching that argument at all.

Also, lynching people is wrong even if they did do something that deserved the death penalty. It deprives the lynched of due process, it is true, but it also deprives the injured of having their injury validated and redressed. Lynchings forever throw doubt on the validity of the victim's injury.

I won't comment on lynchings in the South specifically since that has a bunch of complicated factors, but when it comes to vigilante justice generally, it's one of the places where I agree with Hlynka that there is a "Leviathan-shaped hole". If the state shows itself consistently unable or unwilling to enforce order, then they no longer have the right to rule, and the right to power falls to whoever can and will enforce it. The "consistently" part here being key, even the best rulers will make occasional mistakes or have occasional failures, and I would not find vigilante justice justified here.

This is why things like two tier policing, revolving doors in the courthouse where a judge lets a career criminal out on bond for the 50th time, etc. are so dangerous. They undermine the legitimacy of the current state, and give greater legitimacy to any challengers, whether lone vigilantes or more organized opposition.

If the state shows itself consistently unable or unwilling to enforce order, then they no longer have the right to rule, and the right to power falls to whoever can and will enforce it.

Right, I think this would be a case where "there is no lawful way to achieve redress" and in the extremity you describe there is arguably a duty to enforce justice and create a new justice system with other people of goodwill who share your moral commitments.

They undermine the legitimacy of the current state, and give greater legitimacy to any challengers, wherher lone vigilantes or more organized opposition.

Yes, I 100% agree. A very underrated argument for harsh criminal penalties is precisely so that those who would take matters into their own hands feel no need to do so.

I will entertain arguments for vigilante justice in a circumstances where there is no lawful way to achieve redress

I lean towards supporting vigilante justice only in cases where the vigilante then turns themselves in and pleads guilty to a hostile court. If you believe an injustice has been done and must be redressed outside of the law, very well, but it must then end with justice done within the law, to its fullest extent.

Still gameable, and still has issues, but better than many alternatives.

I lean towards supporting vigilante justice only in cases where the vigilante then turns themselves in and pleads guilty to a hostile court.

"Why, Gary? Gary, why?"

Honestly as a case I have mixed feelings about it, but I'm not convinced Gary was completely in the wrong.

Gary Plauche didn't give the law a chance. If we suppose some counterfactual where Douchet was guilty as hell but the court lets him off because the judge has a soft spot for child molesters, it would make no sense to condition the morality of similar vigilante action on subjecting oneself to the (counterfactual) child-molestor-loving legal system.

To be fair, Plauche’s own statements characterize it entirely as an emotional reaction of a wronged father, and he never tried to make the argument that it was about the insufficiency of the justice system.

Gary is a "there but for the grace of God go I" situation. What he did was in clear contravention of the law. Philosophically, I accept that the state is supposed to have a monopoly on legitimate use of force, extreme circumstances excepted (which does not describe Gary's circumstances). Does the foregoing mean I wouldn't have done the exact same thing in his shoes? Sadly, I don't think so.

I lean towards supporting vigilante justice only in cases where the vigilante then turns themselves in and pleads guilty to a hostile court.

This is just self-sabotaging. If vigilante justice is the right thing to do, then it is also right that the vigilante not be punished for it.

Thinking about it, maybe there should be a difference between breaking a law that is itself unjust (or imposed in an unjust manner), which should face no punishment, and breaking a just law in service of some other cause, which should face punishment. Activists blocking traffic don't claim that laws against blocking traffic are a bad thing, or even that the government selectively prosecutes traffic blockers.

This is just self-sabotaging. If vigilante justice is the right thing to do, then it is also right that the vigilante not be punished for it.

I disagree. I think that it is possible for an act to be both "necessary" and "evil", and that an act being "justified" or "understandable" does not necessarily make it "good".

Which, in fact, is one of the central tropes associated with vigilantism in fiction. The violent man who has no place in the peaceful world his violence creates. The book has to end with Shane riding away. Regardless of his heroism, once the dirty work is done, he cannot remain in the valley.

For obvious reasons "well I needed to break the law to achieve the greater good" is a massive slippery slope. I have an easier time believing that the claim is genuine if the person making it is willing to face the music afterwards, and it puts some sandpaper on the slide, too.

I have an easier time believing that the claim is genuine if the person making it is willing to face the music afterwards, and it puts some sandpaper on the slide, too.

The State that would make vigilantism justifiable is the State that would brutally punish the vigilante regardless of the merit of their claim. The common term for this is "anarcho-tyranny".

The logic I am talking about here also applies to state officials who would seek to break the law in the course of their duties to achieve some greater good, which is an issue ~everywhere.

In the logic I'm talking about they are not breaking the law. They are applying it selectively and vindictively. The lowlife murdering rapist is not a challenge to State Power the way a vigilante is. Your logic would hold if the failure to punish criminals were the result of a loss of state capacity. What we're actually suffering IRL is a loss of state will to punish lowlife criminals precisely because they are lowlife criminals. And also racism, etc.

In the logic I'm talking about they are not breaking the law.

Yes, I am talking about something different than selective application of the law, I am talking about cops who torture serial killers in custody to extract the location of the body of a victim, that sort of thing. If a public official think that's important enough to break the law and misuse his authority for, then he should do the time.

You're talking about a completely different situation.

If a public official think that's important enough to break the law and misuse his authority for, then he should do the time.

I agree, but I don't think that's what anyone else in this conversation was discussing.

If it is the right thing to do there should be no music to face. "You can be a vigilante as long as you're willing to be punished by the very state which made your vigilante actions advisable in the first place" is just a long winded way of saying "You can't be a vigilante".

Have you never seen a western? The hero outlaw who dies and/or turns himself in at the end is a pretty classic trope. The vigilante almost never gets to ride off into the sunset. His role is to offer himself as a moral sacrifice on the alter of innocence and civilization. We love the vigilante as a romantic hero, but his story always ends in tragic sacrifice.

Being a vigilante is really fucking cool and sometimes civilizationally necessary, but you don't get a happy ending. That's always been the deal.

Part of that may have been due to the Hays Code....

Have you never seen a western? The hero outlaw who dies and/or turns himself in at the end is a pretty classic trope.

It is, but I claim it is wrong and broken. It is a trope championed in morality plays by a civilized world as a bulwark against vigilantes, and it has no place in a world where vigilantism is actually necessary.

We love the vigilante as a romantic hero, but his story always ends in tragic sacrifice

I would say that's a very culturally contingent reading. How many Batman comics end up with Bruce Wayne asking to be arrested? What about the murderer in the Christie's Orient Express? At the end of the Count of Monte Christo the count gets most but not all of his revenge and goes off east to live in happiness with his cute ex-slavegirl.

There are two main kinds of vigilante, one politically more ambivalent than the other. The first is the justicar, the knight, the semi-sanctioned or unsanctioned sheriff who corrects the mistake of a hopelessly and explicitly corrupt governing structure co-opted by explicitly political interests in a way that deprives the masses of justice. This is Batman. The second category is more explicitly right wing, the vigilante against anarchy-tyranny, against the criminal masses, against the mob. This is more explicitly right wing, Curtis Sliwa, Daniel Penny, that kind of thing.

The easy way to tell which kind of vigilante story it is is to ask yourself - “do the criminal villains in this story broadly and demographically represent the real perpetrators of most urban violent crime in the location in which this story is set?”. If no, it’s the former, if yes, it’s the latter.

What about the murderer in the Christie's Orient Express?

As opposed to the killer in Christie's Ten Little Indians/And Then There Were None?

At the end of the Count of Monte Christo

I'm more familiar with the space version it inspired, The Stars My Destination, where the ending is all about the antihero's desire to be purged and punished and so achieve forgiveness. But that's probably from a similar era/culture as a lot of Westerns.

I never read ‘And Then There Were Nine’ but isn’t the killer a violent deluded maniac? Whereas the killer in the Orient Express is a symmetric group of people who saw a monstrous miscarriage of justice and felt bound to correct it.

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If it is the right thing to do there should be no music to face.

And this is where where David Friedman and Victor Davis Hanson would tell you that there is always music to face.

I'm not familiar with that particular claim from either one. I present as a counterpoint the Battle of Athens. Long story short, a bunch of military veterans disrupted the stealing of an election (by the inumbent machine) by force (including explosives). They won the election and did not take their punishment for the violence in the end.

"You can't be a vigilante."

Well...yeah. You're not supposed to be a vigilante. If you're allowed to do that stuff you're definitionally not a vigilante.

not supposed

That heavily depends on who's doing the supposing, and why.

For instance, I lend zero credence to people who "not suppose" me when they're under conditions of extreme moral hazard, like how I'm "not supposed" to defend myself if the criminal attacking me is a particular color.

I am not familiar with any such laws, certainly not in any jurisdiction I am likely to be in. If I were to be punished for such an act by the state, it is true that I should not be punished, because my action would be both morally and legally permissible.

I do agree with criticisms about laws restricting the right to self defense full stop (never seen any that condition it on the color of the attacker) but I don't think self-defense is the same as vigilante justice, and conflating the two does the former harm. In fact, people opposed to self-defense frequently conflate the two, arguing that someone injured or killed while doing an unlawful activity did not deserve the criminal penalty of death. But that point is moot: they were not (generally speaking) harmed because the person defending themselves decided to act as judge, jury, and executioner, but because the person acting in self-defense was taking steps deemed necessary to self-preservation.

I am not familiar with any such laws, certainly not in any jurisdiction I am likely to be in.

Because they are usually de facto laws created by selective enforcement, not de jure. See the prosecutor in the Kyle Rittenhouse case straight up saying he would not have prosecuted any of the rioters if they had managed to kill Kyle.

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