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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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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.

The killer in 'And then there were none' was also someone who saw miscarriages of justice and felt bound to correct it -- everyone he called to the island to kill was someone he felt hadn't been sufficiently punished and deserved to die for what they'd done. One can quibble, perhaps, about whether his own death counts, dying as he was from an incurable disease prior to his suicide, and if he actually believes that he has done anything wrong in his murders.

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.

And using selective enforcement as a means of discriminating against people by the color of their skin instead of their deeds is unjust.

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