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Sorry for a late reply, it took me a while to read the article. As far as I can tell from it he was a habitual abuser and his death is not a loss for society,

Sorry for a late reply, it took me a while to read the article. As far as I can tell from it he was a habitual abuser and his death is not a loss for society, quite the opposite. One thing people struggle with is the idea that every life has infinite value. That is obviously nonsense. Then they say every life has a very high value and it's the same for every person. That is also nonsense - if you get attacked by two people, do you have the right to kill them both in self-defense? Yeah, because their 2 lives are less valuable than your 1 life. Most importantly, value to whom? To the person whose life it is, it is indeed very high. Than there's the family, friends, acquaintances, state, society and humanity at large. And to each of those groups, the value is different. The key realization is that to some of those groups, the value can be negative, very negative in fact. Every dictator is no doubt loved by his friends (especially those who get privileged positions from him) so his value to his friends is very high but to his society, the value is often negative. This particular abuser is interesting because his life had a negative value to both his daughters and society/humanity. But he still has family members willing to protect him because his life had positive value to them. This is sad, if he was my family member, I would not protect him. But a lot of people put family before morality - they are genetically predisposed to do so, even if it's detrimental to humanity at large. > Morality doesn’t flow downstream from legality, but the other way around: legality is downstream of morality. No, that's how it should be. Sadly, legality is downstream of morality + practicality + provability. Morality because if the law is too unjust, people revolt. Practicality because it's practical for the people in power to make laws in their favor and because too much morality makes for a weaker state - too many people end up in prison instead of being economically productive. And provability because even though morality operates on reality (it depends on the actual truth), legality requires proof to dispense punishment. This is one reason why the idea of an all knowing god is so tempting - you can cross provability off the board because the god will dispense punishment based on the actual truth. > The fact that they faked injuries in order to present themselves as victims is especially concerning, but considering their father’s connections in the police department, I think they feared retaliation even after their abuser was killed. Exactly. Lying and manipulation are not wrong on its own. They are multipliers. If the goal is good and you used them to achieve it, nothing wrong happened. However, I generally see them as massive red flags because although they are tools good people should absolutely use, they should be used as a last resort and people who reach for them too early generally do so out of habit which basically revels their true nature. > The cycle of violence I hate this term. WW2 axis was destroyed through overwhelming violence. There was no cycle because the good violence was so thoroughly the bad people were all either dead, soon to be executed or no longer had power to continue it (or decided to play innocent victim and keeping them alive was _practical_ in the case of the Japanese emperor). > Hurt people hurt people. There is some truth to this but I feel like this happens because we don't allow victims to fight back and perform the punishment themselves. People who were wronged want to hurt the aggressor but that person is usually untouchable by them (otherwise he wouldn't dare wrong them in the first place). So the anger ends bottled up inside them and ends up hurting others. This is why I hate this celebration of victim hood and the idea that the victim has to be defenseless and ask others for help. We should not just let but encourage people to fight back.

aspenmayer 1y ago
Justice delayed is justice denied. I am on the side of justice, through the justice system, because I think that it is a social good to see injustice brought, well, to justice. In the moment, judgement calls are sometimes necessary, but this is not ideal, as it legitimizes self-help justice, which is fraught with issues of standing, proportionality, and reprisal. Once vigilantism begins, there may be no end to it. Just ask the Hatfields and the McCoys. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatfield%E2%80%93McCoy_feud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatfield%E2%80%93McCoy_feud Justice is a social good, but not an unqualified good; there are failures to convict and miscarriages of justice. My heart goes out to those who have no escape from injustice or legal avenue to rectify illegal acts. But at the same time, these women are expected to just walk away from their abuser, the very same man who raised them, indoctrinated them, to be his subordinate and subservient playthings. They were set up to fail to protect their own best interests in favor of their father’s whims and fancies. That doesn’t excuse or justify their behavior, but it does situate it in a context of ongoing violence, trauma, and lawlessness under the same roof as their captor, so I can see why they were not able to seek justice through the proper channels. They had no way of conceiving of a future world free of their father’s will, and so all hopes rang hollow, a bell their father rang as surely as Pavlov himself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_conditioning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_conditioning Vigilantism is doubling down on bad behavior and hoping the house doesn’t win when the chips are down and we’re going for broke. It’s a flawed strategy for bettors to gain leverage over their supposed betters. I don’t find that self-help is a strategy for a stable society, because it engenders an unstable equilibrium that favors those already willing to dispense violence contrary to the interests of the community and the justice system. The girls are not hardened criminals, but their actions give cover to those who are, by pointing out the flaws in the legitimate monopoly on violence that the state holds. I am rather in favor of correcting the shortcomings and failure modes of the justice system itself so that victims need never take matters into their own hands in the first place, because that way lies madness and corruption. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and bad actors run roughshod over the little people as a matter of course. We ought to do better for each other, as that is what society is. I only hope that the girls are able to be freed, and that their actions are viewed in a light that accommodates the long shadow cast by the long arm of the law they lived under, the same arm that should have defended them from their own father, but did not.

aspenmayer 1y ago

Justice delayed is justice denied. I am on the side of justice, through the justice system, because I think that it is a social good to see injustice brought, well, to justice. In the moment, judgement calls are sometimes necessary, but this is not ideal, as it legitimizes self-help justice, which is fraught with issues of standing, proportionality, and reprisal. Once vigilantism begins, there may be no end to it. Just ask the Hatfields and the McCoys. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatfield%E2%80%93McCoy_feud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatfield%E2%80%93McCoy_feud Justice is a social good, but not an unqualified good; there are failures to convict and miscarriages of justice. My heart goes out to those who have no escape from injustice or legal avenue to rectify illegal acts. But at the same time, these women are expected to just walk away from their abuser, the very same man who raised them, indoctrinated them, to be his subordinate and subservient playthings. They were set up to fail to protect their own best interests in favor of their father’s whims and fancies. That doesn’t excuse or justify their behavior, but it does situate it in a context of ongoing violence, trauma, and lawlessness under the same roof as their captor, so I can see why they were not able to seek justice through the proper channels. They had no way of conceiving of a future world free of their father’s will, and so all hopes rang hollow, a bell their father rang as surely as Pavlov himself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_conditioning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_conditioning Vigilantism is doubling down on bad behavior and hoping the house doesn’t win when the chips are down and we’re going for broke. It’s a flawed strategy for bettors to gain leverage over their supposed betters. I don’t find that self-help is a strategy for a stable society, because it engenders an unstable equilibrium that favors those already willing to dispense violence contrary to the interests of the community and the justice system. The girls are not hardened criminals, but their actions give cover to those who are, by pointing out the flaws in the legitimate monopoly on violence that the state holds. I am rather in favor of correcting the shortcomings and failure modes of the justice system itself so that victims need never take matters into their own hands in the first place, because that way lies madness and corruption. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and bad actors run roughshod over the little people as a matter of course. We ought to do better for each other, as that is what society is. I only hope that the girls are able to be freed, and that their actions are viewed in a light that accommodates the long shadow cast by the long arm of the law they lived under, the same arm that should have defended them from their own father, but did not.