Blonde, I hope you’re right, I really, really, do. But, on this, I do share Monty’s concern. If any of these people do mean what they’re saying, I would ask them to think again …
I don’t see a reason to worry about it either. 99% of the people who talk about how someone should be shot/raped/beaten/tortured/anally assaulted with an acetylene torch, including me, if you handed them a weapon and put them in a room with whoever they want to see whatever done to them, they will drop the weapon and run away. It’s almost always just releasing anger, which isn’t necessarily bad. Better releasing it on some message board where no one knows so much as what continent you are than cussing out someone they actually know.
TMWTGG: What about the two people who said they had actually threatened the parolee with murder?
their local cops get a easy felony bust for harassment (bragging about a crime you committed is never a good idea) and the molester gets his name off the sex offender registry
There’s a difference between saying “I hope X dies.” and “I will kill X.” If they actually threaten someone, then they go from venting to actual threats. Threats should be taken seriously, venting shouldn’t.
But it seems that the same people are ‘venting’ over and over and over. It’s not like a particular case hits them in the guts, any discrestion seems to get someone ‘put on the list’ of a quite a few posters.
Precisely why catharsis isn’t.
No doubt you are correct in saying that 99% of those who espouse extreme corporal/capital punishment would not carry it out if they had to do it alone and personally. But that is not the relevant question most of the time. The question is what would they do if they were part of a mob, either in the street sense, or in the sense of being part of the mob that is the voting public?
I would suggest to you that in either of these situations (and particularly the latter which is in fact how decisions about crime and punishment are made in civil society), such people might well do their part towards the violence perpetrated by the collective.
I think they just want vengence. It offends their sensibilities when they hear about a particularly gruesome murder, or child rape, or something else really horrible, and they want the person to suffer for what he or she did.
This same thought occurred to me a week or so ago (around page 3 or 4 of the “pedophile priest killed” thread), Monty. My guesses:
-
Catharsis
-
Sensed moral high ground.
-
Kicking people while they’re down.
You see the same sort of theme in posts occuring in a meltdown thread.
(Sensed distance from this behavior is due to use of language and not necessarily a feeling of separation from this crowd)
I will agree with what Monty (and later, Avalonian and others) said, and go further to an additionally disturbing trend seen on the SDMB and elsewhere. See, it’s one thing to wish violence on somebody in retaliation for something they did to you or someone you know. I’m sure there are hundreds of thousands of people in the immediate circles of friends and family lost on 9/11 who, if they found themselves in the hypothetical room described by The Man With The Golden Gun face to face with Osama bin Laden, would have no trouble visiting all manner of physical torments on the terrorist mastermind.
But it’s something else entirely to claim a wish for revenge on behalf of somebody you’ve never even met, and it seems like there are people on the SDMB and elsewhere who drag their nets through the daily news wire specifically looking for something to get pissed off about. Take any recent oh-my-god story that gets posted to the BBQ Pit: the story mentioned by Avalonian about the child molester, or this one, or this one, or this one, or any of a hundred more I could cite if I went back more than a week. Horrifying, awful, depressing, yes, no question, every one in its own way. But did anybody here, one single person, actually know the people involved? As far as I know, not at all. So even apart from all the let’s-chain-him-to-a-wall-and-jam-a-cobra-in-his-bum responses that follow predictably, why is the story posted in the first place?
See, we know there are awful people and awful things in the world. That’s a given. Right now, somebody somewhere is either carrying out or contemplating the act of hacking up somebody with a machete. Spouses are being assaulted and children are being burned with cigarettes. Someone in an institution is fervently wishing for matches with which to set fire to his or her bedding. A hundred someones are staggering out of their local taverns and getting behind the wheels of their cars to play their nightly roulette game with the lives of the families in their neighborhoods. And so on, and so on, ad nauseum. There are more than six billion people in the world, and at any given moment, yes, indeed, at this given moment, some of them are perpetrating, or planning to perpetrate, some vile deeds. This is news?
But yes, turn on the television, and we find that, contrary to what we might expect, this is news. An angry driver loses control and plows through a playground. Somebody shoots up a synagogue. A depressed mother strangles her newborn with an extension cord. Drunken fratboys pepper with buckshot a mascot mule helplessly tied to a tree. An airliner disintegrates against the side of a mountain. Another baby is found in a dumpster. Every night, the parade of bloody horror serenades us to sleep, and far from driving us away, we tune in to the litany of death and senseless destruction in droves. If it bleeds, it leads, goes the maxim, and television news organizations that try to counter-program with “happy” lineups find their viewers deserting them.
For whatever reason, we are wired to be interested in negativity. When we hear things are good, we don’t react with happiness; we find ourselves distrustful of the report, and wonder what’s being hidden. When we pass a wreck on the freeway, we don’t keep our eyes forward, either in the interest of safely negotiating heavy traffic or of avoiding being confronted with gore; in fact, it is in the morbid hope of seeing severed appendages that we look at the scene. This might be where evolution has brought us, that humans who look for the negative are more likely to survive, that they may be more paranoid and dour when it’s inappropriate but in the rare event it’s warranted they won’t be caught flatfooted the way a Pollyanna might, and will be prepared to identify and resolve the problem and thereby improve their environment. Or, evolution might have nothing to do with it, and we’ve been trained by society to be angry and fearful, as postulated by Bowling for Columbine in a moment of startling insight before the blowhard host retreated to his comfortable celebrity-hounding schtick.
When viewed objectively, it makes no rational sense why we would want revenge for something that doesn’t affect us; “payback by proxy” is no way to run a society. It’s only the explosion of instant media that makes it possible for us to sit ringside at a celebrity trial or to learn within minutes when people have lost their lives in some disaster or other. All of these events, all around the world, are ingested, masticated, reduced, and regurgitated into our homes twenty-four hours a day, via the television and the internet and all the other mind-boggling technological devices we thought would be our salvation but that are slowly torturing us to the point of insanity. It’s not hard to recognize, if you just take a step back; I personally don’t watch television news at all any more, unless there’s an important breaking event wherein new information is coming in on a minute-by-minute basis. (Example: The loss of Space Shuttle Columbia. I watched until it was clear the news channels had started repeating themselves, at which point I had what I needed and turned it off.) The point is, is it any wonder why we all feel such generalized anxiety all the time, when our living room is filled with unrelenting reports of crisis from morning to night?
Maybe this is a “just say no” appeal, and I know with respect to the world at large I’m trying to block a hurricane with a parasol. But it depresses me to see it on the SDMB. I know we represent a cross-section of humanity, which is one of our strengths; people from many nations, many economic spheres, and many philosophies exchange views here. And as such, our community will reflect the larger world, to some extent. But we aspire to something higher here; we try to be better. We may not always succeed, but you cannot deny the ambition. And part of that, it seems to me, should be a refusal to play the vengeance game, to recognize the natural but partly unconscious human fixation on negative news, and the irrational reactions it engenders, and work against our unexamined but controllable impulses.
So the plea goes like this: Before you post yet another negative story you heard about on TV, along with a link you spent several minutes digging up on Google News so you can share the horror you felt when you heard the original story, ask yourself why you’re doing it. Why did it catch your interest, why do you care about it, and what response do you hope to elicit? And similarly, before posting a reply to one of these, ask the same sorts of questions: What, exactly, is being accomplished by dragging it out? After you vent spleen, are you going to think about this story again twenty-four hours later? Does it affect your life in any way? Are you a healthier person for having permitted yourself to get worked up about it?
I know, I know, I’m tilting at windmills. I just hate to see so many otherwise good people frothing at the mouth for absolutely no reason at all.
I feel like this is almost a driveby (and apologise if so) but this post from cervaise is one of the most lucid (and true) that I’ve ever read here - and I lurk a hell of a lot more than I post!
Also, I don’t think you are alone in this viewpoint. I read those threads with a permanent rolleyes and, unfortunately, tend not to post along the lines of the above despite my views. Mostly because I imagine, rightly or wrongly, that I would just be shouted down amidst a deluge of righteous indignation.
I guess that most people are venting, and that is the sole purpose. What irritates me most is the pious nature of the vent - the fact that people take only one, simplistic, view of a situation and presumably feel superior to the perpetrator of whatever horror has occured. To me, wishing rape, torture or murder on anyone is beneath me (so now I’m feeling superior) and ill-placed in supposedly civilised society.
Though I agree with the majority of you who have posted that these people would never act on these thoughts, I don’t think they are harmless. American jails will only be as safe for prisoners as society demands that they be. There is little outcry in our society for demanding that prisons be free of rape, assault, and murder, especially if it would cost more tax dollars. In fact, I have heard people who dare to say anything about it called “soft on crime” or much, much worse.
If someone goes to jail and is later found innocent, yet has been raped in prison and acquired AIDS, will these posters say they regret all the times they cheered for prison rape?
LilyoftheValley: Please read page three of the first link in this thread. Two people state that they have acted on those thoughts and they’re proud of it.
Okay, Monty, let me change my statement to “the vast, vast majority of people would never act on those thoughts”.
But that’s hardly the main point of my post.:rolleyes:
The main point of my post was that celebrating such a prison culture can be detrimental whether or not any given individual acts on it.
People have this crazy idea that the prison system is about giving people what they deserve rather than protecting the innocent members of soceity from dangerous and sick individuals. The hard part is keeping objectivity. Emotion gets in the way of seeing the course that most benefits soceity.
another thing I found depressing in a major way was the continual re-posting of unsubstantiated information as if it were 100% true, complete w/ “everyone knows this is true” sorts of back up.
damn.
IMO people talk and behave this way because in Western countries at least, there is a break down in the sense of community and communal responsibility. People are out for themselves and their immediate family only and therefore do not see community problems as anything to do with them. They therefore possibly feel free to put forward the idea that rapists should have their balls cut off etc, instead of seeing that in reality, rapists are a product of their environment and we all make up this environment.
And now for the Dukakis Hot Potato:
Which would you prefer? Your beloved SO gets abducted, repeatedly raped, brutally murdered and dumped, naked on the side of a road.
a) His or her rapist/killer wades through the judicial system and gets life in prison, parole possible in 30 years?
b) The rapist/killer is discovered by a PI you’ve hired. You exact your own punishment on the rapist/killer.
I have trouble thinking “option a” is viable in such a case. My gut says “b” makes me happier in the long run. Call me a savage, if you will, but it’s just a feeling. This Board is about expression – why is angry or vengeful expression any less valid than “I love the system?”
People are frothing at the mouth, yes, but it’s not for no reason. This is a horrible, unsustainable, culturally bankrupt society that’s just about to pop. Any excuse whatsoever and citizens of my LA neighborhood will be out in full force maiming and drinking each others’ blood.
And may God rest his soul, I would like a moment of silence in honor of Mr. Charles Bronson, without whom no retributive thought would be quite as colorful.
wring: Quite interesting that your prophetic posting was followed by the very thing you posted about, and just 34 minutes later!