41–50 of 271 posts
The whole situation raises some interesting parallels to wealthy & powerful malefactors routinely skating past legal consequences in our federal courts system.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That doesn't make the actions acceptable, of course. But it does put a spotlight on the importance of having a working legal system that provides some reasonable level of protection to the larger community. This man was tried and convicted by a jury of his peers, it was just in a different courtroom.
That's the kind of logic used to justify lynchings. We have a legal system that enforces a certain burden of proof, that takes place in a courtroom where strict procedure is enforced by an ostensibly impartial judge, and evidence is weighed by an impartial jury. The system is carefully set up to balance the rights of the accused against the interests of the community. It may not work all the time, but it exists for a…
Over the long timespans of human evolution I’m willing to bet that this is a significant selective pressure.. bullies probably just disappeared or were kicked out of the community to fend for themselves
This kind of guy has no no problem passing genes on. There are many more single mothers than single fathers for this reason.
An episode that stuck in my head.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You were half right until you dug into the helplessly racist narrative. The wild west had many incidences of such events and the victims were often white. One need only look at the story of Billy the Kid and the regulators or Wyatt Earp's arc for evidence. The only thing that makes this unusual is it was in 1981. EDIT: person I'm responding to makes the case that this case is SPECIAL in U.S. history and draws a direc…
helplessly racist? Thousands of lynchings occurred like this across the country for a hundred years - you can bet they weren't lynching whites more often.
A) many states had more white people lynched than blacks
B) The concentration of the south eastern states did make black people the victims more often both statistically and numerically, by a large margin but
C) White people being killed was not a statistical outlier. So there is no novelty.
D) “White” didn't include Italians, known Jewish people, any many others at the time. Not until the late 20th century, and pretty much still only so largely inclusive within North America.
E) Extrajudicial killing is a deep seated part of American history
https://www.naacp.org/history-of-lynchings/
So the conclusion is that neither of you are wrong but both are unproductive unsubstantial comments.
Not everyone’s family history is about a secret killing of a black person. Many’s only experience is mob justice against someone who was white.
Its not rare enough for race to be the focus of everyone’s bewilderment here.
This is a story about the Midwest and west where the targets were often not black. So turning it into a cohesion region with the entire north american continent is counterproductive when regions just have different history.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regardless of whether or not vigilantism is ever justified, I don't think that killing someone that has made a credible threat which law enforcement has shown they are unable to protect you against is equivalent to killing motivated by racism.
Lynching has always been driven by people reacting to what they believe was a credible threat, that law enforcement has failed to protect them from. In the historic case, that 'credible threat' was 'race mixing', uppity ______s, jews that were too well off for their own good, etc. When you let the most violent members of a small town community unilaterally decide what is, and what is not a credible threat, that is ex…
To be clear: I am not saying that their actions were right, just that its not fair to compare them to something like racially motivated lynching.
> frontier justice came for McElroy courtesy of the residents of Skidmore (population 440 at the time of the crime). Shaken by the man’s ability to evade jail even after being convicted of a near-fatal attack on a grocery store owner... Belkin also details Skidmore’s plague of subsequent violence ... the series persuasively contends that these crimes indicate that the McElroy episode taught younger Skidmore generatio…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regardless of whether or not vigilantism is ever justified, I don't think that killing someone that has made a credible threat which law enforcement has shown they are unable to protect you against is equivalent to killing motivated by racism.
Lynching has always been driven by people reacting to what they believe was a credible threat, that law enforcement has failed to protect them from. In the historic case, that 'credible threat' was 'race mixing', uppity ______s, jews that were too well off for their own good, etc. When you let the most violent members of a small town community unilaterally decide what is, and what is not a credible threat, that is ex…
"Credible threat" has an actual meaning beyond just "whatever people think a 'credible threat' is".
To be clear, community murders like this happened all the time in US history. The thing that makes this special is that the man killed was white and actually guilty of crimes.
You were half right until you dug into the helplessly racist narrative. The wild west had many incidences of such events and the victims were often white. One need only look at the story of Billy the Kid and the regulators or Wyatt Earp's arc for evidence. The only thing that makes this unusual is it was in 1981. EDIT: person I'm responding to makes the case that this case is SPECIAL in U.S. history and draws a direc…