Vigilantism
Apr. 21st, 2006 03:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lederhosenIn case any of you missed the post that's been doing the rounds the last few days, brief summary: an LJer at Convergence was assaulted by an acquaintance, who injured her badly and nearly killed her before fleeing, and various other LJers have been spreading the story and photos around. You can find it via this post, if you're curious (does not include images, but links to pages that do).
It's a repulsive story, and I'm all in favour of catching the guy and bringing him to justice. But there are several things about this that bug me.
The first is that several people decided to share this story with the rest of LJ by posting pictures of the assault victim all over the place, so people were exposed to them without any warning. It's a very effective way to get people's attention (more on that later)... and it's also a very effective way to trigger flashbacks and associated nastiness in people who've previously been exposed to violence. So don't do this. (Yeah, I know, I post stuff that squicks people from time to time, but I try to avoid anything that's really upsetting.)
The second is the number of people who wanted to find this guy before the police did, and beat the crap out of him. Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but I still think the trial should happen before the punishment; I have no particular reason to doubt the victim's story or the accompanying photo. But given that hoaxes on LJ are not unknown (anybody else remember the burned kitten scam?), it seems to me like it would be prudent to let the guy tell his side of things before the lynching begins. (And, yeah, he ran; guilt is a common explanation for that, but it's not the only reason.)
And the third...
There are a lot of deserving causes out there. Children starving in Africa, AIDS patients dying in the USA, entire species being wiped out in South America, freedom of expression being stifled in Asia, take your pick. There is enough evil in the world that you could dedicate your entire life to fighting it, and you still wouldn't begin to cover it all. So you have to make a decision about what you're going to tackle and what you'll leave to somebody else.
As I see it, there are two different questions you can use to make that decision: "Which option does the most good?" and "Which option makes me feel good?"
IMHO, way too many people make that call based on the second of those instead of the first. Altruism turns into a sneaky sort of selfishness, and the feel-good acts of 'charity' crowd out the ones that really do good.
As one commenter on![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cleolinda's journal put it, after seeing the before-and-after pictures of the victim: "I was so sad when I read that, she's such a pretty girl."
I have friends who've been on the receiving end of violence. Some of them are photogenic, and some of them are not... and if their looks have any bearing on how we respond to that violence, something is deeply fucked up somewhere, and I'm not just talking about the perpetrator.
Yes, I will be happy if & when the guy is caught and brought up on charges, and if the LJ feeding frenzy helps that happen, so be it. But I don't think that everything that has good consequences is in itself good. When we turn 'altruism' into a way to make ourselves feel good, the end result is that less good is done.
And it becomes really tempting to use an altruistic side-effect as an excuse to do something else that might make us feel good.
Like, say, beating the crap out of somebody. And isn't that where this started?
It's a repulsive story, and I'm all in favour of catching the guy and bringing him to justice. But there are several things about this that bug me.
The first is that several people decided to share this story with the rest of LJ by posting pictures of the assault victim all over the place, so people were exposed to them without any warning. It's a very effective way to get people's attention (more on that later)... and it's also a very effective way to trigger flashbacks and associated nastiness in people who've previously been exposed to violence. So don't do this. (Yeah, I know, I post stuff that squicks people from time to time, but I try to avoid anything that's really upsetting.)
The second is the number of people who wanted to find this guy before the police did, and beat the crap out of him. Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but I still think the trial should happen before the punishment; I have no particular reason to doubt the victim's story or the accompanying photo. But given that hoaxes on LJ are not unknown (anybody else remember the burned kitten scam?), it seems to me like it would be prudent to let the guy tell his side of things before the lynching begins. (And, yeah, he ran; guilt is a common explanation for that, but it's not the only reason.)
And the third...
There are a lot of deserving causes out there. Children starving in Africa, AIDS patients dying in the USA, entire species being wiped out in South America, freedom of expression being stifled in Asia, take your pick. There is enough evil in the world that you could dedicate your entire life to fighting it, and you still wouldn't begin to cover it all. So you have to make a decision about what you're going to tackle and what you'll leave to somebody else.
As I see it, there are two different questions you can use to make that decision: "Which option does the most good?" and "Which option makes me feel good?"
IMHO, way too many people make that call based on the second of those instead of the first. Altruism turns into a sneaky sort of selfishness, and the feel-good acts of 'charity' crowd out the ones that really do good.
As one commenter on
cleolinda's journal put it, after seeing the before-and-after pictures of the victim: "I was so sad when I read that, she's such a pretty girl."I have friends who've been on the receiving end of violence. Some of them are photogenic, and some of them are not... and if their looks have any bearing on how we respond to that violence, something is deeply fucked up somewhere, and I'm not just talking about the perpetrator.
Yes, I will be happy if & when the guy is caught and brought up on charges, and if the LJ feeding frenzy helps that happen, so be it. But I don't think that everything that has good consequences is in itself good. When we turn 'altruism' into a way to make ourselves feel good, the end result is that less good is done.
And it becomes really tempting to use an altruistic side-effect as an excuse to do something else that might make us feel good.
Like, say, beating the crap out of somebody. And isn't that where this started?
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no subject
Date: 2006-04-21 08:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-21 12:31 pm (UTC)the way I'm wired I easily flash onto really horrible revenge images (apparently some large subsection of us introverts do that), but I know that this is not and must not become real.
We're in a bad enough place politically -heading backwards into hideousness in my view- without people lynching others too I reckon, and I've been severally abused.