Transcripts / Justice
Introduction
🎸🎶
Alright, so what are we looking at? What new hell have we sunk to now here in the United States of– they ask you how you are and you just have say that you're fine and you're not really fine but you just can't get into it because they would never unders– 🌧
Well, it's a Kentucky Police patrol car with a blue lives matter, thin blue line, Punisher skull on the hood. Um...
𝕋ℍ𝔼ℝ𝔼'𝕊 𝔸 𝕃𝕆𝕋 𝕋𝕆 𝕌ℕℙ𝔸ℂ𝕂 ℍ𝔼ℝ𝔼
But let's stick to tradition and begin by examining the skull. The skull is the symbol of "The Punisher" the Marvel comics' vigilante anti-hero. The Punisher's real name is Frank Castiglione but he changed it to Frank Castle, I guess cause he's ashamed of his Sicilian heritage. Disappointing. Frank Castle is an ex-Marine whose wife and kids are murdered by the mob, leaving him an empty husk of a man whose only consolation is his obsession with revenge. Nyaa. 🐱
There's been a lot of TV and movie adaptations of "The Punisher", and as research for this video I did watch all of them. And my conclusion is that the best one is the 1989 version, where Dolph Lundgren dyes his hair black to pass as Sicilian and runs around naked and sweaty in the sewers worshiping the god of vengeance at a shrine of trash. You know, just like the police do. 🚨
Hi, I'm Nyatalie. Creator of "Catrapoints". And no, I'm not a catgirl. I'm a catwoman. I'm sorry you're intimidated by that. 😼
Look I'm tired of only being valued for my petite, heterosexual body. I'd like to be recognized for my worth as a mother, as a wife, and……… as a woman with values. Just kidding I’m trash. 😸
Let's talk about justice, uwu 😽. Justice is when I get lots of head pats, nyaa–
The Punisher's main quest is to kill all the mobsters who murdered his family. But once he gets revenge, he can't stop killing because it's the only thing that gives meaning to his shitty life. So he wages a one-man war on organized crime. But no matter how many bad guys he kills, it's never enough because new criminals just come along and take the place of the old ones.
It's like a cycle, where violence begets violence and nothing ever really changes. It's almost like this comic book is trying to tell us something about the nature of crime and punishment. But you know what? Let's not overthink this. Sure, just slap a giant skull on the car! Great! Perfect!
Look maybe you're assuming I'm one of these libtarded, antifa-sympathizing, big government anarchists who sits behind my iPhone with my latte, criticizing the police even though I could never do a job one-tenth as difficult as theirs. And to that I say, how dare you assume things that are entirely correct? This is, excuse me a damn fine cup of cawfee. There's just nothing better than waking up in the morning, and having the first dose of the chemical you're addicted to. They tried to make me go to rehab, I said: "Nyaa, nyaa, nyaa."
But you seem like a reasonable person, a person of science, a seasoned vendor, the free marketplace of ideas gorg. And as a reasonable person, I'm sure you wouldn't dismiss my argument just because I happen to enjoy head pats. As Socrates once said: Two plus two is four is equally true whether uttered by a philosopher king or a peasant knave.
Or a nekomimi. 😲 Kawaii desu!
😆 Is this problematic? Cringe culture is dead and we have killed it. This is beyond cringe. This is:
ℂ𝕌ℝ𝕊𝔼𝔻 ℂℍ𝕀𝕃𝔻ℝ𝔼ℕ ℂ𝕌ℝ𝕊𝔼𝔻
So actually Socrates didn't say this quote I just made it up, but that just proves the point I'm making, so maybe you should hear me out nyaa. 😽
I'm making this video at a time when hundreds of videos of police brutality are being shared on social media, spurring on a movement to abolish police and prisons. And at the same time, there's a growing culture of online vigilantism where justice is taken into the hands of Twitter mobs demanding accountability and consequences for bad behavior. All of this raises a lot of questions. Questions like, what should the consequences be for bad behavior? Who should impose these consequences? And under what circumstances? And for what purpose? If we were to abolish police and prisons, what would take their place?
Oh my god these contacts. ↖️👄↖️
I'm literally doing a whole video with fucking sideways cat eyes. Ridiculous.
Why don't we start with the basics and ask ourselves, what is justice Socrates? It's a question philosophers have pondered for thousands of years, with no conclusive answers. I think I can probably figure this out in a YouTube video, cause the philosophers were dummies and I am very smart, nyaa. 🤓
Ra-ra-Rasputin.
Part One: Revenge
The Punisher represents a particular idea about what justice is, symbolized by the skull he wears on his t-shirt so the bad guys know they're about to get punished. The Punisher's view is that justice means harming people who harm people. An eye for an eye. This is called retributive justice, the idea that people who commit crimes deserve punishment in proportion to their crime. It's a very emotionally powerful idea of what justice is, because it's rooted in our instinct to strike back at someone who's harmed us.
Social animals like humans and chimpanzees often practice revenge, probably because it serves an evolutionary function. If another monkey in your monkey troop steals your bananas and you don't get revenge, then other monkeys will learn that you're a doormat monkey. But if you get revenge on the thief monkey by, I don't know, letting her boyfriend pick parasites out of your fur then that sends a message to the other monkeys that it is not profitable to mess with you. So our little monkey brains have evolved a taste for vengeance.
And even in cases where it doesn't actually benefit us, our desire for retribution is strong. And our little monkey brains reward us with a pleasant feeling of catharsis when justice of this kind is served. So of course there's a lot of content out there devoted to scratching this itch.
For example, there's a subreddit called r/JusticeServed with one and a half million subscribers. I first found JusticeServed when the popular feed showed me this post of two teenage thieves, stripped naked, humiliated, and photographed as punishment. And all this celebrated under the heading "Police Justice". In fact before the murder of George Floyd by police, the description of the community was “Now with 20% more police brutality!” Umm... fun fact, this ain't it chief. Period, full stop. That's the tweet.
Of course I subscribed to JusticeServed right away thinking, someone should be keeping an eye on these people. Here's a typical JusticeServed post, woman sets P-E-D-O husband on fire after catching him R-A-P-E seven-year-old daughter titled: “This man got what he deserved”.
INSTANT REGRET, PREDATOR EXPOSED.
To be honest when I wrote this part of this script, I forgot I was gonna be wearing cat ears. I'm really out here trying to have a conversation about immolating sex offenders while dressed like an aging, bargain bin, Belle Delphine impersonator. Well, dress for the job you want.
I mean, whomst amongst us wouldn't set their husband on fire under those circumstances right? Let's look at the comments on that post though. Let's read the room:
“She's a hero in my opinion”
“Should have had it live on television”
“Give her a medal”
“Give her two medals”
So most people are in favor of setting predators ablaze, but you know there's always a couple buzzkills in there whining as usual about "ugh, maybe we shouldn't be cheering on burning people alive with no due process and no evidence". "Lots of men like to f*ck my wife 'cause I'm too busy crying about due process". But those people get shouted down pretty fast. They get called pedo-simps. Pedo-simps. 😆
So JusticeServed is a community for people to gather together and bond over our shared love of extrajudicial violence. But of course there's always someone who takes it a little too far. On this video of a thief being kicked in the head until his face is a bloody pulp, one commenter says:
"That's a justice boner for me. I dream of the day I catch the thieves that stole from me and kick the life out of them."
CRIMINAL FAIL, PRANK GONE WRONG.
So when the righteous zeal for justice becomes the cloak of blood lust, that is off-putting to some people. As one disgruntled former JusticeServed subscriber put it:
“I wanted to see stories and videos of assholes getting their comeuppance. Instead, I got bombarded with an angry, toxic, moral absolutism. Everything is black and white with them. If you don't support mutilating someone beyond repair, then you must support giving them a slap on the wrist, and letting them fuck your wife."
UNSUBSCRIBED.
But even this liberal cuckold still wanted to watch "videos of assholes getting their comeuppance." I think pretty much everyone is capable of enjoying some version of this type of content. There's a lot of sub-genres, you've got: Justice Porn, Play Stupid Games Win Stupid Prizes, Instant Karma, Bad Parking Revenge, Predator Poaching– serial killer sentenced to death and the whole train clapped, instant justice was served, karma fails, stupid people getting what they deserved, karma!
A lot of this content has kind of a right wing feel to it. Unmarked police justice, criminal gets shot after fighting cop, home invader takes shotgun blast to the balls (Arizona) 😆
Just Arizona. What more is there to say? Arizona. Justice served. Punished.
It reminds me of NRA people who spend 10 hours a day fantasizing about how they're gonna kill home intruders with the gun they keep in the bathroom. But I don't think this longing for retribution is distinctively right-wing. Left-wing people have the exact same emotional response, they just have it in different situations. Think about the jubilation on Twitter when they get a racist Karen fired.
“Remember that ugly hag, Lisa, who harassed a black man in front of an apartment building…karma.”
“AND she got her husband fired 🤣 dumb bitch REALLY shoulda minded her business 😌 love to see it”
“She will probably end up with community service and a fine, but I would love to see her in jail for at least 6 months.”
“firing them was not enough. LIFE IN PRISON 🗣”
👏 LIFE 👏 IN 👏 PRISON
An example I personally enjoy is that video of Daniel Holtzclaw. The cop who abused his power to sexually assault a series of Black women, crying in court as he's sentenced to serve 263 years in prison. He just cannot believe that he's actually facing consequences for this.
And of course there’s the much savored vigilante punching of N-A-Z-I Richard Spencer. Let's watch it now. Uhh please try not to enjoy this. Remember this is purely for educational, monetizable purposes. 👊
That was informative. But let's be honest, the reason that video was so popular is people just enjoyed watching an N-A-Z-I get what he deserves.
JUSTICE SERVED. PUNISHED. SMASHING. Very happy gay sounds, uwu. Remember to SMASH SUBSCRIBE.
So this punitive, retributive impulse, no matter how righteous it feels is still basically a situational form of sadism, of schadenfreude. The satisfaction of justice served is the pleasure we take in inflicting or witnessing the suffering of someone who deserves it. Now the phrase "deserves it", is doing a lot of work here. The correct use of that phrase is the difference between a morally well-adjusted person, and someone who's hiding bodies in the crawl-space.
It puts the lotion on its skin, nyaa. 🧴
But people generally agree that those who harm others deserve to be harmed themselves. It's why we love stories about revenge. Stories like "Mean Girls", "The Crow", "Old Boy", "Titus Andronicus" and "Matilda".
Revenge is such a popular plot line because it's easy for people to identify with a revenge-seeking protagonist. And it's just the easiest way to hype people up about spectacles of violence. This technique was used in one of the first books ever, "The Odyssey" by Homer. I stole this copy from my high school, and I stole this copy from my college. I still just read the SparkNotes. Well let's read it now. See, I knew this would be useful someday.
God he's such a fuckboy, what does Athena see in this man? He must be really hot. Okay, I'm ready for my book report. So the hero of the story is Odysseus, and the whole book is him trying to get home to the island of Ithaca after…
Okay so in the prequel, Odysseus' shitty friend Menelaus throws a tantrum after his wife leaves him to run off with a Turkish guy she was actually attracted to how dare she? So Menelaus dragged an entire nation to war, instead of doing what any normal man would do and blowing off some steam at Femboy Symposium.
Anyway when Odysseus finally gets back to Ithaca, he finds that his house is full of men who are eating his food, and drinking his wine, and trying to marry his wife. So Odysseus– and this is the hero of our story here, he murders all of his wife's suitors as payback. And then he rounds up all the… slave women who slept with the suitors, and he has them all hanged. And there's one suitor Melanthius, Odysseus ties him up and cuts off his ears and nose and feet and then rips off his genitals to feed to the dogs.
And reading this I guess I find myself asking… uhh was this really necessary? Like as a test reader, my feedback for Homer is maybe workshop this? I mean, super unlikable protagonist. Really kind of kills it for me. I guess it's a male protagonist and you can get away with making them unlikable, cause men love hearing about assholes. That's why they watch my channel. 😁
But the crazy thing is, I don't think Odysseus is supposed to be an asshole. The text seems to approve of what he does to the suitors and to his uh…… his slaves.
Yikes. Disappointing. Casual reminder that Odysseus kills his slaves. It isn't a good look. Wow this blew up! I don't have a SoundCloud, give me money–
Oh my god, this contact is fully horizontal. This is the last time we're doing cat eye contacts. Fuck this! ⬅️👄⬅️
It just seems disproportionate you know. Like it's not even an eye for an eye, because the suitors didn't kill anyone. They were basically just rude to Odysseus. But I guess you have to understand this kind of thing in cultural context. They came into his home, and they disrespected his wife, and probably she was into it but whatever we'll play along. So that was an affront to Odysseus' honor. And on the island of Ithaca in the year 1000 BC or whatever, honor was everything. Because this was a pre-legal society. No laws, no courts, no cops, school's out, fuck 12. 🚨
So honor is a code of conduct enforced by reputation. And that's what kept people from stealing and lying and murdering each other. Though it was also often the thing causing them to murder each other. Because back then honor was the only thing protecting people from being taken advantage of.
If you're an ancient Mycenaean King and someone invites themselves into your house and drinks your wine and seduces your wife, well you can't let them get away with that. Cause then people will walk all over you. So you need to get revenge to protect your honor, to maintain your reputation as a person who is not to be messed with. It's also the point of hard masculinity in honor cultures.
Hard masculinity is a defensive posture, an intimidating posture. It showcases strength and hides vulnerability. We call it toxic masculinity now, because in our society it's destructive and dysfunctional. We've moved beyond the need for this, which is why it's possible for me to exist. If society collapses and we go back to Achilles and Odysseus, I'm in danger. 🙃
I'm much too delicate for this Mycenaean savagery. Back in Homer's time, I'd be well… I'd be a slave at Femboy Symposium. Extremely sad gay sounds, nyaa. 😿
But for people in situations where appealing to community or state law enforcement is not an option, such as: kings of ancient Mediterranean islands, or gangsters who need to resolve conflicts outside of the law, or wild west cowboys, hard masculinity has a function. It's a warning signal, like a skull t-shirt or the stripes on a poisonous snake. And the poison is vengeance, justice served. So revenge is arguably the most basic form of retributive justice. The philosopher Francis Bacon defined revenge as "wild justice", according to the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article about revenge.
Research! I am very smart, nyaa. 🤓
But in most modern legal systems, revenge is frowned upon and for pretty good reasons. An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind, didn't you know that? If someone harms you and you get revenge by killing him, then his family is gonna try to get revenge by killing you. It's a cycle, a cycle of smashing.
At the end of "The Odyssey", the families and the suitors Odysseus killed band together and plot to get revenge by killing Odysseus. And literally the last thing that happens in the Odyssey is that the goddess Athena– who has an inexplicable lady boner for Odysseus, steps in and saves him by just making the families forget that Odysseus killed their children. So only divine intervention and amnesia stops the cycle of violence. But in reality, that doesn't happen very much. So these cycles can last for decades or even centuries.
In Albania, there's an ancient code called “The Kanun” which requires a family to commit murder in order to preserve their honor when another family offends against them. Life for life, blood for blood. This historically led to blood feuds between families that could last for generations. And in fact it still sometimes happens in parts of Northern Albania. There's documentaries on YouTube about families who are trapped at home, possibly for the rest of their lives, because there's a vendetta against them and if they leave the house they'll be murdered.
Historically blood feuds led to a high mortality rate for young men, which may have contributed to the tradition of what are called Albanian sworn virgins. These are assigned female at birth people, who would take a vow of chastity in exchange for getting to live as men. There's still some of them around, and in a very patriarchal society they're socially recognized as men, allowed to wear men's clothes, use a male name uwu, act as head of a household, inherit family wealth, and generally have the rights and privileges of a man.
Extremely happy trans sounds uwu. 🇦🇱🏳️⚧️
I bring this up just because I think it shows how devastating the blood feuds must've been. Because only desperation would lead a European country hundreds of years ago to support trans rights. No one wants that so you know it was a last resort.
"Um, sworn virgins weren't transgender, most were compelled to provid"– Yeah, I know that sweaty. It was just a joke okay calm down.
Revenge cycles also happen on a larger scale between communities, nations, ethnicities, religions. I'm worried if I give a real example, I'll be canceled for seeming neutral about a conflict where I'm supposed to take a side. So…… In the interest of cowardice, let's say that the cat girls bomb the dog girls and then the dog girls bomb the cat girls and that cycle repeats for a few decades. And by that point, both nations have such a long and bitter list of grievances against each other, that reconciliation is close to impossible.
Extremely angry gay sounds, nyaa. 😠
So a revenge-based code of honor is not really an ideal justice system. It's bloody, it's chaotic, and it produces these endless cycles of violence. So at some point in the growth of a civilization, something has to be done to control the chaos caused by vengeance. And the most popular way to do that is to create a state legal system.
Part Two: Retribution
The extremely heckin cute and valid German sociologist Max Weber defined “the state” as the organization with “a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence”. In an honor society with no rule of law, anyone is allowed to kill someone as long as they do so in accordance with the code of honor. But once you have “the state”, usually only the government is allowed to kill people.
In ancient Babylon, there was a king called Hammurabi who enacted one of the first law codes in the world around 1750 BC, an era that scholars refer to as “History Times”. The code of Hammurabi looked like this, the laws were crudely scratched into the stone using some primitive attempt at writing. I mean, it was like a thousand years ago so, I'm sure they were doing their best.
It's very good sweetie. I'll hang it up on the refrigerator for you. I was expecting this replica to be bigger, sort of a “Spinal Tap” Stonehenge situation.
The actual Hammurabi steles were about seven feet tall, and they were publicly placed in the city so that everyone knew what the laws were. Even though most people were illiterate but hey, they tried sort of. Let's read some of Hammurabi's laws, that’s content right?
Catgirl REACTS to the code of Hammurabi. Nyaaasss queen! ⚖️
We don't deserve rights. 🤪
So there's 282 laws and they're all in if-then form so if you do X, then the punishment is Y. Law 22:
“If anyone is committing a robbery and is caught, then he shall be put to death.”
That's extremely valid.
“If a son of a paramour or prostitute say to his adoptive father or mother ‘you are not my father or my mother’ his tongue shall be cut off”. - Law 192
Well at least they're standing up for adoptive parents.
“If a man put out the eye of another man, his eye shall be put out.” - Law 196
Now we're getting into some of the classics.
“If he break another man's bone, his bone shall be broken.” - Law 197
“If a freed man strike the body of another freed man, he shall pay 10 shekels in money.” - Law 204
“If the slave of a freed man strike the body of a freed man, his ear shall be cut off.” - Law 205
Oh, so there's different punishments for different classes. So it's like our legal system except honest.
“If a builder build a house for someone and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built fall in and kill its owner, then that builder shall be put to death.” - Law 229
“If it killed the son of the owner the son of that builder shall be put to death.” - Law 230
Okay, so by modern standards the code of Hammurabi does not pass the vibe check. The vibrations are very negative. It's a lot of cutting people's hands off and burning them alive, just a major vibe killer all around.
But you have to credit Hammurabi's code for resolving the problem of honor-driven revenge cycles. You know if you live in Babylon and someone harms you, instead of retaliating against their family and potentially starting a generations long blood feud, you take your grievance to the elders of the city who reach a verdict and impose a sentence, justice served.
So the involvement of a neutral third party is one major difference between vigilante revenge and a state legal system of retributive justice. Let's list all the differences. Revenge is personal in the sense that it's the victim who does the avenging. It's often emotional, an act of passion. It can be disproportionate, as in Odysseus killing the suitors for squatting in his palace. And it's sadistic, it's satisfying to the avenger; revenge is sweet.
On the other hand, a legal system of retributive justice is impersonal in the sense that the punishment is imposed by a third party, the state, and not the victim. It's therefore disinterested, so not in theory motivated by emotion and also lacking the sadism of sweet revenge. It's also proportionate, again in theory.
You know an eye for an eye sounds brutal, but it's an eye for an eye and no more than an eye, and that could be considered humane compared to say revenge killing someone's family for an eye. And it's also consistent. So different offenders are supposed to get the same punishment for the same crime. I mean unless you're rich in which case, don't you even worry your little head about it, just pay some gold, it's fine.
Girl these contacts, like– ↗️👄↖️
🙀
So there are supposed to be these differences between revenge and retributive justice. Which is why it's so inappropriate for law enforcement to identify with the outlaw Punisher. Modern criminal sentencing accepts retribution as a goal, while rejecting revenge as lawless.
However, I feel that retributive justice is still spiritually akin to revenge. It scratches the same emotional itch. It's basically revenge by proxy. If revenge is wild justice, then retributive justice is domesticated revenge. In both cases there's a drive to restore the moral order of things, to balance out the karma by harming the person who caused harm. Sometimes in a “poetic justice” kind of way.
Like in the code of Hammurabi, there's this symbolic retaliation of punishing the body part that you offended with. Cutting off the hand that struck the father, cutting off the breasts of the wet nurse who switched the babies, cutting out the tongue that renounced its parents. There's a kind of aesthetic dimension to this, an appreciation for this symmetry of punishment and crime. For a modern example here's a poetic justice post from r/instantkarma:
"Mugshots.com puts people's mugshots online, and then demands payment to take them down. The site's founders were just arrested for extortion. Here are their mugshots."
There's something metaphysically pleasant about poetic justice, this sense of beautiful cosmic harmony. And my guess is that this way of thinking originates in some primeval human instinct that's difficult to get rid of. But, that doesn't mean we shouldn't question it. The logic of retribution has been questioned for thousands of years by philosophers, reformists, messiahs. You know, fancy people who think they're too good to enjoy violence.
One school of anti-retribution thought we could call the “love and forgiveness” school. And the main “love and forgiveness” guy, is a preachy lib you may have heard of called Jesus of Nazareth. Back in Bible times, the Hebrews had laws of retributive justice that were similar to the code of Hammurabi. Like in the book of Exodus, God gives a bunch of laws to Moses including some relaunches of Hammurabi classics.
Viewers at home may now open up your Bibles to Exodus 21:22: ✝️
“If people are fighting and hit a pregnant woman and she gives birth prematurely, but there is no serious injury, the offender must be fined whatever the woman's husband demands and the court allows. But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.”
Headpats for headpats. Welcome to catgirl Bible study nyaa. Extremely devotional gay sounds uwu. 😇
I feel very spiritually aroused right now. My third eye chakra? Dripping. Macaroni in a pot. 🤪
I need Jesus. I'm so sorry. 😜
So the law of Moses is pretty based and uncucked. It's basically an eye for an eye, don't be a homo, you know basic common sense. But then Jesus comes along and he's riding his high horse of love and forgiveness. In Matthew 26:52, a disciple tries to defend Jesus from being arrested after Judas betrays him, but Jesus says:
"Put your sword back in its place… all who draw the sword will die by the sword."
Now some people read that as saying that violence begets violence and should be renounced, even to the point where you shouldn't defend yourself. Which is peak radical centrism. Denying the right of marginalized people to defend themselves? Rethink this. It gets worse. In the sermon on the mount, Jesus says:
"Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you."
Love your enemies? But I don't wanna love my enemies. No loving, smashing! 😠
But maybe, Jesus wasn't as literal-minded as that. You know religion is a very subjective thing and I have my own Bible interpretations. And my personal view, is that a lot of what Jesus says is actually sarcasm. Like, consider Matthew 5:38. Why is no one talking about Matthew 5:38? Jesus says:
"You've heard that it was said, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. But I say to you, do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone's strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also."
Think of the drama of what he's asking you to do here. Someone strikes you across the face and you go, "Uhhhh." This is not pacifism. This is passive aggression, some sort of primeval Hebrew shade. This is the Christianity of: “Okay. Well, I'll pray for you”. 😇 💅
But if you do take Jesus at face value then I would argue that his endorsement of love and forgiveness as a response to wrongdoing, is not justice at all. It's an alternative to justice. In the absence of justice, forgiveness is an emotional unburdening of the resentment and anger that victims of injustice experience. And religion often provides this release, instructing people not to worry too much about serving earthly justice, because justice is really God's business, and he'll take care of that when the day of judgment comes.
It's a little bit like in Hinduism and Buddhism there's the idea of karma, which is like a cosmic law of moral cause and effect that exists independently of any God or human institution. You reap what you sow basically, so maybe don't worry about injustice too much cause karma will take care of it.
This kind of thinking is sometimes called the “just world fallacy”, the cognitive bias that sees the world as inherently fair and good. "Everything happens for a reason". If something really horrible happens, like a child is murdered, people say, "There's a special place in God's kingdom for little angels taken up so soon". And then they'll fantasize about the killer going to hell and being anally demolished by fire demons or whatever. People reassure themselves like this because it relieves the stress of enduring unresolved injustice.
In the Bible, the book of Job deals with the problem of injustice. Why do bad things happen to good people? And the answer is, just don't worry about it. It's part of God's plan. It'll all work out in the end. It's fine. Everything's fine.
The alternative is being burdened with the awareness that the world is just kind of, very not good. In which case you might start getting ideas in your head about, I don't know, maybe changing some things. I guess I should disclaimer that #NotAllReligion, and obviously many political activists have been influenced by faith. But let's put a pin in that for now.
Part Three: Utilitarianism
So there's also a secular tradition of anti-retribution thinking which tries to define justice as something other than retaliation. Utilitarian reformists have argued that the goal of criminal justice should be to improve society rather than punishment for punishment's sake.
Utilitarianism is the moral theory which says that the right thing to do is whatever causes the highest ratio of human happiness to human suffering. So the utilitarian approach to punishment looks forward at preventing future crimes, where retribution looks backward at punishing past crimes, revenge by proxy.
Some utilitarian punishment goals might be: deterrence, punishing criminals as an incentive for others not to offend, or incapacitation of criminals in prisons, or rehabilitation of criminals– trying to educate or discipline them so that they can reenter society.
A lot of people consider these utilitarian goals to be more rational and scientific than retribution, which is very based in emotions. Also the utilitarian idea of justice makes sense even if you don't believe in free will. Cause retribution really only makes sense if you believe that people freely choose their actions and are therefore culpable for their behavior and can be deserving of punishment. Because punishing someone for something they didn't meaningfully choose seems, well...
The Greek historian Herodotus tells a story about the Persian King Xerxes ordering the sea to be whipped with 300 lashes after a storm destroyed his bridge. Which seems irrational, right? To punish a force of nature.
Leave my beautiful wet wife alone! 🌊
It's debatable how free humans are. Like we're at least partially products of our genetics, our environment, our upbringing, our Hogwarts house, the placement of Venus in our natal chart, dry, oily or combination.
And modern criminal sentencing tries to take all of that into consideration. Like you might get a lighter sentence if you argue that, you know, your mother never took you to Disneyland, it was a crime of passion. “Through no fault of my own, I was high on bath salts at the time of the tax evasion, your honor”.
A lot of the language around punishment in our legal system is utilitarian. Like, prisons are called "correctional facilities" and not "retribution cages." But "correctional facilities" is a euphemism, because the fact is these facilities are not doing very much correcting. I'm sorry. In the United States, two-thirds of released prisoners are rearrested within three years, and 76% are rearrested within five years.
And just think about the way we talk about incarceration. Like if someone really evil gets a long sentence, we say: "Good. I hope he rots in prison". Like when was the last time you heard about a criminal sentencing and someone said: "Good. the proven efficacy of our correctional facilities will rehabilitate this man and release him a contributing member of his community".
So even the institutions we have, that are supposed to serve a correctional or rehabilitative function are still obviously satisfying our urge to punish. I think the problem with utilitarianism is that while it's very rational, it's often offensive to human emotions. And you can say facts don't care about your feelings, we shouldn't be basing our legal system on whatever sadistic caprice passes through your mind. And I agree with you. But the fact remains, if someone hurts your child, you don't wanna rehabilitate him. You wanna set him on fire. And this disconnect between the legal system and human emotion affects law enforcement too.
A YouTuber called José has a video called "Why Some Cops Think They're The Punisher," which argues that some cops and soldiers admire The Punisher because they relate to his military background while fantasizing about the moral simplicity of his vigilantism. Jose quotes from interviews with military Punisher fans who say things like:
"Castle doesn't see shades of grey, which, unfortunately, the American justice system is littered with and which tends to slow down and sometimes even hinder victims of crime from getting the justice they deserve.”
“Frank Castle is the ultimate definition of Occam's razor for the military. Don't worry about uniforms, inspections or restrictive rules of engagement. Find the bad guys. Kill the bad guys. Protect the innocent. Any true warrior? That's the dream."
So these cops and soldiers feel cramped by rules of engagement and use of force restrictions that are keeping them from serving swift and brutal justice. You know, “law enforcement would be a lot easier if it weren't for all these pesky laws”.
There's a childish simplicity and dualism to this moral worldview. “Find the bad guys, kill the bad guys”. Again, it reminds me of the NRA rhetoric about how you need a “good guy” with a gun to stop a “bad guy with a gun”. They sound like eight year old boys playing Cops and Robbers. "Good guys and bad guys".
Pew pew pew pew pew pew. That's my impression of an eight year old boy.
And to be fair, I totally understand the appeal of moral simplicity. People love “Justice Served” and “Instant Karma” videos for a reason. We take satisfaction in swift, decisive, elegant retribution. But the procedures of law enforcement and criminal justice don't allow for that. There's all these tedious roadblocks, right to an attorney, right to remain silent, right to a fair trial, presumption of innocence.
A lot of police wish they could simplify things by being judge, jury, and executioner. But the function of police is supposed to be limited to making arrests and initiating criminal investigations. They're not supposed to be walking avatars of karma dispensing free-form retribution in the streets at will, justice served, “now with 20% more police brutality”. But a lot of people defend the police when they behave like this, because the thin-wristed civilians are just as emotionally frustrated by due process as the cops.
Wow did I just say "All Lives Are Bastards"? I'm double canceled.
Well look, all lives are bastards, but only some bastards are armed by the state and licensed to go bastarding around town. The rest of us have to be bastards on our off-time. I also think there's a secular version of the “just world” fallacy going on here. People like to think that if the police kill somebody, it must be because that person did something wrong. Karma at work, justice served.
“Victim blaming” is an expression of the just world fallacy. You get what you deserve, so if something bad happens to you, you must have been asking for it. And obviously racism is a huge part of this. You know, there's structural white supremacy that occupies Black neighborhoods with police instead of investing in communities, and people are prejudiced and more likely to think of Black people as criminal thugs and therefore deserving of police violence.
So we get this "no angel" discourse that comes up every time a Black person is murdered by the police. Where they bring up the victim's criminal record or a picture of them looking like a scary thug, as if that proves they deserved to die. The problem with this, of course, is that no one is an angel. There are no angels walking this earth. We're all flawed, we've all made mistakes, we've all done bad things. That doesn't mean we deserve to die a violent death.
And then there's people like Breonna Taylor and Elijah McClain who as far as we know were about as close to angels as humans come, but that didn't protect them. Though that is 100% beside the point, because Black people in America should not literally have to have white feather wings and glowing halos to deserve not to be murdered by the police.
In fact, people of all races have the absolute right to be low life, drug addicted, petty criminals who contribute absolutely nothing to society and yet still not be executed by the cops, because that's what it's supposed to mean to live in a free country.
So, things need to change. The Punisher police have got to go, and a lot of the rest of our justice system with them. We need to imagine a whole new approach to justice. And to be honest, that might take more than one YouTube video.
I know at the beginning I said I was gonna explain what justice is, but…… I lied. 🙈
I'm sorry that I can't fix America. I'm just a lonely cat. 😿
I guess the only solution is… revolution. And by revolution, I do mean vote Democrat and then bully the Democrats into actually doing something. And if they don't listen, well……
☏
Hang on, let me get this. 📞 Moshi moshi? Heyhowareyou desu!
😾 *hissing*
To be continued…