this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2024
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"Mob justice" is a boogeyman invented to distract you from the fact that the cops and the state give you no justice at all.
It's not even mob justice, it's vigilante justice. It just so happens in this case practically everyone is pretty happy about it having happened.
The mob never called for this CEO's death, we're just not sad he was killed. Even if in general most of us wouldn't actively call for people to be killed.
If it makes CEOs afraid, then fantastic, a nice happy side-bonus.
Yeah, and that's all true, but in the comment I replied to was room for the implication that "mob justice" is a problem somehow.
We're told it would be chaos, some great threat to society, but like, the only examples of mobs that I can think of doing any real damage are groups whose immediate aims were supported by the ruling class. Lynchings in the US south were openly permitted and encouraged by the entrenched white supremacist police state. Witch burnings were encouraged by the state to disenfranchise women from power over their own bodies, and they laid the foundations for capitalism.
Then those horrific examples of state oppression are presented to us as examples of the horrors that await if we were to ever stop bowing to that same state and take matters into our own hands.
Even if the person making the comment didn't intend to reinforce that notion, it's a default assumption for many people and I didn't want it to stand unchallenged.