“Why don’t our daughters visit us, Jim?” (Actually, it might be just physical abuse, but still.)

Well, it’s already established that she does extensive research on her victims. I think it’s reasonable to assume she knew as much about the judge as she did about the rapists he (probably) set free, or the mercenaries.

From what we’ve seen, I don’t think it’s easy to separate justice from vengeance. For one thing, there’s a degree to which vengeance is a necessary part of justice. That’s why worse crimes are supposed to result in harsher sentences. It’s the idea that “you inflicted X amount of harm on your victim, so now the state will attempt to inflict a like amount of harm on you”. I’ll be the first to point out that it doesn’t always (or maybe doesn’t usually) work that way, but that’s the idea behind it.

Moonshadow is absolutely helping certain people take vengeance, and I more than half-suspect that she’s using that as a kind of catharsis for wrongs that have been committed against her. But the thing is, she’s not going after people the system punished. And she’s not going after random people who happened to escape justice. She’s going after a select group of people who the justice system regularly fails to catch and punish. There’s a large degree to which that really has to be about justice—at least in addition to, if not in place of, revenge.

Sure, absolutely. Witness the way she nearly killed a bystander just to get away from Alison.

‘strokes imaginary moustache’ before seeking revenge, dig two graves.

I don’t think this is about preventive publicity.
I think she’s acting out of basic hatred and a need for revenge.
I can believe not everybody’s got the same drives, but I can honestly attest to wanting someone I hated a great deal dead and that I only lacked the means and motive to make it happen.

And revenge can be intensely satisfying. Especially when it can be inflicted a few more times. Righteous revenge followed by really crunching your malefactor is one of the purest pleasures of life.

The “two graves” line is a relevant maxim, but there’s nothing carved in stone that says you’ll forever be wrecked because of what revenge spurs you to do.

How has it been established that she’s doing extensive research? She’s only had one motive rant (against the soldiers) and from the news report of their deaths it didn’t sound like there was anything terribly secret about what they’d done. It’s not like she’s had someone tied to a chair and told them about how she tracked the secret bribes they made to avoid prison time or something else that you couldn’t expect to find with a search engine.

Idk, to me killing the judge just felt like the “Asshole Victim” trope being applied to increase moonshadow’s body count while still having a sense of justification. Sure, she could have killed him over his verdict, but him being a wife-beater among other possible implications is there to give moonshadow a better reason to the reader.

This post just serves to highlight how fundamentally flawed the assumptions behind ‘justice’ really are. Vengeance is a stupid, petty emotion that should never have been enshrined into law. People who are unsafe should be removed from society for the safety of others, naturally. But punishment does not rehabilitate; the recidivism rate of convicts is over 90%, and harsh penalties do not deter people mentally ill enough to commit violent crimes. Meanwhile, when we treat crime as an outgrowth of mental illness, we make real progress. As an example, the complete decriminalization of all drugs in Portugal has lowered crime rates and even lowered the rate of drug use. That’s right, even though there’s no risk to buying the drugs usage rates went DOWN. Why? Because Portugal took the money they used to spend on busting vice and invested in counseling programs for addicts. The moral of the story: you make society better by building people up, not tearing them down.

If anything, all prisons should be replaced with high security psychiatric hospitals – you go in until you’re no longer a danger to yourself and others, and in the meantime we get to learn more about criminal psychology by having the opportunity to directly observe the diseased mind. Killing a couple dozen rapists accomplishes very little. Finding the commonalities between the brains of a couple dozen rapists could lead us to identify and treat people before they ever rape, and is worth infinitely more than small-minded revenge.

If Moonshadow has to use lethal force to prevent a rape, that’s a debate worth having. But what she’s doing right now isn’t just about subverting the rule of law – it’s about costing us an opportunity to find a cure for the problem of rape itself. The number of people who rape is a tiny fraction of the population (thankfully!), but that also means that each rapist we don’t study makes it that much harder to get statistically significant data samples. The opportunity cost alone makes her a monster, but people blinded by ‘justice’ will defend her because they can’t think deeply enough to consider the future.

Oh I understand completely, I didn’t think you were arguing in favor of it at all – I just used it as a jumping off point to make my post, so sorry if I gave you the wrong impression. You just got me thinking and I wanted to add my spin on things. =)

Shino, where to begin…

First of all, I’m not “a dude.” Second of all, I’ve been professionally diagnosed with a constellation of mental illnesses. In fact later today I’m going to be calling around for a new therapist because I’ve just moved to a new town. Third, I am intimately aware of what it’s like to be hurt by another person – it’s one of the main reasons why I’ve been in treatment since my early teens – and I am not here to make apologies for people who hurt other people. And fourth, I was “a psych” myself, and until my illness became too much to manage I used to work with other survivors in a professional capacity. Unless you have been doing the same for longer than I have, I have seen more suffering than you can even imagine. I am not some strawman for you to belittle and work out your anger issues on, and the way you spoke to me was completely inappropriate.

We don’t yet fully understand why people rape. It’s not enough to blame the culture, and it’s completely inaccurate to say that 90% of rapists are men. If anything, when I’ve worked with survivors in the past the biggest component seems to be a failure to respect boundaries in interpersonal relationships – the vast majority of rapists are family members or friends, regardless of gender. Yet the conversation keeps getting steered back to the culture war – are skirts too short, are men too entitled – because that’s familiar territory for people with an axe to grind. People like you, incidentally. You are retarding progress on this issue by flying off the handle and speaking from ignorance, because that is not where the answer will be found. This is not something that will be solved by yelling at people you disagree with (what is?), but by collecting more data so that we can solve this riddle:

“Despite coming from the same background, going to the same schools, living in the same locations, living with the same families, and having the same basic experiences as their peers, why is there is a (thankfully small) percent of men and women who feel entitled, compelled, or unable to prevent their violation of another person’s autonomy, safety, and body?”

If you want to help, advocate for greater investment in mental health care, and for screening of children in school for risk factors; this will help catch people before they wind up hurting themselves or others, as well as give us more data to work with. You can also become a researcher yourself and be part of the solution that way. But right now? You are only part of the problem.