I will often see videos online of someone attacking someone being annoying online followed by comments cheering on the attacker and down voting or arguing with the person if they say the attacker shouldn’t have attacked the person for being annoying or rude.
Can someone explain to me why people cheer on violence like this? For example I saw a video of a guy riding his bike through a crowd like a jerk. An older man pushes him off his bike and the comments are full of people either praising the pusher or saying, “next time make it look like an accident.” I honestly don’t get the idea of encouraging this behavior. Especially since pushes have lead to involuntary manslaughter cases where the person who fell hit their head and died.
Comments
Because there are too many entitled assholes that are rude and do what they want because there are no consequenses.
You’re giving this more thought than the instagram commenters are.
People like it when annoying or offensive people are “punished” for being annoying or offensive. Consequences be damned. Obviously that’s not always smart, because they could hit their head or whatever.
But the commenters aren’t giving it that much though when they text a comment from the toilet or from bed at 1am when they should be sleeping
You could argue that a guy riding his bike through a crowd could cause a serious accident, and stopping him would be self-defense.
In any case you’re way overthinking this. People like to see bullies getting a taste of their own medicine. I don’t personally condone it and I don’t really like fight videos and shit like that, but I understand it.
Easy, because people want actions they deem as bad to have consequences. Your bike example would never be punished by “proper” channels, or it would take a long time.
People like seeing people they deem as bad to be punished, and they want it fast.
Because violence is the voice of those who feel marginalized and unheard.
I think there’s two sides to this.
1: People like to see assholes get humbled. It doesnt necessarily need to be with violence. I think a cop coming out of nowhere and arresting them non-violently would get a similar response.
2: A lot of people secretly love and crave violence. But they mask it.
People have a strong sense of justice.
However, a justice system takes forever and has to go through a lot of checks and balances.
I think one of the best video examples I can think of has this younger kid at a skate park threatening a much older, much bigger kid with a hammer.
Here’s the issue. The smaller kid posed no threat to the bigger one hand to hand. But still could have caused significant and even permanent damage with one good hammer swing.
The older kid throws a leg sweep and drops the younger kid hard, who you can hear screaming after (IIRC).
The problem here is that there would have been no repricussions for the smaller kid, UNLESS he caused a significant injury. And even then, given his age, it wouldn’t have been fitting.
The older kid had no obligation to let himself get hurt. So he attacked first. And there was a lot of outrage about that.
But many others thought this was “true justice”.
That’s where a lot of people support vigilante justice. It’s not that we prefer it over regular justice.
We know it’s not a choice between vigilante justice and the legal system working.
It’s a choice between vigilante justice….or no justice.
Feels good. People feel cheated by life (cause they are) so sometimes they just say fuck it, I’m enjoying mine. We’re all susceptible to this.