For whatever its worth, I attended, and cried at, Kelsey Hightower's life story. The goodness of someone making it out of a really hard situation is cool and inspiring, but the badness of crime being legitimized on the basis of someone's life experience is deeply upsetting and dangerous. There is also this tiny little detail about that idea being antithetical to liberalism itself, but we don't need to get into that.
I’m not suggesting shoplifting is also not a crime, but it isn’t violent. And when somebody is chasing and grappling you it is a natural reaction to fight back.
So basically it seems like here the violence was perpetrated by the white guy, if we are taking the facts at face value.
The younger Allyn Gibson tried to take a picture of the shoplifter as evidence and he was violently attacked. I don't know where you got the idea that he was the aggressor, but that simply is not the case.
I actually do think the college was right about contacting the dean first. In particular, the store should have excellent security cameras, and when somebody steals, you send the forensic-grade evidence to the dean, asking if they would like the photos to be shared with the police or whether the university should handle the matter internally.
We're interested in achieving justice. Justice which is defined by our democratically determined court system.
Why do you think being parsimonious is a better objective than being just?
The legal system is far from perfect, but it is often better than the alternative.
Why do you think there aren't? You realize not everyone starts off with their race and gender when writing, right?
It's time to step away from the propaganda.
It's not okay to commit crimes against other people because we're all protected equally under the law and because every human being deserves respect and contains something divine. This is the most basic tenant of liberalism. It has for sure not been implemented equally or fairly, and boy-howdy is there a lot of work to do, but I'd venture that suggesting that the baby ought to be thrown out with the bathwater does border on dangerous propaganda.
To some extent this makes sense – there's not much interest in discussing "<thing> that everyone thought was the case turns out be correct!" and there's more meat in controversial issues.
The thing is, clickbait is popular, regardless of how much a particular community might feel they're above it. nd I'll wager there are more than a few people out there who value particular viewpoints more as a direct result of their unpopularity; we all do it sometimes, and it's a way to make yourself feel special.
Regardless of all that, I do generally agree that this obvious culture-war flame-bait Bari Weiss-backed blog post has nothing of interest to contribute to this community. But people have the right to get enthusiastic about whatever they want; best to just flag it and move on.
Meanwhile, there are actual people and businesses being crushed under mob social justice, a far scarier phenomenon.