When Morrison was about two years old, her family's landlord set fire to the house in which they lived, while they were home, because her parents could not afford to pay rent.
Come on! Why would you go out of the way to burn somebody's house down, or beat up a person so bad the person get permanent injury[1]? I dont even try to understand how the state ignores the law breaking, states are complex, but a common man doing such things? I can't understand how a person looks in the mirror and not think of himself as a wretch and a demon(?).
I am from Portugal and I am sorry we lost ultramarine territories because i consider the peoples from Angola, Guinea and Mozambique as kindred. But we definitely deserved to lose them with prejudice. What was done to those citizens has no name, and as such I condone their right to arm against their oppressors the same as I would if any other citizen was singled out like they were. I also think all ex-Portuguese peoples(except Brazil) should have the right to claim Portuguese citizenship if they wish to.
All this to say I am very scarred of these events, because if they were so prevalent, it must be very easy to become a monster. I am just ignorant of how, yet.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_X?useskin=vector#Hinto...
Jill¹, who I've known since we were both quite young, is barely a generation removed from the Australian frontier wars, massacres for a century+ prior to 1930², something her parents lived through.
¹ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UKu3bCbFck
² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coniston_massacre
( two geographically seperate references, I know .. it's to carry a point not to join a specific person to a specific event, which could be done )
Divisive rhetoric that creates "us" vs "them" groups. Then comes the dehumanization and rationalization of violence against the othered group. I recall people calling for violence against people who refused to wear masks during covid, as the most recent example that comes to mind. An environment where neighbors are incited to turn against their neighbor breeds monsters.
While rhetoric can increase things, humans seem to have an inherent us-versus-them mechanism whereby clans/tribes are easily created psychologically.
A couple of chapters mentioning various experiments in Ezra Klein's book:
There's a funny spectrum between like, someone intentionally infecting the water supply of a city with a disease as bioterrorism which is obviously a crime which society at large agrees the police to use violence against the perpetrator to stop the act from happening, arrest the perpetrator and put them in jail. And then at the other end of the spectrum is things like spreading HIV, herpes or Covid which different people have varying opinions on whether that's acceptable, bad but non-criminal or criminally harmful to the people being infected.
Humans have very natural intuition around some types of harm or violence - directly observable things like punching or stabbing someone. But if the harm is more indirect and not directly observable, things like pollution or spreading disease, we don't have the same immediate fight-or-flight activation type of recognition and so we are often more lenient towards the perpetrators of those types of harm.
Not comparable. There is "us vs them" based on identity attributes someone is born with, that they have no control over, like their skin color, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and then there is "us vs them" based on someone's deliberate choice to be anti-social, belligerent, and put others at needless risk.
Neither justifies violence threats, but they are not the same thing.
If humanity came across a group of purple aliens, how we would treat them would depend on how advanced they are.
If they were on the level of advanced animals, we might trap them and exhibit them. Keep them in cages and "study" them.
If they were much more advanced than us (maybe the can communicate with us, or zap one of us to death with lasers) we would submit and seek cooperation, and humble ourselves before them.
"My tenants are not paying me rent. I have a wonderful idea! What if I burn down my rental home so that I can perpetuate my inability collect rental income?"