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Comment by scoofy | Hacker News Reader

This is exactly the point of part one of Fist Stick Knife Gun: A Personal History of Violence, by Geoffrey Canada. Unequal or lack of access to the executive branch of government will create a culture of vigilantism and lends itself to organized crime as a replacement for the policing arm of the state.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fist%2C_Stick%2C_Knife%2C_Gun

People become okay with vigilante justice when they see the executive branch as compromised, just look at the insane plot/ending of the film Singham.

Many people see this happening in the US. We should expect to see more vigilante justice and organized crime if we see the executive branch as having a significant principal-agent problem.

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Re: Organized crime.

Organized crime is also going to escalate as the economic squeeze continues to hit white collar workers. Pumping out a bunch of computer science graduates and rendering them unemployable isn't going to lead to all of them giving up and working at Walmart. A certain amount are going to figure out that they can make a better living by going black hat. Likewise for all the office managers, etc. who are put out of a job as belts tighten. Threatening the livelihoods of people who were led to expect a certain standard of living and who can organize and exploit systems is exactly how you end up with organized crime. Doubly so when the burden is falling on the young, who have more appetite for risky decisions.

When I say organized crime, I don’t just mean intelligent criminals. I mean a culture of loyalty. For organized crime to function, all of the members need to have a system of justice underpinning their actions in order to keep the organization whole.

I agree with you. I think such a culture is more likely to arise when you have people who believe in the idea of loyalty but haven't seen it bear fruit in their lives, and who are used to acting within such an organizational framework, which describes a fair number of the workers who either are being displaced or feel themselves to be.

Yea, I think that's fair.

We gave up violence and made the state the authority but thats contingent on the social contract being upheld.

We did this in the late 1800's and early 1900's because the upper classes understood that they needed to be afraid of the masses. Prior to that political violence seems like it was the order of the day. The US has always had a pretty strong aristocracy, but the aristocrats were variously either moral people or they at least had enough of a sense of self-preservation that they wouldn't get too greedy.

One of the most interesting aspects of the policing power in the premodern era was the existence and split of a powerful church.

Religious institutions had some access to legitimate violence in a way that the state couldn’t control. Once authoritarianism gave way to more democratic governance, that effectively disappeared.

not in the UK (or the US) since king Henry VIII made himself Pope of his new Anglican Church in the 1500s

And then the upper classes stirred racial resentment and sent Pinkerton to rough up and kill strikers.

I wonder how much the complete impunity of those involved with Jeffery Epstein has destroyed the faith in the executive branch? People like Leon Black, Les Wexner and a couple of presidents not only escaped justice, but pretty much any scrutiny by any institution, media included. I think it's hard for people to look at that and not think they need to take the law into their own hands.

I’m surely out of the loop here but what crimes are there evidence of Leon Black or Les Wexner having committed?

Participating in the child sex trafficking ring, although Wexner's involvement goes far deeper.

The evidence being…

It blows my mind that people still think Epstein is just a big conspiracy theory and nothing happened.

Pam Bondi said Epstein's black book was on her desk ready to be released, and then a month later she said it didn't exist. She couldn't have been telling the truth both times.

The camera in Epstein's jail cell "failed" for the exact two minutes he was (supposedly) killing himself before magically starting to work again.

Congress told the DOJ to release unredacted documents, and they said "F** you" and released redacted (properly redacted, even) documents any way.

But you're asking a random guy on HN for evidence that there's a cover up and crimes going on. It's pretty clear the powers that be don't want the evidence released, or it would have been already.

> The camera in Epstein's jail cell "failed" for the exact two minutes he was (supposedly) killing himself before magically starting to work again

Why are you lying about this? How does it benefit you?

It takes less than a minute to find this claim disproven in detail https://www.wired.com/story/the-fbis-jeffrey-epstein-prison-...

The idea that the cut happened when Epstein was supposedly killing himself is something you invented yourself, not something even remotely supported by evidence.

I'm confused what your core disagreement is? It seems like you're narrowing in on some relatively unimportant detail. Using your own source, what is the likely explanation for the tape shenanigans? Who cares if op was inaccurate to the exact specifics of the missing footage? Or am I not understanding the implication of the article you cited?

> relatively unimportant detail

GP invented the claim that the timing of the missing footage happened to coincide with Epstein’s death.

That’s not an unimportant detail! If their claim was true, that’d in fact be credible evidence that Epstein was murdered.

I don’t think the sources matter, you won’t find a single vaguely credible one that supports the crucial claim here.

Okay, I got that part wrong, but doesn't the fact it was edited out make it even more convincing there' a coverup? There's not even plausible deniability when it's been edited.

They edited out cameras restarting at exactly midnight?

That seems totally unsurprising to anyone who has ever worked with real CCTV setups, they’re flaming heaps of garbage from garbage suppliers set up by garbage contractors.

Epstein was murdered in a high security prison so that he does not talk.

Lex's entire net worth was managed by Epstein, both before and after the conviction.

Yeah, I think if we're wondering why having a convicted child sex offender as your tax evasion specialist is bad... well?

Yeah, especially that same offender who was let off easy with 12 unindicted co-conspirators because he "belonged to intelligence" and had deep ties to Mossad.

Yeah, I'd totally let that guy manage my billions after all that.

> just look at the insane plot/ending of the film Singham.

What does that even mean?

Spoiler alert for the film. The film ends, not with any kind of officially sanctioned justice, but with a completely extrajudicial killing, for which audiences are expected to cheer. This is exactly the point of an untrustworthy executive branch getting us cheering for what is essentially organized crime that favors our side over another.

Just watched the end scenes and this more like an execution in a heroic light.

I have not seen something like this in this significants, vibe and presumed statement in western media. There are a many examples of uncelebrated murderes of “the bad guy” which the hero does not want or does “against their will” but I have seen no western examples of this kind of celebration of killing the bad guy.

ok instead of depending on movies you can look and learn from history. Look up the French Revolution.

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