this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2023
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Had me nodding in agreement until that last line.
Cruz's Crime is not "100% society's fault." Cruz literally and figuratively pulled that trigger. At best maybe a 50:50, but to completely absolve Cruz of any wrongdoing is asinine.
I don't think that the blame assigned is in the literal sense I think it is in the philosophical sense.
Meaning the chain of events that led here had many MANY interruption points where society could have prevented this from escalating. There is no 1 person to blame for this entire thing, it's a shared societal burden.
It's essentially the Swiss Cheese Model for society and social outbursts.
Edit: I'm not saying what happened wasn't wrong, I'm saying is that we can prevent this shit, and we keep failing over and over.
What I find weird about this is how unbalanced people assign blame. A white young male mass shooter: absolutely society's fault.
When anybody else does something bad, the internet is much less forgiving.
Take an incredibly tame example as comparison: Amber Heard. The internet hates that person, although her life was shit and she isn't even a murderer. I've never ever seen someone say it's society's fault that she acted like a douche.
Or take another mass shooter: Andrew Bing, who was a young black man and killed 6. You don't have people on communities like 4chan, Lemmy and Reddit falling all over themselves blaming society and discussing his tragic life.
It does come off a lot as if the average person online, has a much easier time to sympathise with some people. And in consequence they give these people much more leeway than others.
I completely agree. However, if we're talking about solutions, blaming someone like this doesn't get us anywhere, and it certainly won't prevent another similar tragedy.
The people interested in actually solving this problem aren't wasting their time on the motives of the shooters. They are all aberrations, but when the number of aberrations starts rising, that tells you there's a problem in the system, and treating the symptoms won't make it go away.
It will prevent a similar tragedy by blaming him because that involves locking him up so he can't do it again.
You're missing the point when people say it won't solve future issues. Yes, lock the perpetrator up (ignoring the issues with the penal system in the first place), that's a no brainier. But locking up that person and placing all the blame at their feet doesn't do anything for the other people in very similar situations.
Then we're in complete agreement. I think perhaps I'm not the one missing points here.
The person you were talking to was making a broader societal point. Placing the blame for this whole situation, which is the fruit of many of the failings of society, just enacted through a single man, and saying we're good 'cause that boogeyman is dead or in prison does NOTHING to address the root causes, the actual problems. That's the point you're missing.
I understand exactly what they were trying to say.
Unlike them, I'm not making a broader point, I'm not in a larger discussion of societal reform. Attempting to shift this conversation to that is a fault. If you scroll through this thread I've been extremely consistently saying that Cruz bares responsibility for his actions and condemning him does serve a vital, albeit very disheartening, purpose for all of us.
If you think about it from my perspective it seems that the only purpose of talking about the faults of society in the context of my statements would be to detract from Cruz's guilt, which as I stated previously is asinine.
You're painting a false dichotomy, though. Both of these things can be true at the same time, and in fact are. It does everyone more good to accept that yes, Cruz did a bad thing and should be held accountable, and to accept that, yes, society at large has a hand to play in this.
Can they both be true? Because the post we're under claims 100% of the blame goes to Society. I voiced that this was wrong, and suddenly all of you in the replies want to correct me. Give up, mate, you don't even know what you're fighting for. Cruz is responsible for Cruz's actions, if not wholly than in majority part.
What, exactly, prevents both from being true? Cruz is to blame for his actions. Society is to blame for the conditions that led to the actions. They're both true. We can punish, imprison, whatever, the person who did the crime, while still also acknowledging that there may be other things that led to the thing from happening.
Right, so we agree completely, what then are you here to try to explain? We both claim Cruz is to blame for his actions, and that any actions by society as a whole does not absolve him.