#mob violence

[otteranha]

Eddie’s trying not to beg Steve to stay. Harrington’s already gone above and beyond for him, he deserves a night to sleep in his own bed. But God, does it have to be now? No one will talk about it except to pat his hand and tell him with tight lipped smiles that there’s nothing to worry about- legally the mob can’t do anything. Eddie’s been declared innocent, a tragic victim of the copycat killer.

It doesn’t change the fact that there’s been a group of people standing vigil outside the hospital since he got there. It doesn’t change the fact that the group has been growing in numbers until all of Hawkins seems to either be fleeing in desperation or taking up camp four floors below the room where Eddie lies unable to walk as far as the bathroom without help. It doesn’t change the energy of the mob, steadily humming louder, faster, with the intensity of a hive about to swarm.

“Should have known he’d be hightailing it when trouble came,” Wayne tells him. He’s furious on Eddie’s behalf that Steve would leave now, when the police protection detail has been declared no longer necessary. When the mob below is bigger than ever and angry enough that Eddie can feel it all the way up here.

“He didn’t want to go, he needs to sleep.” Eddie saw how badly Steve wanted to stay, how he was sweating and jaundiced and worse looking than he had since that first fight with the demobats. Steve needed to go home, deserved to go home. But part of Eddie, most of Eddie, wails inside for Steve not to leave him. Not tonight, please not tonight. He’d tried not to let Steve see it, doubted how well his subterfuge had worked.

“I wish I could stay but I just can’t, not tonight. I’m so sorry. But I promise- Anything goes wrong Eds, I’ll be here. I have to go now but if anyone needs me, if you need me, I’ll be here, I swear it.” He’d done a strange thing then, pressing Eddie’s hand to his brow before kissing the back of it like something out of one of the tales of courtly love Eddie had devoured as an Arthurian-legend obsessed kid. And then Steve was leaving. It was almost nightfall. He stopped in the doorway and looked back at Eddie, his face anguished.

True to form, Eddie rallied. “Go on, and don’t worry about lil’ old me. I’ll be fine.”

The mob waits until just after midnight, then comes for him. They drag him from his bed, and Eddie has an insane thought apt to this insane situation that he’s glad he wore sweatpants under his hospital johnny so at least he’s not going to die bare-assed in front of the remaining population of Hawkins. Or maybe he jinxed himself by assuming the worst when he decided to wear them that night.

He sees the kids being held back by their parents, screaming for him as he’s hauled to the elevator, hopes desperately that Claudia and Karen and Sue and Charles will be strong enough to restrain them. The kids aren’t babies anymore; they’re tough and too used to fighting to protect their own. But this isn’t a fight they can win and he prays that parent-adrenaline will be enough let them wrangle his stupid, brave friends away from his side. He couldn’t keep Wayne away, they’d shouted at each other, all terrified love, him trying to make Wayne go, until the moment the door broke down and he was being dragged, his uncle’s grip still white-knuckled on Eddie’s wrist hard enough to bruise.

Everyone is shouting, himself included. He’s pleading his innocence, swearing he never hurt Chrissy. Until he sees the pyre and all the words evaporate inside him and he’s just screaming. They’re jeering at his tears, his terror. Calling him killer, devil-worshipper, Satan himself and worse. And then- something in the atmosphere shifts.

Eddie doesn’t see why the mob’s screaming changes, he’s hypnotized by the pyre. Do I weigh more than a duck? He thinks. You can’t burn me if I weigh more than a duck and then oh I’m hysterical.

“Get away! Get away from it!” They sound higher pitched now, a note of vibrato in the clamor. The shift in his captors’ tenor finally seeps in and Eddie looks around. The number of people buffeting him to a hideous end is shrinking, people peeling off and running. He can hear gunshots and then-

Snarling. Crunching sounds. Someone- something roaring into the night. It’s just the men holding Eddie now, Carver’s crew mostly. Wayne’s run up beside them and they don’t spare him a glance as he wrenches Eddie away from them. There’s a wolf. Massive, tawny, scarred, absolutely furious- lunging for them, slashing them with razor sharp claws until none of them are left standing. When the last of the mob is gone the wolf pads close and presses against Eddie’s side with a whine.

The kids come sprinting to him. “Jesus Christ, Steve! Well now they’re definitely going to think Eddie’s the lord of evil!” says Mike.

Eddie looks down at the wolf. He still feels like he might have a heart attack any minute, but the warm, soft fur is grounding. Steve Harrington looks up at him under the light of the full moon and wags his tail.

[odinsblog]

[philosophicalconservatism]

The hordes of teenagers that have run amuck in Chicago were witnesses, just three years ago (during their formative years) to a nationwide wave of rioting, looting and violence lasting months, and participated in by thousands of individuals in almost every state of the union with impunity. Most mainstream Leftist commentators at the time simply made light of the behavior, while others actually justified it; including by misquoting the pacifist civil rights leader Martin Luther King jr.

And so we are now teaching the entire upcoming generation that this is acceptable social behavior. We are literally normalizing it. Several posts ago I mentioned the less violent instances of looting going on in San Francisco and in other areas of California. It is a continuously ongoing phenomenon. And Wal-Marts anywhere near the effected area of Chicago are now closing down; an absolutely logical response.

Good Samaritan rescues couple beaten, robbed by downtown mob

Hundreds of teenagers flood into downtown Chicago, smashing car windows, prompting police response

[apenitentialprayer]

Mob-rule knows no respect for persons.

Yan Phou Lee, in his 1887 Graduating Address at Yale College

[vintageterror]

[musewrangler]

He cut the connection and Piett pulled up to the emergency station platform, vaulting over the side of the speeder and running to Max’s side as personnel began to run out.

“What happened?” asked the lead nurse, scanner out and running over Veers’ head wound.

“Hit in the head with a rock,” Piett informed him, trying to keep his tone clinical. “It was thrown from about six feet away. He was able to keep his feet and make it to the speeder with my help.”

The man nodded as the grav sled was prepped and the others prepared to lift the General.

“And his name?”

“General Maximilian Veers.”

Piett jogged alongside the team as they began to move.

“Are you his next of kin?”

“No,” he answered as the doors hissed open to admit them to the warmer air of the hospital. “His wife. Myra Veers—she works here.”

[w-i-m-m]

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Helen Lewis

Published: Aug 18, 2022

A quick question. If someone is yelling “repent” at you in the street, are they more likely to be (a) a religious preacher or (b) a left-wing activist?

The answer depends on where you are. Last October, a crowd gathered outside Netflix’s offices in Los Angeles to protest the release of Dave Chappelle’s comedy special The Closer, which contained a long riff criticizing transgender activists. Inevitably, there was a counterprotest: a lonely Chappelle fan holding a sign that read WE LIKE DAVE. This went over badly. Someone took the sign from him and ripped it up. Someone else shouted in his face, and their word choice was notable. The man who liked Dave was urged to “repent.”

A similar sentiment surfaced last month, when students protested the decision of University College London to stop paying Stonewall, an LGBTQ charity, to audit the institution’s compliance with laws on diversity. That decision might sound dry and technical, but to the students, it showed the institution’s lack of commitment to LGBTQ rights. They held a sign that read rejoin stonewall or go to hell.

This fire-and-brimstone language might initially seem odd, because society is becoming less religious—in the U.S., church membership dropped below 50 percent for the first time in 2020, down from 70 percent in 1999. In Britain, where I live, the decline of organized religion is “one of the most important trends in postwar history,” according to the British Social Attitudes survey. We might expect that religious concepts—repentance, hellfire, heresy, apostasy—would have become less salient as a result. But that’s not the case. For some activists, politics has usurped the role that religion used to play as a source of meaning and purpose in our lives, and a way to find a community.

In the U.S., the nonreligious are younger and more liberal than the population as a whole. Perhaps, then, it isn’t a coincidence that they are also the group most likely to be involved in high-profile social-justice blowups, particularly the type found on college campuses. They’ve substituted one religion for another. In The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff suggest that we look at campus protests as outbreaks of “collective effervescence,” a term coined by the sociologist Emile Durkheim to describe emotions that can be accessed only in a crowd. Singing, swaying, and chanting build up a kind of electricity, which ripples through the group. And that’s how a person can end up screaming “repent” at a stranger for the crime of holding a funny sign.

If you’re isolated, reading and sharing political memes and commentary is one way to find like-minded people; meanwhile, social media and dating apps encourage us to label ourselves so that we can be instantly categorized by algorithms and advertisers. Many common social-justice phrases have echoes of a catechism: announcing your pronouns or performing a land acknowledgment shows allegiance to a common belief, reassuring a group that everyone present shares the same values. But treating politics like a religion also makes it more emotionally volatile, more tribal (because differences of opinion become matters of good and evil) and more prone to outbreaks of moralizing and piety. “I was thinking about that Marx quote that religion is the opium of the people,” Elizabeth Oldfield, the former director of the Christian think tank Theos, told me. “I think what we've got now is [that] politics is the amphetamines of the people.”

Oldfield was one of the many commentators, activists, and religious leaders—and, sometimes, people who are all three—whom I recently interviewed for a new BBC documentary, The Church of Social Justice. Some of what I discovered surprised me. I asked Alex Clare-Young, a nonbinary minister in the United Reformed Church, whether their faith or their gender was more surprising to Generation Z acquaintances. “I think probably being religious,” Clare-Young responded. “I know a lot of LGBTQ+ young people who say it’s harder to come out as Christian in an LGBT space than LGBT in a Christian space.”

Politics has now crept into every aspect of our lives. In countries where racial and religious intermarriage have become commonplace, dating across political lines is the new taboo. The young British writer Tomiwa Owolade told me he often saw dating profiles that insisted on “no conservatives.” Victoria Turner, the editor of an anthology titled Young, Woke and Christian, told me that she could happily date someone from another faith, or no faith at all. But a conservative? “Absolutely not. No.” Why not? “Whether your God looks exactly the same as my God, I don’t know,” she told me. “But I do know what the answers are to stop people from suffering and to make the world a more equitable place.”

As politics has usurped religion, it has borrowed its underlying concepts, sometimes putting them into new words. John McWhorter, a linguist and Atlantic contributing writer, recently published a best-selling book reflecting on what he sees as the excesses of America’s racial-justice movement. Its working title was “The Elect,” after the Calvinist idea of a group chosen by God for salvation. (In the end, it was published under the more provocative name Woke Racism.) “The hyper-woke—who were firing people right and left, and shaming people right and left—think that they’re seeing further than most people, that they understand the grand nature of things better than the ordinary person can,” McWhorter told me. “To them, they’re elect.”

He sees other parallels, suggesting that notions such as white privilege and male privilege are versions of original sin—a stain that humans are born with, no matter their individual circumstances. Problematic, he argues, is the new way to say heretic. In his book, McWhorter also identifies a “priestly class” of influential writers and politicians who he believes are dictating the rules of what can and cannot be said.

This phenomenon is not confined to the left, though. At Donald Trump’s rallies, booing members of the press, who were kept in an exposed pen, became part of the ritual. The storming of the Capitol involved hardened militia members and amateur gun nuts, but also dozens of otherwise law-abiding citizens swept up in collective effervescence. There are other religious parallels: QAnon’s lurid myths about blood-drinking elites echo medieval anti-Semitic tropes, and the QAnon rally where adherents awaited the resurrection of John F. Kennedy Jr. had a distinctly millenarian feel. As my colleague Adrienne LaFrance has reported, followers of this conspiracy-theory movement treat the anonymous Q’s online postings as something akin to divine revelations. “I feel God led me to Q,” one QAnon follower told LaFrance.

Because collective effervescence is so powerful, established religions have developed strategies for dealing with enthusiasm that shades into zealotry. “In religious life, or Jewish life, the person you sit next to in synagogue may drive you completely potty, they may be so annoying and have different views, and you must still go to their family’s funeral,” Rabbi Laura Janner-Klausner, of the Bromley Reform synagogue in south London, told me. “You must still take them something when they have just given birth; you must still go to their mourning prayers.”

In real life, churches, mosques, synagogues, and temples force together, in their congregations, a random assortment of people who just happen to live close to them. But today’s social activism is often mediated through the internet, where dissenting voices can easily be excluded. We have taken religion, with its innate possibility for sectarian conflict, and fed it through a polarization machine. No wonder that today’s politics can feel like a wasteland of anguished ranting—and like we are in hell already.

[deborahdeshoftim5779]

Online mobs, helped by social media and cowards who pander to the mob, have legitimised death threats against authors. This is the context behind the recent, evil attack on British-Indian author Salman Rushdie. It is also the context behind the deluge of death threats against author J.K. Rowling. 

Death threats are unacceptable, period. I am glad the police have been called to investigate the disgusting threat sent to J.K. Rowling, but it is far from the first time, and too many people have remained silent while Rowling has been doxxed and threatened in this way. 

In both cases, we see that putting political correctness ahead of freedom of speech does not promote justice: it destroys justice. It destroys freedom of thought for everybody. If one author is not free to speak their mind, then no author or indeed citizen is free to speak their mind. 

The attack on Salman Rushdie, which was unsurprisingly committed by a radical Muslim obeying the Iranian-sponsored fatwa, is an attack on all writers, freedom of speech, and Western civilisation. 

No more pandering to mobs in the name of political correctness. 

No more death threats against authors! 

[indizombie]

Do you know who they are? These are the people of our country. Look at their faces. Someone's fought with his wife; another's son won't listen to him. One's jealous of his neighbour's success, and one has had it with his landlord's demands. From the government's corruption to the cricket team's defeat... they're upset about everything. But their anger is silent, bottled up. They'll pour it out on you. Should I hand you over to them? They'll definitely crack your skull!

Munna Bhai M.B.B.S. (2003)

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“Nine Arrested In Anti-Draft Street Riots,” Montreal Star. March 25, 1942. Page 3.   ---- Tram Store Windows Broken as Mobs Throng North End District ---- Seven youth and a 23-year-old man arrested by city police last night during anti-conscription, anti-Semitic riots in the north and east section of the city, were held on personal bail of $200 each today by Judge Tetreau, pending trial on charges of vagrancy on April 2. All plead not guilty when arraigned. Another accused a 15-year-old boy will appear before Court. 

The nine were arrested at the arena of two of the several disturbances during which, according to police reports, traffic was blocked, store, automobile and street car window were broken, car trolleys were pulled off their lines and cries were pulled off their of “A bas la conscription" (down with conscription) and "A bas les Juifs” (Down with the Jew) drowned out other shouting.

LIST OF ACCUSED The accused today gave their names and addresses as follows:

Fernand Lapointe, 22, 2379 Rouen street; Maurice Riel, 19, 3925 Mentana street;  Jean Paul Deapres, 17, 7566 de-Gaspe street; Raymond Lefrancois, 16, 7549 Henri Julien street; Andre Laberge, 16, 310 St. Joseph Blvd East Edgar Therrien, 17, 6571 St. Dominique street; Jacques Rondeau 18, 5802 13th Avenue Rosemount; Laurent Crevier, 18, 4092, St. Denis street They are charged with vagrancy under article 28, section F, of the Criminal Code which rules that “every one is a loose idle or disorderly person or vagrant who causes a disturbance in or any street, road, highway, or public place by screaming, shouting, wearing, storing, or by being drunk, or by impeding or incommoding peaceable peaceable passengers.' 

The offence carries a maximum penalty of a fine of $50 and costs or six months in Jail with or without hard labor or a fine and jail sentence both.

Contrary to the previous occasion Iast month when similar disturbances took place following an anti-conscription meeting in the St James Market hall, the riots did not start last night at or near the Pouliot anti-plebiscite meeting in the north end. MEETING ORDERLY Police stated today that the first disturbance started In the north end of the city but that the Pouliot meeting was conducted and finished in an orderly fashion. They were corroborated by newspapermen attending the meeting who pointed out that the first outbreak by the youthful demonstrators originated some distance from the hall at St. Dominique and Jean Talon streets where the meeting took place. 

Police were unable to state whether any of the demonstrators had actually attended the meeting. 

The first cries of "A bas les Juifs" and “A bas la conscription” were heard along deChateaubriand, St. Hubert and Beaubien streets, and north end side streets as a large group of youthful demonstrators gathered and headed towards the lower section of the city. The paraders pulled bus trolleys off their power lines, broke some store windows, stuck stickers on others, broke a few street car windows, and held up traffic in general 

The crowd of demonstrators, as well as the spectators along the sidewalks, grew as the paraders continued on St. Lawrence boulevard, Beaubien streets, Bernard and Laurier avenues. The largest group was broken up by police at St. Lawrence boulevard and Pin avenue in a melee in which much shouting and street fighting took place. Several of the youths in court today were arrested at that point.

YOUNG MAN INJURED Maurice Quintal, 17, 6599 Alma street, who claimed to be only passing by at the time was taken to the Hotel Dieu to be treated for facial injuries. He claimed he was struck by a soldier at Napoleon street and St Lawrence boulevard. He was sent home after treatment. 

Meantime, self -elected traffic officers tried to take control of traffic at several points and pieces of ice were flung at automobile when the drivers failed to follow the directions of the would-be traffic directors. This was done first at Laurier avenue and St Lawrence boulevard where the glass in a street car door was also broken. 

One of the first actual fistic melees between the demonstrators and others occurred in front of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association headquarters on Mount Royal avenue near Park avenue, where an altercation took place on the sidewalk. There were some fisticuffs without any real damage and no one could say who was the actual aggressor.

When the first mob was broken up by police at St. Lawrence boulevard and Pine avenue, many of the demonstrators proceeded to St. Hubert street to join another group that had paraded down that street from the north end. The crowd there mounted to about 500 and took control of the street obstructing traffic.   POLICE REINFORCED As the crowd got out of hand on St. Hubert street more police under orders of Chief Inspector Alfred Belanger and Capt. J. O'Neiil were rushed from the north end of the city.

The demonstrators jeered and made cat-calls as they banged on tin cans and old tubs, rapped on passing cars with sticks, and smashed store and street car windows with pieces of ice. 

The demonstration developed into a real riot to the Jewish section and the main plate glass window of Richstone's bakery at 3883 St. Lawrence boulevard was broken as well as the main show window to the Costiner Stationery and Toy store at 3951 St. Lawrence boulevard. 

The remainder of the youths in court today were taken into custody on St. Lawrence boulevard below Napoleon street where an other fracas developed as police reserves tried to break up a parading group there. 

Passengers in street cars on lines along the street visited by the various groups of rioters could be seen standing to the centre aisle of the car or on their seats to avoid flying glass from broken windows. They were following the advice of street car conductors and motor-men. ENDED AT MIDNIGHT By midnight the actual demonstrations had been virtually stopped. Owners of several better-known stores in the district and others with smaller premises surveyed the damage they had suffered, while several groups of citizens could be seen in various places still excitedly discussing the demonstrations. 

One 15-year-old boy who refused to take the advice of police and 'break it up and go home" will appear today in the Juvenile Court. 

Police who were blamed by by some time for the last outbreaks on grounds that there were too many of them at the St. James Market hall, pointed to the demonstrations of last night as proof of the fact that this was only an excuse offered by the rioters for their actions.

Pouliot Urges “No” To Plebiscite Question Both conscription for oversell military service and amalgamation of the Canadian National and Canadian Pacific Railways were the immediate Federal legislative projects warned against last night by Jean Francois Pouliot, M.P. for Temiscouata. when exhorting Canadians to vote "No" In the April 27 plebiscite on pre-election Government commitments.

Mr. Pouliot spoke at a public meeting organized by the Ligue pour la Defense du Canada (League for the Defence of Canada) In the Jean Talon market hall. The hall was filled to capacity by a standing audience and outside, hundreds listened to the speeches from loud speakers. 

Of the conscription issue, Mr. Pouliot said "Only those now on active service overseas, those who served overseas to the war of 1914-18 or those fathers who have sons overseas, can with decency call for compulsory overseas service.”

[AL: Esther Deslile caused a scandal by correctly identifying a strong current of antisemitism and pro-Vichy sentiment in Québec, though historians like John Hellman and Olivier Courteaux have largely confirmed her findings. That this antisemitism and pro-Vichy sentiment gained strength by opposing conscription during the Second World War is not surprising, and here is a particularly riotous example.]

[mightyflamethrower]

[ghostatrandom]

I Put too much effort into this but damn this rematch got intense @sexymanotd

[apenitentialprayer]

The execution of Marie Antoinette, October 16th, 1793.

[Hatred and sin] bring in all kinds of evil and give the prince of evil a home in the leaders of the revolt and their followers. He establishes himself within them and turns them into wild beasts. It is no exaggeration to say that he prepares them to acquire the character of demons. He who from the beginning was a murderer and hated men, now makes them murderers, antagonists to Christ, the Giver of life, and (to an even greater extent) disobedient and hostile to earthly kings and their spiritual Father, Shepherd, and Teacher.

Gregory Palamas (On Peace §7b, a homily given in December of 1350 or January of 1351)

[nitw]

happy 2-day anniversary to reigen choking a guy for trying to cut mob in line to the toilet

[clownsuu]

Ai adventures with yours truly: day 87- still trying to find that delectable angst- instead, I got one story being Wally chilling at howdy’s place due to the rain, Howdy asking Wally if he wants anything grilled to eat, wally flirting to (a very oblivious) howdy from inside while howdy is finishing up grilling (never specified what) and brings food inside, Wally asking to be fed(???) while watching the sunset(?), they both declare they undying love for each other and proceeds to make out passionately on the fuggin couch for several hours

also oh my god these two always gets so dam emotional??? Like they either become besties or lovers and they are always E X T R E M E L Y passionate and cry in eachother’s arms- no matter if it’s normal Wally or obsessive-