The death of George Floyd reveals a sick brotherhood of the badge

Every Fourth of July when I was a boy, the Jaycees sponsored a carnival at our local park, followed by a concert from the town’s volunteer band and a fireworks show. The water-balloon toss and the cotton candy machine were delightful, I suppose, but the attraction that galvanized every boy at the fair was the chance to lay down two bucks to swing a sledgehammer at an old car.

The death of George Floyd reveals a sick brotherhood of the badge MWPVrH9

The death of George Floyd reveals a sick brotherhood of the badge MWPVrH9

This was big money in those days. An hour and a half mowing and trimming a neighbor’s lawn would buy only two swings (plus a hot dog). The younger boys could barely lift the hammer. But there was always a line. And it was longest when there was still glass to be smashed.
I thought of that grand civic tradition as I studied a photograph from the rioting in Minneapolis. The camera caught a young man with a hammer as he took a whack at a cashier’s scanner inside a looted Target store. Destroying the property of innocent people is wrong and, as a form of political protest, it is usually self-defeating. But I couldn’t deny the visceral appeal of putting that hammer through that glass. Destruction speaks to something in the human back-brain, the seat of anarchy, the root of unruliness.
The satisfaction of swinging the hammer has nothing to do with race or class. If kids in the richest, whitest part of the Twin Cities were invited to whale away at a surplus cashier’s scanner, or most anything else, there would be plenty of takers. Riots become riots because the initial violence gives a kind of permission to indulge the limbic urge to destroy. Breaking windows is contagious; so is setting fires, upending cars and emptying store shelves.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/want-to-stop-these-riots-reform-the-police/2020/05/29/b41451e4-a1dc-11ea-9590-1858a893bd59_story.html
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Anarcho-Capitalist, AnCaps Forum, Ancapolis, OZschwitz Contraband
“The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime.”-- Max Stirner
"Remember: Evil exists because good men don't kill the government officials committing it." -- Kurt Hofmann

The death of George Floyd reveals a sick brotherhood of the badge

The death of George Floyd reveals a sick brotherhood of the badge

Anarcho-Capitalist Categorical Imperatives

Via AnCaps: Law & Enforced Unnatural Order