My thoughts on vigilantism on Discovery.

[Thyrzul]

Calling yourself something you are not also helps a lot to be treated like something you are not. That is an other thing been repeated like ad nauseam in \V/'s feedback thread. You were often confronted with not behaving like vigilantes while calling yourselves vigilantes, to which the common response was the "arbitrary choice of name" excuse, implying you have had no intention to look and act anything like vigilantes in the first place. However at later points of the feedback thread you explained your choice of ID as being the closest of what the old Vigilante ID used to be, which then implies that you do have the intention to behave like vigilantes. Keep in mind that such contradictions can undermine your credibility quite fast.

Language evolves, that's a good observation, but it still doesn't mean that you can take a word, render a different ("arbitrary") meaning to it, start using it as such and then expect people to interpret it the way you do. Language evolves through the consensus of all of those speaking it, and in the case of the word "vigilante" there was obviously none here.

Anyways, I don't really understand where did you get the idea of "realities are changed in Discovery" or what exactly you mean by it.

And then there is the part where you take a quote from Spazzy to support your concept, totally forgetting that the harsh world Spazzy described Disco as happens to be this way simply because it has been developed around a space sim lacking game mechanics for jailing, judical courts and several other modern-day concepts of such kind.

About the significance of vigilantes in a Liberty struck by two wars and several other internal and external enemies... splinter civilian groups begining to act upon their own arbitrary interpretation of the law and the general concept of what's good and what's bad instead of following the overal house-wide consensus about such topics is just one more step towards chaos. Vigilantes should be treated with at least the same significance as other internal threats, such as Rogues, Hackers, Xenos, etc.

Steve is not the government, Steve is an individual. You first talk about the relation of authorities and vigilantes, and then bring the relation of an individual and a vigilante. I'm not sure what is your point here, but the two doesn't have to be the same. While Robin Hood and his Merry Men aligned themselves with the people, effectively maintaining good relations with them, they were still considered thieves, outlaws, hunted by the Sheriff and his men, their relation being quite bad. Thinking a little bit of it, the closest thing to a vigilante faction currently is most probably the Hellfire Legion.

You presented a seemingly pro-vigilante opinion and tried to support it's potential necessity with medieval analogies. My intention with this wall of text and point addressing is to provide a counter, and I could just as well bring analogies from various times of our history, just think about the people of France taking law and power into their own hands during the French Revolution, think about how good it was at first and how horrible it turned out to be later.

The tendency is that vigilante movements begin in good faith and with the intention to cooperate with the actual authorities, who maybe more often than not reply with denial mostly due to lack of competence or questionable methods from the vigilantes. Over time the cooperation ceases to exist and the two sides begin to work parallel, up until the point of the first clashes resulting from the conflicts of the original law and the new set of rules the vigilante group created to regulate their own existence and actions. If we inspect the fine details of the event series, we can see that the whole can make up to a logical chain of events. It may not have to be this way, but usually is.

Vigilantism is often, if not always, a response to actual social issues not treated the way they should have been. Such could be the case of Xenos, where a group of miners turned xenophobic terrorists to keep foreign corporations away from Liberty, corporations they blame for their bankrupcy, poorness, famine and related issues. As such, these movements align themselves with the people, just as in your example, but at the same time they align themselves against other people. The difference of their moral code from the authorial law is a two-edged blade: they can hit the guilty where the law cannot due to bureaucracial problems, gaps, or other issues, but with wrong judgement it can also hit the innocent deemed erroreously guilty. It has it's pros as well as it's cons.

TL;DR - Where the job of the authorities is to maintain order, the presence and activity of vigilantes are one more step towards chaos. From this logically comes that as preferences collide, so will these two sides, regardless of what happens with the idividual civilian.

Whew what a wall of text...

---