Your description applies to any organization of any size. The organization that you work for may have taken actions that you don't agree with, despite you possessing your own idealism and morality. You may have even actively participated in these activities, knowingly or not. In many (most?) large organizations, a few people make the big decisions and the ranks below them make those happen.

It's almost as if the idealism and morality of any organization is largely irrelevant to the actual actions of that organization. Even further, in a highly compartmentalized organization like the military or the intelligence agencies (or any random large company), the individual workers may not be fully aware of the big picture goals of their day's work. No grand conspiracy needed.

So how did Chrome work prior to last October? Why not just take advantage of TSYNC if the kernel supports it and do without it if it doesn't? At least until distributions have had a chance to properly adopt the new kernels.

A hard dependency on a few month old feature is a little insane. No other application operates like this.

Any other applications that adopt it will likely do so in a much more sane manner, though: use it if it is present and function without it if it isn't. Having a hard dependency on an optional feature that's only a few months old is kind of an insane approach. Who programs like that?

Yeah, functionally, blue eyes kind of suck. Sunny summer or snowy winter, I can't leave home without sunglasses. I remember the first time I went skiing with a guy from Korea and he found out that we don't just wear sunglasses to look "styling".

And this is almost always the correct approach, with fallback to 1 or 2 on unsupported platforms. Between Windows, Mac, KDE, and Gnome's managed keystores, you've covered over 90% of all users. Every browser reinventing the wheel, poorly, is not the best solution.

I feel like you're missing the forest for the trees here. The reason people engage in vigilante activities is because there isn't a legal remedy available to them. Do you disagree with that?

The practical details of budgeting issues, qualifications for police employment, and prioritization of investigations of course plays a role in why there is no legal remedy available. Those details, however, have no bearing on why people choose vigilante justice over no justice.

Our choices, as a society, are to provide some sort of legal venue to pursue justice whenever people feel wronged or accept that those people will find another way to right the wrong. Of course, the third option is to provide no legal means to pursue justice, but crack down hard on anyone who tried to handle it on their own. There are long-term consequences to that approach as well.

I agree with the AC here. The defendant is at an extreme disadvantage when up against the state and shouldn't be compelled to cooperate in his conviction.

This applies doubly during police interrogation, where there is no time to consider how your statements may be used against you and the police are certainly not sharing their facts and theories with you. Admitting to anything prior to discovery could build a case against yourself, even if your intent was to prove your innocence.

Which is an example of why hard cases make bad law. Jurisprudence shouldn't be tossed out the window just because the subject matter is revolting or sympathetic.

A case which absolutely requires the cooperation of the defendant is what is commonly known as a flimsy case. Doubling down on coercing the defendant to enable access to evidence against himself isn't the proper way forward.

Which seems like a pretty dangerous exemption to me, when you're faced with police who can add/drop charges as they like. You shouldn't need to cooperate with your prosecution at such an early stage in the case and where you are at such an extreme disadvantage. They're not sharing all of their evidence with the accused during the interrogation, so why should the accused be compelled to spill everything out of court?

That's not quite the insult you were aiming for (well, except the meth part).

All of what you are saying is true, but the existence of vigilantism doesn't depend on lofty ideals and solid foundations. If a society refuses to uniformly and fairly allocate justice, people will take it into their own hands. It's inevitable. If society wants to reliably keep people from handling their own justice, it must work together to fix the state's apparatus or expect vigilante actions to continue. A wronged party with no legal remedy isn't just going to let it drop.

In other words, it's not just the wronged person's responsibility to single-handedly "change the system". It's your responsibility, too. By allowing the system to remain broken, you are culpable for the existence of vigilante justice, too. Expecting every wronged person to change the system in order to get their justice is just condoning vigilantism, while still claiming the moral high ground.

You will never get evidence to use against them.

And yet, if you asked people how best to allocate police resources, do you think "sitting in speed traps" would be at the top of anyone's list? There are certainly understandable explanations for why police seem to be useless unless someone is murdered or a big corporation has an extremely urgent minor complaint, but that doesn't in any way invalidate my point.

People only turn to vigilante justice because the alternative is no justice. As a society, we either need to address the crimes that concern people or accept that they will address them by themselves.

It actually does mean exactly that. If a state wishes to assert legitimacy, the onus lies with the state to ensure that justice is uniformly and fairly carried out. The state is ultimately accountable to the citizens, not the other way around. Justice is far more important than the unchallenged authority of the state.

Of course, there can/will be consequences for taking the law into your own hands (which can't often be said for agents of the state). Of course, a regular process for determining guilt and dispensing retribution is preferred.

While it is in many ways (far) less than ideal, there is an easier answer: vigilantism.

One man can solve his "justice" problems by himself, but one man can't change the system by himself. If society at large decides that vigilante "justice" is not something that we want, then we can change the system together. There is a recurring progression to these things that isn't easily short-circuited.