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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32497 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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In this NYT article, race isn't mentioned, so I assumed it was either a black-on-black or black-on-white killing, but apparently it was white-on-black! It's unusual for the NYT to not mention race in such a situation. Could it be that they're finally downplaying all races in their

crime reporting, and not just the ones that it's offensive to speak negatively about? That sounds too good to be true, but I want to believe.

As more hopeful news on another topic that's also of great interest here, This NYT was published recently. The comments are even more hopeful. As an even crazier example that I realize will be very hard for people here to believe, I figured out sometime last month that a large majority of my department at a liberal university in a county that went for Biden almost 90-10 is very strongly oppposed to Harvard in the ongoing supreme court fight over affirmative action (just to qualify it's more "we're against affirmative action as Harvard is currently practicing" it instead of "we're against affirmative action period").

To get to the fight-y, culture war part, I've tried to argue over and over on the old site that certain of this places extreme, bogeyman views are usually straw-men used to tar the entire American left. These views get outsize attention because of all the standard media/clickbait reasons and were never really supported that much. If you just talk to normal people and don't raise suspicion that you're not on board with the egalitarian ideal that people's fates should be mostly decided by their choices instead of their birth, you'll probably also find this.

The standard kumbayah, everyone-should-band-together-against extremists model isn't really so bad: 80% of people on either side mostly agree with each other on values. Such normal people on different sides of the political divide nevertheless have serious factual disagreements that lead to very different policy preferences. The problem is that each side attracts a 20% of moral aliens with bizarre value systems that happen to make them want far more extreme versions of these policy preferences. To achieve their goals, the best thing the aliens can do is disguise themselves as normals to convince at least the normals on their side. As a nice bonus, this might also make the other side suspect that everyone supporting these preferences is an alien, giving them even more support out of solidarity against "unfair" accusations. For the left, this has hopelessly tarred any kind of diversity initiative, for the right, any kind of tough-on-crime thing.

The best way to fight this is to be really careful in distinguishing who you have factual disagreements with vs. who you have values disagreements with. Both sides need to police themselves and kick out the aliens with bad values even if these aliens might agree with them on object-level policy questions. Also, be much more cautious before concluding someone on the other side is an alien. On the other hand, be really careful to emphasize to the other side that your values aren't alien---this is really hard because there'll be a lot of enemy action from the aliens who want to keep their side extreme. I can't say I'm super successful at it here, but I try to emphasize that I care about egalitarianism at the bottom and that my disagreements with the majority of the American right are due to factual disagreements about what's necessary to actually achieve true egalitarianism.

Great post, but one short question: what kind of affirmative action would they want, if not what Harvard is doing? The only alternatives I can think of are explicit race quotas (which are unconstitutional) and class-based affirmative action (which would create disparate impact).

So there are two actual justifications for affirmative action that people usually give. First, that complicated, subjective admissions systems are invariable going to be implicitly biased against certain groups so there needs to be some brute-force explicit bias to counteract this if the department is actually interested in selecting the most qualified candidates. The most popular affirmative action policies are therefore in line with something like, for example in graduate admissions: check outcomes at graduation/at prelims/at quals for these at-risk groups---women, the standard underrepresented racial minorities, etc. If these outcomes are better than average, modify the admissions policy to give those groups a leg up. Keep on calibrating the blunt modification until outcomes look about the same as an average student.

The second reason is that it's alienating to be one of very few people in a particular group in the department. Therefore, give enough of a leg up that there are at least, for example, 2 women in each graduate class. I guess this is effectively a quota by proxy, but it's never an explicit numerical target that needs to be reached, just if there were too few one year, increase the weight the next year. It's also such a low requirement that it shouldn't really ever come up unless the first point was horribly messed up.

Harvard's affirmative action on the other hand is seen as almost a complement to legacy admissions but with good publicity, at the most conspiratorial, way keep down an "uppity" new meritocratic class from competing with a hereditary elite. The whole "helping underrepresented minorities" thing, while they think is a good goal, in this case is just a Trojan horse for a true, nefarious goal.

It's also such a low requirement that it shouldn't really ever come up unless the first point was horribly messed up.

Personal anecdote: I was in Australia's Chemistry Olympiad program twice. The setup of the program was that they put out an exam to anyone interested, best 21 people in the country went to a "scholar school" which was three weeks of extremely intensive university-level learning (we were all high school students), then based off a set of exams there and afterward they'd pick a team of four to represent Australia.

Now, I didn't get picked for the team either time (this was 07 and 08). But take a wild guess at the sex ratio, despite the total lack of any discrimination on the part of the program - it was simply "who had the highest marks on the exam".

Answer: I think there might have been one girl out of 21 one time? I know at least one time it was literally all boys. This wasn't unusual. Physics was similar; biology was typically something like 17:4 favouring girls (I was one of the boys in that one in 05 and 06).

The assumption that if you give everyone equal opportunity, the amount of men and women both able and willing to do X will be the same? It's not actually true. Usually it's not that dramatic, but under extreme selection (IIRC it was about 32,000 kids a year doing that exam? And that's, of course, just the ones who were interested and whose parents/teachers/etc. thought they had a chance) little tips to the balance become nearly pass/fail. And AIUI Harvard has roughly the same degree of selection as was going on there.

As more hopeful news on another topic that's also of great interest here, This NYT was published recently. The comments are even more hopeful. As an even crazier example that I realize will be very hard for people here to believe, I figured out sometime last month that a large majority of my department at a liberal university in a county that went for Biden almost 90-10 is very strongly oppposed to Harvard in the ongoing supreme court fight over affirmative action (just to qualify it's more "we're against affirmative action as Harvard is currently practicing" it instead of "we're against affirmative action period").

Surely you're joking. That NYT headline reads "A Paper That Says Science Should Be Impartial Was Rejected by Major Journals. You Can’t Make This Up." and you regard this as uplifting? Sure, Lysenkoism is installed in every single science institution of importance, but a token Trotskyist was allowed a footnote in Pravda to snark at this.

If you just talk to normal people and don't raise suspicion that you're not on board with the egalitarian ideal that people's fates should be mostly decided by their choices instead of their birth, you'll probably also find this.

I work in academia, I do this on a daily basis. These are not even radicals. But they believe so fervently in the core tenets of progressivism (oppression is always unidirectional, outcome disparities disfavouring "oppressed" groups are sufficient proof of a lack of procedural fairness, women are oppressed - all evidence to the contrary is proof of this, all group differences disfavouring "oppressed" groups are 100% environmental in origin) that no amount of contrary evidence will ever convince them. Whenever I get them to agree in arduous discussions that Lysenkoism cannot be correct, they greet me with a cheery "good thing we got rid of that bourgeois geneticism, eh comrade?" the next morning. And from this, all other injustices of progressivism flow.

Surely you're joking. That NYT headline reads "A Paper That Says Science Should Be Impartial Was Rejected by Major Journals. You Can’t Make This Up." and you regard this as uplifting?

Check the comments and how unanimously against the rejection NYT readers are. The article is also very much not saying that these policies have already been installed in every hard science department, only that they are starting to be and facing huge amounts of pushback. There's a huge difference between these two so it's really important to be precise.

Whenever I get them to agree in arduous discussions that Lysenkoism cannot be correct, they greet me with a cheery "good thing we got rid of that bourgeois geneticism, eh comrade?" the next morning. And from this, all other injustices of progressivism flow.

I find this specific part very hard to believe. Can you give more details on the exact thing you got them to agree on that they immediately went back on? Given the imprecision in your previous paragraph, I'm suspicious that something subtly different might have happened. Which specific people in academia are you talking about? What kind of institution? Which departments?

Which specific people in academia are you talking about? What kind of institution? Which departments?

I am not going to reveal any more information that could lead to my doxxing. I don't see why it's relevant either. I know quite a few academics, at every career level, in different fields. They are very, very similar in this regard.

Can you give more details on the exact thing you got them to agree on that they immediately went back on?

I hope you will forgive my paranoia, but I am not going to repeat heresy here in a context where I have been asked about the particularities of my employment. My above post already contains a list of items that all have been the content of such discussions.

The problem is that

  1. people in different tribes do have legitimate object-level policy and deep value differences, which suffices for adversarial mechanics and strategic deceit even between non-extreme subgroups;

  2. the doctrine of «we should unite against our common enemy, moral aliens» is inherently dehumanizing, radicalizing and begs to be applied to singling out the outgroup's more effective members, so that your team wins «fairly» and «not extremely». And cautious or not, that's what you use it for, consistently.

the egalitarian ideal that people's fates should be mostly decided by their choices instead of their birth

Both sides need to police themselves and kick out the aliens with bad values even if these aliens might agree with them on object-level policy questions.

Reminder: the «people's» here applies to all people in the world who might fancy moving into the US; «egalitarian ideal» is getting the benefits of American citizen; «object-level policy» is limiting immigration; «aliens with bad values» are people who think that legacy citizens, as inheritors of people who have previously invested their lives into the polity, should have more control over the long-term trajectory of said polity and party to the intergenerational compact – irrespective of superfluous market-determined merit of international workforce.

It's blue-and-orange morality for some, no doubt, e.g. for some cosmopolitan coastal liberals, but it's the common-sensical morality of virtually all natural societies, especially of South Asian states, where our friend hails from, currently epitomized in Hindutva ideology but also obvious e.g. in loops foreigners jump through to be allowed to stay in Thailand. To my knowledge, he has never addressed the paradox of insisting that American nativism is so incomprehensibly evil and alien to his sensibilities.

Ahah! You are capable of replying with mostly arguments instead of mostly personal attacks, maybe there is hope for a productive response here.

Well, almost:

especially of South Asian states, where our friend hails from, currently epitomized in Hindutva ideology but also obvious e.g. in loops foreigners jump through to be allowed to stay in Thailand. To my knowledge, he has never addressed the paradox of insisting that American nativism is so incomprehensibly evil and alien to his sensibilities.

This is a pretty huge non-sequitur. Whatever other people you happen to associate me with may or may not do is completely irrelevant to this discussion. There's absolutely no paradox here any more than me saying that you talking about morality at all is a paradox because there are tribes in New Guinea that used to practice slavery and cannibalism. I'll also mention here that I'm 100% a patriotic American culturally, in the eyes of the law, and yes, even by birth if that matters so much to you, but this shouldn't really be necessary for the quoted argument to be total nonsense.

people in different tribes do have legitimate object-level policy and deep value differences, which suffices for adversarial mechanics and strategic deceit even between non-extreme subgroups;

I think there's a failure to fully understand American society that's tripping you up here. It might be educational to listen to Kevin McCarthy's acceptance speech when he was elected Speaker of the House. As far as an official, recent statement of what the mainstream right in the US believes, I think it's hard to do better than this. I find that the values he's emphasizing and glorifying align very strongly with my own even though his policy preferences might dramatically differ. As long as we're reminiscing about what happened years ago, I think even Kevin McCarthy would very much endorse my originally summary of American values.

Reminder: the «people's» here...

Similarly, this particular translation, even while being more a specialization to a non-central example than a translation, is not quite the convincing knockout argument you think. Sure, "immigrant" is a hopelessly corrupted word for the right, rather like "meritocracy" for the left that immediately brings to mind bad feelings due to associations with certain non-central examples. If you talk about specific immigrants however---let's say the properly assimilated doctor contributing to society---most Americans would be pretty happy giving them their "patrimony" or whatever. Similarly, "inheritance" is a much more toxic concept than you imagine. People are embarrassed here for getting things from inheritance instead of hard work and hide this as much as possible.

Of course a more fair translation would be "people" to American of all races, "egalitarian ideal" to the whole content-of-character instead of color-of-skin thing, "object-level policy" to something like desegregation, and "aliens with bad values" to white identitarians.

The comments on that article, as well as those on the NYC subreddit, are pretty telling. Many high votes for comments supporting what the marine and others did, and broadly condemning the government for letting people with 40+ arrests and warrants out for assault (of a 67 year old woman) out on the street.

If this is any representation of NYC, and I bet it is, then if there is a trial the marine and others may well get a not guilty verdict... One can hope...

comparing this to the rittenhouse shooting is surprising. they're both clearly controversial, but opinion on the rittenhouse case was pretty clearly left-right divided. here there are plenty of 'liberals' sympathetic to the white guy who choked a black man to death.

It's the guns and not seeking out the dangerous situation. The purpose of guns is to make holes in people (and deer, but Rittenhouse wasn't going deer hunting). Making holes in people quite often leads to their deaths. So people imagine Rittenhouse getting ready to willingly drive to Kenosha, looking at his gun and choosing between two futures:

  • in future A he doesn't take it with him and doesn't shoot anyone

  • in future B he takes it with him and shoots somebody dead

Yes, future B includes outcomes like "he takes it with him and doesn't shoot anybody because people don't pick up a fight with a man with a gun, or with a man with a gun that chambers a round, or with a man with a gun that points it at them, or they pick a fight with him and he shoots and wounds them", but as firearms instructors say, if you aren't willing to shoot someone dead, don't carry a gun.

Those are liberals who ride the subway.

The progressive goals of (1) Criminal Justice Reform - getting rid of three strikes laws, decriminalizing open drug use, light to nonexistent prosecution for being a public nuisance and (2) promoting public transit, seem to be in tension here. Riding the bus or subway would be more appealing to normal people if psychopaths who are prone to outbursts weren't "just a part of living in the city".

The only things we know that aren't wish casting is the guy who was restrained had an active felony warrant for assault out for him, and "40 interactions with police", whatever that means. We also know a black, a hispanic and a white spontaneously bonded into a group to restrain this guy over whatever he was doing.

I have few thoughts about how this will shake out in court. But I'm on team "They made the world a better place by one unit" no matter the legal outcome.

Edit: Actually, I noticed a third thing. You know what we usually hear in one of these videos? A crowd of people shouting "WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!" "STOP IT!" "YOU'RE HURTING HIM!" We hear none of that. Presumably everyone around saw what went down and thought to themselves "Yeah, that's about right."

So far as I know, there has been exactly zero progress towards a permanent cure for schizophrenia, or towards some treatment or procedure which, administered in childhood, would prevent its appearance.

In my opinion, it is this (as well as some way to switch off the "addictive personality" which deserves as much of a research budget as can be managed. Once these defective brains can be fixed, once and for all rather than with a pricy drug which must be taken every day and has nasty side effects, then our cities can be livable again.

To be honest, I don't expect this within my lifetime, perhaps not within a hundred years. But it must be possible.

I didn't KNOW that there were 3 guys, let alone that only one of them was white! Damn!

I have few thoughts about how this will shake out in court.

My thoughts are that with what's apt to qualify as a "jury of my peers" in New York City, I'd be thinking very hard about whether I have a way to quickly move to a country that won't extradite.

Yeah. You saw my claim below about what the legally correct thing to do in this situation is. Here's a commenter from NYMag asserting basically the same thing, and he clearly things it's a good thing:

It’s basically New York law that if you encounter someone on the train that is mentally unwell and/or unhoused that you either help or you walk away.

What our hapless marine did not understand is that homeless people are basically aristocracy. The correct, society prescribed and legally enforced thing to do when a homeless crazy person goes on a rant and starts throwing things and yelling is to back away slowly. If you can't (in this case, because you're in a subway car), you just cringe and endure it and hope it doesn't go beyond that. You don't make eye contact, and you certainly don't fight -- as the old saying goes, if you lose you go to the hospital and if you win you go to jail.

Here's a novel suggestion on the appropriate response to being screamed at by a belligerent vagrant:

I don't know about you, but if I could spend $100 to keep somebody from being strangled to death, I'd happily hand over $100. So if you see someone in distress in public, before you strangle them to death, consider just giving them $100.

Some might suggest that this might not be the best incentive structure to line up, but those someone's simply don't understand that someone "having a mental health crisis" is both sacred and simply cannot respond to incentives.

So that guy makes it rain every time he sees a homeless person?

There are so many ways to help homeless people; from giving money to nonprofits, to volunteering, etc.

The smug response of 'you should just give them a hundred', is nothing but smug self-righteousness. He's not making anything better, he's just making himself feel superior.

The incentive structure is not the point. The point is that the person sending the tweet has a good heart.

A heart that good needs an Aztec priest to be fully appreciated.

Which brings us back around to what appears to be an irreconcilable difference in worldviews. I don't regard someone that thinks giving cash to belligerent vagrants is a good plan as having a good heart anymore than I regard someone that leaves some treats out for grizzly bears as having a good heart.

I think OP's point is that their actions are to broadcast the image having a good heart, not necessarily actually having one.

I always get amused, darkly, when these people happily place benefit of the doubt on the person demonstrating their disregard for other people's interests and safety. The guy asking for $100 is assumed to have a nigh-angelic nature, while the other person must be either greedy or murderous to refuse?

Other forms as well:

"So what if they broke into your house? They just want your stuff!"

"If someone tries to take your car, let them. It gets worse if you fight back!"

"Shoplifting is a victimless crime! If someone needs something so badly that they'll steal it, it's probably better to let them go."

There are certain lines that are generally understood that, if crossed, means other people will assume you mean them harm or otherwise pose a threat. And they ain't going to try to read your mind to figure out if you are merely crazy or desperate or in need or have the will to do them grievous bodily injury or even kill.

And as soon as I've updated to believing that you pose a significant risk of harm to me or a loved one, the calculation in my mind isn't a binary between "Pay $100 or strangle them to death." Its "Do I have to fight this guy? Can I escape? What will he do if I try to walk away? Does he have a weapon?" and "how quickly can I incapacitate him?"

I'm reasoning under uncertainty here. If I thought that handing over $100 would be guaranteed to de-escalate the situation, and the guy would go on his way and bother me no more maybe that's the better option.

But there's literally no way for me to know that, so I have to work off the evidence I have in front of me, which is someone acting erratically and making demands which is evidence that they are probably dangerous, and may escalate if I try to placate them.

So yeah, fuck false dilemmas.

I always get amused, darkly, when these people happily place benefit of the doubt on the person demonstrating their disregard for other people's interests and safety. The guy asking for $100 is assumed to have a nigh-angelic nature, while the other person must be either greedy or murderous to refuse?

The Rittenhouse case was particularly silly.

Rittenhouse shot people who did exactly as he did - bring a gun to a volatile situation - but he had far more evidence of acting in good faith and non-aggressively (honestly, the fact that he was really walking around cleaning up graffiti seems like the sort of thing a conservative hack writer would add to make him more sympathetic).

But somehow he's damned.

In retrospect that kid is OBSCENELY lucky that there were multiple cameras showing the series of events and thus made it pretty damn clear that he wasn't an aggressor.

Absent that, he'd probably be in prison, possibly forever.

Seems like at least two guys, maybe three restraining the one dude. https://twitter.com/_barringtonii/status/1653941898023665665

Everyones only focusing on that shot with just the marine and the guy, probably taken later than the above pic

Not everyone, Black Lives Matter thinks all three should be prosecuted. Because the mentally ill homeless are ordinary people's social and moral superiors and raising a hand against them, regardless of provocation, is verboten -- and black homeless especially so, of course.

If you choked a non-homeless person to death after they verbally insulted you should you face no penalty? The article says he yelled but hadn't physically assaulted anyone yet. Should the law be that if someone makes a verbal threat someone else is allowed to murder them in response?

The killing is only tangential, and likely accidental. If someone is presenting a credible threat of violence, is it right to physically restrain that person, even if the restraint carries a chance of death?

It is almost impossible to have a physical altercation with a 0% chance of lethal outcomes. Punches kill people all the time. Seemingly non-lethal chokes (like a blood choke that you release when struggle stops, which is what the video seems to show) always carry a risk.

The marine does not snap his neck or do any other obvious action expressing intent to kill. So is he justified in doing any physical restraint?

It depends on exactly what was going on in the car and how potentially lethal that choke hold is. The guy was not assaulting anyone he was reportedly throwing trash around. If he's throwing plastic bags and paper then unless you're extremely confident you can safely restrain him you probably shouldn't do something precisely because the risk of violence for escalation is not worth preventing someone from having harmless trash thrown at them. If he's throwing glass bottles or heavy objects pointedly at people then restraining him seems justified to prevent harm. I don't know what the typical risk of death with that chokehold is. If it's really easy to kill someone if you hold slightly too long and anyone taught that hold would know that then his use of force was clearly disproportionate. If it's a one in a million chance then he's probably not.

someone else is allowed to murder them in response?

I'd really like to discuss this sentiment. I see this kind of hyperbolic statement expressed all the time, often in the form of "There shouldn't be a death penalty for X" or "Doing X doesn't mean they deserve death". Where action X provoked response P which lead to the person's death.

If this isn't just a rhetorical sleight of hand, I really don't get it.

Let's say somebody decides to take a stroll on the Autobahn. I approach him at 200 km/h. Instead of swerving off the road, likely killing me and my passengers, I instead hit the brakes, and subsequently, him. He dies. Would people now come out and say "There shouldn't be a death penalty for people strolling on the Autobahn" or "Taking a stroll doesn't mean he deserves death". No, but he risks justifiable reactions by others that could lead to his demise.

What kind of logic is this?

It's not rhetorical sleight of hand, it's a disagreement about the burden to respond proportionally that falls on people who are provoked.

The logic is that you're only allowed to use necessary and proportional force in self defense. If someone else throws the first punch in a bar fight you can fight back and claim self defense, but if you start stomping on their unconscious body it's clearly not necessary. If someone throws an empty beer can at your head and you pull out a gun and shoot them that's not proportional.

The issue here is that if the man on the subway successfully choked off the homeless man's blood supply then the window of time where his use of force went from necessary and proportional to unnecessary and disproportionate is incredibly short. The left position is that there should be significant legal risk to imperfect self defense so that people are heavily incentivized to deescalate rather than inexpertly use a chokehold and kill someone.

Your Autobahn example is not comparable because it reduces the whole thing to one moment where there's a life or death choice comparable to justified self defense. The people in the subway car had other choices, they could have endured having trash thrown at them, the man could have used a less dangerous hold, he could have stopped squeezing slightly sooner.

I live in California, I am annoyed regularly by a particular homeless man who lives near where I work and I have had fantasies of doing violence to him. I think it will be tragic if the guy who inadvertently killed him spends significant time in jail. But I don't think it would be good to have a legal code that says you can choke someone out if they throw trash at you and if you happen to do it a bit too long and they die well then there's no consequences.

The issue here is that if the man on the subway successfully choked off the homeless man's blood supply then the window of time where his use of force went from necessary and proportional to unnecessary and disproportionate is incredibly short. The left position is that there should be significant legal risk to imperfect self defense so that people are heavily incentivized to deescalate rather than inexpertly use a chokehold and kill someone.

The Left's position in isolation isn't the biggest issue. Although I can argue that it's vastly underestimating how messy actual violence is to think you can easily damn someone for imperfect defense.

The issue is that position as part of a package of other positions that make self-defense more necessary - like weakening the ability to contain segments of the population that disproportionately create these safety concerns by trying to make the prison system "fairer" (i.e. less punitive).

Yeah, I think the second paragraph is a big part of it. If once every now and then a homeless man threw trash at people on a subway, then endure it and wait for the police to show up is pretty tolerable. If they're doing it constantly and the police do nothing then the temptation to take matters into your own hands is quite high. Effective policing is an important public service the state needs to provide.

Effective policing is an important public service the state needs to provide.

I think the Left has worked itself into a shoot - to use wrestling lingo - on cops being if not useless or outright harmful, at least vastly overdeployed as a solution to problems.

I suppose I can see that argument for a high trust, low crime society. I just don't know how it maps to the US.

Ah, now I think we are getting closer. I have several disagreements. Note that I am not making a legal argument but a moral one.

First, I find it incredibly weird to demand what amounts to infinite restraint and control from the attacked, but place zero accountability on the attacker.

Second, I think that disproportionate response is an acceptable deterrent for provocation. In the absence of competent authorities who step in (and this is evidently not the case when it comes to the NYC subway), it might be the only deterrent. This has boundaries of course, and there is such a thing as overdoing it.

Third, on the matter of alternative choices: I have seen this argument when it came to both pedestrians and drivers being attacked by mobs. Paraphrased: It is better to take a beating than killing someone. Again, this places infinite responsibility at the feet of the attacked, and absolves the attackers from essentially all agency. They are seen as holy children, the attacked as omnipotent angels.

Fourth, on enduring abuse: No. No, they shouldn't endure the abuse. I was bullied and beaten up for years. Nobody helped. It only stopped when, one recess, I took a very large stick and beat my attacker blue. This could have seriously injured him. He would have deserved it.

This case might be different from the usual 'Is it really ethical to MURDER* someone just for being poor? (*murder: n. not provide $100k worth of state of the art medical treatment to prolong someone's life by a few months)'.

If you haven't put yourself in danger or created a situation where self-defense is justified or ..., nobody else has the right to intentionally or negligently cause your death. If a homeless guy is screaming at someone or throwing hamburger wrappers at someone, you can't take out a gun and shoot them. And you can't choke the homeless guy out and 'accidentally' kill them. (And if you could, that'd be a way to get away with intentionally killing them!).

If this guy was actively physically attacking someone or something similar, restraining the person could be justified, and then the killing would - maybe still be prosecutable (as minor fights happen a lot more than killings, and escalating them to killings can still be bad), but maybe not be. But if the guy was just being disruptive or screaming, the legal system shouldn't (according to today's ethics) allow that to escalate to a killing - it's disproportionate, it takes the 'monopoly over violence' away from the state and its adversarial legal system, etc.

One response is "the state isn't dealing with this guy and he was a danger, so it's good a vigilante dealt with him". Another response is "this guy doesn't contribute to society or his own life, and shouldn't be alive anyway". I'm sympathetic, but generally allowing random killings of people you judge in the moment to be bad has spillover effects outside cleaning out undesirables.

I get you, but these people aren't making a legal argument or an argument based on rule utilitarianism. They are making either a deontological argument or a virtue ethics argument that boils down to "always take it on the chin". Because any response whatsoever contains the possibility of escalation and that might get somebody killed in the end. Curiosly, it completely strips the attacker of agency and places all the responsibility on part of the bullied.

"The wiser head gives in" was the principle I was raised with. It took a lot of beatings for me to realise that the only way to stop a bully is to fight back. There seem to be people who never had to make that experience.

Turning the other cheek might work for sons of gods but it creates terrible incentive structures for everybody else.

IMHO it's a participation trophy award mentality. These people live in such insulated bubbles where base reality has so little pull on them, they seem to honestly believe there is no such thing as cause and effect. Consequences are things laboriously pondered by a dense bureaucracy such that the proper outcome they learned about in college comes about. Any deviation from that, even if the direct result of Newtonian physics, is immoral and must be prosecuted.

IMHO it's a participation trophy award mentality

I think it's their general condescending attitude towards black people and criminals and all the other "oppressed" and shunned and weak things whose agency is ignored in favor of blaming Vast Impersonal Forces - as Michael Brooks used to say "be kind to people, ruthless to systems".

Well VIFs don't threaten to stab you in the subway, crazy people do. So people defending themselves will sometimes fall afoul of that suggestion.

Consequences are things laboriously pondered by a dense bureaucracy such that the proper outcome they learned about in college comes about.

This rings rather true to me and also explains the insistence of the PMC that outcome disparities must(!) never have anything to do with input differences.

This article says he hadn't assaulted anyone. Other articles claim he "threw garbage at commuters".

I've spent a lot of time in my life doing BJJ and it's very hard to strangle somebody to death without realizing something has gone wrong long before that. It's not even a George Floyd situation where the restraint wasn't a conventional choke and/or it was very potentially a stress heart attack. The Marine was capable of restraining the homeless guy in far less risky positions.

I've spent a lot of time in my life doing BJJ and it's very hard to strangle somebody to death without realizing something has gone wrong long before that.

10+ years of experience doing Judo (at a very low level). I only ever choked out a person once. The other times, they tapped out or the choke didn't work because they tugged their chin in.

My reaction as well from the same background. If i read the coverage right he held that chokehold for two minutes, which is crazy. It only takes a few seconds to knock someone out like that. Anyone trained enough to know the hand position would know that from experience.

Watching the video, although he does use the BJJ position it doesn't really look like he has a blood-choke; his arm just seems to be wrapped around the guy's chin?

Hard to tell of course, but I guess if the dead guy is found to have drugs in his system the defense will want to raise the possibility that the hold was just a restraint and the guy would have OD'd anyways.

On the other hand, the article I read seemed to say that he was just acting unruly but hadn't assaulted anybody at the point when the Marine started restraining him -- which puts the Marine in violation of the 'MYOB' doctrine, which is a bad place to be in a situation like this.

If he had been choking him properly (tightly) the guy would have stopped struggling and the other guys holding him down would have been unnecessary.

Most likely the guy choking him out had only a vague idea what he was doing, or clothing/bags/etc prevented a clean choke. The result was that the guy didn't really go out, but was just oxygen deprived for a long time still struggling, which caused an episode when combined with fentanyl or stress or whatever else.

Have we considered that the article may not be telling(or may not have) the whole truth as to what this crazy homeless guy was doing?

I'm the "don't believe anything you haven't seen with your own eyes" guy -- so yeah.

But given that this is clearly going to court and likely to be a cause celebre, if the grappling was in fact preceeded by a significant assault we will hear about it soon enough. There would probably be a verbal altercation as some part of this, which may be bad for the Marine in terms of claiming self-defense.

Maybe. But maybe that doesn't matter. "Hands up, don't shoot" was a blatant lie. It was known to be a lie almost immediately. It was authoritatively proven to be lie some time later. Neighborhoods still got burned to the ground, and people still believe it to this day.

The flag has been planted at this being an unprovoked lynching. Now, even if a hypothetical video shows the violent felon literally inches from shanking a defenseless woman on that subway, people will be quibbling over whether that really entitles a marine to "murder" him. That we don't know, not for certain, that he would have actually shanked that woman. The woman probably would have survived, the punishment for a survivable stab wound shouldn't be death. People survive stab wounds all the time.

Once upon a time I would have thought that exaggeration. Except it already happened. So yeah. There is no possible provocation that man could have done, up to and including actually physically harming another passenger, which would justify to these activist the subsequence events. Their claims that he didn't do anything preceding the events is not a statement of fact. It's an ontological statement of orthodoxy. Anything he did, no matter what, counts as nothing.

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  1. He is a marine, but he didn't spend his life "doing BJJ".

  2. This wasn't a controlled situation like a martial arts match.

The only way you're going to realize "something has gone wrong long before" the guy dies is if he stops struggling first.

You don’t have to spend a lifetime doing bjj, the rear naked choke is a move taught to beginners. The way it’s taught involves practicing it on other people, you see an instantaneous reaction from the other person the moment you apply pressure. It’s essentially impossible to learn the move without understanding what it does.

This is not to say I feel no sympathy for people defending themselves against a crazy person on the train, being a commuter myself, but the idea that someone could rear naked choke another person for two minutes and be surprised it was lethal is not realistic. The question is whether lethal force was warranted in the situation.

Did we watch the same video? I don't see a man being held still and unconscious for two minutes, I see a man struggling against restraint for two minutes that is eventually choked out. Here's the full video to the best of my knowledge. Until approximately the last 15-20 seconds of the video, he's still visibly struggling, which is presumably why the guy who applied the choke did not release it.

At this stage, I don't think we have sufficient evidence to reach a conclusion regarding whether reasonable people would have believed that the threat had ended.

He's struggling, but he's unconscious. It's not clear to an untrained eye, and from time to time even MMA/jiu jitsu refs will fail to recognize that the person struggling isn't conscious anymore, so it's understandable that these guys didn't realize that he was unconscious.

However, to someone who has experience with this stuff, it's very clear that the guy is unconscious for at least two minutes and twenty seconds of being choked.

It doesn't look like has the choke on perfectly in the first part, though we can't really see it the second minute.

At this stage, I don't think we have sufficient evidence to reach a conclusion regarding whether reasonable people would have believed that the threat had ended.

I agree, and as per my earlier comment I don't even have an opinion on whether he was unwarranted in using lethal force in the situation. My objection is to the idea that any trained person wouldn't understand that the rear naked choke isn't meant to restrain someone, it has deadly potential if held continuously. From his use of the move and his leg wrap around the guy's legs he clearly has training.

I've been training jiu jitsu for the better part of a decade now, and I disagree. The RNC and hooks combo is common enough that a lot of people who don't train have seen it on UFC, and his execution is sloppy enough in more than one way (against a basically non-resisting opponent, by that time) that I find it hard to believe that he had any significant amount of training.

Anyone that trains will know that you shouldn't be holding a legit RNC tight for minutes after the guy has gone unconscious. However, I find it to be very unlikely that they knew the homeless man was unconscious. The homeless man was still moving, and even professional MMA refs occasionally fail to recognize that the competitor being choked is only jerking around unconsciously. If you have little to no training, and a piss poor RNC (which probably didn't put him out quickly), and the guy you're trying to choke keeps flailing around.... and you don't have have enough years in jiu jitsu to have seen people keep fighting when unconscious, then it's pretty easy to conclude that you just aren't successfully strangling him.

Teachmegrappling guy agrees

Honestly, I think that's reading too much into it. I think it's perfectly possible to have a long and successful martial arts career without ever needing to internalize the potential lethality of any hold if it were used beyond the point of tapping out, because it never comes to that in organized settings.

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Yeah, fair, I would expect even a casual observer of mixed martial arts to have noticed that this is probably going to be very bad for someone if not released quickly.

The way it’s taught involves practicing it on other people, you see an instantaneous reaction from the other person the moment you apply pressure. It’s essentially impossible to learn the move without understanding what it does.

Other willing people, who are playing along. Which was not the case here. Even if the Marine had been taught the move in a controlled situation and practiced it on other people, if the homeless guy didn't react the way the Marine had been taught, the Marine would be in uncharted territory at that point.

No, you practice it live too. We have children do this, I’d be shocked if actual marines don’t as well.

what? like you go to random strangers and choke them to see how someone in an uncontrolled situation would react?

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Homeless people are entitled to the same protections you are - if you are screaming in public, I do not think you should be extradjudicially killed for it.

I'm instinctively supportive of such killings, probably because such people viscerally disgust me and I see no good reason for their existence, but rationally I can't really muster any argument in support of my inclination. You're right. My feelings are wrong.

I wonder if "videogames taught me choking people out doesn't harm them" is going to help the dude in court. Could be the difference between voluntary and involuntary manslaughter.

even if his air supply was cut off , it would still take him 5-8 minutes to actually die. So I suspect something else , like drugs, played a role.

Way, way less long for a blood choke

IMO this one's far more open-shut than the George Floyd thing.

I've done a lot of jiujitsu & grappling and I'd honestly not expect somebody I was restraining Chauvin-Floyd style to die of asphyxiation.

If I've got a tight Rear Naked Choke on somebody I'm expecting them to pass out within 10-20 seconds and then I'm categorically letting go.

I am justing talking about a possible explanation for the person dying sooner than would be expected from oxygen deprivation alone . Not innocence or guilt. Look at the Eric Garner case..he still took 5 minutes to die after being choked out.

Did we watch the same video? I don't see a man being held still and unconscious for two minutes, I see a man struggling against restraint for two minutes that is eventually choked out. Here's the full video to the best of my knowledge. Until approximately the last 15-20 seconds of the video, he's still visibly struggling, which is presumably why the guy who applied the choke did not release it.

At this stage, I don't think we have sufficient evidence to reach a conclusion regarding whether reasonable people would have believed that the threat had ended.

Is there any video of what led up to this available?

Not that I'm aware of, unfortunately.

I would wager that some combination of excited delirium, drugs, and underlying heart conditions were involved in the death. Of course, a blood choke certainly can kill someone if held excessively long, but there isn't much evidence to arrive at a specific conclusion at the moment, so guesses are mostly about what your priors are, and I know what mine are when it comes to belligerent vagrants.

A rear naked choke cuts off blood to the brain, not air.

right and it takes 5 minutes to die even if the person passes out much sooner .

Citation needed on that one.

Yeah, people have been accidentally knocked out by blood chokes. It's fast.

I wouldn't be so sure, IIRC there was another case where drugs seemed obvious but a court found it was murder

so why have courts at all if only takes one case to set precedent for all the others? each case has to be looked at on an individual basis. The suddenness of death leads me to think drugs, but could be wrong.

Hemophiliacs are more likely to die if you shoot them, the existence of moral luck does not change the action - death is a foreseeable consequence of extended choking.

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