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The identity of the man who choked Jordan Neely on the NYC subway has been made public.
The man now gets to become the center of a media firestorm, and will certainly be subjected to credible threats, to say nothing of the likelihood that the activists in charge of Manhattan’s criminal justice system will indict him. If he ever gets to live a normal life again, it certainly won’t be in New York, and probably not in any urban blue-heavy environment in this country. Future prospective employers will know him as the guy who murdered a defenseless man and beloved Michael Jackson impersonator who was experiencing homelessness and needed help. This will be how he’ll be perceived by a substantial number of important people who will have the power to determine important things about the future of his life, regardless of any legal outcomes for him, favorable or otherwise.
I told the story previously of how I was assaulted on public transit by a mentally-ill black lowlife, and how I was very close to being severely injured and nobody in the vicinity would have been able nor willing to stop it from happening. (Sorry, the comment search functions both here and on Reddit are terrible, such that it would be too much work for me to track down that comment thread.) Since posting that story, a very similar situation happened to me yet again - with a predictably similar antagonist - and once again, I was sickened and humiliated not only by the actions of the schizophrenic loser who accosted me, and by my relative inability to effectively defend myself if the guy had started attacking me, but also by the inaction of the other grown men standing nearby. Without telling the whole story, I ended up in that position because I attempted to stop the lunatic from harassing a different guy, and then that guy stood around and watched the assailant menace me and did not intervene in any way.
I have fantasized about doing exactly what Daniel Penny - the NYC subway hero - did. Except for in my fantasies, I didn’t unintentionally end the man’s life due to a tragic and unforeseen accident; I just kicked the absolute shit out of him, taking him by surprise and beating him within an inch of his life, or stabbing him before he could get a hand in me. These fantasies are just that: unrealistic power fantasies, the stuff I would do if I were a much stronger, taller, more physically-powerful, more experienced with interpersonal violence than I actually am. I’ve never been in a proper fistfight, and even if I knew how to properly defend myself, in both this situation and the previous one, I allowed the guy to close distance on me and get into an advantageous position, such that they had me right where they wanted me.
I’ve stewed and ideated about what I could have done differently, why I’m a grown man who let myself be treated like a pathetic plaything by individuals who are my social and biological inferiors in every imaginable way except for that I’m diminutive and even-tempered while they’re large, high-testosterone, and well-acquainted with violence because it’s literally the only tool in their toolbox.
I’ve also thought about what would have been the consequences for me if somehow I really had been able to put these guys in their place and seriously injure or kill them. I’ve imagined being at trial - a highly-publicized media shitstorm of a trial, given the demographics involved - and having to answer questions that are designed to get me to hang myself with their rope. I’ve thought about what would happen if they found my posts on The Motte. If they asked me, “Are you glad that Mr. Schizo is dead?” How could I credibly answer “no, this is a terrible tragedy, I never wanted to take someone’s life” when I’ve got a backlog of posts here saying explicitly that I believe that schizophrenic street criminals’ lives have no value whatsoever and that the world would be better if all of them were summarily rounded up and sent to gulags or executed? If they were to ask me “did you do this because Mr. Schizo is black”, no matter how sincerely I would answer “no, it’s because he was attacking me”, how can I be confident that they won’t drag up all my posts here and paint me as a “hate criminal”?
I have no idea how racially-aware Daniel Penny is. I have no clue if he has similar opinions about the scourge of worthless criminal crazies and what to do about them, and I have no reason to assume that his lawyers are lying when they say that he’s devastated that Jordan Neely died, that Mr. Penny never wanted nor foresaw this outcome, etc. It’s very easy for me to say “I’m glad Jordan Neely is dead, you did the world a favor, this was a wonderful thing you did and you shouldn’t feel an ounce of guilt or sadness about it”, but in the actual event that I did what Mr. Penny did, I probably would be pretty shaken-up about it. For most people, taking a life - especially when you hadn’t planned to - is probably pretty psychologically destabilizing, even if it was totally necessary and justified.
Still, though, what if Penny thinks the same way I do about the homeless population? What if he truly does believe, as I do, that Jordan Neely was human garbage who had no redeeming value, and that his death is a great boon to the entire population of NYC? He can’t say that in court, even if it’s true. He would be pilloried and convicted of manslaughter and sent to prison. His only legal hope is to vociferously insist that Neely’s death is a tragedy, that he would never have done what he did if he could have foreseen that it would result in a death, that he is 100% innocent of the crime of racial consciousness or animus toward the experiencing-homelessness population. His future depends on his ability to persuasively perform colorblind egalitarian liberalism, regardless of whether or not he believes in it or not.
Outside of the edgy dissident-right spaces I frequent, every other commentator, even putatively conservative ones, are doing the expected throat-clearing about how Neely’s death is a tragedy, that we all wish he “could have gotten the help he needed”, etc. If anyone believes, as I do, that the first step to saving our civilization is for tens of thousands of people to pull a Daniel Penny on their local subway-screaming bum, they’re sure not saying it out loud. The veil of self-censorship and paying homage to liberal pieties will persist no matter what happens to Daniel Penny, and nobody will get the public catharsis of hearing a powerful or important person say out loud that Jordan Neely’s death was a good thing and we need more of it. Those who do say something like that out loud better hope and pray that they’re never thrust into a courtroom and asked to defend those opinions under oath; the defense stand is no place for hard-nosed honesty, and neither is our society.
I'm one of those who believe that this is a tragedy stemming from the end of forced institutionalization and the demise of law and order. This guy could have been alive being looked after and kept away from normies.
There does seem to be a cold new strain of secular right that just sees the guy as a worthless meat sack who shouldn't even exist. Seemingly confirming the progressive suspicion that the right would rather see whole swaths of humanity simply genocided.
On the one hand the right talks about upholding civilization, but the blase attitude regarding mediating institutions and recovering a government that was makes me think a primitive vigilante-ism strain that is quite anti-civilization is taking hold. A thrill of the idea of taking things into their own hands. Perhaps a kind of Fight Club style fascination with the manhood-testing the follows from the collapse of it all. An actual disappointment at 1955 law enforcement returning. The 1955 justice system would not just kill the guy. It was not that vicious. (You could say after 40 prior arrests it would...but Neely would never have gotten to 40 prior arrests. He'd have been put away permanently.)
The problem here is that mass incarceration of the 'humane' variety isn't a realistic option. I mean, you can try to have a cordoned off village or facility filled with deranged schizophrenics but it won't last very long. These guys need constant supervision. If you don't want them burning things down or tormenting one another, usually the weakest and most vulnerable, then you are looking at very high costs.
Coming from a part of the Nordic world that is considered to treat their mentally ill in the most humane possible way, the system in place is constantly teetering on the edge of falling apart. It can not afford any higher ratios of mentally ill entering society. Even now there are a host of mentally ill people locked in jail for little other reason than a lack of other facilities to house them. The others are kept at facilities that house the criminally insane. The semi-functional ones are homeless. Benefitting immensely from the small scope of the homeless problem, they can be periodically checked on. If that wasn't the case the problem would get a lot worse.
Considering a Nordic country can barely handle the problem with it's relatively comfortable population, I don't see America finding any solutions.
High costs compared to the chicken feed allocated to social programs, or compared to the Pentagon budget?
Where I live there is practically no military spending. The budget issue is centered around balancing debt with all the other things people rely on, like general healthcare. We could, instead of building a new hospital, just expand the facilities for the mentally ill. But there is an obvious cost there. Personally, I would much rather take the hospital and more doctors since there is a dire need for both.
I am sure the US is in a much worse spot than where I'm from. And could benefit from trimming a lot of the fat off the Pentagon pig, but my point was that even a Nordic model state could not fit the population proportions that the US had to deal with. Simply put, there are, proportionally, too many socially unfit. I am sure there is a solution or a fix that can better the situation by a lot. But unless people are willing to sacrifice some of their own safety and quality of life, I don't see a 'humane' solution like is often imagined existing somewhere in Europe.
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To note, America has a much higher mentally ill population.
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To be very clear, I am a hardcore proponent of law and order, and I strongly desire a society where Daniel Penny would never have had to do what he did, because it wouldn’t have gotten to that point. I don’t hunger for an era of vigilantism and wanton interpersonal violence; there’s a reason that I’ve made it into my thirties without ever engaging in a single act of interpersonal violence. While I do believe that war and combat can be ennobling for some men under certain circumstances, I’m largely in agreement with you that the reduction of violence in favor of civilization has been, on balance, a significant improvement for mankind.
However, I do sincerely believe that the long-term maintenance of society does in fact depend on the application of severe violence by the state toward certain individuals within society. Treating schizophrenic repeat-offending criminals as “people who need help” is a cancerous attitude which will erode - and already has eroded - civilization. No, he did not “need help” and he did not deserve help; he was a useless scumbag, a burden on every other person around him, and we are better off without him in every possible way. I agree with you that it’s far from ideal that random strangers had to take matters into their own hands to do to Jordan Neely what the state should have already done, in a way that would have been legitimized by the imprimatur of state sovereignty and monopoly on violence. Somebody needed to permanently remove Jordan Neely from society, and if it’s not going to be the state - which, clearly, given the state of our civilization, it wasn’t going to be - the next best thing is 24-year-old former Marines.
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