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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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