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The easiest solution here, as far as I can tell, is to have different legal regimes for rural life vs. urban life. Let urban life be for the bug-man law-and-order types like me, with a concomitant no-nonsense legal regime, and for the rowdy teenagers and drunkards who are concerned about their mischief falling afoul of that regime, let them go mess around in the rural areas where the legal regime is designed to provide an outlet for the barbarian lifestyle. (I don’t mean barbarian in a negative way, but simply to draw a contrast between that ethos and the cosmopolitan lifestyle I prefer.)
Personally, I don’t think I’ve ever done anything in my life that would have resulted in me being killed or severely punished under the type of legal regime I’m advocating. I’ve been drunk and stupid before, but never in a way that would cause strangers to feel threatened by me; maybe that’s just because I’m small and not physically-imposing, so my drunk behavior doesn’t present as menacing even if I’m performing the same actions as you and your friends did.
I do have the “privilege” of being white and middle-class-presenting, meaning that people are far less likely to assume the worst of me than they are of someone who looks and acts like Jordan Neely; fortunately, that disparity in perception is justified by statistical reality. People really should be less scared of me than they were of Jordan Neely; if they assumed he had a long rap sheet and was capable of violence, they were right to assume that - not only because we know that it’s true, but because people who look and act like him are, statistically, far more likely to have that be true of them than people who looks and act like me are.
Considering the preferences repeatedly expressed by urban and rural residents in elections and informal communication, wouldn't it make more sense to keep rural life for "bug-man law-and-order types", and setting aside the cities for the people who are willing to tolerate the occasional subway screamer in return for having atomicity and interesting ethnic shops and occasionally getting to pat themselves on the shoulder for being enlightened and compassionate? Why do you want to live in a city to begin with? If you move to a city and want to impose a lifestyle on it that the majority of existing dwellers reject, doesn't that put you in the same category as the Islamic refugees that move to a country like Germany or France for economic reasons and then fly off the handle demanding that the locals cease their haram behaviours like having lightly clothed women waltz around in public?
("Let first-world life be for the pious Muslim types like me, with a concomitant no-nonsense moral police, and for the kaffirs and lascivious dogs who are concerned about their mischief falling afoul of that regime, let them go mess around in the desert where the legal regime is designed to provide an outlet for the barbarian lifestyle.")
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On the other hand, assuming you're a man, you are still much more likely to be violent than much of the population. It seems to me that in order to justify your position, you have to rather arbitrarily draw a line right where it benefits you the most (you get the benefit of the doubt if you are doing something suspicious or disconcerting, but you don't have to extend the same benefit of the doubt to the group most likely to be able to harm you).
The base right of violent criminal activity is low, so even a substantially increased probability may still be low. And no, making a bad assumption and having it turn out to be correct is not right. It's lucky. Our legal system strongly discourages this form of argument--you cannot use information you did not have access to at the time in a self-defense argument, because it is very bad to encourage vigilantism with low standards. The legal system is surely far from perfect at determining guilt but it's a hell of a lot better than letting every random person off the street just decide that they think someone else did something wrong. I don't know the details of your encounters, but there are violent attacks that happen where the aggressor thinks they're completely in the right because they didn't understand the situation, or felt insulted, or think they have a right to other people's stuff, or whatever. Encouraging such behavior is likely to result in more public violence and should be a last resort at best.
This assumes that people are in one of two states: behaving in a deranged and menacing way in public, or minding their own business. That's not really the case though, there is a pretty smooth spectrum of menacing behavior people can exhibit in public.
If observers are being good basians, they will factor in the observed behavior in addition to more contextual information about a person. A well dressed white man drunkenly throwing a single strike at someone and not following it up would seem like a much bigger deal than a similarly attired 5'0" white woman doing the same to me, partially because the woman is much less physically imposing, but also because of what I know about rates of sexed violence and my guess about the likelihood of escalation to a point I couldn't easily control.
At the same time, waving a gun around is a red-alert pretty much no matter the identity of the person doing the waving.
Based on the descriptions I've seen, Jordan Neely was not actually behaving in any sort of violent way. That's why Hoffmeister has to resort to "statistical reality" about black people, to claim that agitated, annoying behavior can be construed as violent. This is not allowed as part of a legal argument for self-defense, with good reason, just like a woman walking alone can't turn around and shoot a man for following her on the public sidewalk and then make an argument about "statistical reality." A "good bayesian" can conclude anything they would like, given limited evidence, if their priors are sufficiently bad. This is why the law does not tell everyone to act like bayesians.
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The legal system was perfectly fine with letting Neely (and many similarly situated) continue his one man reign of terror. Fix that, and then maybe it'll have the legitimacy to judge the Marine.
A "reign of terror"? Are you deliberately taking the piss? He's not Jack the Ripper (the marine, however, did kill someone).
Yeah, "public nuisance crimes" are not what I would call a "reign of terror." No one knew who this guy was until he was killed. An open container of alcohol in public? Turnstile hopping? This forum will get incensed over the fact the FBI uses loopholes and process crimes to punish politicians and rich celebrities who lied to said FBI, and then turn around and seriously claim that these are very legitimate crimes that prove Neely was dangerous and it was a massive failure of law and order for him to still be on the streets. I haven't found any reference to kidnapping; the only serious or violent crimes I've seen reference to are 4 assaults (over 8 years) and without knowing more about those cases, it's wildly irresponsible to jump straight from "arrested" to "definitely guilty." Like, it's entirely possible that he did commit those crimes, and others, and the DA just let him go out of misplaced sympathy. It's also possible he got into altercations with other mentally ill homeless but it's unclear who was at fault. Or that he was misidentified, or was the victim of a false accusation for being weird and noisy in public (it's totally impossible that someone could overreact to him dancing and being loud on the subway, right? that would definitely never happen?).
I think it's highly unlikely he's never committed any legitimate crime, but spouting a number like "42 arrests" is actively misleading and "reign of terror" is a frankly embarrassing level of unsupported, pearl-clutching propaganda.
And it's even possible the veteran had mind-reading powers to get any of this information!
You're engaged in mockery, but when the veteran put him in that chokehold, he didn't even know any of this. Literally the only information he had was what he observed, Neely walking back and forth and angrily ranting. This was apparently sufficient to put him in a chokehold for, what, 10 minutes? 15? You can see some of the video here; Neely is barely responsive and the restraint continues. Like, sure, be skeptical of claims that he was as pure and innocent as the new-fallen snow. But also be skeptical of claims that he spent all his time terrorizing the populace and execution was the only solution.
There's a lot of subway weirdos. I suspect the crime rate would be much higher than it actually is if every subway weirdo regularly committed crimes.
What a sad and boring society it would be if we executed all weirdos.
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This just seems like a way for the Blues to visit violence on the Reds, harrying the Helots style.
The same thought occurred to me, but in this case I’m assuming that the Blues remain as averse to interpersonal violence as they currently are, and that Blues’ violent pets - people like Jordan Neely - are dealt with comprehensively and violently, rather than allowed (let alone encouraged) to run free and wreak havoc on hapless Reds. And I’m also assuming that in this scenario Reds are permitted to be armed to the teeth in order to guard against incursions from undesirables who push their luck.
This is not a term that conforms to our engagement rules. Its antagonistic in its assumptions, and doesn't even seem necessary within the context.
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How does arming rural citizens to the teeth help here? You already said that people in rural areas should be given special treatment (for what reason, I don't know, since rural meth heads are just as obnoxious as urban ones in my experience), so you have to give them special treatment. A guy with a shotgun willing to shoot anyone who enters onto his property has even less opportunity to evaluate if the person he's shooting fits into one of the special categories you seem willing to create wherein people are given a free pass to violate laws that ostensibly apply to everybody. If it becomes clear that antisocial behavior is tolerated beyond a certain line then ne'er do wells will have an incentive to go there and urban leaders will have an incentive to make sure they go there, especially progressive ones who don't want to put them in jail.
It wouldn't even be a progressive thing, necessarily. Exiling your ne'er do wells is just good sense- it solves the problem more semi-permanently and is much cheaper than jailing them. Apartheid SA and the USSR both tended to deal with petty criminals by dropping them off in rural areas and not caring very much what happened.
If the best examples you can come up with are the USSR and apartheid-era SA you may want to rethink your argument.
They were extremely different regimes that independently arrived at the same conclusion.
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To disprove hydro's examples you must show the bad aspects of those regimes are necessary requirements for their low petty crime rate OR that their petty crime rate wasn't actually low.
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