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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.
Saying that society should recognize that these people are garbage and not give a damn about them is a position that can only be taken if one is very selective about whom this categorization refers to, and this selectivity is why activists protest and call opinions such as yours inherently racist, or classist, or whatever. When Mr. Penny decided to put Mr. Neely in a chokehold, his information was limited to what he could tell from the approximately 30 seconds or whatever it was that Penny observed him in public. He didn't have a copy of the guy's criminal record to know that he was a general homeless scofflaw who had been arrested 42 times previously, mostly for turnstile jumping and public drunkenness but at least four times for assault. All he knew was that the guy was ranting and raving about being hungry and not caring if he went to jail and that this behavior made some (most?) people around him uncomfortable so he decided to do something about it, or, more accurately, assist in a group effort to do something about it.
Giving him a free pass on this seems reasonable enough, but only because we have the additional context that this was a black, homeless, schizo, ne'er do well. Suppose, on the other hand, a white, middle-class, student at a prestigious university (possibly your son) got drunk and started making a scene on public transit. A group of black passengers were made uncomfortable by his behavior and the young man died after on of these passengers put him in a choke hold. When I was in my early 20s being drunk, loud, and obnoxious on public transit was a regular occurrence, as we could go to the club in the city on 50 cent drink night without having to drive or park. Just a few years ago a friend of mine went into a similar rant about Taco Bell on the train back to the hotel after the 2018 ACC Championship Game in Charlotte. And if the counterargument is that Neely was obviously a dangerous hobo then that just confirms the suspicions of all the social justice do-gooders that you expect the rules to be different for certain people, and we're supposed to expect people to be able to tell the difference based on the way a guy's dressed or whether we think he's mentally ill or homeless or, mast damningly, whether he's white.
I remember a similar storyline back when black guys getting shot by cops was in the news more often, and most of the conservatives I know kept pointing out that one has an obligation to obey when a police officer tells you to do something. As a guy in his '30s this seemed reasonable, until I looked back at my own life and realized that by these people's standards I'd have been dead a long time ago. Yes, I agree generally with the argument that if a police officer decides to arrest you then what happens afterward happens on his terms, not yours, and if you have a problem with that you can bring it up in court. On the other hand, any teenager who is told to stop by police is going to start running. I wasn't a bad kid by a long-shot—I only got two write-ups in four years of high school, and one was for a class cut—but I still liked to occasionally indulge in the kind of mischief kids indulge in, like drinking in woods of indeterminate ownership or stealing pumpkins from farm fields and shit like that, and this would sometimes end with a fat, black cop chasing a bunch of spry kids through fields and woods. I once got away because I crawled under a fence that the guy couldn't fit under. If we took these statements about a duty of compliance to their logical conclusion, the officer had every right to shoot me. After all, I had clearly committed a crime, ignored his orders and fled. And it was clear that he wasn't going to catch me unless he could stop me from a distance. And this was for the same type of "quality of life" shit a lot of law and order types are complaining about. How would you like it if property you paid for was being used without permission by people on quads and dirt bikes during the day, cutting trails you don't want, contributing to erosion, and scaring away huntable animals, and then at night the same kids would come back and build fires and leve beer cans and fast food wrappers everywhere? People in rural areas have gotten in trouble for putting up tripwires and spike strips and other kinds of booby traps to keep people from trespassing, and while there's some pushback it's understandable that parents get pissed when criminal trespass results in serious premeditated injury. If we develop standards they have to apply to everybody, and few people realize what the implications of this would be.
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.
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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