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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.
This part sounds bad. I am not sure whether you intended it or not, but it sounds like you'd be ok if you were humiliated by you social or biological superiors (wtf is that anyway? More Aryan? More muscular? Longer dick?), but the fact that wrong people assaulted you is upsetting. I don't think it is a very good position.
As I made clear in another comment, this passage had nothing to do with race - I get why people assume that everything is racial in my mind, but actually there are other things I care about as well - and everything to do with the fact that the guy has a massive criminal rap sheet, is homeless and wholly dependent on others, and is a drain on society; also the fact that he has a (currently) incurable mental illness that renders him a permanent danger to other people. He’s a perfect example of someone who needs to be removed from the gene pool, improving the genetic stock of humanity immediately.
As for whether or not I’d be fine with being humiliated by my betters… it depends on the reasons they’re humiliating me in this hypothetical scenario, and whether or not I stand to ultimately gain from it. While I’m skeptical about some elements of the structure and culture of military initiation - basic training, boot camp, etc. - I recognize that the whole “the drill sergeant treats you like dirt and makes a humiliating example out of you” thing has an impressive history of creating an effective fighting force. This would be a scenario where a man is being dominated by his social better, in order to forge him into something improved. He’s suffering a temporary loss in status in order to not only enhance his own status later on down the line, but also to increase the total quotient of effectiveness and status of the group as a whole.
This is markedly different from a situation in which I’m being dominated by my social inferior; it lowers my own status immensely, but produces no corresponding rise in status later on - unless, of course, I respond with force that could get me judicially lynched by a regime that hates me and finds the schizos useful/sacred - and it also immiserates others around me who watch the situation and either feel powerless to intervene, or who have to sublimate the shame of being too apathetic to care.
Fuck the genetic stock of humanity. Seriously. Our scientific understanding of population genetics is shit anyway, and so is our understanding of brain functions and much else in our bodies. We are not nearly capable of producing any judgement on the level that would allow to formulate some "improvement" programs as a society, and thousand times less as a petty low state functionary who has no idea about these high-minded things anyway. And, the experience shows all the guys that cared too much about genetic purity of humanity were not the good guys, to allow myself a huge understatement. So I think staying away from all talk about "improving genetic stock" is the only way for a decent person to behave. Not with a 100 foot pole.
I didn't say a word about racial and did not assume it. I think this is the case of protesting too much.
You literally asked me if my criteria for declaring someone my superior is “more Aryan”. Don’t pretend you didn’t make it racial.
As for everything else in your comment, I declare unequivocally that the eugenicists were correct, and that what the Third Reich did to Jews was an unforgivable travesty not only because industrialized mass murder is a moral abomination, but also because Jews are a generally high-quality, high-human-capital population. Real eugenicists, of the turn-of-the-century progressive-aligned variety, stayed focused on removing actually dysgenic elements from the population - not via murder, but via sterilization and other non-violent policies - such as the mentally retarded and degenerate populations. The fact that our society marginalized and repudiated them after WWII to retroactively legitimize the Global American Empire was a catastrophic blow to our civilization.
I also asked if it's a longer dick, so let's get into the gay angle too, right? I just enumerated the known definitions of "superior", without having or implying any idea which one is yours. I thought mentioning the dick would be enough to make sure this list is made in mockery of the whole concept, not as a suggestion for it, but of course, it wasn't.
That said, if you are fine with eugenics, I am not sure why the racist angle offends you so much. Even if racist eugenics is wrong (which I am not sure if you believe or not, but it's immaterial) - it's a small wrong. It's like an argument between two theoretical physicists about quantum theory - one may come out right and another may come out wrong, but they both are and remain respected scientists, and their ideas, even is occasionally wrong, would still gain them respect. If eugenics is fine, the only sin of racist eugenics is they get some small details wrong, not that the whole thing is morally abominable.
Again, thanks, but fuck that. As a Jew, I don't want my shield against the fires of Auschwitz to be "high-quality genes", by any definition. Neither I want anybody else's. Either we agree that we don't do "genetic engineering by murdering people" thing (and forced sterilization and other things - which can not be "non-violent" by definition - are only a small step removed from it), regardless of how sure we are we got it right this time (we didn't, we never will) - or we are in the deepest pits of Hell, and no rationalization ever changes that.
Yeah, I remember, the forced sterilization programs and the Nobel prize for lobotomy. Thanks but no thanks.
Also, weren't those the same guys that were super-worried too many Jews are getting into Harvard and Yale? They finally solved that problem, I hear, took them a century but it's done.
I think you're making it a bit too easy on yourself here, though I broadly agree.
The holocaust was bad. (Galaxy brain take, I know.) It was such a humongous bad, and it existed in such a cluster of other bad things, that the entire memetic landscape around it is rightfully considered toxic forever. Nobody should be killed for genes, nobody should be sterilized for genes. But. But. Any child born with a preventable disease is still a stain on humanity's rap sheet! Any person born deaf, or born dumb, or born spastic - we say that such people not just have a right to life but exhibit their own worth, in one of the most blatant instances of sour grapes in the history of civilization. If that was true, why is nobody lining up to have their ears pierced, or their brain lobotomized? It seems obvious that if all other things were equal, you should choose for a child to be born healthy rather than sick, smart rather than stupid, capable rather than incapable. That impulse has enabled and abetted horrible crimes, and we may say that humanity is not capable of safely enacting such improvements, that it gives far too much license to sociopaths and demagogues to advocate disfigurement and naked murder - all granted. But the impulse in itself is good.
Then we can ask further: what of a woman who knowingly brings a sick child to term? Is it a moral good to bring a life into the world that is doomed to an early death? What of a child that is in continuous pain until their untimely but predictable death? If we continue along this line long enough, we either lose the ability to say that a child being born in suffering and doomed to death is morally bad, or we may end up in the bizarre position of "a significant crime is being committed, but we are bound to idly stand by." Fine, be that the case, we may know that granting ourselves license to intercede will only result in worse crimes. But I think we must hold in mind that this does not make the lesser crime a moral good.
A day may come when genetic editing becomes so cheap and widely available that any child can be easily modified before birth to exclude all of those disorders which make life not worth living, or even improve on the human template. When that day comes, I think we do not want to be ideologically committed to the idea that an act of willingly and knowingly creating beings to suffer has inherent moral worth.
Maybe. But that's what makes it so dangerous. And that's what requires the "100 foot pole approach" - we can't trust our obvious instincts to navigate us safely there. It's easy to avoid eating foods that are bad for us and smell and taste foul. It's much harder to avoid eating food that tastes awesome and still is bad for us. We need some special measures to avoid it. Like, not keeping such foods at home at all. Same approach here - exactly because it has a kernel of good in there, we must be extra careful to not let this kernel of good to lead us to the abominable places. Because we know it happened to us before.
Everybody is born in suffering and is doomed to death. The question is just timing. And I'm not sure where one would find the audacity to say they know the "correct" timing to make such kinds of decisions and force them on others.
What of an adult? What if you decide somebody's life is too hard and murder them? For their own good? After all, we are doing so many things to force people to behave in certain ways that they don't want to behave, for their own good. Why not make the ultimate step and murder them for their own good, since we are so smart we totally can decide for them that their lives aren't worth living?
Every human being will suffer. That's the part of being human (excluding Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, I guess, but I don't think you can be born this way?). Again, the question is just the form and the degree. I am all for reducing the amount of suffering, but deciding for another that their life is not worth living because of the suffering is a huge step, which we should be very very very careful about.
I do think there's a fundamental difference in morality between creating life and sustaining life. I don't think that we have a moral duty, for instance, to instantiate the greatest number of barely net positive existences (the Repugnant Conclusion). But to reject it requires assigning special moral worth to beings who are currently alive, which is why there is still, IMO, a moral difference between embryo selection for trait and murder for trait.
And at any rate, if you allow a citizen to give birth to a child whose life is going to be comparatively of much less value - to themselves - than another, you have also made a choice. Inaction is not inherently morally privileged.
Well, sure, I am fully on board with this. I just think that we will grow up to become worthy of this step, and when we do I would like us to have preserved that impulse to reduce suffering and multiply joy in our heart, not snuffed it out.
edit: That's overdramatic, but you know what I mean.
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