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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   30001 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

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https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/12/us/jordan-neely-daniel-penny-new-york-subway-death-charge/index.html

Daniel Penny, a 24-year old Marine, turned himself to police after being charged with 2nd degree manslaughter for the killing of Jordan Neely. It looks like I was initially wrong. I said that drugs may have played a role given that the original NYTs story, which I replied to, from a week ago said that Neely had been choked for only 2-3 minutes and released and was unresponsive. The updated story is that he was choked out for much longer, as long as 15 minutes, which would have def. been lethal, and the video is pretty bad.

So retract my original argument in which I posit drugs played a role. This is why you should always wait until you have all the information before forming an opinion. I didn't think the story would blow up like it did. I just assumed it was some random altercation. The video is why it went so viral. I think Penny is not without some guilt here. Keeping someone in a choke for so long is going to end in death. It's likely Neely was not rendered unconscious near-instantly from blood loss to the brain, such as from a sleeper hold as I assumed from the original story (I assumed Penny put Neely in a hold, and then Neely went limp in 20-30 seconds and did not come back), but far worse, had been suffocated to death, like being held underwater because his windpipe was restricted. That's why he was flailing around. It would have been more humane had Penny just shot him although that would have carried a worse charge.

A second degree manslaughter conviction is not that bad. only max 15 years for killing someone, and with parole Penny may only spend 5 years, which is a pretty lenient sentence for killing a guy, and not even in self defense or accident. By comparison, Ross Ulbricht faces multiple life sentences despite not killing anyone. I cannot say Penny is not without some blame in this matter. But In Penny's defense, the police took too long to come, and despite Marine training he and his accomplices didn't know what else to do.

I think he might be guilty of going too far. I expect a hung jury because these cases haven’t been working in NYC.

I think the bigger question is what should we be doing with people like Neely? He’s obviously a net negative utilitarian value on society harassing people all day with a potential to have a bad moment and throw someone in front of a train.

Just locking him in a cell seems a little mean and drastically increases his suffering. My solution sounds a little like slavery where we put people on a farm with supervision. He gets to do a little work like taking off vegetables etc. But is removed from society.

the push for de-institutionalization is partly to blame. In the past maybe he would have been committed. It's easy to find solutions to deal with overtly violent or mentally ill people, but those who are a nuisance and only occasionally act or threaten violence, but without breaking laws or physically harassing people, are harder to deal with.

Would he have been institutionalized in a non-prison? Based on his choices of victims: children and old ladies, he seems fairly sane. Just bog standard sociopathy and desire to harm humans explains this behavior pretty well.

Couldn’t it be that there are just far less mentally ill people in Japan, per capita? At least when it comes to the mental illnesses, like schizophrenia, which are likely to produce homelessness and street harassment? I’ve seen persuasive evidence that rates of schizophrenia differ by race/ethnicity, and it seems plausible that Japan would have significantly less homelessness than the U.S. no matter what economic/political arrangement were in place in either country.

I’ve seen persuasive evidence that rates of schizophrenia differ by race/ethnicity, and it seems plausible that Japan would have significantly less homelessness than the U.S. no matter what economic/political arrangement were in place in either country.

Do you have a link? I agree it seems plausible Japan would have less homelessness regardless.

Here’s an analysis of race differences in psychotic personality. Huadpe also linked to a similar one up above. I’ll see if I can find one about schizophrenia.

That's a study of race and psychopathic personalities. That's a pretty big mistake. But otherwise a very interesting study, cheers.

You’re right, and I should have been far more careful in my phrasing and distinguished those two things. Good call-out.

I'm under the impression that mental health is very poorly-understood in Japanese society compared to the US, so it may just be that they seem mentally-healthier simply because they're broadly more ignorant of the potential reality of things. You arguably see this reflected in the culture; besides the culture around suicide mentioned below, I have seen a fair number of "these people need therapy" takes in discussions about mecha anime (especially as many characters in these works tend to be teenagers who go through traumatic things), and ever since the explosion of VTubing, the term "menhera" (from the English term "mental health") has become a fixture of the lexicon of certain communities around it (and often used in context of talents making particularly odd or poor decisions stemming from, well, mental health issues that haven't been diagnosed or treated). Japanese culture seems to favor the grin-and-bear-it approach to emotional suffering, whereas modern Western/first-world culture favors directly interrogating emotional suffering.

"Mental illness" is, I think in most cases, something of a euphemism. At best most of these people are dual diagnosis (mental illness and drug addiction).

Right, I’m specifically talking about the mental illnesses that cause the types of symptoms we associate with homeless street harassers; I don’t doubt that Japan has high rates of depression, anxiety, etc., but those don’t make you homeless and don’t make you harass strangers.

Japan as a culture has a long, long history of valorizing and romanticizing suicide as a totally acceptable and even deeply admirable response to a variety of negative situations. If culture has any effect at all on behavior, I'd expect a lot more suicide in a country that pumps out a deluge of memes about how suicide is heckin' rad.

There are tons of people who, with a cheap studio apartment could likely get by working part time hours at a McDonald's and being at least at the margin a productive-to-neutral member of society.

I think tons overstates it. A substantial portion of the unhoused cohort have already been evicted from free housing. They were unable to follow the rules for housing and many are non-compliant with their medication. They'll need more supervision than a flop house provides.

Neely ran away from a residential care facility he was placed in as part of a plea deal and there was a warrant for his arrest at the time of his killing. He's a shining example of someone who should be institutionalized, but lowering barriers to instituionalization involves complex trade offs and reasoning about them from viral news clips seems like a bad idea.

It comes up a lot in discussions of homelessness that there are lots of low visibility functional temporarily homeless people, and then a smaller number of high visibility dysfunctional long term homeless people. I briefly worked with an otherwise functional middle aged adult who had been homeless for a couple months. Cheap flophouses would be a huge benefit to people who are temporarily in between relatives with couches to crash on, but it wouldn't do much for the guys screaming on the subway.

Forensic mental health facilities are effectively prison tier secure. They are designed with multiple layered barriers between the inmate and the outside.

I have experience with the design of these facilities. In one fun example some open air courtyards are designed without 90 degree angles (think octogon rather than square) and with rotating anti-climb barriers . The reason for this is that some mental health patients are capable of ridiculous feats of strength and will attempt things that no sane person would attempt. Things like wedging themselves into a 90 degree corner of an outdoor courtyard and shimmying up 6 metres to get onto the roof.

Yes, that I can see. The people together enough to couch surf could use a flop / boarding house. Housing the Jordan Neely's with this cohort would drive them out, or pull down the marginal ones.

The cohort in tents are often in tents because of addiction or other mental health issues. They may not be as aggressive as Neely, but they're unlikely to be suitable for flop houses either.

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