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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   30978 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023

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Witness to Jordan Neely chokehold death calls Daniel Penny a 'hero'

Whoops, wrong link, not sure how that happened. Lets try again.

Witness to Jordan Neely chokehold death calls Daniel Penny a 'hero'

"He’s a hero," said the passenger, who has lived in New York City more than 50 years.

The witness, who described herself as a woman of color, said it was wrong for Bragg to charge Penny with second-degree manslaughter.

"I’m sitting on a train reading my book, and, all of a sudden, I hear someone spewing this rhetoric. He said, ‘I don’t care if I have to kill an F, I will. I’ll go to jail, I’ll take a bullet,’" recalled the woman, who is in her 60s.

"I’m looking at where we are in the tube, in the sardine can, and I’m like, ‘OK, we’re in between stations. There’s nowhere we can go,’" she said. "The people on that train, we were scared. We were scared for our lives."

Penny stepped in when Neely started using the word "kill" and "bullet."

"Why in the world would you take a bullet? Why? You don’t take a bullet because you’ve snatched something from somebody’s hand. You take a bullet for violence," she added.

Freelance journalist Alberto Vazquez began recording the confrontation after Neely was already in a chokehold and offered a second account of the homeless man’s conduct.

"He started screaming in an aggressive manner," Vazquez told the New York Post. "He said he had no food, he had no drink, that he was tired and doesn’t care if he goes to jail. He started screaming all these things, took off his jacket, a black jacket that he had, and threw it on the ground."

I do wonder if words can do justice with how threatening Neely was being on that train. I'm reminded of the Always Sunny bit about "the implication".

I do wonder if words can do justice with how threatening Neely was being on that train.

Probably doesn't matter that much for general conversations. I'm sure it'll matter legally, but when we're having the ethical discussion about it, it's going to just keep coming back to some people thinking that you shouldn't ever get violent with a belligerent vagrant that has not yet initiated any physical force and others not caring what happens to belligerent vagrants. This probably isn't a bridgeable divide and most of the nuance is intellectual window-dressing. Yes, it would be best if the person doing the restraining exercise somewhat more caution than choking a guy to death. Yes, it's also true that restraining someone will not be completely safe for the restrainee, particularly when they're likely high as a kite and experiencing excited delirium. Neither of those points really moves the needle from people's gut responses.

Yes, it would be best if the person doing the restraining exercise somewhat more caution than choking a guy to death.

Was Neely choked to death? I was watching Tim Pool and he remarked that Neely was alive and unconscious when police arrived. I wonder if that was him talking out of his ass, then I looked it up more. From Time

When officers arrived on the scene, Neely was unconscious. He was transported to the hospital where he later died, according to the New York Police Department.

I looked and I looked and I looked, and I found no account arguing this fact. Penny did not choke Neely to death. Penny choked Neely unconscious, and he then later died.

people thinking that you shouldn't ever get violent with a belligerent vagrant that has not yet initiated any physical force

I mean, if the media keeps framing what happened in a deceitful way, and people never learn how menacing and threatening Neely was, literally threatening and in saying he will kill someone, than yeah sure. But this is an artifact of a lying media for most NPCs who have a received opinion on this topic. I doubt many people's priors are that someone can literally threaten to kill you, give every indication that they intend to kill you, and you must wait to be dead before you are allowed to do anything about it.

Was Neely choked to death?

...

Penny choked Neely unconscious, and he then later died.

This seems a bit like saying that someone wasn't stabbed to death, just stabbed until they collapsed from blood loss, after which they later died. Yeah, if you choke someone unconscious and they proceed to never wake up, they were choked to death. I don't give a shit about Neely, I'm on the side that assumes Penny was a good Samaritan that had no intention of doing any harm beyond restraining the violent lunatic that was threatening people, but I also don't really see what I'm getting from the distinction above.

agree. I am not sure this distinction matters . Neely would otherwise be alive if not for the altercation. Maybe Penny's team can argue that the force was not excessive, because Neely died later.

This is a terrible take, that wipes away intent, reasonable expectations of the outcome of the altercation, and is just pure dystopian strict liability. It erases all differences between tazing someone, shooting someone, pepper spraying someone, holding someone, or even just yelling at someone with a frail heart. Did you take any sort of action in the direction of someone who died? Not sure the distinction about what you did really matters.

If I have a rare genetic condition that makes my head as frail as an eggshell. And if someone punches me causing my skull to break and killing me. That person is a murderer. "But they didn't mean to," okay, so some manner of manslaughterer according to their state laws.

No. The eggshell skull rule is for civil law. In criminal law, if they punch you not intending to kill you, but do kill you, that's likely voluntary manslaughter, or what New York calls First Degree Manslaughter. It might not even be a crime at all, if the punch would not have been expected to cause serious physical injury.

Even in civil law, the eggshell skull rule is also only supposed to apply to damages; if there is no negligence there is no responsibility and thus no damages regardless of the plaintiff's skull state. In practice courts will draw the inference that there was negligence from the amount of damage caused (ignoring the plaintiff's hidden frailty), then apply the eggshell skull rule to award full damages, but that's because the courts are utterly broken.

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