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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   30977 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.

I think it is likely that the Internet disproportionately represents people who look on the matter without nuance because such people are the most likely to write commentary about it. I would like to think that in reality, there is a large number of people who can think about the matter in a nuanced way. I can, and I can easily think of a number of people whom I know in person who also could.

"Nuance" in this case is a trick. It's a way to map a yes-or-no, guilty or not-guilty question onto a spectrum such that "guilty" is all but one of the endpoints and "not guilty" is the excluded endpoint. Then demand no one take the endpoint positions because they're not nuanced. Then all the acceptable positions get to map back to "guilty".

That is, once you're talking about "nuance", you've decided Penny is guilty and you're only talking about his level of guilt.

No, when I say nuance I mean actual nuance, not what you are talking about.

I can think about this matter with actual nuance, and I am sure that several people I know in real life also can.

I can imagine more information coming in about what happened and, based on that information, deciding that Penny is not guilty of anything at all. That is, I have not ruled out deciding that Penny is guilty of nothing. Based on the information I have seen so far I think it is likely that he is at least slightly guilty in the sense of being guility of using too much force, but I can imagine more information changing my mind about that.

The position described by The_Nybbler accounts for your type of "actual nuance".

To put my spin on it, I think it's important to recognize ones own biases and contextualize ones own thinking process. That doesn't mean our views and opinions stop being relevant or valuable, as much as they ever were. In fact, recognizing what we think and how we likely came to think it changes very little.

But on the flipside, recognizing that our minds are, most of the time, just playing third rate magician parlor tricks does wonders to help oneself realize that we are in fact not bending the laws of physics and we can in fact not read minds. We knew the card drawn was going to be the ace of spades because every card in the deck was the ace of spades because we, at some point, through whatever process, chose that deck to perform with.

To put that in context, here's your deck:

I think here is the key: some witnesses report that Neely was throwing trash at people. If that was actually the case, then I think that it was reasonable for Penny or anyone else to attempt to restrain Neely. If Neely was just ranting and threw nothing, then I am not so sure. This is all aside from the other question of whether Penny's particular method of restraint was reasonable.

The parameters of your 'nuance' are not accidental. They are not tethered to some objective metric linked to the fabric of reality. They are chosen by you. Now why did you choose them? Do you think it is likely Neely was throwing trash at people? I don't.

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