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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   30967 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".

"We were scared for our lives."

No. No reasonable person would be in that situation, and, "survivor" or not, it cheapens our discourse to tolerate such statements with not even gentle push-back.

  • -27

Why? Why would no reasonable person fear for their lives?

It seems pretty clear that Neely was a bad dude with a history of violence. While the people on the train likely didn’t know that, violent weirdos give off an aura.

Second his language certainly indicated he was willing to do extreme things.

Third, people read of crazy people like Neely doing crazy dangerous violent things.

When someone says they "feared for their life" I expect there to have been a reasonable chance that they would die. Now I'm at best a middle-of-the-road martial artist, but I'm not a malnourished psychotic either. Compared to Neely I'm a force of nature. In a train car with a dozen people I doubt I could do enough damage to kill someone before being stopped. Maybe? Call it under 10%, fixating on one person with the sole goal of killing.

Now one might contort the phrase to mean "needed to do something to reliably avoid a lethal threat". That might well be the case here, but it's a dangerous equivocation: after all, by that standard one "fears for their life" constantly while driving a car.

  • -29

Compared to Neely I'm a force of nature. In a train car with a dozen people I doubt I could do enough damage to kill someone before being stopped. Maybe? Call it under 10%, fixating on one person with the sole goal of killing.

Okay but this is the comment you're replying to:

It seems pretty clear that Neely was a bad dude with a history of violence. While the people on the train likely didn’t know that, violent weirdos give off an aura.

Second his language certainly indicated he was willing to do extreme things.

Third, people read of crazy people like Neely doing crazy dangerous violent things.

Bystander effect aside, you can be an MMA fighter and still be paralysed by the fear factor in such circumstances if you've never been in one in the first place. Very important to keep in mind that one is a contained, monitored environment where everyone has to follow the same rules and medical help will be readily available when necessary. One the other hand, a young man raised in the slums of Rio and who had seen stabbings, people being beat to death, etc. and had to fight for himself a few times would still stand a better chance than the big macho guy who does MMA on the weekends if it was an unexpected, deadly encounter. Because he won't be as prone to hesitate or be paralysed with the fear response. And he will be be more prone to reflexively use his environment and to fight hard and dirty instead of trying to follow a mechanistic, paint by numbers system.

[ @The_Nybbler makes similar points ]

To clarify, can you answer 2 questions?

  1. How common are killings in similar circumstances -- a single, unarmed individual kills complete strangers on a modestly crowded bus/train after exhibiting unfocussed threatening behaviour?

  2. In light of your answer to (1), and the unfortunate common presence of disturbed individuals on public transit, how do you estimate the probability that any given passenger (other than Neely) would have died on that trip?

From this side of the screen:

  • I was unable to find any examples in a brief search -- plenty of cases of group violence, armed killings, or direct person-to-person conflicts, but none resembling the facts at hand. Presumably it's happened -- just due to the huge numbers of encounters.

  • Given that I can't find any examples, and that this type of thing must happen thousands of times a year, I'll put the individual death probability at < 0.01%.

If you can get a better handle on (1), then I'm happy to update.

I'm not sure I follow. Perhaps I'm misreading your post and if so, apologies in advance.

Are you asking whether it's rational for one to fear for their life given the stats that show how many civies actually die in these situations? It's a hostile scenario, you're in a crowded train where everyone could very well go into panic mode and make your ability to maneuver that much harder. Even if you remember the stats at the face of your fight or flight instinct, that's no guarantee that things won't escalate to fatal proportions in this situation. A crazy person going crazy in the middle of a crowd is not being rational, so if you don't already have any experience subduing crazies amidst a crowd, odds are you'd act irrationally too just to save yourself.

People have fears disproportionate to actual threats all the time. For example, some people won't go to the beach because they're convinced sharks will eat them. And when they're reported to fear for their life when a wave breaks over their feet, we acknowledge that, but with a footnote that the fear is irrational, and sharks aren't really a danger of much magnitude in that situation.

There is an urgent societal need to (as much as possible) ground such feelings in reality, in part because mortal danger justifies a lot of otherwise forbidden behavior. One's dog phobia, for example, does not justify shooting your neighbor's pet when it barks.

People have fears disproportionate to actual threats all the time. For example, some people won't go to the beach because they're convinced sharks will eat them. And when they're reported to fear for their life when a wave breaks over their feet, we acknowledge that, but with a footnote that the fear is irrational, and sharks aren't really a danger of much magnitude in that situation.

There is an urgent societal need to (as much as possible) ground such feelings in reality, in part because mortal danger justifies a lot of otherwise forbidden behavior. One's dog phobia, for example, does not justify shooting your neighbor's pet when it barks.

Exactly, and this is why traditional common law construct of "reasonable man" exists.

If you end before a court worthy of this name, judge and jury would not ask: "were you afraid" but "would reasonable man in this situation be afraid of death or great bodily harm?"

They usually do the killing in the station, where it's easier because they can just push people onto the tracks. On the train its harder to successfully kill someone.

I'm unsure if this framing illuminates much. If I, without your consent and neither any pressing need nor benefit to you or anyone else, performed a procedure on your house that gives it a <0.01% p.a. chance of spontaneously collapsing the tiny probability of something happening in your lifetime would not be a convincing defence. That the risk is small doesn't matter when there is no reason why anyone should tolerate being exposed to it in the first place, which is a significant difference to things like driving which you brought up in the post above.

That the risk is small doesn't matter when there is no reason why anyone should tolerate being exposed to it in the first place

Agreed. My issue is with the casual use of "fearing for ones life", which cheapens and reduces our ability to del with what should be very serious issues. In the case at hand, it seems reasonable for the passengers to have restrained Neely, as some violence was arguably reasonably anticipated from him. Shooting him, for example, would not have been justified though, and we should, IMO, calibrate our language to maintain respect for human life.

I don't understand your objection. "Calibrating our language to maintain respect for human life" is exactly why "fearing for your life" is such a powerful argument these days.

More comments

What about "fearing for one's life or grievous bodily harm"? Would that make any difference? Pointing out that only so many people are actually killed by such criminals misses the point.

More comments

I’m surprised you couldn’t find any, I think some twenty-five people got pushed onto tracks in NYC last year with several casualties. There was also the widely publicized mass shooting last spring, which somehow everyone survived but is exactly the kind of “unstable person trying to kill people” story that sticks in people’s head.

Odds are still very low, but normal people don’t pull out the calculator and reason probabilistically when a crazy person starts yelling at them. Being trapped in an enclosed space with an aggressive, unstable person is pretty scary for most people, especially if they haven’t had years of exposure to combat situations like yourself.

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