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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   30963 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

People are both more resilient and more delicate than you can imagine. You can be pushed and hit your head on the ground in the wrong way, and you're dead.

Dealing with sketchy public transit on a daily basis, my main death fear is getting stabbed, though. I've only seen a crazy threateningly brandish a knife on the bus a couple times, but it's always terrifying. And knives, contrary to popular belief, are every bit as deadly as guns, and pretty much everyone can get a hold of one. Someone who's in a particular mental state can plausibly turn into a threat to your life in a second. (So can sane people, but the threat they pose is always more calculated and directed toward some end e.g. mugging you, which if you don't resist isn't usually a life thread.)

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