I was at a bus stop yesterday sitting on a bench with a glass enclosure. A guy came up to me and asked me what time the bus was coming. I responded and went back to scrolling on my phone. 20 minutes later he suddenly started acting erratic and threw his phone towards me. The glass enclosure was not fully open on one side, but had a door shaped opening where he was standing. I was trapped.
Thankfully, that’s where it ended. But I was terrified for those 10 minutes. Every time he reached inside his heavy jacket pocket, I half expected him to pull out a knife (there have been some knife attacks on the subway). He wasn’t making me “uncomfortable”, he made me fear for my life. People don’t choose to feel fear, it’s a natural response.
Progressives acting like feeling fearful when a person is being aggressive is a moral failure are deliberately looking at it through some convoluted intersectional lens. Obviously most people in the Neely situation weren’t aware of his history , they only knew that this person was being aggressive this instant. A person wearing a suit and Rolex would have elicited the same response.
All the “hurr durr, I’ve been in uncomfortable situations on the subway but you know what I didn’t do? Murder people” is exhausting and performative empathy at its finest. You can understand the complexity of the situation while recognizing what happened was a tragedy
100%. It’s a luxury of the wealthy to pretend like they’re just more enlightened and that’s why these events don’t bother them. In reality it’s because they don’t have to deal with it as much. I was completely humiliated by someone once (in front of my boss no less) for suggesting that maybe we shouldn’t let people just do drugs in the street and form tent encampments everywhere--she accused me of wanting to lock up homeless people, let them get raped in emergency shelters, etc etc. But of course she’s one who lives in a gated community with security, sent all of her children to a very expensive private school, and treats visiting homeless encampments to deliver supplies as some kind of tourism, in my opinion. Whereas I rely on public transportation as a young-ish female who works late hours, and don’t have the money to live in a neighborhood that isn’t patrolled by private security. Getting followed home at night by aggressive men or spat on in the face by panhandlers and STILL somehow being considered the privileged oppressor is really frustrating.
I lived in the George Floyd incident neighborhood, and I watched as rich twitter liberals cheered the burning down of a low income but arguably the most diverse neighborhood in Minneapolis. Infuriating!
My work has had to completely lock down bathrooms and add security throughout the building due to street vagrants doing drugs what used to be publicly accessible restrooms in an area where there aren’t many. I’ve had to deal with tweakers coming in with open sores and wounds, yelling at each other, locking themselves in the stalls for an hour or more, etc. Went to a meeting about all this recently and had to listen to a woman who works from home chastise us all for taking a “carceral approach” instead of providing directions to safe injection sites and bringing in crisis response. I almost screamed.
Yeah my wife used to take the bus and once had a belligerent guy screaming and attacking people on the bus with her. All the more scary as he was bleeding profusely from a knife wound, from who knows where.
Typical white supremacy demanding to not feel uncomfortable in the presence of someone just asking to be seen. Why does your wife want to erase this man’s lived experience?
Exactly. It’s similar to their dismissals of women who don’t want to share bathrooms & locker rooms with men who say that they’re women. It’s a fact that men commit more violence than women, and that women are often the targets of that violence. It’s not saying ALL men are violent, but it’s enough to keep men out of women’s spaces. Decent men know this and respect our boundaries. It’s natural for women to be suspicious of men they’re not familiar with, and those women that say otherwise haven’t been appointed to speak on behalf of all of us.
Gaslighting a generation of girls to ignore their he instincts that are there to protect them is reckless. It’s saying that trans identified men’s (TW) fear of men is legitimate but women’s fear of men who disregard their boundaries is not.
Absolutely parallel. Leftist women are still pressured to fulfill the same misogynistic social roles and contracts ascribed to women— be the mother/carer/nurturer above all, even if it means ignoring your own needs. Esp white liberal women, because we all know they’re just the worst monsters with literally violent tears. Uncomfortable around homeless men? Uncomfortable around AGPs? Uncomfortable around street harassers who happen to be men of color? Just a bigoted woman failing at her main job of “being kind.”
Shellenberger's book has a terrifying account of man who attacked a woman entering a building who specifically waited for a woman (any woman--he did not know the victim) as the CCTV showed him letting many men enter the building unmolested.
The gall of these people who hold this standard and a completely different one in nearly every other area of life. Concepts like stigma, microaggressions, representation, invalidating, etc... The rest of the world is so fragile we need to avoid saying or even thinking anything that might cause the slightest discomfort, but someone puts you in fear for your life and you just gotta suck it up..
I used to take the metro train in my hometown regularly when in high school about 15 years ago now. Went back to visit about 6 months ago, got on the train and immediately was met by a guy trying to sit next to all the women on the train, harassing us, all while chain smoking. Everyone just moved to another car, not sure security ever came. Just last month I went back again and hopped on the train. Immediately a guy starts walking up and down the car asking if any of us work for TSA. He then picked out a specific woman and decided she was an undercover agent. From there it was all downhill and ended with him screaming at her that he was going to get the whole train to jump her and everyone on the train just got off as quickly as possible. No one tried to deescalate or tried to create distance between him and the woman. Nobody will stand up for her, nobody will stand up for me. It’s just not worth the risk. I’m never riding it again.
Also, Penny's martial arts fuckups were technical, not moral.
"Position before submission" is the saying in jiu-jitsu. If you've got someone's back, you should use your legs to secure the position (using either hooks or a rear body triangle) before attacking the neck. Penny fucked up by relying on the chokehold to maintain his backmount, so he couldn't let it go or else risk losing his position.
Also, choking someone out is a matter of compressing their carotid arteries, not their windpipe. It's lack of bloodflow to the brain that causes rapid loss of consciousness; lack of air into the lungs results in what we saw with George Floyd - where they remain awake and struggling pretty much right up to the point of death. If you have someone in a chokehold and they're not out cold in 5-10 seconds, then you don't have their arteries squeezed off so they'll go straight from struggling to dying with very little in between.
But Penny shouldn't be expected to know that in order to engage in self-defense. If the goal of progressives is "community-based policing" rather than leaving it to trained professionals, then it's inevitably going to be an amateur-hour shitshow.
The Jordan Neely story makes me so angry all around. Anyone with half a brain knows that these types of tragedies will happen when we live in a time where those of us in large cities are told to just accept that there is a contingent of mentally ill and drug addicted people wandering the streets often displaying violent and erratic behavior, while at the same time there’s a push for a decrease in police presence. What a perfect recipe for vigilantism.
Something frustrating with Katie and Jesse's assertion that bystanders shouldn't do anything to protect themselves and/or their fellow passengers is that the question becomes "ok, well who then?". With the push to decrease policing and to envision the police force as a whole as corrupt killers, apparently not them either. And even if Jesse/Katie believe police are the answer, police aren't around 24/7. So what happens during the response time? What if another 67-year-old gets pushed to the ground with orbital fractures? Yes, we all have rights and no one "deserves" to die, but for the people pushing others to the ground and into subway tracks, their victims "deserve" safety too, and sometimes in protecting the one, it's really fucking hard (near impossible, really) to protect the other.
Exactly. My elderly parents and sister’s kids ride the subway. I am comforted by the fact that if they are threatened in a crowded car or someone seems especially aggressive & sleazy there likely are going to be men (Latino or black or white gym bros or guys in suits or whatever) who will step in and, if necessary, get physical in their defense.
Norms in which young and middle-aged men are supposed to risk themselves in defense of women, children and the vulnerable are common, admirable and usually a great social positive. As are ones where men are taught to be profoundly ashamed if they stand by and do nothing. Women can’t offer this security; men can. And strength, physical prowess and bravery are great pluses. These are simple truths that are often impossible for feminists and progressives to acknowledge. Though they and their loved ones benefit from them, especially in NY.
Jesse & Katie aren’t doing quite this, but they are ignoring what it’s like to be vulnerable, Jesse is 6’4” and Katie literally lives on a remote island. They both grew up amongst highly educated people in crime-free areas. Everyone deserves to feel safe like they did.
I sympathize with the complement you're implicitly giving the guys who do step in, but as a society-scale response this is exactly the wrong way to go. These problems are supposed to be solved on social level by voting out DAs that believe the homeless are entitled to do what they want! If a city gets that in order, vigilantes will rarely ever be needed. (And by keeping its police force reasonably funded, but this part has been widely understood by now.) If it doesn't, no one will usually step in, since it's mostly just putting yourself into danger (including for prosecution) for no obvious gain. I wasn't surprised at all that the guy who played the main role here was from out of town and too young to have picked up the learned helplessness of professional city-dwellers.
My understanding is Penny, the guy who did this, grew up in Queens and nearby West Islip, Long Island (where he would have been around even more NYC cops and firemen than he would’ve had he only lived in Queens.) It’s not like he just showed up wide-eyed in the Big City, chewing on a stalk of wheat a la Axl Rose getting off the Greyhound bus that brought him from rural Indiana to LA in the ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ video.
I agree with all you say about social policy. 100%. And I certainly don’t want everyone’s safety to be dependent on reckless off-duty marines with some MMA moves, which they then execute incompetently with tragic results
But I’m middle-aged and can remember what NYC was like in the bad days. A lot of horrific things were done by people who were totally sane. The subway is a confined space. Life is chaotic and things can quickly turn ugly.
There are, indeed, still plenty of guys in NYC who will punch out another man if they see him rubbing his bulging crotch against a confused frightened schoolgirl on the subway. They remain a great deterrent. (Before omnipresent security cameras & cellphones they pretty much were the deterrent.) They’re not afraid of lawsuits. God bless them.
I think there’s a weird refusal to recognize both that men commit the vast majority of heinous crimes and that other men (often with limited educations) who have the potential to respond with violence have largely been what’s kept them in line.
We're living in this weird time for men where we're still supposed to do all the manly things of 40-60 years ago, but then when we do we're screamed at for it. This goes across the board whether its enforcing safety in public or dating.
I think maybe the exact opposite is true? I don't think it's possible to ever fully scale up a workable response.
If we have a society where men fulfill their most basic animal role- protecting the group- this stuff might happen less.
We are always going to have mentally ill homeless people around. They will never go away, although the problem will lessen with some societal changes (police and prosecutors doing their jobs).
Maybe- and I'm speculating wildly here- some of the problems we are seeing with men and boys falling behind is that we have completely scorned this role for them. We venerate the nurturing role that females usually have; this has made men feel redundant.
I love falling asleep every night next to a big man who will fight to defend me if something goes wrong. I mean, don't get me wrong, I will go all shrieking spider monkey on an intruder, but he's the one who is really going to make a difference in a fight.
And you don't have to be a big man to fulfill this role. My grandpa was 5'6", 130 lbs, and was known as the toughest meanest bastard around his Detroit neighborhood. Once, when he was an old man, he was drinking at a local bar and his hand was shaking a bit. A new guy saw this, and taunted him. There was a silence and a regular told the new guy quietly " Don't. That guy will rip your fucking head off". My dad ( his son-in-law) was with him, which is how I knew the story. I wasn't hanging around in bars when I was five.
In principle, bystanders with guns are supposed to solve that. I don't expect anyone to join in with fists alone against someone who might have a knife (and I don't know anyone around me whom I'd expect to do that, unless their own or a friend's life is at stake). But of course, what works and what doesn't depends on how far the rot has progressed. If word goes around that good Samaritans are socially valued and legally supported (which includes an amount of understanding if things go wrong), then there will be more of them. As it stands, however, politics is the lever that actually can be pulled.
I don't know the extent to which a random man can pull of such things, by the way. As someone who failed PE at school, I shouldn't be judging by myself, but I see significant differences in... body shape around, to put it politely. I'm not sure how many of them are Sumo ringers.
I wonder if the narrative would have been different if it was: JN throws a punch, marine throws a punch, accidentally kills him when JN’s head hits the floor in a weird way. In other words, must we get to the point where unless someone has just stabbed us, we have to sit around and accept things before we act in self defense?
I think that’s good! This is the kind of society we want to live in. I believe a thriving citizenry is afraid all the time. Also? Crime is a right wing fiction. Doesn’t happen. Never has.
If I were more conspiratorially minded, I would say Soros and the WEF globalist elites want working people to be constantly scared, humiliated, and emasculated. So they deliberately flood the streets with violent lunatics, and the only felony charges they'll prosecute are against everyday people who have the nerve to defend themselves. Here's another one where a bodega worker got charged with a felony in a clear case of self-defense:
The Neelys of the world are just cannon fodder to keep people terrorized, so that the masses will be more likely to meekly go along with living in ze pods and eating ze bugs.
However, if I loosen the tinfoil hat, I'd say the reason people like the garage worker, bodega worker, Kyle Rittenhouse, and now Penny get charged and/or vilified by progressives is because of a 'shoot the messenger' approach to relieving progressive cognitive dissonance around the consequences of anarchy. There's a glaring difference between how 'community based policing' works in progressive fantasyland (everyone joins hands and sings kumbaya) and how community-based policing works in reality (amateur-hour vigilantism and use of deadly force in self-defense situations).
For what it's worth, Bragg might not charge Penny in this case, to avoid another humiliation like when they got pressured into dropping charges against the bodega worker. Bragg might also just not have the political capital/bravery to pursue questionable charges against both Penny and Trump at the same time.
I agree. I live in LA and we know here that if we call the cops and say “there is a homeless man saying crazy things and scaring me,” they won’t come. That’s just the reality of the situation, and some people will feel they have to step in and fill that role. I would prefer that didn’t happen, and to have professionals to rely on rather than random civilians, but in some places it doesn’t feel like there is anyone to ask for help.
There is a mini encampment forming in my neighborhood and the guys who live there aren’t the craziest I’ve seen but definitely behave erratically. I called 311 to ask about cleaning it up and they actually came…and just threw out their trash for them (room service). I called 311 back and asked why they didn’t remove the encampment and they said “well they weren’t committing a crime.” They told me to call back if they assault someone. So dumb.
The NYPD budget is extremely high and policing in the subways has increased, I think that in this particular case it's hard to blame 'defunding the police' moreso a failure of NYC's mental health infrastructure. In like SF I can see it but here probably not.
Also worth noting the one time I actually called the NYPD and told them a homeless person was sleeping in my building they came immediately with a mental health worker and handled the situation extremely well. Idk if this is common but it's worth actually trying before just assuming the police won't do anything
I work in NyC entail health. Mental health facilities are overburdened. However. I guaranfuckingty that he didn't want treatment. And without a mental hygiene warrant, you cannot force people into treatment perhaps more people with SMi would want treatment if the providers were more skilled.
I was not aware that they have increased policing on the subway
Yeah the the schizophrenic never want treatment. They're paranoid of everything including treatment. The same reason they need treatment is the same reason they won't accept treatment and the same reason they can't stay on and follow treatment.
Yeah I think striking the right balance on criminal justice is very important. We need to balance the right to public safety with the right to equal justice and rehabilitation but I do think enforcement of some public order rules matters.
I think there are many factors: some of it is economics. Some of it is that so many mental health providers are at capacity and so people are not getting the healthcare they need AND if they are they are not seeing their doctor for long enough. I also think that the police used to sweep homeless people off the street and we stopped doing that.
It's more that the initial anti police movement in 2020 led to a deep hole being dug in terms of lawlessness, that police departments across most major cities in north America are still trying to dig their way out of almost 3 years later. They're struggling to hire and the cops they do have are now more reluctant to do their jobs, knowing it might get filmed and put on CNN for every progressive to armchair quarterback.
So you're arguing the Ferguson effect is real and is affecting performance? There's a lot of disputed evidence on that subject. In my view it comes down to the leadership of the city actually supporting the cops, I think in NYC the leadership largely support the cops doing their jobs.
I think you mean the US. We have no mental health infrastructure. If you commit a serious enough crime AND happen to be severely mentally imbalanced you may be permanently locked up. Otherwise there is no mental health infrastructure for the poor and or severely crazy. It's just rotating through the system pointlessly.
We need to stop pretending 100% can be rehabilitated. I say that knowing full well a close relative of mine would never and has never been capable of succeeding on their own without immense and incredibly draining family support. She has ruined lives, marriages, friendships and careers of the people around her and hasn't worked a day in almost 40 years.
I feel you man. That's so hard to hear but so familiar. I was born to a parent with a frustrating and complex mental disorder that they would absolutely not seek help for and would never have been mandated to because they were never ever violent. The other was addicted to drugs, another mental health issue that nobody would demand treatment for in order to participate in society.
They just don't think of us when in reality these are our diseases too.
NYPD is well-budgeted but that doesn't help if they're being ordered not to enforce the laws, in this case the laws against sleeping in the subway, jumping turnstyles and 'harassment' which is what this would have been classified as. In 2016-2017 there was 1 death in the subway system, there were more than 20 last year.
But there’s no reason to think that random vigilante violence would do anything to protect people either, unless you think we should declare open season on homeless and mentally ill people on the street. For every actual act of violence there’s dozens of incidents where someone is yelling and acting out but nobody else is hurt. (It’s not clear to me yet whether this was A or B there, but it does seem like nobody was in reasonable fear for their life). I agree that we need to do something about the yelling and acting out too, but just because the police and government services aren’t being effective doesn’t license anyone else to go around using force preemptively, and it wouldn’t be effective if they did.
They weren’t “on the street.” They were crowded into a subway car, a very narrow metal tube that was careening through Brooklyn and Queens, mainly in long dark tunnels.
Big difference.
These would’ve been people familiar with the subway and random “crazy people.” yet they viewed him as a particular problem and potential danger. An assessment that would seem to now be vindicated by either our knowledge of his recent brutal unprovoked subway assault or his recent attempt to kidnap a child.
It was a horrible tragedy. But the idea that clearly everyone should have just sat on their hands and hoped for the best is naive and presumptuous.
I’m not arguing they weren’t justifiably afraid of physical harm. I’m saying specifically they don’t seem to have been in reasonable fear for their life, from what I’ve seen so far.
Not sure that’s for anyone to claim. If that was the case we could basically throw out every progressive claim that speech is violence. (Which we do, but that doesn’t mean they don’t feel it.) I have been in many situations with erratic homeless people where I’ve felt totally safe one minute and “holy shit” the next. It’s regrettable all around but I don’t blame anybody for acting in self defense. Being fully in control of your rational brain is literally impossible when your amygdala takes over.
For 13 years I have lived in a pretty mixed-race single family neighborhood right in a large city, but it is quiet and off the beaten path. You might see homeless people on the main commercial drag 3 blocks away, but they don't come back into our neighborhood.
Except one day this junkie gets dropped off by an Uber on our street while I am out playing Frisbee with my 7yo kid on the sidewalk. Dude is 6'6", ~55, built like a boxer. Maybe housed, but pretty rough looking. So he knocks on a few doors randomly. Kind of suspicious, looks confused, sits on a porch for a while, for sure some sort of junkie.
Then he comes over and asks where he is...
I tell him and he says he got dropped off on the wrong street, or maybe he gave the driver the wrong street. I ask him if he needs anything, or any help, or if he would like something to eat or drink. He says no, no he is fine and goes back to sitting on a different neighbor's front porch.
So then he comes over to try and talk again, but isn't making a lot of sense, I try to be polite and even offer to give him money for an Uber so he can get to where he is going (he admits it is to a drug house).
He says nah and goes back to sitting on my neighbor's porch. I suggest he sit on my porch since it is in the shade, and I am home unlike my neighbor, he declines, but then my neighbor gets home.
Neighbor is also nice/helpful to him, but he continues to not make a ton of sense, goes and sits on a different porch.
Ok so far this whole situation is mildly unpleasant, and worth keeping an eye on, but no big deal...
And then he suddenly produces a cell phone, and makes a few calls where he talks loudly to some presumed friends about how racist we all are (people trying to be nice to him and help him) and how he is going to beat the shit out of us including the kid, and that he used to be a professional boxer, etc. Fantastic! Openly speculating about whether he could take the two of us.
So we are about to call the police, when he comes over again, but asks for help with where he is and the address, alternating between being normal, and super hostile.
He then calls and Uber and is gone 15 minutes later.
Sure. The same view we all have. We can all imagine whatever we want, but if someone who was there was actually afraid for their life, I would have thought we’d have heard that by now.
Right. But the question will be whether a chokehold like that, held for that long, was proportionate and did not bring an obvious risk of death. Unarmed grappling is not in all cases lethal force, but choking someone potentially is, as was demonstrated here.
These are the questions that will be brought to the grand jury and at trial, and even if you’re mad at me about it, I don’t think they have obvious answers.
What’s maybe more interesting than just arguing about it is comparing this to Rittenhouse. I think Rittenhouse had a far, far stronger legal case, because he had guns pointed at him. But I think he had a much weaker moral case, because he voluntarily put himself in a situation where that could be anticipated. Penny was a bystander who acted in the moment. I have far more sympathy for Penny than Rittenhouse.
But good intentions only go so far. When you kill someone unnecessarily, we investigate and you face the consequences, and that’s as it should be.
You're assuming a lot with the word 'random'. Vigilante interventions into violence will still do more than no interventions at all, though obviously plan A should be the state monopoly on violence. That social contract only works when cops and prosecutors keep the Neely's of the world off public transportation.
It’s random because it will be a small subset of the people acting out who experience a vigilante intervention, and it’s also a small subset of the people acting out who will do harm afterwards. Meanwhile those interventions are temporary, or should be. So any direct effect is going to be very small.
Then there’s all kinds of ways in which the net effect could be more violence and harm. Trying to restrain someone is going to produce an immediate escalation in the amount of force they’re using.
Sure, but on the flip side, as more people inevitably decide their only shot at public safety is taking matters into their own hands, that small subset will grow larger. And in terms of Pavlovian conditioning, if acting out repeatedly leads to asskickings, even mentally ill people will eventually either tone it down or relocate to an area with fewer vigilantes, like an empty alley, to have their outbursts.
Maybe. I just don’t think there’s enough people who’ll take that risk, and I think the effects on the crazy people are hard to predict.
I’m over 200lb and strong, but there’s no way I would preemptively try to restrain anyone who hadn’t yet used physical force themselves. (It’s not clear to me yet whether this guy had done so. I’m just talking in general.)
Also, I don't think framing every interaction like this as "were you in fear for your life" is useful. I don't need to think someone is going to literally murder me for me to feel unsafe. Getting punched in the face or shoved or even just screamed at wildly most likely won't result in my dying, but it's something I feel justified in not wanting to happen and reacting to if feels unhinged enough. Again, if given the chance, I'd just run, but then again I'm sure the elderly woman who Neely punched would not have minded if someone stepped in on her behalf and took some measure of control of the situation.
I don’t disagree about what will happen in practice, but the context above was asking a normative question about what people should do when police and government services fail to prevent these situations. And the normative answer needs to suggest something that is effective, proportionate, and not going to bring a bunch of unintended consequences.
I would bet my life that this marine had absolutely no intention of killing the homeless guy. He was restraining him, and it went bad. It was an accidental death.
I don’t think he meant to either, but the technique he used is notorious, so it’s at least not the same kind of accident as “I tried to grab him and he fell, hit his head and died”.
Yeah, I was off-put by how Jesse was, on the one hand, saying pretty clearly that, if a bunch of "hardened" New Yorkers were that freaked out, that by itself was prima facie evidence that the situation was quite serious, yet also just acting like everyone should have backed off and, I guess, waited until it actually went violent? I'm not some sort of super macho dude telling the soy-boy "I would've just decked him". I love me some martial arts movies, but I also know the difference between fantasy and real life and take the use of force very seriously. That being said, the problem with these sorts of situations where someone is acting erratically and showing a serious potential for violence is that you are inherently operating with a lot of uncertainty, but, if you only intervene when you *are* certain, it can easily be too late. Maybe Jordan wouldn't have ended up doing anything, maybe he would have come at someone and it didn't connect, people got away, maybe someone got a blackeye or split lip. Or maybe they get a TBI or worse. This all happens in a split second.
I think it was fully justified for people to intervene and try and restrain him; however, it definitely should be investigated to see if the use of force once he was ostensibly restrained was excessive. If so, yes, there should be the potential for some sort of legal repercussion. NOT because they intervened and restrained him, but if it turns out that they went beyond what they could reasonably deem necessary in such a way that showed a reckless disregard for Jordan's life.
Again, such a tiresome aspect of our culture that this is either "wait to get stabbed by a person having a psychotic episode" or "shoot anybody who looks at you." It's like Marky Mark talking about how he wouldn't have let 9/11 happen because he gets up at 4am to workout in his mansion. Sick, bruh. Dudes on United 93 were total cucks! WOO.
Violence is not something most people deal with in any meaningful way and it just seems insane to have these rational discussions about "why didn't he have full control of a chaotic situation" when most of us would have most likely just waited to get punched and then felt bad about it for the next five months while wishing we had done something differently and blaming ourselves for chaos descending on us in a steel tube hurtling (trudging?) beneath the surface of the Earth.
I think the marine was justified- morally- in intervening. I don't think he had reckless disregard for Jordan's life probably. I think adrenaline and animal instincts took over ( yes, we are animals and we have those).
I’d actually really like to hear their response to this. I hear this a lot too and at this point I feel like it is codifying cowardice as the correct cultural response. It’s hard to see such a thing as a good development for society, and no one seems to be able to make a coherent case on why it’s desirable and good. It’s become extremely frustrating and I am starting to think this is going to be catastrophic for progressivism (both sane and otherwise) for decades to come.
I love BARpod but there are times where I wish Jesse would start eating meat and lifting weights or dabbling in HRT*. The notion that you shouldn't defend yourself when you're feeling threatened to one degree or another is odd. Now, of course, most self-defense experts will tell you, hey, if you're in danger your first move should be to RUN. But if you can't run, you have to know how to defend yourself, even if this opens you up to some risk in the moment or down the road. It's an odd stance to say "he shouldn't have done that" from the comfort of a podcast.
*And I mean this as a friend, Jesse. Let me guide you to the wonders of regenerative farming and pastured venison and elk and deadlifts.
"feeling threatened to one degree or another" is really way too vague for me. This kind of thinking would justify that asshole who shot a girl who was turning around in his driveway, Ahmad Arbury, and hundreds of other incidents. I think taht, rightly, especially in a place where guns are everywhere, that the law doesn't see it that way.
Its not just the push for a decrease in police. The local attorney's in cities across America are declining to prosecute cases. When they do prosecute, they are pushing for limited sentencing. Everything boils down to incentives or disincentives. And currently the disincentives to doing crime are shrinking.
Given how out of control the situation has gotten with the homeless population in many US cities the past few years, I've been genuinely surprised (i) by how little vigilantism there appears to have been and (ii) that organized crime doesn't seem to have moved back into the protection racket business at all.
That doesn't make any sense? The people shooting at cars approaching their houses (elderly recluses in rural areas) are basically a completely different demographic than the people who most frequently encounter homeless people.
Schizophrenia can be a very intractable problem, especially when adults with it refuse treatment. The book Katie mentioned, Jonathan Rosen's The Best Minds, is very good on the policy and treatment challenges.
The legal barrier to holding someone for more than 24-72 hours (state laws vary) is very high. Generally, you can't do it unless someone's an imminent danger, and past violence doesn't count. Lots of people want the laws changed, but they haven't been so far, and civil-rights groups often oppose change, due to understandable concerns about how freely we institutionalized people who weren't an imminent threat under the old statutes.
The implications of allowing an ideologically captured profession to permanently imprison disagreeable individuals with little or no due process are legitimately horrifying. I’ve signed commitment orders (not a regular part of my current job but one rotates in this business) and I take it very seriously, but not everyone does.
I don’t like having these sorts of seriously ill people wandering the streets because they refuse treatment, but I don’t know what the solution is.
Are you concerned some psychiatrists would start locking people in asylums for "clinical pathological transphobia" if they get caught listening to BARPod?
I think there's enough outrage to go around. Literally nobody looks good in this story from a rational perspective, least of all the legislators in charge of trying to run nyc.
Because of many, many ACLU lawsuits and policy decisions, we cannot hold insane people against their will. Full stop. We cannot forcibly medicate them. We have no carrots, and no sticks. He suffered because he did not want to take his meds. And we couldn't make him.
I should qualify this by saying this video, which wasn’t attached and I haven’t seen, was timed at 2’55”. I can’t confirm that it captures the whole incident but 15 minutes seems to be an exaggeration.
I accept that 15 minutes of constant choking is an error on my part but I think that's kind of besides the point because the low end of 3 minutes is still enough to kill a guy. Penny could have wrapped the guy up
Penny could have also taken the less lethal means of striking with closed fists, but I would assume he chose the choke hold as a less violent option, to just restrain the guy until police arrived.
Yeah I mentioned elsewhere that, in hindsight, Penny would have been better off kicking the shit out of Neely, but it's understandable why he would in the moment have thought the chokehold was a more humane option.
I don’t think he should have done what he did, I just mean that when people encounter a scary situation and feel like there aren’t other options, they might think they have to take matters into their own hands, like this guy did. And even if he is a former marine, that doesn’t make him qualified to handle this situation, obviously, and this terrible thing happened.
For all the pigeon holing people do with stuff like this, funny I haven't heard anyone bring up the possibility that Penny was also mentally unwell and just another victim of "not enough services".
Lol pretty funny quoting Merriam Webster to discuss a legal terms definition that doesn't apply to NYS and having to say "it's appropriate" at the end.
He didn't have a gun or knife and he threw some shit. He yelled his arms and threatened the train car. The idea that those factors mean you can walk up behind a person and choke them past death is very steep compared to Neely's actions.
Well I was very intimidated by this molly person from the midwest. My adrenaline was going and I was shaking and then I saw a comment where she said that maybe Penny didn't mean to kill Neely with a several minute long choke. Seemingly not realizing that cutting off a guy's airway for minutes might kill him. And knowing that this Midwest person doesn't understand that cutting off air is vital made me not as scared.
I've mostly avoided all the crazy people in my commutes on buses and trains in the city. But if all you need is a story of a person who didn't kill the threatening homeless guy, I can point to my 65 year old dad at the time. Sure it was inadvisable for him to involve himself but he wrapped up a homeless guy who was yelling and erratic on the 5 train until cops arrived at the next stop.
I don't buy the idea that a choke from behind for minutes on a guy who is only generally threatening was the only way to go and I don't buy the whole "you can't judge Penny" tone of your response if my 65 year old office working dad can do a better job restraining a guy who makes it out alive with the same type of general threat
Or maybe you could use an example from Portland where two upstanding men tried to talk an aggressive person down and got stabbed and died. I'm not saying I agree with the choke hold but it is wishful thinking that there is actually some sort of *correct* thing to do in these scenarios. I'm glad your 65 year old dad was able to subdue that guy in that specific instance. There is no indication that would have work in this instance. I'm not caping for choke holds but I'm so uninterested in one off examples that have no practical application to this scenario or policy in general.
Hey! Sometimes you should talk to a crazy dude and it works! Sometimes you can just bear hug them and it works! I have no suggestions for when these suggestions don't work!
You could use that example but you'd be replacing a guy throwing a jacket on the ground and yelling threats with a guy who prior to the stabbing was already yelling threats and physically accosting people like stealing their shit.
I'm cool with looking at these two situations, understanding the facts and timeline as they are, and saying that choking a guy to death was extreme, especially considering he was still being choked when his wrists were also restrained.
Also this was very funny. Uses an example from Portland and then says "I'm so uninterested in one off examples that have no practical application to this scenario or policy in general."
Since you are interested in examples despite what you wrote, I would say that my example of my dad on the NYC subway restraining a homeless person without killing them is a better comparison for a guy walking up to a homeless guy who's not physically attacking anyone but is yelling threats and chokes the hobo to death on the subway platform and not even letting go when the guy's wrists are restrained.
But yeah, if you want to bring up the example where the jacket is actually a knife, go for it.
People in chokeholds in the context of MMA know that they also have an obligation to tap-out for their own safety. Neely could have just let himself be restrained. It's possible he was fighting the restraint, and that it was a combination of the restraint & Neely continuing to resist the restraint that unfortunately led to his death.
Right, I think “used clearly disproportionate force” can also be the result of a mistake rather than malice, but it is a different kind of accident to “the restrained person died unexpectedly while held with force proportionate to the threat”. And the fine distinctions there are why we have professional police officers. Given current evidence the force used was clearly disproportionate to the threat posed, perhaps unintentionally. A criminal investigation is obviously merited. (That doesn’t mean I think for sure he should have been held, charged, etc - that may or may not have been appropriate, we’ll find out.)
Because Neeley hadn’t actually hit anyone, I am leaning toward low-level manslaughter--you have to be careful when you restrain someone before their threat level is clear . (Maybe he can get the same deal Neeley got for an unprovoked attack on an old woman--that could absolutely have killed her.)
If Neeley had gotten around to attacking someone I wouldn’t feel that his restrainer had the duty to know what he was doing--you force someone to restrain you from attacking others, it might turn out they don’t know how to do that safely. That’s why we have cops.
You need to listen to the latest Advisory Opinion episode on this because you'll learn that you're incorrect. He doesn't have to hit anyone first. Jury instructions in self defense cases ask jurors to consider "reasonable people" felt like Neely "posed an imminent threat to him or others", self defense was justifiable. They'd have to prove he *intended to kill* Neely (say if Penny drew a gun and shot him, as opposed to trying to physically restrain him).
Exactly. He wasn't trying something disproportionate like pulling a gun on him. He was trying to hold him until police could come. From what I've heard lawyers saying the law says the DA would have to be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Penny took that action with the intention of killing him. Later video showed that Penny had put Neely in a recovery position, and that he waited for medical assistance to arrive. People intending to kill someone else don't usually do that.
There was also a second guy (nameless as far as I can tell) who was there helping to restrain Neely. The two of them could have held him down by the arms easily.
I'm sure that Penny regrets what he did, and it was a horrible accident, but that doesn't necessarily mean he shouldn't face charges. Involuntary manslaughter maybe? I'm not a lawyer but I think if you accidentally kill someone it's reasonable to at least face charges, even if he ends up being ultimately acquitted if it's ruled pure self defense.
It's not an accidental death in the way you're thinking when self defense is involved. He chose a proportional response (physical restraint). Reasonable people felt that Neely posed an imminent threat, and they were confined in the space of a subway car. They'd have to be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Penny went into the act of holding Neely with the intent to kill him to hold him responsible.
NY fucked up by letting a clearly troubled guy bounce around the system, with 40 arrests in a decade, mental health problems exacerbated by drug use. He wasn't going to live happily ever after. I suggest you listen to the most recent episode of Advisory Opinions on this topic. If Penny's intent was to immobilize Neely until help arrived, and reasonable people agree that there was imminent danger to him or others, it will be up to *prosecutors* to prove *beyond a reasonable doubt* that he intended to KILL him.
"If Reasonable people" is doing allllll the lifting there as it seems unreasonable to this - all credit to Jesse for this phrase - hardened NYer.
Prosecutors actually don't have to prove that Penny intended to kill Neely if they're not going for a particular charge. Do you think people don't go to prison for accidentally killing someone?
I'm not going to listen to that podcast unless you can tell me they were on the train. I don't know why you think I'd care about their opinions if they also weren't there.
It's helpful to know how these things are considered in the law. If you contend a crime has been committed, it will be judged there, not in a Substack thread. The podcast goes over jury instructions, which are in plain English and which guide a jury in making their decisions in cases like this. If you wish to write angry comments free from the burden of knowledge about how the law works, that's your choice.
"Do you think people don't go to prison for accidentally killing someone?" Accidentally killing someone in a car accident is different than a self defense case (and if you listen to the podcast you'll hear it's not about whether he thought Neely was a threat to him, but to others around them as well).
The thing people who are condemning Penny before he's been charged need to know is that all of these protests, some which affect subway transit, are going to make it more likely a future trial (if it goes to trial) will be moved to a different jurisdiction because it will make it harder to find an impartial jury. If it's moved -- hardened New Yorkers who are more used to mentally unwell people will not BE on the jury, it could be in a suburb of NY where ppl aren't using the subway as often (though I understand there are a lot of commuters, but ppl who commute do so because they don't WANT to live in the city).
When violence happens no one is in control. That’s really deeply hard for people to wrap their heads around. The best most highly trained fighter you’ve ever seen isn’t Batman and could kill someone completely by mistake or be killed by some random person who got lucky. At best you can make it less chaotic. That’s why we have such strong violence taboos.
When the city allows sick people who are too sick to get treatment to just wander around until they die in public things like this happen because people will have to make very hard choices about their own safety. And the whole purpose of why we have institutions is to prevent choices like this from needing to be made.
I’m so sad for a fourteen year old kid whose mother was murdered and thrown in a suitcase. He should have had some place to go where he would have been kept safe and fed and warm, where he couldn’t harm anyone including himself. And I understand the twenty four year old marine later in life crossing his path having to do what he throughly was necessary for his safety and the safety of others.
It sounds like it was three minutes which if the guy is fighting the whole first two minutes probably didn’t feel that long or how much longer he held on after. You can’t expect someone to be Batman in a self defense situation. People will watch a Chuck Norris movie and think it’s real. Nobody actually has that level of physical mastery over another person. Even with stuff like Jiu Jitsu that is effective it’s like “oh are we fighting near furniture? That’s a whole different thing.”
Very true. People who’ve never been in a violent interaction don’t realize this.
I used to work in a bar. One Sunday night towards closing, there were only a couple customers, and two staff, the night manager tending bar, and me being bar back. In walk two inebriated characters. They had come in before and been refused service and again they were told to leave. An argument ensued and was escalating in the drunk’s side. I was about three steps away from this. Finally, the drunk said, “Ya know what?” And he came around the bar and slammed his hand down on the bartender’s shoulder. Next thing I knew I was halfway down the room arms extended straight out with the back of the guy’s jacket in my bunched fists, his feet are dangling in midair (I’m tall) and he’s screaming “Put me down! Put me down!” I did, at the door and that was that. But.
I lost time. I have no memory of moving in and grabbing the guy. It was probably only ten seconds, but it still freaks me out. I’m not a violent person, not even prone to yelling. But I sometimes wonder what might have happened if he or his friend had fought back. What would I have not remembered if that had been the case?
Now I know what “blind rage” is, and it scares me.
I’ve heard about the micro dosing T in perimenopausal women that Katie mentioned. See now, aging as a woman is a disease that needs remedy, hormonal remedy. No doubt that the hormone replacement therapy probably makes a lot of 40 year old women feel better, and honestly, I’m tempted, just so I can keep my mid drift tight and get some energy, but I’m also so fucking tired of every stage of life as a female being treated as a condition that we need saving from with hormones.
Scared of puberty and becoming an adult human female? We have hormones for that. Are the burdens of existing as an adult human female with your natural fertility intact too overwhelming? We have hormones for that too. Are you an adult human female who has to unfortunately continue to exist after your natural “fuckable” age? We have hormones for that.
Seems like life as a woman in her natural hormonal state is a medical condition that warrants therapy. I’m over it. All of it.
Having kids and getting old do not make women failures as humans, but you wouldn’t be able to tell by how we treat both fertility and aging as disease in WOMEN.
I don't know exactly what the moms Katie follows are up to, but sometimes women will be prescribed small amounts of testosterone to treat things like low libido. (Side effects include issues you'd expect, like growth of some unwanted body hair.) Since all women have some naturally occurring T, anyway, I guess I'd want to know what's meant by "microdosing T" before I formed an opinion on whether these specific women should be taking it for their specific issues.
As someone who doesn't want any more body hair than what I've already got and has a strong bias against taking drugs I don't absolutely need, I can tell you I won't be starting T anytime soon. But I'm not dead set against other people taking it for what ails them if they've got reasonable doctors/NPs who think a low dose is OK.
One can think a therapy is largely bogus and still recognize their are exceptional cases that might warrant the treatment.
Lowering libido with age is not a disease or even AT ALL unnatural. Women’s sex drive NATURALLY isn’t the same as men’s. Now, if some women want to take T to want to want to have relations that is a personal choice, personally i don’t want to be drugged into wanting to fuck after my fertility is gone, but I still don’t think it’s beneficial to women to treat all inconvenient physical aspects of being a woman as negative “symptoms”. As Mary stated above, a lot of the the time our bodies react poorly to poor environmental conditions. We could put our energies into recognizing and addressing the needs of women’s bodies instead of trying to drug our bodies into what even? Perpetually appearing fertile, but without fertility?
Why aren’t men offered hormones to temper all their ailments? Why don’t we offer a little estrogen or a little testosterone blocking when their libidos are out of control and they are ruining their marriages? Or how about the phenomena of becoming grumpy old men? There isn’t some hormone that would make old cantankerous men less insufferable. Estrogen has also been shown to be protective to the brain and is part of the reason men have higher rates of autism and schizophrenia. Why don’t we treat anti-social men with low doses of estrogen?
Hormone balancing is a whole thing on Instagram. Fortunately, most of the content is about ways to take care of yourself through diet, exercise and sleep to “rebalance” your hormones. Some of it also is med spas offering to do these panels to measure your Estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone and then coming up with a personalized cocktail. Low doses of t are suggested for the slow down of the metabolism that happens after 40.
Men do take hormones, e.g., to replace the testosterone that naturally declines as they age. I don't think a hypothetical male version of me would be up for that, but if the question is whether men's aging is sometimes treated pharmacologically, then the answer is definitely yes.
My dad was taking T shots for a while & my mom hated it. He was always slightly inappropriate with her & they give a disabled obese guy prone to anger T shots so he’s bugging my mom for sex (at least that’s what I was told without asking by my mom because I’m an only child & she doesn’t think to save that for her therapist).
Yeah, what do I know, but it kinda seems to me that if both members of a heterosexual couple in their 50s experience diminished libido, that might work out better than if one has lower libido and the other is still horny as a 25yo?
You make a good point, and I wholeheartedly agree about hormones for puberty or fertility, but knowing what I do about the menopause and the immense difficulties for some women that come with it, I'm actually very glad that HRT is available for that stage of life.
Well, to be honest, most men would rather wear a condom every time than not get laid at all, so women probably could do more to make men shoulder the contraceptive burden if women were willing to turn it into a game of chicken.
Also neither of my grandmothers had access to birth control. One had 4 and the other had 5 kids. What they had access to was education and the right to work, own property, and vote. I don’t think that rejecting the idea that women need to manage being a woman with hormones is necessarily an endorsement of the reversal of women’s rights. It’s not hormones or 15 kids.
This is the world view that I no longer believe in: that being female is a burden I would be better off being able to opt out of or, in essence I would be better off if my body were more like a man’s. We do have ways of controlling fertility. The barrier methods and copper iuds, and even natural cycle tracking, but also... not engaging in penetrative sex. If one thinks it’s too much of a burden, opt out. I no longer want to opt out of my body, nor do I want to teach my daughters that they NEED to opt out in order to live a dignified life.
Jesse: “This started because a man was loudly threatening people on the subway, and I think some of the riders interpreted it as he was going to kill somebody..
“..and a guy did what he probably shouldn’t have done and directly intervened.”
If a number of riders on that subway carriage reasonably believed Neely was going to kill someone how can anybody say nobody should have intervened?
Is the appropriate (ie liberal handwringing) response really to awkwardly witness a schized-out bum assault an innocent person and then just feel bad about it afterwards?
There have been many people saying Daniel Penny’s actions set some kind of dangerous “precedent.” Of course this is nonsense; most people just aren’t built to intervene the way he did.
Jesse again: “Once in a while on the New York subway you find somebody who is a little too crazy and you move to the next subway car.”
Ok great.. What does this achieve exactly?
I would bet the majority of people are glad to know there is the possibility of people like Daniel Penny on their subway car or in their neighbourhood who might just put themselves in harm’s way to protect them from the tragic Jordan Neely’s of this world.
I was a little staggered by the "move to another car" comment. Say there's a guy acting in an aggressive, irrational, generally hostile manner on the subway - with a mix of men, women, possibly children, who knows - what sort of man gets up and leaves them all to it? What sort of society is that? And when everybody in the car goes to do that, how do you think the aggressor will react then?
It’s very much the type of response that assumes that it’s okay for one person to benefit while others don’t. As you point out, probably not everyone can leave (and also older or more burdened people are probably the ones left behind). Also as a person who has done that, it’s not necessarily easy to pull off — it very much depends on where in the car you are, etc.
As a fellow big-city-dweller I didn’t take it that way. He was more saying, “people weirding you out is common, and you could just safely leave the subway car if you were bothered; this was different and people probably were in danger.”
If there was a mom with an infant or a small child, burdened by carrying all the crap mom’s have to carry, or a physically challenged person in the subway car it’s not as easy to move quickly.
And moving cars while the train is moving is absolutely crazy to me.. how is safe? You’re walking on a small grating completely exposed with no sides or walls? Shiver.
From what I know of the situation, it doesn't seem like a huge problem that Penny intervened. It is a problem that he used a chokehold and killed the guy. He hasn't been charged yet, the DA is trying to figure out what happened and what laws may be appropriate. In other words, he's being professional and responsible, as people with positions of responsibility in the real world tend to be. Somehow this is lost when people log onto twitter too often. I don't think Daniel Penny is a horrible person, as much as I can tell about someone I've never met, but he did kill someone and should be investigated and possibly charged.
The thing is, if you try confronting the threatening person, it's likely no one will help you, it's also likely you will get hurt (even more likely when it's group of people who are causing trouble), and on top of that it's extremely likely you will be the one sued for assault. Police and security guards are usually to far/too busy to intervene. All in all, the safest thing is usually to do as Jessie described: try not to catch the attention of the threatening person, and flee as soon as possible. Another commenter said it was learned helplessness and it's exactly what it is.
I don't know if that's learned helplessness. I will say, my first strategy is to avoid attracting the attention of the crazy person. But that doesn't mean that if I saw them threatening or going after someone else I would still cower and flee. It really depends on the overall scenario. I'm not going to escalate and situation unnecessarily.
I feel it is in the sense that it trains people into accepting unacceptable situations on in a regular basis. And it's compounded by people who affirm these situations are normal.
I think of it more as self-preservation. Learned helplessness would be to stay put in a car where someone is behaving erratically. Getting yourself up and out the door and into a different car takes some agency.
Wasn’t there kids on a train setting fire to an older man’s clothes in a subway/ at a subway stop last yr where a FOX weatherman intervened? Walking away when seeing that would be unethical.
I do this, because I don't know whether the person is just annoying or is actually dangerous, and if he (or she) is dangerous, there's very little I—a tiny elderly woman—could do to defend myself or anyone else. There are rarely police anywhere nearby, and if they're around they are also ignoring what I see. "What does this achieve exactly?" It gets me out of a potentially dangerous situation that I am unable to predict, prevent, or mitigate.
A lot of the twitter people were saying, “why didn’t anyone offer Neeley food or water?” And... that is why. I personally would not get within grabbing distance of an unstable man making threats no matter what he claimed to need.
Yes but your personal situation isn’t really that different to anyone else’s. Nobody wants to be near, let alone confront, a volatile lunatic on the subway or anywhere else. It can be a split second before you’re spat at or stabbed or worse.
It’s a perfectly natural response to want to get as far as possible from people like Neely, which is why it is perfectly useless advice.
It also doesn’t scale. Yes, some people might get up and move to the next carriage when they see and hear someone like Neely start their shit; but obviously it doesn’t work if everybody does. And who’s to say there isn’t another Neely in the next carriage anyway?
This is why I asked what does it achieve.
Despite the terrible ending, Penny’s action at least dealt with the situation at hand on behalf of everyone nearby.
Don’t know how old this is, but it’s been floating around online today. The woman couldn’t even walk away when the man grabs her hair and you can see her mouthing “help me” but everyone around her is frozen. I think the 3 responses are flight, fight or freeze, and most people fall in the freeze category. I’ve been in situations around erratic people and the last thing I want to do is draw attention by making any sudden movements. I’d only move if a group of people were moving.
I’ve seen that video. Many such cases. That woman was right to be terrified and it’s always frustrating when nobody deals with the perpetrator. Saying that, I can completely understand why they don’t.
Another video I saw today was footage of Neely after Penny let him go. The people there had put him in an approximation of the recovery position as they waited for the ambulance. Before the clip ends you can clearly see Neely take a deep breath, suggesting he was alive.
One video that appears to have been disappeared is the footage of what happened before Penny grabbed him..
It’s like being in a wildebeast herd. Danger comes, everyone flees, but some are faster or better positioned for escape. what you’re really betting on is that the predator doesn’t fixate on you and moves to an easier target.
It's a tough question, and IMHO some of depends on what specifically Neely said and did.
If you wait for him to punch somebody in the face or to draw a knife, it may be too late to try to restrain him. On the other hand, if you escalate to a fight based on verbal threats and body language, someone can get hurt or killed. I don't know the answer.
> Once in a while on the New York subway you find somebody who is a little too crazy and you move to the next subway car
I get that that's what people usually do. It's what most people do in most situations like that.
But multiple people had called 911. And there are women and, if I recall, young people still on the train sort of cowering at the far end.
What I'd ask those who walked off is how'd they'd feel if that woman and child you scooted by as you got off the car was stabbed to death. For many, they wouldn't feel much. They'd blame it on the crazy guy and probably have a sense of "well, I made the right choice".
But some people would not forgive themselves. They'd feel a great deal of personal responsibility for abandoning people less capable of them. I'm not surprised that a young marine probably falls into the second category and not the first.
I guarantee Penny stayed not because he didn't think he could get away. He intervened because he didn't think it'd be right to just let the guy do whatever he was going to do.
Great episode and nuanced explanation of what led to Neely’s death.
I’d recommend people watch this news segment from 7 years ago about the choking of an aggressive passenger on an LA subway: https://youtu.be/M1LqoUPjqRQ
One guy is combative, hasn't hit anyone, a passenger chokes him from behind, the combative guy loses consciousness, and the passenger gets invited for a glowing TV interview with the title: "Subway hero describes showdown with combative passenger”.
The choking in that case didn’t lead to death, but that was pretty much luck. The passenger even says in the interview he had no training, didn’t know what he was doing, but just acted.
The only variable that’s wildly different between the two cases is the race of the people involved, and perhaps the fact (although unclear from the video) that the Marine may have held on to the choke a bit longer after Neely went limp.
Obviously, we don't want people taking the law into their own hands, but I thought it was interesting to see the difference in attitude between the TV host and comments then, and what's going on today with so many people calling the Neely case close to an intentional lynching…
I think it's easy to judge in hindsight what we all would have done in that instance, like we're supposed to be thinking rationally. He did not think he would kill the guy but he was trying to protect the other passengers in a city that has abandoned them. That guy should have been in the hospital long ago. He should never have had to struggle like that on the street. And yes, the ONLY REASON PEOPLE CARE is that a white man killed a black man. Just look at Gunviolence.org and look at how many murders in the past 72 hours - children, mothers, etc.
One of the things that really drives me nuts is that everyone gets super upset about specific mass shootings but don’t give a fuck about the more common ones (beefs or DV related). Like somehow it’s not tragic if your own dad or husband kills you???
Jo Maugham is literally like if you imagined the worst, most pompous barrister with the thinnest possible skin, but instead of being a book character, he's a real person.
I'm just here to bust on Jesse for saying "petite" larceny as opposed to "petty" larceny. Yeah it is spelled petit but it is really petty. Some ancient vestige of the common law I suppose.
From my very limited understanding of French, “petit” is pronounced similarly to “petty,” whereas the feminine version, “petite,” is the one that’s pronounced similarly to “pet-eet.”
In French, the emphasis is on the second syllable, so "pe-TEE" for the masculine "petit," and "pe-TEET" for the feminine "petite" (or "pe-TIT" if you're Quebecois).
Yeah, but have you heard how American lawyers pronounce all their OTHER legal terms?
I still remembered how hard my ex-lawyer mom laughed at me when I pronounced "habeas corpus" as if it were a phrase from my Latin textbook: "HA-bay-us COR-poos." So much for the Latin teachers' argument that studying Latin will make you sound smarter.
Oh, of course the lawyers mangle court-Latin and court-French.
And I just now realized that, when "habeas corpus" is removed from its legal context, I instinctually pronounced it the Latin way you described, but in context, it's hay-bee-us cor-piss.
I’m so sick of the scale of urban decay and the associated liberal defense of anti-social behavior. I’m ready to vote for DeSantis. I am 52 and never voted Republican. I am more and more sympathetic to conservative ideology. Leftist culture and policy is corrosive and does not produce a normal, functioning society. Maybe class-based leftist politics would generate reasonable policy, but the individualistic identity politics of the American left is totally bankrupt. I still support universal healthcare, a strong social safety net for the ill and old. I think income inequality to the degree we have it in the US is bad for democracy and morally grotesque. But I can’t watch people shooting up on the sidewalk, girls cutting off their tits, people afraid to take trains or park in the city, schools lying to parents, adults afraid to say what they think, and say: Yes, this is working great. I’m so over it all. I hope DeSantis wins. I hope all these left wing nuts get voted out.
I feel ya- the only thing that’s stopping me from voting R is the abortion bans (also I don’t want to become one of those people who make politics their whole personality), if Republicans stopped caring about that one issue overnight I wonder how many people would immediately switch sides.
I’m also glad that people are more and more comfortable admitting this without feeling the need to do the whole “Aw shucks, I’ll always be a lifelong progressive and those wacky right wingers are still crazy and evil, but even I think the progressive left has gone too far!” schtick
I've thought about it long and hard and came to the conclusion that I would be willing to give up abortion access (except in case of rape and mother's health) if it means that I would be recognized as the sex that I am and I would feel safer on the streets. I already know that the left fearmongers blacks to keep them voting in the party line so why won't the do the same with women?
I understand what you mean. I live in a place that just recently signed a 6 week abortion limit which I’m pretty bummed out about (only it actually does include exceptions for rape and incest provided there’s documentation, which sounds good on paper but I’m not sure how it’s exactly going to work in practice) . However, would I risk my safety and personal happiness by moving to another city that doesn’t have as good of a quality of life just because of this one issue? Hell no
Yeah, I’ve considered that. Is this how people in their 50s saw the sixties? But I was a kid in the 70s and the cities didn’t look like they do now. It’s Mad Max. I don’t know how we let it get this bad.
*Homer Simpson Voice* No political assassinations SO FAR.
(Though not for lack of trying... see the Congressional Baseball Shooting, the man arrested w/a gun near Kavanaugh's house who said he wanted to kill three justices, and, also, Jan. 6.)
Urban defense of anti social behavior is a thing but it's really not as common as you're making it out to be. The Democratic mayor and governor of NY both had normie, barpod friendly takes on the Neely controversy. A few city council members did have very bad takes though. I don't know how voting for Desantis would possibly help as the president is not in charge of the NY subway.
I can’t respond to EKG2 directly. I appreciate that perspective. I voted for the Independent candidate in Oregon’s last election. I don’t have any influence on NYC, which is 2000 miles away. But my neighborhood, and every town and city near me is overrun with drug addicts shitting and shooting up in the streets. People are getting attacked in the streets. The trains are havens for smoking math and fentanyl. It scares me. It is so extreme. And it is my hope that Dems will get voted out at every level because they are failing to govern at a very basic level.
But Eric Adams HAS put into place policy to address literally the type of situation that has occurred. Much to the chagrin of haters to the left of him he is rounding up homeless people and having them committed.
I support his reforms. A girl recently showed up in my town. Very seriously mentally ill. She is filthy, confused. She lies down in parking lots and refuse piles. SHE NEEDS TO BE COMMITTED. She is a danger to herself. I’ve seen men talking to her. She is at risk of sexual assault as well as injury. I disagree very strongly with the ACLU position that people like her are “free” and that institutionalizing them infringes on their freedom. Freedom requires agency and her ability to make decisions is broken.
>I still support universal healthcare, a strong social safety net for the ill and old. I think income inequality to the degree we have it in the US is bad for democracy and morally grotesque.
Germany has involuntary (stationary) treatment *after* the first serious crime ( https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma%C3%9Fregelvollzug , mostly for schizophrenics and pedophiles). IMHO this is a good middle ground. You cannot do it merely based on "behaving erratic" or some vague notion of "antisociality", as the definition of that will merrily swing with the political wind (surely someone in NYC will count manspreading; and I don't trust German politicians on this either, as some of them have made some pretty ominous noises around COVID).
It really isn't hard to come up with some kind of metric for involuntary treatment. The people that need that type of thing are almost always repeat offender in short periods of time. The state often sides with not doing this, likely because the state doesn't give a fuck but, when someone gets arrested 5 times in a year, its pretty easy to determine there is some kind of severe issue.
More to the point, I don't think there is any metric for involuntary treatment that should have seen a schizophrenic, repeatedly violent offender left on the outside. Somehow we've gotten lost in a debate about if the cops are the right ones to confront mentally ill people who are acting erratically and completely forgotten that if we let schizophrenic, repeatedly violent offenders walk around we will get tragic results.
I was happy Katie mentioned Jonathan Rosen's account about Michael Laudor. The book, The Best Minds, I can't recommend enough. It's about mental illness and the "tragedy of good intentions" as its subtitle says and it's so layered and well-written. I listened on Audible and am going out later today to get a hard copy because there was so much I want to reread.
The Roxane Gay article started out reasonable but then took a turn to a ridiculous, illogical argument. I would like to think that an editor might question the article's logic before publishing, but I guess that doesn't happen at the nytimes.
The one thing that’s being missed in a lot of these discussions is there is now a movement towards encouraging schizophrenics to not take meds and that we should just accept their alternative reality, no matter what that reality is. Which — as a person who is occasionally insane myself — is insane. And so very very frustrating.
Yeah, I have seen more and more of that. I get that there is a very small number of people with psychosis who can do okay without medication, but that's not the vast majority of people psychosis and often times those people are only able to do so later in life after they've spent time on medication and learned how to manage their illness triggers; the vast majority of people with psychosis are not John Nash.
The drugs for schizophrenia are really awful and have terrible side effects. That means we should try to develop better ones that have fewer and less severe side effects. And we should try to get as many people with schizophrenia into programs that help build skills and reduce the doses of medication that they need. See below:
We should also make psychiatric hospitals less unpleasant while we're at it. Simple stuff like making sure that they physical facility is well maintained and that the staff are polite to the patients will go a long way. Far too many people are assaulted while they're patients at inpatient psychiatric hospitals and that's not going to make recovery any easier.
It’s true that the drugs for schizophrenia are terrible, but it’s hard to say how much better than can get, given that we still don’t really understand what schizophrenia is. It’s also hard for me to see a ton more money getting put into psychiatric hospitals. Where are the incentives to do that?
The progress that may come is when neuroscience (perhaps with the help of AI) helps us actually understand mental illness, but right now our options are not good, and while throwing more money at the problem might help a little bit, the American political system is not inclined towards that outcome.
My guess is that schizophrenia is more than one disease; depression is clearly more than one disease and they're probably not all that similar biologically but are all grouped as one disease for convenience. Hopefully once we're able to separate out the different types of schizophrenia, we'll be able to understand it better.
When it comes to drugs, I share your pessimism. The big Pharma companies have mostly exited the psychiatric sector. We just have a bunch of me-too atypical antipsychotics that are then quickly marketed for bipolar disorder and depression as well. It's such a tough field. Maybe RTMS is the best bet for new treatments.
TMS is cool, but it's still not a theory-based treatment.
I do note the Joanna Moncrieff argument that names like "antipsychotic" or "antidepressant" are not really accurate. Antibacterial drugs kill bacteria. We know which ones, we know how, we can test to see if the patient has the bacteria and what their susceptibility is. There's some more complexity in practice, but it's totally different to give a drug that is "anti-" to an actual pathogenic agent versus these psychiatry drugs that basically just numb up your mind in a way that makes you less troublesome. They have some uses, but they aren't cures.
I also note that chronic schizophrenia is associated with structural brain abnormalities and volume loss, which implies that this is a much bigger problem than a few neurotransmitter levels being out of whack.
I have had 3 rounds of TMS and it definitely saved my life but unfortunately you can’t use it for people with mania issues, ie no bipolar, no schizophrenia. It’s also a huge pain in the ass, and most places outside the US don’t want to use it bc it’s so expensive (and you can just use ug electroshock instead).
My wife had ECT, the side effects kind of suck, but she's mostly stable now after a year where she was hospitalized a dozen times. It works, but no one really knows WHY exactly. I fear it's going to be a while before we make much progress on mental illness. I suspect depression has more to do with patterns and connections in your brain rather than explicit biochemical pathways, but that sounds too much like 'it's all in your head' for people. But I've always thought the stigma against implying 'its all in your head' was stupid anyway. All of you, everything that most people would consider as 'you' is all in your head, but just try to be a completely different person and see how that goes.
I have family members who've had success with it for OCD and melancholic depression -- which is a big deal because those are really serious diseases. It really is a game changer for stuff like that.
One thing I am curious about is why RTMS is contraindicated for anything with mania and whether that's just out of an abundance of caution. There are some trials for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder so they may be able to do it safely without worrying about triggering mania. With any luck the results will get reported, and soon.
It is pretty hard to get staff to stay at psych hospitals because it’s so difficult to deal with the patients (and regularly dangerous for the staff). Obviously patients shouldn’t be assaulted but it’s definitely not simple to handle the staffing issues.
The staff just often get beat all the time. Nobody wants to do a job where people scream at you, berate you and injure you all the time. Even mentally ill homeless people don't want to be around other mentally ill homeless people.
Well that’s an issue, but for most people it’s still better for them to be on their meds. Also it’s quite probable your relative has narcissism personality disorder on top of the schizophrenia, and unfortunately there’s very little that can be done about personality disorders even if the person actively wants to change.
I came here specifically looking for this joke lol- I already know it, but I was appalled that she did not actually tell it because others may not know how hilarious it is. This is irresponsible journalism and I am here demanding that Katie tell the joke at the top of the next show. Like if you agree.
I was at a bus stop yesterday sitting on a bench with a glass enclosure. A guy came up to me and asked me what time the bus was coming. I responded and went back to scrolling on my phone. 20 minutes later he suddenly started acting erratic and threw his phone towards me. The glass enclosure was not fully open on one side, but had a door shaped opening where he was standing. I was trapped.
Thankfully, that’s where it ended. But I was terrified for those 10 minutes. Every time he reached inside his heavy jacket pocket, I half expected him to pull out a knife (there have been some knife attacks on the subway). He wasn’t making me “uncomfortable”, he made me fear for my life. People don’t choose to feel fear, it’s a natural response.
Progressives acting like feeling fearful when a person is being aggressive is a moral failure are deliberately looking at it through some convoluted intersectional lens. Obviously most people in the Neely situation weren’t aware of his history , they only knew that this person was being aggressive this instant. A person wearing a suit and Rolex would have elicited the same response.
All the “hurr durr, I’ve been in uncomfortable situations on the subway but you know what I didn’t do? Murder people” is exhausting and performative empathy at its finest. You can understand the complexity of the situation while recognizing what happened was a tragedy
100%. It’s a luxury of the wealthy to pretend like they’re just more enlightened and that’s why these events don’t bother them. In reality it’s because they don’t have to deal with it as much. I was completely humiliated by someone once (in front of my boss no less) for suggesting that maybe we shouldn’t let people just do drugs in the street and form tent encampments everywhere--she accused me of wanting to lock up homeless people, let them get raped in emergency shelters, etc etc. But of course she’s one who lives in a gated community with security, sent all of her children to a very expensive private school, and treats visiting homeless encampments to deliver supplies as some kind of tourism, in my opinion. Whereas I rely on public transportation as a young-ish female who works late hours, and don’t have the money to live in a neighborhood that isn’t patrolled by private security. Getting followed home at night by aggressive men or spat on in the face by panhandlers and STILL somehow being considered the privileged oppressor is really frustrating.
I lived in the George Floyd incident neighborhood, and I watched as rich twitter liberals cheered the burning down of a low income but arguably the most diverse neighborhood in Minneapolis. Infuriating!
I was a witness too. I will never get over it.
My work has had to completely lock down bathrooms and add security throughout the building due to street vagrants doing drugs what used to be publicly accessible restrooms in an area where there aren’t many. I’ve had to deal with tweakers coming in with open sores and wounds, yelling at each other, locking themselves in the stalls for an hour or more, etc. Went to a meeting about all this recently and had to listen to a woman who works from home chastise us all for taking a “carceral approach” instead of providing directions to safe injection sites and bringing in crisis response. I almost screamed.
“let them get raped in emergency shelters” -- is she unaware that homeless ppl are often raped in those encampments?
Yeah my wife used to take the bus and once had a belligerent guy screaming and attacking people on the bus with her. All the more scary as he was bleeding profusely from a knife wound, from who knows where.
Typical white supremacy demanding to not feel uncomfortable in the presence of someone just asking to be seen. Why does your wife want to erase this man’s lived experience?
And these are the same people (for the most part) who claim traumatization over shoulder rubs. The cognitive dissonance is astounding.
Exactly. It’s similar to their dismissals of women who don’t want to share bathrooms & locker rooms with men who say that they’re women. It’s a fact that men commit more violence than women, and that women are often the targets of that violence. It’s not saying ALL men are violent, but it’s enough to keep men out of women’s spaces. Decent men know this and respect our boundaries. It’s natural for women to be suspicious of men they’re not familiar with, and those women that say otherwise haven’t been appointed to speak on behalf of all of us.
Gaslighting a generation of girls to ignore their he instincts that are there to protect them is reckless. It’s saying that trans identified men’s (TW) fear of men is legitimate but women’s fear of men who disregard their boundaries is not.
Absolutely parallel. Leftist women are still pressured to fulfill the same misogynistic social roles and contracts ascribed to women— be the mother/carer/nurturer above all, even if it means ignoring your own needs. Esp white liberal women, because we all know they’re just the worst monsters with literally violent tears. Uncomfortable around homeless men? Uncomfortable around AGPs? Uncomfortable around street harassers who happen to be men of color? Just a bigoted woman failing at her main job of “being kind.”
Well said.
Shellenberger's book has a terrifying account of man who attacked a woman entering a building who specifically waited for a woman (any woman--he did not know the victim) as the CCTV showed him letting many men enter the building unmolested.
But didn’t you hear what Roxanne Gay said? You’re fine. It’s only momentary discomfort. Yeesh. :::snaps fingers:::
The gall of these people who hold this standard and a completely different one in nearly every other area of life. Concepts like stigma, microaggressions, representation, invalidating, etc... The rest of the world is so fragile we need to avoid saying or even thinking anything that might cause the slightest discomfort, but someone puts you in fear for your life and you just gotta suck it up..
I used to take the metro train in my hometown regularly when in high school about 15 years ago now. Went back to visit about 6 months ago, got on the train and immediately was met by a guy trying to sit next to all the women on the train, harassing us, all while chain smoking. Everyone just moved to another car, not sure security ever came. Just last month I went back again and hopped on the train. Immediately a guy starts walking up and down the car asking if any of us work for TSA. He then picked out a specific woman and decided she was an undercover agent. From there it was all downhill and ended with him screaming at her that he was going to get the whole train to jump her and everyone on the train just got off as quickly as possible. No one tried to deescalate or tried to create distance between him and the woman. Nobody will stand up for her, nobody will stand up for me. It’s just not worth the risk. I’m never riding it again.
If they want more people to use mass transit instead of driving in cars, they're going to have to take these incidents seriously.
Also, Penny's martial arts fuckups were technical, not moral.
"Position before submission" is the saying in jiu-jitsu. If you've got someone's back, you should use your legs to secure the position (using either hooks or a rear body triangle) before attacking the neck. Penny fucked up by relying on the chokehold to maintain his backmount, so he couldn't let it go or else risk losing his position.
Also, choking someone out is a matter of compressing their carotid arteries, not their windpipe. It's lack of bloodflow to the brain that causes rapid loss of consciousness; lack of air into the lungs results in what we saw with George Floyd - where they remain awake and struggling pretty much right up to the point of death. If you have someone in a chokehold and they're not out cold in 5-10 seconds, then you don't have their arteries squeezed off so they'll go straight from struggling to dying with very little in between.
But Penny shouldn't be expected to know that in order to engage in self-defense. If the goal of progressives is "community-based policing" rather than leaving it to trained professionals, then it's inevitably going to be an amateur-hour shitshow.
The Jordan Neely story makes me so angry all around. Anyone with half a brain knows that these types of tragedies will happen when we live in a time where those of us in large cities are told to just accept that there is a contingent of mentally ill and drug addicted people wandering the streets often displaying violent and erratic behavior, while at the same time there’s a push for a decrease in police presence. What a perfect recipe for vigilantism.
Something frustrating with Katie and Jesse's assertion that bystanders shouldn't do anything to protect themselves and/or their fellow passengers is that the question becomes "ok, well who then?". With the push to decrease policing and to envision the police force as a whole as corrupt killers, apparently not them either. And even if Jesse/Katie believe police are the answer, police aren't around 24/7. So what happens during the response time? What if another 67-year-old gets pushed to the ground with orbital fractures? Yes, we all have rights and no one "deserves" to die, but for the people pushing others to the ground and into subway tracks, their victims "deserve" safety too, and sometimes in protecting the one, it's really fucking hard (near impossible, really) to protect the other.
Exactly. My elderly parents and sister’s kids ride the subway. I am comforted by the fact that if they are threatened in a crowded car or someone seems especially aggressive & sleazy there likely are going to be men (Latino or black or white gym bros or guys in suits or whatever) who will step in and, if necessary, get physical in their defense.
Norms in which young and middle-aged men are supposed to risk themselves in defense of women, children and the vulnerable are common, admirable and usually a great social positive. As are ones where men are taught to be profoundly ashamed if they stand by and do nothing. Women can’t offer this security; men can. And strength, physical prowess and bravery are great pluses. These are simple truths that are often impossible for feminists and progressives to acknowledge. Though they and their loved ones benefit from them, especially in NY.
Jesse & Katie aren’t doing quite this, but they are ignoring what it’s like to be vulnerable, Jesse is 6’4” and Katie literally lives on a remote island. They both grew up amongst highly educated people in crime-free areas. Everyone deserves to feel safe like they did.
I sympathize with the complement you're implicitly giving the guys who do step in, but as a society-scale response this is exactly the wrong way to go. These problems are supposed to be solved on social level by voting out DAs that believe the homeless are entitled to do what they want! If a city gets that in order, vigilantes will rarely ever be needed. (And by keeping its police force reasonably funded, but this part has been widely understood by now.) If it doesn't, no one will usually step in, since it's mostly just putting yourself into danger (including for prosecution) for no obvious gain. I wasn't surprised at all that the guy who played the main role here was from out of town and too young to have picked up the learned helplessness of professional city-dwellers.
My understanding is Penny, the guy who did this, grew up in Queens and nearby West Islip, Long Island (where he would have been around even more NYC cops and firemen than he would’ve had he only lived in Queens.) It’s not like he just showed up wide-eyed in the Big City, chewing on a stalk of wheat a la Axl Rose getting off the Greyhound bus that brought him from rural Indiana to LA in the ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ video.
I agree with all you say about social policy. 100%. And I certainly don’t want everyone’s safety to be dependent on reckless off-duty marines with some MMA moves, which they then execute incompetently with tragic results
But I’m middle-aged and can remember what NYC was like in the bad days. A lot of horrific things were done by people who were totally sane. The subway is a confined space. Life is chaotic and things can quickly turn ugly.
There are, indeed, still plenty of guys in NYC who will punch out another man if they see him rubbing his bulging crotch against a confused frightened schoolgirl on the subway. They remain a great deterrent. (Before omnipresent security cameras & cellphones they pretty much were the deterrent.) They’re not afraid of lawsuits. God bless them.
I think there’s a weird refusal to recognize both that men commit the vast majority of heinous crimes and that other men (often with limited educations) who have the potential to respond with violence have largely been what’s kept them in line.
We're living in this weird time for men where we're still supposed to do all the manly things of 40-60 years ago, but then when we do we're screamed at for it. This goes across the board whether its enforcing safety in public or dating.
Easiest solution to that is to live in a more conservative area. Men in Texas get screamed at a lot less than men in Portland.
I think maybe the exact opposite is true? I don't think it's possible to ever fully scale up a workable response.
If we have a society where men fulfill their most basic animal role- protecting the group- this stuff might happen less.
We are always going to have mentally ill homeless people around. They will never go away, although the problem will lessen with some societal changes (police and prosecutors doing their jobs).
Maybe- and I'm speculating wildly here- some of the problems we are seeing with men and boys falling behind is that we have completely scorned this role for them. We venerate the nurturing role that females usually have; this has made men feel redundant.
I love falling asleep every night next to a big man who will fight to defend me if something goes wrong. I mean, don't get me wrong, I will go all shrieking spider monkey on an intruder, but he's the one who is really going to make a difference in a fight.
And you don't have to be a big man to fulfill this role. My grandpa was 5'6", 130 lbs, and was known as the toughest meanest bastard around his Detroit neighborhood. Once, when he was an old man, he was drinking at a local bar and his hand was shaking a bit. A new guy saw this, and taunted him. There was a silence and a regular told the new guy quietly " Don't. That guy will rip your fucking head off". My dad ( his son-in-law) was with him, which is how I knew the story. I wasn't hanging around in bars when I was five.
In principle, bystanders with guns are supposed to solve that. I don't expect anyone to join in with fists alone against someone who might have a knife (and I don't know anyone around me whom I'd expect to do that, unless their own or a friend's life is at stake). But of course, what works and what doesn't depends on how far the rot has progressed. If word goes around that good Samaritans are socially valued and legally supported (which includes an amount of understanding if things go wrong), then there will be more of them. As it stands, however, politics is the lever that actually can be pulled.
I don't know the extent to which a random man can pull of such things, by the way. As someone who failed PE at school, I shouldn't be judging by myself, but I see significant differences in... body shape around, to put it politely. I'm not sure how many of them are Sumo ringers.
Can’t both be true?
I wonder if the narrative would have been different if it was: JN throws a punch, marine throws a punch, accidentally kills him when JN’s head hits the floor in a weird way. In other words, must we get to the point where unless someone has just stabbed us, we have to sit around and accept things before we act in self defense?
In NYC you can get shot, wrestle the gun away from the shooter, use it on him in self defense and STILL get charged with a crime. https://nypost.com/2023/04/01/nyc-garage-worker-charged-with-attempted-murder-for-shooting-thief/
I think that’s good! This is the kind of society we want to live in. I believe a thriving citizenry is afraid all the time. Also? Crime is a right wing fiction. Doesn’t happen. Never has.
They just want everyone to lay down and die to protect criminals from experiencing the consequences of their actions.
Did you listen to the episode? Didn't Jesse say that Neely yelled threats and threw a jacket on the floor?
That's an action punishable by death to you?
I hope neither you nor your kid ever get loud in public or you guys might get choked to death
If I were more conspiratorially minded, I would say Soros and the WEF globalist elites want working people to be constantly scared, humiliated, and emasculated. So they deliberately flood the streets with violent lunatics, and the only felony charges they'll prosecute are against everyday people who have the nerve to defend themselves. Here's another one where a bodega worker got charged with a felony in a clear case of self-defense:
https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/19/us/new-york-bodega-stabbing-murder-charges/index.html
The Neelys of the world are just cannon fodder to keep people terrorized, so that the masses will be more likely to meekly go along with living in ze pods and eating ze bugs.
However, if I loosen the tinfoil hat, I'd say the reason people like the garage worker, bodega worker, Kyle Rittenhouse, and now Penny get charged and/or vilified by progressives is because of a 'shoot the messenger' approach to relieving progressive cognitive dissonance around the consequences of anarchy. There's a glaring difference between how 'community based policing' works in progressive fantasyland (everyone joins hands and sings kumbaya) and how community-based policing works in reality (amateur-hour vigilantism and use of deadly force in self-defense situations).
For what it's worth, Bragg might not charge Penny in this case, to avoid another humiliation like when they got pressured into dropping charges against the bodega worker. Bragg might also just not have the political capital/bravery to pursue questionable charges against both Penny and Trump at the same time.
There is no "quite". They ARE ignoring the vulnerability of other people.
I agree. I live in LA and we know here that if we call the cops and say “there is a homeless man saying crazy things and scaring me,” they won’t come. That’s just the reality of the situation, and some people will feel they have to step in and fill that role. I would prefer that didn’t happen, and to have professionals to rely on rather than random civilians, but in some places it doesn’t feel like there is anyone to ask for help.
There is a mini encampment forming in my neighborhood and the guys who live there aren’t the craziest I’ve seen but definitely behave erratically. I called 311 to ask about cleaning it up and they actually came…and just threw out their trash for them (room service). I called 311 back and asked why they didn’t remove the encampment and they said “well they weren’t committing a crime.” They told me to call back if they assault someone. So dumb.
If governments abdicate their responsibility to uphold public safety they need to be held accountable.
The NYPD budget is extremely high and policing in the subways has increased, I think that in this particular case it's hard to blame 'defunding the police' moreso a failure of NYC's mental health infrastructure. In like SF I can see it but here probably not.
Also worth noting the one time I actually called the NYPD and told them a homeless person was sleeping in my building they came immediately with a mental health worker and handled the situation extremely well. Idk if this is common but it's worth actually trying before just assuming the police won't do anything
I work in NyC entail health. Mental health facilities are overburdened. However. I guaranfuckingty that he didn't want treatment. And without a mental hygiene warrant, you cannot force people into treatment perhaps more people with SMi would want treatment if the providers were more skilled.
I was not aware that they have increased policing on the subway
Yeah the the schizophrenic never want treatment. They're paranoid of everything including treatment. The same reason they need treatment is the same reason they won't accept treatment and the same reason they can't stay on and follow treatment.
Yeah the improvement in numbers was such that even the NYPost credited Hochul and Adams credit.
https://nypost.com/2023/03/12/policing-nycs-subways-is-working-but-not-nearly-enough/
Good to know glad to gear
Yeah I think striking the right balance on criminal justice is very important. We need to balance the right to public safety with the right to equal justice and rehabilitation but I do think enforcement of some public order rules matters.
Cops are fucking everywhere when I ride the subway now
How awful for you.
Do you have any theories on why there are so many more homeless now, in many big cities?
I think there are many factors: some of it is economics. Some of it is that so many mental health providers are at capacity and so people are not getting the healthcare they need AND if they are they are not seeing their doctor for long enough. I also think that the police used to sweep homeless people off the street and we stopped doing that.
It's more that the initial anti police movement in 2020 led to a deep hole being dug in terms of lawlessness, that police departments across most major cities in north America are still trying to dig their way out of almost 3 years later. They're struggling to hire and the cops they do have are now more reluctant to do their jobs, knowing it might get filmed and put on CNN for every progressive to armchair quarterback.
So you're arguing the Ferguson effect is real and is affecting performance? There's a lot of disputed evidence on that subject. In my view it comes down to the leadership of the city actually supporting the cops, I think in NYC the leadership largely support the cops doing their jobs.
Ferguson effect coupled with/compounded by a tight labour market - everyone is short staffed these days not just police departments.
With all the other job opportunities out there, who wants to be a cop in this day and age?
NYC's mental health infrastructure?
I think you mean the US. We have no mental health infrastructure. If you commit a serious enough crime AND happen to be severely mentally imbalanced you may be permanently locked up. Otherwise there is no mental health infrastructure for the poor and or severely crazy. It's just rotating through the system pointlessly.
We need to stop pretending 100% can be rehabilitated. I say that knowing full well a close relative of mine would never and has never been capable of succeeding on their own without immense and incredibly draining family support. She has ruined lives, marriages, friendships and careers of the people around her and hasn't worked a day in almost 40 years.
I feel you man. That's so hard to hear but so familiar. I was born to a parent with a frustrating and complex mental disorder that they would absolutely not seek help for and would never have been mandated to because they were never ever violent. The other was addicted to drugs, another mental health issue that nobody would demand treatment for in order to participate in society.
They just don't think of us when in reality these are our diseases too.
NYPD is well-budgeted but that doesn't help if they're being ordered not to enforce the laws, in this case the laws against sleeping in the subway, jumping turnstyles and 'harassment' which is what this would have been classified as. In 2016-2017 there was 1 death in the subway system, there were more than 20 last year.
But there’s no reason to think that random vigilante violence would do anything to protect people either, unless you think we should declare open season on homeless and mentally ill people on the street. For every actual act of violence there’s dozens of incidents where someone is yelling and acting out but nobody else is hurt. (It’s not clear to me yet whether this was A or B there, but it does seem like nobody was in reasonable fear for their life). I agree that we need to do something about the yelling and acting out too, but just because the police and government services aren’t being effective doesn’t license anyone else to go around using force preemptively, and it wouldn’t be effective if they did.
They weren’t “on the street.” They were crowded into a subway car, a very narrow metal tube that was careening through Brooklyn and Queens, mainly in long dark tunnels.
Big difference.
These would’ve been people familiar with the subway and random “crazy people.” yet they viewed him as a particular problem and potential danger. An assessment that would seem to now be vindicated by either our knowledge of his recent brutal unprovoked subway assault or his recent attempt to kidnap a child.
It was a horrible tragedy. But the idea that clearly everyone should have just sat on their hands and hoped for the best is naive and presumptuous.
> but it does seem like nobody was in reasonable fear for their life
What are you basing this on? Multiple people called 911.
I’m not arguing they weren’t justifiably afraid of physical harm. I’m saying specifically they don’t seem to have been in reasonable fear for their life, from what I’ve seen so far.
I have no clue how you are coming to that conclusion
Has any witness said they feared for their life? Penny certainly hasn’t.
Not sure that’s for anyone to claim. If that was the case we could basically throw out every progressive claim that speech is violence. (Which we do, but that doesn’t mean they don’t feel it.) I have been in many situations with erratic homeless people where I’ve felt totally safe one minute and “holy shit” the next. It’s regrettable all around but I don’t blame anybody for acting in self defense. Being fully in control of your rational brain is literally impossible when your amygdala takes over.
For 13 years I have lived in a pretty mixed-race single family neighborhood right in a large city, but it is quiet and off the beaten path. You might see homeless people on the main commercial drag 3 blocks away, but they don't come back into our neighborhood.
Except one day this junkie gets dropped off by an Uber on our street while I am out playing Frisbee with my 7yo kid on the sidewalk. Dude is 6'6", ~55, built like a boxer. Maybe housed, but pretty rough looking. So he knocks on a few doors randomly. Kind of suspicious, looks confused, sits on a porch for a while, for sure some sort of junkie.
Then he comes over and asks where he is...
I tell him and he says he got dropped off on the wrong street, or maybe he gave the driver the wrong street. I ask him if he needs anything, or any help, or if he would like something to eat or drink. He says no, no he is fine and goes back to sitting on a different neighbor's front porch.
So then he comes over to try and talk again, but isn't making a lot of sense, I try to be polite and even offer to give him money for an Uber so he can get to where he is going (he admits it is to a drug house).
He says nah and goes back to sitting on my neighbor's porch. I suggest he sit on my porch since it is in the shade, and I am home unlike my neighbor, he declines, but then my neighbor gets home.
Neighbor is also nice/helpful to him, but he continues to not make a ton of sense, goes and sits on a different porch.
Ok so far this whole situation is mildly unpleasant, and worth keeping an eye on, but no big deal...
And then he suddenly produces a cell phone, and makes a few calls where he talks loudly to some presumed friends about how racist we all are (people trying to be nice to him and help him) and how he is going to beat the shit out of us including the kid, and that he used to be a professional boxer, etc. Fantastic! Openly speculating about whether he could take the two of us.
So we are about to call the police, when he comes over again, but asks for help with where he is and the address, alternating between being normal, and super hostile.
He then calls and Uber and is gone 15 minutes later.
It’s easy to say that from the safety of your laptop view of what happened.
Sure. The same view we all have. We can all imagine whatever we want, but if someone who was there was actually afraid for their life, I would have thought we’d have heard that by now.
Right. But the question will be whether a chokehold like that, held for that long, was proportionate and did not bring an obvious risk of death. Unarmed grappling is not in all cases lethal force, but choking someone potentially is, as was demonstrated here.
These are the questions that will be brought to the grand jury and at trial, and even if you’re mad at me about it, I don’t think they have obvious answers.
What’s maybe more interesting than just arguing about it is comparing this to Rittenhouse. I think Rittenhouse had a far, far stronger legal case, because he had guns pointed at him. But I think he had a much weaker moral case, because he voluntarily put himself in a situation where that could be anticipated. Penny was a bystander who acted in the moment. I have far more sympathy for Penny than Rittenhouse.
But good intentions only go so far. When you kill someone unnecessarily, we investigate and you face the consequences, and that’s as it should be.
You're assuming a lot with the word 'random'. Vigilante interventions into violence will still do more than no interventions at all, though obviously plan A should be the state monopoly on violence. That social contract only works when cops and prosecutors keep the Neely's of the world off public transportation.
It’s random because it will be a small subset of the people acting out who experience a vigilante intervention, and it’s also a small subset of the people acting out who will do harm afterwards. Meanwhile those interventions are temporary, or should be. So any direct effect is going to be very small.
Then there’s all kinds of ways in which the net effect could be more violence and harm. Trying to restrain someone is going to produce an immediate escalation in the amount of force they’re using.
Sure, but on the flip side, as more people inevitably decide their only shot at public safety is taking matters into their own hands, that small subset will grow larger. And in terms of Pavlovian conditioning, if acting out repeatedly leads to asskickings, even mentally ill people will eventually either tone it down or relocate to an area with fewer vigilantes, like an empty alley, to have their outbursts.
Maybe. I just don’t think there’s enough people who’ll take that risk, and I think the effects on the crazy people are hard to predict.
I’m over 200lb and strong, but there’s no way I would preemptively try to restrain anyone who hadn’t yet used physical force themselves. (It’s not clear to me yet whether this guy had done so. I’m just talking in general.)
Agreed except to note in this particular case it appears to have reasonable self defense grounds.
Also, I don't think framing every interaction like this as "were you in fear for your life" is useful. I don't need to think someone is going to literally murder me for me to feel unsafe. Getting punched in the face or shoved or even just screamed at wildly most likely won't result in my dying, but it's something I feel justified in not wanting to happen and reacting to if feels unhinged enough. Again, if given the chance, I'd just run, but then again I'm sure the elderly woman who Neely punched would not have minded if someone stepped in on her behalf and took some measure of control of the situation.
You think about the number of times that police interact with people even homeless people the negatives are absolutely in the vast minority.
No, no, much better to get pushed onto a subway track. Just deal with it. What's the worst that could happen?
I don’t disagree about what will happen in practice, but the context above was asking a normative question about what people should do when police and government services fail to prevent these situations. And the normative answer needs to suggest something that is effective, proportionate, and not going to bring a bunch of unintended consequences.
I would bet my life that this marine had absolutely no intention of killing the homeless guy. He was restraining him, and it went bad. It was an accidental death.
I don’t think he meant to either, but the technique he used is notorious, so it’s at least not the same kind of accident as “I tried to grab him and he fell, hit his head and died”.
Seemed like it improved it here.
Yeah, I was off-put by how Jesse was, on the one hand, saying pretty clearly that, if a bunch of "hardened" New Yorkers were that freaked out, that by itself was prima facie evidence that the situation was quite serious, yet also just acting like everyone should have backed off and, I guess, waited until it actually went violent? I'm not some sort of super macho dude telling the soy-boy "I would've just decked him". I love me some martial arts movies, but I also know the difference between fantasy and real life and take the use of force very seriously. That being said, the problem with these sorts of situations where someone is acting erratically and showing a serious potential for violence is that you are inherently operating with a lot of uncertainty, but, if you only intervene when you *are* certain, it can easily be too late. Maybe Jordan wouldn't have ended up doing anything, maybe he would have come at someone and it didn't connect, people got away, maybe someone got a blackeye or split lip. Or maybe they get a TBI or worse. This all happens in a split second.
I think it was fully justified for people to intervene and try and restrain him; however, it definitely should be investigated to see if the use of force once he was ostensibly restrained was excessive. If so, yes, there should be the potential for some sort of legal repercussion. NOT because they intervened and restrained him, but if it turns out that they went beyond what they could reasonably deem necessary in such a way that showed a reckless disregard for Jordan's life.
Again, such a tiresome aspect of our culture that this is either "wait to get stabbed by a person having a psychotic episode" or "shoot anybody who looks at you." It's like Marky Mark talking about how he wouldn't have let 9/11 happen because he gets up at 4am to workout in his mansion. Sick, bruh. Dudes on United 93 were total cucks! WOO.
Violence is not something most people deal with in any meaningful way and it just seems insane to have these rational discussions about "why didn't he have full control of a chaotic situation" when most of us would have most likely just waited to get punched and then felt bad about it for the next five months while wishing we had done something differently and blaming ourselves for chaos descending on us in a steel tube hurtling (trudging?) beneath the surface of the Earth.
I think the marine was justified- morally- in intervening. I don't think he had reckless disregard for Jordan's life probably. I think adrenaline and animal instincts took over ( yes, we are animals and we have those).
I’d actually really like to hear their response to this. I hear this a lot too and at this point I feel like it is codifying cowardice as the correct cultural response. It’s hard to see such a thing as a good development for society, and no one seems to be able to make a coherent case on why it’s desirable and good. It’s become extremely frustrating and I am starting to think this is going to be catastrophic for progressivism (both sane and otherwise) for decades to come.
“Unless you are being pummeled by a lunatic you should just sit there, do nothing, and wait for it to happen.”
Did they say bystanders shouldn't do anything?
I don't think so. I think they just said in their experience, bystanders who experience it every day just try to ignore it or get off the train.
I love BARpod but there are times where I wish Jesse would start eating meat and lifting weights or dabbling in HRT*. The notion that you shouldn't defend yourself when you're feeling threatened to one degree or another is odd. Now, of course, most self-defense experts will tell you, hey, if you're in danger your first move should be to RUN. But if you can't run, you have to know how to defend yourself, even if this opens you up to some risk in the moment or down the road. It's an odd stance to say "he shouldn't have done that" from the comfort of a podcast.
*And I mean this as a friend, Jesse. Let me guide you to the wonders of regenerative farming and pastured venison and elk and deadlifts.
"feeling threatened to one degree or another" is really way too vague for me. This kind of thinking would justify that asshole who shot a girl who was turning around in his driveway, Ahmad Arbury, and hundreds of other incidents. I think taht, rightly, especially in a place where guns are everywhere, that the law doesn't see it that way.
Its not just the push for a decrease in police. The local attorney's in cities across America are declining to prosecute cases. When they do prosecute, they are pushing for limited sentencing. Everything boils down to incentives or disincentives. And currently the disincentives to doing crime are shrinking.
Right! The MSU shooter was not prosecuted on gun charges and so he...had guns. Which he used to kill young people.
Given how out of control the situation has gotten with the homeless population in many US cities the past few years, I've been genuinely surprised (i) by how little vigilantism there appears to have been and (ii) that organized crime doesn't seem to have moved back into the protection racket business at all.
Give it some time. Things degrade much more and this could easily start happening twenty times a month.
Would not be surprised if this began happening more and more. The central nervous systems of most NYers must be threadbare.
The vigilanties are too busy shooting people that turn their car around around in their driveways to attack actual criminals.
That doesn't make any sense? The people shooting at cars approaching their houses (elderly recluses in rural areas) are basically a completely different demographic than the people who most frequently encounter homeless people.
The outrage should be about that - why was this man left to suffer with such severe mental health problems?
Schizophrenia can be a very intractable problem, especially when adults with it refuse treatment. The book Katie mentioned, Jonathan Rosen's The Best Minds, is very good on the policy and treatment challenges.
I’m halfway through it! A brilliant book!
For sure and I downloaded that book but this guy had over 40 arrests, multiple assaults. It just seems like there would have been a better solution.
The legal barrier to holding someone for more than 24-72 hours (state laws vary) is very high. Generally, you can't do it unless someone's an imminent danger, and past violence doesn't count. Lots of people want the laws changed, but they haven't been so far, and civil-rights groups often oppose change, due to understandable concerns about how freely we institutionalized people who weren't an imminent threat under the old statutes.
Neely also had an outstanding warrant for assault, so there was no legal barrier to getting him off that subway car, merely an enforcement barrier.
The implications of allowing an ideologically captured profession to permanently imprison disagreeable individuals with little or no due process are legitimately horrifying. I’ve signed commitment orders (not a regular part of my current job but one rotates in this business) and I take it very seriously, but not everyone does.
I don’t like having these sorts of seriously ill people wandering the streets because they refuse treatment, but I don’t know what the solution is.
Are you concerned some psychiatrists would start locking people in asylums for "clinical pathological transphobia" if they get caught listening to BARPod?
Because we decided mental hospitals were bad but didn’t have an alternate plan for what to do with all the broken toys after we closed them.
I think there's enough outrage to go around. Literally nobody looks good in this story from a rational perspective, least of all the legislators in charge of trying to run nyc.
Because of many, many ACLU lawsuits and policy decisions, we cannot hold insane people against their will. Full stop. We cannot forcibly medicate them. We have no carrots, and no sticks. He suffered because he did not want to take his meds. And we couldn't make him.
Two minutes and fifty-five seconds, not fifteen minutes.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-65506075
I should qualify this by saying this video, which wasn’t attached and I haven’t seen, was timed at 2’55”. I can’t confirm that it captures the whole incident but 15 minutes seems to be an exaggeration.
People are bad at estimating time under pressure. I doubt it was 15 minutes but it may have felt like that.
Also, it may also explain why the marine held on too long.
I accept that 15 minutes of constant choking is an error on my part but I think that's kind of besides the point because the low end of 3 minutes is still enough to kill a guy. Penny could have wrapped the guy up
Penny could have also taken the less lethal means of striking with closed fists, but I would assume he chose the choke hold as a less violent option, to just restrain the guy until police arrived.
Yeah I mentioned elsewhere that, in hindsight, Penny would have been better off kicking the shit out of Neely, but it's understandable why he would in the moment have thought the chokehold was a more humane option.
Not everyone has the same ability to gauge time, especially in stressful situations. Armchair quarterbacking is easy.
I don’t think he should have done what he did, I just mean that when people encounter a scary situation and feel like there aren’t other options, they might think they have to take matters into their own hands, like this guy did. And even if he is a former marine, that doesn’t make him qualified to handle this situation, obviously, and this terrible thing happened.
For all the pigeon holing people do with stuff like this, funny I haven't heard anyone bring up the possibility that Penny was also mentally unwell and just another victim of "not enough services".
PTSD from military service? We don’t know. But ppl are quick to malign ppl in the military.
How is the word "assault" being used here and who did Neely assault on this train car?
Lol pretty funny quoting Merriam Webster to discuss a legal terms definition that doesn't apply to NYS and having to say "it's appropriate" at the end.
He didn't have a gun or knife and he threw some shit. He yelled his arms and threatened the train car. The idea that those factors mean you can walk up behind a person and choke them past death is very steep compared to Neely's actions.
Well, I'm sure when you were in a scary, chaotic adrenalin charged incident you stuck to your script perfectly.
How did it go down when you did it?
Well I was very intimidated by this molly person from the midwest. My adrenaline was going and I was shaking and then I saw a comment where she said that maybe Penny didn't mean to kill Neely with a several minute long choke. Seemingly not realizing that cutting off a guy's airway for minutes might kill him. And knowing that this Midwest person doesn't understand that cutting off air is vital made me not as scared.
I've mostly avoided all the crazy people in my commutes on buses and trains in the city. But if all you need is a story of a person who didn't kill the threatening homeless guy, I can point to my 65 year old dad at the time. Sure it was inadvisable for him to involve himself but he wrapped up a homeless guy who was yelling and erratic on the 5 train until cops arrived at the next stop.
I don't buy the idea that a choke from behind for minutes on a guy who is only generally threatening was the only way to go and I don't buy the whole "you can't judge Penny" tone of your response if my 65 year old office working dad can do a better job restraining a guy who makes it out alive with the same type of general threat
Or maybe you could use an example from Portland where two upstanding men tried to talk an aggressive person down and got stabbed and died. I'm not saying I agree with the choke hold but it is wishful thinking that there is actually some sort of *correct* thing to do in these scenarios. I'm glad your 65 year old dad was able to subdue that guy in that specific instance. There is no indication that would have work in this instance. I'm not caping for choke holds but I'm so uninterested in one off examples that have no practical application to this scenario or policy in general.
Hey! Sometimes you should talk to a crazy dude and it works! Sometimes you can just bear hug them and it works! I have no suggestions for when these suggestions don't work!
You could use that example but you'd be replacing a guy throwing a jacket on the ground and yelling threats with a guy who prior to the stabbing was already yelling threats and physically accosting people like stealing their shit.
I'm cool with looking at these two situations, understanding the facts and timeline as they are, and saying that choking a guy to death was extreme, especially considering he was still being choked when his wrists were also restrained.
Also this was very funny. Uses an example from Portland and then says "I'm so uninterested in one off examples that have no practical application to this scenario or policy in general."
Since you are interested in examples despite what you wrote, I would say that my example of my dad on the NYC subway restraining a homeless person without killing them is a better comparison for a guy walking up to a homeless guy who's not physically attacking anyone but is yelling threats and chokes the hobo to death on the subway platform and not even letting go when the guy's wrists are restrained.
But yeah, if you want to bring up the example where the jacket is actually a knife, go for it.
People in chokeholds in the context of MMA know that they also have an obligation to tap-out for their own safety. Neely could have just let himself be restrained. It's possible he was fighting the restraint, and that it was a combination of the restraint & Neely continuing to resist the restraint that unfortunately led to his death.
Right, I think “used clearly disproportionate force” can also be the result of a mistake rather than malice, but it is a different kind of accident to “the restrained person died unexpectedly while held with force proportionate to the threat”. And the fine distinctions there are why we have professional police officers. Given current evidence the force used was clearly disproportionate to the threat posed, perhaps unintentionally. A criminal investigation is obviously merited. (That doesn’t mean I think for sure he should have been held, charged, etc - that may or may not have been appropriate, we’ll find out.)
Because Neeley hadn’t actually hit anyone, I am leaning toward low-level manslaughter--you have to be careful when you restrain someone before their threat level is clear . (Maybe he can get the same deal Neeley got for an unprovoked attack on an old woman--that could absolutely have killed her.)
If Neeley had gotten around to attacking someone I wouldn’t feel that his restrainer had the duty to know what he was doing--you force someone to restrain you from attacking others, it might turn out they don’t know how to do that safely. That’s why we have cops.
You need to listen to the latest Advisory Opinion episode on this because you'll learn that you're incorrect. He doesn't have to hit anyone first. Jury instructions in self defense cases ask jurors to consider "reasonable people" felt like Neely "posed an imminent threat to him or others", self defense was justifiable. They'd have to prove he *intended to kill* Neely (say if Penny drew a gun and shot him, as opposed to trying to physically restrain him).
Exactly. He wasn't trying something disproportionate like pulling a gun on him. He was trying to hold him until police could come. From what I've heard lawyers saying the law says the DA would have to be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Penny took that action with the intention of killing him. Later video showed that Penny had put Neely in a recovery position, and that he waited for medical assistance to arrive. People intending to kill someone else don't usually do that.
There was also a second guy (nameless as far as I can tell) who was there helping to restrain Neely. The two of them could have held him down by the arms easily.
I'm sure that Penny regrets what he did, and it was a horrible accident, but that doesn't necessarily mean he shouldn't face charges. Involuntary manslaughter maybe? I'm not a lawyer but I think if you accidentally kill someone it's reasonable to at least face charges, even if he ends up being ultimately acquitted if it's ruled pure self defense.
It's not an accidental death in the way you're thinking when self defense is involved. He chose a proportional response (physical restraint). Reasonable people felt that Neely posed an imminent threat, and they were confined in the space of a subway car. They'd have to be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Penny went into the act of holding Neely with the intent to kill him to hold him responsible.
You’re assuming one’s sense of time is constant no matter the circumstances.
NY fucked up by letting a clearly troubled guy bounce around the system, with 40 arrests in a decade, mental health problems exacerbated by drug use. He wasn't going to live happily ever after. I suggest you listen to the most recent episode of Advisory Opinions on this topic. If Penny's intent was to immobilize Neely until help arrived, and reasonable people agree that there was imminent danger to him or others, it will be up to *prosecutors* to prove *beyond a reasonable doubt* that he intended to KILL him.
"If Reasonable people" is doing allllll the lifting there as it seems unreasonable to this - all credit to Jesse for this phrase - hardened NYer.
Prosecutors actually don't have to prove that Penny intended to kill Neely if they're not going for a particular charge. Do you think people don't go to prison for accidentally killing someone?
I'm not going to listen to that podcast unless you can tell me they were on the train. I don't know why you think I'd care about their opinions if they also weren't there.
It's helpful to know how these things are considered in the law. If you contend a crime has been committed, it will be judged there, not in a Substack thread. The podcast goes over jury instructions, which are in plain English and which guide a jury in making their decisions in cases like this. If you wish to write angry comments free from the burden of knowledge about how the law works, that's your choice.
"Do you think people don't go to prison for accidentally killing someone?" Accidentally killing someone in a car accident is different than a self defense case (and if you listen to the podcast you'll hear it's not about whether he thought Neely was a threat to him, but to others around them as well).
The thing people who are condemning Penny before he's been charged need to know is that all of these protests, some which affect subway transit, are going to make it more likely a future trial (if it goes to trial) will be moved to a different jurisdiction because it will make it harder to find an impartial jury. If it's moved -- hardened New Yorkers who are more used to mentally unwell people will not BE on the jury, it could be in a suburb of NY where ppl aren't using the subway as often (though I understand there are a lot of commuters, but ppl who commute do so because they don't WANT to live in the city).
When violence happens no one is in control. That’s really deeply hard for people to wrap their heads around. The best most highly trained fighter you’ve ever seen isn’t Batman and could kill someone completely by mistake or be killed by some random person who got lucky. At best you can make it less chaotic. That’s why we have such strong violence taboos.
When the city allows sick people who are too sick to get treatment to just wander around until they die in public things like this happen because people will have to make very hard choices about their own safety. And the whole purpose of why we have institutions is to prevent choices like this from needing to be made.
I’m so sad for a fourteen year old kid whose mother was murdered and thrown in a suitcase. He should have had some place to go where he would have been kept safe and fed and warm, where he couldn’t harm anyone including himself. And I understand the twenty four year old marine later in life crossing his path having to do what he throughly was necessary for his safety and the safety of others.
It sounds like it was three minutes which if the guy is fighting the whole first two minutes probably didn’t feel that long or how much longer he held on after. You can’t expect someone to be Batman in a self defense situation. People will watch a Chuck Norris movie and think it’s real. Nobody actually has that level of physical mastery over another person. Even with stuff like Jiu Jitsu that is effective it’s like “oh are we fighting near furniture? That’s a whole different thing.”
“When violence happens no one is in control.”
Very true. People who’ve never been in a violent interaction don’t realize this.
I used to work in a bar. One Sunday night towards closing, there were only a couple customers, and two staff, the night manager tending bar, and me being bar back. In walk two inebriated characters. They had come in before and been refused service and again they were told to leave. An argument ensued and was escalating in the drunk’s side. I was about three steps away from this. Finally, the drunk said, “Ya know what?” And he came around the bar and slammed his hand down on the bartender’s shoulder. Next thing I knew I was halfway down the room arms extended straight out with the back of the guy’s jacket in my bunched fists, his feet are dangling in midair (I’m tall) and he’s screaming “Put me down! Put me down!” I did, at the door and that was that. But.
I lost time. I have no memory of moving in and grabbing the guy. It was probably only ten seconds, but it still freaks me out. I’m not a violent person, not even prone to yelling. But I sometimes wonder what might have happened if he or his friend had fought back. What would I have not remembered if that had been the case?
Now I know what “blind rage” is, and it scares me.
I’ve heard about the micro dosing T in perimenopausal women that Katie mentioned. See now, aging as a woman is a disease that needs remedy, hormonal remedy. No doubt that the hormone replacement therapy probably makes a lot of 40 year old women feel better, and honestly, I’m tempted, just so I can keep my mid drift tight and get some energy, but I’m also so fucking tired of every stage of life as a female being treated as a condition that we need saving from with hormones.
Scared of puberty and becoming an adult human female? We have hormones for that. Are the burdens of existing as an adult human female with your natural fertility intact too overwhelming? We have hormones for that too. Are you an adult human female who has to unfortunately continue to exist after your natural “fuckable” age? We have hormones for that.
Seems like life as a woman in her natural hormonal state is a medical condition that warrants therapy. I’m over it. All of it.
Having kids and getting old do not make women failures as humans, but you wouldn’t be able to tell by how we treat both fertility and aging as disease in WOMEN.
I don't know exactly what the moms Katie follows are up to, but sometimes women will be prescribed small amounts of testosterone to treat things like low libido. (Side effects include issues you'd expect, like growth of some unwanted body hair.) Since all women have some naturally occurring T, anyway, I guess I'd want to know what's meant by "microdosing T" before I formed an opinion on whether these specific women should be taking it for their specific issues.
As someone who doesn't want any more body hair than what I've already got and has a strong bias against taking drugs I don't absolutely need, I can tell you I won't be starting T anytime soon. But I'm not dead set against other people taking it for what ails them if they've got reasonable doctors/NPs who think a low dose is OK.
One can think a therapy is largely bogus and still recognize their are exceptional cases that might warrant the treatment.
Lowering libido with age is not a disease or even AT ALL unnatural. Women’s sex drive NATURALLY isn’t the same as men’s. Now, if some women want to take T to want to want to have relations that is a personal choice, personally i don’t want to be drugged into wanting to fuck after my fertility is gone, but I still don’t think it’s beneficial to women to treat all inconvenient physical aspects of being a woman as negative “symptoms”. As Mary stated above, a lot of the the time our bodies react poorly to poor environmental conditions. We could put our energies into recognizing and addressing the needs of women’s bodies instead of trying to drug our bodies into what even? Perpetually appearing fertile, but without fertility?
Why aren’t men offered hormones to temper all their ailments? Why don’t we offer a little estrogen or a little testosterone blocking when their libidos are out of control and they are ruining their marriages? Or how about the phenomena of becoming grumpy old men? There isn’t some hormone that would make old cantankerous men less insufferable. Estrogen has also been shown to be protective to the brain and is part of the reason men have higher rates of autism and schizophrenia. Why don’t we treat anti-social men with low doses of estrogen?
Hormone balancing is a whole thing on Instagram. Fortunately, most of the content is about ways to take care of yourself through diet, exercise and sleep to “rebalance” your hormones. Some of it also is med spas offering to do these panels to measure your Estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone and then coming up with a personalized cocktail. Low doses of t are suggested for the slow down of the metabolism that happens after 40.
Men do take hormones, e.g., to replace the testosterone that naturally declines as they age. I don't think a hypothetical male version of me would be up for that, but if the question is whether men's aging is sometimes treated pharmacologically, then the answer is definitely yes.
My dad was taking T shots for a while & my mom hated it. He was always slightly inappropriate with her & they give a disabled obese guy prone to anger T shots so he’s bugging my mom for sex (at least that’s what I was told without asking by my mom because I’m an only child & she doesn’t think to save that for her therapist).
Yeah, what do I know, but it kinda seems to me that if both members of a heterosexual couple in their 50s experience diminished libido, that might work out better than if one has lower libido and the other is still horny as a 25yo?
You make a good point, and I wholeheartedly agree about hormones for puberty or fertility, but knowing what I do about the menopause and the immense difficulties for some women that come with it, I'm actually very glad that HRT is available for that stage of life.
Wish I could like this a million times!
Well, to be honest, most men would rather wear a condom every time than not get laid at all, so women probably could do more to make men shoulder the contraceptive burden if women were willing to turn it into a game of chicken.
Also neither of my grandmothers had access to birth control. One had 4 and the other had 5 kids. What they had access to was education and the right to work, own property, and vote. I don’t think that rejecting the idea that women need to manage being a woman with hormones is necessarily an endorsement of the reversal of women’s rights. It’s not hormones or 15 kids.
This is the world view that I no longer believe in: that being female is a burden I would be better off being able to opt out of or, in essence I would be better off if my body were more like a man’s. We do have ways of controlling fertility. The barrier methods and copper iuds, and even natural cycle tracking, but also... not engaging in penetrative sex. If one thinks it’s too much of a burden, opt out. I no longer want to opt out of my body, nor do I want to teach my daughters that they NEED to opt out in order to live a dignified life.
“already this
morning
i have killed
a fox
with a baseball
bat”
—William Carlos Williams
Jesse: “This started because a man was loudly threatening people on the subway, and I think some of the riders interpreted it as he was going to kill somebody..
“..and a guy did what he probably shouldn’t have done and directly intervened.”
If a number of riders on that subway carriage reasonably believed Neely was going to kill someone how can anybody say nobody should have intervened?
Is the appropriate (ie liberal handwringing) response really to awkwardly witness a schized-out bum assault an innocent person and then just feel bad about it afterwards?
There have been many people saying Daniel Penny’s actions set some kind of dangerous “precedent.” Of course this is nonsense; most people just aren’t built to intervene the way he did.
Jesse again: “Once in a while on the New York subway you find somebody who is a little too crazy and you move to the next subway car.”
Ok great.. What does this achieve exactly?
I would bet the majority of people are glad to know there is the possibility of people like Daniel Penny on their subway car or in their neighbourhood who might just put themselves in harm’s way to protect them from the tragic Jordan Neely’s of this world.
I was a little staggered by the "move to another car" comment. Say there's a guy acting in an aggressive, irrational, generally hostile manner on the subway - with a mix of men, women, possibly children, who knows - what sort of man gets up and leaves them all to it? What sort of society is that? And when everybody in the car goes to do that, how do you think the aggressor will react then?
It’s very much the type of response that assumes that it’s okay for one person to benefit while others don’t. As you point out, probably not everyone can leave (and also older or more burdened people are probably the ones left behind). Also as a person who has done that, it’s not necessarily easy to pull off — it very much depends on where in the car you are, etc.
As a fellow big-city-dweller I didn’t take it that way. He was more saying, “people weirding you out is common, and you could just safely leave the subway car if you were bothered; this was different and people probably were in danger.”
If there was a mom with an infant or a small child, burdened by carrying all the crap mom’s have to carry, or a physically challenged person in the subway car it’s not as easy to move quickly.
And moving cars while the train is moving is absolutely crazy to me.. how is safe? You’re walking on a small grating completely exposed with no sides or walls? Shiver.
A Jesse sort of man does that.
Yes it’s really a pointless thing to say
"what sort of man gets up and leaves them all to it?"
The kind that pees sitting down, most likely.
From what I know of the situation, it doesn't seem like a huge problem that Penny intervened. It is a problem that he used a chokehold and killed the guy. He hasn't been charged yet, the DA is trying to figure out what happened and what laws may be appropriate. In other words, he's being professional and responsible, as people with positions of responsibility in the real world tend to be. Somehow this is lost when people log onto twitter too often. I don't think Daniel Penny is a horrible person, as much as I can tell about someone I've never met, but he did kill someone and should be investigated and possibly charged.
The thing is, if you try confronting the threatening person, it's likely no one will help you, it's also likely you will get hurt (even more likely when it's group of people who are causing trouble), and on top of that it's extremely likely you will be the one sued for assault. Police and security guards are usually to far/too busy to intervene. All in all, the safest thing is usually to do as Jessie described: try not to catch the attention of the threatening person, and flee as soon as possible. Another commenter said it was learned helplessness and it's exactly what it is.
I don't know if that's learned helplessness. I will say, my first strategy is to avoid attracting the attention of the crazy person. But that doesn't mean that if I saw them threatening or going after someone else I would still cower and flee. It really depends on the overall scenario. I'm not going to escalate and situation unnecessarily.
I feel it is in the sense that it trains people into accepting unacceptable situations on in a regular basis. And it's compounded by people who affirm these situations are normal.
I think of it more as self-preservation. Learned helplessness would be to stay put in a car where someone is behaving erratically. Getting yourself up and out the door and into a different car takes some agency.
I would never try to intervene. I'm too much of a scaredy-cat.
Someone tried to talk down a crazy person on my local train line, and the crazy person detonated a bomb that blew holes in the roof of the train car. If you click the link, do read to the end. It's totally insane. https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/new-details-on-weekend-cta-pink-line-explosion-injuring-suspect-and-several-riders/
That's terrifying!
Wasn’t there kids on a train setting fire to an older man’s clothes in a subway/ at a subway stop last yr where a FOX weatherman intervened? Walking away when seeing that would be unethical.
I do this, because I don't know whether the person is just annoying or is actually dangerous, and if he (or she) is dangerous, there's very little I—a tiny elderly woman—could do to defend myself or anyone else. There are rarely police anywhere nearby, and if they're around they are also ignoring what I see. "What does this achieve exactly?" It gets me out of a potentially dangerous situation that I am unable to predict, prevent, or mitigate.
A lot of the twitter people were saying, “why didn’t anyone offer Neeley food or water?” And... that is why. I personally would not get within grabbing distance of an unstable man making threats no matter what he claimed to need.
Yes but your personal situation isn’t really that different to anyone else’s. Nobody wants to be near, let alone confront, a volatile lunatic on the subway or anywhere else. It can be a split second before you’re spat at or stabbed or worse.
It’s a perfectly natural response to want to get as far as possible from people like Neely, which is why it is perfectly useless advice.
It also doesn’t scale. Yes, some people might get up and move to the next carriage when they see and hear someone like Neely start their shit; but obviously it doesn’t work if everybody does. And who’s to say there isn’t another Neely in the next carriage anyway?
This is why I asked what does it achieve.
Despite the terrible ending, Penny’s action at least dealt with the situation at hand on behalf of everyone nearby.
Don’t know how old this is, but it’s been floating around online today. The woman couldn’t even walk away when the man grabs her hair and you can see her mouthing “help me” but everyone around her is frozen. I think the 3 responses are flight, fight or freeze, and most people fall in the freeze category. I’ve been in situations around erratic people and the last thing I want to do is draw attention by making any sudden movements. I’d only move if a group of people were moving.
https://twitter.com/LeftismForU/status/1654208557259149316?s=20
You’re only allowed to be terrified of “cis” PMC white men. Everyone else gets one halo around their head for each identity card they’re carrying.
I remember that! And everyone was asking where the men were who could have stepped in.
Filming apparently! That woman was straight up taken hostage because she couldn't leave fast enough, it's really upsetting.
It’s too bad no one was around to put him in a chokehold.
I’ve seen that video. Many such cases. That woman was right to be terrified and it’s always frustrating when nobody deals with the perpetrator. Saying that, I can completely understand why they don’t.
Another video I saw today was footage of Neely after Penny let him go. The people there had put him in an approximation of the recovery position as they waited for the ambulance. Before the clip ends you can clearly see Neely take a deep breath, suggesting he was alive.
One video that appears to have been disappeared is the footage of what happened before Penny grabbed him..
It’s like being in a wildebeast herd. Danger comes, everyone flees, but some are faster or better positioned for escape. what you’re really betting on is that the predator doesn’t fixate on you and moves to an easier target.
"you don't need to outrun the predator, you just need to outrun your slowest friend"
It's a tough question, and IMHO some of depends on what specifically Neely said and did.
If you wait for him to punch somebody in the face or to draw a knife, it may be too late to try to restrain him. On the other hand, if you escalate to a fight based on verbal threats and body language, someone can get hurt or killed. I don't know the answer.
Human life isn’t that precious and we need to stop acting like it is. That is the answer.
Society is about rights and responsibilities. You don’t get to participate if you don’t hold up your end.
> Once in a while on the New York subway you find somebody who is a little too crazy and you move to the next subway car
I get that that's what people usually do. It's what most people do in most situations like that.
But multiple people had called 911. And there are women and, if I recall, young people still on the train sort of cowering at the far end.
What I'd ask those who walked off is how'd they'd feel if that woman and child you scooted by as you got off the car was stabbed to death. For many, they wouldn't feel much. They'd blame it on the crazy guy and probably have a sense of "well, I made the right choice".
But some people would not forgive themselves. They'd feel a great deal of personal responsibility for abandoning people less capable of them. I'm not surprised that a young marine probably falls into the second category and not the first.
I guarantee Penny stayed not because he didn't think he could get away. He intervened because he didn't think it'd be right to just let the guy do whatever he was going to do.
Great episode and nuanced explanation of what led to Neely’s death.
I’d recommend people watch this news segment from 7 years ago about the choking of an aggressive passenger on an LA subway: https://youtu.be/M1LqoUPjqRQ
One guy is combative, hasn't hit anyone, a passenger chokes him from behind, the combative guy loses consciousness, and the passenger gets invited for a glowing TV interview with the title: "Subway hero describes showdown with combative passenger”.
The choking in that case didn’t lead to death, but that was pretty much luck. The passenger even says in the interview he had no training, didn’t know what he was doing, but just acted.
The only variable that’s wildly different between the two cases is the race of the people involved, and perhaps the fact (although unclear from the video) that the Marine may have held on to the choke a bit longer after Neely went limp.
Obviously, we don't want people taking the law into their own hands, but I thought it was interesting to see the difference in attitude between the TV host and comments then, and what's going on today with so many people calling the Neely case close to an intentional lynching…
We don't want people taking the law into their own hands.
We don't want district attorney's prosecuting most crimes.
Big cities need to Pick one.
Agreed. District Attorneys MUST prosecute crimes, especially violent ones, so that citizens aren't forced to take the law into their own hands.
Great point: the outcome of such a chaotic situation is a coin toss.
I think it's easy to judge in hindsight what we all would have done in that instance, like we're supposed to be thinking rationally. He did not think he would kill the guy but he was trying to protect the other passengers in a city that has abandoned them. That guy should have been in the hospital long ago. He should never have had to struggle like that on the street. And yes, the ONLY REASON PEOPLE CARE is that a white man killed a black man. Just look at Gunviolence.org and look at how many murders in the past 72 hours - children, mothers, etc.
One of the things that really drives me nuts is that everyone gets super upset about specific mass shootings but don’t give a fuck about the more common ones (beefs or DV related). Like somehow it’s not tragic if your own dad or husband kills you???
Jo Maugham is literally like if you imagined the worst, most pompous barrister with the thinnest possible skin, but instead of being a book character, he's a real person.
Blocked me for calling him solipsistic
He sounds like a cartoon bordering on an unfunny Monty Python sketch.
I'm just here to bust on Jesse for saying "petite" larceny as opposed to "petty" larceny. Yeah it is spelled petit but it is really petty. Some ancient vestige of the common law I suppose.
Jesse’s mispronunciation pales in comparison to Katie’s butchering of Maugham--it’s Mawm not Maw-gum 😱
YES, I came to say this! Like Somerset Maugham, I can't believe even Jesse didn't catch this! Lol, still a great ep.
This is awfully petit of you
I also chuckled at Jesse's mispronunciation. It sounded like a person stole a size 2 sun dress from Macy's.
From my very limited understanding of French, “petit” is pronounced similarly to “petty,” whereas the feminine version, “petite,” is the one that’s pronounced similarly to “pet-eet.”
In French, the emphasis is on the second syllable, so "pe-TEE" for the masculine "petit," and "pe-TEET" for the feminine "petite" (or "pe-TIT" if you're Quebecois).
Yeah, but have you heard how American lawyers pronounce all their OTHER legal terms?
I still remembered how hard my ex-lawyer mom laughed at me when I pronounced "habeas corpus" as if it were a phrase from my Latin textbook: "HA-bay-us COR-poos." So much for the Latin teachers' argument that studying Latin will make you sound smarter.
Oh, of course the lawyers mangle court-Latin and court-French.
And I just now realized that, when "habeas corpus" is removed from its legal context, I instinctually pronounced it the Latin way you described, but in context, it's hay-bee-us cor-piss.
Katie’s pronunciation of “affluent” bugged me, she was putting stress on the 2nd syllable and I think it should be on the 1st.
I’m so sick of the scale of urban decay and the associated liberal defense of anti-social behavior. I’m ready to vote for DeSantis. I am 52 and never voted Republican. I am more and more sympathetic to conservative ideology. Leftist culture and policy is corrosive and does not produce a normal, functioning society. Maybe class-based leftist politics would generate reasonable policy, but the individualistic identity politics of the American left is totally bankrupt. I still support universal healthcare, a strong social safety net for the ill and old. I think income inequality to the degree we have it in the US is bad for democracy and morally grotesque. But I can’t watch people shooting up on the sidewalk, girls cutting off their tits, people afraid to take trains or park in the city, schools lying to parents, adults afraid to say what they think, and say: Yes, this is working great. I’m so over it all. I hope DeSantis wins. I hope all these left wing nuts get voted out.
I feel ya- the only thing that’s stopping me from voting R is the abortion bans (also I don’t want to become one of those people who make politics their whole personality), if Republicans stopped caring about that one issue overnight I wonder how many people would immediately switch sides.
I’m also glad that people are more and more comfortable admitting this without feeling the need to do the whole “Aw shucks, I’ll always be a lifelong progressive and those wacky right wingers are still crazy and evil, but even I think the progressive left has gone too far!” schtick
I've thought about it long and hard and came to the conclusion that I would be willing to give up abortion access (except in case of rape and mother's health) if it means that I would be recognized as the sex that I am and I would feel safer on the streets. I already know that the left fearmongers blacks to keep them voting in the party line so why won't the do the same with women?
I understand what you mean. I live in a place that just recently signed a 6 week abortion limit which I’m pretty bummed out about (only it actually does include exceptions for rape and incest provided there’s documentation, which sounds good on paper but I’m not sure how it’s exactly going to work in practice) . However, would I risk my safety and personal happiness by moving to another city that doesn’t have as good of a quality of life just because of this one issue? Hell no
Yeah, I’ve considered that. Is this how people in their 50s saw the sixties? But I was a kid in the 70s and the cities didn’t look like they do now. It’s Mad Max. I don’t know how we let it get this bad.
It was 1977.
I was a kid in the 1990s andvt is my as bad as it was then. But things have definitely declined
That’s so sad. Societies can go either way.
*Homer Simpson Voice* No political assassinations SO FAR.
(Though not for lack of trying... see the Congressional Baseball Shooting, the man arrested w/a gun near Kavanaugh's house who said he wanted to kill three justices, and, also, Jan. 6.)
There aren’t really any leaders who would become martyrs. None of them are inspiring.
Martyrs usually believe what they're saying.
Urban defense of anti social behavior is a thing but it's really not as common as you're making it out to be. The Democratic mayor and governor of NY both had normie, barpod friendly takes on the Neely controversy. A few city council members did have very bad takes though. I don't know how voting for Desantis would possibly help as the president is not in charge of the NY subway.
I can’t respond to EKG2 directly. I appreciate that perspective. I voted for the Independent candidate in Oregon’s last election. I don’t have any influence on NYC, which is 2000 miles away. But my neighborhood, and every town and city near me is overrun with drug addicts shitting and shooting up in the streets. People are getting attacked in the streets. The trains are havens for smoking math and fentanyl. It scares me. It is so extreme. And it is my hope that Dems will get voted out at every level because they are failing to govern at a very basic level.
But Eric Adams HAS put into place policy to address literally the type of situation that has occurred. Much to the chagrin of haters to the left of him he is rounding up homeless people and having them committed.
I support his reforms. A girl recently showed up in my town. Very seriously mentally ill. She is filthy, confused. She lies down in parking lots and refuse piles. SHE NEEDS TO BE COMMITTED. She is a danger to herself. I’ve seen men talking to her. She is at risk of sexual assault as well as injury. I disagree very strongly with the ACLU position that people like her are “free” and that institutionalizing them infringes on their freedom. Freedom requires agency and her ability to make decisions is broken.
DeSantis isn't even likely to win the Republican primary.
I find that so depressing. He’s a good R candidate.
It’s going to be Trump and Biden in 2024 and Brandon somehow wins again, screencap this.
I'm with you, 100%.
Agree with you on this.
>I still support universal healthcare, a strong social safety net for the ill and old. I think income inequality to the degree we have it in the US is bad for democracy and morally grotesque.
Then I advise you resist supporting Republicans.
Germany has involuntary (stationary) treatment *after* the first serious crime ( https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma%C3%9Fregelvollzug , mostly for schizophrenics and pedophiles). IMHO this is a good middle ground. You cannot do it merely based on "behaving erratic" or some vague notion of "antisociality", as the definition of that will merrily swing with the political wind (surely someone in NYC will count manspreading; and I don't trust German politicians on this either, as some of them have made some pretty ominous noises around COVID).
It really isn't hard to come up with some kind of metric for involuntary treatment. The people that need that type of thing are almost always repeat offender in short periods of time. The state often sides with not doing this, likely because the state doesn't give a fuck but, when someone gets arrested 5 times in a year, its pretty easy to determine there is some kind of severe issue.
More to the point, I don't think there is any metric for involuntary treatment that should have seen a schizophrenic, repeatedly violent offender left on the outside. Somehow we've gotten lost in a debate about if the cops are the right ones to confront mentally ill people who are acting erratically and completely forgotten that if we let schizophrenic, repeatedly violent offenders walk around we will get tragic results.
There’s a line between where involuntary commitment is ethical and when it’s not, and sometimes it can be hard to tell where someone is on that line.
And then there is this case.
I was happy Katie mentioned Jonathan Rosen's account about Michael Laudor. The book, The Best Minds, I can't recommend enough. It's about mental illness and the "tragedy of good intentions" as its subtitle says and it's so layered and well-written. I listened on Audible and am going out later today to get a hard copy because there was so much I want to reread.
The Roxane Gay article started out reasonable but then took a turn to a ridiculous, illogical argument. I would like to think that an editor might question the article's logic before publishing, but I guess that doesn't happen at the nytimes.
The one thing that’s being missed in a lot of these discussions is there is now a movement towards encouraging schizophrenics to not take meds and that we should just accept their alternative reality, no matter what that reality is. Which — as a person who is occasionally insane myself — is insane. And so very very frustrating.
Yeah, I have seen more and more of that. I get that there is a very small number of people with psychosis who can do okay without medication, but that's not the vast majority of people psychosis and often times those people are only able to do so later in life after they've spent time on medication and learned how to manage their illness triggers; the vast majority of people with psychosis are not John Nash.
The drugs for schizophrenia are really awful and have terrible side effects. That means we should try to develop better ones that have fewer and less severe side effects. And we should try to get as many people with schizophrenia into programs that help build skills and reduce the doses of medication that they need. See below:
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/20/health/talk-therapy-found-to-ease-schizophrenia.html
We should also make psychiatric hospitals less unpleasant while we're at it. Simple stuff like making sure that they physical facility is well maintained and that the staff are polite to the patients will go a long way. Far too many people are assaulted while they're patients at inpatient psychiatric hospitals and that's not going to make recovery any easier.
The meds can have bad side effects, but if I might hurt people if I didn’t take it? Take the fucking meds!!
It’s true that the drugs for schizophrenia are terrible, but it’s hard to say how much better than can get, given that we still don’t really understand what schizophrenia is. It’s also hard for me to see a ton more money getting put into psychiatric hospitals. Where are the incentives to do that?
The progress that may come is when neuroscience (perhaps with the help of AI) helps us actually understand mental illness, but right now our options are not good, and while throwing more money at the problem might help a little bit, the American political system is not inclined towards that outcome.
My guess is that schizophrenia is more than one disease; depression is clearly more than one disease and they're probably not all that similar biologically but are all grouped as one disease for convenience. Hopefully once we're able to separate out the different types of schizophrenia, we'll be able to understand it better.
When it comes to drugs, I share your pessimism. The big Pharma companies have mostly exited the psychiatric sector. We just have a bunch of me-too atypical antipsychotics that are then quickly marketed for bipolar disorder and depression as well. It's such a tough field. Maybe RTMS is the best bet for new treatments.
TMS is cool, but it's still not a theory-based treatment.
I do note the Joanna Moncrieff argument that names like "antipsychotic" or "antidepressant" are not really accurate. Antibacterial drugs kill bacteria. We know which ones, we know how, we can test to see if the patient has the bacteria and what their susceptibility is. There's some more complexity in practice, but it's totally different to give a drug that is "anti-" to an actual pathogenic agent versus these psychiatry drugs that basically just numb up your mind in a way that makes you less troublesome. They have some uses, but they aren't cures.
I also note that chronic schizophrenia is associated with structural brain abnormalities and volume loss, which implies that this is a much bigger problem than a few neurotransmitter levels being out of whack.
I have had 3 rounds of TMS and it definitely saved my life but unfortunately you can’t use it for people with mania issues, ie no bipolar, no schizophrenia. It’s also a huge pain in the ass, and most places outside the US don’t want to use it bc it’s so expensive (and you can just use ug electroshock instead).
My wife had ECT, the side effects kind of suck, but she's mostly stable now after a year where she was hospitalized a dozen times. It works, but no one really knows WHY exactly. I fear it's going to be a while before we make much progress on mental illness. I suspect depression has more to do with patterns and connections in your brain rather than explicit biochemical pathways, but that sounds too much like 'it's all in your head' for people. But I've always thought the stigma against implying 'its all in your head' was stupid anyway. All of you, everything that most people would consider as 'you' is all in your head, but just try to be a completely different person and see how that goes.
I have family members who've had success with it for OCD and melancholic depression -- which is a big deal because those are really serious diseases. It really is a game changer for stuff like that.
One thing I am curious about is why RTMS is contraindicated for anything with mania and whether that's just out of an abundance of caution. There are some trials for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder so they may be able to do it safely without worrying about triggering mania. With any luck the results will get reported, and soon.
It is pretty hard to get staff to stay at psych hospitals because it’s so difficult to deal with the patients (and regularly dangerous for the staff). Obviously patients shouldn’t be assaulted but it’s definitely not simple to handle the staffing issues.
The staff just often get beat all the time. Nobody wants to do a job where people scream at you, berate you and injure you all the time. Even mentally ill homeless people don't want to be around other mentally ill homeless people.
So, on the one hand that’s insane but on the other my schizophrenic relative is a complete lying narcissistic psychopath on or off meds.
Well that’s an issue, but for most people it’s still better for them to be on their meds. Also it’s quite probable your relative has narcissism personality disorder on top of the schizophrenia, and unfortunately there’s very little that can be done about personality disorders even if the person actively wants to change.
If anyone’s curious about the sheep joke:
https://www.jokebuddha.com/joke/McGregors_Legacy
I came here specifically looking for this joke lol- I already know it, but I was appalled that she did not actually tell it because others may not know how hilarious it is. This is irresponsible journalism and I am here demanding that Katie tell the joke at the top of the next show. Like if you agree.
I learned that joke from JK Rowling (she has a PG version about enchanting sheep in one of the later HP books.)