When Katie remarks near the beginning that she only gets cat-called by pedophiles, Jesse fails to add in that "she would just end up giving them money instead", or something to that effect.
I side with dangerously mentally unwell people receiving compulsory state care with strong oversight to prevent abuses. Good on you, Jesse, but the important piece in what you said is that it shouldn’t have ever become your responsibility. For your sake and the sake of everyone else in that train, including that crazy guy.
The entity responsible for killing Jordan Neely is the state of New York. Daniel Penny took the only possible, reasonable choice left when they abdicated their responsibility to care for the mentally unwell.
Penny did the right thing in intervening but unfortunately he made a mistake in using potentially lethal force. I’m sure he would agree it was a mistake, he didn’t want Neely to die.
I've said this many times, but it is not reasonable or fair to expect ordinary citizens to be experts at safely restraining violent criminals.
Even for expertly trained people, it's very difficult, and requires multiple people, and even then there is still a risk of either party being seriously hurt. Hell even safely estraining a child requires multiple people and isn't easy - I've had such professional training and had to do it on occasion.
I also think you're underestimating the danger to the person doing the restraining.
Once you're restraining a person, they are even more motivated to attack you than before. They now have one target, instead of a whole train car full of people, and nothing to lose. Even if they stop moving and appear unconscious, they could easily be faking it in order to get you to let your guard down.
If you want experts to do the restraining, then police should be allowed and empowered to do their jibs, and also given more funding for better training, and higher pay in order to attract better candidates. And we have to stop unfairly generalizing and demonizing all cops.
Until then, any citizen that is forced to defend themselves, or any good Samaritan who bravely steps up to protect others, should be given extremely wide latitude in their use of force.
Daniel Penny did absolutely nothing wrong. He should be given a medal.
The fact that a lowlife scumbag who literally liked to punch ladies and beat up elderly men, repeatedly, got killed, is irrelevant - and good riddance. Let's stop pretending that it's a tragedy when pieces of garbage like Jordan Neely, George Floyd, Michael Brown etc are killed. It isn't, and something is wrong with you if you think that the world is not a better place with them dead.
Right with you up until the last paragraph. Neely was no angel but he was out of his mind. We as a society ought to have put him in an institution somewhere. Instead, we’ve bent knee to idealistic rich kids who prefer to let crazy people ritually die in the street. Neely did a lot of messed up things, but unlike people who claim to have “anxiety” he really couldn’t do better.
I agree that it would be preferable that he be involuntarily institutionalized.
I knew that I would lose a lot of people with that last part, and I'm fine with that.
Once someone starts brutalizing innocent people, especially as severely as Neely and the others I mentioned, I really lose all sympathy. Mentally ill or not.
Perhaps none of us have free will, I don't know, so maybe no one 'deserves' punishment, but neither do the innocent people deserve to be tormented.
A rabid dog doesn't 'deserve' punishment, but it still needs to be put down.
I hear your perspective, and maybe I’m giving myself too much credit for separating sheep from goats. There are people who choose to do messed up stuff and people who are messed up. Neely seemed to me to fall squarely in the second camp. Our society has really broken on this issue and I honestly see it as some weird form of human sacrifice like sky burial but even more cruel. The worst thing we could have done to that guy is what we did, leaving him to go crazy and eventually die in public.
Penny is to be commended for stepping in to help, but that doesn’t make the death not tragic.
I’m from a weird perspective where I’d kill someone if I had to, and then after their funeral I’d still put flowers in their grave and say a prayer for them.
I think people like Neely choose violence for a thrill, for sadistic pleasure, for their own entertainment.
I don't think it's a coincidence that he repeatedly assaulted the elderly. He was a bully.
If free will exists at all, then he chose to do those things.
I'm pretty sure that I could murder a hundred Jordan Neelys, and if there was somehow zero risk of legal or social consequences, I would sleep like a baby.
I seriously think the city should give a large monetary award anytime a violent criminal is killed in self-defense.
It makes the world a safer and better place, improves quality of life, and also saves the public a great deal of money.
right. I don’t think that penny should have tried to restrain Neely. I also don’t think that he should do jail time for it. Since it was an accidental death, Most likely outcome is exoneration on self defense grounds. Next likely is a technical guilty plea for lesser charges but with a slap on the wrist given the circumstances.
The fact that Penny was charged in the first place is a travesty. Self-defense is not a crime, and no one should be subjected to the ordeal of a criminal trial when they are obviously innocent in the first place.
This prosecutor deserves to be in prison, for the rest of his life if you ask me.
the point of the trial is to determine whether or not penny was acting in reasonable self defense. It’s still possible, but harder to make that defense if the person was unarmed and didn’t make the first physical contact. If you accidentally kill someone you can still face charges.
I’m watching the video it seemed like an accident. He wanted to put him in a hold and put him to sleep. It was an accident more than a mistake. The fault is still on the state. Jordan shouldn’t have been wandering around.
Of course. It’s hard to say exactly what went wrong when. In hindsight obviously Neely should have been somewhere in custody, but the fact is there are always going to be occasions where people slip through the cracks and a situation like this will happen. In those situations I think that we really need to use words, not potentially lethal physical force, and call the police.
I fully expect penny to get at worst a slap on the wrist and more likely than not total exhoneration (self defense).
I’m hoping for the same but it really ought never to have gone to trial. He seems to have followed the exact same escalation path as everyone else. There were more people than just him holding Jordan down.
If I’m emotional, I just hate the framing. The guy is dead and he had been crazy at least since his mom was literally murdered and shoved into a suitcase and thrown by the side of the road. And the way we responded to that was to let him ritually die in the street because it makes rich liberal kids feel happy. Then those same people get offended that someone was put in a position where they killed him by mistake as an act of self-defense. It just burns me up.
I know you have seen a lot of people thrown away. I grew up in a mostly stable family but in a Great Plains area plagued by too much rural despair. At a school reunion this weekend, I just learned about another drug death among my high school classmates. One of my best friends told me quietly about how hard it was to get her brother treatment for drugs and mental health issues even at the state hospital; it was just fortunate that before they were turned away, he started to rant about the government stalking him. I live in Appalachia now and people there are considered disposable too.
We gotta get away from progressive dogma, and really dogma of any stripe, when it comes to helping people in crisis.
It’s crazy how someone being taken over by a mind altering substance that hijacks their nervous system still gets to make all these decisions about their own care. I just don’t get it. Like if you were diagnosed with poor judgment disorder and you were told the treatment was making good decisions.
It might hurt some feelings but all of these people would be alive.
It’s tricky because there are reasonable analysists who think that increasing policing actually doesn’t reduce the number of such incidents. Sometimes there are counterintuitive explanations for things. For example literally no one knows why the huge worldwide drop in crime (or the prior crime spike) happened - to the extent that people hypothesize maybe it was due to changes in lead poisoning or abortion access. it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with policing policies that left wing types are against. I don’t think we have enough info to know what the post Covid spike was caused by. Demoralization of the police seems more likely than defunding that far lefties wanted given most police departments have actually gotten bigger budgets…
Fwiw I think bail reform is actually good to the extent it evens the playing field in terms of income (it’s not about warm fuzzies, it’s about ensuring people aren’t punished specifically for being poor) but it needs fixing so to take into account risk of re-offending not just flight risk.
Violence is hard to dial. There’s the thinnest notch between Enough to Disable and Enough to Kill. I think Penny acted in good l faith. I would acquit if I was on that jury. I look forward to seeing what the people Penny protected have to say about his actions that day.
I tend to agree - I don’t have all the facts at trial but with what I know I think acquittal is likely the right outcome. But I also tend to think that we don’t really want a society where people are overtly trying to be vigilantes and even do things like restrain people with chokeholds other than as a last resort. A lot of the pro penny people go imo too far talking about how he or rittenhouse are heros.
Someone can be found not to be guilty of a crime and yet we can still acknowledge it would have been better had they not put themselves in that situation / mistakes were made.
Its not a mistake. Its a life or death situation where you have to think to fast to make those kind of adjustments. You’ve been watching too many movies.
American leftists, if they want the average citizen to see transit as a dignified and good way of getting around, cannot also insist their libertarian social experiment of allowing hard drug use and anti-social behavior onboard accompany it. You can have one or the other.
The head of the Washington State poison center claimed that secondhand fentanyl smoke posed a negligible risk because most of the drug had already been filtered out by the user.
As a result, leftists insisted that people who had asthma attacks triggered by fentanyl smoke were having anxiety attacks rather than asthma attacks and that the transit operators who developed headaches or nausea after exposure were actually suffering from psychosomatic illnesses. And then mocked them for being stupid for thinking the knew better than health officials because this was the one case when mocking people for mental health conditions was acceptable. Never mind that street fentanyl is unregulated and so we don't know exactly what's in it.
To add insult to injury, this was right before the Supreme Court struck down the transit mask mandate, and Seattle was strictly enforcing that, so the Health Department's official opinion was that fentanyl smoke was less dangerous than a virus nearly everyone had immunity to. There was a running joke that taking your mask off would immediately get you thrown off the bus, unless you were doing so to smoke drugs in which case it was totally fine. Taking it off because you're having an asthma attack from the fentanyl smoke exposure, absolutely unacceptable.
Leftists really do think there's no such thing as a dangerous drug (unless it's one that they can blame on muh capitalism, i.e. OxyContin). In my area I've heard my "comrades" mock the fact that cops handle fentanyl with gloves. "Oooh, big tough cop afraid of overdosing?" Yes, they are, you fucking idiots.
I'm not a leftist. There is no evidence that fentanyl is dangerous to touch. Or that simply being near it is dangerous in any way whatsoever. Toxicology has no politics.
I understand and neither would I! I think the main problem is that the narrative fueled by police departments and local news organizations that it's possible to be affected by fentanyl by being near it has made it harder for the public at large and their representatives to make useful decisions about the best way to mitigate the harms of unregulated, poisoned, black-market drugs.
Police officers are paid to collect/retrieve drugs for prosecution/safety. It is their duty to understand how to handle drugs safely. Being ignorant about that amounts to them contributing to the hysteria surrounding illicit drug use.
I've been wondering if it has improved since the increased police etc. I have rarely ridden, to a few games events, but that was a few years ago and it was fine. But have seen scary stories in recent years.
It's much, much better. Lake Street is getting redone soon, and there is security most days at all the problem stations. I'm not sure Franklin Avenue station will ever be good, given it's Red Lake land, but to Metro Transit's credit, they've effectively ignored the loudmouths of 2020 and have started enforcing social norms again
Why are American urbanites so enamored with trains? Most cities and towns are built for automobiles. Why not expand the bus systems instead? It's the same thing, except you don't have to pay for a complete overhaul of infrastructure, you can expand and change routes much more flexibly, and buses cost much less to maintain than train cars. In my experience buses are less likely to become rolling homeless shelters since the driver can see the entire space, though antisocial behavior is certainly present.
Part of me suspects there's a certain amount of transportation chauvinism at play here. Trains are romantic and literary and ~European~, buses are for dirty poor people.
Five seconds in New York City would answer your question: Buses get stuck in traffic. They stop more frequently than trains do, so they spend most of their time loading, unloading, or trying to merge back into moving traffic. Also, there is much more fare evasion on the bus than on the subway. Drivers are not going to intervene.
Okay but New York City already has a light rail system. A shitty one that they're not capable of maintaining or cleaning or upgrading or doing anything else for, but they have it.
I'm thinking more the /r/fuckcars breed of gentrifying urbanite who wants to retrofit an already existing city with light rail. We have these people all over the place in Detroit, techies who came here from NYC and SF and think that this metro area of all places is an ideal location for muh choo choos.
I hate train people too. They never seem to be the kind of person I would see riding a train though. They closely resemble “we should all wear suits on planes again” folx.
Trains can fit more people and can go faster. Not to say buses don't have a place but anyone taking the bus in typical NYC traffic midtown knows it can be painfully slow. I can't imagine going to coney island in a bus. I might think differently if there were less cars on the street and more buses and if we actually enforced the rules that don't allow cars to go into the bus lanes, but we're not there yet.
Trains are hands down bang for your buck the best way of getting a lot of people from A to B. It's just simple reality in a city that has limited space. Busses can function to a certain point as it, but you're going to be separating it's route from traffic & basically making a less efficient train system.
I am not an insufferable r/fuckcars user, but one way I do definitely swing far left on is how america has designed it's cities and public places to be almost exclusively for one or two people in a two ton death machine to get around. It's inefficient as shit, parking (especially "free parking") consumes so much space, and being in a car all the time removes you from society, other people, and is very hard to build a desirable place to be around.
Subways are the absolute bee’s knees. I lived in Berlin, Germany, throughout the 1990s and traveled mostly by subway or bike. Buses were less predictable due to traffic and a whole lot slower than the subway.
Unlike Jesse, I was able to take advantage of a month-long pass, which he surely did too during the year he spent there on a Bosch fellowship.
Anyone who's not sure why trains are preferable has never spent time in a city with a functional rail system. Or hell, even a barely-functional rail system. For the individual commuter, they're a much faster way of getting around, and for the city, they handle higher volumes better with lower operating costs and lower emissions. Even in Boston, which has one of the least functional and most perpetually-under-construction metro system's in the country, the T is almost always a better option for getting around than the buses. Is it the best choice for every city when looking to solve short-term transit problems? Obviously not. The start-up cost is high and maintenance difficult without good back-up systems already in place. But any city which is expecting to grow and looking to future proof should absolutely invest in rail.
It’s neither weird nor an attempt. Everything you’ve said I’ve already addressed in other responses. Read those, or don’t, I don’t care, your tone irritates me and I’m done talking to you. Have the last word.
Substack mobile collapsed the threads weirdly, and I didn't see that others had said similar things. Didn't intend to pile on. Regardless, sorry for meeting snark with snark.
I’ve lived in Europe and I don’t want my main mode of transport to be a powerful vehicle that could barrel down a kid if I took my eyes off the road for one second, that’s why I like trains.
It benefits us tremendously to have a variety of modes of transportation. Not everyone can drive, but everyone can get on a train or take a bus, out-of-town visitors don’t need to rent a car to get where they want, and it’s freeing to be able to choose how you get around. It’s honestly amazing to be able to pay a small fare, sit in a comfy chair for a bit, watch the countryside, and in a brief amount of time, be in a completely different place.
If anything, people who really love driving or drive for work should be happy about the existence of alternatives. There are plenty of people who are miserable driving, bad at it, have physical limitations that prevent them from driving well, or are financially struggling due to the cost of car ownership. If someone gets their licence taken away for bad driving, but the only way they can get around is to drive; they’ll get back on the road. Do all these people really need to be on the road? Let’s free up some space for the people who actually want or need to drive. That’d cut down on traffic and the number of irresponsible/angry/distracted/stressed drivers and would likely reduce the risk of accidents.
Buses in NYC are terrible. We have three kinds of buses in NYC. Local buses, which stop at every stop. Then there are Limited Buses, which stop at specific stops along the route, but not every stop. There are also Select Buses, which cost more, and are like Limited Buses except that they have a specific route where they skip many stops. There's actually a fourth kind of bus, which is the Staten Island bus, which picks people up in Manhattan and only begins stopping in Staten Island.
Taking the bus is a tough thing though. They are not very consistent, and almost always packed. For Local/Limited, it is the same as taking the subway. But, as one might expect, buses go places where the subway may not.
In Chicago, buses are fine for shorter trips or if you live accessible to an express bus, but even so some people dislike taking them. Even with the various problems with the L (worse since covid), they are much more efficient for commuting downtown if you live somewhere accessible to them (some will take a bus to the L if not). And yes, the train is usually more reliable depending on the time of day and the line, and traffic is painful.
I've never properly been in Chicago. I would say what a lifesaver the Citibike's have been for me. Less so for crossing boroughs, but more so for moving quickly from one section of a borough to another. It used to take me an hour plus to travel from my side of Brooklyn to another, whereas with a bike it takes 20 minutes.
I used to bike commute part of the year (I dislike biking when it is dark and cold), but haven't for ages -- I've never really liked biking on certain city streets and the lake path can just be crazy in the summer, and then I moved to where it is less convenient but still doable. I should start up again because it kept me in good shape. Anyway, I agree biking is good for shorter trips around my neighborhood and others nearby, although I use my own bike. (We do have a Divvybike program that seems similar to Citibike.)
Yes, but the long term benefit of taking all those buses off the road far outweighs the temporary increase in traffic during construction. The most congested commuter road in my city is currently having a subway built underneath it for this reason.
I take a bus daily to commute to work. The ride is much less comfortable than the metro (DMV); swaying, bouncing, sudden stops, etc. Winters in the Twin Cities also tend to wreck the roads faster than they can be repaired. Last time I took a bus there I thought the driver was intentionally hitting potholes, until I figured out that there are just so many of them they're impossible to avoid.
The bus system in the DMV is actually quite good in terms of coverage, timeliness, and comfort.
There's nothing libertarian about letting violent criminals and lunatics terrorize innocent people, or about using the subway system as a de facto homeless shelter and mental asylum.
I feel like Jesse gets to this point broadly, but I want to put a finer point on it: many progressive movements and organizations that have been attacked and destroyed by the left have been focused on women’s rights (or female rights since who knows what the fuck a woman is these days, amiright?).
The pussy hats, discussions of abortion, using uterus imagery on protest signs, Hollaback!, female only rape crisis centres, female only spaces in general, etc etc. All diminished and/or destroyed by the left with accusations of transphobia and racism. All leaving women who wished to remain in the good graces of the left with only two options:
1) engage in doublethink like the pathetic Emma Vigeland, who threw all women under the bus by pretending that it’s totally fine to be hit in the face, spit on, jerked off on, and screamed at in public in a civilized society
2) shut up forever and suffer in silence.
Growing up in a home and community that I can safely say really did not like or respect women and girls, it’s darkly funny to me that these were the same two options provided to me as a child. Either pretend it doesn’t bother you, or push it down deep inside of you. Any show of weakness or tears would just be putting more of a target on your back.
My hot take is this destructive side of the left has recreated this dynamic for the same reason it existed in my childhood: they fucking hate women. They hate women so much they can’t even bear to say the word “women”, unless there’s a qualifier in front of it that makes it slightly less disgusting to them (trans, black, disabled, etc).
I gravitated towards feminism for the same reason I ultimately walked away from the social justice left: I’m sick of being hated, being told to be fine with it or shut the fuck up. I want to find a community where I am respected and can be respectful of other people. Or at least one where I’m not being degraded for an identity characteristic I cannot control, no matter what WPATH says.
Anyway, all of that to say I wish people cared more about what a man screaming about raping a woman on a train does to everyone who has to be exposed to that shit, not just the women but the men too. The state needs to step in, but as they are currently refusing to do so, I’m glad you did instead Jesse.
This is why it is essential for women and men to embrace the concept of feminism and not compulsively spit out, "But I don't agree with every single person who calls themselves a feminist and therefore I just can't get on board" Maybe consider for a minute why you feel that way about this particular movement but not other movements that advocate for entire categories of humans.
This makes you want to make a trip to wherever the heck you are in Canada so we can hang out for a few evenings and write a new feminist manifesto. As I’ve mentioned before, I teach about feminism and am more or less a professional feminist, although that description also makes me squirm because it implies dogmatism, which I loathe. I feel like I can’t work with integrity anymore because practically every student who takes my classes has been indoctrinated to believe that to prioritize “women“ is exclusionary by definition. And I don’t mean that they are committed men’s rights activists. No, everything has to be queer, and the only women who deserve to be called women - full stop - are trans women. The same goes for volunteer work in nonprofits that used to be oriented toward women’s needs, especially the rape crisis center I helped found in my town. Now the entire sector is all about “anti-oppression,“ which means centering race while erasing sex/gender dynamics, and the local staff proudly center queerness in a way that I think might be alienating to some clients.
(Before anyone accuses me of female chauvinism, I also very clearly see that men and boys face particular challenges, and is a feminist and a mother two sons I care a lot about those issues. I also know that those issues are mostly not the fault of feminists and that alleviating them requires a lot of involvement from men of goodwill.)
I would say, however, that while there is definitely an element of hate against women on the left, in the main leftist men have the same stake in women’s oppression that men on the right do: and this is a *material* stake. Men across the political spectrum benefit from exploitive relations when it comes to work, sex, and reproduction. The overt hate of a minority of men functions to secure those benefits and to enforce the division of women into respectable and bad women. The respectable women try to protect their status by distancing themselves from the disreputable ones while reassuring the men that they are the good women, after all - a dependable source of ego massage and emotional labor on top of the benefits previously mentioned. This, in turn, bolsters the egos of foolish and insecure women. Far from being a brave truth-teller, Emma Vigeland is one of the women desperately currying male approval.
In this dynamic, we all lose - including the many men who want to live with women in ways that let us all live authentically and in integrity. And in the U.S., women lose rights (abortion, and possibly soon IVF and no-fault divorce in some states) without being able to state whose rights are violated, lest we be tarred as bigots.
As for Jesse, he is the bravest demi-boy and we salute him.
Really well said. I try to be optimistic about the future, thinking all of this weird identitarian silliness is mostly a knee-jerk reaction to the political distortions created by the rise of neoreactionary right-wing populism and that it will fade away once Trump dies or loses, but I worry sometimes that a weird genie has been let out of the bottle and that it could take years to undo all the damage.
The identitarian silliness predates Trump, though. It coalesced on Twitter, and then it merged with the most illiberal pseudo-leftist elements at universities. (A lot of people think it originated in the universities, but actually Tumblr created a pastiche of some elements of postmodern thought, made them a whole lot dumber, and then recycled the whole mess back into the universities where careerists paralyzed by groupthink decided circa 2015 that they needed to research asexuality as an identity.) From the universities, it rippled into other institutions and brought us the silliness that hopefully peaked in 2020.
But maybe it hasn’t peaked for good. Maybe we will see some oscillations at the level we’re currently at. Either way, Trump could drop dead tomorrow and we’d still be stuck with a Tumblr culture for at least another decade.
The same left that fought for, and continues to fight for, reproductive rights, maternity leave, Medicaid, SNAP benefits, the Equal Rights Amendment, and recruiting women into careers they have historically been a minority in (e.g., engineering)?
The left does not hate women. Quite amazing how people allow the trans issue to drive and distort all their political thinking.
If you read my comment again, you'll see that I'm discussing an aspect of the left that engages in destroying movements and organizations, many of which focus on women's rights. This faction of the left has done very little fighting for the issues you discuss, unless you count posting an infographic on Instagram stories, which I don't.
The functional, materially focused, side of the left wing (working class orgs that are actually still working class, unions that haven't lost themselves to virtue signalling and purity politics, feminists who haven't betrayed themselves) are the ones who fought for, and continue to fight for, these issues, though they are a dying breed. It's also foolish to think that the left has a monopoly on every progressive policy that has been implemented across the world and across time: plenty of people who call themselves centrists or conservative have participated in implementing what is now considered progressive policy. Nixon founded the EPA, for Christ's sake.
Finally, my political thinking is quite clear, thank you very much. This is why I'm able to engage with you civilly on this topic, even though you've made personal attacks against my character in the past. It's pretty incredible to me that a broad comment about misogyny on the left reads to you as being solely about the "trans issue". Yet my thinking is distorted? Hm.
I think we were much closer to identifying the things that make it more difficult to be a woman in society 10-20 years ago than we are now. In this category I would include things like public/private sexual harassment, rape, domestic violence, lack of medical research on female bodies, abortion access, etc. It feels like the modern social justice movement has blown a lot of hot air on the window into women's experiences, to the point where many people (including women) can no longer see through it and make common sense of things.
There's certainly a lot of eating our own within the feminism movement, as there is with all movements (trashing comes to mind: https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/trashing.htm), but I think the modern social justice left that is currently eating women alive is distinct from the feminist movement in some ways, including the fact that they have done whatever they could to de-centre women, even from women's issues (umm actually, did you know that men can get pregnant too?!?!). At least toxic women's groups were still fighting for the common good of women some of the time.
I'm pro personal responsibility and agency, and I don't like doomerism, but I also wonder how far the bounds of feminism or any political movement can or should expand to one's individual identity/daily actions outside of voting and political action. Maybe this isn't what you're getting at here, but I feel like feminism has been at its most successful when it is focused on illuminating issues that are impacting women or working towards a stated political goal. Of course, it's very difficult to do any of this when you have people that you have been told are "on your side" politically calling you out for the harm you're causing by saying that you don't like getting harassed on the subway.
Despite or because of all of this, I find myself staying faaaaar away from political/social justice/feminist organizing these days. I don't want to deal with the kind of behaviour that has become common place in these spaces, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. That, more than anything, might be the most successful dagger to the heart of this movement. I do miss having that community, but I don't miss the most toxic elements as it slowly slid into our current iteration of social justice culture. Honestly? I miss the feminism I found when I was young the most - even if it was quasi-feminism or immature. At least it wasn't set upon telling me how bad I was all the time.
There's an odd contradiction in some progressive spaces where they want lots of well funded quasi-public goods like libraries, mass transit, and parks while also not wanting to enforce any sort of rules or norms that make these places and things attractive and inviting to normal people. I think the general standard for using these places should be "if you can't do it in a similar private equivalent to this space, you can't do it here." You can't bathe in the sink, walk around asking for money, or sleep in Barnes & Noble, and you shouldn't be able to do those kinds of things in a public library. Similarly, you shouldn't be able to do things on a city bus that you can't do on a Greyhound bus. Bookstores and private buses aren't always a great experiences, I'm not sure anyone actually likes taking a Greyhound, but they tend to be a lot more comfortable and inviting than their public equivalents because they can and do enforce rules regarding their use.
Libraries can be great places to read books, but when I want to get some reading done, I drive 15 minutes to a nearby city's public library because my local library has become a de facto homeless shelter. The downtown library has lots of cool spaces, interesting old architecture and fixtures, and great reference materials. It's also a place I hate spending time in because of frequent and loud disruptions, people with truly awful hygiene, and requests for money. If there wasn't a comfortable library nearby, I'd probably stop spending time at local libraries except to quickly pop in to pick up books.
While I think we should provide services for the homeless, mentally ill, and other people with serious problems, letting some of them use parks or mass transit to do whatever the hell they want isn't compassionate, does nothing to address their underlying problems, and spoils these spaces for people who want to use them for their intended purposes.
I think if someone is doing hard drugs in a public place, they should be arrested, but then sent to a center where they get mandated treatment because they clearly have a problem. I don't think it's progressive to let them roam the streets high off their minds, screaming at people, shitting in the streets, killing dogs (shout out to Park Slope Panthers!)
This frustrates me so much, especially since the response from progressives is frequently something to the effect of only privileged people care about this (contrary to progressive claims, the most privileged people I know care least about this), or you are a bad person for caring about it. There isn't a magic wand you can wave to get people to only care about the things you want them to care about and if people know they're going to be shamed for reasonable concerns, they're going to stop talking about them and stop using public spaces, transit etc.
From what I can tell, the progressive "solution" to this is to take every single homeless person and match them a free home, i.e. any given house in the U.S. that is currently uninhabited. The only argument in favor of this that they can give is that there's x homeless people and 1.2x vacant homes, something something Blackrock.
Don’t forget that those free houses need to be in nicer neighborhoods than you or I live in because otherwise we’re creating ghettos. And we can’t ever control or police the standard at which they upkeep that house like everyone else because that too would be wrong… somehow.
I've heard the "something, something Blackrock" line so many times. And it never makes sense. My favorite is when I point out that Blackrock doesn't own enough houses to really affect house prices and they move on to Blackrock shouldn't be able to buy up houses because it's just wrong for a giant corporation to own so many houses so we really need to pass a law. Let's do everything except building more housing to lower the price of housing before we try building more housing.
BlackRock has never even been in the business of buying individual homes, that's the similarly named Blackstone which, like you pointed out, doesn't even own enough homes to have any real impact on housing prices. This Washington Post article has a good summary and debunking of many of the many of the claims made about the two companies here:
The thing to remember is that idiots on twitter screaming about this stuff don’t use libraries or parks or public transit. They sit in front of their computers all day. It’s all theory crafting to them.
The idea of equating a library to a Barnes and noble makes me queasy tbh. While obviously I agree with not sleeping or soliciting people, or engaging in any type of illegal activity it’s closer to a community center or park than a private business with a profit motive. You can sit in a public library and read or work all day, you can definitely not expect to do that at B&N. Kids over a certain age can go to libraries and to community centers after school and quietly play games or read or do their homework until their parents get home from work and expect to be relatively safe. People can come and use a computer for free at a library - they can’t expect to do that at a Best Buy. Anyway. Just saying there is a role for community third spaces with a public service rather than profit motive.
I intended, though didn't articulate it this way, for the standard to be more of a starting point for rules and enforcement rather than a library just copying Barnes & Noble. I don't have any issue with people using libraries for things that like sitting around reading all day, browsing the internet, hosting tabletop gaming clubs, etc. that are within the spirit of the modern library's goals.
Stuff that's well outside the library's mission or is disruptive to other patrons shouldn't be tolerated, however.
Cool, yes I see what you mean - and I’m sorry your local library is full of people that don’t respect the space and others use of it.
I get it wasn’t your intent - I just get a little testy with the sorta libertarian idea that every public service and space would be better if it were a for-profit business instead. I don’t like the idea of a library becoming something that anyone feels like they have to leave if they don’t have money to spend, or don’t feel welcome in because of class, culture, or race considerations.
I love Karens insofar as they are instruments of shame for antisocial behavior. I like the idea that enforcing norms is the job of everyone, not police. Playing music without headphones, catcalling, harassment of women, etc. should not be normalized.
Fully agree with everything you said here. I would just add that I once saw a Reddit thread critical of the Karen slur where at least two black women said they were called Karen for asserting themselves. Also, age plays into it. If you are 20 and gorgeous and maximally fuckable, you won’t get called a Karen.
I’m 60 years old, and I cannot count the number of people I know who are named Karen. I also can’t think of one of them who’s a lousy human being.
I agree that black and Hispanic women do get called Karens (I saw it on my NextDoor), but I have been reliably informed by others on social media that the term clearly refers only to racist white women (ironically, Karen Attiah might have been one of those informing us of that fact).
I don't know if I would go so far as to call it racist, but it's definitely sexist. It's effectively a tool to shame women for being loud and opinionated, when no such gendered equivalent exists for men. "Dick" would be the closest thing, but it's not a proper noun, and "dick" doesn't conjure up an archetype the way "Karen" does. Yeah, it's a pretty small, semantic thing to be upset about, but it's just one example of the kinds of double standards you see in public discourse.
I have a similar issue with the weird hatred everyone seems to feel towards Kamala Harris. She's profoundly uncharismatic, I won't dispute that, but it's bizarre that her "fakeness" is considered as politically fatal a flaw as Biden being senile or Trump being a felon. She's a politician! Being fake is part of their fucking job! At least with Hillary Clinton, she genuinely did have a lot of baggage. But it really feels like people are grasping at straws to justify their intense hatred Kamala when the fact of the matter is that she's just a mediocre politician in the same vein as Jeb Bush or John Hickenlooper.
I have an intense hatred of Kamala Harris. I do think she's more fake than any other politician.
Remember the time she implied that Joe Biden was a racist during the primary debates? Remember her stating her pronouns during that interview? Her voice, dripping with sanctimony every time she speaks, literally creeps me out every time I hear it, it makes my skin crawl.
Also her conduct as a criminal prosecutor (apparently preventing death row inmates from accessing dna evidence that could exonerate them) is unforgivable.
And I've voted for more women for president in my life than men, in both primaries and general elections. Out of four presidential elections I've voted in, I voted for three different women (and two of the four were black).
One thousand percent. Thank you. It *is* a racist and sexist epithet, and as a white woman it makes me hurt and angry to hear it. I'm a human being and I have a right to be upset about things and not name-called for it.
There’s a great Baron Von Sketch about someone who is “that woman.” There’s antisocial behaviour going on and at some point people are grateful to let her step in and be That Woman.
When I hear people like Emma Vigeland talking about how they feel they just have to be understanding if someone hits them or acts aggressively toward them in public, it always strikes me that they are talking about decisions they make as adult individuals. When I'm out in public, I'm often with my little kids or my mother, and I definitely feel a lot more protective of them than I feel worried about my own safety.
So if you're going to argue that people in population-dense areas just have to be cool with people screaming, hitting others, or shooting up in public, you should probably also realize that people who can afford to move out of areas where that behavior is tolerated are going to do just that, gutting the taxpayer base as they do so. And that won't be good for those who remain.
Are you talking about her Jordan Neely-inspired comment or her “transwomen are women and they should play women’s sports, I don’t care what anyone else thinks” comment?
So, everyone knows about the Neely/Penny case, but there was another subway killing last year that got decidedly less attention, happened in a rough part of Brooklyn, and lacked the racial angle: A man named Devictor Ouedraogo was harassing people on a train and punched a young woman in the face. The woman’s boyfriend, 20-year-old Jordan Williams, pulled out a knife and stabbed Ouedraogo. He died at the hospital. Unlike Penny, Williams is Black (as was Ouedraogo). He was arrested and detained, and treated more harshly than Penny, even though there was a clearer and more obvious self-defense aspect in this case: The man had already attacked a woman! But unlike Penny, Williams was carrying a weapon, which complicates matters. Luckily for Williams, the grand jury would not indict him because it was clearly self-defense, and charges were dropped.
There was also a case where a bodega worker was assaulted by a black women and her boyfriend who had a knife. Somehow the worker used the guy's knife to defend himself and killed the guy and he got charged. Luckily there was enough public outcry that charges where dropped.
I remember that guy - Washington Heights, right? It was all caught on security cameras and it was the most open-and-shut self-defense case I could ever imagine, and a complete waste of time to even consider prosecuting.
Jose Alba, that fiasco is well-known in New York. Alba still hasn't recovered psychologically and may have already returned to the Dominican Republican, where he's from.
The Post gets a lot of shit but if they hadn't dug up and publicized the security footage it's possible Alba would still be sitting in jail.
P.S. Trump visited the bodega where Alba worked. I don't think Biden was even made aware of it.
The Post is like 95% garbage and 5% legitimately important journalism. They broke the Hunter Biden story and were really the only ones covering it while the rest of American media desperately attempted to sweep it under the rug.
I think the bodega worker used his own knife, not the knife of the boyfriend who attacked him (which by the way was prompted by the worker not allowing the girlfriend to steal).
Not that it changes anything, it was 100% self-defense, and against a larger, younger, and extremely violent man.
There was also the incident just a few months ago where Younece Obuad shot a crazy man with his own gun while protecting himself and a woman. Also self-defense, no charges, even though the shots were fired in a crowded subway car.
Responding to a punch with a knife is a much greater escalation than responding to threats with jiu jitsu. Stabbing someone creates a huge risk of death, a carotid choke almost never does.
I disagree. People don't seem to understand how violence work in real life, it's not like in the movies.
A single punch can kill a person. More often, it breaks jaws, fractures eye sockets, knocks out teeth, broken noses, sometimes causes permanent vision damage, or brain damage.
When someone assaults you (or your girlfriend) without provocation, you should not have to allow yourself to be permanently maimed in order to minimize the harm to your assailant. Your jaw, your nose, even a single of your teeth are worth more than the life of the person who attacked you.
ANY level of force is justified in eliminating or neutralizing the threat under these circumstances, as far as I'm concerned. And the fastest and most reliable way to neutralize a threat is to kill them. It's that simple.
It would only be excessive force if you continued to use violence once it was clear that the assailant no longer posed a threat.
Don't like it? Don't attack innocent people without provocation.
True, but it’s counterbalanced by the fact that Ouedraogo had already physically attacked someone, whereas Neely was only talking. Not working in Williams’ favor was the fact that he was carrying a knife in the first place, because if you’re carrying a weapon then you have the expectation of using it. But with the punch, the unprovoked attack on Williams’ girlfriend, the self-defense became real. Now, Penny’s lawyers may likely argue you shouldn’t have to wait for someone to get injured to take action when someone’s making threats, and they’ll have a good point. It’ll probably all hinge on the degree of force Penny used and whether he could have reasonably expected it to kill Neely.
1. Knives are carried for many reasons besides as a weapon. They are one of the most useful and versatile and common tools in existence, and used in countless professions.
2. Carrying a weapon for self-defense is reasonable, rational, and lawful. It also happens to be explicitly protected by the second ammendment (and the Supreme Court has ruled that the Second Ammendment applies to knives as well as firearms) .*
Self-defense is not a crime, and carrying a weapon in anticipation of the possibility of self-defense is not a crime.
*I realize that the US constitution does not apply in New York City, and that our justice system has perverse and deeply unjust interpretation and application of the laws around self-defense.
That's the reality, but let us not pretend that the status quo is acceptable or reasonable. It is not. We should all be outraged and enraged that self-defense is effectively considered a crime in this city.
Wow, and then Jesse “Amy Cooper” Singal goes and commits *literal attempted murder* against this poor man who was just exercising his first amendment rights. For shame!
On this week's Threedom podcast, with Scott Aukerman, Lauren Lapkus and Paul F Tompkins, one of them made the same error in mixing up who jerked off into a planter before being corrected.
After 10/7, I am 0% surprised that some journalists would be enthusiastic about harassing and threatening a woman (if they were told her name was Shoshanna).
in my defense, right about the time someone said, "pussy hats are offensive to trannys" is when I started thinking SJWs calling everything problematic is fucking stupid. I was on their side...once.
Indeed! And yet none of our pinks are represented by the yarn colorways at the women’s march. Someone in the realm of Big Fiber Arts needs to be canceled retroactively!
I worry terribly about everyone who believes any woman has day-glo pink genitalia. Perhaps I’m terribly wrong, and sex is a spectrum after all. But even then, fluorescent pink is far beyond that spectrum.
If you’re messing around with anyone whose genitals are hot pink, no matter how hot/aroused they are, I recommend you run away stat and don’t approach again without a Geiger counter.
Same (plus the pink=racist angle Jane mentioned) Looking back on that it’s interesting… at the time I (and everyone I know) thought… wow there sure are some stupid people saying stupid things online. Little did we know that Twitter was going to become what everyone thought all liberals thought. And the fact that women’s march just totally… caved to the wackos showed how it could leak into the real world. Beginning of an era I think.
Remember that woman who went viral because she posed with a sign that said "Don't forget: white women voted for Trump"? I was so irritated by this. Obviously the white women who voted for Trump were not at this march!
Jesse, it was not in Italy that I was followed by a group of seven or eight teenage boys asking me "ma'am, you fucking?" while on a hike, teens who then ended up throwing stones at me because I refused to acknowledge them. Not all cultures have the same kind of harrassment.
I totally agree. In Italy they’re going to shout at you how beautiful you are and take it too far to make you uncomfortable… not to the point of you feeling like you’re in physical danger. And in non-western cultures… you have to worry about being physically assaulted or killed for leaving the house without a man or not covering your head.
In America, when I had teenagers yell shit when I run I could just slap my fat ass and they would laugh. The only place I have encountered hostile teenagers while running was Denmark (they were Arabs too.)
I live in District 61A, and have been getting Stancil’s campaign emails/fliers. I legitimately thought he was a bot/AI programmed to be a caricature of a progressive candidate, which makes the fake website even funnier.
Minneapolis Primos- Let’s have a BARPOD meet up and invite Will! I’m sure it would be very productive and nuanced, as he seems to know the truth about everything. Is Stancil going to single handily turn Uptown around? #YesHeWILL!
My previous impression of your average New Yorker was that crazy subway people would have been mobbed by a bunch of manly vaguely Italian types and stopped from being menaces.
But the last few years have shown me that New York is in fact full to the brim with pussies.
That being said, Jessie is a 2 on the Karen scale and about a 3 on the pussy scale. At least he said something.
But shit the last guy to actually confront a crazy subway person is facing jail time so I guess I don’t blame y’all. Although if everyone stopped being a pussy and did the right thing I’m sure the court couldn’t throw everyone in jail.
Sorry, NY is just a fucking joke at this point. Ridiculous.
Yes he spoke up, but I wouldn’t say that makes him considerably less of a pussy. I’m also not a fighting type, and I agree with his idea that aggressively seeking out fighting isn’t good, but it shouldn’t have been a look the other way thing at all. That’s the problem. He’s still a pussy cuz he just looked the other way until he finally couldn’t. Like almost all the other people on that train. So slightly less a pussy maybe, but not considerably. You gotta get up and make it clear that the behavior is unacceptable and if enough people start doing that together you can back down most of the crazies. And maybe the normal people can take back that shithole city.
Do you live in NYC, and ride the subway frequently?
Ignoring even crazy situations is the norm. And even if you're inclined to be a good Samaritan when you first move here, living in the city changes you.
Partly it desensitizes you, but mostly it's a matter of survival. You encounter crazy people and aggressive thugs looking for a fight every single day, often multiple times a day. You quickly realize that avoiding eye contact and pretending not to notice is the only way to be left alone (most of the time). You also realize that if you do get involved in an altercation, chances are that no one will help you. It's sad but it's true. And you realize this even more keenly if you've ever been assaulted, or had a close call, but you know in any case.
So yes, Jesse was significantly more brave than the average New Yorker.
Maybe that's a low bar, maybe that's a sad state of affairs, but the reasons for that aren't the fault of Jesse, or, any individual. We have a culture and society and legal system and media ecosystem where every incentive is to ignore everything and stay out of it.
I mean I live in Albuquerque so I completely understand everything you’re saying. Look at the wrong person funny and now you have a fentanyl fiend trying kick your ass or rob you. So most people do mind their business. But that is a problem. Especially for NY as I understand public transit is heavily relied on. I drive because I don’t wanna get stabbed by a bus crackhead. But I would fucking hope if that crackhead was trying to stab me people would intervene. That you cannot rely on the guy sitting next to you on a bus or train to help you fend off crazy homeless drug addicts is fucking pathetic. I’m not a fighter but I’m definitely not one to sit back and watch such injustice. It just takes all of us pussy normal people to push back but everyone’s head is so far up their own ass their fellow man can fuck off and fend for themselves.
It’s disgusting how far we’ve fallen. Just basic shit has gone out the window. Yeah the bar is about as low as it can can get. I just hate it so much. How do you fix that on a societal level? I don’t think you can.
There are steps that can be taken. Our politicians, prosecutors, and law enforcement leadership can stop arresting people for defending themselves. When a bystander does decide to intervene, they should know that no matter what happens, they will not be arrested, and the violent criminal or lunatic will be.
Our media institutions can stop the relentless race baiting and slandering, and stop pretending that black people can do no wrong, and that anytime a white person hurts a black person, no matter how justified, it automatically makes them a racist.
There's a lot more that needs to be done, including actually enforcing the law and removing lunatics and homeless people from the trains so that bystanders aren't constantly faced with these situations in the first place.
But making it so good Samaritans don't need to fear the law, and being ostracized by the media, in top of all the other risk, would be a good start.
There will soon be a new level of paid subscriber called Subway Vigilante, but you pay in the scalps of mentally ill people on subways. That’s gross, Jesse.
feeding them and housing them for free doesn't seem to be working, but scalping being next on the list of solutions is something i didn't expect. i would expect it to work.
If Alvin Bragg had the opportunity to prosecute Jesse, it would probably draw the attention of entirety of NY Media (hoping for his imprisonment, since they missed out on the HIPPO prosecution).
It might even be a big enough distraction that Bragg would lose interest in prosecuting Daniel Penny.
Can confirm. I live in Switzerland, where the trains are so punctual that if they are even 90 seconds late, there are announcements to apologize. But as soon as you cross into Germany, all bets are off. Who knows when—if ever—you will arrive. This is so known and accepted that a magazine for people learning German, Deutsch Perfekt, recently had a special feature on how to cope with the ridiculously unreliable German trains.
In my experience the high-speed rail is uniformly at least half an hour behind, and making tight connections is almost impossible, but most of the high-speed routes that I traveled at least have high enough frequency that you’ll rarely lose more than 45 minutes or so by simply catching the next one.
The regional rail, by contrast, I have found to be quite reliable and have regularly made trips with several <5 minute changes without issue.
Of course that’s all anecdotal, and I’ve heard plenty of nightmare anecdotes too, but however funny it is to joke about the punctuality of Deutsche Bahn, it should not be mistaken for a system that doesn’t work.
Believe me, they can. I've travelled in Europe by train quite a lot over the past decade and all my worst problems were in Germany. (And I must say that my experience of Italian trains has been that they're cheap and generally reliable).
Yes! Italian trains are much more reliable than German ones, and unbelievably fast too. The one slow point in my experience is Milan, where tracks don’t go through, so trains have to come in, let off passengers, pick up new ones, and then back out again. This structural problem does cause delays, but Milano Centrale is currently undergoing a massive renovation to fix the problem.
There are several Italian translations that don’t go through. All the big ones. Venice, Rome, Naples, Bologna, etc. I don’t even see how they would fix this, since going through in the case of all of these would entail going through major historical parts of the city.
Having said that Italian trains are amazing! And well worth the wait to go into the station, unload and come back out.
Chicagoland commuter trains were super punctual when I used to ride them daily, the only exceptions being occasional sad delays for morning suicides (about monthly) or daytime car crashes (about twice a year).
I spent three weeks in May going through France, Belgium, Denmark, and Germany - this was not my experience at all. The longest delay we had was 40 minutes, once, going from Hamburg to Copenhagen. Weird.
As for the Berlin U-Bahn system, it’s simple, classic and it worked perfectly - just like the Paris Metro.
Extremely disappointed with this episode.
When Katie remarks near the beginning that she only gets cat-called by pedophiles, Jesse fails to add in that "she would just end up giving them money instead", or something to that effect.
Do 👏 better 👏
I side with dangerously mentally unwell people receiving compulsory state care with strong oversight to prevent abuses. Good on you, Jesse, but the important piece in what you said is that it shouldn’t have ever become your responsibility. For your sake and the sake of everyone else in that train, including that crazy guy.
The entity responsible for killing Jordan Neely is the state of New York. Daniel Penny took the only possible, reasonable choice left when they abdicated their responsibility to care for the mentally unwell.
Penny did the right thing in intervening but unfortunately he made a mistake in using potentially lethal force. I’m sure he would agree it was a mistake, he didn’t want Neely to die.
I've said this many times, but it is not reasonable or fair to expect ordinary citizens to be experts at safely restraining violent criminals.
Even for expertly trained people, it's very difficult, and requires multiple people, and even then there is still a risk of either party being seriously hurt. Hell even safely estraining a child requires multiple people and isn't easy - I've had such professional training and had to do it on occasion.
I also think you're underestimating the danger to the person doing the restraining.
Once you're restraining a person, they are even more motivated to attack you than before. They now have one target, instead of a whole train car full of people, and nothing to lose. Even if they stop moving and appear unconscious, they could easily be faking it in order to get you to let your guard down.
If you want experts to do the restraining, then police should be allowed and empowered to do their jibs, and also given more funding for better training, and higher pay in order to attract better candidates. And we have to stop unfairly generalizing and demonizing all cops.
Until then, any citizen that is forced to defend themselves, or any good Samaritan who bravely steps up to protect others, should be given extremely wide latitude in their use of force.
Daniel Penny did absolutely nothing wrong. He should be given a medal.
The fact that a lowlife scumbag who literally liked to punch ladies and beat up elderly men, repeatedly, got killed, is irrelevant - and good riddance. Let's stop pretending that it's a tragedy when pieces of garbage like Jordan Neely, George Floyd, Michael Brown etc are killed. It isn't, and something is wrong with you if you think that the world is not a better place with them dead.
Right with you up until the last paragraph. Neely was no angel but he was out of his mind. We as a society ought to have put him in an institution somewhere. Instead, we’ve bent knee to idealistic rich kids who prefer to let crazy people ritually die in the street. Neely did a lot of messed up things, but unlike people who claim to have “anxiety” he really couldn’t do better.
I agree that it would be preferable that he be involuntarily institutionalized.
I knew that I would lose a lot of people with that last part, and I'm fine with that.
Once someone starts brutalizing innocent people, especially as severely as Neely and the others I mentioned, I really lose all sympathy. Mentally ill or not.
Perhaps none of us have free will, I don't know, so maybe no one 'deserves' punishment, but neither do the innocent people deserve to be tormented.
A rabid dog doesn't 'deserve' punishment, but it still needs to be put down.
I hear your perspective, and maybe I’m giving myself too much credit for separating sheep from goats. There are people who choose to do messed up stuff and people who are messed up. Neely seemed to me to fall squarely in the second camp. Our society has really broken on this issue and I honestly see it as some weird form of human sacrifice like sky burial but even more cruel. The worst thing we could have done to that guy is what we did, leaving him to go crazy and eventually die in public.
Penny is to be commended for stepping in to help, but that doesn’t make the death not tragic.
I’m from a weird perspective where I’d kill someone if I had to, and then after their funeral I’d still put flowers in their grave and say a prayer for them.
I think people like Neely choose violence for a thrill, for sadistic pleasure, for their own entertainment.
I don't think it's a coincidence that he repeatedly assaulted the elderly. He was a bully.
If free will exists at all, then he chose to do those things.
I'm pretty sure that I could murder a hundred Jordan Neelys, and if there was somehow zero risk of legal or social consequences, I would sleep like a baby.
I seriously think the city should give a large monetary award anytime a violent criminal is killed in self-defense.
It makes the world a safer and better place, improves quality of life, and also saves the public a great deal of money.
right. I don’t think that penny should have tried to restrain Neely. I also don’t think that he should do jail time for it. Since it was an accidental death, Most likely outcome is exoneration on self defense grounds. Next likely is a technical guilty plea for lesser charges but with a slap on the wrist given the circumstances.
The fact that Penny was charged in the first place is a travesty. Self-defense is not a crime, and no one should be subjected to the ordeal of a criminal trial when they are obviously innocent in the first place.
This prosecutor deserves to be in prison, for the rest of his life if you ask me.
the point of the trial is to determine whether or not penny was acting in reasonable self defense. It’s still possible, but harder to make that defense if the person was unarmed and didn’t make the first physical contact. If you accidentally kill someone you can still face charges.
I’m watching the video it seemed like an accident. He wanted to put him in a hold and put him to sleep. It was an accident more than a mistake. The fault is still on the state. Jordan shouldn’t have been wandering around.
Of course. It’s hard to say exactly what went wrong when. In hindsight obviously Neely should have been somewhere in custody, but the fact is there are always going to be occasions where people slip through the cracks and a situation like this will happen. In those situations I think that we really need to use words, not potentially lethal physical force, and call the police.
I fully expect penny to get at worst a slap on the wrist and more likely than not total exhoneration (self defense).
I’m hoping for the same but it really ought never to have gone to trial. He seems to have followed the exact same escalation path as everyone else. There were more people than just him holding Jordan down.
If I’m emotional, I just hate the framing. The guy is dead and he had been crazy at least since his mom was literally murdered and shoved into a suitcase and thrown by the side of the road. And the way we responded to that was to let him ritually die in the street because it makes rich liberal kids feel happy. Then those same people get offended that someone was put in a position where they killed him by mistake as an act of self-defense. It just burns me up.
I know you have seen a lot of people thrown away. I grew up in a mostly stable family but in a Great Plains area plagued by too much rural despair. At a school reunion this weekend, I just learned about another drug death among my high school classmates. One of my best friends told me quietly about how hard it was to get her brother treatment for drugs and mental health issues even at the state hospital; it was just fortunate that before they were turned away, he started to rant about the government stalking him. I live in Appalachia now and people there are considered disposable too.
We gotta get away from progressive dogma, and really dogma of any stripe, when it comes to helping people in crisis.
It’s crazy how someone being taken over by a mind altering substance that hijacks their nervous system still gets to make all these decisions about their own care. I just don’t get it. Like if you were diagnosed with poor judgment disorder and you were told the treatment was making good decisions.
It might hurt some feelings but all of these people would be alive.
It’s tricky because there are reasonable analysists who think that increasing policing actually doesn’t reduce the number of such incidents. Sometimes there are counterintuitive explanations for things. For example literally no one knows why the huge worldwide drop in crime (or the prior crime spike) happened - to the extent that people hypothesize maybe it was due to changes in lead poisoning or abortion access. it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with policing policies that left wing types are against. I don’t think we have enough info to know what the post Covid spike was caused by. Demoralization of the police seems more likely than defunding that far lefties wanted given most police departments have actually gotten bigger budgets…
Fwiw I think bail reform is actually good to the extent it evens the playing field in terms of income (it’s not about warm fuzzies, it’s about ensuring people aren’t punished specifically for being poor) but it needs fixing so to take into account risk of re-offending not just flight risk.
Violence is hard to dial. There’s the thinnest notch between Enough to Disable and Enough to Kill. I think Penny acted in good l faith. I would acquit if I was on that jury. I look forward to seeing what the people Penny protected have to say about his actions that day.
I tend to agree - I don’t have all the facts at trial but with what I know I think acquittal is likely the right outcome. But I also tend to think that we don’t really want a society where people are overtly trying to be vigilantes and even do things like restrain people with chokeholds other than as a last resort. A lot of the pro penny people go imo too far talking about how he or rittenhouse are heros.
Someone can be found not to be guilty of a crime and yet we can still acknowledge it would have been better had they not put themselves in that situation / mistakes were made.
Its not a mistake. Its a life or death situation where you have to think to fast to make those kind of adjustments. You’ve been watching too many movies.
yessss....trainsss finally.
American leftists, if they want the average citizen to see transit as a dignified and good way of getting around, cannot also insist their libertarian social experiment of allowing hard drug use and anti-social behavior onboard accompany it. You can have one or the other.
The head of the Washington State poison center claimed that secondhand fentanyl smoke posed a negligible risk because most of the drug had already been filtered out by the user.
https://publichealthinsider.com/2022/04/05/its-safe-to-give-help-questions-and-answers-about-secondhand-fentanyl-exposure/
As a result, leftists insisted that people who had asthma attacks triggered by fentanyl smoke were having anxiety attacks rather than asthma attacks and that the transit operators who developed headaches or nausea after exposure were actually suffering from psychosomatic illnesses. And then mocked them for being stupid for thinking the knew better than health officials because this was the one case when mocking people for mental health conditions was acceptable. Never mind that street fentanyl is unregulated and so we don't know exactly what's in it.
To add insult to injury, this was right before the Supreme Court struck down the transit mask mandate, and Seattle was strictly enforcing that, so the Health Department's official opinion was that fentanyl smoke was less dangerous than a virus nearly everyone had immunity to. There was a running joke that taking your mask off would immediately get you thrown off the bus, unless you were doing so to smoke drugs in which case it was totally fine. Taking it off because you're having an asthma attack from the fentanyl smoke exposure, absolutely unacceptable.
Leftists really do think there's no such thing as a dangerous drug (unless it's one that they can blame on muh capitalism, i.e. OxyContin). In my area I've heard my "comrades" mock the fact that cops handle fentanyl with gloves. "Oooh, big tough cop afraid of overdosing?" Yes, they are, you fucking idiots.
I'm not a leftist. There is no evidence that fentanyl is dangerous to touch. Or that simply being near it is dangerous in any way whatsoever. Toxicology has no politics.
Okay well I'm still not gonna blame anyone for not wanting to touch or be near an extremely potent drug.
I understand and neither would I! I think the main problem is that the narrative fueled by police departments and local news organizations that it's possible to be affected by fentanyl by being near it has made it harder for the public at large and their representatives to make useful decisions about the best way to mitigate the harms of unregulated, poisoned, black-market drugs.
https://youtu.be/215hLEVD9ww?si=tPRCuW5Xr3cCwdbT
Police officers are paid to collect/retrieve drugs for prosecution/safety. It is their duty to understand how to handle drugs safely. Being ignorant about that amounts to them contributing to the hysteria surrounding illicit drug use.
So they shouldn’t wear gloves while handling fentanyl? Wat
Shouldn't one always wear gloves when handling (potential) evidence?
In the twin cities they spent a ton of money on light rail, and then turned it into a homeless shelter. They basically permanently crippled it.
No fare enforcement either.
It was pretty bad for a while there, tho I will say I see more police and TRIP agents on the blue line now and it subsequently is much better.
I've been wondering if it has improved since the increased police etc. I have rarely ridden, to a few games events, but that was a few years ago and it was fine. But have seen scary stories in recent years.
It's much, much better. Lake Street is getting redone soon, and there is security most days at all the problem stations. I'm not sure Franklin Avenue station will ever be good, given it's Red Lake land, but to Metro Transit's credit, they've effectively ignored the loudmouths of 2020 and have started enforcing social norms again
Good to hear!
It also would be nice if they just enforced the fair. That would eliminate 99.999% of all of this
I scream internally when i see people jump the fare. IDK why they don't install the gates style turnstile so people can't jump.
Probably a fire risk?
Why are American urbanites so enamored with trains? Most cities and towns are built for automobiles. Why not expand the bus systems instead? It's the same thing, except you don't have to pay for a complete overhaul of infrastructure, you can expand and change routes much more flexibly, and buses cost much less to maintain than train cars. In my experience buses are less likely to become rolling homeless shelters since the driver can see the entire space, though antisocial behavior is certainly present.
Part of me suspects there's a certain amount of transportation chauvinism at play here. Trains are romantic and literary and ~European~, buses are for dirty poor people.
Five seconds in New York City would answer your question: Buses get stuck in traffic. They stop more frequently than trains do, so they spend most of their time loading, unloading, or trying to merge back into moving traffic. Also, there is much more fare evasion on the bus than on the subway. Drivers are not going to intervene.
Okay but New York City already has a light rail system. A shitty one that they're not capable of maintaining or cleaning or upgrading or doing anything else for, but they have it.
I'm thinking more the /r/fuckcars breed of gentrifying urbanite who wants to retrofit an already existing city with light rail. We have these people all over the place in Detroit, techies who came here from NYC and SF and think that this metro area of all places is an ideal location for muh choo choos.
I hate train people too. They never seem to be the kind of person I would see riding a train though. They closely resemble “we should all wear suits on planes again” folx.
Trains can fit more people and can go faster. Not to say buses don't have a place but anyone taking the bus in typical NYC traffic midtown knows it can be painfully slow. I can't imagine going to coney island in a bus. I might think differently if there were less cars on the street and more buses and if we actually enforced the rules that don't allow cars to go into the bus lanes, but we're not there yet.
Trains are hands down bang for your buck the best way of getting a lot of people from A to B. It's just simple reality in a city that has limited space. Busses can function to a certain point as it, but you're going to be separating it's route from traffic & basically making a less efficient train system.
I am not an insufferable r/fuckcars user, but one way I do definitely swing far left on is how america has designed it's cities and public places to be almost exclusively for one or two people in a two ton death machine to get around. It's inefficient as shit, parking (especially "free parking") consumes so much space, and being in a car all the time removes you from society, other people, and is very hard to build a desirable place to be around.
Okay but what are you suggesting? That we bulldoze everything and start again?
Subways are the absolute bee’s knees. I lived in Berlin, Germany, throughout the 1990s and traveled mostly by subway or bike. Buses were less predictable due to traffic and a whole lot slower than the subway.
Unlike Jesse, I was able to take advantage of a month-long pass, which he surely did too during the year he spent there on a Bosch fellowship.
I'm in Vienna now and they appear to have a similar honor system. Yet to find somewhere to scan my seven day pass...
Salt Lake City, UT, I believe, still has an honor system for their light and heavy rail.
Anyone who's not sure why trains are preferable has never spent time in a city with a functional rail system. Or hell, even a barely-functional rail system. For the individual commuter, they're a much faster way of getting around, and for the city, they handle higher volumes better with lower operating costs and lower emissions. Even in Boston, which has one of the least functional and most perpetually-under-construction metro system's in the country, the T is almost always a better option for getting around than the buses. Is it the best choice for every city when looking to solve short-term transit problems? Obviously not. The start-up cost is high and maintenance difficult without good back-up systems already in place. But any city which is expecting to grow and looking to future proof should absolutely invest in rail.
Weird attempt at telling me what I have and haven’t done.
Weird attempt at not responding to anything of substance.
It’s neither weird nor an attempt. Everything you’ve said I’ve already addressed in other responses. Read those, or don’t, I don’t care, your tone irritates me and I’m done talking to you. Have the last word.
Substack mobile collapsed the threads weirdly, and I didn't see that others had said similar things. Didn't intend to pile on. Regardless, sorry for meeting snark with snark.
I’ve lived in Europe and I don’t want my main mode of transport to be a powerful vehicle that could barrel down a kid if I took my eyes off the road for one second, that’s why I like trains.
It benefits us tremendously to have a variety of modes of transportation. Not everyone can drive, but everyone can get on a train or take a bus, out-of-town visitors don’t need to rent a car to get where they want, and it’s freeing to be able to choose how you get around. It’s honestly amazing to be able to pay a small fare, sit in a comfy chair for a bit, watch the countryside, and in a brief amount of time, be in a completely different place.
If anything, people who really love driving or drive for work should be happy about the existence of alternatives. There are plenty of people who are miserable driving, bad at it, have physical limitations that prevent them from driving well, or are financially struggling due to the cost of car ownership. If someone gets their licence taken away for bad driving, but the only way they can get around is to drive; they’ll get back on the road. Do all these people really need to be on the road? Let’s free up some space for the people who actually want or need to drive. That’d cut down on traffic and the number of irresponsible/angry/distracted/stressed drivers and would likely reduce the risk of accidents.
Buses in NYC are terrible. We have three kinds of buses in NYC. Local buses, which stop at every stop. Then there are Limited Buses, which stop at specific stops along the route, but not every stop. There are also Select Buses, which cost more, and are like Limited Buses except that they have a specific route where they skip many stops. There's actually a fourth kind of bus, which is the Staten Island bus, which picks people up in Manhattan and only begins stopping in Staten Island.
Taking the bus is a tough thing though. They are not very consistent, and almost always packed. For Local/Limited, it is the same as taking the subway. But, as one might expect, buses go places where the subway may not.
In Chicago, buses are fine for shorter trips or if you live accessible to an express bus, but even so some people dislike taking them. Even with the various problems with the L (worse since covid), they are much more efficient for commuting downtown if you live somewhere accessible to them (some will take a bus to the L if not). And yes, the train is usually more reliable depending on the time of day and the line, and traffic is painful.
I've never properly been in Chicago. I would say what a lifesaver the Citibike's have been for me. Less so for crossing boroughs, but more so for moving quickly from one section of a borough to another. It used to take me an hour plus to travel from my side of Brooklyn to another, whereas with a bike it takes 20 minutes.
I used to bike commute part of the year (I dislike biking when it is dark and cold), but haven't for ages -- I've never really liked biking on certain city streets and the lake path can just be crazy in the summer, and then I moved to where it is less convenient but still doable. I should start up again because it kept me in good shape. Anyway, I agree biking is good for shorter trips around my neighborhood and others nearby, although I use my own bike. (We do have a Divvybike program that seems similar to Citibike.)
Sure but I’m not talking about NYC. And anyway at this point it would probably be quicker to name things in NYC that *aren’t* terrible.
Pizza is pretty good, overall.
Yeah but you can get that elsewhere and there’s a decent chance rats won’t have walked on it.
Road congestion.
...which you'll deal with a lot more of for the several-to-many years it takes to get a light rail system going.
Yes, but the long term benefit of taking all those buses off the road far outweighs the temporary increase in traffic during construction. The most congested commuter road in my city is currently having a subway built underneath it for this reason.
I would love to know what city you live in that this makes financial sense.
I don’t think anything I can say or show you will make you reconsider your stance—you sound like you’re digging in. I’m going to tap out.
I take a bus daily to commute to work. The ride is much less comfortable than the metro (DMV); swaying, bouncing, sudden stops, etc. Winters in the Twin Cities also tend to wreck the roads faster than they can be repaired. Last time I took a bus there I thought the driver was intentionally hitting potholes, until I figured out that there are just so many of them they're impossible to avoid.
The bus system in the DMV is actually quite good in terms of coverage, timeliness, and comfort.
There's nothing libertarian about letting violent criminals and lunatics terrorize innocent people, or about using the subway system as a de facto homeless shelter and mental asylum.
I feel like Jesse gets to this point broadly, but I want to put a finer point on it: many progressive movements and organizations that have been attacked and destroyed by the left have been focused on women’s rights (or female rights since who knows what the fuck a woman is these days, amiright?).
The pussy hats, discussions of abortion, using uterus imagery on protest signs, Hollaback!, female only rape crisis centres, female only spaces in general, etc etc. All diminished and/or destroyed by the left with accusations of transphobia and racism. All leaving women who wished to remain in the good graces of the left with only two options:
1) engage in doublethink like the pathetic Emma Vigeland, who threw all women under the bus by pretending that it’s totally fine to be hit in the face, spit on, jerked off on, and screamed at in public in a civilized society
2) shut up forever and suffer in silence.
Growing up in a home and community that I can safely say really did not like or respect women and girls, it’s darkly funny to me that these were the same two options provided to me as a child. Either pretend it doesn’t bother you, or push it down deep inside of you. Any show of weakness or tears would just be putting more of a target on your back.
My hot take is this destructive side of the left has recreated this dynamic for the same reason it existed in my childhood: they fucking hate women. They hate women so much they can’t even bear to say the word “women”, unless there’s a qualifier in front of it that makes it slightly less disgusting to them (trans, black, disabled, etc).
I gravitated towards feminism for the same reason I ultimately walked away from the social justice left: I’m sick of being hated, being told to be fine with it or shut the fuck up. I want to find a community where I am respected and can be respectful of other people. Or at least one where I’m not being degraded for an identity characteristic I cannot control, no matter what WPATH says.
Anyway, all of that to say I wish people cared more about what a man screaming about raping a woman on a train does to everyone who has to be exposed to that shit, not just the women but the men too. The state needs to step in, but as they are currently refusing to do so, I’m glad you did instead Jesse.
Thank you for this amazing comment.
This is why it is essential for women and men to embrace the concept of feminism and not compulsively spit out, "But I don't agree with every single person who calls themselves a feminist and therefore I just can't get on board" Maybe consider for a minute why you feel that way about this particular movement but not other movements that advocate for entire categories of humans.
This makes you want to make a trip to wherever the heck you are in Canada so we can hang out for a few evenings and write a new feminist manifesto. As I’ve mentioned before, I teach about feminism and am more or less a professional feminist, although that description also makes me squirm because it implies dogmatism, which I loathe. I feel like I can’t work with integrity anymore because practically every student who takes my classes has been indoctrinated to believe that to prioritize “women“ is exclusionary by definition. And I don’t mean that they are committed men’s rights activists. No, everything has to be queer, and the only women who deserve to be called women - full stop - are trans women. The same goes for volunteer work in nonprofits that used to be oriented toward women’s needs, especially the rape crisis center I helped found in my town. Now the entire sector is all about “anti-oppression,“ which means centering race while erasing sex/gender dynamics, and the local staff proudly center queerness in a way that I think might be alienating to some clients.
(Before anyone accuses me of female chauvinism, I also very clearly see that men and boys face particular challenges, and is a feminist and a mother two sons I care a lot about those issues. I also know that those issues are mostly not the fault of feminists and that alleviating them requires a lot of involvement from men of goodwill.)
I would say, however, that while there is definitely an element of hate against women on the left, in the main leftist men have the same stake in women’s oppression that men on the right do: and this is a *material* stake. Men across the political spectrum benefit from exploitive relations when it comes to work, sex, and reproduction. The overt hate of a minority of men functions to secure those benefits and to enforce the division of women into respectable and bad women. The respectable women try to protect their status by distancing themselves from the disreputable ones while reassuring the men that they are the good women, after all - a dependable source of ego massage and emotional labor on top of the benefits previously mentioned. This, in turn, bolsters the egos of foolish and insecure women. Far from being a brave truth-teller, Emma Vigeland is one of the women desperately currying male approval.
In this dynamic, we all lose - including the many men who want to live with women in ways that let us all live authentically and in integrity. And in the U.S., women lose rights (abortion, and possibly soon IVF and no-fault divorce in some states) without being able to state whose rights are violated, lest we be tarred as bigots.
As for Jesse, he is the bravest demi-boy and we salute him.
I wish I could give your comment 1,000 likes.
Left wing misogyny is real. As real as right wing misogyny.
Liberals and moderate righties fortunately are pretty ok with women IME.
Really well said. I try to be optimistic about the future, thinking all of this weird identitarian silliness is mostly a knee-jerk reaction to the political distortions created by the rise of neoreactionary right-wing populism and that it will fade away once Trump dies or loses, but I worry sometimes that a weird genie has been let out of the bottle and that it could take years to undo all the damage.
The identitarian silliness predates Trump, though. It coalesced on Twitter, and then it merged with the most illiberal pseudo-leftist elements at universities. (A lot of people think it originated in the universities, but actually Tumblr created a pastiche of some elements of postmodern thought, made them a whole lot dumber, and then recycled the whole mess back into the universities where careerists paralyzed by groupthink decided circa 2015 that they needed to research asexuality as an identity.) From the universities, it rippled into other institutions and brought us the silliness that hopefully peaked in 2020.
But maybe it hasn’t peaked for good. Maybe we will see some oscillations at the level we’re currently at. Either way, Trump could drop dead tomorrow and we’d still be stuck with a Tumblr culture for at least another decade.
It’s the ideological Hall of Mirrors - the Loony Left and the Loony Right each feed upon and sustain each other.
The left hates women?
The same left that fought for, and continues to fight for, reproductive rights, maternity leave, Medicaid, SNAP benefits, the Equal Rights Amendment, and recruiting women into careers they have historically been a minority in (e.g., engineering)?
The left does not hate women. Quite amazing how people allow the trans issue to drive and distort all their political thinking.
If you read my comment again, you'll see that I'm discussing an aspect of the left that engages in destroying movements and organizations, many of which focus on women's rights. This faction of the left has done very little fighting for the issues you discuss, unless you count posting an infographic on Instagram stories, which I don't.
The functional, materially focused, side of the left wing (working class orgs that are actually still working class, unions that haven't lost themselves to virtue signalling and purity politics, feminists who haven't betrayed themselves) are the ones who fought for, and continue to fight for, these issues, though they are a dying breed. It's also foolish to think that the left has a monopoly on every progressive policy that has been implemented across the world and across time: plenty of people who call themselves centrists or conservative have participated in implementing what is now considered progressive policy. Nixon founded the EPA, for Christ's sake.
Finally, my political thinking is quite clear, thank you very much. This is why I'm able to engage with you civilly on this topic, even though you've made personal attacks against my character in the past. It's pretty incredible to me that a broad comment about misogyny on the left reads to you as being solely about the "trans issue". Yet my thinking is distorted? Hm.
The Left (and the Right) "hates" women. It's the center, where the normies sit, that doesn't.
I think we were much closer to identifying the things that make it more difficult to be a woman in society 10-20 years ago than we are now. In this category I would include things like public/private sexual harassment, rape, domestic violence, lack of medical research on female bodies, abortion access, etc. It feels like the modern social justice movement has blown a lot of hot air on the window into women's experiences, to the point where many people (including women) can no longer see through it and make common sense of things.
There's certainly a lot of eating our own within the feminism movement, as there is with all movements (trashing comes to mind: https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/trashing.htm), but I think the modern social justice left that is currently eating women alive is distinct from the feminist movement in some ways, including the fact that they have done whatever they could to de-centre women, even from women's issues (umm actually, did you know that men can get pregnant too?!?!). At least toxic women's groups were still fighting for the common good of women some of the time.
I'm pro personal responsibility and agency, and I don't like doomerism, but I also wonder how far the bounds of feminism or any political movement can or should expand to one's individual identity/daily actions outside of voting and political action. Maybe this isn't what you're getting at here, but I feel like feminism has been at its most successful when it is focused on illuminating issues that are impacting women or working towards a stated political goal. Of course, it's very difficult to do any of this when you have people that you have been told are "on your side" politically calling you out for the harm you're causing by saying that you don't like getting harassed on the subway.
Despite or because of all of this, I find myself staying faaaaar away from political/social justice/feminist organizing these days. I don't want to deal with the kind of behaviour that has become common place in these spaces, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. That, more than anything, might be the most successful dagger to the heart of this movement. I do miss having that community, but I don't miss the most toxic elements as it slowly slid into our current iteration of social justice culture. Honestly? I miss the feminism I found when I was young the most - even if it was quasi-feminism or immature. At least it wasn't set upon telling me how bad I was all the time.
There's an odd contradiction in some progressive spaces where they want lots of well funded quasi-public goods like libraries, mass transit, and parks while also not wanting to enforce any sort of rules or norms that make these places and things attractive and inviting to normal people. I think the general standard for using these places should be "if you can't do it in a similar private equivalent to this space, you can't do it here." You can't bathe in the sink, walk around asking for money, or sleep in Barnes & Noble, and you shouldn't be able to do those kinds of things in a public library. Similarly, you shouldn't be able to do things on a city bus that you can't do on a Greyhound bus. Bookstores and private buses aren't always a great experiences, I'm not sure anyone actually likes taking a Greyhound, but they tend to be a lot more comfortable and inviting than their public equivalents because they can and do enforce rules regarding their use.
Libraries can be great places to read books, but when I want to get some reading done, I drive 15 minutes to a nearby city's public library because my local library has become a de facto homeless shelter. The downtown library has lots of cool spaces, interesting old architecture and fixtures, and great reference materials. It's also a place I hate spending time in because of frequent and loud disruptions, people with truly awful hygiene, and requests for money. If there wasn't a comfortable library nearby, I'd probably stop spending time at local libraries except to quickly pop in to pick up books.
While I think we should provide services for the homeless, mentally ill, and other people with serious problems, letting some of them use parks or mass transit to do whatever the hell they want isn't compassionate, does nothing to address their underlying problems, and spoils these spaces for people who want to use them for their intended purposes.
I think if someone is doing hard drugs in a public place, they should be arrested, but then sent to a center where they get mandated treatment because they clearly have a problem. I don't think it's progressive to let them roam the streets high off their minds, screaming at people, shitting in the streets, killing dogs (shout out to Park Slope Panthers!)
This frustrates me so much, especially since the response from progressives is frequently something to the effect of only privileged people care about this (contrary to progressive claims, the most privileged people I know care least about this), or you are a bad person for caring about it. There isn't a magic wand you can wave to get people to only care about the things you want them to care about and if people know they're going to be shamed for reasonable concerns, they're going to stop talking about them and stop using public spaces, transit etc.
From what I can tell, the progressive "solution" to this is to take every single homeless person and match them a free home, i.e. any given house in the U.S. that is currently uninhabited. The only argument in favor of this that they can give is that there's x homeless people and 1.2x vacant homes, something something Blackrock.
Don’t forget that those free houses need to be in nicer neighborhoods than you or I live in because otherwise we’re creating ghettos. And we can’t ever control or police the standard at which they upkeep that house like everyone else because that too would be wrong… somehow.
I've heard the "something, something Blackrock" line so many times. And it never makes sense. My favorite is when I point out that Blackrock doesn't own enough houses to really affect house prices and they move on to Blackrock shouldn't be able to buy up houses because it's just wrong for a giant corporation to own so many houses so we really need to pass a law. Let's do everything except building more housing to lower the price of housing before we try building more housing.
BlackRock has never even been in the business of buying individual homes, that's the similarly named Blackstone which, like you pointed out, doesn't even own enough homes to have any real impact on housing prices. This Washington Post article has a good summary and debunking of many of the many of the claims made about the two companies here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20231205042035/https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/11/30/black-hole-robert-f-kennedy-jrs-housing-conspiracy-theory/ (the archive.org link is so non-subscribers can get around the Washington Post paywall)
The thing to remember is that idiots on twitter screaming about this stuff don’t use libraries or parks or public transit. They sit in front of their computers all day. It’s all theory crafting to them.
The idea of equating a library to a Barnes and noble makes me queasy tbh. While obviously I agree with not sleeping or soliciting people, or engaging in any type of illegal activity it’s closer to a community center or park than a private business with a profit motive. You can sit in a public library and read or work all day, you can definitely not expect to do that at B&N. Kids over a certain age can go to libraries and to community centers after school and quietly play games or read or do their homework until their parents get home from work and expect to be relatively safe. People can come and use a computer for free at a library - they can’t expect to do that at a Best Buy. Anyway. Just saying there is a role for community third spaces with a public service rather than profit motive.
I intended, though didn't articulate it this way, for the standard to be more of a starting point for rules and enforcement rather than a library just copying Barnes & Noble. I don't have any issue with people using libraries for things that like sitting around reading all day, browsing the internet, hosting tabletop gaming clubs, etc. that are within the spirit of the modern library's goals.
Stuff that's well outside the library's mission or is disruptive to other patrons shouldn't be tolerated, however.
Cool, yes I see what you mean - and I’m sorry your local library is full of people that don’t respect the space and others use of it.
I get it wasn’t your intent - I just get a little testy with the sorta libertarian idea that every public service and space would be better if it were a for-profit business instead. I don’t like the idea of a library becoming something that anyone feels like they have to leave if they don’t have money to spend, or don’t feel welcome in because of class, culture, or race considerations.
I love Karens insofar as they are instruments of shame for antisocial behavior. I like the idea that enforcing norms is the job of everyone, not police. Playing music without headphones, catcalling, harassment of women, etc. should not be normalized.
I know this is a losing battle, but I still think that it's wrong to use the term 'Karen'.
As long as there are innocent people named Karen, who there are many thousands of, this is needlessly cruel and unfair.
Plus, in my opinion it's essentially a racist and sexist term, because it's really only used to refer to white women.
Fully agree with everything you said here. I would just add that I once saw a Reddit thread critical of the Karen slur where at least two black women said they were called Karen for asserting themselves. Also, age plays into it. If you are 20 and gorgeous and maximally fuckable, you won’t get called a Karen.
I’m 60 years old, and I cannot count the number of people I know who are named Karen. I also can’t think of one of them who’s a lousy human being.
I agree that black and Hispanic women do get called Karens (I saw it on my NextDoor), but I have been reliably informed by others on social media that the term clearly refers only to racist white women (ironically, Karen Attiah might have been one of those informing us of that fact).
I would love to see some statistics on the number of people named Karen filing for a legal change in the last few years.
I'm guessing it's not a small number.
I don't know if I would go so far as to call it racist, but it's definitely sexist. It's effectively a tool to shame women for being loud and opinionated, when no such gendered equivalent exists for men. "Dick" would be the closest thing, but it's not a proper noun, and "dick" doesn't conjure up an archetype the way "Karen" does. Yeah, it's a pretty small, semantic thing to be upset about, but it's just one example of the kinds of double standards you see in public discourse.
I have a similar issue with the weird hatred everyone seems to feel towards Kamala Harris. She's profoundly uncharismatic, I won't dispute that, but it's bizarre that her "fakeness" is considered as politically fatal a flaw as Biden being senile or Trump being a felon. She's a politician! Being fake is part of their fucking job! At least with Hillary Clinton, she genuinely did have a lot of baggage. But it really feels like people are grasping at straws to justify their intense hatred Kamala when the fact of the matter is that she's just a mediocre politician in the same vein as Jeb Bush or John Hickenlooper.
I have an intense hatred of Kamala Harris. I do think she's more fake than any other politician.
Remember the time she implied that Joe Biden was a racist during the primary debates? Remember her stating her pronouns during that interview? Her voice, dripping with sanctimony every time she speaks, literally creeps me out every time I hear it, it makes my skin crawl.
Also her conduct as a criminal prosecutor (apparently preventing death row inmates from accessing dna evidence that could exonerate them) is unforgivable.
And I've voted for more women for president in my life than men, in both primaries and general elections. Out of four presidential elections I've voted in, I voted for three different women (and two of the four were black).
So this has nothing to do with sexism or racism.
One thousand percent. Thank you. It *is* a racist and sexist epithet, and as a white woman it makes me hurt and angry to hear it. I'm a human being and I have a right to be upset about things and not name-called for it.
There’s a great Baron Von Sketch about someone who is “that woman.” There’s antisocial behaviour going on and at some point people are grateful to let her step in and be That Woman.
When I hear people like Emma Vigeland talking about how they feel they just have to be understanding if someone hits them or acts aggressively toward them in public, it always strikes me that they are talking about decisions they make as adult individuals. When I'm out in public, I'm often with my little kids or my mother, and I definitely feel a lot more protective of them than I feel worried about my own safety.
So if you're going to argue that people in population-dense areas just have to be cool with people screaming, hitting others, or shooting up in public, you should probably also realize that people who can afford to move out of areas where that behavior is tolerated are going to do just that, gutting the taxpayer base as they do so. And that won't be good for those who remain.
From the little that I unfortunately know of her, Emma seems to not think things through to their logical conclusion.
She’s not about Conclusions! She’s about Beginnings!
For precision, please delete all of your comment except: “Emma seems not to think.“
Yes. But even for adults, it is bizarre she thinks she can consent on behalf of every other adult in the world.
Her comment may be the stupidest take I’ve heard someone express. Kind of majestic, the scale of it.
Are you talking about her Jordan Neely-inspired comment or her “transwomen are women and they should play women’s sports, I don’t care what anyone else thinks” comment?
Porque no los dos?
Are we sure that the guy was having a mental health crisis? He may just have seen her show… 🤷♂️
So, everyone knows about the Neely/Penny case, but there was another subway killing last year that got decidedly less attention, happened in a rough part of Brooklyn, and lacked the racial angle: A man named Devictor Ouedraogo was harassing people on a train and punched a young woman in the face. The woman’s boyfriend, 20-year-old Jordan Williams, pulled out a knife and stabbed Ouedraogo. He died at the hospital. Unlike Penny, Williams is Black (as was Ouedraogo). He was arrested and detained, and treated more harshly than Penny, even though there was a clearer and more obvious self-defense aspect in this case: The man had already attacked a woman! But unlike Penny, Williams was carrying a weapon, which complicates matters. Luckily for Williams, the grand jury would not indict him because it was clearly self-defense, and charges were dropped.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna89473
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna91780
There was also a case where a bodega worker was assaulted by a black women and her boyfriend who had a knife. Somehow the worker used the guy's knife to defend himself and killed the guy and he got charged. Luckily there was enough public outcry that charges where dropped.
I remember that guy - Washington Heights, right? It was all caught on security cameras and it was the most open-and-shut self-defense case I could ever imagine, and a complete waste of time to even consider prosecuting.
Jose Alba, that fiasco is well-known in New York. Alba still hasn't recovered psychologically and may have already returned to the Dominican Republican, where he's from.
The Post gets a lot of shit but if they hadn't dug up and publicized the security footage it's possible Alba would still be sitting in jail.
P.S. Trump visited the bodega where Alba worked. I don't think Biden was even made aware of it.
While the Post is generally crappy, I’m glad they’re at least covering local stories.
The Post is like 95% garbage and 5% legitimately important journalism. They broke the Hunter Biden story and were really the only ones covering it while the rest of American media desperately attempted to sweep it under the rug.
The Post has a lot of garbage but also covers crime and degrading city conditions the NYT spikes in favor a restaurant reviews.
I think the bodega worker used his own knife, not the knife of the boyfriend who attacked him (which by the way was prompted by the worker not allowing the girlfriend to steal).
Not that it changes anything, it was 100% self-defense, and against a larger, younger, and extremely violent man.
There was also the incident just a few months ago where Younece Obuad shot a crazy man with his own gun while protecting himself and a woman. Also self-defense, no charges, even though the shots were fired in a crowded subway car.
Responding to a punch with a knife is a much greater escalation than responding to threats with jiu jitsu. Stabbing someone creates a huge risk of death, a carotid choke almost never does.
I disagree. People don't seem to understand how violence work in real life, it's not like in the movies.
A single punch can kill a person. More often, it breaks jaws, fractures eye sockets, knocks out teeth, broken noses, sometimes causes permanent vision damage, or brain damage.
When someone assaults you (or your girlfriend) without provocation, you should not have to allow yourself to be permanently maimed in order to minimize the harm to your assailant. Your jaw, your nose, even a single of your teeth are worth more than the life of the person who attacked you.
ANY level of force is justified in eliminating or neutralizing the threat under these circumstances, as far as I'm concerned. And the fastest and most reliable way to neutralize a threat is to kill them. It's that simple.
It would only be excessive force if you continued to use violence once it was clear that the assailant no longer posed a threat.
Don't like it? Don't attack innocent people without provocation.
True, but it’s counterbalanced by the fact that Ouedraogo had already physically attacked someone, whereas Neely was only talking. Not working in Williams’ favor was the fact that he was carrying a knife in the first place, because if you’re carrying a weapon then you have the expectation of using it. But with the punch, the unprovoked attack on Williams’ girlfriend, the self-defense became real. Now, Penny’s lawyers may likely argue you shouldn’t have to wait for someone to get injured to take action when someone’s making threats, and they’ll have a good point. It’ll probably all hinge on the degree of force Penny used and whether he could have reasonably expected it to kill Neely.
1. Knives are carried for many reasons besides as a weapon. They are one of the most useful and versatile and common tools in existence, and used in countless professions.
2. Carrying a weapon for self-defense is reasonable, rational, and lawful. It also happens to be explicitly protected by the second ammendment (and the Supreme Court has ruled that the Second Ammendment applies to knives as well as firearms) .*
Self-defense is not a crime, and carrying a weapon in anticipation of the possibility of self-defense is not a crime.
*I realize that the US constitution does not apply in New York City, and that our justice system has perverse and deeply unjust interpretation and application of the laws around self-defense.
That's the reality, but let us not pretend that the status quo is acceptable or reasonable. It is not. We should all be outraged and enraged that self-defense is effectively considered a crime in this city.
I remember this one!
Harvey Weinstein was the jerking-off-in-the-plant guy, not Louis CK. Y’all need to get your masturbators straight. 🙄
Wow, and then Jesse “Amy Cooper” Singal goes and commits *literal attempted murder* against this poor man who was just exercising his first amendment rights. For shame!
On this week's Threedom podcast, with Scott Aukerman, Lauren Lapkus and Paul F Tompkins, one of them made the same error in mixing up who jerked off into a planter before being corrected.
Love the Pretzel Gang so much.
No, Katie is right?
After 10/7, I am 0% surprised that some journalists would be enthusiastic about harassing and threatening a woman (if they were told her name was Shoshanna).
in my defense, right about the time someone said, "pussy hats are offensive to trannys" is when I started thinking SJWs calling everything problematic is fucking stupid. I was on their side...once.
I liked the "pussy hats are racist because they're hot pink" angle. "Some of us aren't that color!" Lady, nobody is that color!
But … aren’t all pussys pink on the inside? Don’t we all have the same color blood and muscle tissue?
The far right and far left are obsessed with skin color to the point that they see it when skin isn't even what we're talking about.
Indeed! And yet none of our pinks are represented by the yarn colorways at the women’s march. Someone in the realm of Big Fiber Arts needs to be canceled retroactively!
Right I think she’s saying no one’s uterus and ovaries are hot pink
I worry terribly about everyone who believes any woman has day-glo pink genitalia. Perhaps I’m terribly wrong, and sex is a spectrum after all. But even then, fluorescent pink is far beyond that spectrum.
If you’re messing around with anyone whose genitals are hot pink, no matter how hot/aroused they are, I recommend you run away stat and don’t approach again without a Geiger counter.
An HR Giger counter, maybe?
That specific women’s march was one of the first few times I first noticed there was something really ‘off’ about trans activism.
Same (plus the pink=racist angle Jane mentioned) Looking back on that it’s interesting… at the time I (and everyone I know) thought… wow there sure are some stupid people saying stupid things online. Little did we know that Twitter was going to become what everyone thought all liberals thought. And the fact that women’s march just totally… caved to the wackos showed how it could leak into the real world. Beginning of an era I think.
Remember that woman who went viral because she posed with a sign that said "Don't forget: white women voted for Trump"? I was so irritated by this. Obviously the white women who voted for Trump were not at this march!
Ugh, yes.
Jesse, it was not in Italy that I was followed by a group of seven or eight teenage boys asking me "ma'am, you fucking?" while on a hike, teens who then ended up throwing stones at me because I refused to acknowledge them. Not all cultures have the same kind of harrassment.
I totally agree. In Italy they’re going to shout at you how beautiful you are and take it too far to make you uncomfortable… not to the point of you feeling like you’re in physical danger. And in non-western cultures… you have to worry about being physically assaulted or killed for leaving the house without a man or not covering your head.
That’s a very extreme generalization but okay
Where was it?!
India.
Namaste
That blew coffee out of my nose 😂
In America, when I had teenagers yell shit when I run I could just slap my fat ass and they would laugh. The only place I have encountered hostile teenagers while running was Denmark (they were Arabs too.)
I live in District 61A, and have been getting Stancil’s campaign emails/fliers. I legitimately thought he was a bot/AI programmed to be a caricature of a progressive candidate, which makes the fake website even funnier.
Minneapolis Primos- Let’s have a BARPOD meet up and invite Will! I’m sure it would be very productive and nuanced, as he seems to know the truth about everything. Is Stancil going to single handily turn Uptown around? #YesHeWILL!
Oh I would love his opinion on Hennepin avenue reconstruction and how it is probably racist somehow
Not enough police precincts were burned down!
I wonder if the fake website sells merch
My previous impression of your average New Yorker was that crazy subway people would have been mobbed by a bunch of manly vaguely Italian types and stopped from being menaces.
But the last few years have shown me that New York is in fact full to the brim with pussies.
That being said, Jessie is a 2 on the Karen scale and about a 3 on the pussy scale. At least he said something.
But shit the last guy to actually confront a crazy subway person is facing jail time so I guess I don’t blame y’all. Although if everyone stopped being a pussy and did the right thing I’m sure the court couldn’t throw everyone in jail.
Sorry, NY is just a fucking joke at this point. Ridiculous.
Jesse is less of a pussy than the average New Yorker, by a considerable margin, especially for a guy who isn't comfortable fighting.
Yes he spoke up, but I wouldn’t say that makes him considerably less of a pussy. I’m also not a fighting type, and I agree with his idea that aggressively seeking out fighting isn’t good, but it shouldn’t have been a look the other way thing at all. That’s the problem. He’s still a pussy cuz he just looked the other way until he finally couldn’t. Like almost all the other people on that train. So slightly less a pussy maybe, but not considerably. You gotta get up and make it clear that the behavior is unacceptable and if enough people start doing that together you can back down most of the crazies. And maybe the normal people can take back that shithole city.
Do you live in NYC, and ride the subway frequently?
Ignoring even crazy situations is the norm. And even if you're inclined to be a good Samaritan when you first move here, living in the city changes you.
Partly it desensitizes you, but mostly it's a matter of survival. You encounter crazy people and aggressive thugs looking for a fight every single day, often multiple times a day. You quickly realize that avoiding eye contact and pretending not to notice is the only way to be left alone (most of the time). You also realize that if you do get involved in an altercation, chances are that no one will help you. It's sad but it's true. And you realize this even more keenly if you've ever been assaulted, or had a close call, but you know in any case.
So yes, Jesse was significantly more brave than the average New Yorker.
Maybe that's a low bar, maybe that's a sad state of affairs, but the reasons for that aren't the fault of Jesse, or, any individual. We have a culture and society and legal system and media ecosystem where every incentive is to ignore everything and stay out of it.
I mean I live in Albuquerque so I completely understand everything you’re saying. Look at the wrong person funny and now you have a fentanyl fiend trying kick your ass or rob you. So most people do mind their business. But that is a problem. Especially for NY as I understand public transit is heavily relied on. I drive because I don’t wanna get stabbed by a bus crackhead. But I would fucking hope if that crackhead was trying to stab me people would intervene. That you cannot rely on the guy sitting next to you on a bus or train to help you fend off crazy homeless drug addicts is fucking pathetic. I’m not a fighter but I’m definitely not one to sit back and watch such injustice. It just takes all of us pussy normal people to push back but everyone’s head is so far up their own ass their fellow man can fuck off and fend for themselves.
It’s disgusting how far we’ve fallen. Just basic shit has gone out the window. Yeah the bar is about as low as it can can get. I just hate it so much. How do you fix that on a societal level? I don’t think you can.
There are steps that can be taken. Our politicians, prosecutors, and law enforcement leadership can stop arresting people for defending themselves. When a bystander does decide to intervene, they should know that no matter what happens, they will not be arrested, and the violent criminal or lunatic will be.
Our media institutions can stop the relentless race baiting and slandering, and stop pretending that black people can do no wrong, and that anytime a white person hurts a black person, no matter how justified, it automatically makes them a racist.
There's a lot more that needs to be done, including actually enforcing the law and removing lunatics and homeless people from the trains so that bystanders aren't constantly faced with these situations in the first place.
But making it so good Samaritans don't need to fear the law, and being ostracized by the media, in top of all the other risk, would be a good start.
Has it ever not been a joke?
Jesse...you're like seven feet tall...just whup his ass.
There will soon be a new level of paid subscriber called Subway Vigilante, but you pay in the scalps of mentally ill people on subways. That’s gross, Jesse.
feeding them and housing them for free doesn't seem to be working, but scalping being next on the list of solutions is something i didn't expect. i would expect it to work.
Dammit, Greg, when did you forget that the only reason we bigxts keep spending our sweet primo dollars is so we can traffic in scalps?
If Alvin Bragg had the opportunity to prosecute Jesse, it would probably draw the attention of entirety of NY Media (hoping for his imprisonment, since they missed out on the HIPPO prosecution).
It might even be a big enough distraction that Bragg would lose interest in prosecuting Daniel Penny.
It is cannon that he now reports the show from hippopotamus jail.
Fact check: German trains are notorious for having bad on-time performance and the rest of Europe loves making fun of them (American systems are no doubt worse of course). https://www.railtech.com/all/2023/12/05/deutsche-bahn-punctuality-drops-to-record-low/?gdpr=accept
Can confirm. I live in Switzerland, where the trains are so punctual that if they are even 90 seconds late, there are announcements to apologize. But as soon as you cross into Germany, all bets are off. Who knows when—if ever—you will arrive. This is so known and accepted that a magazine for people learning German, Deutsch Perfekt, recently had a special feature on how to cope with the ridiculously unreliable German trains.
In my experience the high-speed rail is uniformly at least half an hour behind, and making tight connections is almost impossible, but most of the high-speed routes that I traveled at least have high enough frequency that you’ll rarely lose more than 45 minutes or so by simply catching the next one.
The regional rail, by contrast, I have found to be quite reliable and have regularly made trips with several <5 minute changes without issue.
Of course that’s all anecdotal, and I’ve heard plenty of nightmare anecdotes too, but however funny it is to joke about the punctuality of Deutsche Bahn, it should not be mistaken for a system that doesn’t work.
They can’t be as bad as Italy. I took the train there a few times and every time it was late and once like 45 minutes.
Believe me, they can. I've travelled in Europe by train quite a lot over the past decade and all my worst problems were in Germany. (And I must say that my experience of Italian trains has been that they're cheap and generally reliable).
Yes! Italian trains are much more reliable than German ones, and unbelievably fast too. The one slow point in my experience is Milan, where tracks don’t go through, so trains have to come in, let off passengers, pick up new ones, and then back out again. This structural problem does cause delays, but Milano Centrale is currently undergoing a massive renovation to fix the problem.
There are several Italian translations that don’t go through. All the big ones. Venice, Rome, Naples, Bologna, etc. I don’t even see how they would fix this, since going through in the case of all of these would entail going through major historical parts of the city.
Having said that Italian trains are amazing! And well worth the wait to go into the station, unload and come back out.
Agreed! Italian trains are even better than Swiss trains, and that is saying something!
Chicagoland commuter trains were super punctual when I used to ride them daily, the only exceptions being occasional sad delays for morning suicides (about monthly) or daytime car crashes (about twice a year).
I spent three weeks in May going through France, Belgium, Denmark, and Germany - this was not my experience at all. The longest delay we had was 40 minutes, once, going from Hamburg to Copenhagen. Weird.
As for the Berlin U-Bahn system, it’s simple, classic and it worked perfectly - just like the Paris Metro.