This week on the show, Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog discuss the recent killing of a homeless man on the New York City subway and the less recent killing of a fox in the UK. Featuring: A Michael Jackson impersonator, a marine, the American media, Jo Maugham and Jo Rowling (no relation).
Also, please come to this FIRE event with Katie at the University of Washington on May 12th. It’s about free speech and it’s, appropriately, free.
Part 1:
New York Magazine: “Daniel Penny Identified As the Man Who Choked Jordan Neely to Death”
NBC News: "Video shows NYC subway confrontation end with fatal chokehold"
NYT: "No Arrest in New York Subway Chokehold Death, and Many Want to Know Why"
Roxanne Gay: “Making People Uncomfortable Can Now Get You Killed”
Jonathan Rosen: “American Madness”
Part 2:
The Critic Magazine: Taking the clown seriously
The Daily Mail: Is Jolyon the fox-killing Brexit-loathing barrister with a penchant for silk kimonos the most ludicrous man in Britain?
The Spectator: Jolyon Maugham’s opening sentence might be the worst of all time
I was at a bus stop yesterday sitting on a bench with a glass enclosure. A guy came up to me and asked me what time the bus was coming. I responded and went back to scrolling on my phone. 20 minutes later he suddenly started acting erratic and threw his phone towards me. The glass enclosure was not fully open on one side, but had a door shaped opening where he was standing. I was trapped.
Thankfully, that’s where it ended. But I was terrified for those 10 minutes. Every time he reached inside his heavy jacket pocket, I half expected him to pull out a knife (there have been some knife attacks on the subway). He wasn’t making me “uncomfortable”, he made me fear for my life. People don’t choose to feel fear, it’s a natural response.
Progressives acting like feeling fearful when a person is being aggressive is a moral failure are deliberately looking at it through some convoluted intersectional lens. Obviously most people in the Neely situation weren’t aware of his history , they only knew that this person was being aggressive this instant. A person wearing a suit and Rolex would have elicited the same response.
All the “hurr durr, I’ve been in uncomfortable situations on the subway but you know what I didn’t do? Murder people” is exhausting and performative empathy at its finest. You can understand the complexity of the situation while recognizing what happened was a tragedy
100%. It’s a luxury of the wealthy to pretend like they’re just more enlightened and that’s why these events don’t bother them. In reality it’s because they don’t have to deal with it as much. I was completely humiliated by someone once (in front of my boss no less) for suggesting that maybe we shouldn’t let people just do drugs in the street and form tent encampments everywhere--she accused me of wanting to lock up homeless people, let them get raped in emergency shelters, etc etc. But of course she’s one who lives in a gated community with security, sent all of her children to a very expensive private school, and treats visiting homeless encampments to deliver supplies as some kind of tourism, in my opinion. Whereas I rely on public transportation as a young-ish female who works late hours, and don’t have the money to live in a neighborhood that isn’t patrolled by private security. Getting followed home at night by aggressive men or spat on in the face by panhandlers and STILL somehow being considered the privileged oppressor is really frustrating.
I lived in the George Floyd incident neighborhood, and I watched as rich twitter liberals cheered the burning down of a low income but arguably the most diverse neighborhood in Minneapolis. Infuriating!
I was a witness too. I will never get over it.
My work has had to completely lock down bathrooms and add security throughout the building due to street vagrants doing drugs what used to be publicly accessible restrooms in an area where there aren’t many. I’ve had to deal with tweakers coming in with open sores and wounds, yelling at each other, locking themselves in the stalls for an hour or more, etc. Went to a meeting about all this recently and had to listen to a woman who works from home chastise us all for taking a “carceral approach” instead of providing directions to safe injection sites and bringing in crisis response. I almost screamed.
“let them get raped in emergency shelters” -- is she unaware that homeless ppl are often raped in those encampments?
Yeah my wife used to take the bus and once had a belligerent guy screaming and attacking people on the bus with her. All the more scary as he was bleeding profusely from a knife wound, from who knows where.
Typical white supremacy demanding to not feel uncomfortable in the presence of someone just asking to be seen. Why does your wife want to erase this man’s lived experience?
And these are the same people (for the most part) who claim traumatization over shoulder rubs. The cognitive dissonance is astounding.
Exactly. It’s similar to their dismissals of women who don’t want to share bathrooms & locker rooms with men who say that they’re women. It’s a fact that men commit more violence than women, and that women are often the targets of that violence. It’s not saying ALL men are violent, but it’s enough to keep men out of women’s spaces. Decent men know this and respect our boundaries. It’s natural for women to be suspicious of men they’re not familiar with, and those women that say otherwise haven’t been appointed to speak on behalf of all of us.
Gaslighting a generation of girls to ignore their he instincts that are there to protect them is reckless. It’s saying that trans identified men’s (TW) fear of men is legitimate but women’s fear of men who disregard their boundaries is not.
Absolutely parallel. Leftist women are still pressured to fulfill the same misogynistic social roles and contracts ascribed to women— be the mother/carer/nurturer above all, even if it means ignoring your own needs. Esp white liberal women, because we all know they’re just the worst monsters with literally violent tears. Uncomfortable around homeless men? Uncomfortable around AGPs? Uncomfortable around street harassers who happen to be men of color? Just a bigoted woman failing at her main job of “being kind.”
Well said.
Shellenberger's book has a terrifying account of man who attacked a woman entering a building who specifically waited for a woman (any woman--he did not know the victim) as the CCTV showed him letting many men enter the building unmolested.
But didn’t you hear what Roxanne Gay said? You’re fine. It’s only momentary discomfort. Yeesh. :::snaps fingers:::
The gall of these people who hold this standard and a completely different one in nearly every other area of life. Concepts like stigma, microaggressions, representation, invalidating, etc... The rest of the world is so fragile we need to avoid saying or even thinking anything that might cause the slightest discomfort, but someone puts you in fear for your life and you just gotta suck it up..
I used to take the metro train in my hometown regularly when in high school about 15 years ago now. Went back to visit about 6 months ago, got on the train and immediately was met by a guy trying to sit next to all the women on the train, harassing us, all while chain smoking. Everyone just moved to another car, not sure security ever came. Just last month I went back again and hopped on the train. Immediately a guy starts walking up and down the car asking if any of us work for TSA. He then picked out a specific woman and decided she was an undercover agent. From there it was all downhill and ended with him screaming at her that he was going to get the whole train to jump her and everyone on the train just got off as quickly as possible. No one tried to deescalate or tried to create distance between him and the woman. Nobody will stand up for her, nobody will stand up for me. It’s just not worth the risk. I’m never riding it again.
If they want more people to use mass transit instead of driving in cars, they're going to have to take these incidents seriously.
Also, Penny's martial arts fuckups were technical, not moral.
"Position before submission" is the saying in jiu-jitsu. If you've got someone's back, you should use your legs to secure the position (using either hooks or a rear body triangle) before attacking the neck. Penny fucked up by relying on the chokehold to maintain his backmount, so he couldn't let it go or else risk losing his position.
Also, choking someone out is a matter of compressing their carotid arteries, not their windpipe. It's lack of bloodflow to the brain that causes rapid loss of consciousness; lack of air into the lungs results in what we saw with George Floyd - where they remain awake and struggling pretty much right up to the point of death. If you have someone in a chokehold and they're not out cold in 5-10 seconds, then you don't have their arteries squeezed off so they'll go straight from struggling to dying with very little in between.
But Penny shouldn't be expected to know that in order to engage in self-defense. If the goal of progressives is "community-based policing" rather than leaving it to trained professionals, then it's inevitably going to be an amateur-hour shitshow.
The Jordan Neely story makes me so angry all around. Anyone with half a brain knows that these types of tragedies will happen when we live in a time where those of us in large cities are told to just accept that there is a contingent of mentally ill and drug addicted people wandering the streets often displaying violent and erratic behavior, while at the same time there’s a push for a decrease in police presence. What a perfect recipe for vigilantism.
Something frustrating with Katie and Jesse's assertion that bystanders shouldn't do anything to protect themselves and/or their fellow passengers is that the question becomes "ok, well who then?". With the push to decrease policing and to envision the police force as a whole as corrupt killers, apparently not them either. And even if Jesse/Katie believe police are the answer, police aren't around 24/7. So what happens during the response time? What if another 67-year-old gets pushed to the ground with orbital fractures? Yes, we all have rights and no one "deserves" to die, but for the people pushing others to the ground and into subway tracks, their victims "deserve" safety too, and sometimes in protecting the one, it's really fucking hard (near impossible, really) to protect the other.
Exactly. My elderly parents and sister’s kids ride the subway. I am comforted by the fact that if they are threatened in a crowded car or someone seems especially aggressive & sleazy there likely are going to be men (Latino or black or white gym bros or guys in suits or whatever) who will step in and, if necessary, get physical in their defense.
Norms in which young and middle-aged men are supposed to risk themselves in defense of women, children and the vulnerable are common, admirable and usually a great social positive. As are ones where men are taught to be profoundly ashamed if they stand by and do nothing. Women can’t offer this security; men can. And strength, physical prowess and bravery are great pluses. These are simple truths that are often impossible for feminists and progressives to acknowledge. Though they and their loved ones benefit from them, especially in NY.
Jesse & Katie aren’t doing quite this, but they are ignoring what it’s like to be vulnerable, Jesse is 6’4” and Katie literally lives on a remote island. They both grew up amongst highly educated people in crime-free areas. Everyone deserves to feel safe like they did.
I sympathize with the complement you're implicitly giving the guys who do step in, but as a society-scale response this is exactly the wrong way to go. These problems are supposed to be solved on social level by voting out DAs that believe the homeless are entitled to do what they want! If a city gets that in order, vigilantes will rarely ever be needed. (And by keeping its police force reasonably funded, but this part has been widely understood by now.) If it doesn't, no one will usually step in, since it's mostly just putting yourself into danger (including for prosecution) for no obvious gain. I wasn't surprised at all that the guy who played the main role here was from out of town and too young to have picked up the learned helplessness of professional city-dwellers.
My understanding is Penny, the guy who did this, grew up in Queens and nearby West Islip, Long Island (where he would have been around even more NYC cops and firemen than he would’ve had he only lived in Queens.) It’s not like he just showed up wide-eyed in the Big City, chewing on a stalk of wheat a la Axl Rose getting off the Greyhound bus that brought him from rural Indiana to LA in the ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ video.
I agree with all you say about social policy. 100%. And I certainly don’t want everyone’s safety to be dependent on reckless off-duty marines with some MMA moves, which they then execute incompetently with tragic results
But I’m middle-aged and can remember what NYC was like in the bad days. A lot of horrific things were done by people who were totally sane. The subway is a confined space. Life is chaotic and things can quickly turn ugly.
There are, indeed, still plenty of guys in NYC who will punch out another man if they see him rubbing his bulging crotch against a confused frightened schoolgirl on the subway. They remain a great deterrent. (Before omnipresent security cameras & cellphones they pretty much were the deterrent.) They’re not afraid of lawsuits. God bless them.
I think there’s a weird refusal to recognize both that men commit the vast majority of heinous crimes and that other men (often with limited educations) who have the potential to respond with violence have largely been what’s kept them in line.
We're living in this weird time for men where we're still supposed to do all the manly things of 40-60 years ago, but then when we do we're screamed at for it. This goes across the board whether its enforcing safety in public or dating.
Easiest solution to that is to live in a more conservative area. Men in Texas get screamed at a lot less than men in Portland.
I think maybe the exact opposite is true? I don't think it's possible to ever fully scale up a workable response.
If we have a society where men fulfill their most basic animal role- protecting the group- this stuff might happen less.
We are always going to have mentally ill homeless people around. They will never go away, although the problem will lessen with some societal changes (police and prosecutors doing their jobs).
Maybe- and I'm speculating wildly here- some of the problems we are seeing with men and boys falling behind is that we have completely scorned this role for them. We venerate the nurturing role that females usually have; this has made men feel redundant.
I love falling asleep every night next to a big man who will fight to defend me if something goes wrong. I mean, don't get me wrong, I will go all shrieking spider monkey on an intruder, but he's the one who is really going to make a difference in a fight.
And you don't have to be a big man to fulfill this role. My grandpa was 5'6", 130 lbs, and was known as the toughest meanest bastard around his Detroit neighborhood. Once, when he was an old man, he was drinking at a local bar and his hand was shaking a bit. A new guy saw this, and taunted him. There was a silence and a regular told the new guy quietly " Don't. That guy will rip your fucking head off". My dad ( his son-in-law) was with him, which is how I knew the story. I wasn't hanging around in bars when I was five.
In principle, bystanders with guns are supposed to solve that. I don't expect anyone to join in with fists alone against someone who might have a knife (and I don't know anyone around me whom I'd expect to do that, unless their own or a friend's life is at stake). But of course, what works and what doesn't depends on how far the rot has progressed. If word goes around that good Samaritans are socially valued and legally supported (which includes an amount of understanding if things go wrong), then there will be more of them. As it stands, however, politics is the lever that actually can be pulled.
I don't know the extent to which a random man can pull of such things, by the way. As someone who failed PE at school, I shouldn't be judging by myself, but I see significant differences in... body shape around, to put it politely. I'm not sure how many of them are Sumo ringers.
Can’t both be true?
I wonder if the narrative would have been different if it was: JN throws a punch, marine throws a punch, accidentally kills him when JN’s head hits the floor in a weird way. In other words, must we get to the point where unless someone has just stabbed us, we have to sit around and accept things before we act in self defense?
In NYC you can get shot, wrestle the gun away from the shooter, use it on him in self defense and STILL get charged with a crime. https://nypost.com/2023/04/01/nyc-garage-worker-charged-with-attempted-murder-for-shooting-thief/
I think that’s good! This is the kind of society we want to live in. I believe a thriving citizenry is afraid all the time. Also? Crime is a right wing fiction. Doesn’t happen. Never has.
They just want everyone to lay down and die to protect criminals from experiencing the consequences of their actions.
Did you listen to the episode? Didn't Jesse say that Neely yelled threats and threw a jacket on the floor?
That's an action punishable by death to you?
I hope neither you nor your kid ever get loud in public or you guys might get choked to death
I'm not sure anyone here is suggesting that what Neely did merited a death sentence. I'd like to see more steelmanning from a fellow BARpod'er. If we don't have steelmanning, the terrorists win!
Ultimately I think what this kind of situation reveals is that when you have a bunch of chaotic shit happening in a city, chaotic results occur. Sometimes people die as a very unfortunate result.
I suppose one solution would be to try and keep the chaos level down. I spend a lot of time in NYC and it's honestly amazing that there aren't way more subway deaths (whether it's a crazy person shoving someone onto the tracks, or a citizen who feels compelled to dive into the self-defense deep end). When a clearly unhinged person walks into a car, a million scenarios flash through one's mind under the category of "how the next five minutes might go."
How does one steel man this comment from muliebrity?
"They just want everyone to lay down and die to protect criminals from experiencing the consequences of their actions."
That's a straw man if there ever was one. Are you saying that she isn't saying that Neely deserved a death sentence when she says that he met the consequences of his actions?
I absolutely understand that people die in cities and we should try to prevent those when we can and I think the same about deaths on the subway. You think there would be more. It comes down if you're gonna kill someone you better have a good reason to do it and it seems like a lot of people in these comments are taking it for granted that Penny was legitimately fearful and had no other options. Also I know a number of Marines as you might and they get trained in hand to hand combat
That’s the thing: without mind reading, I don’t know if we can say that Penny intended to kill Neely. What if he had him in a choke hold, Neely didn’t die, and they just forced him off the car at the next station? It’s unfortunate but I do think at the end of the day, this kind of accident happens when chaos reigns.
If I were more conspiratorially minded, I would say Soros and the WEF globalist elites want working people to be constantly scared, humiliated, and emasculated. So they deliberately flood the streets with violent lunatics, and the only felony charges they'll prosecute are against everyday people who have the nerve to defend themselves. Here's another one where a bodega worker got charged with a felony in a clear case of self-defense:
https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/19/us/new-york-bodega-stabbing-murder-charges/index.html
The Neelys of the world are just cannon fodder to keep people terrorized, so that the masses will be more likely to meekly go along with living in ze pods and eating ze bugs.
However, if I loosen the tinfoil hat, I'd say the reason people like the garage worker, bodega worker, Kyle Rittenhouse, and now Penny get charged and/or vilified by progressives is because of a 'shoot the messenger' approach to relieving progressive cognitive dissonance around the consequences of anarchy. There's a glaring difference between how 'community based policing' works in progressive fantasyland (everyone joins hands and sings kumbaya) and how community-based policing works in reality (amateur-hour vigilantism and use of deadly force in self-defense situations).
For what it's worth, Bragg might not charge Penny in this case, to avoid another humiliation like when they got pressured into dropping charges against the bodega worker. Bragg might also just not have the political capital/bravery to pursue questionable charges against both Penny and Trump at the same time.
There is no "quite". They ARE ignoring the vulnerability of other people.
I agree. I live in LA and we know here that if we call the cops and say “there is a homeless man saying crazy things and scaring me,” they won’t come. That’s just the reality of the situation, and some people will feel they have to step in and fill that role. I would prefer that didn’t happen, and to have professionals to rely on rather than random civilians, but in some places it doesn’t feel like there is anyone to ask for help.
There is a mini encampment forming in my neighborhood and the guys who live there aren’t the craziest I’ve seen but definitely behave erratically. I called 311 to ask about cleaning it up and they actually came…and just threw out their trash for them (room service). I called 311 back and asked why they didn’t remove the encampment and they said “well they weren’t committing a crime.” They told me to call back if they assault someone. So dumb.
If governments abdicate their responsibility to uphold public safety they need to be held accountable.
The NYPD budget is extremely high and policing in the subways has increased, I think that in this particular case it's hard to blame 'defunding the police' moreso a failure of NYC's mental health infrastructure. In like SF I can see it but here probably not.
Also worth noting the one time I actually called the NYPD and told them a homeless person was sleeping in my building they came immediately with a mental health worker and handled the situation extremely well. Idk if this is common but it's worth actually trying before just assuming the police won't do anything
I work in NyC entail health. Mental health facilities are overburdened. However. I guaranfuckingty that he didn't want treatment. And without a mental hygiene warrant, you cannot force people into treatment perhaps more people with SMi would want treatment if the providers were more skilled.
I was not aware that they have increased policing on the subway
Yeah the the schizophrenic never want treatment. They're paranoid of everything including treatment. The same reason they need treatment is the same reason they won't accept treatment and the same reason they can't stay on and follow treatment.
Yeah the improvement in numbers was such that even the NYPost credited Hochul and Adams credit.
https://nypost.com/2023/03/12/policing-nycs-subways-is-working-but-not-nearly-enough/
Good to know glad to gear
Yeah I think striking the right balance on criminal justice is very important. We need to balance the right to public safety with the right to equal justice and rehabilitation but I do think enforcement of some public order rules matters.
Cops are fucking everywhere when I ride the subway now
How awful for you.
Idk what you mean I wasn't implying it was awful. It actually is good. It definitely makes my girlfriend feel safer.
Do you have any theories on why there are so many more homeless now, in many big cities?
I think there are many factors: some of it is economics. Some of it is that so many mental health providers are at capacity and so people are not getting the healthcare they need AND if they are they are not seeing their doctor for long enough. I also think that the police used to sweep homeless people off the street and we stopped doing that.
It's more that the initial anti police movement in 2020 led to a deep hole being dug in terms of lawlessness, that police departments across most major cities in north America are still trying to dig their way out of almost 3 years later. They're struggling to hire and the cops they do have are now more reluctant to do their jobs, knowing it might get filmed and put on CNN for every progressive to armchair quarterback.
So you're arguing the Ferguson effect is real and is affecting performance? There's a lot of disputed evidence on that subject. In my view it comes down to the leadership of the city actually supporting the cops, I think in NYC the leadership largely support the cops doing their jobs.
Ferguson effect coupled with/compounded by a tight labour market - everyone is short staffed these days not just police departments.
With all the other job opportunities out there, who wants to be a cop in this day and age?
NYC's mental health infrastructure?
I think you mean the US. We have no mental health infrastructure. If you commit a serious enough crime AND happen to be severely mentally imbalanced you may be permanently locked up. Otherwise there is no mental health infrastructure for the poor and or severely crazy. It's just rotating through the system pointlessly.
We need to stop pretending 100% can be rehabilitated. I say that knowing full well a close relative of mine would never and has never been capable of succeeding on their own without immense and incredibly draining family support. She has ruined lives, marriages, friendships and careers of the people around her and hasn't worked a day in almost 40 years.
I feel you man. That's so hard to hear but so familiar. I was born to a parent with a frustrating and complex mental disorder that they would absolutely not seek help for and would never have been mandated to because they were never ever violent. The other was addicted to drugs, another mental health issue that nobody would demand treatment for in order to participate in society.
They just don't think of us when in reality these are our diseases too.
NYPD is well-budgeted but that doesn't help if they're being ordered not to enforce the laws, in this case the laws against sleeping in the subway, jumping turnstyles and 'harassment' which is what this would have been classified as. In 2016-2017 there was 1 death in the subway system, there were more than 20 last year.
But there’s no reason to think that random vigilante violence would do anything to protect people either, unless you think we should declare open season on homeless and mentally ill people on the street. For every actual act of violence there’s dozens of incidents where someone is yelling and acting out but nobody else is hurt. (It’s not clear to me yet whether this was A or B there, but it does seem like nobody was in reasonable fear for their life). I agree that we need to do something about the yelling and acting out too, but just because the police and government services aren’t being effective doesn’t license anyone else to go around using force preemptively, and it wouldn’t be effective if they did.
They weren’t “on the street.” They were crowded into a subway car, a very narrow metal tube that was careening through Brooklyn and Queens, mainly in long dark tunnels.
Big difference.
These would’ve been people familiar with the subway and random “crazy people.” yet they viewed him as a particular problem and potential danger. An assessment that would seem to now be vindicated by either our knowledge of his recent brutal unprovoked subway assault or his recent attempt to kidnap a child.
It was a horrible tragedy. But the idea that clearly everyone should have just sat on their hands and hoped for the best is naive and presumptuous.
> but it does seem like nobody was in reasonable fear for their life
What are you basing this on? Multiple people called 911.
I’m not arguing they weren’t justifiably afraid of physical harm. I’m saying specifically they don’t seem to have been in reasonable fear for their life, from what I’ve seen so far.
I have no clue how you are coming to that conclusion
Has any witness said they feared for their life? Penny certainly hasn’t.
I honestly wouldn't expect a reasonable person to draw a distinction. "Oh this deranged person may fracture my skull or stab me, but they probably won't kill me" is not something you can expect a person to think in that situation. It's very fight-or-flight. At some level, legitimate fear of any level of violence towards you is the same as fear for your life.
But that distinction still exists, and will be key if this goes to a grand jury or to trial. It’s obviously terrifying, but the question for the use of lethal force is whether a reasonable fear of death existed.
That assumes the force used was intentionally lethal.
If you shoot a guy in the head and he dies, yeah you need to be able to show reasonable fear of death.
If you shoot a guy in the foot and he dies, you don't necessarily need to show reasonable fear of death, merely reasonable fear of bodily harm, because you wouldn't necessarily expect shooting someone in the foot to turn out, in hindsight, to be an appllication of lethal force.
Correct. But then the question is going to be whether he can reasonably have believed that a three minute chokehold would be non-lethal (and that it was required for safety).
Unless something about the moment before contact comes out that casts things differently (and that could go either way), I think at most it’s negligence, and even on that I doubt he’d be convicted. But I still don’t want to live in a society that greenlights lethal violence by citizens as a solution to non-legal threats, that just goes to a bad place.
Fuck that. If someone is possibly attacking others in public, they have forfeited any concern for their well-being. End of story. If they end up dead that is on them. It is a pretty simple and enforceable social norm.
The 911 calls Jesse mentioned indicated that people thought he had a weapon and would use it. I would say that qualifies.
The stories I can find say that one of the callers said that one of the people involved in the fight was armed, but that it was not clear which person they meant (and neither of them was armed in fact).
There were five calls in total, but at least two of them were reporting the struggle after it started. The transcripts aren’t available so it’s not yet clear to me whether the others were made before or after the physical altercation started.
The ones after it started aren’t a reliable indicator of the level of threat before. What happens when unexpected events happen in front of people is that they try to figure out what’s going on by a process of speculation and discussion, but very often they come to incorrect conclusions in the moment. It’s natural, not malicious, but it wouldn’t reflect the state of mind before the altercation started.
Jesse’s point is that NYers see a lot of crazy & aren’t quick to call 911 on most days, but they were during that ride. Your assessment of their actual risk doesn’t erase what the ppl who called the police were seeing in that moment.
I’m specifically saying two things:
1. A call to 911 does not in itself imply a threat to life (vs injury, self-injury, etc). I agree that the threat must have been elevated to trigger it, but without the content of the calls you can’t say for sure that they were afraid someone would die.
2. Those calls made after the altercation began don’t reflect the situation beforehand. Of course I would call 911 if I saw two people fighting on a train, and if I had overheard someone speculating about one of them having a weapon, I might repeat that to the operator. There’s nothing wrong with that but it’s not evidence of the state of things before the fight.
Dude- I'm a 55 year old woman who isn't large. If someone punches me in the face, I might be compromised for the rest of my life. Chronic pain, brain injury, whatever. I would go from a productive busy working nurse to someone maybe on disability. At least for a while. Which I can't afford.
Absolutely. But the law about when you can kill someone in self-defense or the defense of others (in NY and CA and I think most places) requires that there be a reasonable fear of death, specifically.
I don’t think the distinction is really that hard to make. And it doesn’t mean I’m diminishing the fear of serious bodily harm. But it’s the difference between being afraid you’ll get punched (which can be fatal, but rarely) and having someone point a gun at you, or pull out a knife.
I don’t think Penny intended to use lethal force either. But he still did. The intent matters, but so does the outcome, and what he did is not legal unless certain conditions were true. Whether he’ll be charged or convicted is another question.
Not sure that’s for anyone to claim. If that was the case we could basically throw out every progressive claim that speech is violence. (Which we do, but that doesn’t mean they don’t feel it.) I have been in many situations with erratic homeless people where I’ve felt totally safe one minute and “holy shit” the next. It’s regrettable all around but I don’t blame anybody for acting in self defense. Being fully in control of your rational brain is literally impossible when your amygdala takes over.
For 13 years I have lived in a pretty mixed-race single family neighborhood right in a large city, but it is quiet and off the beaten path. You might see homeless people on the main commercial drag 3 blocks away, but they don't come back into our neighborhood.
Except one day this junkie gets dropped off by an Uber on our street while I am out playing Frisbee with my 7yo kid on the sidewalk. Dude is 6'6", ~55, built like a boxer. Maybe housed, but pretty rough looking. So he knocks on a few doors randomly. Kind of suspicious, looks confused, sits on a porch for a while, for sure some sort of junkie.
Then he comes over and asks where he is...
I tell him and he says he got dropped off on the wrong street, or maybe he gave the driver the wrong street. I ask him if he needs anything, or any help, or if he would like something to eat or drink. He says no, no he is fine and goes back to sitting on a different neighbor's front porch.
So then he comes over to try and talk again, but isn't making a lot of sense, I try to be polite and even offer to give him money for an Uber so he can get to where he is going (he admits it is to a drug house).
He says nah and goes back to sitting on my neighbor's porch. I suggest he sit on my porch since it is in the shade, and I am home unlike my neighbor, he declines, but then my neighbor gets home.
Neighbor is also nice/helpful to him, but he continues to not make a ton of sense, goes and sits on a different porch.
Ok so far this whole situation is mildly unpleasant, and worth keeping an eye on, but no big deal...
And then he suddenly produces a cell phone, and makes a few calls where he talks loudly to some presumed friends about how racist we all are (people trying to be nice to him and help him) and how he is going to beat the shit out of us including the kid, and that he used to be a professional boxer, etc. Fantastic! Openly speculating about whether he could take the two of us.
So we are about to call the police, when he comes over again, but asks for help with where he is and the address, alternating between being normal, and super hostile.
He then calls and Uber and is gone 15 minutes later.
It’s easy to say that from the safety of your laptop view of what happened.
Sure. The same view we all have. We can all imagine whatever we want, but if someone who was there was actually afraid for their life, I would have thought we’d have heard that by now.
Right. But the question will be whether a chokehold like that, held for that long, was proportionate and did not bring an obvious risk of death. Unarmed grappling is not in all cases lethal force, but choking someone potentially is, as was demonstrated here.
These are the questions that will be brought to the grand jury and at trial, and even if you’re mad at me about it, I don’t think they have obvious answers.
What’s maybe more interesting than just arguing about it is comparing this to Rittenhouse. I think Rittenhouse had a far, far stronger legal case, because he had guns pointed at him. But I think he had a much weaker moral case, because he voluntarily put himself in a situation where that could be anticipated. Penny was a bystander who acted in the moment. I have far more sympathy for Penny than Rittenhouse.
But good intentions only go so far. When you kill someone unnecessarily, we investigate and you face the consequences, and that’s as it should be.
You're assuming a lot with the word 'random'. Vigilante interventions into violence will still do more than no interventions at all, though obviously plan A should be the state monopoly on violence. That social contract only works when cops and prosecutors keep the Neely's of the world off public transportation.
It’s random because it will be a small subset of the people acting out who experience a vigilante intervention, and it’s also a small subset of the people acting out who will do harm afterwards. Meanwhile those interventions are temporary, or should be. So any direct effect is going to be very small.
Then there’s all kinds of ways in which the net effect could be more violence and harm. Trying to restrain someone is going to produce an immediate escalation in the amount of force they’re using.
Sure, but on the flip side, as more people inevitably decide their only shot at public safety is taking matters into their own hands, that small subset will grow larger. And in terms of Pavlovian conditioning, if acting out repeatedly leads to asskickings, even mentally ill people will eventually either tone it down or relocate to an area with fewer vigilantes, like an empty alley, to have their outbursts.
Maybe. I just don’t think there’s enough people who’ll take that risk, and I think the effects on the crazy people are hard to predict.
I’m over 200lb and strong, but there’s no way I would preemptively try to restrain anyone who hadn’t yet used physical force themselves. (It’s not clear to me yet whether this guy had done so. I’m just talking in general.)
I'm in a similar position, 6 ft 200lb weightlifter and I probably wouldn't either, but then I'm not a Marine
Agreed except to note in this particular case it appears to have reasonable self defense grounds.
Also, I don't think framing every interaction like this as "were you in fear for your life" is useful. I don't need to think someone is going to literally murder me for me to feel unsafe. Getting punched in the face or shoved or even just screamed at wildly most likely won't result in my dying, but it's something I feel justified in not wanting to happen and reacting to if feels unhinged enough. Again, if given the chance, I'd just run, but then again I'm sure the elderly woman who Neely punched would not have minded if someone stepped in on her behalf and took some measure of control of the situation.
You think about the number of times that police interact with people even homeless people the negatives are absolutely in the vast minority.
No, no, much better to get pushed onto a subway track. Just deal with it. What's the worst that could happen?
I don’t disagree about what will happen in practice, but the context above was asking a normative question about what people should do when police and government services fail to prevent these situations. And the normative answer needs to suggest something that is effective, proportionate, and not going to bring a bunch of unintended consequences.
I would bet my life that this marine had absolutely no intention of killing the homeless guy. He was restraining him, and it went bad. It was an accidental death.
I don’t think he meant to either, but the technique he used is notorious, so it’s at least not the same kind of accident as “I tried to grab him and he fell, hit his head and died”.
Yeah, we’ll see. What I’ve read is that a mistake in applying the hold that crushes the windpipe can easily be fatal (and may not be related to how long it was held - the damage could happen suddenly).
Re: “notorious”, use of arm chokeholds by police is banned by the DOJ, NYC, CA, etc. And I don’t think you need a medical degree to understand that even temporarily preventing someone from breathing or receiving oxygen to their brain carries a risk of death. Penny may have been specifically trained on this hold in the Marines, which is probably not going to help his case.
A properly applied RNC will cause loss of consciousness in around 5 seconds, because of compression on the carotid arteries cutting off bloodflow to the brain.
A sloppy RNC (or a knee to the back of the neck) will compress the windpipe instead of the carotids, which if not released, leads to what happened with George Floyd and Neely - they struggle for a matter of minutes as their brain is gradually starved of oxygen, and then they die.
Sudden, fatal crushing of the windpipe is really rare from chokeholds (or body weight from a knee on the neck); that's more of a risk you run if you soccer-kick someone full force in the Adams Apple while they're on the ground. It takes a ton of force to crush the windpipe so badly they still can't breathe even after the pressure is removed.
Seemed like it improved it here.
Yeah, I was off-put by how Jesse was, on the one hand, saying pretty clearly that, if a bunch of "hardened" New Yorkers were that freaked out, that by itself was prima facie evidence that the situation was quite serious, yet also just acting like everyone should have backed off and, I guess, waited until it actually went violent? I'm not some sort of super macho dude telling the soy-boy "I would've just decked him". I love me some martial arts movies, but I also know the difference between fantasy and real life and take the use of force very seriously. That being said, the problem with these sorts of situations where someone is acting erratically and showing a serious potential for violence is that you are inherently operating with a lot of uncertainty, but, if you only intervene when you *are* certain, it can easily be too late. Maybe Jordan wouldn't have ended up doing anything, maybe he would have come at someone and it didn't connect, people got away, maybe someone got a blackeye or split lip. Or maybe they get a TBI or worse. This all happens in a split second.
I think it was fully justified for people to intervene and try and restrain him; however, it definitely should be investigated to see if the use of force once he was ostensibly restrained was excessive. If so, yes, there should be the potential for some sort of legal repercussion. NOT because they intervened and restrained him, but if it turns out that they went beyond what they could reasonably deem necessary in such a way that showed a reckless disregard for Jordan's life.
Again, such a tiresome aspect of our culture that this is either "wait to get stabbed by a person having a psychotic episode" or "shoot anybody who looks at you." It's like Marky Mark talking about how he wouldn't have let 9/11 happen because he gets up at 4am to workout in his mansion. Sick, bruh. Dudes on United 93 were total cucks! WOO.
Violence is not something most people deal with in any meaningful way and it just seems insane to have these rational discussions about "why didn't he have full control of a chaotic situation" when most of us would have most likely just waited to get punched and then felt bad about it for the next five months while wishing we had done something differently and blaming ourselves for chaos descending on us in a steel tube hurtling (trudging?) beneath the surface of the Earth.
I think the marine was justified- morally- in intervening. I don't think he had reckless disregard for Jordan's life probably. I think adrenaline and animal instincts took over ( yes, we are animals and we have those).
I’d actually really like to hear their response to this. I hear this a lot too and at this point I feel like it is codifying cowardice as the correct cultural response. It’s hard to see such a thing as a good development for society, and no one seems to be able to make a coherent case on why it’s desirable and good. It’s become extremely frustrating and I am starting to think this is going to be catastrophic for progressivism (both sane and otherwise) for decades to come.
“Unless you are being pummeled by a lunatic you should just sit there, do nothing, and wait for it to happen.”
Did they say bystanders shouldn't do anything?
I don't think so. I think they just said in their experience, bystanders who experience it every day just try to ignore it or get off the train.
I love BARpod but there are times where I wish Jesse would start eating meat and lifting weights or dabbling in HRT*. The notion that you shouldn't defend yourself when you're feeling threatened to one degree or another is odd. Now, of course, most self-defense experts will tell you, hey, if you're in danger your first move should be to RUN. But if you can't run, you have to know how to defend yourself, even if this opens you up to some risk in the moment or down the road. It's an odd stance to say "he shouldn't have done that" from the comfort of a podcast.
*And I mean this as a friend, Jesse. Let me guide you to the wonders of regenerative farming and pastured venison and elk and deadlifts.
"feeling threatened to one degree or another" is really way too vague for me. This kind of thinking would justify that asshole who shot a girl who was turning around in his driveway, Ahmad Arbury, and hundreds of other incidents. I think taht, rightly, especially in a place where guns are everywhere, that the law doesn't see it that way.
Its not just the push for a decrease in police. The local attorney's in cities across America are declining to prosecute cases. When they do prosecute, they are pushing for limited sentencing. Everything boils down to incentives or disincentives. And currently the disincentives to doing crime are shrinking.
Right! The MSU shooter was not prosecuted on gun charges and so he...had guns. Which he used to kill young people.
Given how out of control the situation has gotten with the homeless population in many US cities the past few years, I've been genuinely surprised (i) by how little vigilantism there appears to have been and (ii) that organized crime doesn't seem to have moved back into the protection racket business at all.
Give it some time. Things degrade much more and this could easily start happening twenty times a month.
Would not be surprised if this began happening more and more. The central nervous systems of most NYers must be threadbare.
The vigilanties are too busy shooting people that turn their car around around in their driveways to attack actual criminals.
That doesn't make any sense? The people shooting at cars approaching their houses (elderly recluses in rural areas) are basically a completely different demographic than the people who most frequently encounter homeless people.
The outrage should be about that - why was this man left to suffer with such severe mental health problems?
Schizophrenia can be a very intractable problem, especially when adults with it refuse treatment. The book Katie mentioned, Jonathan Rosen's The Best Minds, is very good on the policy and treatment challenges.
I’m halfway through it! A brilliant book!
For sure and I downloaded that book but this guy had over 40 arrests, multiple assaults. It just seems like there would have been a better solution.
The legal barrier to holding someone for more than 24-72 hours (state laws vary) is very high. Generally, you can't do it unless someone's an imminent danger, and past violence doesn't count. Lots of people want the laws changed, but they haven't been so far, and civil-rights groups often oppose change, due to understandable concerns about how freely we institutionalized people who weren't an imminent threat under the old statutes.
Neely also had an outstanding warrant for assault, so there was no legal barrier to getting him off that subway car, merely an enforcement barrier.
The implications of allowing an ideologically captured profession to permanently imprison disagreeable individuals with little or no due process are legitimately horrifying. I’ve signed commitment orders (not a regular part of my current job but one rotates in this business) and I take it very seriously, but not everyone does.
I don’t like having these sorts of seriously ill people wandering the streets because they refuse treatment, but I don’t know what the solution is.
Are you concerned some psychiatrists would start locking people in asylums for "clinical pathological transphobia" if they get caught listening to BARPod?
Not sure if you say that in jest, but it would be a terrible full circle if a profession that once imprisoned women for "hysteria" when their husbands got sick of them then came to imprison men for speaking basic facts. And given the way some custody battles go, it's not far-fetched to imagine someone trying to use the increasingly politicized language of mental health to get rid of someone.
Because we decided mental hospitals were bad but didn’t have an alternate plan for what to do with all the broken toys after we closed them.
I think there's enough outrage to go around. Literally nobody looks good in this story from a rational perspective, least of all the legislators in charge of trying to run nyc.
Because of many, many ACLU lawsuits and policy decisions, we cannot hold insane people against their will. Full stop. We cannot forcibly medicate them. We have no carrots, and no sticks. He suffered because he did not want to take his meds. And we couldn't make him.
Two minutes and fifty-five seconds, not fifteen minutes.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-65506075
I should qualify this by saying this video, which wasn’t attached and I haven’t seen, was timed at 2’55”. I can’t confirm that it captures the whole incident but 15 minutes seems to be an exaggeration.
People are bad at estimating time under pressure. I doubt it was 15 minutes but it may have felt like that.
Also, it may also explain why the marine held on too long.
I accept that 15 minutes of constant choking is an error on my part but I think that's kind of besides the point because the low end of 3 minutes is still enough to kill a guy. Penny could have wrapped the guy up
Penny could have also taken the less lethal means of striking with closed fists, but I would assume he chose the choke hold as a less violent option, to just restrain the guy until police arrived.
Yeah I mentioned elsewhere that, in hindsight, Penny would have been better off kicking the shit out of Neely, but it's understandable why he would in the moment have thought the chokehold was a more humane option.
Not everyone has the same ability to gauge time, especially in stressful situations. Armchair quarterbacking is easy.
NYC fucked up and let a man with obvious violent tendencies roam free after seriously injuring an older woman in an unprovoked assault, and attempting to kidnap a 7-year-old child. He should not have been on the streets. The city put the people on the train in the position of judging whether the crazy guy is making empty threats or if he's going to assault/kill them. Systemic denialism.
Opposition to prisons as a whole? That's bonkers.
I don’t think he should have done what he did, I just mean that when people encounter a scary situation and feel like there aren’t other options, they might think they have to take matters into their own hands, like this guy did. And even if he is a former marine, that doesn’t make him qualified to handle this situation, obviously, and this terrible thing happened.
For all the pigeon holing people do with stuff like this, funny I haven't heard anyone bring up the possibility that Penny was also mentally unwell and just another victim of "not enough services".
PTSD from military service? We don’t know. But ppl are quick to malign ppl in the military.
How is the word "assault" being used here and who did Neely assault on this train car?
Lol pretty funny quoting Merriam Webster to discuss a legal terms definition that doesn't apply to NYS and having to say "it's appropriate" at the end.
He didn't have a gun or knife and he threw some shit. He yelled his arms and threatened the train car. The idea that those factors mean you can walk up behind a person and choke them past death is very steep compared to Neely's actions.
It's very funny that you think I don't understand the terms or I'm playing semantics when you're using a general term and applying it an actual event in a real city with it's own laws.
Whether we're using the colloquial meaning or the legal one, I think I've seen enough information to say that choking this guy to death was excessive. You seem to be making the argument that the general assault definition should be used here for some reason.
Colloquially, he assaulted them verbally. Maybe physically if you think throwing garbage - maybe a plastic bottle or his sweatshirt - meets that threshold for physical.
Sometimes crazy people get on the subway and yell. They yell disgusting, awful shit, can be erratic and gesture at people and most times we move to the other side because it's a nuisance that you deal with. And I'm talking about generally threatening behavior, not just smelling like shit. This reported behavior from Neely doesn't rise to meet the level of an assault to me as it's going to be used in NYC and it doesn't meet the general meaning as interpreted by me either.
"And you're using the term colloquially, misunderstanding the legal definition, and then pretending NY statute is all that matters when discussing the case."
I didn't realize Cornell Law superceded NYC law in this case.
"We can talk about whether Penny was justified under NY statute (almost definitely, but not using the term "assault"), under the principles of general US self defense law (almost definitely, and freely using the term assault), or under an abstract moral philosophy (almost definitely, and we can make up whatever words we want as long as they communicate a clear meaning). The fact is, they're essentially the same laws with different names for things. If your hangup is the use of the term assault, when you are wrong about the definition of the term assault, you are playing semantics."
They're not essentially the same laws if one place requires more burden of proof.
"If your biggest complaint here is with the use of the term "assault" in a state where "assault" doesn't mean "assault," we can have a discussion without using the word.
The fact is, Neely put people in a position to be in fear for their safety. He expressed threats verbally, expressed threats physically, and his erratic behavior along with statements about not being afraid to go to jail and expecting to die that day were more than enough to make the threats credible and imminent. That justifies restraining him in all 50 states, no question. If he hadn't died, would you be fine with Penny restraining him until police arrived?"
This isn't some gotcha that you're uncovering..I said as much in multiple comments. I'm okay with a person restraining someone acting erratically.
"If you are okay with restraining him, do you believe Penny intended to choke him to death? I find that very hard to believe. Any argument you make about "you don't get to choke somebody to death for yelling things" has to acknowledge that Penny wasn't trying to choke anybody to death."
I don't need to think Penny intended to choke Neely to death. You seem like you're pretty sure Penny didn't intend to choke Neely to death but you have no way of knowing that.
"Sometimes crazy people get on the subway and yell. Rarely does that result in 3 people calling 911 before somebody steps in to restrain the crazy person. Rarely does that person have a well-known history of random violent outbursts, or multiple arrests for attacking strangers. This is not a simple case of a crazy person yelling on the subway, and you know it."
Penny can make the argument that throwing a sweatshirt or garbage around and no physical violence from Neely meets the threshold for this response.Yeah, it's not a simple case now because someone was choked to death and that warrants an investigation because it's so abnormal
Well, I'm sure when you were in a scary, chaotic adrenalin charged incident you stuck to your script perfectly.
How did it go down when you did it?
Well I was very intimidated by this molly person from the midwest. My adrenaline was going and I was shaking and then I saw a comment where she said that maybe Penny didn't mean to kill Neely with a several minute long choke. Seemingly not realizing that cutting off a guy's airway for minutes might kill him. And knowing that this Midwest person doesn't understand that cutting off air is vital made me not as scared.
I've mostly avoided all the crazy people in my commutes on buses and trains in the city. But if all you need is a story of a person who didn't kill the threatening homeless guy, I can point to my 65 year old dad at the time. Sure it was inadvisable for him to involve himself but he wrapped up a homeless guy who was yelling and erratic on the 5 train until cops arrived at the next stop.
I don't buy the idea that a choke from behind for minutes on a guy who is only generally threatening was the only way to go and I don't buy the whole "you can't judge Penny" tone of your response if my 65 year old office working dad can do a better job restraining a guy who makes it out alive with the same type of general threat
Or maybe you could use an example from Portland where two upstanding men tried to talk an aggressive person down and got stabbed and died. I'm not saying I agree with the choke hold but it is wishful thinking that there is actually some sort of *correct* thing to do in these scenarios. I'm glad your 65 year old dad was able to subdue that guy in that specific instance. There is no indication that would have work in this instance. I'm not caping for choke holds but I'm so uninterested in one off examples that have no practical application to this scenario or policy in general.
Hey! Sometimes you should talk to a crazy dude and it works! Sometimes you can just bear hug them and it works! I have no suggestions for when these suggestions don't work!
You could use that example but you'd be replacing a guy throwing a jacket on the ground and yelling threats with a guy who prior to the stabbing was already yelling threats and physically accosting people like stealing their shit.
I'm cool with looking at these two situations, understanding the facts and timeline as they are, and saying that choking a guy to death was extreme, especially considering he was still being choked when his wrists were also restrained.
Also this was very funny. Uses an example from Portland and then says "I'm so uninterested in one off examples that have no practical application to this scenario or policy in general."
Since you are interested in examples despite what you wrote, I would say that my example of my dad on the NYC subway restraining a homeless person without killing them is a better comparison for a guy walking up to a homeless guy who's not physically attacking anyone but is yelling threats and chokes the hobo to death on the subway platform and not even letting go when the guy's wrists are restrained.
But yeah, if you want to bring up the example where the jacket is actually a knife, go for it.
People in chokeholds in the context of MMA know that they also have an obligation to tap-out for their own safety. Neely could have just let himself be restrained. It's possible he was fighting the restraint, and that it was a combination of the restraint & Neely continuing to resist the restraint that unfortunately led to his death.
Right, I think “used clearly disproportionate force” can also be the result of a mistake rather than malice, but it is a different kind of accident to “the restrained person died unexpectedly while held with force proportionate to the threat”. And the fine distinctions there are why we have professional police officers. Given current evidence the force used was clearly disproportionate to the threat posed, perhaps unintentionally. A criminal investigation is obviously merited. (That doesn’t mean I think for sure he should have been held, charged, etc - that may or may not have been appropriate, we’ll find out.)
Because Neeley hadn’t actually hit anyone, I am leaning toward low-level manslaughter--you have to be careful when you restrain someone before their threat level is clear . (Maybe he can get the same deal Neeley got for an unprovoked attack on an old woman--that could absolutely have killed her.)
If Neeley had gotten around to attacking someone I wouldn’t feel that his restrainer had the duty to know what he was doing--you force someone to restrain you from attacking others, it might turn out they don’t know how to do that safely. That’s why we have cops.
You need to listen to the latest Advisory Opinion episode on this because you'll learn that you're incorrect. He doesn't have to hit anyone first. Jury instructions in self defense cases ask jurors to consider "reasonable people" felt like Neely "posed an imminent threat to him or others", self defense was justifiable. They'd have to prove he *intended to kill* Neely (say if Penny drew a gun and shot him, as opposed to trying to physically restrain him).
Exactly. He wasn't trying something disproportionate like pulling a gun on him. He was trying to hold him until police could come. From what I've heard lawyers saying the law says the DA would have to be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Penny took that action with the intention of killing him. Later video showed that Penny had put Neely in a recovery position, and that he waited for medical assistance to arrive. People intending to kill someone else don't usually do that.
There was also a second guy (nameless as far as I can tell) who was there helping to restrain Neely. The two of them could have held him down by the arms easily.
I'm sure that Penny regrets what he did, and it was a horrible accident, but that doesn't necessarily mean he shouldn't face charges. Involuntary manslaughter maybe? I'm not a lawyer but I think if you accidentally kill someone it's reasonable to at least face charges, even if he ends up being ultimately acquitted if it's ruled pure self defense.
It's not an accidental death in the way you're thinking when self defense is involved. He chose a proportional response (physical restraint). Reasonable people felt that Neely posed an imminent threat, and they were confined in the space of a subway car. They'd have to be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Penny went into the act of holding Neely with the intent to kill him to hold him responsible.
You’re assuming one’s sense of time is constant no matter the circumstances.
NY fucked up by letting a clearly troubled guy bounce around the system, with 40 arrests in a decade, mental health problems exacerbated by drug use. He wasn't going to live happily ever after. I suggest you listen to the most recent episode of Advisory Opinions on this topic. If Penny's intent was to immobilize Neely until help arrived, and reasonable people agree that there was imminent danger to him or others, it will be up to *prosecutors* to prove *beyond a reasonable doubt* that he intended to KILL him.
"If Reasonable people" is doing allllll the lifting there as it seems unreasonable to this - all credit to Jesse for this phrase - hardened NYer.
Prosecutors actually don't have to prove that Penny intended to kill Neely if they're not going for a particular charge. Do you think people don't go to prison for accidentally killing someone?
I'm not going to listen to that podcast unless you can tell me they were on the train. I don't know why you think I'd care about their opinions if they also weren't there.
It's helpful to know how these things are considered in the law. If you contend a crime has been committed, it will be judged there, not in a Substack thread. The podcast goes over jury instructions, which are in plain English and which guide a jury in making their decisions in cases like this. If you wish to write angry comments free from the burden of knowledge about how the law works, that's your choice.
"Do you think people don't go to prison for accidentally killing someone?" Accidentally killing someone in a car accident is different than a self defense case (and if you listen to the podcast you'll hear it's not about whether he thought Neely was a threat to him, but to others around them as well).
The thing people who are condemning Penny before he's been charged need to know is that all of these protests, some which affect subway transit, are going to make it more likely a future trial (if it goes to trial) will be moved to a different jurisdiction because it will make it harder to find an impartial jury. If it's moved -- hardened New Yorkers who are more used to mentally unwell people will not BE on the jury, it could be in a suburb of NY where ppl aren't using the subway as often (though I understand there are a lot of commuters, but ppl who commute do so because they don't WANT to live in the city).
When violence happens no one is in control. That’s really deeply hard for people to wrap their heads around. The best most highly trained fighter you’ve ever seen isn’t Batman and could kill someone completely by mistake or be killed by some random person who got lucky. At best you can make it less chaotic. That’s why we have such strong violence taboos.
When the city allows sick people who are too sick to get treatment to just wander around until they die in public things like this happen because people will have to make very hard choices about their own safety. And the whole purpose of why we have institutions is to prevent choices like this from needing to be made.
I’m so sad for a fourteen year old kid whose mother was murdered and thrown in a suitcase. He should have had some place to go where he would have been kept safe and fed and warm, where he couldn’t harm anyone including himself. And I understand the twenty four year old marine later in life crossing his path having to do what he throughly was necessary for his safety and the safety of others.
It sounds like it was three minutes which if the guy is fighting the whole first two minutes probably didn’t feel that long or how much longer he held on after. You can’t expect someone to be Batman in a self defense situation. People will watch a Chuck Norris movie and think it’s real. Nobody actually has that level of physical mastery over another person. Even with stuff like Jiu Jitsu that is effective it’s like “oh are we fighting near furniture? That’s a whole different thing.”
“When violence happens no one is in control.”
Very true. People who’ve never been in a violent interaction don’t realize this.
I used to work in a bar. One Sunday night towards closing, there were only a couple customers, and two staff, the night manager tending bar, and me being bar back. In walk two inebriated characters. They had come in before and been refused service and again they were told to leave. An argument ensued and was escalating in the drunk’s side. I was about three steps away from this. Finally, the drunk said, “Ya know what?” And he came around the bar and slammed his hand down on the bartender’s shoulder. Next thing I knew I was halfway down the room arms extended straight out with the back of the guy’s jacket in my bunched fists, his feet are dangling in midair (I’m tall) and he’s screaming “Put me down! Put me down!” I did, at the door and that was that. But.
I lost time. I have no memory of moving in and grabbing the guy. It was probably only ten seconds, but it still freaks me out. I’m not a violent person, not even prone to yelling. But I sometimes wonder what might have happened if he or his friend had fought back. What would I have not remembered if that had been the case?
Now I know what “blind rage” is, and it scares me.
I’ve heard about the micro dosing T in perimenopausal women that Katie mentioned. See now, aging as a woman is a disease that needs remedy, hormonal remedy. No doubt that the hormone replacement therapy probably makes a lot of 40 year old women feel better, and honestly, I’m tempted, just so I can keep my mid drift tight and get some energy, but I’m also so fucking tired of every stage of life as a female being treated as a condition that we need saving from with hormones.
Scared of puberty and becoming an adult human female? We have hormones for that. Are the burdens of existing as an adult human female with your natural fertility intact too overwhelming? We have hormones for that too. Are you an adult human female who has to unfortunately continue to exist after your natural “fuckable” age? We have hormones for that.
Seems like life as a woman in her natural hormonal state is a medical condition that warrants therapy. I’m over it. All of it.
Having kids and getting old do not make women failures as humans, but you wouldn’t be able to tell by how we treat both fertility and aging as disease in WOMEN.
I don't know exactly what the moms Katie follows are up to, but sometimes women will be prescribed small amounts of testosterone to treat things like low libido. (Side effects include issues you'd expect, like growth of some unwanted body hair.) Since all women have some naturally occurring T, anyway, I guess I'd want to know what's meant by "microdosing T" before I formed an opinion on whether these specific women should be taking it for their specific issues.
As someone who doesn't want any more body hair than what I've already got and has a strong bias against taking drugs I don't absolutely need, I can tell you I won't be starting T anytime soon. But I'm not dead set against other people taking it for what ails them if they've got reasonable doctors/NPs who think a low dose is OK.
One can think a therapy is largely bogus and still recognize their are exceptional cases that might warrant the treatment.
Lowering libido with age is not a disease or even AT ALL unnatural. Women’s sex drive NATURALLY isn’t the same as men’s. Now, if some women want to take T to want to want to have relations that is a personal choice, personally i don’t want to be drugged into wanting to fuck after my fertility is gone, but I still don’t think it’s beneficial to women to treat all inconvenient physical aspects of being a woman as negative “symptoms”. As Mary stated above, a lot of the the time our bodies react poorly to poor environmental conditions. We could put our energies into recognizing and addressing the needs of women’s bodies instead of trying to drug our bodies into what even? Perpetually appearing fertile, but without fertility?
Why aren’t men offered hormones to temper all their ailments? Why don’t we offer a little estrogen or a little testosterone blocking when their libidos are out of control and they are ruining their marriages? Or how about the phenomena of becoming grumpy old men? There isn’t some hormone that would make old cantankerous men less insufferable. Estrogen has also been shown to be protective to the brain and is part of the reason men have higher rates of autism and schizophrenia. Why don’t we treat anti-social men with low doses of estrogen?
Hormone balancing is a whole thing on Instagram. Fortunately, most of the content is about ways to take care of yourself through diet, exercise and sleep to “rebalance” your hormones. Some of it also is med spas offering to do these panels to measure your Estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone and then coming up with a personalized cocktail. Low doses of t are suggested for the slow down of the metabolism that happens after 40.
Men do take hormones, e.g., to replace the testosterone that naturally declines as they age. I don't think a hypothetical male version of me would be up for that, but if the question is whether men's aging is sometimes treated pharmacologically, then the answer is definitely yes.
My dad was taking T shots for a while & my mom hated it. He was always slightly inappropriate with her & they give a disabled obese guy prone to anger T shots so he’s bugging my mom for sex (at least that’s what I was told without asking by my mom because I’m an only child & she doesn’t think to save that for her therapist).
Yeah, what do I know, but it kinda seems to me that if both members of a heterosexual couple in their 50s experience diminished libido, that might work out better than if one has lower libido and the other is still horny as a 25yo?
You make a good point, and I wholeheartedly agree about hormones for puberty or fertility, but knowing what I do about the menopause and the immense difficulties for some women that come with it, I'm actually very glad that HRT is available for that stage of life.
Wish I could like this a million times!
Well, to be honest, most men would rather wear a condom every time than not get laid at all, so women probably could do more to make men shoulder the contraceptive burden if women were willing to turn it into a game of chicken.
Also neither of my grandmothers had access to birth control. One had 4 and the other had 5 kids. What they had access to was education and the right to work, own property, and vote. I don’t think that rejecting the idea that women need to manage being a woman with hormones is necessarily an endorsement of the reversal of women’s rights. It’s not hormones or 15 kids.
This is the world view that I no longer believe in: that being female is a burden I would be better off being able to opt out of or, in essence I would be better off if my body were more like a man’s. We do have ways of controlling fertility. The barrier methods and copper iuds, and even natural cycle tracking, but also... not engaging in penetrative sex. If one thinks it’s too much of a burden, opt out. I no longer want to opt out of my body, nor do I want to teach my daughters that they NEED to opt out in order to live a dignified life.
“already this
morning
i have killed
a fox
with a baseball
bat”
—William Carlos Williams
Jesse: “This started because a man was loudly threatening people on the subway, and I think some of the riders interpreted it as he was going to kill somebody..
“..and a guy did what he probably shouldn’t have done and directly intervened.”
If a number of riders on that subway carriage reasonably believed Neely was going to kill someone how can anybody say nobody should have intervened?
Is the appropriate (ie liberal handwringing) response really to awkwardly witness a schized-out bum assault an innocent person and then just feel bad about it afterwards?
There have been many people saying Daniel Penny’s actions set some kind of dangerous “precedent.” Of course this is nonsense; most people just aren’t built to intervene the way he did.
Jesse again: “Once in a while on the New York subway you find somebody who is a little too crazy and you move to the next subway car.”
Ok great.. What does this achieve exactly?
I would bet the majority of people are glad to know there is the possibility of people like Daniel Penny on their subway car or in their neighbourhood who might just put themselves in harm’s way to protect them from the tragic Jordan Neely’s of this world.
I was a little staggered by the "move to another car" comment. Say there's a guy acting in an aggressive, irrational, generally hostile manner on the subway - with a mix of men, women, possibly children, who knows - what sort of man gets up and leaves them all to it? What sort of society is that? And when everybody in the car goes to do that, how do you think the aggressor will react then?
It’s very much the type of response that assumes that it’s okay for one person to benefit while others don’t. As you point out, probably not everyone can leave (and also older or more burdened people are probably the ones left behind). Also as a person who has done that, it’s not necessarily easy to pull off — it very much depends on where in the car you are, etc.
As a fellow big-city-dweller I didn’t take it that way. He was more saying, “people weirding you out is common, and you could just safely leave the subway car if you were bothered; this was different and people probably were in danger.”
If there was a mom with an infant or a small child, burdened by carrying all the crap mom’s have to carry, or a physically challenged person in the subway car it’s not as easy to move quickly.
And moving cars while the train is moving is absolutely crazy to me.. how is safe? You’re walking on a small grating completely exposed with no sides or walls? Shiver.
A Jesse sort of man does that.
Yes it’s really a pointless thing to say
"what sort of man gets up and leaves them all to it?"
The kind that pees sitting down, most likely.
From what I know of the situation, it doesn't seem like a huge problem that Penny intervened. It is a problem that he used a chokehold and killed the guy. He hasn't been charged yet, the DA is trying to figure out what happened and what laws may be appropriate. In other words, he's being professional and responsible, as people with positions of responsibility in the real world tend to be. Somehow this is lost when people log onto twitter too often. I don't think Daniel Penny is a horrible person, as much as I can tell about someone I've never met, but he did kill someone and should be investigated and possibly charged.
The thing is, if you try confronting the threatening person, it's likely no one will help you, it's also likely you will get hurt (even more likely when it's group of people who are causing trouble), and on top of that it's extremely likely you will be the one sued for assault. Police and security guards are usually to far/too busy to intervene. All in all, the safest thing is usually to do as Jessie described: try not to catch the attention of the threatening person, and flee as soon as possible. Another commenter said it was learned helplessness and it's exactly what it is.
I don't know if that's learned helplessness. I will say, my first strategy is to avoid attracting the attention of the crazy person. But that doesn't mean that if I saw them threatening or going after someone else I would still cower and flee. It really depends on the overall scenario. I'm not going to escalate and situation unnecessarily.
I feel it is in the sense that it trains people into accepting unacceptable situations on in a regular basis. And it's compounded by people who affirm these situations are normal.
I think of it more as self-preservation. Learned helplessness would be to stay put in a car where someone is behaving erratically. Getting yourself up and out the door and into a different car takes some agency.
I would never try to intervene. I'm too much of a scaredy-cat.
Someone tried to talk down a crazy person on my local train line, and the crazy person detonated a bomb that blew holes in the roof of the train car. If you click the link, do read to the end. It's totally insane. https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/new-details-on-weekend-cta-pink-line-explosion-injuring-suspect-and-several-riders/
That's terrifying!
Wasn’t there kids on a train setting fire to an older man’s clothes in a subway/ at a subway stop last yr where a FOX weatherman intervened? Walking away when seeing that would be unethical.
I do this, because I don't know whether the person is just annoying or is actually dangerous, and if he (or she) is dangerous, there's very little I—a tiny elderly woman—could do to defend myself or anyone else. There are rarely police anywhere nearby, and if they're around they are also ignoring what I see. "What does this achieve exactly?" It gets me out of a potentially dangerous situation that I am unable to predict, prevent, or mitigate.
A lot of the twitter people were saying, “why didn’t anyone offer Neeley food or water?” And... that is why. I personally would not get within grabbing distance of an unstable man making threats no matter what he claimed to need.
Yes but your personal situation isn’t really that different to anyone else’s. Nobody wants to be near, let alone confront, a volatile lunatic on the subway or anywhere else. It can be a split second before you’re spat at or stabbed or worse.
It’s a perfectly natural response to want to get as far as possible from people like Neely, which is why it is perfectly useless advice.
It also doesn’t scale. Yes, some people might get up and move to the next carriage when they see and hear someone like Neely start their shit; but obviously it doesn’t work if everybody does. And who’s to say there isn’t another Neely in the next carriage anyway?
This is why I asked what does it achieve.
Despite the terrible ending, Penny’s action at least dealt with the situation at hand on behalf of everyone nearby.
Don’t know how old this is, but it’s been floating around online today. The woman couldn’t even walk away when the man grabs her hair and you can see her mouthing “help me” but everyone around her is frozen. I think the 3 responses are flight, fight or freeze, and most people fall in the freeze category. I’ve been in situations around erratic people and the last thing I want to do is draw attention by making any sudden movements. I’d only move if a group of people were moving.
https://twitter.com/LeftismForU/status/1654208557259149316?s=20
You’re only allowed to be terrified of “cis” PMC white men. Everyone else gets one halo around their head for each identity card they’re carrying.
I remember that! And everyone was asking where the men were who could have stepped in.
Filming apparently! That woman was straight up taken hostage because she couldn't leave fast enough, it's really upsetting.
It’s too bad no one was around to put him in a chokehold.
I’ve seen that video. Many such cases. That woman was right to be terrified and it’s always frustrating when nobody deals with the perpetrator. Saying that, I can completely understand why they don’t.
Another video I saw today was footage of Neely after Penny let him go. The people there had put him in an approximation of the recovery position as they waited for the ambulance. Before the clip ends you can clearly see Neely take a deep breath, suggesting he was alive.
One video that appears to have been disappeared is the footage of what happened before Penny grabbed him..
It’s like being in a wildebeast herd. Danger comes, everyone flees, but some are faster or better positioned for escape. what you’re really betting on is that the predator doesn’t fixate on you and moves to an easier target.
"you don't need to outrun the predator, you just need to outrun your slowest friend"
It's a tough question, and IMHO some of depends on what specifically Neely said and did.
If you wait for him to punch somebody in the face or to draw a knife, it may be too late to try to restrain him. On the other hand, if you escalate to a fight based on verbal threats and body language, someone can get hurt or killed. I don't know the answer.
Human life isn’t that precious and we need to stop acting like it is. That is the answer.
Society is about rights and responsibilities. You don’t get to participate if you don’t hold up your end.
> Once in a while on the New York subway you find somebody who is a little too crazy and you move to the next subway car
I get that that's what people usually do. It's what most people do in most situations like that.
But multiple people had called 911. And there are women and, if I recall, young people still on the train sort of cowering at the far end.
What I'd ask those who walked off is how'd they'd feel if that woman and child you scooted by as you got off the car was stabbed to death. For many, they wouldn't feel much. They'd blame it on the crazy guy and probably have a sense of "well, I made the right choice".
But some people would not forgive themselves. They'd feel a great deal of personal responsibility for abandoning people less capable of them. I'm not surprised that a young marine probably falls into the second category and not the first.
I guarantee Penny stayed not because he didn't think he could get away. He intervened because he didn't think it'd be right to just let the guy do whatever he was going to do.
Great episode and nuanced explanation of what led to Neely’s death.
I’d recommend people watch this news segment from 7 years ago about the choking of an aggressive passenger on an LA subway: https://youtu.be/M1LqoUPjqRQ
One guy is combative, hasn't hit anyone, a passenger chokes him from behind, the combative guy loses consciousness, and the passenger gets invited for a glowing TV interview with the title: "Subway hero describes showdown with combative passenger”.
The choking in that case didn’t lead to death, but that was pretty much luck. The passenger even says in the interview he had no training, didn’t know what he was doing, but just acted.
The only variable that’s wildly different between the two cases is the race of the people involved, and perhaps the fact (although unclear from the video) that the Marine may have held on to the choke a bit longer after Neely went limp.
Obviously, we don't want people taking the law into their own hands, but I thought it was interesting to see the difference in attitude between the TV host and comments then, and what's going on today with so many people calling the Neely case close to an intentional lynching…
We don't want people taking the law into their own hands.
We don't want district attorney's prosecuting most crimes.
Big cities need to Pick one.
Agreed. District Attorneys MUST prosecute crimes, especially violent ones, so that citizens aren't forced to take the law into their own hands.
Great point: the outcome of such a chaotic situation is a coin toss.
I think it's easy to judge in hindsight what we all would have done in that instance, like we're supposed to be thinking rationally. He did not think he would kill the guy but he was trying to protect the other passengers in a city that has abandoned them. That guy should have been in the hospital long ago. He should never have had to struggle like that on the street. And yes, the ONLY REASON PEOPLE CARE is that a white man killed a black man. Just look at Gunviolence.org and look at how many murders in the past 72 hours - children, mothers, etc.
One of the things that really drives me nuts is that everyone gets super upset about specific mass shootings but don’t give a fuck about the more common ones (beefs or DV related). Like somehow it’s not tragic if your own dad or husband kills you???
Jo Maugham is literally like if you imagined the worst, most pompous barrister with the thinnest possible skin, but instead of being a book character, he's a real person.
Blocked me for calling him solipsistic
He sounds like a cartoon bordering on an unfunny Monty Python sketch.
I'm just here to bust on Jesse for saying "petite" larceny as opposed to "petty" larceny. Yeah it is spelled petit but it is really petty. Some ancient vestige of the common law I suppose.
Jesse’s mispronunciation pales in comparison to Katie’s butchering of Maugham--it’s Mawm not Maw-gum 😱
YES, I came to say this! Like Somerset Maugham, I can't believe even Jesse didn't catch this! Lol, still a great ep.
This is awfully petit of you
I also chuckled at Jesse's mispronunciation. It sounded like a person stole a size 2 sun dress from Macy's.
From my very limited understanding of French, “petit” is pronounced similarly to “petty,” whereas the feminine version, “petite,” is the one that’s pronounced similarly to “pet-eet.”
In French, the emphasis is on the second syllable, so "pe-TEE" for the masculine "petit," and "pe-TEET" for the feminine "petite" (or "pe-TIT" if you're Quebecois).
Yeah, but have you heard how American lawyers pronounce all their OTHER legal terms?
I still remembered how hard my ex-lawyer mom laughed at me when I pronounced "habeas corpus" as if it were a phrase from my Latin textbook: "HA-bay-us COR-poos." So much for the Latin teachers' argument that studying Latin will make you sound smarter.
Oh, of course the lawyers mangle court-Latin and court-French.
And I just now realized that, when "habeas corpus" is removed from its legal context, I instinctually pronounced it the Latin way you described, but in context, it's hay-bee-us cor-piss.
Katie’s pronunciation of “affluent” bugged me, she was putting stress on the 2nd syllable and I think it should be on the 1st.
I’m so sick of the scale of urban decay and the associated liberal defense of anti-social behavior. I’m ready to vote for DeSantis. I am 52 and never voted Republican. I am more and more sympathetic to conservative ideology. Leftist culture and policy is corrosive and does not produce a normal, functioning society. Maybe class-based leftist politics would generate reasonable policy, but the individualistic identity politics of the American left is totally bankrupt. I still support universal healthcare, a strong social safety net for the ill and old. I think income inequality to the degree we have it in the US is bad for democracy and morally grotesque. But I can’t watch people shooting up on the sidewalk, girls cutting off their tits, people afraid to take trains or park in the city, schools lying to parents, adults afraid to say what they think, and say: Yes, this is working great. I’m so over it all. I hope DeSantis wins. I hope all these left wing nuts get voted out.
I feel ya- the only thing that’s stopping me from voting R is the abortion bans (also I don’t want to become one of those people who make politics their whole personality), if Republicans stopped caring about that one issue overnight I wonder how many people would immediately switch sides.
I’m also glad that people are more and more comfortable admitting this without feeling the need to do the whole “Aw shucks, I’ll always be a lifelong progressive and those wacky right wingers are still crazy and evil, but even I think the progressive left has gone too far!” schtick
I've thought about it long and hard and came to the conclusion that I would be willing to give up abortion access (except in case of rape and mother's health) if it means that I would be recognized as the sex that I am and I would feel safer on the streets. I already know that the left fearmongers blacks to keep them voting in the party line so why won't the do the same with women?
I understand what you mean. I live in a place that just recently signed a 6 week abortion limit which I’m pretty bummed out about (only it actually does include exceptions for rape and incest provided there’s documentation, which sounds good on paper but I’m not sure how it’s exactly going to work in practice) . However, would I risk my safety and personal happiness by moving to another city that doesn’t have as good of a quality of life just because of this one issue? Hell no
Yeah, I’ve considered that. Is this how people in their 50s saw the sixties? But I was a kid in the 70s and the cities didn’t look like they do now. It’s Mad Max. I don’t know how we let it get this bad.
It was 1977.
I was a kid in the 1990s andvt is my as bad as it was then. But things have definitely declined
That’s so sad. Societies can go either way.
*Homer Simpson Voice* No political assassinations SO FAR.
(Though not for lack of trying... see the Congressional Baseball Shooting, the man arrested w/a gun near Kavanaugh's house who said he wanted to kill three justices, and, also, Jan. 6.)
There aren’t really any leaders who would become martyrs. None of them are inspiring.
Martyrs usually believe what they're saying.
Urban defense of anti social behavior is a thing but it's really not as common as you're making it out to be. The Democratic mayor and governor of NY both had normie, barpod friendly takes on the Neely controversy. A few city council members did have very bad takes though. I don't know how voting for Desantis would possibly help as the president is not in charge of the NY subway.
I can’t respond to EKG2 directly. I appreciate that perspective. I voted for the Independent candidate in Oregon’s last election. I don’t have any influence on NYC, which is 2000 miles away. But my neighborhood, and every town and city near me is overrun with drug addicts shitting and shooting up in the streets. People are getting attacked in the streets. The trains are havens for smoking math and fentanyl. It scares me. It is so extreme. And it is my hope that Dems will get voted out at every level because they are failing to govern at a very basic level.
But Eric Adams HAS put into place policy to address literally the type of situation that has occurred. Much to the chagrin of haters to the left of him he is rounding up homeless people and having them committed.
I support his reforms. A girl recently showed up in my town. Very seriously mentally ill. She is filthy, confused. She lies down in parking lots and refuse piles. SHE NEEDS TO BE COMMITTED. She is a danger to herself. I’ve seen men talking to her. She is at risk of sexual assault as well as injury. I disagree very strongly with the ACLU position that people like her are “free” and that institutionalizing them infringes on their freedom. Freedom requires agency and her ability to make decisions is broken.
DeSantis isn't even likely to win the Republican primary.
I find that so depressing. He’s a good R candidate.
It’s going to be Trump and Biden in 2024 and Brandon somehow wins again, screencap this.
I'm with you, 100%.
Agree with you on this.
>I still support universal healthcare, a strong social safety net for the ill and old. I think income inequality to the degree we have it in the US is bad for democracy and morally grotesque.
Then I advise you resist supporting Republicans.
Germany has involuntary (stationary) treatment *after* the first serious crime ( https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma%C3%9Fregelvollzug , mostly for schizophrenics and pedophiles). IMHO this is a good middle ground. You cannot do it merely based on "behaving erratic" or some vague notion of "antisociality", as the definition of that will merrily swing with the political wind (surely someone in NYC will count manspreading; and I don't trust German politicians on this either, as some of them have made some pretty ominous noises around COVID).
It really isn't hard to come up with some kind of metric for involuntary treatment. The people that need that type of thing are almost always repeat offender in short periods of time. The state often sides with not doing this, likely because the state doesn't give a fuck but, when someone gets arrested 5 times in a year, its pretty easy to determine there is some kind of severe issue.
More to the point, I don't think there is any metric for involuntary treatment that should have seen a schizophrenic, repeatedly violent offender left on the outside. Somehow we've gotten lost in a debate about if the cops are the right ones to confront mentally ill people who are acting erratically and completely forgotten that if we let schizophrenic, repeatedly violent offenders walk around we will get tragic results.
There’s a line between where involuntary commitment is ethical and when it’s not, and sometimes it can be hard to tell where someone is on that line.
And then there is this case.
I was happy Katie mentioned Jonathan Rosen's account about Michael Laudor. The book, The Best Minds, I can't recommend enough. It's about mental illness and the "tragedy of good intentions" as its subtitle says and it's so layered and well-written. I listened on Audible and am going out later today to get a hard copy because there was so much I want to reread.
The Roxane Gay article started out reasonable but then took a turn to a ridiculous, illogical argument. I would like to think that an editor might question the article's logic before publishing, but I guess that doesn't happen at the nytimes.
The one thing that’s being missed in a lot of these discussions is there is now a movement towards encouraging schizophrenics to not take meds and that we should just accept their alternative reality, no matter what that reality is. Which — as a person who is occasionally insane myself — is insane. And so very very frustrating.
Yeah, I have seen more and more of that. I get that there is a very small number of people with psychosis who can do okay without medication, but that's not the vast majority of people psychosis and often times those people are only able to do so later in life after they've spent time on medication and learned how to manage their illness triggers; the vast majority of people with psychosis are not John Nash.
The drugs for schizophrenia are really awful and have terrible side effects. That means we should try to develop better ones that have fewer and less severe side effects. And we should try to get as many people with schizophrenia into programs that help build skills and reduce the doses of medication that they need. See below:
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/20/health/talk-therapy-found-to-ease-schizophrenia.html
We should also make psychiatric hospitals less unpleasant while we're at it. Simple stuff like making sure that they physical facility is well maintained and that the staff are polite to the patients will go a long way. Far too many people are assaulted while they're patients at inpatient psychiatric hospitals and that's not going to make recovery any easier.
The meds can have bad side effects, but if I might hurt people if I didn’t take it? Take the fucking meds!!
It’s true that the drugs for schizophrenia are terrible, but it’s hard to say how much better than can get, given that we still don’t really understand what schizophrenia is. It’s also hard for me to see a ton more money getting put into psychiatric hospitals. Where are the incentives to do that?
The progress that may come is when neuroscience (perhaps with the help of AI) helps us actually understand mental illness, but right now our options are not good, and while throwing more money at the problem might help a little bit, the American political system is not inclined towards that outcome.
My guess is that schizophrenia is more than one disease; depression is clearly more than one disease and they're probably not all that similar biologically but are all grouped as one disease for convenience. Hopefully once we're able to separate out the different types of schizophrenia, we'll be able to understand it better.
When it comes to drugs, I share your pessimism. The big Pharma companies have mostly exited the psychiatric sector. We just have a bunch of me-too atypical antipsychotics that are then quickly marketed for bipolar disorder and depression as well. It's such a tough field. Maybe RTMS is the best bet for new treatments.
TMS is cool, but it's still not a theory-based treatment.
I do note the Joanna Moncrieff argument that names like "antipsychotic" or "antidepressant" are not really accurate. Antibacterial drugs kill bacteria. We know which ones, we know how, we can test to see if the patient has the bacteria and what their susceptibility is. There's some more complexity in practice, but it's totally different to give a drug that is "anti-" to an actual pathogenic agent versus these psychiatry drugs that basically just numb up your mind in a way that makes you less troublesome. They have some uses, but they aren't cures.
I also note that chronic schizophrenia is associated with structural brain abnormalities and volume loss, which implies that this is a much bigger problem than a few neurotransmitter levels being out of whack.
I have had 3 rounds of TMS and it definitely saved my life but unfortunately you can’t use it for people with mania issues, ie no bipolar, no schizophrenia. It’s also a huge pain in the ass, and most places outside the US don’t want to use it bc it’s so expensive (and you can just use ug electroshock instead).
My wife had ECT, the side effects kind of suck, but she's mostly stable now after a year where she was hospitalized a dozen times. It works, but no one really knows WHY exactly. I fear it's going to be a while before we make much progress on mental illness. I suspect depression has more to do with patterns and connections in your brain rather than explicit biochemical pathways, but that sounds too much like 'it's all in your head' for people. But I've always thought the stigma against implying 'its all in your head' was stupid anyway. All of you, everything that most people would consider as 'you' is all in your head, but just try to be a completely different person and see how that goes.
I have family members who've had success with it for OCD and melancholic depression -- which is a big deal because those are really serious diseases. It really is a game changer for stuff like that.
One thing I am curious about is why RTMS is contraindicated for anything with mania and whether that's just out of an abundance of caution. There are some trials for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder so they may be able to do it safely without worrying about triggering mania. With any luck the results will get reported, and soon.
It is pretty hard to get staff to stay at psych hospitals because it’s so difficult to deal with the patients (and regularly dangerous for the staff). Obviously patients shouldn’t be assaulted but it’s definitely not simple to handle the staffing issues.
The staff just often get beat all the time. Nobody wants to do a job where people scream at you, berate you and injure you all the time. Even mentally ill homeless people don't want to be around other mentally ill homeless people.
So, on the one hand that’s insane but on the other my schizophrenic relative is a complete lying narcissistic psychopath on or off meds.
Well that’s an issue, but for most people it’s still better for them to be on their meds. Also it’s quite probable your relative has narcissism personality disorder on top of the schizophrenia, and unfortunately there’s very little that can be done about personality disorders even if the person actively wants to change.
If anyone’s curious about the sheep joke:
https://www.jokebuddha.com/joke/McGregors_Legacy
I came here specifically looking for this joke lol- I already know it, but I was appalled that she did not actually tell it because others may not know how hilarious it is. This is irresponsible journalism and I am here demanding that Katie tell the joke at the top of the next show. Like if you agree.
I learned that joke from JK Rowling (she has a PG version about enchanting sheep in one of the later HP books.)
Brit here. I hate that I know this, but it’s pronounced Jo-Lee-on Mom.
Jo-Lee-on, Jo-Lee-on, Jo-Lee-on, Jo-Lee-on,
I'm begging of you, please don't take my mom.
Katie’s pronunciation of Maugham was really getting to me throughout the episode. In thought maybe it was just because I’m a WASPy Canadian who took English Lit courses, and I should be so hard on her. But then she played a clip where the interviewer said his name. Katie! Argh!
I get a weird vibe from the Roxanne Gay piece, it sounds like she's saying "what a bunch of prudish bourgeoisie Karens, don't yuck the delightful Michael Jackson impersonator's yum."
She's trying to retain cred among "fat activists" who threw her under a bus after she had weight-loss surgery.
I didn't know she had that surgery done. I've watched her career over the years; every once in a while she seems reasonable. And then- omg- just nuts.
If you get fat affirming surgery does that make you transfat?
This comment deserves a free year subscription.
There was some quote from someone lumping Neeley in with the wrong house shooters saying that people deserve to live without fear of dangerous, unpredictable men.
Which... yes. People do, including when the dangerous and unpredictable man making threats is black and mentally ill. And the less people believe the state will protect them the more they will do it themselves, with even more deadly consequences.
Also people sarcastically saying Neely’s only crime was being mentally ill, poor and homeless and that he was murdered for being those things. *Nobody* is saying that. It’s all political theatre where the victim and offender happen to fall into convenient demographic buckets. You have people like AOC saying Neely was murdered and tacking on some buzzwords like mental health, social safety net, etc., after the fact. As if Neely would have voluntarily submitted himself to an outpatient program.
They don’t want involuntary institutionalization of mentally ill, homeless people. Somehow they expect mentally ill people to have the cognitive capacity to commit to a program voluntarily if one was made available.
It's glaringly obvious that the people making such statements have never dealt with or even studied serious mental illness. They're ignorant, unserious people, which is why it distresses me that some of them get so much media attention.
Seems like the more trust in institutions falls the more likely this is to happen.
No one has addressed why this guy had a baseball bat. Are they even available for sale in England? Why wouldn't he use a cricket bat? Self hating brit? This whole thing stinks to high hell.
Yeah, you can buy them from Amazon. He was living in a posh house, so he probably has one for home defence. (You can't get a good swing with a cricket bat, not in that way.)
The most likely explanation is because London lawyers play softball as a team building after work social activity - non contact so suitable for men and women together, nobody cares about the result so it doesn’t get too edgy, lots of standing around so chance to drink.
Alternative explanation...Scottish comedian Kevin Bridges had a routine pondering the same question, his local sports shop sold hundreds of baseball bats, never sold a single ball.
Hahaha I might have to check this bridges fellow out. Thanks for the heads up!
Was thinking the same thing. What the hell was a Brit doing with a baseball bat? Is this a translation thing, where over in England baseball bat means flashlight?
You can buy then in Scotland so I assume readily available in London. WHY he would have it is another matter . . .
We do play something like baseball in the UK but it's called rounders. The bat is shorter by about 18 inches. Probably not quite as effective for bludgeoning foxes to death but better than a cricket bat and more on-brand for a posh UK barrister
It all makes sense now!
An Australian perspective on the mental health deal. Back in 1992 in Victoria a state premier (like a state governor in the US) from the right wing political party took over the state. One of the things he did to cut costs was shut down the state run asylums for the mentally ill, replacing them with in community care.
In 1994 Victoria Police shot 8 people dead in the one year. This was an unprecedented number in Australia, and from that point on they tended to be the police force with the highest body count each year.
Turns out that if you release a bunch of people that warranted institutionalisation into the community, bad things happen.
Interesting. Here in the US it was advocates on the left who got the asylums shut down and instead demanded community based treatment. (to be fair, the asylums were shitholes).
So it seems that voluntary, community treatment can fail horribly no matter the impetus.
In theory community based care sounds great, but it denies the reality of some of the people that were institutionalised. I've had the pleasure of dealing with a violent, paranoid schizophrenics. There's no negotiating with them. They may decide not to fly into a rage, but some days what you say to them will influence that decision mildly, or not at all.
Should all of them be institutionalised? Of course not. Cases vary. Should some of them? Yes. Definitely yes.
I'm no expert, but my understanding is that is was California under Reagan that set the precedent that spread nation-wide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanterman%E2%80%93Petris%E2%80%93Short_Act
I genuinely don’t understand all the people with the worst takes on stuff like this Neely thing. Like, how do you think that way? Do you really believe this stuff? And if so, how the fuck can sane people be expected to live alongside these people? What is their goal? Why are they doing this?
I’m glad I’m not hyper online because I can see how people go fucking crazy. Like I just want to round up all these insane people and shoot them into the sun. I know that’s not healthy but what the flying fuck else should I think when people like this are free to spew this garbage? It makes me question free speech when so much of it is so destructive. And obviously people would say the same for things I believe and say, so what do we do about this unbridgeable divide?
Basically we’re fucked I guess.
I read the comments in the NYT on an article on how to deal with crazy people on the subway. The comments were all totally sane. Every commenter said New Yorkers should not be expected to act as social workers or institutional guards. People are sick of it.
I know- the takes are nuts!
Barring some crazy new info we get, like the marine goes around strangling people who litter, this is so obviously a case of him accidently killing someone after stepping in and trying to help.
I can’t believe I live in a world now where this sentence needs to exist “they don’t think it’s transphobic for lesbians not to like dick…” Either I’m getting really old or it’s getting really weird round here. I suppose it’s likely both ;)
If anybody is interested after having their appetite whetted by the first line, here's a list of quotes from Jollyone's book: https://twitter.com/Robin_C_Douglas/status/1652327327513149447
He's currently wondering if he can bring legal action against bad reviews due to potential loss of earnings. Seriously.
It would be too delicious if he set up a crowdfunder for that...
What a dumbass.
The thing I don't get about Katie mispronouncing Maugham's name throughout the entire episode is that at one point she plays a clip from a UK news report and the woman speaking says the guy's name.
I think she has a processing disorder.
or maybe a quirk ? like it just doesn't seem important to her
If I knew I had a history of mispronouncing names I might try harder to avoid messing that up -- especially if I had a podcast! 😂
Right? LOL. I'm like that with dates and times. I won't put anything out in the world without double and triple checking.
I definitely would have moved to another car and not intervened. Odds are that there were old people and children in that car with Neely. They generally don't move very fast and I'm sure they could have dealt with Neely successfully on their own. That way the marine wouldn't have had to choke him and Neely would have been alive. I'm sure the old people and children would have been fine too.
Moving between cars on the NYC subway isn't really safe.
You’re probably right! But we don’t know, and neither did anybody there.
Most kids are generally decent in grappling sports.
And during diaper pride month. How dare they.
The city of New York has spent over a billion dollars on mental healthcare services, how come this money isn't actually making a difference on solving these problems? Like I want non-institutional voluntary mental healthcare policies but we need to find out how to make them work to prevent people like Jordan Neely from suffering like this.
I would love to know what they're spending all that money on. Mental health concerns can include serious mental illness, non-severe mental illness and even things like grief or reactions to other normal life events. Was that money spent on services for people with mild or non-severe mental illnesses? Obviously we should be spending money on that, but we still need to spend a lot of money on services for people with serious mental illnesses. And people with serious mental illness should be prioritized because if they don't get services, the consequences can be deadly.
I'd also like to know if they were spending it on services that had evidence supporting them or they were throwing money at non-profits that were providing unproven feel-good services or just raising awareness.
Yeah, we really need to find out how to make healthcare policies work to prevent people from suffering like Jordan Neely. In the mean time, we really need to stop pretending we have figured out health care policies that prevent people from suffering like Jordan Neely and we just need to fund them. We end up wasting a lot of money and having a lot of people suffering like Jordan Neely... and the women he punched.
The answer is that these policies ARE likely helping. Extrapolating patterns from an N of 1 is not a useful way to measure the effects of policies.
Because there are a lot of messed up people and providing them all the 24-7 staff of trained minders it might take to effectively treat them (assuming treatment is possible) would cost many many times what you suppose.
The most cost effective way to do it is a mental hospital, but people soured on those (for some good reasons, but without an alternate plan). You have people like my half-brother, who is so badly "autistic" that if he isn't constantly drugged into a stupor he is an imminent violent threat to everyone around him (especially himself).
There isn't much to do with him other than drug him into a stupor and put him in a group home with 3 other similar people and a couple minders. Except that is now 6 people + house society has to pay taxes to support. It is very expensive.
And just generally people are not all necessarily "fixable".
To be honest I want it to work I don't want the only solution to our crisis to be for people to be involuntarily detained and forced into treatment. That being said if it becomes necessary than we may have to just that.
Let me explain people with schizophrenia to you. They are paranoid of anything and everything. So, the same reason they need help happens to be the same reason. They won’t voluntarily pursue it.
A relative of mine thought the US government was gang stalking her and brain hacking. That person isn’t voluntarily doing anything.
I dont think its possible to solve the problem without coercion--I got to observe the "voluntary approach" up close when a homeless emcampment of obvious addicts suddenly materialized on the border of my neighborhood.
These people appeared *somewhat* sane and even admitted to reporters they had drug problems.
My hood is super-liberal (I'm a secret Rightie who does counterintelligence) and initially--as you'd expect-- the camp was teeming with friendly social workers, offering services and healthcare options that any middle-class person would consider reasonable.
But there were too many dreary rules that went with the goodies (i.e. No drugs on the premises. No walking around naked) so eventually the sheriff's department had to "strongly suggest" the addicts leave.
I doubt a single dude went to rehab via this particular (and pricey) outreach effort.
At this point, society both allows it and enables it. Put more simply, the only reason someone stands on a corner begging for money is because people will give them money. People typically only exchange money when they see a value in something. Unfortunately, I think for most that value is feeling good about one's self for a few minutes (hell, maybe even a day or two) but the money really isn't helping the person who received it.
From the "social services" to the individuals handing out money on streets, we as a society enable this sort of degenerate lifestyle.
Because I am Very Old, I remember the pre-culture war culture war flare-up concerning Bernard Goetz.
Oh my God, that's a blast from the past.
Goetz was international news a decade before the internet. Imagine that scenario today.
Had forgotten all about this.
Isn’t that surname pronounced “Mawm”?
Noooooooo... Jolyon's voice sounds a lot like my uncle-in-law's (that's not a thing, is it? I don't know. FIL's brother). Now, every time there's a family thing, I'm going to be reminded of the ocean-going fuckwit HMS Joyless Moan.
ETA: Oh man, the book reviews are phenomenal.
"His work is worth taking seriously, not because it has any scholarly, literary, or other value (it is precisely as awful as Zhu’s review describes), but rather, because beneath the many, many layers of accumulated idiocy, Bringing Down Goliath represents an ideological attack on the foundations of the rule of law."
"It is fortunate that the book is so incompetently written that it is likely to turn readers against Maugham’s philosophy, but that is no reason for complacency."
I haven't looked at this absolute muppet's twitter feed for a long time, but I do highly recommend it for a laugh.
https://twitter.com/JolyonMaugham/status/1654760991547113479
I LOVE it when Brits call people Muppets. It's my favorite.
The Subway should install like knockout gas or nitrous or smth. People start acting crazy on the subway just lock the doors and dose everyone. This would stop the violence and also please the defund police people, bc no one would have to go to jail.
Street performers need to pay their fair share of income taxes. Maybe then we could fund these programs. They stand to gain most from increased use of the subway.
Penny is not a vigilante.
Phoenix Jones is a vigilante. The Guardian Angels were vigilantes.
I saw the guardian angels every night I took the EL train in Chicago. I felt safer with them there- and never saw any vigilante action. The bad guys saw that a good man was ready and willing to beat their ass if they tried something. I appreciated it.
I’ve got one question….
It’s been several years of BLM style protests around the narrative of unarmed black men being killed by white men or police officers.
I’m 100% on the side that even the most horrible of us deserve all legal protections, defense, and respect.
But in all those years, I cannot think of a single case where the victim wasn’t a car thief, addict, history of violence, actively ilengaged in violence, or something.
Can they not find a single case in all of the US when a totally innocent man was murdered by the police? Not one? Legitimate question. I can’t recall a single one.
The closest I remember is the guy out of Atalanta. But the. See didn’t fit the narrative and seemed to fizzle in activist circles as soon as that became obvious.
Sure, Philando Castile. A cop pulled him over, he had a legal gun in the car, told the cop so, and the cop immediately shot him dead (with his GF and daughter in the back seat).
People don't talk about that one because he was shot by "officer Jeronimo Yanez", so it is problematic for the narrative. Also not unarmed (as you note).
Officer Yanez clearly was a scaredy cat who shouldn't have been conducting stops, but it was a legit bad start to the interaction.
Officers are looking for armed robbers. A traffic stop where driver says "I have a gun" and starts reaching for it, cop tells him not to reach for it, and then driver says "I am reaching for it". And then the driver and passenger start saying "he isn't pulling it out", but I don't think it is 100% clear what their hands are doing.
It was a bad shooting, but not as cut and dried as people want to make it out to be, and also something that is just going to happen sometimes when the country is as armed as it is. Traffic stops are very fraught.
As I always like to point out, Germany has ~100x fewer police shootings than the US (per "stop"). It also has ~100X less incidence of offenders having a gun on them. I don't think that is a coincidence.
You can start with Elijah Jovan McClain. A horrific heartbreaking story.
Beat me to it. The Elijah McClain case is absolutely awful. He got more than local recognition after George Floyd’s death, but, honestly, if any case should’ve sparked BLM/“the reckoning”— it should’ve been his murder.
Yeah that is a tough one.
Elijah McClain is almost like the exception the proves the rule. The rule being that cops don’t just murder unarmed black people for no reason
Excuse != reason
Eric Garner was selling loose cigarettes when he was killed, but that doesn’t mean the cops had a reason.
Don’t get me wrong: in my view the majority of deaths caused by cops aren’t justified. But there is almost always a *reason* why cops end up escalating to deadly violence and there’s scant evidence that reason is racism.
Oh, yes, I agree. Flattening these actions to racism/white supremacy does a disservice to everyone.
I love that JoMa is such an insufferable dipshit that even Jesse’s reaction to him was immediate and visceral disgust.
Speaking of violence in the streets, Dinkytown is trending on twitter for masked group brawls.
Those are just reparations stompings!
A friend said it was liberal arts students rumbling over who’s degree is more unemployable.
Why did Vazquez, instead of filming, not step up to either stop the chokehold or at least say, "Hey, dude! Maybe don't chokehold someone."
Or you could say " I see he it looks like he's not breathing. I'm going to check a pulse".
As someone who rides the subway every day, you do have to look away from a lot of things. It's pretty common to be on a car with a mentally ill person yelling about various things or two people quarreling. My personal fave was when a couple was having an argument and the man yelled "You're pussy tastes like Similac, bitch!"
Omg so do I! Is that a really sick burn, or is it incomprehensible?
Maughm blocked me only yesterday! In a thread about him blocking people just because he was a bit peeved with them . . . .https://twitter.com/_clishmaclaver_/status/1654905240355840000?t=tbU9IZgGvRfMivbk1adwYg&s=19
I won't be able to listen to this one until tomorrow afternoon, which is annoying af because I had totally forgotten about Jolyon Maugham beating a fox to death in his wife's kimono, and now I really want to hear K&J's take on it.
I'm a freak, I like the girls with the boom
I once got [consciously uncoupled] in a [Whole Foods] bathroom
Short Version: Michael Shellenberger's Sanfransicko & Jonathan Rosen's Best Minds are truly must reads.
TLDR Version:
I'm sure all of us have a string of epiphany moments that lead to this heterodox road, but a KEY moment for me was when Shellenberger's book first came out. I was reading it at the same time I was revisiting Deleuze and Guitarri to sub lecture for a colleague. The juxtaposition hit me hard: we are living in a postmodern experiment that will end badly.
Somewhere in the middle of Brilliant Minds Rosen reflects on his graduate school education--wondering what if "THEORY" infiltrated law and policy. Here we are, and its absolutely f'n terrible.
“Not that all Helens share the same beliefs “ -- could this be a Thirty Helens Agree ref?? Please, please let it be so.
Ooooh. The fox killer. Looking forward to this.
A+ episode name.
Would the NYC subway narrative be different if Penny were not a Marine?
The subtext I'm picking up is ,"this trained soldier should have known how to exercise non-lethal force". In other words, he is being held to a higher standard of care than a random citizen who had never served.
I don't think so. It hinges on the fact that he was white. Him being a marine is a cherry on top for those who are calling it a lynching.
In the video there are clearly two men subduing him with a third that comes into help occasionally. The first is Penny, the second is a black man. Note how the media and those on Twitter didn't even give this black man a second look.
A lot of times they don't even give it a first look, editing out the part where theother person is assisting him.
Trained soldiers aren't big on non-lethal force. That's what cops are for. Soldiers are for the people you want dead.
Great ep as usual but Katie absolutely butchers the pronunciation of "Maugham": it should be pronounced something like "mawm" or maybe "mawhm".
I mean, yes - it's 'mawm' or 'morm' depending on your flavour of accent - but at the same time, it really made me laugh because I was imagining how much it will have boiled his piss every time she did it.
I know it's trivial, but how difficult is it to find out how to pronounce people's names before you talk about them on a podcast? Makes me wince every time.
Jesse, not digging your reporting of the Neely killing and the "something went wrong and now he's dead" comment
Penny wants to subdue a guy who's threatening everyone even if that person has not actually physically attacked someone? Fine. Penny wants to subdue a guy with a chokehold for more than a few seconds and then chokes a guy to death? I think that's where it went wrong.
Who cares if Neely was choked for 1 minute, 3 minutes, or 15 minutes? The guy was choked and died while being subdued. That's the big point.
Penny could have bear hugged him and wrapped Neely up. The idea that Penny killed a guy unjustifiably and with way too much force isn't as bizarre as your reporting and tone makes it out to be.
I don’t think “want” comes in here at all. It’s easy to think calmly and rationally about what happened now, but I doubt that was the case on the subway car. The marine’s brain went Threat Detected -> Subdue Threat.
You're seemingly putting stock in Penny's ability to correctly and appropriately subdue a threat when as far as you know he's 0 for 1 in keeping subdued threats alive.
Like I said in the comment you read and responded to, I'm okay with Penny choosing to subdue someone who's being threatening even if the threat is not physically threatening anyone in particular. I'm okay with detecting and subduing a threat whether or not it's a "want" or a need.
But Penny chose to subdue a guy with a choke for enough to kill him when Penny could have just wrapped Neely up without involving Neely's neck.
Your belief that he “could have just X” is making a number of assumptions about the situation. When Fight or Flight gets triggered, i don’t think there’s a lot of choice involved.
As a matter of neuroscience, the minute the amygdala takes over, it’s essentially lights out for the prefrontal cortex.
I am making assumptions that Penny could have subdued Neely without choking him to death. Absolutely.
That's not what Fight or Flight is. You don't go into autopilot.
"your honor, his fight or flight response caused him to not have the ability to control his body."
The question is: Was Penny justified in using force?
If the answer's "no", then it's assault/manslaughter.
If it's "yes", I don't think it's fair to Monday-morning quarterback a split decision of which techniques that are usually not lethal the Marine should have used or not used to take down a threat...
A several minute long chokehold was a split second decision?
Your after-the-fact analysis reminds me of the people who always claim "the cops could have shot the the guy in the foot" whennthey have nomclue about the actual.circumstances.
Really? A split second decision to shoot a gun is the same as a 3 minute long chokehold and requires the same quick nature?
There were also other people assisting him in the restraint (I think it’s possible they may have also been concerned about the risk of the hold Penny had, and expected him to relax it once Neely was otherwise restrained.)
I understand the adrenaline is flowing in a situation like this, but any use of deadly force is rightfully going to be be questioned. I don’t want to live in a society where someone being pushed under a subway train is shrugged off, but I also don’t want to live in one where we shrug off choking someone to death.
Yes, the use of the chokehold technique at that moment was a quick decision made in a difficult situation. The fact that it lasted several minutes while Neely still resisted is irrelevant. You argue in favor of a bear hugging technique which would also have lasted several minutes.
Again, you’re not arguing that the marine shouldn’t have held him down several minute, you’re arguing technique. That’s Monday-morning quarterbacking
Look, Matt has seen a lot of action movies. So he would have just Vulcan nerve pinched him. Problem solved! Duh.
No, I'm actually a comedy guy.
If saying that Penny didn't need to choke a guy for minutes is the same level of ridiculousness as using a Vulcan Pinch, I'm okay with that.
Is there a definition of a Monday morning quarterbacking that you're using to define what the real argument is or is Monday morning quarterbacking whatever you say it is?
A hug would most likely be around Neely's sternum and arms, not his neck. Even if it lasted several minutes, a restraining hug may not have killed him.
Obviously, we could all benefit from you clearheaded superheroics when we’re on the subway with an unhinged man threatening passengers… What you’re saying isn’t resonating because you’re blaming the Marine for using a sub-optimal (according to you) technique for restraining Neely.
But in the video I posted on here (https://youtu.be/M1LqoUPjqRQ), you see another altercation on a subway where a passenger used a chokehold to great effect. The combative guy went out, and the situation was diffused.
So what is your argument? That he didn’t use the optimal technique? Didn't perform it perfectly? That’s not a crime. If I’m attacked or fear for my life, I don’t have to respond in the statistically safest technique to take down (while not lethally harming) my assailant. The question is all about whether the use of force by the Marine was warranted, so I don’t know why you keep harping on about techniques dude…
"Obviously, we could all benefit from you clearheaded superheroics when we’re on the subway with an unhinged man threatening passengers… What you’re saying isn’t resonating because you’re blaming the Marine for using a sub-optimal (according to you) technique for restraining Neely.
But in the video I posted on here (https://youtu.be/M1LqoUPjqRQ), you see another altercation on a subway where a passenger used a chokehold to great effect. The combative guy went out, and the situation was diffused."
Yeah, it worked for this guy. I'm not sure why you think this case sets a precedent. Also, did this vigilante hold the choke until the point of killing the aggressor? No. The guy didn't kill the aggressor.
"So what is your argument? That he didn’t use the optimal technique? Didn't perform it perfectly? That’s not a crime. If I’m attacked or fear for my life, I don’t have to respond in the statistically safest technique to take down (while not lethally harming) my assailant. The question is all about whether the use of force by the Marine was warranted, so I don’t know why you keep harping on about techniques dude…"
It's not been proven that the force was warranted unless you have a video we don't.
I keep harping on the technique because he choked a guy until the guy died and you seem to be ignoring that the podcast we listened to never said that Neely was actually violent other than yelling and screaming and throwing his jacket on the floor. Penny approached Neely according to reports, restrained him and chose to place a guy in a hold that cuts off air for minutes.
You’re not wrong but you’re applying a level of rationale that was likely impossible in the moment. Flight or fight means you’re no longer behaving rationally. Calm and rational decision making is the domain of the prefrontal cortex which goes off-line in the presence of the amygdala lighting up.
Fight or Flight (or Flee) doesn't mean someone goes on autopilot and it also doesn't mean that every response the stressed person chose was the right decision. The amygdala might be lighting up more than usual but it's not the only active part of the brain.
Based off of what we know about the situation I think it's okay to say choking a guy from behind for minutes, including when the person is being wrist restrained is an over the top response to the information in the episode and the few updates since
Once he’s down that path and there’s struggle and commotion, yes, I imagine time began moving in strange ways.
I’m not a marine, but I’m fairly sure that they’re trained to act on intuition and instinct (as well as training said intuition to be faster and more accurate).
That said, this was not a combat situation, so the use of such force maybe wasn’t ideal here. But the guy reacted to the threat, and he reacted on instinct.
Is a bear hug even a good way to subdue an adult (or a method people are taught). It seems like that would just lead to Penny (and the other dude) trying to restrain Neely who is actively fighting back the entire time and hoping they can keep control of the situation until whenever the cops arrive. And also that Penny was able to think rationally and considering all the possibilities when feeling there is an immediate threat that requires physical intervention. Even as a Marine, he hasn’t been trained on how to handle this particular situation calmly and cooly; he’s running on instinct and adrenaline.
Big “Mark Wahlberg would’ve stopped the 9/11 hijackers” energy here
So the amount of effort to stop 9/11 = amount of effort to move your hands from a choke to a bear hug especially when other people are also helping subdue the threat?
I just want to be clear on how dumb this comparison is.
Nah. OP's comment makes perfect sense. A lot of people are self-flatting with how and what should have gone down sitting in an armchair with the benefit of hindsight and inflated moral authority.
A.k.a. Fuck Chapo Trap House
It only makes perfect sense if you think the same amount of effort and thought that would go into stopping 9/11 is the same amount of effort as Penny moving his arm away from Neely's neck or choosing to subdue Neely in a different way that didn't kill Neely.
What does Chapo have to do with this?
Since you apparently don’t get the reference https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2012/01/18/145404733/mark-wahlberg-with-me-aboard-9-11-hijackers-would-have-been-stopped
To be clear, you are Mark Wahlberg here.
I got the reference. The part of the sentence to the left of the equal sign is the reference to Mark stopping 9/11. I figured that was obvious.
"So the amount of effort to stop 9/11 = amount of effort to move your hands from a choke to a bear hug especially when other people are also helping subdue the threat?"
Have you considered that the Marine didn't probably believe he was killing him? If he didn't think he was killing him and instead though he had him in a sleeper hold then why would he shift to a bear hug. Also, a bear hug if it didn't put him to sleep might have had him continue to struggle or potentially even bite.
If you choke someone for 3 minutes you can't say you didn't realize you'd kill a guy. If I held a guy underwater I can't be surprised that he drowns.
Also, why does it matter that he's a Marine? I know plenty and they're not the greatest characters.
Also, I only referenced Marine to identify him. I never suggested that had anything to do with his character. You are making up arguments to fight against that I’m not even making.
You have poor reading comprehension. I didn’t say a bear hug might have killed him. Read it again.
I removed the part about the bear hug because I confused your statement with another but good job disregarding the first statement
"If you choke someone for 3 minutes you can't say you didn't realize you'd kill a guy. If I held a guy underwater I can't be surprised that he drowns.'
Ya, this sounds a lot like the “coulda shot him in the leg”, silliness.
I don't know enough to judge whether it was justified, but a rear naked choke is very dangerous. It looks like Penny thought he was leaving the choke open enough to avoid hurting Neely (and the second guy tells that to somebody just before they let Penny go), but it's a risky hold. Maybe Neely was threatening enough to justify it, but I don't know.
Ya, if the crazy guy is innocent then this is a tragedy but it sounds like dude shoulda been choked out 3 old ladies ago.
If you're going to tell me to withhold judgment then you should also be messaging Barpod to tell them to withhold judgment until more information comes out. If you're not going to email them about releasing an episode before more information is out, don't message me
You're saying that my view that Penny could have restrained Neely differently doesn't hold up to scrutiny?
Really? A different type of restraint that's not choking a guy to death is unfathomable to you?
As for the tortilla comment, I can ask my 65 year old dad how he restrained that homeless guy who was fucking with him on the 5 train and I'll make my snap judgment.
Correct, your position clearly doesn't hold up to scrutiny at this point in time.
Glad your dad wasn't in Penny's situation, act while people recorded him on a video, and then had the homeless guy die. Would be maddening to have millions of Americans making how he "could have" and "should have" not killed the homeless guy after watching a couple seconds of video.
You are entitled to your view on the subway incident. I view your comments as one of a class of knee jerk reactions to shaky phone videos with the full benefit of hindsight, all given from the comfort of a keyboard/phone.
As is customary for me, I delete all comments on episode once it's open to the public. Will give you 12 hours to read this comment before I remove this one.
"Correct, your position clearly doesn't hold up to scrutiny at this point in time."
I like how you say my position doesn't hold up to scrutiny at this time while also saying to withhold judgment until more information comes out when I'm asking if Penny could have restrained Neely in a different way as Neely died after a several minutes long choke and was also wrist restrained while still being choked.
"Glad your dad wasn't in Penny's situation, act while people recorded him on a video, and then had the homeless guy die. Would be maddening to have millions of Americans making how he "could have" and "should have" not killed the homeless guy after watching a couple seconds of video."
My dad's not in Penny's situation because he didn't go and rear choke a guy to death - not out of luck.
Don't act like the choke only happened for a duration of a couple seconds of video. I'm not basing my judgement off mere seconds.
"You are entitled to your view on the subway incident. I view your comments as one of a class of knee jerk reactions to shaky phone videos with the full benefit of hindsight, all given from the comfort of a keyboard/phone."
I'm so sorry. I should have checked with you on what are valid knee jerk reactions in this situation. Thank you.
The Invalid Knee Jerk Reaction is to say that nothing wrong went on here after
Penny chokes a guy to death who's also being wrist restrained on the video. BarPod reports at the time that there's no evidence of Neely being physically attacking, just generally threatening, and even today we've not seen reports that Neely attacked anyone.
"As is customary for me, I delete all comments on episode once it's open to the public. Will give you 12 hours to read this comment before I remove this one"
Good luck deleting this comment, Ambergris
If anyone wants to hear about the subway story from a legal perspective I recommend the latest episode of Advisory Opinions.
Impatient Northerners like myself might want to consider 1.25X because it’s David French and a lawyer from Kentucky (guest to fill in for Sarah Isgur who is away this week).
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/advisory-opinions/id1490993194?i=1000612287179
This old Sam Harris episode has a lot of overlap with this Jordan Neely conversation:
https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/90-living-with-violence
This episode had another instance of a tic I find annoying, if understandable given that J/K are coming from the left: they’ll say “both sides are crazy about this”, but then they’ll exclusively pick instances of left-wing craziness to highlight, perhaps taking it as a given that we’re familiar with those of the right, or maybe that it doesn’t have the cultural power of the left. But if you look at the top tweets for “neely” and especially their top comments, you’re going to see pretty overt sentiments that Neely deserved it, that Penny is a hero specifically for having killed him, that the world is a better place, etc, and racial animus is often obvious.
The other thing that bothered me was that J went from accurately describing Neely saying “I don’t care if I go to jail for life”, to saying that’s tantamount to a threat to murder someone, to saying later that Neely was yelling about murdering people, which so far I haven’t heard claimed. And I think it’s a stretch in the first place to say that it amounts to a threat to murder.
I understand what you’re trying to say but what else would there be to add? “Right wing Twitter is being crass and lowkey racist, alert the media?”
You could say the same about left-wing twitter. I already know what NHJ and the usual outrage crew are saying about this. Presumably the point is to document and discuss it.
How did he come to possess a baseball bat in England?
A goatherder from Cyprus whittled it for him out of Apricot wood.
Bought it at Sports Direct, like most people
Isn't that grounds for expulsion from parliament?
Is there anything to discuss really about Jolyon? He's a putz who doesn't matter.
I know Katie was kidding, but there was a horrible Asian on Asian murder here in Connecticut a few years ago: https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2022/12/06/nearly-two-years-after-the-murder-of-a-yale-grad-student-pan-faces-evidence-in-court/
Crime of passion, it seems, and a very sad story.
Classic model minority. Even their murderers go to MIT
I remember there was a politically motivated shooting in California where a man from Mainland China targeted a Taiwanese-American church, a textbook example of a hate crime but it didn’t get much coverage.
There was also a case where an elderly gay man accidentally ran over a group of people at pride in Wilton Manors, Florida, there was some speculation that it was an act of terrorism until the full story came out that it was a tragic accident. This was before the Parental Rights in Education bill was passed and Desantis Derangement Syndrome wasn’t in full swing, I shudder to think how the media would have absolutely butchered the story in order to Own The Repubs if that happened now.
Jo-lian reminds me of the brain worm from Dont Hug Me I’m Scared
I don’t remember the brain worm specifically, but +1 for the reference.
Why the hell didn’t he contact the British version of animal control? Why assume the fox didn’t have a chance to survive?
The guidance he quoted said something like "if you find a trapped fox on your property, you must kill it humanely." I thought that was kind of ambiguous. Must you kill it? Or if you kill it, must it be humane? After doing some more reading about this, I now believe it's the former. The authorities want you to deal with it yourself, which does seem kind of weird. You would think they would want experts in humane killing to do it.
Yes, I posted this before that part came on, I was mad 😄
i am seriously butt hurt over your avacado toast presumptions. as a former back to the lander in the cascades/rockies in the seventies we ate avacado toast in the seventies. your sterotyping avacado toast as yuppie. it's hippie. don't cancel us tie dyed stoners who ate well. do better jesse
Another take on violence: https://lindynewsletter.beehiiv.com/p/fighting?utm_source=lindynewsletter.beehiiv.com&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=on-fighting
All the reports I've seen about him being a "Michael Jackson impersonator" weren't describing someone with an actual, tax-paying business who performed at events and parties. It showed him as an illegal subway busker who annoyed people people by playing music and dancing on a subway car and passing the hat later to get some off-the-books income.
Now, of course, people who agressively beg for money to captive audiences don't deserve to die for doing it. But also it's not an example of what a "good" person he was. Good people don't busk inside a subway car.
The NY Times, shamefully, just glosses any questions about his past "career" "entertaining" people inside subway cars:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/07/nyregion/jordan-neely-daniel-penny-nyc-subway.html
> It was a Monday afternoon and a 30-year-old man was ranting on an F train headed through Manhattan. He was a regular on the subway, once a gifted Michael Jackson impersonator, but he was also troubled. City workers had tried to help him for years.
It is not legal to busk inside a subway car and I can assure you, NY'ers who ride the trains daily don't like it.
You are allowed to perform in the stations, but not in the cars. You can perform on a platform, but you have to be a certain distance from a ticket booth or machine, and you can't have a loudspeaker. Videos I've seen of Neely performing violate all these rules.
See https://gothamist.com/news/the-buskers-dilemma-whats-allowed-and-whats-not-for-subway-performers
> Explicitly panhandling is not allowed, but peppering a guitar case or hat with some dollars hoping it prompts commuters to throw some change in there is allowed. Some advocacy groups recommend putting up a sign with your Venmo or Cashapp to protect against theft.
As a Duluthian, I can't speak for residents of Minneapolis and St. Paul (and the surrounding suburbs) as to whether it is, in any sense, "worth it", but there is way more theater there than anywhere else 1) in MN, 2) in the US outside NY, and maybe LA and Chicago?
Were the people who killed them also released from police custody without charge? Let’s be real about the difference here. This irritated me on the show too: the whole reason this is a topic is that other killings on the subway presumably don’t have the person responsible going home free. Now maybe he should and maybe he shouldn’t have been held - I can see why they didn’t think he was a threat - but that question is why there’s a debate.
Can you seriously not see the difference between this death and the others? Apples and oranges.
It's more that using force against someone like Neely isn't an exact science. There are 3 options:
1) psychos have free reign
2) the state deals with the psychos
3) citizens deal with the psychos
#2 falls apart when you have a DA like Alvin Bragg, and some percentage of citizens will opt for #3 over #1. The problem with #3 is shit happens when you leave law enforcement to random amateurs, so sometimes a citizens arrest results in a fatality.
There are plenty of ways to Monday-Morning-Quarterback how Penny could have done a better job of restraining Neely without killing him, but hindsight is 20/20.
A man with a rapsheet the size of a phonebook who assaulted an entire passenger car (in the legal sense of assault) and then was accidentally killed in a citizens arrest is newsworthy, sure, but the part you're falling for is that it was some sort of deliberate hate crime.
As someone who is native New Yorker who grew up in less rich very diverse areas and raised my children in the same areas and just moved last year to help with my grandkids in Oregon, I want to state that these people that talk about how they don't mind being spit on or masturbated to etc feel like their credibility is linked to the grittiness of their surroundings. No matter what they say they look upon homeless people as props or politics.
It’s like buying ripped jeans basically. “Yeah I’m tough enough to live in a hell scape! Where do you live, square? In a safe town surrounded by caring neighbors in a house that you bought without going into crippling debt to share with your family and children? HA! Nice try, dork.”
It's part and parcel of how "Big City Dweller" is an identity for so many people. They think that the very fact of living in a big city makes them fascinating.
Totally. "If I have this interesting facial hair I won't have to consider my values or develop an actual inner landscape! I'm just interesting facial hair guy!"
Compared to:
"If I voluntarily spend $40k a year to live next to real life District 9 I won't have to consider my values or develop an actual inner landscape! I'm just I Live in Hell Guy!"
This is all totally fine, and word are violence and people will kill themselves if you don't use the right pronouns.
I saw a great tweet that said something along the lines of “the ‘there are no safe spaces in the real world, snowflake’ attitude of 2015 conservative circles is now popular on some parts of the left in response to concerns about being spit at on the street or children seeing graphic BDSM imagery in public at pride”
The only good thing here is that these same people are largely not reproducing.
That’s a lot because people are just looking for knock down talking points and the evolutionary ponds of twitter/Reddit etc. will evolve them ones which work really well regardless of consistency.
Agreed. And I suspect a large number of these hardened urban dwellers are lying about their comfortability. Thinking about hip hop, there’s a recurring theme of pride in coming up in a rough area— but a desire to leave for wealth, comfort, and safety. If those born and raised in intimidating urban areas feel bogged down by it all, I’m sure the “moved for the rich tapestry” types are, too (and then some!).
I guess the charitable explanation is hard times build resilience and character but they still suck to experience. But when it’s a choice to just live in an urban horror show it becomes questionable. Maybe it’s just that they don’t know what to do with themselves without the drama of living in a city.
“It’s just that raw gritty feeling I love about living in a city!! When I get in bed at night and I’m too wired to sleep despite being exhausted I know that I made the right choice in living in this exhilarating metropolis!”
Do you think living in some American cities today is kind of like the whole thing soldiers experience, where they come back from the hyper stimulating war scenario only to find real life too boring? Is the new “going to Afghanistan” just “spending 40k a year in rent and dodging mental patients with machetes”?
This reminds me of the “Bike Cuck” meme from a few years ago that people were mocking, only taken to it’s absolute extreme.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/my-bike-got-stolen-recently
My bike got stolen in 1980 and I am still angry when I think about it.
Mine was stolen in 2010 and I’m still mad. I lock up my current bike with a huge chain that’s a pain to carry, but I’m not “donating” my nice, well-maintained bike to some tweaker.
That's devastating!
I really don’t understand why there’s no political juice in actually doing something about this, even in cities that have the money to do so. Or maybe, why there’s no political backlash for the complete failure to succeed in doing so despite spending billions of dollars on it. SF somehow cannot build roughly 10,000 simple shelter beds so it can move people from the street despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year on homelessness. But nobody seems to care that it doesn’t work, and then there’s the weirdos who are actually proud of it not working.
I do want to say that there’s another category which might get mixed up, and that’s one I’ve tried to express: when you live in a city as it IS, not as you wish it was, there are practical compromises you have to make day to day, because the alternatives in the moment are all worse. I don’t enjoy that and it’s one of the reasons I moved out of SF, and I think people should feel it’s something that demands action, but it is still true that when I encounter those situations, which I still do in the East Bay, experience says that the safe and prudent course of action is to sit tight. That’s not to say it’s okay that it happens, only about what to do when it does.
Well one big reason it doesn’t work is even if you built beds half of them would just leave them if there were even simple rules like “don’t break stuff or fight others”.
This has always been an issue when dealing with homeless people. They often don't want to be around one another.
Also we can’t just say “homeless” and assume we’re talking about the same people. Drug addicts? Mental patients? People who can’t afford rent and are living in their car? It’s like saying “let’s cure cancer.” Well, ok, which cancer? Leukemia? Or pancreatic cancer?
The point is that if the city doesn’t have the shelter space, it can’t legally clear encampments at all. Whether or not they stay is a separate issue.
The thing about "vote blue no matter who" is it means backlash just doesn't really happen in those cities.
There is political capital in doing something, it's why Eric Adams got elected in the first place. He is rounding up homeless people and if they are mentally ill or addicted to something, he is involuntarily committing them. The wokies in the safer neighborhoods who never ride the subway are pissed but the average person who actually lives in NYC and deals with this is happy about it and are demanding more.
Given that the LA mayoral election was basically about homelessness it should come as a shock when bass fails to address this meaningfully and also pays no consequence and yet this is almost certainly what will happen. My city councilwoman Traci Park does seem to have her head in the right space on this topic and has been doing a solid job given the limitations of the post. But eventually I’ll just leave LA, which is a shame as it really is a lovely place in so many ways.
It’s kind of like driving drunk repeatedly
And thinking it’s fine because you haven’t gotten into an accident yet.
It doesn’t. But it adds context to the situation where progressives are trying to pass it off as just some mentally ill person who made people “uncomfortable” and was killed by a racist white marine. Neely had a long history of aggressive behavior and his history adds credence to the story that people in this situation were valid to feel fearful. Particularly since he proclaimed he was going to die today and he doesn’t give a fuck anymore. That sounds like the beginning of suicide bombing.
Of course this doesn’t mean he would have done something or that he deserved to die, but we’re looking at it in hindsight saying how people could have should have responded in what was a highly charged situation.
Of course it matters otherwise people believe the lie that Neely was killed simply for being a hungry Black man in the world
I think it adds context about how scary he likely was before the chokehold, which we have reports of really concerning things but no video of body language. His criminal history makes me more likely to believe Neely was particularly physically threatening.
It 100% matters at least to the context. For instance, had the New York City and State politicians actually prosecute the many crimes, including the multiple violent crimes Neely committed, then maybe he'd be in jail instead of harassing people on a train. Had New York politicians ever tried to focus on reforming the mental health apparatus in their state and city then maybe he would have gotten the help he needed instead of circulating through the streets and jails.
If someone has been arrested 40 times in under a decade, it is literally an inevitability that they will die soon, whether that's by violence, drugs or some combination in a homeless camp.
We need permanent care solutions for the type of mentally ill people that will never sufficiently be able to get their act together on their own. There is a significant percentage of the population that has some kind of severe mental illness that drugs can not control. Further, even if the drugs did control them, those types of people struggle to take their medication on an ongoing basis while living alone.
I’ve seen some reports that the guy had actually assaulted him before, so it was his second encounter.