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Notes -
To be very clear, I am a hardcore proponent of law and order, and I strongly desire a society where Daniel Penny would never have had to do what he did, because it wouldn’t have gotten to that point. I don’t hunger for an era of vigilantism and wanton interpersonal violence; there’s a reason that I’ve made it into my thirties without ever engaging in a single act of interpersonal violence. While I do believe that war and combat can be ennobling for some men under certain circumstances, I’m largely in agreement with you that the reduction of violence in favor of civilization has been, on balance, a significant improvement for mankind.
However, I do sincerely believe that the long-term maintenance of society does in fact depend on the application of severe violence by the state toward certain individuals within society. Treating schizophrenic repeat-offending criminals as “people who need help” is a cancerous attitude which will erode - and already has eroded - civilization. No, he did not “need help” and he did not deserve help; he was a useless scumbag, a burden on every other person around him, and we are better off without him in every possible way. I agree with you that it’s far from ideal that random strangers had to take matters into their own hands to do to Jordan Neely what the state should have already done, in a way that would have been legitimized by the imprimatur of state sovereignty and monopoly on violence. Somebody needed to permanently remove Jordan Neely from society, and if it’s not going to be the state - which, clearly, given the state of our civilization, it wasn’t going to be - the next best thing is 24-year-old former Marines.
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