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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32962 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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The tendency that's emerged to view random acts of violence as indicative of 'a mental health emergency that is the result of government shortcomings' is concerning and just weird. The current example is Jordan Neely.

  1. People are getting lost in this speculative 'why' behind these actions and losing sight of the 'what'. in other words, that someone has a mental disorder that may have contributed to their decision to commit a random and violent crime is a very distant second to the fact that they committed a random and violent crime. it seems like many of the perpetrators who receive this sort of public treatment are people who have committed a laundry list of crimes in the past and for whom this sort of behavior was entirely predictable. And it's this 'they have a mental disorder it doesn't count' mentality that seems to be at the root cause of these people not being held accountable and put behind bars so they can't repeat that's behind all of this. Sure, maybe treating mental health disorders will help, but they can receive those services in jail (or we should focus on ensuring they can receive them, if they can't already). And this narrative ignores that the sole purpose of a criminal justice system is not to reform criminals; it's to serve justice and reduce the amount of crime that's happening. And before anyone makes the non-intuitive claim that there is nothing to suggest that arresting people reduces crime, yes there is; and i don't even know why the assumption that arresting people doesn't reduce crime exists in the first place. It seems very obvious and logically sound that if someone has a tendency to commit crime, they cannot do so if they are in jail.

  2. It ignores that there are people with mental disorders who go their entire lives without committing a random act of violence. Looking for a basically exogenous (e.g. outside the realm of the self) source of blame instead of holding individuals accountable is so symptomatic of a form of thought that has begun to plague society. It is always the system's fault, it is always something else's fault. It's a cancerous way of thinking because who the hell is to say what ultimate cause led to someone doing something. It's pure speculation, so to focus on identifying and blaming this vague ultimate cause instead of focusing on holding people accountable falls victim to causal ambiguity and sets yourself up to not be able to remedy the problem

  3. I don't know why there is this view that if the government just dumps more money into this magical mental health pot, that random acts of violence will be solved. We can't even be sure that mental health issues are generally and primarily the cause for this sort of behavior, but even to the extent that we can, I just find it so weird that people think the government can somehow solve it. Like just throwing money at this vague notion of mental health services will somehow solve the problem

One of the counterarguments to this "hard on crime" line of thinking is the problem of mass incarceration. There is a limit to how many people can be imprisoned without compromising the system’s integrity. I learned more about this when I read about the Russian prison system, which developed its own set of rules after the communist revolution in 1917 and following literal imprisonment of whole nations in gulags. A similar phenomenon is happening in US prisons, where powerful gangs impose their own laws and influence both the inmates and the outsiders. Mass incarceration is a problem of the type that stares back if you stare at it intensely enough.

There is also a deeper problem behind this - whether we call it a “mental health crisis”, as some on the left do, or “social fabric being ripped apart”, as some on the right do. It is shocking that over 9% of males can expect to be imprisoned in their lifetime. Even if we are not among them, we cannot ignore the fact that 10% of males will experience the prison system for a period of time. Therefore, I do not think that the solution is to release violent criminals or to be extra tough on crime.

over 9% of males can expect to be imprisoned in their lifetime

Wow, I would not have guessed. See source here, including racial breakdown: https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/Llgsfp.pdf

But, do note that the above is 1997 report using 1991 data. I believe rates are up since then, though, so I don't mean to disagree with your point.

Your data doesn't appear to include local jails, as ireally suggests below. However, rates are not up since 1991, which is at the top or end, depending on the particular stat, of the big crime peak - rates of homicide, property crime, etc have significantly decreased since then, even including the post 2020 spike

In what is my new favorite excuse, ChatGPT told me wrongly, my apologies. Checking Wikipedia (ironically, given how often we were told not to do that at first), per capita peaked in ~2008 (including local jails).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate#Growth_and_Subsequent_Decline


year  total         per-100k

1940	0,264,834	201

1950	0,264,620	176

1960	0,346,015	193

1970	0,503,586	161

1980	0,503,586	220

1985	0,744,208	311

1990	1,148,702	457

1995	1,585,586	592

2000	1,937,482	683

2002	2,033,022	703

2004	2,135,335	725

2006	2,258,792	752

2008	2,307,504	755

2010	2,270,142	731

2012	2,228,424	707

2014	2,217,947	693

2016	2,157,800	666

2018	2,102,400	642

2020	1,675,400	505

Wikipedia is almost always a better source - in the sense of usefulness and accuracy of the information - than something like (not implying these are the same) nyt/cnn/nypost/local news, or even worse a popular random website, even if that random website is from "harvard" or something. It's a worse source than a paper / dataset / article in a trade publication / review article in the field, but those are hard to interpret if you're not familiar with them.

It is shocking that over 9% of males can expect to be imprisoned in their lifetime. Even if we are not among them, we cannot ignore the fact that 10% of males will experience the prison system for a period of time.

I always have a hard time believing this. I suspect that this statistic includes -- and is vastly inflated by -- relatively short stints in county jails. If we look at the country's entire population and count everyone who, for example, spent a night in jail for a misdemeanor Fail To Appear warrant for driving on a suspended license and lump them together with the actual criminals in state and federal prisons, then I can see 9-10% being plausible. But actual prison incarceration? Doubt.

Lots of people have been jailed at one point in their life. Few have ever been imprisoned. Jail =/= prison. I think a lack of awareness of this distinction has led to the popularization of this statistic.

I posit it is sort of magical bean type of thinking. Lots of people don't like mass imprisonment/institutionalization. They also happen to not like being assaulted/raped/murdered by smelly people on the subway, or don't like strolling through a park full of feces and needles. Mental health is the magic bullet that lets you mentally square this circle, you don't have to make tradeoffs! This theory also generally fits into the worldview of the modern PMC and other urbanites who value talking and words very highly. In this unrealistic theory of the world the steps go like this:

  1. Get people to talk to social workers and shrinks.

  2. They now are fully functional citizens who can work at whole foods and live in (totally available) housing just like them.

  3. Now the streets are also clean and safe.

With regard to number 3, the exact inverse appears to be the current trend. I wouldn't be surprised if throwing money at "mental health" is actually exacerbating the problem.

This is not stemming from politicians. This is grass roots. There are tons of protests over Neely, for instance. You see this sentiment on the NYC subreddit as well. If you ask a progressive person, and frankly many moderate liberals as well, they echo it as well. On the contrary, politicians are just responding to what their constituents are saying on this one.

‘Tons of protests over Neely’ is not how I would describe literal tens of people in a city of 8 million.

It's not implausible. Assuming minimum values--"tons" being at least two, "tens of people" being at least 20--that works out to 200 lbs. per person.

So I guess then you're of the opinion that the ex-Marine whose actions led to Mr. Neely's untimely demise should be charged to the full extent of the law? After all, Neely was merely ranting, and while it's a common feature of schizophrenics, isn't inherently dangerous. To assume that such behavior was indicative of a violent tendency was unreasonable. Neely did have a violent past, but unless Penny can demonstrate that he had prior knowledge of this violence (and he almost certainly can't), his actions weren't justified any more than if he had perpetrated them upon an arbitrary person.

To assume that such behavior was indicative of a violent tendency was unreasonable

Is it unreasonable? In my experience, I have observed two flavors of schizophrenic ranting: "untargeted" and "targeted". Untargeted being when someone is yelling at the air, or at inanimate objects. "Targeted" when they are getting in specific people's faces.

I don't know which Neely was doing but I actually suspect that P( engaging in targeted ranting | no history of violence ) < 0.05, making it reasonable to assume.

Ex-Marine whose actions led to Mr. Neely's untimely demise should be charged to the full extent of the law?

If the Marine was in Afghanistan and blew up an entire family (ironically targeting a man working for a US-based aid company) including 7 children because he mistook buckets of water in their car for bombs - that's not a problem, nobody gets punished. US generals tried to lie about it until the media moved on, concealing their error.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/13/us-will-not-punish-military-over-afghanistan-drone-killing-of-civilians.html

People broadly recognize that there are errors made in wartime, especially when the US wants to look tough. On the macro scale, that's why the US was there for so long, because it was so embarrassing to admit they had no clue what was going on and no hope of achieving their nebulous, ill-defined goals. On the micro scale, they wanted to minimize the embarassment of getting attacked by ISIS during their ignominious withdrawal, so there would've been a lot of pressure to bomb some ISIS related target.

But our ex-Marine instead kills some useless homeless insane person who's a blight on everyone around him and this is a major problem? This is bizarro world where insane violent criminals get treated with 1000x the dignity of innocent families. If we can accept collateral damage in wasteful wars, we should accept collateral damage in maintaining basic standards of behaviour.

Alternately, some bleeding heart liberal would say 'stop bombing innocent families, don't kill unhoused people on the subway'

But who says 'slaughter the innocent, treasure and protect the guilty!'

But who says 'slaughter the innocent, treasure and protect the guilty!'

I can actually defend Neely in the context of your analogy from a right-wing perspective. Bombing Afghan aid workers and not giving a shit but handling Neely with kid gloves is right and proper because he's American and the Afghan aid worker isn't. One of our guys is worth a hundred foreigners, that's the whole point of being a nation with national in-group preference.

And all the people on the subway aren't Americans? What about the 7-year-old girl he tried to abduct? Or the 67 year old woman he punched?

Precisely because he's threatening Americans, he should be a higher priority target than some random Afghans (a country that is almost as far from the US as it is possible to get). A nationalist, in-group focused USA would sort out its problems at home before going out to wreak havoc in the Middle East and North Africa.

That's fair. I don't dispute that Neely should have been in jail already for his previous crimes against Americans.

After all, Neely was merely ranting, and while it's a common feature of schizophrenics, isn't inherently dangerous.

Is it? Have you been polling schizophrenics for their proclivity to rant? I suppose we should assume 90% of the top level posters here are schizophrenics yeah?

From what I've read so far, Neely was walking back and forth yelling at nobody in particular that he was hungry and thirsty and that he didn't care if he went to prison and he was ready to die. He then aggressively threw his jacket onto the floor. I could be mistaken, but I was under the impression that that this is the kind of behavior that is usually reserved for the mentally ill and intoxicated. You can call it ranting, raving, or whatever, but it's certainly not normal and is certainly distinct from going off on tangents in a space specifically dedicated for the purpose. News reports indicated that Neely was schizophrenic and I'm assuming that that influenced his behavior, but I'm no psychiatrist.

He had an open warrant for punching an elderly woman in the face. Also he had 44 prior arrests. Also multiple people have come forward to say he had tried to victimize others in crimes that went unreported. This is unsurprising, most crime is unreported, so anytime a criminal gets caught doing something, it’s safe to assume he has done it multiple times before. This means Neely probably victimized hundreds of people already, through acts of trying to kidnap a teen girl to trying to push people into the tracks (attempted murder). Thus the marine was fully justified in using non lethal means to subdue the threat. The fact he had an anomalous reaction, likely to due to drugs and an unhealthy lifestyle like George Floyd, isn’t the marines fault in the least.

Thus the marine was fully justified in using non lethal means to subdue the threat.

Unless the marine knew about that criminal history (and note btw that a large number of those arrests were for things like turnstile jumping), they are irrelevant to the question of whether he was justified.

I'm not very sympathetic to "The actor couldn't have researched that specific information, therefore their decision couldn't have been affected by those facts."

As a simple example, imagine that the unknowable facts were completely different. In this hypothetical Neely has won the Carnegie Medal for civilian heroism, was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, is a shoo-in for canonization as a Saint, and did every other good thing you can name. The marine still hasn't done any biographical research. Do you think that that background would be just as irrelevant as the real one?

I don't blame people for being correct even if their reasoning can't withstand strict scrutiny.

Yes, that background would very obviously be completely irrelevant. To quote the California Supreme Court:

the law recognizes the justification of self-defense not because the victim "deserved" what he or she got, but because the defendant acted reasonably under the circumstances. Reasonableness is judged by how the situation appeared to the defendant, not the victim. As the Court of Appeal noted, "Because [j]ustification does not depend upon the existence of actual danger but rather depends upon appearances' (People v. Clark (1982) 130 Cal. App.3d 371, 377 [181 Cal. Rptr. 682]; see also CALJIC No. 5.51), a defendant may be equally justified in killing agood' person who brandishes a toy gun in jest as a `bad' person who brandishes a real gun in anger."

People v. Minifie, 13 Cal. 4th 1055, 1068 (1996). That seems to me to be 100 percent correct, both legally and morally.

I'm more sympathetic to that argument when we have months of factfinding followed by days of debate on the minutiae of the event, like in a criminal trial. We don't usually have that much detail available, so we have to use something to fill in the blanks the rest of the time.

The flow of information from the "unknown" background to the actor isn't magic, it's just not explained in the text. For a more concrete example of how background characteristics can change the events in a way that aren't reflected in a description, consider:

Alice shot Bob after he approached her in the alleyway behind 1st street. She stated that she feared for her life, as he was carrying knives "in an obvious manner". Bob was a 23 year old male who...

The end. Everything else is background that she couldn't have researched (and even the age would've been a guess). Otherwise it might change your opinion that he:

A) ...had a history of mugging, a rap sheet as long as your arm, etc.

B) ...was a culinary student heading home from class.

I think that variant A was likely justified, and variant B likely wasn't. Do you think that both are, or neither?

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Arriving at a correct answer through insufficiently rigorous reasoning is what is called "guessing". We discourage it in students, we discourage it in AIs (at least to the point where they guess so well as to be indistinguishable from reasoning). I damn well want to discourage guessing before you attack someone, too.

He used the appropriate level of force. People forget it wasn’t just him - he had help from two black men who also thought this guy needed restraining. Are they guilty of aiding in murder? Why is no one calling for their arrest? This is a rhetorical question - I know exactly why they aren’t

BLM was calling for the arrest of all of them. Consistent, if wrong.

Didn’t see that, got a source?

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  1. Perhaps, but nevertheless Neely's criminal history is irrelevant.

  2. The others did not cause Neely's death. If anything, they made it less likely that Neely would die, by reducing the need for Penny to use great amounts of force.

On your 2nd point - did they really?

If the marine restraining Neely was in the wrong and jumped the gun, intervening on Neely's behalf would have made it less likely that he dies. Instead, they enabled the marine.

I'm very much on the side of the marine and the men who assisted, but you cannot so neatly excuse the 'extras' from culpability if you see Neely's death as a grave injustice. If you're going to be pissed at the marine, you should be pissed at the others.

Saying "Actually, the other two men could have potentially saved Neely's life by helping restraining him" is a disingenuous redirection from the obvious racial dynamics at play. That may have pull with you, but I'm betting most people who are even aware of the incident don't even know there were others involved.

We could investigate the reasons behind that state of affairs as well, but the answers will also lie in that general direction.

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Actually from a legal perspective you’re wrong - helping restrain someone so that they can be more effectively executed makes you an accomplice. Once again, I ask why no one is calling for these people to also be prosecuted, when Chauvins fellow officers who didn’t even touch Floyd all got heavy sentences?

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walking back and forth yelling at nobody in particular that he was hungry and thirsty and that he didn't care if he went to prison and he was ready to die. He then aggressively threw his jacket onto the floor.

What, do you think, would have happened next. This seems to be leading up to a certain kind of action, no?

Probably nothing, in my experience. That raises an interesting question: Penny was apparently from Long Island, so he might have been more frightened of Neely than a more worldly person would have been (or perhaps not. Perhaps Penny came to NYC often and had seen his share of homeless people. Or, perhaps Neely was in fact behaving in an unusually frightening manner.

"A more worldly person wouldn't be scared of a raving lunatic and would just know that's the cost of city living"

That misstates the issue. The issue is NOT whether or not it is a cost of city living; it is whether a reasonable person in Penny's position would have believed that Neely posed an imminent danger. There is actually a lot of case law which struggles with this particular issue. Eg: Calif Criminal Jury Instruction 505, on self-defense, says: "When deciding whether the defendant’s beliefs were reasonable, consider all the circumstances as they were known to and appeared to the defendant and consider what a reasonable person in a similar situation with similar knowledge would have believed." Well, does that mean a reasonable New Yorker, or a reasonable tourist, or something else? For example, the California Supreme Court has rejected the idea that a jury must consider what a "reasonable gang member" or a "reasonable battered woman" would believe, People v. Humphrey, 13 Cal. 4th 1073 (1996).* I would personally say that a jury should hear evidence of how conversant Penny was with ranting homeless people and should take into account how someone with that level of familiarity would have responded (that is part of "similar knowledge," IMHO), but then I am partial to criminal defendants.

*Though evidence that a battered woman might actually perceive a danger is admissible. But that is a different question than whether the belief is reasonable; self-defense requires both that the defendant have an actual belief that danger is imminent and that the belief be reasonable (though in CA and elsewhere, having an actual, but unreasonable belief = imperfect self-defense, which is a partial defense).

Well, it seems they joined in after Penny initiated things, which is a different scenario. I might have joined myself, to keep things from escalating, even if I didn't think Neely was an actual threat.

"It's not 'Nam Smokey, there are rules" -- if you're gonna fight with bums and expect not to be arrested, you need to wait for them to very clearly hit you first. This does put one at a disadvantage, but them's the breaks.

Cameras ruining all the fun these days, you can't get away with saying they swung first smh

No cameras showing the start of the incident here. Not that that will help Penny; the general rule of authority is that it started when they saw it.

I think the facts haven’t come out to discern whether he should be charged.

But I’m less talking about whether Neely deserved to be killed, and more talking about the public response to his actions - irrespective of his death. This same outcry happens when there are other random acts of violence that catch the headlines. Michelle Go, for instance.

I think honestly it stems from a much larger error in meta ethics in the sense that it seems that the west has come to the conclusion that people cannot choose their behavior at all, and thus if they do a bad thing, or fail to do a good thing, there must be a systemic explanation because of course he didn’t choose to live that way and didn’t choose to do that thing. And once you’ve moved the locus of control away from the individual, it becomes the fault of society and we must have programs to deal with this sort of thing, and if we have them, they need more money.

The incentive is obvious from an elite government/nonprofit elite POV — the programs created to solve the “systemic problems” are basically elite jobs programs. People like them love programs because people like them work for those new programs and spend that money. They benefit directly.

But I think the bigger issues this approach creates are learned helplessness (self-cultivation is a skill, self-control is a skill, and so is discipline), and an increasing reluctance to say something about bad behavior in ourselves and others. And in a lot of places (go talk to teachers, for example) the rules don’t exist. Teachers complain about this all the time. Kid doesn’t do anything in class but draw dickbutt and act out? He’s getting a C, because we don’t flunk kids anymore. If a kid disrupts class, even if they do so in a threatening way? He goes to the office and nothing happens. Cops tell similar stories — you can arrest them all day and watch them walk out, charges dropped, a day later. What this creates is a lack of accountability and structure. People pretty much know they face few consequences of their actions. So given that most of us won’t so much as say something, and the authorities aren’t allowed to do anything, anyone so inclined will do whatever he wants to.

I agree with your assessment. When I've written about it I've referred to it as this perception that we are in a post-homo sapien world; that we have fully outgrown our primitive nature and have gained the ability to perfectly engineer society and human nature. It ignores that the same basic laws of nature apply; that human systems are complex to the point that they cannot be fully comprehended, so we cannot simply decide to intervene to produce x desired outcome because a. there is no way we can truly understand and respond to the ultimate and specific causal forces and b. there is no way we can truly understand the effects a given intervention can have. I mean it sort of doesn't matter whether people have the ability to choose their behavior. Whether or not the decision to murder someone is the result of genetic predispositions and a traumatic childhood, that person is a murderer; and we should be focused on ensuring they cannot murder.

I think the meta ethical fallacy you point out and the post-homo sapien world i point out observe something that is intellectually muddled and has a selective view of whether free will exists/human nature is a blank slate. This narrative suggests that free will exists to the extent that human nature is something that can be re-engineered by humans, but not to the extent that the individual can be held accountable for their actions.

I find this all especially interesting given that if you look at people who did just heinous shit throughout history, e.g. serial killers or rapists etc., they typically had a rough upbringing and they probably would not have done their heinous acts if not for some traumatic and formative experience. But no one jumps in and says Jeffrey Dahmer shouldn't be held accountable because he had a fucked up childhood. But even if they did, you have to ask, who gives a fuck? He did what he did. You can't go back in time and change his childhood.

I view many progressive prerogatives like this as being this rebellion against the notion that the laws of nature apply to humans and reign supreme (in that they cannot be refuted or changed). It's this notion of the helicopter mom and the administrative state; that we can overcome our environment, pad its walls to eliminate everything bad, and that we are not subject to the imperceptible interdependencies that characterize complex systems. That there are inevitable and organic consequences to actions which serve to deincentivize bad behaviors. Complex human systems function in the same way as a free market; the free market functions the way it does because it is a complex web of organic nodes, just like any system of humans.

Alternatively, I think it may be the result of modern existence becoming very complex --> complexity is uncertainty --> humans fear uncertainty most of all --> humans gravitate to these notions that the environment and the uncertainty it creates can be conquered/that there is a bad guy (e.g. the system, elites, whatever) that can be blamed and defeated. I truly think that in 10 years people are going to be shocked and find absurd notions like these.

I think this rejection of the laws of nature and natural way of things also manifests in the popular view that someone's wage should be a reflection of the standard of living that wage affords them, and not a reflection of their market value/contribution to the company. It's a rejection of the idea that the life someone ends up with is largely a function of the decisions they've made.

I tend to agree, but I wonder if there’s also a sense in which blaming big systems is a dodge against having to do something concrete. If the problem is dangerously mentally ill on the subway, detaining them seems mean. Blame something huge means you don’t have to do the mean thing.

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