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The belief that he is a “degenerate” whose death doesn't matter is founded on the assumption that he was a menace to society himself, beyond simply being a homeless subway busker. Then it matters a great deal whether the violent crimes people attribute to him actually happened or not.
This is a general pattern in the culture war that really irks me. People decide they don't like someone, then either fabricate evidence or present it in the most damning way. This happens on Reddit all the time. For example, Redditors say the executives of Norfolk Southern should be in jail because they turned East Ohio into an uninhabitable wasteland. If you point out that there is no evidence that the area is or will become uninhabitable by any reasonable definition, they downvote you, because you're challenging their conclusion.
In the case of Jordan Neely, if you think he's a degenerate because he kidnaps children, it's rather important to prove whether that's true. If Jordan Neely is a degenerate even without evidence that he kidnapped a child, then people should present the evidence for that without resorting to unproven allegations.
And don't get me started on the fact that many charges can be framed in completely different ways depending on whether you like the accused or not. For example, “he kidnapped a child” can mean anything ranging from “he snatched a random toddler off the streets and stuffed her in the trunk of his car” to “he took his fifteen-year-old son on an out-of-state family visit in contravention of the custody arrangement with his ex-wife”. When you mention “child kidnapping”, people probably instinctively think of the former, while most cases are probably more like the latter.
I am not a court of law. If harassing and scaring random people around is a regular day in someone’s life then that’s a degenerate who wouldn’t survive for long in 99% of human societies that has ever existed. I don’t have to care about the specifics of their mischiefs to come to this conclusion.
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