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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30404 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

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I dont understand your theory of the case at all. It is that 15 years in prison is an appropriate sentence for... being inexperienced at restraining violent crazy people?

If they die? Yes.

He clearly committed manslaughter, so he gets the punishment for manslaughter.

If they die? Yes.

So you get into a car accident, which results in the death.

You're cool with with doing 15 years?

Before you start talking about nuance, please see your comment.

What am I doing at the time?

If I'm drunk, or running a stop sign, or driving in the shoulder, or driving above the speed limit, or lane splitting, or making a disallowed turn: yes, I am fine with that.

If you don't want to do the time, simply do not do the crime.

So, in your theory, self defense and defense of other is only available to like, Jon Jones and Chuck Liddel?

I don't know what to say, dude.

Simply do not hold a choke for 15 minutes.

A potentially great insight from miles away with the benefit of hindsight...which also might be horribly wrong.

I don't have to have been their to know that doing the thing that always kills people would kill someone.

It's a simple application of physics and understanding of biology: when you deprive someone's brain of oxygen for 15 minutes, it stops working. You can tell when this happens because it's when they stop moving and they stop breathing and they shit their pants.

Except he never really stops moving and breathing

Given that the dude was found fully a corpse on the scene, I find that hard to believe.

There are countries that don't even have Good Samaritan laws and where you can be held liable for death or injury caused by your inept first aid.

There's no such law for defense of others. So yes, if your defensive actions result in death or injury, the court will determine if your actions were permissible.

whether this was self defense is what's up for debate. if all he was doing was schizo ranting then does that really justify a chokehold?

I wouldn't call it ranting, I would call it menacing, and I think it does justify being restrained. A chokehold is probably the only restraint the majority of humans know for use against humans that aren't children.

There appears to me, to be a fairly common sentiment among people less familiar with violence (and possibly pejoratively I think this is more common on the American left) that violence is some sort of dial you can perfectly calibrate. There is a reason all combat sports are conducted, essentially, on a mat, with a very restrictive moveset, and almost every kid starts before puberty so they cant really hurt each other. But even then MMA does not, in any real way, reflect streetfighting.

In real fights basically everything is potentially lethal. A slap? Well, by a weak woman, probably not, but a real one by a man, for sure. I could rupture your eardrum, while dealing punch-adjacent force, which will cause you to fall. Have I gotten to falling? Anytime someone is forced to the ground they are at risk of dying. Its called head trauma, and its nothing like Hollywood portrayals. Hit someone over the head with a whiskey bottle and they hit the ground. Big chance you've just committed murder. Even if the guy is just in a full nelson for 15 minutes there's a decent chance they are going to have permanent problems, including death. Am I a big rear naked choke guy? Nope. I suck at it comparatively to my favorite, the hammerlock and armbar series of moves. This makes sense, I wrestled at a high level for over a dozen year. But still if I put a guy like this in a hammerlock for 15 minutes he's going to destroy his arm. And the internal bleeding, on a guy with that health profile, we are talking amputation as a >50% probability, and death is certainly not off the table.

Muscle tissue is far more resistant to ischemia than the brain. You are irreversibly brain damaged in five minutes without oxygen and dead in ten. With muscles...the times are measured in hours.

While true, it seems fairly tangential. Like George Floyd, this person more than not, likely died because they came into the incident in such a depleted physical condition. While a cop obviously has the option of just throwing on some cuffs and then taking a deep drag on a cigarette, that wasn't available to our civvies here.

Eh...like, maybe if he was a fit healthy dude, sure, he'd have survived. Same for George Floyd. This being said, both of these guys weren't exceptionally unhealthy or fragile. This is more like a crapshoot: if it took 9 minutes to kill Floyd maybe his hypothetical football-playing 17yo Boy Scout nephew might've survived for 12. Neither of these people were manhandling Grandpa or medically frail hospital patients.

A chokehold is probably the only restraint the majority of humans know for use against humans that aren't children.

Half Nelson or hammerlock are well known natural wrestling moves that are probably safer (for the receiver) than anything choke adjacent -- strictly inferior to the newer MMA tech from the giver's perspective, but as I said before if you want to wrestle bums on the subway you may need to accept some handicap if you want to minimize your legal liability.

Those are both common wrestling moves, but not a lot of people actually wrestle. I don't even think of the half nelson as a particularly good restraint, its good at turning people from their stomach to their back, which isn't useful in real life fights. Hammerlocks, are good, yes, but they are strictly supervised in actual wrestling because its so easy to destroy an arm. Like I said, if you hammerlock this guy for 15 minutes, he's losing his arm.

There were several 911 calls, including some about Neely. Nobody bothers to call for ordinary schizo ranting.

does that really justify a chokehold?

Yes

By all means, institutionalize mentally ill vagrants.

Also by all means, punish extrajudicial killings. We can do both, NYC police got 10.3 BILLION this year.

Why is it suddenly so important to charge and punish Penny in particular?

Surely the fact that he killed someone should figure in the calculus somewhat, should it not? And in any other context, would you find compelling the argument, "sure, maybe Bob committed a serious crime, but we shouldn't charge him, because his victim was insufficiently punished for completely unrelated crimes"?

What if Joe was a dangerous criminal who escaped from death row, before running into Bob and getting killed in the altercation (Bob knew nothing of Joe’s history)? There’s no real loss here, so punishment would be gratuitous.

And I do think the previously revealed moral character of Joe and Bob should factor in our interpretation of the altercation. If Joe has proven himself unworthy of charity (in the motte sense) , then Bob’s words and actions against Joe should get the benefit of charity in the eyes of the law.

For something like 500 years, Anglo-American criminal law has considered the moral character of the victim, if unknown to the defendant, to be irrelevant to questions of self-defense. So if you are arguing for it to be taken into account in this case, you are arguing for a double standard to be applied.

Can you explain the rationale for the moral character being irrelevant?

Why double standard ? Don't you mean a different standard? Can you refer to, or imagine, a situation where I fall on the other side?

Can you explain the rationale for the moral character being irrelevant?

Note that I said that it is irrelevant if unknown to the defendant

Yeah, explain that argument.

The problem I have with it is that the case becomes about thoughtcrime.

It is harder (perhaps impossible) to ascertain the contents of Bob's mind, than the contents of Joe's rap sheet. Common sense dictates we start looking for the keys under the lamppost, ie with Joe's rap sheet. If Joe's rap sheet (and Bob's ) is empty or light, then we can veer into mentalism and voo, ask him to cry convincingly for the jury etc.

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Along the same lines as "Mary Rice Davies applies" i increasingly feel like we need a "Joker's Dark Knight speach applies".

No one freaks out when a homeless schizophrenic attacks somone because its all part of a plan. But when an ostensible "normie" does so everyone loses thier fucking mind because it exoses the central lie that underpins the entire secular progressive/humanist worldview. Rousseau, Locke, Mill, Rawls, Et Al were wrong.

And that lie is? The equal moral worth and dignity of the two? No, that's not it, you like that one.

And that lie is?

That violence and ultimate agency/control resides with the state (or society) rather than with the individual. That the state of nature is "just".

Aren't you a fan of Hobbes? It's the same conclusion, just without the window dressing. The government keeps you from a state of nature. You owe it everything in return and it owes you nothing else. So if it wants you to refrain from acting against homeless schizophrenics, it is your duty to stoicly accept this and not act against homeless schizophrenics.

Hobbes, while he is the father of modern authoritarianism, would be considered a libertarian of all but anarchocapitalism in the modern era.

I don't see how. His social contract is "You accept this social contract which says that we, the sovereign, own you and can morally command you in any way we see fit. The only thing you get from that is you're no longer in a state of nature. If you reject this contract you're in a state of nature and we can do whatever we want to you, because that's how a state of nature works".

This is the standard leftist caricature of Hobbes yes, but as this case aptly illustrates, it completely fails to adress Hobbes' thesis.

Homeless schitzos menacing people is the state of nature. Upstanding citizens killing homeless schitzos out of hand is the state of nature.

The thing about social contracts that progressives do not seem to grasp is that they are reciprocal, imposing duties and privileges on both sides. A Hobbesian could easily argue that the City and State of New York rejected the contract first (or were at the very least derelict in their duties) because what happened on that subway was the state of nature and thus Sgt Penny was under no obligation to obey their rules.

The social contract is, at its base, a lie. It started as a justification of why one should obey the government, and the details are irrelevant, whether Hobbes, Rosseau, or even Locke. All "social contracts" boil down to "Society's representative, government, shall be the sole and final judge of all disputes under this contract". No other term is necessary, though if you want one it can be "Society, through it's representative, government, may change the terms of this contract at any time, prospectively or retrospectively, with or without notice".

Hobbes's just has a bit less window dressing than the rest. There are no enforceable reciprocal duties. An apparent "breach" on the part of the sovereign may only be judged by the sovereign, not answered by a breach on the part of the individual. So even if the city and state of New York were derelict, Penny does not lose his obligation to follow their rules. And if they rejected the contract, why, then Penny is in a state of nature, and the city and state of New York can enforce their laws upon him morally because in a state of nature, the strong do what they will.

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I am, and no it is not, because a core component of Hobbes' thesis is that violence and ultimately control resides with the individual not the state. Accordingly, a state that declines to protect the individual is derelict in its duties and is owed nothing.

In the Hobbesian view an individual chooses to obey the law in the hopes that others will do the same. The job of the cops is not to protect the public from criminals but to protect criminals (and those suspected of being criminals) from the public. The cops failed to protect Neely by failing to arrest him and keep him separate from the public.

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