penny for your thoughts

there is a fight for civilization. choose your fighter.

choose your fighter

battle lines have been drawn on who gets to decide what sort of civilization we are to inhabit, what license and agency we may possess, and who gets to do what to whom and at what cost and accountability.

it’s difficult not to see this case as a symbol, a barometer of zeitgeist.

one thing is certain: however this turns out, large numbers of people are going to be upset. but perhaps the most telling question is “what will those people do next?” and because one group threatens to act far worse than the other if it does not get its way, is it getting to trample the rights of others and hold the administration of law hostage?

it’s an important question. let’s look.

the case of daniel penny is highly polarizing. many bray for his blood as a needless killer of an innocent. many others call him hero. facts are played with fast and loose and with all the emotional vitriol that may be mustered because this is a clash of visions and only one may prevail.

jordan neely was threatening other subway riders. he was, it turns out, out on a warrant for having done so in the past. this was not a “nice kid” or a “simple street performer unjustly attacked” he was a longstanding danger and problem. he was arrested 44 times often for violent crimes. he kidnapped a 7 year old girl in 2015, punched a 64 year old man in the face in 2019, and hit a 67 year old woman on the subway so hard in 2021 it broke her nose and orbital bone.

he was at it again.

neely was shouting at passengers, expressing that he was hungry and thirsty, demanding things, and making statements about being ready to die or go back to jail for life. he also reportedly said he was willing to/planning to kill people on the train

and daniel stepped in to stop it.

was the threat credible? based on history, it seems like some sort of violence was. this was sure not the guy you wanted near you in a small space.

was this handled in the best possible platonically perfect fashion? no. but it never is. it cannot be. ever been a real fight with an aggressive and determined adult male? i have. it’s not like the movies and it can go from “looks possible” to “you’re going to the hospital and might have lifelong injuries” in a big hurry. responding is difficult. no one gets it bang on right, especially not in a case like this. that’s not a reasonable standard for armchair quarterbacks who’ve never taken a hit from a blitzing linebacker. neither is “oh, he just should have done this one incredibly complex and far sighted thing if he had perfect knowledge and infinite capacity and feared nothing.” this stuff is always a mess. this one turned deadly.

neely was alive when the cops arrived. they took one look, said “yuck” and left him to his fate. and perhaps they had a point. perhaps not. i wasn’t there so i’m not going to opine, but i will say that “all cops should be ready to get hep C to save problem people” is not a sound standard.

i have spoken in the past about how any sort of sane society must see to itself. then as now, the issue was “the subway” as it seems to be such a flashpoint for lunatics and predators. the video therein will look familiar. happens every day.

and normalizing this is not normal. living like this is not normal.

excerpt therefrom:

a society must see to itself and establish the morals, mores, and behavior that it will accept.

that is what makes it a society.

civilization is not a thing to be directed from the top down but the sum of the bottoms up relationships and order that emerge from its inhabitants in their exercise of agency and association.

it and its people must be self-governing and each must expect the same from each and all.

that’s the price and the payoff of full participation in the social contract.

anything else is barbarism and that includes “reliance upon government to do this for me.” such dependency is the hallmark of the child. adults solve their own problems and set up their own systems. adults step up to repair that which is broken.

“the government should fix this” is just a lazy way of admiring the problem but failing to be a part of the solution. it’s an admission that it’s “someone else’s problem to fix.”

“i care, but not enough to do anything myself” is not a terribly compelling mantra.

“i profess to care, but will wail against and vilify those who try to generate some semblance of societal order here because i want all the nice stuff without any conflict” is likely far worse and hypocritical to boot. it’s a childish inability to recognize trade offs or accept responsibility.

and yet we’re seeing this every day in 100 places and the result is debasement and degeneration.

we appease.

we do not deter.

we strive not for justice but for flimsy justification for malfunction and indolent passivity.

we wring our hands and rend our garments, but no one steps forward to act.

madness and menace run free.

and none dare stand to stop it because the vast and increasingly aggressive machinery of the state stands always poised to leap into attack on any who do. villains are freed, heroes are thrown in deepest dungeons, and the demoralization and disintegration of once high trust ethoses marches on in implacable hobnailed boots.

there is no good answer alone because it’s always “you against the machine” and the machine has grown hostile to civilization, a golem lost in malinstruction and malincentive.

but how did we get to here? what is this in service of?

i would say it’s in service of fear driven perverse incentive.

consider:

the reason you get railroaded by fearful prosecutors is because they (often rightly) fear small population groups who hold them hostage and misBehavior Leveraged Manipulation proves a potent extortion arm for extremist politics and it’s leading to extraordinary skew.

it’s literally “let us loot or we’ll burn the city” as naked threat from populations all too eager to prove the sincerity of their threats.

but at a certain point, isn’t that just saying “this is coming no matter what you do”?

this has rotted systems as all those in power fear riot and mayhem to the exclusion of all else including and especially being called out for failing to display any sense or morality or even handedness.

in the end, it’s simple: the criminal has rights far in excess of the victim for fear of what the criminal’s compatriots might do if he were held to account.

i hate this question as much as you likely do, but here it is anyway:

if daniel penny had been black, would he even have been charged?

no cops, free bail, free defense, and no jail even for multiple violent offenders has proved a potent mixture. police are utterly demoralized and impotent. so too is civilization.

every time you try to arrest someone, they walk in hours. prosecutors drop or reduce charges based entirely on race because race is what determines whether windows get broken and auto dealers burned after your verdict. this is extortion. it’s terrorism. it’s the opposite of civilization. a small group literally loots any time they feel like one of their own was mistreated while the majority is cowed into silence and impotence.

why on earth would anyone stand up to defend a white or asian person or a woman accosted in her own bathroom by a dude in a dress or, for that matter, damn near anyone assaulted by some “marginalized group?”

you’re instantly in every crosshair. the cops will not take your side and the justice system will dogpile you out of craven self-interest and inverted virtue signaling. you’ll get sued in civil court as well (as penny is) because lawyers love the publicity and will take cases on contingency because payments can be millions over injury to negative value people. even if you prevail, you’re going to be out hundreds of thousands maybe millions of dollars in defense and your name will have been dragged coast to coast in endless media feeding frenzy. you’ll spend your life getting hate mail and death threats.

helluva thing to take on for a stranger on the subway.

this is dafna yoran, the prosecutor in the penny case.

would you want her deciding whether or not to come after you?

how about the someone who assaulted you?

in a world of “the process is the punishment” such people possess vast power to ruin lives or grant clemency. whom they pursue and why matters.

have a listen.

this is where you land when “coddle those who threaten us” becomes the primary political praxis of cowards and the thousand little deaths they die.

this is their avatar, their justification jingo.

this is also her career maximizing choice: prevent riots and ruckus, vilify taking a stand, and free those most likely to prey upon her and those like her because that chance to her is remote but the chance that if she sparks the next george floyd fracas, she’s out of favor and out of a job is all too real.

do you think the jurors here are not under the same pressure and fear?

how is that a fair trial?

the incentive set stinks.

this is all a race to the bottom. it elevates the worst and most predatory and the more badly they act and threaten to act, the more they get. there is nothing “mostly peaceful” about it. this used to be called “appeasement” back when social and political theorists still possessed any cojones or discernment. they say they want “peace” but it turns out to be “a little piece of poland, a piece of france, perhaps a nice slice of belgium” and on it goes until inch by inch you have been railroaded for miles.

“leaders” fear riots and repercussions and so make themselves into something that any who would support order must fear.

and so fear pervades and everyone watches everything go pete tong and no one lifts a finger except to make it worse.

really stop and think about this:

give people who look like me license to harass, attack, loot, steal, and assault or we’ll go wild and harass, attack, loot, steal, and assault.

this is the proposition.

where can this possibly go other than bad?

lines must be drawn and this must end. it is not survivable. you cannot sustain a civilization that cowers in craven worship of sacred predators as they stalk the streets red in tooth and claw. that’s surrender. that’s being over-run by barbarism.

it’s there because we put it there. it’s there because we let it get WAY, WAY out of hand. the presidents and senators and governors and mayors and prosecutors who sat by and allowed it are a cancer and it will kill us if it is not excised.

such cultish contrition and self-abasement as self-harm may be the true core conscience of some of these so called civil servants, but what they are and where they are prevails because we were weak and when faced with “facing down the toddler tantrum to avoid the next 20 and a lifetime of histrionics” we failed.

our whole society has become this: a bunch of alleged adults standing around watching behavior that would, 30 years ago, have gotten rapidly rectified when you got the taste slapped out of your mouth mired in helpless halfassery and just milling around with thumbs up bums wondering why this is allowed to go on and why no one will do anything to stop it.

every “adult” in the room is terrified to do the obvious thing. she’s the boss here. and she knows it.

then even when someone tries to step in, they’re instantly intercepted by the defender of the toxin, avataring weaponized empathy in her mantra of “don’t you touch that poor little girl, you don’t know what she’s going through!”

and until we as a society can once more even in such a simple and clear cut case say “i do not fricking care, she can go go through it outside and away from us, her feelings are not my concern, her actions are, and i have a bill for whoever brought her in here” we’re cooked.

it’s just endless “we get to make everyone feel unsafe but it’s literally genocide if you try to stop us” running riot.

and that is not a basis for a functional or even a sane society.

that’s it guys. western civ had a nice run. will the last impotent wretch out please turn out the lights.

“but what can i do, i am just one person, said 330 million people…”

you want safe streets?

then it must be safe to stop dangerous people and this is not a role you can devolve to the state if you would retain the essential liberty and probity of free people.

you want safe spaces?

ditto.

this is all of a piece. from who may attack whom to who may force themselves into whose locker rooms, it’s all the same question from different angles and magnitudes.

whose society is it and to what norms does it comply?

is tolerance of teleological terrorism to be the new normal?

and politicians fear them because they are organized, single minded, and willing to go absolutely bonkers if told “no.”

and pulling back from this precipice is not an extreme idea.

i asked this once before:

just making it OK to hand out a non-voluntary removal or (if need be) an ass kicking in defense of societal norms and societal function again would head off 70% of these issues. there needs to be a penalty, not a prize. arresting and incarcerating a small number of people would head off much of the rest. this is not some exotic technology or utopian idea. it’s what we fricking did for 200 years. and it mostly worked until the social justice loons convinced those acting badly that it was not their fault and started blaming the victims and their protectors and the riots they allowed broke the justice system and made it fearful of precisely that from which it was intended to defend.

a society that places those who violate rights above those who seek to protect them is barbarism. it’s racist, sexist, anti-human, and vicious. it’s open season on basic safety and self-determination.

it’s amazing to me that not only have women (by far the most vulnerable and most victimized by this) not risen en masse to vote and protest as a block here but instead choose to clutch pearls, vote empathy for aggressors, and wonder where all the good men have gone.

back in the 90’s, most US cities from NYC to SF to chicago to minneapolis were well and truly safe, nice places to live, places you could park a car or go for a walk at night.

how you like them today?

you can have a right to ride the subway in peace or you can protect the sacred villains because “alleged equity” but mostly because they threaten to go mad and break stuff if you dare tell them to stop acting out.

there is no “both” and there is no middle way.

there is no “we just need more cops.”

civilization may only establish and defend its norms at the level where civilization takes place, the personal level, one to one, human to human.

society must be allowed to protect itself, people must be allowed to protect themselves and to be protected by the system rather than fed into its hungry maw when they respond to threats. we must be allowed to protect others. allow it and we will. we did it once and we will again. chivalry and community standards are not a dead ideas, they’ve just been made illegal and unfeasible for any not willing to hazard their whole life to protect the well being of a stranger on a train or to stop a tantrum in wal-mart.

chivalry and rising to the defense of others against the depredations of bad people is natural. it’s intrinsic to the sort of social animal humans are meant to be. remove this assault on it, pass laws defending it, generate liability shields and instantiate “stand your ground” rights against intimidation, assault, and intrusion, and it will flourish once more.

and nature will heal.

choose well.