suicidal empathy

(it's exactly what it sounds like)

i know it’s been the cute new pose of the intellectual to play semiotic games to deconstruct the term “suicidal empathy” and pretend it lacks meaning, but let’s not lose the essence of the the issue in amongst the word games of academia and twitterati:

this misplaced instinct to constantly construe dangerous and predatory aggressors as victims and thereby not only shield them from the consequences of their actions, but aid and abet them into further depredations and violence is civilizational suicide.

to fail to recognize attacks against yourself and your neighbors as attacks is a profound form of disassociation and demoralization.

this, large, dangerous, and seriously mentally unstable man chased a couple through the subway physcially attacking both.

“He comes up and he kicks my friend in the back, and basically pushes him through the transition of the cars,” the woman said in a phone interview Friday night.

“My friend freaks out, runs away, and then he grabs me by the head and pushes my head down, trying to like maybe throw me on the ground or something. But I didn’t, I resisted as much as I could. I didn’t fall, and then I immediately opened up the car and then ran towards my friend.”

they fled the subway, he followed, and who knows what might have happened had police not been around.

“We get off at West 4th Street and then we turn around and we see he’s following us. That’s when I was like: ‘Oh, like, this is scary. Like, why is he following us?'” the woman recalled, calling the perp a “buff guy.”

“We started running a little bit, but then thank God the cops were right there because, I mean, we kept thinking about, imagine that there were no cops, we would have had to literally run for our lives. They immediately arrested him. It was shut down really fast by the cops and we respected that.”

so far, OK. it’s a city, it’s crappy, but stuff happens sometimes. but then, you get the problem, and like so many problems, it comes back to “the graph.” (IYKYN)

which way western civ?

despite this mortal fear and naked, unprovoked aggression from a man they clearly felt was seriously dangerous, they made a decision:

“She said the attack left her and her friend “in shock,” but they ultimately chose not to cooperate with prosecutors… Maybe a part of me was just like, I don’t want to put another black man in jail.”

they are literally refusing to press charges.

and 5 days later, burke kills a man, a total stranger, for no reason other than the fact that burke obviously barking mad and deeply dangerous.

here’s just the run ins he’s had with the law since february that have made the media. (i have no access to his full record)

look at how many bites the big apple had at getting this rotten fruit out of the barrel.

and look at how they failed.

robbery, resisting arrest, assault on a police officer, weapons possession, crack, IV drugs, breaking and entering, destruction of property, it just goes on and on and this is all in 3 fricking months. amazingly, he attacks this couple on the subway, gets hauled down to court, and then, in the face of all this is released without bail.

the system refuses to hold a man who is attacking strangers on the train.

even the victim refuses to cooperate.

and it keeps getting worse.

may 7: he’s taken in for “acting erratically” in front of a police station. what that really meant was “he pulled a stick from a garbage can and approached officers threateningly with it.” they take him to bellevue for psych eval.

they release him in one hour.

and a couple hours later, 76 year old ross falzone is dead, murdered by burke for no reason whatsoever apart from “burke is crazy” and “the system is pathetically broken.”

seriously, if your pattern recognition is this poor, what on earth are you doing in a justice system? what are you doing as a mental health professional?

i’m just dying to hear how this fact pattern resulted in “no bail.”

prosecutors reportedly sought $3,000 cash / $9,000 bond, but judge marva brown released him on supervised release.

let’s be very clear: “supervised release” is a joke. there is no supervision, just release. it’s basically “off you go crazy person who will never comply with this! check in with an officer if you remember! if not, no biggie, the system is so overloaded that no one will notice or come looking for you.”

and so a few days later, burke is back on the streets waving sticks at cops in front of a police station. burke is a big guy, a dangerous guy. i used to be a fighter (muay thai) and i know the build.

so the cops scoop him up, take him to the psych ward, and they plop him back on the street in an hour? did they even assess him?

just what is going on here?

it’s suicidal empathy: the consistent and overt identification with people who are attacking you and the desperate inversion of making them out to be “the victim here” while somehow casting your own victimization as “privilege.”

it’s a whole set of nested hallucinations and dogma that have been oft discussed, but i think all these things reside inside a profound perceptive disconnect that people are missing and that’s one of the basic idea of punishment and justice.

this is entirely avoidable. “the system is so jammed we cannot handle the load!” yeah, that’s because instead of taking the small number of people who committ nearly ALL crimes off the street, you keep releasing them

how many court days did this fine fellow clog up?

the data is so stark that one must be willful to ignore it

i wrote a whole piece on 3 strikes and you need to be out HERE.

want some really provocative data? if you want to protect black men, elect a republican prosecutor. 6.6% drop in all cause mortality, mostly from lower gun deaths. (source)

that’s a staggering number, an outlandish reduction in human carnage.

but tell me again about your empathy.

this whole “we need to let people rob and rape and plunder because ‘demoralized by structural ism’” thing we have going on is desperately harmful to literally everyone. we all get dragged down by it and even the alleged empathy beneficiaries wind up dying in droves.

this whole set of beliefs and the policy emergent therefrom is as ghastly as it is deluded.

and it needs to end.

suicidal empathy is exactly what it sounds like.

stop pretending it isn’t.