U.S. Society

Comment Of The Day: “Comment Of The Day: “Ethics And The Death Of Jordan Neely”

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Further discussion of the Jordan Neely case is appropriate, as Daniel Penny, the US Marine veteran who apparently killed Neely, a homeless and mentally-disturbed man, while trying to protect passengers on a New York City subway train earlier this month, has been charged with second-degree manslaughter.

I expected that, and while the pressure being placed on authorities by race-hucksters trying to make this tragedy into George Floyd II probably played a part, I think Penny had to be charged. He used excessive force to engage in a defensible act of civic responsibility, and a man died. That’s manslaughter. “We believe that the conviction should be for murder because that was intentional,” said Neely family attorney Lennon Edwards said today. Right: it must have been intentional, because all white people are looking for excises to kill blacks. I can forgive the family for being angry, bitter, and legally ignorant, but Edwards’s statement is unforgivable.

Then there is the news media spin, with outlets like the Associated Press describing Neely as a “homeless street artist” to make him sound like he was restrained for painting portraits of subway riders without their consent. He was screaming at them and threatening them, and had harmed strangers before. The news media is already doing its Kyle Rittenhouse act on Penny. They want him to be tarred as a racist and murderer.

Here is Null Pointer’s Comment of the Day on Humble Talent’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Ethics And The Death Of Jordan Neely”:

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In order to live in a civilized society, citizens must agree to abide by a the rules of a social contract. No defecating in the streets. No fornicating in public. No random acts of aggression or violence. Things like that. Over the last few decades, a portion of the citizenry has decided to unilaterally rewrite the underlying rules of the social contract without any buy-in from the rest of the citizenry. What they don’t seem to understand is that this buy-in is necessary. If the vast majority of the citizenry does not agree on a new social contract, and the old contract is destroyed, then the civilization is destroyed. It reverts to fragmented tribal groups who refuse to cooperate with one another.

The attempt to normalize random acts of violence and aggression will never be agreed to by the majority of the citizenry. Safety is one of the base blocks in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. If civilization cannot offer a baseline level of safety to its citizenry, then there is no reason to buy into it. The entire reason people form civilizations is to obtain a baseline level of safety. If a civilization does not offer a baseline level of safety, then what reason is there for people to subvert their own desires, customs, culture and beliefs to a larger group? Especially when that larger group also demands a large portion of the fruits of individual’s labor to be handed over to them to support that civilization.

The civilization saboteurs can keep kicking the pillars out from under the civilization, but they will not be able to stop the collapse that occurs as a result. More riots may not have the effect they are hoping for.

Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Gee, I can’t imagine what the commentariat might want to bat around today. Freak-outs over CNN daring to host a forum with a the leading candidate to oppose the President in 2024, the news media rushing to dismiss evidence of the Biden family’s access peddling, Rep. George Santos being indicted, the stampede at the border, the Marine who interceded with a rampaging homeless man on the subway indicted, a Squad member holding an anti-Semitic event at the Capitol…yeah, just another sleepy Friday.

Personally, I’m rooting for you to avoid all that stuff and leave me something to write about.

You Want “Takeaways From Trump’s CNN Town Hall”? Ethics Alarms Will Give You Takeaways…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

  • The mainstream media’s Trump-derangement/hate/obsession/phobia/negative bias is so overwhelming that it is incapable of controlling it or even attempting to be professional. Ann Althouse apparently had the exact reaction to the Memeorandum array of outraged headlines from the most important partner in the Axis of Unethical Conduct this morning as I did: she screen-shotted it all and used it as a post, writing only, “You can see an image of outrage….… if you go to Memeorandum right now, but I’ve saved it for you…” Indeed, this evidence says much more about the state of journalism and punditry in the nation than anything it reveals about Donald Trump.
  • The one unstated but implicit message of the media reaction was that CNN was breaching some kind of imaginary, 21st Century journalism ethics tenet by televising the thing. That’s totalitarianism creeping out: like it or not, Trump is the current front-runner to be the GOP nominee for President, and there is an obvious valid news objective in letting the public see him in a spontaneous forum and hear what he has to say. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a fine representative of the Big Brother wing of the Democratic Party, condemned CNN over its programming: of course she did. A depressingly large contingent of Democrats would avoid elections entirely if it could keep them in power, just as Joe Biden avoids press conferences. Too dangerous! The Daily Beast was kind enough to provide almost a parody of anti-Trump spin about the town hall, calling Trump a lair while recycling the mainstream media’s Official Democratic Party Talking Points, like describing the Jan. 6 riot as a “failed coup” and the George Floyd riots as “overwhelmingly peaceful and simply demand[ing] that police officers refrain from shooting and killing innocent Black people.”

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Integrity Test For The Mainstream Media: Will It Remind The Public That Biden’s New Immigration Policy Is What He Mocked Trump For In 2020?

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

That’s a silly headline, isn’t it? First, the MSM has already established that it has no integrity, so any tests are superfluous. Second, the mainstream media sees its job as protecting Democrats, not calling attention to their lies, distortions of facts, embarrassments, failures and hypocrisy.

Still, if ever Donald Trump was handed an opportunity to say, “Nyah, nyah, nyah, I told you so, you big dummy!” this is it. During their final debate in the 2020 campaign, Biden expressed disgust at the Trump policy disqualifying aspiring illegal immigrants from applying for asylum in the U.S. if they neglected to first apply for asylum in the other countries they traveled through on the way here, saying,

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A Hanlon’s Razor Challenge: Is The Decline Of History Literacy Among U.S. Students Due To Malice Or Incompetence?

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

[I apologize for using that Sam Cooke song to introduce this topic, as it is lazy and obvious, but 1) we don’t hear enough of Sam Cooke, one of the many great voices of the Fifties, and 2) I’ll always take a video over a picture, and I’ll always choose a song over just words.]

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) released last week showed that about 40% of eighth graders scored below the basic level in U.S. history in 2022, compared to 34% in 2018. Only 13% of students performed at or above the “proficient” level in U.S. history. In addition, Eighth graders’ average civic scores decreased by 2-points compared to 2018, the NAEP results show. They are comparable to results from 1998, which is the first assessment year for civics under the current framework.

Why this should surprise anyone is a mystery. Although the decline is being attributed to the pandemic and the beyond idiotic (but politically unavoidable) lockdown, it has been clear for years that indoctrination according to partisan and woke agenda items had taken priority over teaching history and civics as the teaching ranks have become increasingly populated by ideologues and proto-Marxists who themselves don’t know much about history. It is deemed more important today to teach children that they are either the victims of systemic racism or complicit in it as well as the complex joys of alternate sexual orientations rather than the content of the Constitution, the U.S. role in winning World War II, or the issues underlying the Civil War.

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Observations On The Trump Defamation and Rape Civil Trial Verdict [Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 44 Comments

Former President Donald Trump has been found liable in the rape and defamation civil suit brought by Jean E. Carroll’s civil suit, and Carroll is to be awarded a total of $5 million in damages. This was not a criminal case, because the statute of limitations for rape had run: the alleged sexual assault occurred in 1995 or 1996.

A federal jury of six men and three women found that Carroll, now 79, had proved by a preponderance of the evidence that Mr. Trump sexually assaulted her in a dressing room of the Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan. The jury did not, however, find that Trump raped her, as she claims.

But because the former President on his Truth Social platform called her case “a complete con job” and “a Hoax and a lie,” the jury also found that he had defamed the plaintiff. His lawyer said he would appeal; no witnesses were called on behalf of Trump’s defense.

The ex-President’s reaction was characteristic:

Ethics observations:

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Comment Of The Day: “Ethics And The Death Of Jordan Neely”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

There are strong indications that the race-hucksters are revving up to make Jordan Neely the next George Floyd in time to re-charge the batteries of racial distrust in time for the 2024 Presidential campaign, so further attention must be paid. This is true, unfortunately, before the investigation of the tragic incident has been completed. The Federalist warns that the death of the black homeless man at the hands of a white former Marine attempting to protect fellow passengers is being primed for exploitation:

Penny’s fate will, as Peachy Keenan wrote in The Federalist, be a test of whether young American men should dare to act courageously when others are in peril. But there’s even more at stake in this case. With Neely being anointed as the new George Floyd, the questions of whether Penny was right to restrain Neely or if he used inappropriate force to do so are merely sidebars to a broader narrative about American racism. Floyd’s death became a metaphor for a myth about systemic police racism. Floyd’s actions the night of his death, his criminal record, and the fact that his body was full of what might have been a lethal dose of fentanyl were dismissed as irrelevant. The only thing that mattered was that he was a black man and that the cop who had, in an act of undoubted callous brutality, snuffed out his life was white. In the name of a belief, however mistaken, that Floyd’s death was just one of countless incidents in which blacks were being slaughtered with impunity, millions took to the streets in “mostly peaceful” riots that shook the nation.

More than that, it set off a moral panic in virtually every sector of American life that elevated the woke catechism of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) to a new secular religion — since accepted by the Biden administration as mandatory for every government agency and department — that treats color-blind policies and even the goal of equal opportunity as forms of racism that must be eradicated.

Read the whole thing…but first read Humble Talent’s Comment of the Day on the related Ethics Alarms post, “Ethics And The Death Of Jordan Neely”:

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“It is true that Penny could not have known that history when he intervened; it is also relevant information now.”

I don’t know that this is right… There’s evidence that Neely was kind of known in the subway community – You ride the same car to and from work five days a week, 200 days a year, and you’ll probably eventually start to recognize a face or two, and the face of the lunatic getting violent, perhaps one famous for cracking the orbital bone of a 67 year old woman or trying to kidnap a 7 year old girl might be a face to remember. Penny might not have known about all 44 arrests, but I don’t think it’s impossible that he knew the guy was a violent problem.

This case is… sad. I don’t know that this is Neely’s fault, so much as I’m pretty convinced that fault, if we have to look at it that way, doesn’t lie with Penny. Neely was failed so many different ways – When it comes to mental health, you just cannot expect people to reason themselves to sanity. For the people that are able to, that great. For the people who think the oven is their shoe rack, their pristine house is covered in bugs, that their arm is not their arm, that their 80 pound frame is too fat, or whatever psychosis brings on to Neely’s position, there needs to be people in your life that care enough to help.

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Ethics And The Death Of Jordan Neely

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

You know the story by now, presumably. A week ago, Jordan Neely, a homeless and mentally ill black man, was shouting at passengers riding with him in the subway. He was apparent getting in passengers’ faces and causing significant anxiety. A 24-year-old former Marine, Daniel Penny, decided that it was his civic duty to intervene, especially since there were no law enforcement authorities in the car. He tackled and restrained Neely (apparently some other riders assisted), put him in a chokehold, and held him until he became unconscious. Neely was later pronounced dead at a hospital. New York City’s medical examiner ruled that Neely died from compression of the neck and classified the death as a homicide, which does not automatically mean it was a crime. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office is investigating. So far, Penny has not been charged.

It is Penny’s misfortune to be white, so the usual race-bating activists and demagogues are framing the episode as “George Floyd II.” Fortunately Neely did not say “I can’t breathe” before passing out.

Ethics Observation #1: The presumed racial animus that was attached to the Floyd case will keep repeating itself in such incidents until it is decisively rejected. As the culture has been conditioned now, whenever a white man is involved in the death of a black man, the motive is presumed to be racism, and the crime a hate crime.

Penny, who was only officially named three days ago, released this statement through his lawyers:

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Ethics Observations On Joyce Carol Oates’ Twitter Humiliation

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

 

Oates, a prolific and much-honored writer as well as a college professor,deleted the tweet after merciless mockery. In case you are, like her, unfamiliar with Marvel Comics tropes, the intergalactic supervillain Thanos wields the Infinity Gauntlet,”one of the most powerful objects in the [Marvel] Universe.” It empowers the wearer to do anything and everything imaginable.

Observations:

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Next Up On The Rapidly Expanding List Of Speech Progressives Want To Censor: “Fear Speech”

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

New York Times reporter and opinion writer Julia Angwin has been given a prominent space in the latest Sunday Times to expound on why another kind of speech needs to be suppressed, controlled and if possible, censored: “fear speech.”

Already the relentlessly radicalizing progressive hoard has embraced the anti-American concept of censoring other kinds of speech according to their very subjective definitions: “misinformation,” meaning opinions or analysis they disagree with, or distortions of truth that emanate from someplace or some one not devoted to advancing the Left’s goals and agendas, and “hate speech,” which they want to have excluded from First Amendment protections as they define it on a case by case basis. Now the Times is starting the metaphorical ball rolling to target more speech that these two categories might miss. Its designated messenger declares,

This year, Facebook and Twitter allowed a video of a talk to be distributed on their platforms in which Michael J. Knowles, a right-wing pundit, called for “transgenderism” to be “eradicated.” The Conservative Political Action Coalition, which hosted the talk, said in its social media posts promoting the video that the talk was “all about the left’s attempt to erase biological women from modern society.”

None of this was censored by the tech platforms because neither Mr. Knowles nor CPAC violated the platforms’ hate speech rules that prohibit direct attacks against people based on who they are. But by allowing such speech to be disseminated on their platforms, the social media companies were doing something that should perhaps concern us even more: They were stoking fear of a marginalized group.

Note the carefully crafted rhetoric: stoking fear of a marginalized group. Stoking fear of a group to marginalize it as much as possible for political gain is apparently hunky-dory, as in…

She continues,

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