No passive genocide
“Nobody deserves to die”
-Hunters and Collectors, The Holy Grail
The Wall Street Journal editorial put it out an editorial defending Daniel Penny, the man who killed Jordan Neely on the subway. The remarkable thing about the op-ed it is even on their own account of events, no real critical thinking is required to think Daniel Penny is guilty. Passage and highlight courtesy of @jaywillis on Twitter.
Now I don’t know that Daniel Penny is guilty. It’s conceivable that he isn’t, there’s a lot that still hasn’t come out regarding the events on the train. However, based on the facts as they are currently understood by the public- e.g., the facts available to the WSJ and Penny’s Twitter defenders, the state will have two extremely strong arguments Penny is guilty that he will have to resist:
“Acting erratically, shouting and claiming that you have little to live for” is not, in and of itself, a sufficient basis for an attack on someone to be self-defense. Self-defense requires something more direct like attacking someone, drawing a weapon, stating that you’re about to attack someone, etc. Perhaps more happened than this, or perhaps the jury will see these actions as directly triggering self-defense, but on the basis of what is currently known, this is a problem for Penny’s defense.
Even if we grant there was a sufficient basis for self-defense, putting someone in a rear naked chokehold for fifteen minutes is excessive force. Someone explicitly warned him while he was doing it that Neely had shat himself, that it seemed like he might be dying, and that he knew on the basis of what his military wife had told him that Penny might be killing Neely. I have no experience with grappling martial arts, but it is common knowledge apparently among grapplers that this choke is extremely dangerous. Of course, Penny might be able to create sufficient doubt around whether or not this was excessive force, perhaps events we don’t know about made it more reasonable than it seemed, or perhaps Penny was genuinely ignorant of the dangers. but there is pretty obviously a case to answer for here.
I take seriously the idea of being innocent until proven guilty and not making judgments till all the facts are known. What I have written here isn’t a meaningless, boilerplate disclaimer, I genuinely think there is a real possibility that Penny is innocent but I see no way that a fairminded person could look at the publicly available evidence and conclude that there isn’t even a case to answer. So the question becomes why on earth are the WSJ and so many people on Twitter saying exactly this?
One line that I have seen is that there ‘simply must’ be more to the story than is public. That Penny, being an honorable person without a criminal record, and Neely having a rap sheet a mile long, Neely must have done something more to make this self-defense and to force Penny to use such violence. While it’s certainly possible that there is more to the story, I find the idea that there ‘must’ be something more to the story so absurd at its face that I’m not inclined to credit it as a real belief, at least among the more sophisticated conservatives. You don’t think young men with dreams of being heroes are sometimes rashly violent? You don’t think the fact not a single person on that train has said, even anonymously, to a reporter that there is more to the story yet at least a little worrying? It would be one thing to hold that Penny will probably be vindicated, but it another thing altogether to declare him innocent or condemn the charges against him as if they were wrong on the facts for a certainty.
That leaves three interpretations of Penny supporters arranged in a spectrum, each presupposing a declining degree of malice:
They support the killing of homeless people.
They support the killing of homeless people who are being disruptive and menacing and may well be about to get violent.
They don’t support the killing of homeless people who are being disruptive and menacing and may well be about to get violent but if it happens, it happens. It’s a shame on some level, but ‘normal’ people have been pushed so far by the homeless crisis “What do you expect”?
I think these categories go well beyond disputed cases of putative self-defense like this one and speak to attitudes about the death of homeless people generally. I worry a lot about the third group because while there are some supporters of 1 & 2, they won’t get anywhere without the support of an awful lot of people who fall into the third category.
The generalized version of 3 is that while of course, one doesn’t want the homeless to die, “well they’re not exactly making it easy are they, and something must be done.” I think of this third category as passively genocidal. It’s not that they want this group to die, maybe they even don’t want them to die a little, but they’ve lost the baseline sense, that is supposed to unite us as a society that it would be a really bad thing if these people died violently. Rather, is “regrettable”.
One of my great fears is that America is in a situation bordering on the mass death of persecuted groups. The two groups which seem most directly vulnerable to me are trans people and the homeless. I hope these fears seem silly in a few years’ time, but I’d rather speak them than be quiet.
Recently a number of people, including Donald Trump, at present the leading nominee for the 2024 Republican nomination have proposed the creation of camps for the homeless, into which they would be forced (yes, if you make it illegal for homeless people to sleep on the street but legal to sleep into the camp you’re forcing them into the camp, they don’t have access to houses this is not difficult to understand).
Here’s an entirely possible scenario:
The camps are created and the homeless are forced into them.
Due to a combination of under-resourcing and maladministration, the camps have inadequate sanitation and are overcrowded, as a result, there are outbreaks of disease ranging from COVID to diphtheria and cholera.
The camps have inadequate medical supplies and staffing so many die.
I emphasize this is just an example scenario that could happen, it’s not a prediction.
If this happens, it will not be because a minority of people actually want the homeless dead, it will be because “Hey, it’s a big problem, my cousin got yelled at by one, and yes there are difficulties with the camps but someone had to do something and don’t you know the government always fucks these things up, besides we can’t pour unlimited resources into the camps when [insert more sympathetic group] needs help, and I reckon a lot of the stories are exaggerated, bleeding hearts and all that, a lot of these people were pretty sick, to begin with, and we couldn’t just leave things the way they are, you know.”
Refuse. Tell everybody who will listen that nobody deserves to die- nobody, nor is any death indifferent, and whatever you do to any of my brothers, you do to me. I know I sound maudlin and melodramatic here, and will probably look even sillier in five years, but it’s important, so, so be it.
"Wilhoit's Law" has big flaws, I think, and only some general vibes in its favor.
> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
...but those vibes fit pretty well in this case. Perry is a middle-class veteran blond white man -- a very in-group figure. Neely was a troublemaking homeless mentally ill black man -- a very out-group figure. (To be clear about the racial aspect: race is part of the in-group/out-group feelings, but but not the only part and probably not the biggest part.)
Insofar as conservatives are motivated by a desire to see the "right people" on top of the hierarchy, then of course they'll be motivated to look for reasons the law should excuse one of the right people. And some of them will write about whatever reasons they find.
Pretty strong chain of reasoning. Two additions.
1. This is basically the logic that underwrites the climate genocide that is *currently* beginning to unfold, and (3) is warranted for those who hold it by the fact that, for all their protestations, their political foes do as well (just with regard to supra- rather than intranational identifications).
2. Such camps have in the past existed in the United States and it's not at all absurd to suppose they may again; see viz. *Grapes of Wrath*.
The only way to cash out your final thought, I strongly suspect, is through a radical uptick in transnational climate solidarities. Anything shy of that, and the underlying structure of affect remains intact.
Given that such solidarities are not at all on track to be forthcoming at scale, I think a future is neither far away nor unlikely in which it's most Dem-aligned people saying "regrettable" about domestic internment camps and maybe even automated killing of displaced people at borders while R-aligned people take as their normative position a more active approach to genocide.
For anyone to whom this thought remains horrifying, as it should, extremely active engagement in transnational climate solidarities is the appropriate next step.