“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
"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.
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.
OK, I'm not in the best place cognitively right now, so could someone explain to me slowly how climate is even relevant to what's described in the original post?
(I believe) Ira Allen considers it likely that climate change will cause massive displacements as people flee areas that become unable to support their prior population. This would mean that more temperate areas would see massive influx of immigrants who've lost everything i.e. a bunch of scary foreign homeless people. From that premise it is reasonable to extrapolate from the current treatment of homeless people to how people will feel about these scores of homeless refugees.
I don't know a single person who suggested a serious alternative to the officially-reported facts of the Kyle Rittenhouse case, nor do I know anyone who suggested a serious alternative to normal self-defense law - but I know tons of people who nevertheless thought that Rittenhouse should have somehow been found guilty.
My impression - and I'm not sure whether this counts as being charitable or not - is that their ultimate objection was to the laws that allowed so many guns at the protest. Their "case", such as it is, rests on wanting a kind of crude moral scorekeeping, wherein letting Kyle Rittenhouse off feels like a victory for Team Gun, even though Team Gun is ultimately to blame for what went down at that protest.
I think if you want a real explanation for why anyone would think Daniel Penny is innocent, this is the general type of explanation you should be looking for. Finding Daniel Penny guilty feels like a victory for Team Soft-On-Crime, even though (according to some peoples' judgement) Team Soft-On-Crime is to blame for Penny and Neely being in that situation in the first place. It's a cringeworthy argument, in terms of intellectual consistency, but it sort of makes sense under a pre-philosophical morality that's based on scorekeeping rather than impersonal rules.
If you want criminal trials decided based on the politics of the defendant and you're willing to admit that openly, that's fine, but the people I have in mind would not admit to wanting that; they identify with liberal democracy and the rule of law.
If all you're saying is that it's natural for humans to want trials decided on political grounds, and that politics often makes people hypocrites, then sure, I agree. But I sure as heck scorn it, at least insofar as it conflicts with the rule of law. Lots of things that are part of human nature are worthy of scorn.
Yeah, my point was mostly in agreement with your comment, only adding that the phenomenon you describe (and decry) is far more general than the instances you reference.
We seem to disagree over (read as: "you're wrong about") whether or not criminal trials ARE decided based on politics. They are, from the DA's decision to file charges, to the jury's deliberations and verdict, to the judge's sentence, and mantras about "liberal democracy" and "rule of law" won't change that.
> 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.
The risk to the homeless seems plausible, but I don't see any realistic world in which trans people are killed en masse in the United States. There's a strong apathy to the plight of the homeless among both political parties, whereas trans people are a hot-button culture war topic, and any minor inconvenience to them becomes national news. The homeless are poor, low status, can't use the internet much, and easy to ignore; they are in the traditional sense "marginalized". Trans people are distributed more evenly among the population, with some that are poor but many that are rich and famous, and a disproportionate number of them are young and online, making them higher status and highly salient to others.
1. There are, but generally there won't be many trans people living in those places, and any local hate crimes against or imprisonment of trans people would inspire a national response. Also, isolated instances in some tiny rural town don't really meet the bar of "mass death".
2. You mean something like Trump succeeding in crowning himself president for life? That's certainly possible, but any rapid attempt to consolidate power and turn himself into a dictator would likely lead to a revolt, so he'd need to gradually replace judges and politicians with loyalists over a long period of time. I'd expect that to take many years, so I don't think it meets your implied time frame of "soon". I think it's also questionable whether total rule by the religious right would actually result in mass death. I could see them putting trans people in some sort of reeducation camp or restricting their rights in other ways, but trans people always have the option of claiming they've been "cured" and going back to presenting as their biological sex, which I'd expect would get them released.
3. Sure; there were some high-ranking jews in the Nazi party. But it means that action against them would need to be more intentional, creating a culture of fear in those people and preventing them from speaking out; it couldn't be the same as the risk to homeless people, which is that they're simply ignored and left to die. The latter seems like a much more likely risk; people are already very comfortable letting strangers in third-world countries die preventable deaths, while it's much rarer to see a first-world population decide to activly kill members of some group.
I'd be happy to bet against you on this if we could agree on terms.
It has been only 6 months since you wrote this essay, and sadly things feel like we really are hanging on a thread come next November. We in the USA are in a dangerous position. They are going to come for any marginalised people first if it happens. Undocumented is another category of people at especially high risk.
Reading this as a Brit reminds me of how very much different UK society is to the USA. Like, we have a disgraceful level of homelessness but I don't think there's much risk of a homeless genocide over here - they are a forgotten group rather than an actively hated one.
"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.
OK, I'm not in the best place cognitively right now, so could someone explain to me slowly how climate is even relevant to what's described in the original post?
(I believe) Ira Allen considers it likely that climate change will cause massive displacements as people flee areas that become unable to support their prior population. This would mean that more temperate areas would see massive influx of immigrants who've lost everything i.e. a bunch of scary foreign homeless people. From that premise it is reasonable to extrapolate from the current treatment of homeless people to how people will feel about these scores of homeless refugees.
I don't know a single person who suggested a serious alternative to the officially-reported facts of the Kyle Rittenhouse case, nor do I know anyone who suggested a serious alternative to normal self-defense law - but I know tons of people who nevertheless thought that Rittenhouse should have somehow been found guilty.
My impression - and I'm not sure whether this counts as being charitable or not - is that their ultimate objection was to the laws that allowed so many guns at the protest. Their "case", such as it is, rests on wanting a kind of crude moral scorekeeping, wherein letting Kyle Rittenhouse off feels like a victory for Team Gun, even though Team Gun is ultimately to blame for what went down at that protest.
I think if you want a real explanation for why anyone would think Daniel Penny is innocent, this is the general type of explanation you should be looking for. Finding Daniel Penny guilty feels like a victory for Team Soft-On-Crime, even though (according to some peoples' judgement) Team Soft-On-Crime is to blame for Penny and Neely being in that situation in the first place. It's a cringeworthy argument, in terms of intellectual consistency, but it sort of makes sense under a pre-philosophical morality that's based on scorekeeping rather than impersonal rules.
This "crude moral scorekeeping" you scorn is called "politics": distinguishing friend from enemy.
If you want criminal trials decided based on the politics of the defendant and you're willing to admit that openly, that's fine, but the people I have in mind would not admit to wanting that; they identify with liberal democracy and the rule of law.
What I want has little bearing on what IS.
If all you're saying is that it's natural for humans to want trials decided on political grounds, and that politics often makes people hypocrites, then sure, I agree. But I sure as heck scorn it, at least insofar as it conflicts with the rule of law. Lots of things that are part of human nature are worthy of scorn.
Yeah, my point was mostly in agreement with your comment, only adding that the phenomenon you describe (and decry) is far more general than the instances you reference.
We seem to disagree over (read as: "you're wrong about") whether or not criminal trials ARE decided based on politics. They are, from the DA's decision to file charges, to the jury's deliberations and verdict, to the judge's sentence, and mantras about "liberal democracy" and "rule of law" won't change that.
This essay makes some good points about the current state of the "rule of law" in America: https://graymirror.substack.com/p/a-new-theory-of-constitutional-cynicism.
I think this is basically correct at the phenomenological level. Structurally, I wouldn't see it as being at odds with the OP.
> 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.
The risk to the homeless seems plausible, but I don't see any realistic world in which trans people are killed en masse in the United States. There's a strong apathy to the plight of the homeless among both political parties, whereas trans people are a hot-button culture war topic, and any minor inconvenience to them becomes national news. The homeless are poor, low status, can't use the internet much, and easy to ignore; they are in the traditional sense "marginalized". Trans people are distributed more evenly among the population, with some that are poor but many that are rich and famous, and a disproportionate number of them are young and online, making them higher status and highly salient to others.
I'm not so confident because:
1. There are places where people who hate trans people have an overwhelming local majority.
2. The right could win the power struggle.
3. Groups with some representatives among the rich and powerful have suffered mass death before.
1. There are, but generally there won't be many trans people living in those places, and any local hate crimes against or imprisonment of trans people would inspire a national response. Also, isolated instances in some tiny rural town don't really meet the bar of "mass death".
2. You mean something like Trump succeeding in crowning himself president for life? That's certainly possible, but any rapid attempt to consolidate power and turn himself into a dictator would likely lead to a revolt, so he'd need to gradually replace judges and politicians with loyalists over a long period of time. I'd expect that to take many years, so I don't think it meets your implied time frame of "soon". I think it's also questionable whether total rule by the religious right would actually result in mass death. I could see them putting trans people in some sort of reeducation camp or restricting their rights in other ways, but trans people always have the option of claiming they've been "cured" and going back to presenting as their biological sex, which I'd expect would get them released.
3. Sure; there were some high-ranking jews in the Nazi party. But it means that action against them would need to be more intentional, creating a culture of fear in those people and preventing them from speaking out; it couldn't be the same as the risk to homeless people, which is that they're simply ignored and left to die. The latter seems like a much more likely risk; people are already very comfortable letting strangers in third-world countries die preventable deaths, while it's much rarer to see a first-world population decide to activly kill members of some group.
I'd be happy to bet against you on this if we could agree on terms.
It has been only 6 months since you wrote this essay, and sadly things feel like we really are hanging on a thread come next November. We in the USA are in a dangerous position. They are going to come for any marginalised people first if it happens. Undocumented is another category of people at especially high risk.
Reading this as a Brit reminds me of how very much different UK society is to the USA. Like, we have a disgraceful level of homelessness but I don't think there's much risk of a homeless genocide over here - they are a forgotten group rather than an actively hated one.