Questions a Journalist Might Ask.
Did they do a toxic screening in New York City on Daniel Penny -- a blood draw -- the day he killed Jordan Neely on the subway? When will the results be in? Could medications, prescribed or not, have led to this extra-judicial killing?
Why did Penny use physical force to respond in fear to words, a verbal encounter with a smaller man? Why did he need another man to step in and tell him to get up and stop killing Neely? Has he no self control?
Was there something inherent in his military training that made him so fearful, and lacking any self direction before another person ordered him to release the unconscious man? Can't he think for himself in realistically assessing danger and responding with just force to protect himself, without causing death and destruction of others? Has he tried carrying mace in his purse or backpack?
This is not a good look for Marine training, for sure. You'd hate to think men like this, perhaps with undiagnosed mental problems, walk amongst us and are potential killers because of what the U.S. military taught them in entry-level infantry positions.
"Keep your hands to yourselves". We learned that in kindy-garden...
More information about Daniel Penny's education and upbringing please. How does society raise a man like this to take a life so needlessly?
"He was... an American boy. raised on promises. (oh yeah. all right. take it easy, baby, make it last all night...) he was. an American boy..." ~Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
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In spite of initial silence and inaction, and then the predictable twisting by politicians and the media into their prewritten narratives about urban homelessness and crime, Jordan Neely is fast becoming one of those names — like Emmett Till or Kitty Genovese or Bernhard Goetz or Trayvon Martin or George Floyd.
In some way, these names become shorthand for how we as Americans treat our fellow Americans, tainted by all the toxic ingredients of prejudice, fear, and misguided rage that drag us down as a society, again and again.
There are many, many layers to the murder — yes, murder because I’m not sure what else to call the strangulation homicide of a nonviolent human being — of Jordan Neely.
These include the utter failure of a police-state approach to a mental health crisis not just in New York but in American cities writ large, and New York’s two election cycles of over-the-top fearmongering around subway crime...
The highly charged rhetoric from the likes of Adams, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, or her 2022 opponent Lee Zeldin, amplified by “if it bleeds, it leads” TV news and sensationalistic crime coverage not only in the tabloids but the allegedly staid New York Times, undoubtedly prejudiced “the jury pool” of subway riders who sentenced Neely to death...
And there is a lot that can and will be said about the increased criminalization of homelessness, amid a housing crisis, exacerbated by Adams, who has dispatched a mini-army to rip down tents and who has flooded the subways with so many officers that F train civilians apparently felt deputized.
Twitter trolls are making much of Neely’s reported more than 40 arrests, but that feels more a comment on the morality of the arrestors — in a city that responds to mental health crises with guns instead of aid — than the arrested.
ADDED: The Internet is working round the clock to gather facts:
The alleged subway vigilante, Daniel Penny, grew up in a million-dollar home in a 96% white Long Island town where the median household income is about 40% higher than statewide
Maybe it's not the color of the skin so much as the sheltered economic upbringing that causes men to lash out in violence when their fears get the best of them? Maybe we need a better class of diversity in leadership, advising and training our people how to be human? Maybe we've instinctively raised a fearful generation of American boys who respond with physical aggression to unfamiliar situations that cause them fear? How is Daniel Penny any different than "helpers" like Kyle Rittenhouse? One used a gun he was not legally entitled to own, another used his bare hands and full-body takedown.
Is this lawful in our New America or not? It has little to do with race, and more to do with economic interests, I fear. Some people think we can simply eliminate the weakest and most vulnerable in the society they have created and are now afraid to live in...
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