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Jordan Neely’s death on May 1, 2023 by a Marine veteran who placed him in a chokehold after the 30-year-old, homeless African-American appeared on a New York subway train allegedly hurling garbage and verbal abuse at passengers is one extreme end of a social malady plaguing our society today: individuals who treat the public sphere as an extension of their private sphere (or lack thereof), and who subject others to their obtrusive behaviors.
Neely had been arrested over 40 times previously for various crimes ranging from lewd behavior to assaulting senior citizens. As one commentator noted: This guy has been arrested dozens of times and he is back on the subway causing people to be scared for their safety; either get some law enforcement on the subway or give citizens authority to protect themselves without recourse.
Other recent incidents include two women blasting music from their phones on a plane in flight (pictured above). The women gave the middle finger to annoyed fellow passengers. As the article points out, one of the alarming trends in travel is the rise of people using personal speakers in public and carrying on loud phone conversations without using headphones.
Another recent article describes a woman voted off a Frontier Jet for lobbing a barrage of vulgar expletives in an argument she started with a couple seated rows in front of her.
People who use their phones as personal speakers are polluting every pocket of the public sphere; their boisterous behavior indicates they believe they are entitled to treat shared public space as their own private space—indeed, as an extension of their disheveled bedrooms.
Why is it that so many people have no understanding of their responsibility not to dominate the public sphere, monopolize it, or even make themselves highly conspicuous and obtrusive in it? For indeed, when we draw unnecessary attention to ourselves and transgress on the personal space of others in public, we undermine the ability of others to interject themselves into that space and use it for their own limited goals and aims. However limited it might be, the public sphere is one or two spaces in which our agency as human beings unfold. We have a duty to make ourselves as unobtrusive as possible in shared public spaces so that we can allow as many participants as possible in the public sphere to feel comfortably ensconced in that space in a manner that does not compromise the reasonable way they are entitled to exercise their agency.
Those individuals who contaminate the public sphere exhibit contempt and disrespect for the idea of a shared space and the norms and mores that secure its operation for all those who inhabit it. Others may read and talk and enjoy moments of quiet or tolerate a reasonable level of volubility which does not nullify their own equilibrium and sense of equanimity.
Those guilty of emitting noise pollution, the linguistic equivalent of grunting farm animals, proclaim their vulgarity as a right—and one that normalizes thuggery as the new standard of public (mis)behavior.
This trend is permissible today only because we have two phenomena at work.
The first is massive inclusivity of uncivilized and improperly socialized persons in the public domain. I am speaking of hordes of individuals flooding the present and the future with little thought from members of society about how to assimilate such individuals into the culture when, truth be told, many of them are unassimilable.
Also, there is a concomitant radical egalitarianism at issue. Everyone must have a place at the table. The attendant forms of self-expression are permissible because what cultivated folks think of as miscreants contaminating the public domain is interpreted differently in the minds of progressives. For the latter, public domain polluters are merely committing behavioral malapropisms, a form of self-expression and, a fortiori, self-fulfillment. The truth is, such reprobates have always existed. They were called vulgar, low-class, thuggish, pedestrian at best, and they and their behaviors were stigmatized. They were shamed if they showcased their beastly sensibilities in public spaces. They were forced to retreat. In their stead, bourgeois values and virtues prevailed.
Today, there is a revolt against those bourgeois mores, norms and values which are properly elitist, exclusionary and, above all, rationally discriminatory.
Just as every sophomoric high school opinion of any village idiot is too often raised to the level of human knowledge, so tolerance is invoked to excuse tawdry and vulgar behavior as constitutive of personal identity.
To criticize this behavior regardless of the ethnic makeup of whom it is directed toward is to incur being labeled a white cultural, civilizational imperialist. One is likely to be accused of commodifying public space into private realms. That is a form of race-capitalism, we are told.
Judging by the rage and the massive protests surrounding Neely’s death, one is left with the impression that to appraise and adjudicate obstreperous behavior that violates the public sphere is verboten. Since it is apparently imperialistic and racist now to hold behavior to a civilizational standard, all aberrant, nefarious, and anomalous behaviors that compromise the public domain are graded on a curve.
I am not referring here to mere oddities and eccentricities, or inconveniences caused by behaviors of other people which are the price we pay for living in a free society.
The truth is that we are increasingly witnessing persons de-ratifying the social contract we live by with gross, uncivilized behavior. This behavior is normalized and mainstreamed as the manifest vitality and the loud, bodacious expression of certain individuals. To disrupt and punish it is to be a discriminator. What the uncivilized violators of the public domain need is a civilizade blasted against them. These people suffer not just from faulty socialization, the obstruction of sensibilities, and a paucity of decent manners, but also from deep impulse control.
Their sense of radical entitlement to monopolize shared public space results from a refusal to limit their desires, wishes and whims. Theirs is a solipsistic universe where none but themselves exists.
The desire to live in concord with others is what drives civilization. Barbarism is a tendency towards disassociation. Today’s civilizational social disruptors are inverted barbarians.
This whole phenomenon, though, is the logical consequence of over-democratization. The latter leads to massive inclusiveness, the kind in which the lowest common denominator in each is enshrined. The exceptional, the refined, the decorous are annihilated via neglect, default, and willful stigmatization as exclusionary and discriminatory.
The short response to these behaviors is for anyone to step in to restore order, be it a law enforcement agent, a flight attendant, or dutiful citizens.
The longer response is applied rational discrimination, which will curb the degree of radical inclusivity. Yes: vote people off airplanes, maroon them from cruise ships, and toss them from trains. Hyper-democratization is tyrannical. Parents have morally outsourced their children to government schools which in turn not only entertain their thuggery but, unfortunately, long ago abandoned the seemingly jejune notion of creating moral character and developing and cultivating refined sensibilities.
Coarseness, crassness, and inelegance have been raised to a statistical average, codified, and then enshrined like a national treasure trove on which others can pin their aspirational identities. Civilized people must resoundingly reject this trend. Moral and behavioral vigilantes must police the public domain. Moral opprobrium must be visited upon violators of public decency, norms, and mores. And, in the limited context available to the civilized enforcers, the violators must simply be ejected from the larger public sphere they occupy. They will then think twice before acting out their thuggish instincts. If each civilized citizen took it upon him- or herself to be the fiduciary and custodian of the public sphere, then the aberrant will learn the art of reflection, inconspicuousness, courtesy, and decent manners.
Or maybe they will simply learn to keep their mouths shout when they are inclined to yell and pick a fight with others if they know a vigilante citizen is there to hold them publicly accountable for their behavior.
The problem for Daniel Penny now is the lynch mob of civil wrongs “activists” vowing and shouting, “no justice, no peace.” NYC has the opportunity to return to civilization, but it looks as if they’ll decline the invitation and prosecute Penny for 1st degree racism.
Penny should get a medal and stipend.
Murdering someone because you consider them disruptive is not “returning to civilization”. The idea you think it does means you are not fit to live in society.
You’re a lying idiot.
Penny didn’t murder Neely. He killed him by accident with a choke hold while protecting people. And Neely was a PIECE OF SHIT who’d been arrested 44 times, including for punching random senior citizens – including women – and severely harming them. He was threatening people on the subway before Penny choked his ass out. Fuck him and fuck you. He deserved to die. The world is better off without him and I wager it would be better off without you, too.
Ooh. But he was black WHO GIVES A SHIT? Blacks murder whites every single day and murder even more of each other but nobody gives a shit. It’s supposed to matter because a white guy killed a black one? Fuck that motherfucker. Burn in HELL, Neely.
Fucking Fester.
“Penny didn’t murder Neely. He killed him by accident with a choke hold while protecting people.”
Your best defense of Penny is he committed murder 2 or manslaughter. Not the flex you think it is. Then again thinking isn’t your strong suit.
“And Neely was a PIECE OF SHIT who’d been arrested 44 times, including for punching random senior citizens – including women – and severely harming them.”
Your, obviously, a piece of shit and you love violence. Sounds like you think you deserve a taste of your own medicine.
“Ooh. But he was black WHO GIVES A SHIT?”
I didn’t even mention Neely’s race. I actually think the most important factor was he was homeless. You being a mouth breathing racist can’t see anything else. You’re really pathetic Jeff.
You dick licker. You’re defending a monster, as Greenfield correctly called him. Neely was terrorizing innocent people on that subway. He was a piece of shit and that’s what killed him. Penny is a hero.
And you’re defending Neely because he was black, not because he was homeless. You’re an obvious liar. Have you ever helped a homeless person? Do you donate to homeless causes?
No. And don’t pretend you do.You’re a piece of shit, too. You don’t give a shit about homeless people, you prig.
“You dick licker.”
Oh, right you’re a homosexual. That had slipped my mind.
“Neely was terrorizing innocent people on that subway.”
Before he was murdered Neeley was calling for food and water. He was clearly in bad place and may have actually been a threat to himself or others. That doesn’t warrant being killed. By your own standards you should have been killed years ago.
“And you’re defending Neely because he was black, not because he was homeless.”
You have absolutely no way of knowing that. Even if I were saying his murder was unjust because he was black what’s the problem with that? Oh, you’re a genocidal racist. Again, by your own standards you should have been killed years ago.
“Have you ever helped a homeless person? Do you donate to homeless causes?
No. And don’t pretend you do.”
Again, you have no proof of that. Clearly, you are insane and a danger to community.
Same old Danny Foster….defender of the indefensible.
Perhaps you should talk to people who ride the NYC subway everyday and what they have to put up with from clearly insane people.
Perhaps you should ride the NYC subway everyday for a month, but you won’t. You are all down with the idea of the downtrodden as long as you don’t really have to get those oh so delicate fingernails dirty.
“Same old Danny Foster….defender of the indefensible.”
You considering NOT murdering homeless people “indefensible”? I gotta say that tracks with you.
“Perhaps you should talk to people who ride the NYC subway everyday and what they have to put up with from clearly insane people.”
Gee, maybe some effort should be put forth to help those people. You see them as mentally ill after all. Funny how righties never get around to thinking about the issue long enough to come to the most logical conclusion.
Are you the guy who invented the selfie?
Like gratuitous posts purporting personal moral supremacy, they’ll all about promoting old number one.
After kissing Jeff’s buttocks, pucker up for mine.
Good one. I can see him puckering up right now! I don’t want his lips near my ass, though.
You’re not too bright.
First. The belligerent prick was breathing when Penny released him. (Murder would, at least, involve releasing him until Neely’s breath had expired.)
Two. We don’t have the autopsy report yet. The scumbag might have died of a fentanyl overdose like George Floyd did.
Three. Others on the subway also aided in the take down – demonstrating that Peny wasn’t alone in assessing & acting in response to an overt threat.
I take it that you’d cower in a corner while he beat another old lady into submission. (You have the mentality for it.)
Thanks, I was also thinking that the autopsy report is needed. I hope it isn’t faked.
It wasn’t murder.
thanks for the useful idiot point of view – now go back to your cave of irrelevancy
The overwhelming majority of assailants, troublemakers, and anti social miscreants are black. That’s not a racist statement, its a stamens of fact and until society is willing to push back on the black communities and let them know their behavior will not be tolerate anymore then we can expect more of the same daily.
We must not and cannot simply use “black” as the targeted group. ANYONE who violates western standards of decency and decorum is the target. The solution is to return to the cultural and civilizational ethics that made us the greatest and freest people.
We are not a nation. Not anymore. We are an empire containing many different and increasingly varied cultures. Blacks have problems assimilating to western civilizational standards, but blacks did much better before government began to treat them as helpless and discriminate in their favor.
Other people groups are being added to our empire every day. They have no desire or inclination to assimilate. They are hostile to the people who founded and made this place (and the entire world!) more free and prosperous.
We are doomed. The only hope is that westernkind of every ethnicity, race, and national origin can once again establish the culture, laws and social ethics of Christianity.
Dr. Hill has written a beautiful piece here. He ends, however, with a naive hope, but one I share. The loud women on the plane will not be changed by the disapproval of anyone but their families and loved ones. Their behavior is, in large part, motivated by aggressive racial hostility and resentment. Calling it out leads to violence, not contrition.
The Christian ethics are the ethics of altruism and self-sacrifice, love your enemy, turn the other cheek, the meek shall inherit your airplane flight and your country (illegal alien invasion), you are your brotha’s keeper, judge not that ye shall not be judged.
The rational way to live is judge and be ready to be judged. Respect those that have earned respect, love those that have earned love. Values, spiritual and material, must be EARNED, not granted from pity. Pity for the guilty is treason to the innocent.
But one thing you wrote reminded me of Emily Wilson’s book title, “The Greatest Empire: The Life Of Seneca”.
The greatest empire is your SELF. Your self is your mind, your personality, your character, your emotions, your habits, your impulses, your thoughts, your actions. It’s the greatest and most difficult empire to conquer, domesticate, educate, civilize, tame.
“Imperare sibi maximum imperium est.”
(The greatest empire is to be emperor of oneself)
Seneca, Epistle 113.30
Ok then. I judge you to be a miserable, worthless reprobate, lacking any redeeming morality or qualities. You are a selfish worthless little person who respects nothing but your greatest empire, himself.
You do nothing of worth, therefore you are nothing of worth.
‘You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go.'” — Cromwell
And I judge you to be a stalker.
Thank you Cal from Canada!
A stalker, a Mad Hatter, who keeps expecting me to keep going down the rabbit hole with him.
Unlike a stalker, Intrepid seeks solitude and separation. He has consistent intolerance for the intrusion of aggressive stupidity masquerading as reason. Is this not admirable? Free speech for all here, and that includes the aggressively stupid whose exposure will teach the naive and low information reader. Intrepid is up to the task. Occasionally we also get massive smackdowns from Tortoise Herder and others.
Carry on, Intrepid!
You have been down the rabbit hole for longer than I remember. Try telling me that to my face.
By Jove, America is now a predominantly Redneck country, black and white, and Latino Rednecks. Vulgar, loud, crass, obscene, flamboyant, rude, angry, emotional, confrontational, anti-intellectual, and violent.
The only New England and Tidewater Virginia WASPs left are the East-Asians!
Who would have thought that Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Monroe, in the year 2023 would be more culturally at home among the Chinese-Americans than among most white Americans. Even the whites today are no longer acting all that white, they need to start learning to act Asian before the Asians too become Rednecks.
You must not live in this country or you’ve never been on the subways in Chicago and New York City.
I won’t even fly today after seeing dozens and dozens of videos of outrageous behavior on airplanes. It is shocking. But this kind of stuff happens because there are no consequences to bad behavior anymore.
I will say, back in the 70s and 80s when I commuted on the el trains in Chicago, black thugs used to get on with blasting boom boxes to intentionally piss people off. I don’t know why I wasn’t afraid of them, but I would confront them and tell them that if they didn’t turn off the loud music, I would go to the conductor and have the train stopped. They would usually get off at the next stop. My friends used to tell me I was going to get killed someday. I never did.
Back then, your threat meant something. Not so much today. We no longer have the rule of law now that we did then. And I remember the 60’s and 70’s very well. There was the hippie chaos and stupidity, but western rule of law was much stronger then than now.
I was a very pretty blonde-haired, blue eyed girl growing up in what was then the 10th largest city in the United States. I could walk myself to the zoo at 10 years old, down a very busy main street thoroughfare – a distance of about 3 miles. My mother never worried about my safety.
We would leave our home unlocked when we left for the weekend. Our bikes were never locked. Newspapers were dispensed from machines that allowed someone to take the entire stack after paying 10 cents for one paper, but that did not happen as a rule. Liquor stores were closed on Sunday morning by law. The Lord’s Prayer and the pledge of allegiance were recited at the beginning of each school day. Children played unsupervised and came home for dinner, as instructed, “before dark.” I could go on and on.
Social trust.
San Jose? It’s the tenth most populous city now. And it’s over two hundred square miles.
If I’d been on that flight, I would’ve bitch slapped both of them and smashed that phone.
Well, you do have a documented history of violence and out of control, emotional outbursts. Must be the linger effects of brain damage you absorbed.
That or you are nothing but big talk and zero action.
So which is it, dipshit? A history of violence or big talk but zero action?
Because I admit, I AM violent. But only against assholes like you. I would never harm an innocent person. I protect them.
So which is it, dipshit? A history of violence or big talk but zero action?
Because I admit, I AM violent. But only against assholes like you. I would never harm an innocent person. I protect them.
LOL! It was an either or statement stupid. You constantly have violent, out of control emotional outbursts yet aren’t in prison. At least not now. So that would indicate you’re all go and no show. Unless you can somehow prove your record as a street fighter but I doubt that will ever happen.
You are unbowed. When everything goes to s–t, all the pencil necks will be screaming for you to do something. Carry on, Sir.
The answer to your question is San Antonio.
I’ve been to San Antonio. I liked it there. I liked Dallas and Houston, too. And Temple. Temple has a street named after Ted Nugent!
Austin sucks, though.
Lack of empathy, or inability to understand the other person’s point of view.
I think they know their conduct is irritating and disturbing to other people. That’s why they do it. And often they’re trying to provoke a response that they feel will justify their further escalation. It is sick behavior by unsocialized people with no impulse control or manners and an unending feeling of grievance and entitlement that has been inculcated in them by our elites, especially in media and education, relentlessly for over half a centurty.
I know what you mean by “unsocialized,” but the ugly truth is they have been socialized.
Well, to a different society maybe.
and with VERY different values. It goes back to the ‘great society’ where the government decided to encourage blacks to be lifelong democrats who depend on gov. for everything – welfare, food stamps, subsidized housing – and reward multiple babies with more welfare $. Don’t need no husbands or daddies – the government is daddy, and that led to the breakdown of black two parent families
Yes. Majority black socialization is vastly different from western norms. It is not lack of socialization, but socialization teaching hateful views of whites, Asians, Jews and Hispanics, fear and distrust of police, dependence upon government and intractable victimhood because of pervading “whiteness.” It is a great evil. Only blacks themselves can proselytize other blacks to become westernkind. Just finish school. Marry and get a good job before you have kids. Stay married and love your spouse and children. Invest in their future and your own. That is the formula for generational success.
Yeah, a tribal one.
I get into conflict with inconsiderate scum on a regular basis. They all feel entitled to be offensive and usually get away with it. I got into it with some scumbag just the other day.
That would explain why the punk murdered a homeless person.
A homeless psychotic, which most of them are. And he wasn’t murdered, he was killed by accident while he was terrorizing subway passengers. Good riddance.
Their was nothing accidental about Neely’s murder. You yourself admitted Penny put him in a choke hold. That makes it clear you know it was intentional.
You need to calm down Jeff. You so emotional
And you’re a dick sucker. But not a good one who just prefers dicks to pussies. A public bathroom creeper. Neely was a monster. GOOD RIDDANCE.
“You considering NOT murdering homeless people “indefensible”? I gotta say that tracks with you.”
First off we don’t know if he was murdered. He was alive when he went to the hospital and the autopsy has not been released. So stop all the hysterical hyperbole.
“Gee, maybe some effort should be put forth to help those people. You see them as mentally ill after all. Funny how righties never get around to thinking about the issue long enough to come to the most logical conclusion.”
Last I checked the Left is running everything in the deep blue cities where there are thousands of homeless. So where’s the effort put forth to help those people. More social workers?
We used to put people like this in mental hospitals or jail. But we don’t do that anymore do we….because of morons like you. Considering all of your issues maybe that would be the place for you, Danny.
As always, you just want to bag on conservatives but you never really get around to solving anything. You would rather have the narrative continue endlessly.
“And you’re a dick sucker. But not a good one who just prefers dicks to pussies. A public bathroom creeper.”
Well, now we all know how you spend your weekends. Well, at least when you’re not cheating on your wife.
It’s New England W.A.S.P. culture versus Southern Redneck culture or as Chris Rock put it black people versus niggahs.
I remember reading an article about the cultural-historical significance of the “Rat Pack”, which mentioned something called the “W.A.S.P. standard”, which was an unspoken, taken for granted, American cultural ideal of pre-1960 America. This WASP standard was personified by such celebrities as Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, Sidney Poitier, Diahann Carrol — good manners, articulate English, elegant dress, respectful formality.
The emergence of Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Rock and Roll, and then the Rat Pack and the stolen election of Irish-Catholic JFK signaled the assault and rejection of the WASP standard in favor of what can be called the Redneck standard — vulgarity, loudness, crassness, all things “keepin’ it real”. All things anti-WASP standard.
One should read Thomas Sowell’s masterful essay “Black Rednecks and White Liberals” and the first half of Diana West’s book “The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization” to get an understanding of this cultural sea-change in America that really began with Elvis and Rock and Roll.
One has to remember that Rock and Roll was seen as shocking and deplorable “jungle music” by conservatives back in the 1950s. And conservatives saw Elvis as a corrupter of morals. Were they right or wrong? The cultural fact is Elvis and Chuck Berry are the cultural fathers of Cardi B. and her big, hit song, “Wet Ass Pussy”. Rock and Roll is the direct cultural ancestor of Rap.
“I have no objection to the Twist as such. But it does represent some kind of change in our standards. What has happened to our concepts of beauty and decency and morality?” – President Eisenhower, 1962
So according to you we are supposed stay stuck in the 50s with only your taste in culture being the dominant one.
The conservatives of the 50s and 60s are most definitely not the conservatives of today. Times have changed, although you wouldn’t know it sitting there in Mommy’s basement 24/7
The 50’s were a halcyon era that I perhaps see through the rose-tinted glasses of an old woman who was a child then, living a carefree existence that would be unimaginable to my grandchildren. But life was better then than it is now, really. For one thing, family income among blacks was rising rapidly and catching up with that of whites, and educational attainment was getting better all the time (especially after Sputnik, which scared our teachers into pounding math and science into us big time). Life was good, and getting better. How does that compare with our dystopian present?
The post WWII era up until the 70s was infinitely better, safer and more productive than now. Then there was a coup d’etat to get rid of Nixon. And then came Herbert Marcuse and his Marxist Frankfurt School philosophy.
Other than Reagan and Trump it has been downhill ever since. And the left tried to get rid of both of them as well.
Leftists are traitors.
I agree with you. I remember the pounding of math and science after Sputnik. The only thing I can remember that was bad was duck and cover. That thought was terrifying to me, but it also bespoke a government that was performing a constitutional function – to protect its own citizens. So, even duck and cover, scary as it was, still indicated the government was functioning as intended to protect us from foreign enemies.
It sounds pretty good to me, babe. America sucks right now. The 50s were before my time. I vaguely remember playing in my backyard and watching TV in the late 60s when I was a pre-schooler but then the hippies came along and ruined everything.
I just looked up the lyrics to that Cardi B “song.” Totally ghetto but funny. I’d like to do her.
The birth of Rock an Roll.
1954 Bill Halley Rock Around the Clock
I was eight.
I wasn’t even a sperm cell in my dad’s balls yet, LOL! That’s a good song though.
You couldn’t find real America with two hands and a flashlight.
Do you really expect we are going to go back to the WWII days of Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, Sidney Poitier, Diahann Carrol? These people were in the movies. That wasn’t real life. Real America was always much coarser than how MGM portrayed it.
Any more than Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Rock and Roll was real life. It was culture. And the culture changes about every 5 years. And there is nothing you can do about it from that Lotus Flower of yours. And bagging on Rednecks won’t get you anywhere either. Their music, country music is the essence of this country. Stick to Ayn Rands Tiddlywink Music.
People like Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele are irrelevant to the black culture at large. They failed to stem the tide of the Cardi B’s and the X Kendi’s. As if white people reading their books will change anything. And if I read West’s book and I get an understanding of this cultural sea-change in America that really began with Elvis and Rock and Roll., will that stop Rock music? Little late for that.
You are about as much fun as what gets stepped in on a side walk.
But hey, watch some Danny Kaye re-runs and then turn on TCM and you can gripe to your hearts content.
I prefer “Route 66” reruns. A TV show produced in and around 1962.
I still watch Twilight Zone re-runs.
In Florida I get the ME channel – twilight zone on every weeknight at around midnite. I have a few fave episodes in my DVR colection.
So campy! But it was wonderful.
I went through a recent period of being unable to sleep and found all the episodes of “The Guns of Will Sonnett” in order on Youtube. What a great show! Every episode ends with a prayer for the people who have just been encountered and the prayers are beautiful.
“The Outer Limits” is good, too. The original and the one from the nineties.
This is definitely a class issue. Every day I encounter someone blasting an idiotic video loudly from.their phone. When I ask them to use headphones, they usually apologize and turn it down.
Equally bad or perhaps worse are the stone-ers (it won’t let me spell it correctly). I think we need train cars exclusively dedicated to these people who smell atrocious and can’t face a morning commute without taking drugs. They need their own Skunk Cars because their vile odor contaminates an entire train car filled with normal people.
Ah, public transit! How wonderful it will be when everyone has to use trains, and even more skunky people are dominating them.
Public transit tends to attract scumbags. The light rail here in Santa Clara Valley is easily invaded by scum who don’t pay. I got into a fight with one of them just last week.
LOL! What city do you live in? Here in CA, pot is legal so people smoke it in public all over the place. I smell it my apartment building’s hallways and elevators, too. My ex girlfriend smokes it every day. I’m going to take her back anyway, though.
We have an epidemic of psychopaths in these times.
I am a victim; therefore, I am entitled! –Simplicity Nes Pas?
I would say it has to be a bit simpler than that…
As further context, it is true that noise ordinances already on the books are less enforced than in the past–and this is an awful societal problem… The local ordinance here states that noise, such as from a stereo played outdoors is NOT TO BE HEARD beyond the property line, or 50 feet from the source, either one… The leftist leadership of the PD now attempts to avoid enforcing this unless first extensively harangued into doing so… This tends toward fostering a ghetto mentality and environment, even in relatively affluent neighborhoods,,, Not good…
Disturbing the peace is a criminal category–not ‘disturbing the noise’… We simply need to return to a cultivated environment of fundamental societal education in which an understanding that peace is original, neutral and presumed good clearly predominates–noisemaking is exceptional and must serve a constructive purpose, and even then must be limited…
Practically, the current noise situation is both a failure of public education, and a result of leftist captured police leadership organizations at the national level (which is a disgusting and very dangerous situation for many other reasons)…
Just wait until the Muslims get to be 5%, not .5%, of the American population!
Minneapolis and Astoria, Queens have recently given mosques permits to broadcast their supremacist wailing over loudspeakers all day long. Allegedly to respect the sacredness of RELIGION. “We must respect religion”.
Excuse me but in America religion is a private matter, your rights end where another citizen’s rights begin, you don’t have the right to broadcast your sacred noise into your neighbor’s ears, you have the right to pratice any religion you desire and you have the right to be free of any religion too. Catholics have the right to be left in peace from Protestants, and vice versa, and infidels, heretics, and blasphemers have the right to be left in peace from Muslims.
The Founders fought a (R)evolution against a Christian Divine Monarchy, against a Christian theocracy and it’s Divine Christian King.
“I don’t agree with [Marjorie Taylor] Greene that America is a Christian nation. I don’t believe America is a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, an atheist nation — or an anti-Christian nation, either. America was supposed to be a free country; that’s all. Yet I don’t think she disagrees. I think people like her are simply trying to say that Christianity matters to them. It’s on the verge of being outlawed in America, along with just about everything else leftists dislike or loathe [Ayn Rand and Objectivism included].” – Objectivist Michael J. Hurd
Oh, religion is private matter? Really? So private that you go out of your way to lambaste it, ridicule it, and attack it wherever possible, as you do in this post. ‘Christianity laid the ground for this. Christianity laid the ground for that….etc.’ We are on the verge of a theocracy according to you.
The Revolution was fought over the economic abuses England was forcing on us. Not because the King was Christian. Nowhere in the Declaration of Independence does the word Christianity appear. Jefferson outlines the list of abuses very clearly. Perhaps you should read them.
The Left managed to find the right to gay marriage in the Constitution, right behind the imaginary ‘good and plenty’ clause. So like a good little totalitarian objectivist you managed to find Christianity in the Declaration.
You really ought to stop changing history to suit your objectivist purposes. Next thing we know you will be telling us the newly formed United States was coming out of the Christian Dark Ages
Sorry America has always been a Christian nation. The first Bible printed was done so by act of Congress skippy. By the way if you wish to see how tolerant Americans are, try seeing stories and Minnesota allowing Christians to broadcast the Lord’s Prayer five times a day.
We as a nation are doomed to be materialistic, swines, dedicated to pursuing selfish pleasures, hence a corrupt leadership and institutions found only in the Twilight Zone or Hitler’s or Stalin’s regimes.
Wait! Minneapolis DID get that loudspeaker bullshit approved!?
They had tried to legislate loudspeakers before, and it was thwarted. (Guess they kept up the effort until they got their way.)
Quiet is a western value. Most cultures do not share it, but some Asian cultures value quiet as well. It allows one to have integrity in one’s self and to think. Loud music or shouting is an aggressive assault.
My black friend and her husband always flee to the whitest neighborhood possible. When I went to see her at her new house, she walked me out to my car. Another car was driving down her street obviously looking at an empty lot next to hers, and she jokingly started “acting black” by jumping around waving her hands and talking loudly in a black ghetto manner. I had to laugh because it was funny – but she KNOWS white people will have second thoughts before buying a lot and building next to a black, most especially a “ghetto” culture black.
My friend is not ghetto, but she still holds extremely racist views about police and white people. Ironically, she lives next door now to a retired white police officer and lectures him about police racism. She is one of the reasons I despair. But I admit I laughed when she started dancing and whooping and hollering when the car drove by to view her next-door lot.
Racism is the belief in genetic determinism, that DNA determines character. Racism needs to be distinguished from bigotry and from prejudice, they are three different concepts.
There is nothing immoral about prejudice in the sense of pre-judgement, it’s the natural and automatic way the mind works. We pre-judge almost everything and everyone automatically, it happens almost instantaneously and subconsciously. The immorality lies when we discover that the conclusions of our pre-judgement are wrong but we refuse to change our pre-judgement to an objective judgement after discovering the true facts about a person.
Every demographic group has general behavior patterns, it is not immoral to recognize that, but it is immoral not to recognize that a demographic group consists of individuals and not every individual will be a conformist-sheeple and behave in the general patterns of the group.
“Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.” – Ayn Rand
Her being black would be the least of it. Who wants to live next to a loud, obnoxious, flamboyant, emotional, aggressive neighbor? It would not matter if that neighbor was white, Asian, or Hispanic, no civilized person wants to live next to a neighbor like that.
Unfortunately black (and to a lesser extent Latino culture) tends to be loud, obnoxious, and flamboyant. not to mention violent. I don’t want to live in a neighborhood of Latinos who throw loud house parties every weekend and the men drink and piss on the street corners every day after work.
My girlfriend is racist. She actually admitted it a few days ago. Her son isn’t though. When she told him what I said about most black Americans and white leftists, he told her, “mom, he’s right about everything. I’d like to meet him.” Epic fail on her part. I do love her, though.
Yeah, that’s when one learns how racist they are, when your girlfriends start letting their racism out. They never get called on it, so they aren’t aware how racist they are.
Yeah, she loves a white guy but is racist against whites. WTF? She used to say she wasn’t a racist. At least she finally told the truth, although I’m not sure how good I feel about that.
I can’t help but love her, though. I’m a slave to that pussy.
I did meet another chick today, though. She had a ring on her wedding finger so I hope she isn’t married. I caught her scoping out my unit so I suspect the ring is just jewelry.
“Why We Need Behavioral Vigilantes.” When parents or lack of parents, schools, & the law enforcement system have ripped the fabric of society apart with failure to enforce the norms of hiuman behavior this type of abhorent behavior and open criminal activity are the result. over the last 50-60 years these institutions have been lowering standards and calling it progress. Yes, in order to survive there will have to be vigilantes patrolling the streets, shopping malls, and sporting events just to protect innocent people trying to live a life.
“Why We Need Behavioral Vigilantes.” When parents or lack of parents, schools, & the law enforcement system have ripped the fabric of society apart with failure to enforce the norms of hiuman behavior this type of abhorent behavior and open criminal activity are the result. over the last 50-60 years these institutions have been lowering standards and calling it progress. Yes, in order to survive there will have to be vigilantes patrolling the streets, frontpagemag.com/hopping malls, and sporting events just to protect innocent people trying to live a life.
Thank you, Jason. And I love your podcast.
Prof. Hill, please consider that the very people who most desperately *need* to read this essay are at the same time very unlikely to possess the vocabulary to understand it! Even today — though perhaps for not much longer, I fear — holders of PhD degrees in philosophy are not the primary threats to maintaining a polite society. Thus, I encourage you to prepare a similar essay using more commonly used words. Now, if you don’t know what I mean by “more commonly used words,” perhaps I should have said “vernacular.” N’est-ce pas? Thank you for your consideration.
On the contrary the cultural rot comes from the philosophers at the universities. The contempt for the civilized and the glorification of the primitive (cultural and moral relativism, the noble savage, comes from Jean-Jacques Rousseau) is an idea that can only become dominant in the culture when it keeps being inculcated in the young at the schools generation after generation. The idea that it is right, normal, and healthy to “let it all hang out” (a slogan from the 1960s) like a savage primitive comes from the philosophers at the universities.
“Give me child until he is 7 and I will show you the man” – Aristotle
“The philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation will be the philosophy of the government [and the culture] in the next.” – Abraham Lincoln
“The present state of the world is not the proof of philosophy’s impotence, but the proof of philosophy’s power. It is philosophy that has brought men to this state—it is only philosophy that can lead them out.” – Ayn Rand
So what are you going to do about it, besides wring your hands? Replace one moribund philosophy with another moribund one?
The world is obviously not going to accept your whining or Ayn Rand’s teachings to any great extent.
I notice when I respond to your drivel there is usually only one downvote. Assuming it is yours why don’t you be a man and respond. Grow a pair instead of hiding behind a graphic, Mr. Sensitive.
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It is the F–You culture. My pleasure. You being annoyed means nothing to me.
Portable boom speakers.
Sound cars.
Loud or whiney auto exhaust systems.
Those middle-aged Harley goofs with custom pipes thinking they are cool.
Motorcycle speakers you can hear a 1/2 mile away. Sharing a long worn out Bob Seger tune.
You cannot relax in peace at a hotel pool. Likely the hotel will be pumping in their music; an inconsiderate(s) will be playing theirs.
In Hawai’i, on a deserted beach, we enjoyed the wind and the waves. Total peace. Loved it.
Other than sitting on a deserted beach sounds like you don’t like much of anything anymore.
I hear the homeless have overrun HI as well. So much for the beaches.
I can’t wait for China’s domination of the West. This miscreants will see that they no longer will dominate the headlines with their anti social behavior.
We’ve let the inmates run the asylum, and they’ve burned it to the ground.
Let’s see how tolerant the CCP becomes towards transgenders, and blacks.
They will be in for a rude awakening.
And we will all be organ donors.
There is an epidemic of suchbehavior which is aided and abetted also bythe use of cellphones anywhere and everywhere-when you fly you can see peolple using phones despite requests of airlines requiring cessation of the use of phones in flight and people having the most private conversations in public .It really is an ongoing assault against hat makes for civilized behavior
This is not just an American culture issue, having experienced the same blatant “in your face” behavior in various parts of China including the first class compartment of their high speed trains, or at public concerts where people have loud conversations on their cell phones in the middle of the performance.
It’s basically a younger person form of self indulgence intended to offend with the expectation of no consequences; “I can do whatever I want so screw you!”
This self centered intentional lack of consideration for others reflects a rapidly growing cultural narcissism in younger people where “permissiveness” and “show-off” social media has encouraged bad behavior.
Instead of “defund the police”, we should have an “air marshal” on every flight, a security officer on every subway train, and bring back the cop walking the beat.
And, we need to actually punish offenders instead of a slap on the wrist.
Yes, there’s an initial cost to this, but over time, it should self correct
Funny, when I go to the Pittsburgh Symphony’s ever-popular classical concerts the audience is amazingly polite and well-educated. It is most unusual to hear anyone clap after a movement rather than after the entire piece. Nobody would dare cough or move during the performance, especially if the performance is being recorded. And at the first concert of the season, there is a drumroll, everybody gets to their feet, and the orchestra, led by an Austrian maestro, plays the Star Spangled Banner, with the audience singing along. So there really are bastions of civilization, if you know where to look.
It sounds like the audience in Pittsburgh is way more polite than elsewhere. When I hear a live performance in our local classical station there is coughing galore, especially during the slow movements of an orchestral piece or a more intimate chamber piece.
You are lucky. The audience is the main reason I gave up on going to live music concerts.
In my elementary school (public school), we went to see and hear the symphony once per month. It was my favorite field trip. We were taught all about the different instruments, the composers, etc.
We did that as well. That was when schools actually taught real stuff. I lived in Montgomery Co. Md just over the D.C. line. It was a short trip down Constitution Hall and the National Symphony.
By the way. Thanks for your defense of me re: Cat and THX. He had the cojones to reply to her because she agreed with him but he doesn’t have the stuff to take me on personally.
And so it goes. He got a real dressing down from the mods a couple of weeks ago because he thought his posts were being banned. The mods accused him of spamming and also mentioned that several commenters want him thrown off the site entirely. It’s not just me. So what does he do? He lays low for a day or two and goes right back to what he was doing. Narcisisstic Personality Disorder
When we allowed crazies like Madalyn Murray O’Hair etc. to undermine
our Judeo/Christian foundation, then the demons of hell stepped into the vaccuum.
Time to return to our Creator, the God of our fathers.
The cellphone has enabled anti social behavior but then again feminism has also enabled women to think that they can dress with the motto of less is more and expect to be treated as if they live in Victorian England
Exactly. I believe a woman can dress any way she wishes, but she cannot escape the impression she makes with her clothing. Generally, male sexual response is highly visual, but female response much, much less so. I had to teach my daughters this because young women do not understand men and the implications of something as simple as yoga pants. I think it is kindness to men to refrain from arousing sexual desire that will not be reciprocated.
The non-western cultures that are overwhelming us do not have the chivalrous standards we westernkind assume as normal. As much as it offends the equity / equality crowd, women and men are different and those differences must be honored for society to have peace. Our new massive replacement foreign population does not honor or respect the female sex and tolerates abhorrent sexually practices.
Thanks KH. Very insightful into male behavior. The visual thing is projection by males with high hormone levels onto females. Very dangerous because after their hormone levels drop, negative projections can take over.
I have to admit I’m one of those guys who gets aroused when I see attractive women in yoga pants. They shouldn’t dress like that if they don’t want guys to get turned on. How ate we supposed to control our urges? We can’t.
Ha, ha! There are plenty of songs on my phone that will make these jerks sorry they weren’t considerate of others. Heck, I can irritate them into swinging at me without electronics or vulgarity.
DO IT!
I just bought some massive speakers in my little car and they can play VERY LOUDLY without distortion. I fight back when some idiot is blasting a song with no melody, loud thumping percussion and lyrics that sound like repetitive grunting.
I can roll down my windows and volley with my country western, jazz, classical, etc. My speakers are AWESOME.
The visual contamination problem is also an abuse to the civilized.
Not just a few walking horror movies lurking about out there. At least Lon Chaney Sr. dressed well.
Looking at baseball stadium crowds in the 30s and 40s, comparing them to the present. A great many people must truly hate themselves nowadays.
.
“Visual contamination.” That phrase is so apt.
I recently bought a book by Henry Hope Reed called “The Golden City.” It is about American architecture and is loaded with pictures of our early, classical architecture and contrasts with pictures of newer forms that have no beauty or appeal. It is a great book to explore another aspect of visual contamination.
Nothing here a good choke-hold wouldn’t cure.
Oh Jason, I loathe noise pollution. It’s one of the most inconsiderate things a person can perpetrate. I almost got into it with some Mexican Mafia looking guy the other day because he was playing loud music on a light rail platform.He didn’t even have a ghetto blaster, just some home made contraption which are the norm here in weirdo San Jose. I told him “hey asshole, you know Walkmans have been around for forty years, right.? Buy some fucking headphones.” He didn’t like that. He confronted me but didn’t have the balls to start swinging. I wanted to throat punch him off the platform and jump on his ribcage but I was a bit tipsy and not in the mood, which is why I was taking the light rail and not driving.
People in my apartment building walk around with those contraptions blaring, too. It’s a new building and I’m the only person who ever lived in my unit but most of the tenants are formerly “homeless” (derelicts) and have few social skills and are incapable of learning them. And they speak in loud outdoor voices in the common areas, as if they’re still living under a freeway overpass or the scummy park down the street. I used to confront them but it doesn’t work. They don’t learn. You can beat the shit out of them and the day they get out of the hospital, they’l be at it again.
I thought noise pollution from miscreants was a San Jose thing but apparently it’s common in all large blue cities. American culture has coarsened and I don’t like it..
99% of people don’t change their deeply entrenched character habits. It is possible to change character defects but it requires a lot of constant and consistent hard work, over many years, often for a decade or decades. Sometimes the character defect never goes away and all one can do is to constantly remind oneself about the defect and keep it in check by avoiding the situational triggers that trigger the defect. As Seneca said, it takes a lifetime just to learn how to live.
Which makes me wonder, if one day the average human lifespan is extended to 300, 400, 500, or more years (I’ve read that in theory it can be extended to 800 years) what would be the effect on human character? Would the maladjusted, the miscreants, the neurotics, those who fight against the facts of reality, after 200 or 300 years, finally settle down and serenely accept the facts of reality? I’m reminded of a scene in one of my favorite movies, “Carlito’s Way”, where Carlito tells his girlfriend, “This guy, this counsellor in Lewisburg, Mr Seawald, once said to me: “Charlie, you run out of steam. You can’t sprint all the way. You gotta stop sometime. You can’t buck it forever. It catches up to you. It gets you. You don’t get reformed, you just run out of wind.”
“It is only in romances that people undergo a sudden metamorphosis. In real life, even after the most terrible experiences, the main character remains exactly the same.” – Isadora Duncan
When are you going to change your character defect.
You’re right about character habits. Most people never change and even the ones who do are usually triggered by a major upheaval in their lives, not by willpower.
But who am I to judge? I just had sex for five hours with a fat crazy chick who lives in some women’s shelter. And I slapped my next door neighbors ass on an elevator this morning. I’m a pig. But when I told her she had a great ass, she said thank you.
Mr. Bargholz, don’t be offended but you’re a bit coarse yourself, more Southern Redneck than new England WASP, more Stanley Kowalski than Cary Grant.
I wonder if you had been born in 1904 instead of 1974 if maybe you wouldn’t have become more of a gentleman than a roughneck.
You are such a girl, such an effete little snob.
I am what I am.
I am a bit like Stanley Kowalski. I like that character. I don’t give a shit. I sure would like to look like Cary Grant, though Don’t get me wrong, I’m incredibly handsome but nobody was better looking than that guy, not even Brad Pitt or George Clooney.
And I was born in 1964. I’m old as F.
A lot of people don’t know that Jordan Neely didn’t start his threatening and bizarre behavior till after he started taking k2 (synthetic marijuana). They also don’t know that high doses of k2 makes it more difficult to breath and makes people more aggressive.. k2 killed Jordan Neely not Daniel Penny. Who made it possible for Jordan Neely to get k2? The politicians who legalized marijuana share culpability.. Anyone see the parallels to George Floyd. Floyd had ingested 3X the dose of fentanyl known to kill people. He also had injested marijuana.
Ah, the old Floyd lie. You know that didn’t work last time your ilk belched it out?
Three separate autopsies were done on Saint George Floyd and ALL of them determined he died of a fentanyl overdose, you racist scumbag.
You’re a liar Jeff:
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/george-floyds-autopsy-and-the-structural-gaslighting-of-america/
Fake news. Go watch CNN and MSDNC and STFU.
K2. I had to look that up. One of its street names is “Black Mamba.” That doesn’t sound good to me. Black mambas aren’t just deadly, they supposedly chase people. I sure don’t want to smoke a black mamba.
Last year I smoked some “weed wax” because the chick down the hall I was with wanted to. When I saw her pipe I told her “you can’t smoke crack in my apartment!” But I looked it up online and she’d told me the truth. It was only marijuana. I enjoyed it but I wish I hadn’t smoked it because it impaired my memory and I wish I could remember every second of our tryst.
So was this the first woman you cheating on your wife with or another one? Did your wife finally get sick of your abuse and kick you out? Now you’re doing drugs in some apartment building and spewing bigotry online.
Pathetic.
WTF is wrong with you? I don’t have a wife.
And marijuana isn’t a drug.
And I’m not a bigot for drilling a black chick who’s my neighbor and very kind to me. Lots of black chicks, actually. And yesterday it was some latin/hispanic type chick. Yeah, I’m an equal opportunity “bigot.”
When’s the last time you got laid? And does your butt still hurt from the pounding?
“Jordan Neely’s death on May 1, 2023 by a Marine veteran who placed him in a chokehold…”
Pretty much everyone is saying he used a chokehold. Well, everyone but those who know how to apply a choke hold. and actually LOOKED at and evaluated the pictures showing the actual position of the arm.
If it wasn’t a choke hold than why did Neely die?
How about waiting for an autopsy. You can’t can you. You might lose the moment when it doesn’t work out for you.
What kind of restraint was it? I put a scumbag in a choke hold once but had to stop because he kept resisting and was going to kill himself. I just punched him out and rubbed his face in some gravel.
Something, something “documented history of violence…” something, “…show no regard for the lives of others…” hrm, “…no remorse for past anti-social behavior.”
The guy I choked was an unrepentant ex convict who bragged about his past crimes. Your type of guy, apparently. Not mine. I smashed his glasses with a rock after I kicked his ass.
What'[s your major malfunction, anyway? Why are you such an asshole? Why be a leftist when you don’t have to be?
Jason Hill deserves his professorship. Spot on and very well said.
The worst culprits in this regard are negros.