Why was Martial Simon free to kill Michelle Go?
More on the killing of Michelle Go, who was pushed to her death this past Saturday in front of an oncoming New York subway train, can be found here:
[New York’s Asian[] Community leaders said that even if Saturday’s fatal attack was not motivated by racial hatred, it added to a sense of palpable fear among Asian-Americans.
“This is horrifying. It’s a horrible attack on yet another one of our citizens,” said Wai Wah Chin, charter president of the Chinese-American Citizen’s Alliance of Greater New York. “This has to stop.
Prevention is worth a pound of cure. There were police officers in the Times Square station where the killing occurred, but I doubt they’re allowed to arrest someone for being a public nuisance – which was what Simon had previously been until the fatal moment that happened in an instant. Simon (previously referred to as “Martial” because earlier news reports had his first and last names reversed) had a lengthy history of mental illness and criminality, and it’s not as though the state hadn’t tried to intervene previously:
“He’s been on medication for over 20 years and in and out of mental hospitals in New York,” a woman who identified herself as Martial’s sister, Josette, told The Post.
But there are limits to how long someone can be kept in a mental hospital for merely being crazy, and it’s also very expensive. Treatment with drugs often helps when the person is in the hospital, so authorities can’t justify keeping the person much longer. But on release he or she often stops taking the drugs.
This is just plain tragic, for everyone involved (in particular for Michelle Go, but not just for her):
Josette Simon wept as she recalled she once even begged a hospital to keep her troubled brother locked up after his life was derailed by mental illness.
“He was a hardworking man, he was a giving man,” Simon, 65, said through tears of her younger brother, Martial Simon, 61.
“Somehow, in his 30s, something happened and he lost it,” she said. “He kept seeing and hearing people after him. One of my sisters took him in. He stayed, and then he said, ‘I have to go back to New York.’ “…
Josette Simon, who lives outside Atlanta, Ga., said her brother was diagnosed with schizophrenia, with his conditioning worsening after their mother died 23 years ago.
“She was taking care of him,” Simon said. “She had to call the police on him a couple of times, but after that, he went downhill. He’s been in and out of mental hospitals at least 20 years.”
And here it is, just as I suspected emphasis mine]:
“I remember begging one of the hospitals, ‘Let him stay,’ because once he’s out, he didn’t want to take medication, and it was the medication that kept him going,” his sister told The Post.
Schizophrenia is generally incurable. These situations are rather common. You can’t keep everyone locked up forever against their will, and fortunately most people with schizophrenia will never become violent. But they are somewhat more likely to become violent than people without the illness, although it can be hard to predict who will be the ones to harm others:
Although the majority of patients with schizophrenia are not actually violent, an increased tendency toward violent behaviors is known to be associated with schizophrenia. There are several factors to consider when identifying the subgroup of patients with schizophrenia who may commit violent or aggressive acts. Comorbidity with substance abuse is the most important clinical indicator of increased aggressive behaviors and crime rates in patients with schizophrenia. Genetic studies have proposed that polymorphisms in the promoter region of the serotonin transporter gene and in the catechol-O-methyltransferase gene are related to aggression…Management of comorbid substance use disorder may help prevent violent events and overall aggression. Currently, clozapine may be the only effective antipsychotic medication to repress aggressive behavior.
Good luck with any of that once the person is outside the hospital.
Simon also had a criminal record, although it doesn’t appear to have involved actual violence (it may have involved a threat of a gun that didn’t exist, however). Reports on the exact charges differ, but here’s one:
Martial has a criminal record with at least three arrests going back to 1998, when he was busted for robbery, with the latest coming in October 2019 for criminal possession of a controlled substance. He served two years in state prison for attempted robbery and was released in August 2021, state records show.
That last robbery was unsuccessful (in another account, I read that the person ran away). But here we have “controlled substance,” so Simon probably was abusing some sort of substance, which would have increased his risk for criminality.
What to do with someone like that? Even before Bragg became the DA, Simon’s crimes don’t appear to have warranted very lengthy sentences. And although he was insane, it was probably only when he didn’t take his meds. A dilemma, indeed, because you can’t lock up everyone who fits that description on the off chance that the person will go on to commit a heinous crime.
DA Bragg gave what he considered reassurance to frightened New Yorkers:
When asked if New Yorkers had to be worried about the suspect being released immediately from jail, he said no.
It probably takes a crime of this magnitude, however, for Bragg to keep someone in jail pending trial. There is little doubt in my mind that, according to Bragg’s guidelines for charging criminals, Simon would not have gone to prison in the first place for his earlier offenses.
Curtis Sliwa – the man who founded the Guardian Angels in New York, and who recently ran for mayor as the Republican nominee and lost to Eric Adams – had some remarks, too:
Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa said he’s seen the suspect “many times” ranting in the subway.
“He will have a conversation and then all of a sudden he will have a psychotic disorder,” Sliwa said. “Again, an Asian gets pushed in front of a train.
So Simon was a fixture in that station and perhaps in others. There are many such people, more than there were when Giuliani and Bloomberg were the mayors. They created an atmosphere that it wouldn’t be tolerated. How was this done? Was it the “broken windows” policy? Here’s one opinion (from 2015):
“Giuliani is right. De Blasio is in denial,” said Floyd Parks, 60, a vagrant who was hanging around a recently broken-up homeless encampment in Harlem.
Writing in Sunday’s Post, Giuliani blasted de Blasio’s “so-called ‘progressive’ view” of homelessness, saying the city should be pushing addicts and the mentally ill into treatment, and everyone else into shelters.
Longtime vagrant Mohamed Rasul, 60, said that under deBlasio, the homeless decide their own fates.
“I’ve seen mayors come and go, and I’ve never been as comfortable as under de Blasio,” he said.
“I have choice under de Blasio, and I choose to be homeless.”
…Rasul said that under Giuliani, cops would wake him by smacking something “with a baton, shine a flashlight in my eyes and cart me off to a shelter.”
“These days, if I don’t want to cooperate, I don’t have to,” he said.
Indeed. And Martial Simon didn’t have to, until now.
One might also ask why, exactly, was Winston Glynn (from Jamaica) allowed into this country and why was he still roaming the streets. More than one week ago, this viciously violent vagrant (yet another plaguing Gotham’s streets) robbed a Burger King in East Harlem and killed a young woman working the overnight shift for one hundred dollars. When arrested to shouts of “basura” from the onlookers, Glynn began ranting about reparations and slavery. Neither Adams nor Bragg will ever have the sense or the strength of character to reverse NYC’s sad decline into urban decay.
I wonder if he smoked pot.
I have a tiny Thai sister-in-law in LA. She doesn’t ride public transit, but still, I worry about her.
Hmm. I wonder if Simon developed schizophrenia after heavy marijuana use. Alex Berenson’s book “Tell Your Children” has some interesting evidence about the connection between marijuana use and both schizophrenia and violence. Paranoia can be a side effect of marijuana abuse, and because paranoia makes people afraid of others, it can make people violent. Berenson also points out that paranoid schizophrenics have a very high likelihood of becoming violent–just under 50%. As he says, the majority of paranoid schizophrenics are not violent, if by “majority” you mean “51%.”
I see that Kate got there ahead of me!
Can’t they find a way to implant long-term drugs into these people so they don’t have to take a pill everyday?
J:
It depends on the definition of “violent” as well as how “paranoid schizophrenic” is diagnosed and what percentage of the schizophrenic population is considered to be paranoid.
But here are some figures for general schizophrenia:
We are left with the same question: what to do? Lock up all schizophrenics indefinitely? Lock up those with substance abuse issues? Obviously not. The problem is very real, especially because of the tendency to stop taking meds when out of the hospital.
“Why was Martial Simon free to kill Michelle Go?”
The greater safety under Guiliani demonstrates it is not an insolvable problem.
The Left however sees it as one of the necessary elements in the dissolution of American society needed to send the underlying message that no matter where you are, you’re under threat and at deadly risk.
A deeply fearful public is an easily controlled public.
“COVID-19: Democratic Voters Support Harsh Measures Against Unvaccinated”
https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/partner_surveys/jan_2022/covid_19_democratic_voters_support_harsh_measures_against_unvaccinated
As the country song goes, “my give-a-damn is busted”. NYC people voted for this shiit, they get what they deserve. I hate to see such a young girl killed, just like the grad student in LA, randomly knifed, but this will continue until the populace wakes up.
There will more Bernard Goetz in the future.
“You can’t keep them locked up.” Perhaps that is where we need to start our discussion. If someone is a threat to others, especially to random others, perhaps we need to find a way to keep them out of contact with random others. If that means keeping them locked up, maybe we need to re-examine the statement at the beginning of this comment.
What is the relative value of Michelle Go’s life vis-à-vis Simon Martial’s freedom? Is that the equation?
A number of years ago I visited one of the classic old “insane asylums” before our political elite decided it was not right to keep people locked up. It was a horrendous visit: the people there were at various levels of dementia. Some seemed fairly normal, others sat in a catatonic stupor, and the worst hooted and shouted, or had to be physically restrained so they didn’t harm themselves or others. I left thinking how horrible it was. Had I known then that the facility would shortly be closed and the inmates mostly turned out on the streets, I would have voted in favor of keeping them locked up. The population outside would not be safe with those people roaming free.
But enlightened politicians had their way, the facility was closed, and the inmates are now free to find alcohol and drugs to fuel their internal demons. We as a society are not better off as a result of that decision.
No sane community wants someone like Martial Simon on the loose.
“You can’t keep everyone locked up forever against their will”
However you *can* keep the crazies locked up forever. And should.
Yes it’s dangerous to put all options on the table. And most of us have been ‘Carefully Taught’ to Not Go There.
All that Instinctively Not Going There can ever really mean is that you’re Eloi… whether you (want to) know it or not.
And there’s no shortage of Morlocks. Not all of whom are clinically insane.
Zaphod:
No, you can’t – realistically. It would be too expensive, as well as more pernicious in that it would lock up way too many people indefinitely. Liberty and all that, you know. Of course, you don’t mind locking up people indefinitely – as long as it’s not you, right? Lock everybody up who might ever be a problem. And if some people even get labeled “crazy” who aren’t – like in the old Soviet Union – no biggee either, right? Let’s make an omelet!
physicsguy on January 18, 2022 at 5:18 pm said:
People keep sticking a fork in their eyes and then whining that it hurts.
Yeah mental institutions are snake pits. But someone has to make an argument for tolerating shit covered streets and lunatics menacing you, under conditions wherein you would not grant a non-lunatic the same leeway.
So, you cannot hold them to account as if they were sane, and you cannot lock them up because it violates the rights which sane people have memorialized for themselves – even though the crazy are not sane.
So what’s the effen point in a system of association like that, again?
As for me, I would not lock them up. I’d take one of the paradisaical Hawaiian Islands or some other tropical garden spot, and just dump them on the beach there.
How could you be faulted for that? Unless, of course, you consider that they have a right to shit up your life, to undermine your civilization, menace the population at large, and burden your daily moves; while they have no positive reciprocal obligations whatsoever. You cannot control them, and you cannot exclude them either. Nice Plan!
Yeah, that is where progressive grandma ethics have gotten us. A morality fit only for masochists who deserve what they get.
And of course the Soviets had a rather interesting use of mental health for those who were dangerous to the state. One wonders if Xi uses similar practices? But then the left in the USA have decided that there are classes and categories of Americans who are mentally ill; be it the WuFlu or AGW. What could be wrong with that, Z? After all, totalitarianism isn’t a suicide pact. (sarc)
Zaphod on January 18, 2022 at 6:09 pm said:
People who cannot control themselves reduce to either enemies or wards.
Enemies don’t have the same civil or political liberties as do the law-abiding.
Neither do wards.
Of course, one does have an option that neither involves taking control of their lives or punishing them.
Exclusion.
DNW:
Terrible use for an island paradise. If we’re gonna let them loose someplace, why not a place that’s not so nice? Like an Alaskan island?
Decades ago I read a very painful article written by a woman about her schizophrenic brother. Her family was wealthy and cared deeply about him. They had the means, the resources, and the desire to help him. But they were unable to: he could not be hospitalized against his will because he was not considered “a danger to himself and others.” When he would be hospitalized, he’d stabilize, get released, and then he’d go off his medication. And the cycle would begin again.
Deinstitutionalization didn’t help him at all. He ultimately froze to death on the streets of Manhattan. His sister felt they were lucky that he wasn’t violent when he’d be in his state. But his family was heartbroken when he died.
Jails aren’t the best place for them — they don’t get the proper treatment. But it does keep the ones who tend towards violence off the streets. The deinstitutionalization has been terrible for the mentally ill. While there were abuses they needed to be remedied, the baby was thrown out with the bath water.
@Neo:
“Of course, you don’t mind locking up people indefinitely – as long as it’s not you, right?”
You got that right! It’s called Enlightened Self Interest. You may have encountered the term before.
And from a purely Benthamite Utilitarian view (not something I’d always go with, mind you), institutionalising these hopeless cases *does* achieve the Greatest Possible Good / Least Possible Harm.
DNW’s Modest Proposal has its merits, too.
F on January 18, 2022 at 6:54 pm said:
Because Kale and cabbage probably won’t even grow there; and South Georgia where they won’t freeze to death, is reserved for criminals who can be expected to learn how to use a hoe. And unlike the criminal, the idea is only to remove, not to add any sense of loss of associative privilege.
I figure one banana and pineapple plantation island is worth sacrificing to let them lay babbling in the sun all day stuffing their faces with tropical fruit, if that rids us of those that insist on remaining crazy. They can be crazy there.
Some schizophrenics can apparently be managed with what are called long-acting injectables (LAIs) or depot medications, some of which have been around since the 1960s. Patients have to visit their doctor or nurse every 1 to 3 months for the injection, but the LAIs do offer a way around the issue of medication discontinuation that works for at least some patients (though not for all, of course, and the LAIs do have some downsides). Here’s a link to an article written for nonspecialists about depot medications for schizophrenia:
https://www.webmd.com/schizophrenia/schizophrenia-long-lasting-drugs
Does exposure to survivable amounts of fentanyl create more crazy people? Yesterday there was somebody on a talk show, maybe Jimmy Failla or one of his guest, who was saying that the “fentanyl epidemic” is mislabelled and should be called “ fentanyl poisoning” as many of the people dying were using some “ recreational” amount of some other drug that had been laced with fentanyl. How many of these people know it is in there? Why is it being put in there?
F:
Ah, to have your faith in the ability of authorities to make these fine distinctions.
I have no such faith. Such a system of locking people up can be heavily abused, and rest assured that it will be heavily abused. There is no way to predict such things except in the most egregious cases. And in fact, Simon’s been locked up many times before and it didn’t help did it? He would have had to have been locked up for life – he and millions and millions of other people who – unlike Simon – would never have murdered anyone.
Simon had never been violent before as far as I know, having looked at his record. Criminal? Yes. Paranoid? Yes. Probably verbally threatening. Attempted robbery – as far as we know, without a gun and without harming anyone.
And yet quite a few people here would like to have locked someone with that history up, probably for life. Interesting.
Until we can predict better who will be violent, it is not a good idea to do what you suggest. The solution is to make the penalties and interventions greater and more enforceable for vagrancy and crimes of violence, just as Giuliani did, and to get rid of these awful Soros DAs. You can make it harder for people like Simon to harass others without locking up all the schizophrenics in the US.
Neo’s solution (7:45 p.m.) would help keep some of these mentally ill people off the streets and away from the subway lines. That would be good for the public. The mentally ill would spend a lot of time in jail, though. That might not be better for them than a decently-run mental institution.
Apparently (I read Alex Berenson’s “Tell Your Children”), the anti-psychotic medications have side effects. When they become too bothersome, the patients stop taking them, and then they regress into their problems again.
Zaphod (and DNW isn’t far behind):
Like all tyrants and tyrant-wannabees, you justify the terrible gulag you want to create.
I’m very glad you’re not in charge.
Not that the people who actually are in charge at the moment are much better, or have better intentions.
Kate:
Yes, side effects are a huge problem and one of the main reasons they stop taking the meds. The other is that when they’re on the meds they feel they’re okay and don’t need them.
Also, the prisons are already full of the mentally ill.
@Neo:
If I were in charge (most unlikely, alas.. I’ve always wanted a solid gold toilet), I’d keep you around. And you’d be able to take the subway at 3am. And the subway would be running at 3am. I’d make it Run On time 😛
In other totally unrelated news, the Academic Agent and Friends just did a long group discussion about Uncle Ted Kacyznski’s writings on Learned Helplessness.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQ4lnLewV_I
Uncle Ted is a bit like Menachem Begin. Had some Big Thoughts, and also not so coincidentally perpetrated some terrorist atrocities. You don’t ignore the wisdom just because you (you do, don’t you?) disavow the Nasty Bits?.
Too much Learned Helplessness going around. Things can be improved. It just requires a modicum of (trigger warning) Will. Be like the Irgun! Make that Brave New World! 🙂
Jackboots never go out of style for some or for some lumberjacks either.
Have some relations who were involved in building a shelter for homeless. It’s a massive project, modifying what might be considered some cross between a dorm and a motel into something housing the unthreatening homeless. And it will hold maybe twenty of the area’s nearly one hundred perennials.
What would have to be done to house the potentially and actually violent and still not be a jail is practically inconceivable.
I’m a Lumberjack and I’m OK: I sleep all night and I throw rocks at the Overton Window all day!
That was the philosopher, he’s the man of the woods. But you both share a taste in boots it seems.
IIRC Philosophy has something to do with Beer and Sheep Dips. Bit over your pay grade, Om.
Have a Victoria Bitter (Fosters is for Fags) and shaddup.
@RichardAubrey:
“It’s a massive project”
For a small group. Not for a properly governed State.
Apollo or the Interstate System, or the Manhattan Project were Massive Projects.
Getting these unfortunates into safe, secure accommodation out of everyone else’s faces *and* doing it less inhumanely than having them defecating in the streets and baying at the moon and randomly killing the citizenry is merely a Moderately Big Project. Should be do-able. Just requires clear thinking and Will. For some reason, can’t quite grok it myself, your present rulers in the broader sense than just the formal political apparatus have quite the aversion to any kind of Triumph of the Will. 😛
In a perverse kind of way, this complete and utter inability to Act is *Insert Name of Very Bad Man*’s Revenge:
The Russians can Act. The Chinese can Act. The West and its satrapies can only Flail About in Learned Helplessness.
Z:
You know what to do with the sand.
Tyrants who read deep, think big unponderables, and yet understand nothing.
Prudence would suggest that giving a government that has already shown a propensity to abuse the law to go after its political enemies more weapons with which to do so is unwise.
That being said, government does have the duty to protect the public and the safety of subway platforms must be improved to prevent this type of thing.
In 1970 I took a job in Manhattan and ended up working there until 2008 and hence lived through the bad times, similar to now, and lived through the Giuliani and Bratton (police commissioner) renaissance. In the final years that I was there it was the most wonderful place to be because of the renaissance.
In the 70’s there were areas of the city you just would not visit. Not out of the way places, but places like Times Square, the East Village, parts of the Upper West Side. Before DeBlasio, these limits had been erased. Sure there were still places you would not go, but they now were on the margins of mostly wonderful places and pretty easily identifiable.
I came away from this experience with one conclusion. The renaissance was almost completely the result of changes in policing. Broken windows theory led to many very creative policing techniques. Statistical policing (in NYC COMPStat), a Bratton creation, was also a key element. Bratton surrounded himself with an interesting group of smart, creative, and innovative folks and they were not just from the ranks.
NYPD also was very aware of neighborhood policing and how important it is to work with the folks that you are policing.
The greatest city in the world, gone. I would not go back now on a bet. Sad…
I’m glad I am not in charge of the crazies too, as I want nothing at all to do with them, and see no reason why I should.
That said, you are of course neither responding to the observation nor the argument that the current system is simply a form of sublimated sexual perversion run for the emotional benefit of a bunch of old progressives. Pixie haired progressive grandmas get their jollies, and the innocent die.
What we are also not seeing is the out of control antagonist as “either enemy or ward” paradigm being addressed. Nor the implicit and politically indefensible assumption of self-destructive and non-reciprocal moral obligations of the sane toward the insistently insane.
Where does this open ended unconditional obligation to roll over and bare one’s neck come from? A command from Heaven? From the terrier’s church lady authorities?
Are you actually willing to argue that?
I have no interest in placing anyone in a gulag. I want nothing for the insistently insane other than that they be where they cannot harm the innocent. Where that is, is largely a matter of indifference to me. If they can be happy and find bodily pleasure there, fine with me. If after being dropped off to an awaiting fruit basket on Tahiti or wherever and molesting each other to their heart’s content, they want to then go live on the streets in France or Canada or wherever, then fine. Who cares where they go as long as they are removed from their prey.
When you say “gulag” you are referring to a system of camps where political prisoners are set to work for the state, with the possibility of their reintegration into so-called society once the state has had its way with them and exploited their labor power.
To the extent what I say is taken seriously as a proposal, I propose no camp system. There is no punishment. There are no guards. There is no discipline, no instructions, no work detail, no schedule no interference with their wills except insofar as another of their own kind may do so.. This has nothing to do with economic systems. It is just a nonviolent gateway to elsewhere or nowhere.
Which one they choose does not matter to me.
Personally, I find legitimate both DNWs and neo’s POV. My heart lies with neo but my mind cannot refute the points DNW makes.
neo states, “The solution is to make the penalties and interventions greater and more enforceable for vagrancy and crimes of violence, just as Giuliani did, and to get rid of these awful Soros DAs.”
Getting the Soros DAs and AGs out of office is indeed an absolute necessity. But isn’t making “the penalties and interventions greater and more enforceable for vagrancy and crimes of violence” in effect simply removing them by placing them in jail as well? And wouldn’t that result in the Martial Simons simply rotating through the system as he did?
Which leads me to suggest that at least much of the source of at least the homelessness is cultural. We lack the ability to solve this problem but we can reduce it to much more tolerable levels. A proposition made impossible by leftist machinations and liberal premises.
“You can’t keep them locked up.” Perhaps that is where we need to start our discussion. If someone is a threat to others, especially to random others, perhaps we need to find a way to keep them out of contact with random others. If that means keeping them locked up, maybe we need to re-examine the statement at the beginning of this comment.
As a medical student I spent a summer doing physicals on 200 schizophrenic men in the VA hospital in LA. That was early days of the anti-psychotic drugs, which had significant side effects, Even so, using the methods of professor Harrington, who was chief of the service, we got quite a few men to half way houses like board and care homes today. The managers of these homes had been trained to be sure the men took their meds and what to do if they seemed to be regressing into psychosis. There is a way to successfully treat these people. Not all require life long incarceration. Modern drugs have far less side effects but these people have no insight. California passed a law, the “Short Doyle Act” that was supposed to provide out patient treatment. It was a lie.
Using modern drugs and similar methods to what we used, I am sure much of the homeless problem could be solved. It might be more expensive then the present spending of Democrat cities like LA and SFO but maybe not. There is no political will to do so. Virtue signaling is more popular.
One of Harrington’s UCLA residents wrote a book about his methods. It is called “Reality Therapy” It is in print 50 years after being written. At one time, it was popular in LA schools but those days are long gone.
I think I will read that. Having no actual idea of the content, the title reminds me somewhat of the rational emotive behavioral therapy we were taught about in school.
Now obviously for those with gross organic disturbances of the brain which cause their issues, it is self-evidently tautological to concede that you are not going to talk them out of it.
But, there seems at some level to be – at least at an observer’s remove – some act of will, or cooperation, no matter how vestigial, with the illness, which in some ways parallels addictions.
Obviously cutting to the chase through brain chemistry altering drugs will if they work, work. Another tautology, obviously.
But when we think of some anxiety disorders, not all or maybe not even most, but some, there seems to be a partially unresistant will at work. I do not say that they exactly enjoy their illness and the “benefits” which it brings, but in a few cases at least, one particularly famous, the subject was able to report knowing when he was slipping into such a state.
I recall asking a professor what would happen if we took a catatonic and placed him alone in a cabin in the woods with food and the necessities of life. Would he eventually rouse under the pressure of meeting his own bodily needs?
He said it would be interesting to try, but completely unethical.
“A dilemma, indeed, because you can’t lock up everyone who fits that description on the off chance that the person will go on to commit a heinous crime.”
I think I’ve made this point before but…we CAN lock up people like this Martial Simon. We used to do it. Then we decided to stop doing it.
It doesn’t necessarily make the problem easier to resolve with but I do believe it’s important and useful to understand this is not something happening to us. We’re doing it to ourselves.
Mike
DNW:
Catatonia isn’t just one thing; it’s a term used for many rather different problems. Some of them have an organic cause (encephalitis or meningitis, for example). Even if the intervention you suggested were ethical, it probably wouldn’t work for people with those forms of the problem.
MBunge:
I guess our argument is about the word “can.”
Of course we can lock up everyone with even a hint of mental illness – if we want to pay the enormous cost in money, manpower, and liberty. In liberty, because 99% of the people we will be locking up (and there will be very many of them) would never be committing violent acts and would be merely living out their somewhat-addled lives in the community rather than locked up.
You think “we used to do it”? First of all, there was always crime and there was always the village idiot (or idiots) or odd people. I’ve already described my own experiences in the 1950s and early 60s and there were plenty of crazy people around. Plenty of them – and that was when we locked up people a lot more readily than now. In addition, there was Skid Row in every town. The difference was in policing – the bums were made to keep more in their own territory.
In addition, when mental illness commitments were much easier, a lot of sane people were committed by their hostile or inconvenienced family members, and spent their lives (or much of their lives) in mental institutions. Lastly, if commitment was easier, the process would be used for political enemies.
Good times, good times.
I realize that you’re not saying that locking people seen as mentally ill up so readily was good. But it also wasn’t all that effective. I believe the growth in the problem in recent years is a combination of factors that represent cultural changes, in particular connected with family breakdown and substance abuse, as well as policing changes in particular.
I’m not sure anyone has answered the Boss’ question:
“Why was Martial Simon free to kill Michelle Go?”
Because that’s a feature of the Marxist-Soros system of degrading the US from the ground up until it falls.
Those who “caused” Ms Go’s demise will never face the ramifications of letting violent people roam the streets…criminals OR crazies.
Did DeBlasio or Bragg (or their predecessors) ever take the morning train? Hail a midtown cab? Walk through Central Park after dark without a security team before & aft? The rules they make are to effect you not them. Intense insecurity & high threat/fear is how they rattle your cage & make you crave/love Big Brother.
The solution to this is similar to 1776’s solution to taxation without representation, not giving the goonies their own private Idaho.
Uncle Ted is a bit like Menachem Begin. Had some Big Thoughts, and also not so coincidentally perpetrated some terrorist atrocities.
Is a military headquarters of an occupation army a legitimate military target or not?
In 1929, when the Arabs of Hebron slaughtered 69 non-Zionist religious Jews, were they upset about Deir Yassin in 1948?
Menachem Begin was a great man and a true statesman. How many revolutionaries voluntarily disband their armies? The day after Israel was declared a state, Begin got on the radio and announced that the Irgun’s militia was being disbanded, that a country couldn’t have two armies, and that while he wasn’t happy with the socialist government, the Irgun would participate in the political process as a loyal opposition (notwithstanding the fact that the Labor party leadership including David Ben Gurion tried to kill Begin by shelling a ship he was on, the Altalena).
Later, he would call Anwar Sadat’s bluff regarding making peace, leading to the first Arab-Israeli peace accord.
It’s unfortunate that Begin doesn’t get his due, but then as someone on the political right the international media wasn’t going to portray him in a good light. The guy was fluent in at least five languages and helped change the course of history.
He also knew how to deal with Joe Biden. In 1982, Begin was in Washington to meet with Pres. Reagan and doing a round of Senate hearings. Biden was unhappy with Israel’s incursion in Lebanon and with Jews living in Judea and Samaria and threatened to cut off aid to Israel.
Begin told Biden,
“Don’t threaten us with cutting off your aid. It will not work. I am not a Jew with trembling knees. I am a proud Jew with 3,700 years of civilized history. Nobody came to our aid when we were dying in the gas chambers and ovens. Nobody came to our aid when we were striving to create our country. We paid for it. We fought for it. We died for it. We will stand by our principles. We will defend them. And, when necessary, we will die for them again, with or without your aid.”
I’ve got no problem with a bit of judicious killing… Whether it be the King David Hotel or the odd village or three hundred… That goes for Ariel Sharon and Sabra / Shatila too — nicely done by proxy… What? Who? Me? And all that.
Perfectly well aware of what Arabs are capable of doing. Your guys paid them back with interest.
I love nothing more than a nice impregnable wall keeping people I don’t like who don’t like me away from me.
I also think that conquest and having and holding is really all there is and the rest of the fine words are just candy floss and unicorns and that any society which forgets that is bound for subjugation by others.
There’s a notion around here, perhaps that I’m a bit unfair to Israel. I think not. I’m merely pointing out a double standard. And a tendency of some to mistake what happens to suit them and theirs for some kind of unavoidable cosmically ordained moral imperative.
Somehow, such, errr.. Solutions are not available to White Americans or White Westerners. Because that would be Nazi.
I just think we should all be able to have our Israels.
I think you think that when I slap in a bit of ironic praise, I’m doing a Goebbels. I’m not. I want White ppl to do same.
@JAM:
More specifically, I’m trying to make people look at ideas they’d instinctively shy away from because they’ve been conditioned to do so and don’t know it.
For example, every Good Conservative Boomer knows that Ted K. the Unabomber was a dangerous, nutty, madman. And that’s all the thought they’ll ever give him. But that dangerous nutty madman also had some profound insights about the predicaments of Western Modernity. And these are worth examining in detail.
Same Good Conservative Boomer has a mental image of Menachim Begin as being the Hero of Camp David.. The fact that he tried to assassinate Konrad Adenauer (a fact you may have overlooked) amongst a bunch of other very unpleasant stuff he also did doesn’t detract from the fact that some of his ideas and policies were bright and shiny wonderful things and made life better for millions of Israelis and Egyptions (and the American taxpayer poorer to the tune of 2B/year x 2… but if that’s not been indexed, doesn’t matter because what’s a Billion these days?).
It’s arguable that there might be better ways of breaking through OldThink and brainwashing than the sledgehammer of drollery (well it is to *me*) I swing… but Caliban is my middle name 🙂
Think I’ve said it before, but I appreciate and respect your reasoned and unfailingly polite rebuttals to some of my, err, provocations.
No, you can’t – realistically. It would be too expensive,
IIRC, Fuller Torrey has offered the estimate that institutional care is advisable for roughly 1/3 of that population which has had schizophreniform episodes. That’s about 0.23% of the population, or about 780,000 people. The state asylum census in 1955 accounted for about 0.5% of the population. Given the costs of long-term care, the expense would amount to approx. 0.55% of gross domestic product. (The long-term care census is as we speak about 1.1 million, mostly infirm people in nursing homes).
Z and his Solutions.
How “clever.” What dung he rolls.
De-institutionalizing unfortunately does not work, since science has not yet come up with a medicine that makes people take their medicine.
Homeless people, violent prone or otherwise, would not be on the streets if they persistently congregated, slept, lived, attacked, abused , threatened , murdered and/or created a general nuisance very near the homes of those politicians who implemented and promoted their “no arrest” policies.
Because these leftist politicians are exempt from and immune to the consequences of their no-arrest policies, by virtue of their socio-economic standing, they just do not care how many “other” innocent folks get harassed or killed by the homeless .
THEY DO NOT CARE.
These politicians do not have any skin in the game, which allows them to pursue policies that harm the other guy.
This is the typical MO of the liberal progressive.
Does any sentient life form believe that political excrement like DeBlasio or Chesa Boudin would be promoting their “no arrest” policies if it was their own children or their own family members who were being molested or killed by those individuals who they let freely roam the cities they “govern?”
If the thousands of homeless in SF decided to pitch their tents in front of the home of Nancy Pelosi (one of the wealthiest members of Congress) , who thinks the City of SF would just modify their “human excrement” map and let the homeless stay there?
Unfortunately, it is, once again, the voters who are to blame, for electing individuals to office whose defining characteristics are contempt for and hatred of all things USA and for its citizenry.
When policies are enacted that intentionally and purposefully endanger the people, it tells you all you need to know about those individuals who are promoting such policies; about what they think of the average citizen.
Why was the Bastille stormed in July 1789?
Couple of points: Increasing or making more consistent various penalties only works if the individual in question makes the connection at the time his action occurs to him. One characteristic of the mentally ill is not making such connections. The fallback, then, is to round them up whether they know why it’s happening or have no clue.
As to why this excrement keep getting elected: In part, they promise things a politically useful set of voters want. Money, “programs’, and so forth. And the voters identify with a zinnified view of America taught them in school and elsewhere, in which a campaign effectively sneering at American values implicitly or otherwise, gives them a really good feeling.
Art Deco:
You cannot predict who would be violent. You would have to lock up every schizophrenic, not “just” 1/3 of them. The cost is not just in money, either, obviously. As I previously said, the cost would be in liberty. Preventive detention – which is what it is – for that many people? The measure shouldn’t pass a legality test.
Also, there is an effective treatment for schizophrenia these days (unlike in the past): medication. If medicated, schizophrenics usually are not delusional, and locking them up for life could not be justified in any free society.
Zaphod:
You write: “I’m trying to make people look at ideas they’d instinctively shy away from because they’ve been conditioned to do so and don’t know it.”
Oh, really? Actually, you’re making unwarranted assumptions about people and what they know or don’t know, and why, and then telling people they are stupid or uninformed or too afraid to look at something (or some combination of all of that) and you’re just the one to enlighten them.
How on earth would you have a clue what “every Good Conservative Boomer knows” about the Unibomber or anything else? Particularly in the US, or really anywhere? Almost always, what you proceed to describe as what they know or don’t know is nothing of the sort. You seem totally unaware of your own ignorance.
And predictably, you suddenly bring up something to do with Israeli and/or a Jew, one of your absolute favorite topics. This time it’s Menachem Begin, and you make a whole bunch of assumptions about what said “Conservative Boomers” think about him. You are relying on nothing but your imagination, as is so often the case, because not only we were not discussing Begin recently but I’m unaware that he’s ever been discussed on this blog or even mentioned except rarely and tangentially in passing (hard to do an effective search, because his last name is the same as a common word). So you actually have zero idea what anyone here thinks about him.
Then, on top of your imaginings about what people think, you add “[Begin] tried to assassinate Konrad Adenauer (a fact you may have overlooked)…” That “fact” was asserted in a memoir written by one of the actual plotters, who said that Begin was the mastermind behind it. True or not true? You don’t know and I don’t know, but I would call it an allegation rather than a fact.
Robbery is by definition a violent crime.
That’s whether or not the victim is actually harmed, and whether or not an actual weapon is used: Fake weapons, unloaded guns, claim of having a weapon, or any kind of implied physical threat all are normally considered armed robbery.
That strikes me as a false dichotomy. It’s not all or nothing. We did (pre-1965 or so) lock up a lot more people in mental institutions, prior to the whole “de-institutionalization” movement. I’m not saying that was an ideal solution. But when people are mentally ill, abuse drugs, and have a history of violence (as this guy did), it seems they should go into the “lock ’em up” category. There will be mistakes on both sides–people who get locked up who needn’t be, and people who are not locked up who should have been–but we need to try to find that balance, and not just punt and rely on punishing people after the fact.
Jimmy:
There is a big difference between threatening violence and committing violence. The circumstances of that attempted robbery, as I read them in an article I don’t have time to find now, was that Simon entered a car (it may have been a cab, to the best of my memory) and asked the driver for money, saying he had a gun or some other weapon. He didn’t have a weapon nor did he show one. The driver fled and nothing happened.
That was the most violent Simon ever is reported to have been until the moment he killed that woman.
Jimmy:
As I’ve said in other comments, in the 1950s we locked up a lot of people who should not have been locked up. The same would be true today. That may be okay with you, but it’s not okay with me. Plus, in the 1950s – and this is key – we had no treatment for schizophrenia. We do now. The problem is that people stop taking their meds. So one would have to lock people up who are basically sane while locked up but who MIGHT stop taking their meds if released. And they’d have to be locked up for life.
Not a solution.
Neo: there were some model state hospitals. Manteno State Hospital in Illinois appears to have been one of them:
http://www.asylumprojects.org/index.php?title=Manteno_State_Hospital
The hospital figured prominently in sociologist Andrew Abbott’s 1988 book “The System of Professions”:
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo5965590.html
It (the hospital) went downhill in the 1960s-1970s and was closed in 1985.
The state hospitals and state schools in my native state were definitely *not* model institutions (an especially notorious one was located in a neighboring town). Whether they were better than the streets or prison is a valid question, however. So is whether we would do a better job of running them today than we did back then.
neo on January 19, 2022 at 3:43 pm said:
Any stats or references on that?
And of course, “we” were not locking them up, as we were either not alive or of an age to do so at the time.
The states were locking them up.
Insofar as goes a conspiracy such as one might have seen imagined or portrayed in an Alfred Hitchcock television drama, where a little old lady is cheated out of her liberty and estate by a dissolute son and a scheming daughter-in-law, it is obvious that a manifest injustice is occurring.
However, In the case of some behaviorally erratic and irrational person who persistently gets in the face of strangers – who owe him or it or whatever NOTHING – and annoys or even menaces them, then institutionalization might be the better option, than would be their applying the ultimate right of self-help which the normal folks have to eventually rectify the situation, and liberate themselves from the oppression of the insane.
The philosopher is annoyed, hope he doesn’t flip out. 🙂
Who is this “we” he speaks of?
Go bite a rolling tire Om.
DNW:
You and Z can form The Society of Sand Pounding Philosophers.
Are you paid by the word? What after all, is in it for you, you of the royal “we?”
Better to publicly pound sand, than one’s own pud as you do, Om. In any event, you are certainly not a philosopher; sand pounding or otherwise.
Nor, obviously, are you a logician, competent or otherwise.
Nor, are you capable of making an even elementary argument, contenting yourself instead, with chasing around and yapping at those who can and who do, until you get noticed.
Nor, finally, and as your latest question demonstrates, are you minimally familiar with basic punctuation rules. For if you were, you manifestly would not need to ask who the ” ‘we’ ” I referred to was, once you noticed the quotation marks around the word, and the fact that it was located beneath a block indent quotation. That was the “we” referred to.
Sometimes I almost feel more pity for you, than contempt, Om. Please, help us all, and yourself, by finding something more constructive to do.
I don’t really like writing this kind of thing. But it is something you need to confront for your own good.
DNW:
You do get paid by the word, it seems, but by who and why?
You may want to curb the rage and hostility; those can be bad things unchecked. But enough about you and your issues.
DNW, he could have been a contender.
Cheers.
And just like that an otherwise prime opportunity to have a rational discussion devolves into a playground pissing contest.
Another day ending in “y” it would seem.
Did the Boss fire all the bouncers?
Philosophers are like that, and I don’t even pretend to be one.
John Guilfoyle on January 19, 2022 at 9:11 pm said:
Disappointed as you may be, I’d like to be allowed to point a couple- three things out.
The first is that my taking notice of, and then eventually responding to X, has not really prevented anyone else from continuing to comment on the mental illness social disaster along whatever lines they wish.
The subject of much comment here and on the Internet generally – including Tucker Carlson most recently – is how the mentally ill persist in their annoying patterns of getting into the faces of others, until some unfortunate result is provoked; and how this is perfectly predictable.
And too, if somewhat ironically, one might see in your complaint a kind of localized example of just what does eventually occur to the social infrastructure when those possessed by irrational drives and needs to make their presence felt on unwelcoming others, are neither held in check nor corrected.
What we have here is actually a paradigm case of the urban situation writ small.
Something to consider as we ponder the wisdom of letting the mentally ill run rampant in any context, and what the natural fall out tends to be.
If anyone distressed or disappointed by the previous exchange finds the prospect comforting, they may know that I plan on going back to ignoring those camping on my doorstep, and will allow the city government to handle the matter.
Upthread, two options for providing on-going medication were suggested: monthly shots or implanted medication.
Does anyone here have sufficient knowledge to educate us further about those options? Success? Problems/issues? Etc.