That’s easy to say when it isn’t your teeth that might end up decorating the F train, not to mention that the NYPD don’t really smile upon vigilantism. It’s a sad thing, that some people are dissuaded from help by the prospect of being arrested for their troubles, but that is the world we live in.
(by the way, the threading on this “bbs” sucks… i don’t know whether it’s user adaptation or the system itself, but so far imho it’s a big step down from disqus. i’m sure it has potential to be great, but it’s apparently a long walk to get there.)
Yes. I run my mouth off often. Sometimes I drink heavily and then run my mouth.
I think @IanMcLoud and your position is that it would have been better for the crowd to physically subdue and detain the two guys until the authorities arrive. I have these issues with doing that:
Trying physically restrain them would cause them to get more violent, not less. If they had been drinking, it would be more likely that they would respond with additional force.
We don’t know if they had concealed weapons. If they brandished those, it’s more likely that someone will get seriously injured or killed.
With the number of people in the crowd, it could have turned into a vigilante mob. When the police show up and those two guys are beaten and bloody, who do you think is spending the night in jail?
Don’t get me wrong, the two guys are clearly in the wrong. Their behavior is unacceptable. I hope those those two men are identified and have to answer to the law for their actions. But, as I said, I think trying to de-escalate the situation was the correct move. It looked like the guy in the blue button down shirt (not the polo) and the guy in the white striped shirt inserted themselves into the middle to try and calm the situation. It looks like the worst injury suffered was some scratches and bruises, which in any case is better than broken bones, knife wounds, and bullet holes.
Generally, cooler heads will prevail.
Because I gotta tell you, the minute that twerp reached out for that girl’s neck, I would have stepped between them and beat the living shit out of the guy.
I stay the hell away from confrontation, but when the line gets crossed…
i didn’t mean to sound callous there. i say what i said in the confidence that these pricks will be caught thanks to this video evidence, and they will certainly face charges for assault at the very least, probably also battery and hate crimes violations.
it raises an interesting question: can 100% citizen surveillance (which we are closer and closer to) substitute for citizens’ arrests and vigilantism? not in all cases, no, but in this case isn’t it a much more civil solution to the problem just to vid these assholes?
Reviewing your posts, I see what you mean. Yes, it is so far a bad outcome (but far from worst), as you said, but what if it were guaranteed that they would be punished fully by law thanks to this video? The fundamental question here seems to be: Would you still say in that case that it was a bad outcome?
This bbs is terrible. Boing Boing now has a comment that’s almost as bad as YouTube’s. Yaaaay; and on top of it, the discussion is now on its own page. I don’t get it. Oh yeah, and I had to re-register.
That brings up a legal question I’ve been contemplating: This would obviously not qualify as self-defense, so would such actions on the part of a citizen be defensible in court? Or would you simply end up sharing the defendant’s bench with the asshat?
Look at the term homophobe, okay… if you showed it to someone from a time when the term homosexual wasn’t bandied around, they’d take it to mean a person who’s scared of either similarity in general (an odd thought), or, get this - people similar to themselves - a double whammy for the homophobes in the closet!
Off topic, but here’s another personal favorite from that general “golden era” of Onion articles. It appeared in the year that my alcohol problem first really started becoming, well, a problem, and it straight blew my mind. (As drunks go, I was pretty self-aware.)
Agreed. I find it really difficult to navigate, especially in terms of following conversation threads. If I expand the Reply function, great, I can read those, but then when I go back to reading below that the rest of a post’s comments, I have to weed through new comments mixed in with comments that I already read when I expanded that Reply section. Ugh.
Holy fucking shit, I´m almost shaking from anger right now. What the fuck is wrong with some people? I hope these scumbags don´t get away with it. Sorry, not a very constructive comment.
I want to believe in the rule of law and nonviolence and solving bad speech with more speech. But to be honest, I’d shed no tears to see some homophobes to get an ass whoopin’.
Five bucks sez that the first one, the loudmouth, IS a cop - Or at least some low-wage wannabe-cop. Or a very-low-on-the-totem-pole authoritarian, like a parking meter warden or theater usher.
The second one looks to be a little more sly and sneaky…
