Police opened fire on a subway platform in Brooklyn during a confrontation with an alleged fare-beater, striking the man cops said was armed with a knife, two straphangers caught in the fray, and one of the firing officers, NYPD officials said Sunday.
One of those two passengers hit by the cops’ bullets, a 49-year-old man, was hospitalized in critical condition after he was hit struck in the head, according to the NYPD.
The two officers who opened fire were assigned to patrol the Sutter Avenue subway stop in the 73rd precinct when they spotted a man skip the station turnstile and walk through an open gate toward the train platform, Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey explained at an evening press conference from Brookdale Hospital.
Ahh yes. Nothing like killing a perp and a few bystanders for a few dollars’ worth of fare. USA! USA!
I think if people had even more guns this could have been avoided. What if there was a six year old with a 22 there to respond to the gunshots with some of his own? maybe less people would be dead.
Guns make everyone way safer. We need to start providing them in utero.
How dare you politicize gun violence while a police officer is injured!
You mean the one that shot the other people? Officer mental health is important! Someone think of the shooter!!
Take the guns from the police and give them to the embryos. I think you’re on to something here.
Right, or the bystander that got shot in the head could have returned fire, if only he were armed
Removed by mod
Why stop at guns? Everyone should have access to portable WMDs to keep the world safe.
Hey, we have to draw the line somewhere. Let’s stop at a gigaton.
I think it’s also the responsible thing to limit our young people to the kiloton range until they are 21.
Make sure the 17 year olds in the military get the good stuff though.
Abortions are prebirth, so should guns
This has been an ongoing problem in the city. Fuckin Mayor Officer Landlord has been dumping millions into multiple cops sitting on platforms, on their phones, watching for people jumping the 2.90 fare. Which they just raised from 2.70. They’re more than spending what they’re hypothetically losing on fare jumpers. Neoliberal capitalist bullshit in action.
Meanwhile in Albuquerque we’ve made buses free because the fare infrastructure costs more than to run the buses.
They stopped him for a few dollars’ worth of fare.
They shot him for charging at them with a knife.We’ll see if that story pans out, I’m sure the body cam footage is coming any minute…
The statement by the Department Chief literally references that there is body cam footage, that is the source of information for the statement.
No no no. They mean the footage being released for public scrutiny. The police have lied about the body camera footage before.
The uniformed duo followed the alleged fare-beater up the stairs to the elevated L train platform around 3 p.m., when they gave him commands to stop and turn around. Maddrey said during a verbal altercation, they “became aware of a knife.”
Body-worn camera footage, which Maddrey said he reviewed before the press conference, allegedly showed the man make a verbal threat to the officers. He told the cops, “I’m going to kill you if you don’t stop following me,” the chief said.
As the encounter continued to escalate, a northbound L train pulled into the station. The train cars opened and the man jumped inside, according to police.
Where is this knife charge mentioned?
He was charging… away… with his knife…
Maddrey said the officers followed the man, each firing a Taser which proved ineffective in subduing the man. He then exited the train while it was still at the station and charged the officers with the knife, the chief said.
it was the next sentence from what you copied lol
So this guy charged at them, then got tased and then got on a train car and got away… right
Was he on the limitless pill maybe? Maybe that’s secretly why they chased after him so hard?
bro, what? did you even read the article? they shot him? he didn’t get away?
they shot him when he was running away from them?
I know it’s like that by headline, but they repeatedly tried to subdue him and eventually he charged at them with a knife after having said “I’ll kill you”. I don’t know I would hesitate to stop him without my gun if he suddenly ran at me with a knife. I’m just thinking survival, instinctively, and not about bystanders around me in that moment.
I’m just thinking survival, instinctively, and not about bystanders around me in that moment.
Kind of fair point for yourself.
However I expect more of a trained professional who has repeated firarms training. They should be sesitized to controlling their direction of fire even in an emergency.
It really is bizarre how many people seem to just accept lower standards for police than for random Joe gun owner off the street. It’s not confusing though; it’s just another facet of the great team sport of society for many people.
If we’re supposed to value and respect our police, maybe we should actually expect good things from them!
That’s not even the point. The training should have taught them how to de-escalate the situation, or even let it go. They transformed a 3$ fare skipped into a massacre, how’s that normal?
It’s 3$, if he has a knife, just let him go, it’s not worth the risk. You’ll track him down later and get him without killing him, passerbys and other cops.
You don’t need to drop a nuke because there’s a pickpocketer somewhere in the city
Ok, so these people are too incompetent to win a 4v1 against an untrained opponent? Is this better somehow?
If a guy doesn’t pay $3, has a knife and threatens the police -> mental problem. The answer isn’t shooting but handling the situation and deescalating.
They shot because the guy charged at them with a knife, not because of the fare. OP’s thread title is deliberately misleading, in a desperate attempt to twist this into ACAB fuel.
Any bystander injuries are to be blamed on the aggressor Mr. Knifey.
They chased someone into a train over 3 dollars. There is now hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical bills, possibly over a million. Because someone “stole” a 3 dollar fare.
How the police react to stuff is absolutely up for debate. This is why we stopped doing car chases.
If someone runs a red light, and a cop tries to pull them over to give them a ticket, and instead the guy jumps out of the car and tries to attack the cop with a knife and gets shot in self-defense, it is absolutely not accurate to frame that as “cop shot that guy for running a red light”.
But this is what exactly the OP is trying to do. And that’s bullshit.
Police don’t chase for red lights anymore specifically because the damage car chases were doing was out of line with the civil infraction.
Don’t see how that’s relevant to anything. A police officer walking after another person, on foot, doesn’t have the potential for collateral damage that a car chase does.
It is completely ridiculous to frame this as “police shot a man over $2.90”, when the shooting only happened after a verbal death threat, brandishing a lethal weapon, followed by an overt attempt to make good on that threat with that weapon.
Only the most ACAB-addled mind would think it appropriate to frame the events that way.
A police officer walking after another person, on foot, doesn’t have the potential for collateral damage that a car chase does.
Looks at the number of people that got shot.
Obviously that’s not true.
And all of that stuff with the weapon is based only on the police claims. The same police that won’t release the body camera footage.
Looks at the number of people that got shot.
Obviously that’s not true.
Not as a result of two people walking, but as a result of someone brandishing a knife and attempting murder in a public place. Cringe goalpost move.
And all of that stuff with the weapon is based only on the police claims.
And all of what you’re saying is based on literally nothing but your hate boner for police, lmao.
The image released shows a knife clutched in the criminal’s hand. I’m sure he was strolling around like that very innocently and cops just opened fire on him for a laugh, right?
The straw-grasping is incredible.
The same police that won’t release the body camera footage.
Like it’d matter to your type. We have extensive hard video evidence of what happened with Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha, all put online publicly mere days after the event, and there are still innumerable imbeciles claiming shit it directly contradicts happened, lol.
The knife that mysteriously doesn’t show up on any footage and couldn’t be located after the fact?
I know better than to believe police lies. It’s all they do. ACAB, no exceptions.
Especially the NYPD
There’s a still image of the police body cam here which shows the knife.
https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/nypd-shooting-sutter-ave-subway-station-brooklyn/
Edit 4 days later: And now we have the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EaAraFPzEo
Literally knife to gun fight. (Edit: allegedly, no video [yet])
Poor guy. Wish he could’ve been treated instead of killed. Wonder if here in the US we could put mancatchers/catch poles to good use:
An example of someone ostensibly suffering a mental health crisis eventually being subdued by a large number of responders with said poles.
Until cops prove themselves trustworthy, I will assume they’re lying. They have a long way to go.
$1000 says there is no amount of examples of trustworthiness you could be shown that would change your mind, just admit what you are, don’t be prejudiced and too much of a wimp to admit it.
Yes, I am prejudiced when cops are involved. Where’s my $1000?
So you admit that you were lying here.
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NYPD goes HARD on toll jumpers, but there’s virtually zero enforcement on traffic and cars. Everywhere I go I see assholes with illegally modified vehicles, degenerates speeding down shoulders and medians, motorcycles on crowded sidewalks and pedestrian paths, and too many drunk drivers to count. There are so many cases where one pig parked on the shoulder during rush hour would fund the city budget for a year.
Instead we get whole families of pigs loitering by the turnstiles
The NYPD also loves to go after jaywalkers and vagrants, particularly when they’re interfering with the flow of street traffic.
Cars are King, baby.
Who drives and who uses the subway.
That’s your answer.
Clearly that’s where the money is. $2.90 goes hard
Apparently we’re calling commuters “straphangers” now too. I wonder if the NYPD will shoot at speeding wheelgrippers next.
I was wondering what that word meant. Thanks for the context.
The reason is the same reason why bullies go after vulnerable and/or isolated kids. The type of person who has a car and has the money and means to illegally modify it is also the type of person who would give the police absolute hell if they so much as dared to look at them the wrong way. A person jumping a small toll is someone who is poor and will never attract the sympathies of any judge who will treat them very harshly.
Yeah I just can’t help but think of all that sweet sweet money that we absolutely used to get by charging the rich assholes being bad with their fancy toy cars to the point of it being the main funding force for police for decades and wonder…
Why not take?
I want that. I really do. The major problem is that throughout most of history the wealthy have always gotten away with the most incredibly blatant shit and the general attitude of the legal system has been to comfort the comfortable and grieve the aggrieved. The times where the people on the top got their comeuppance and where the wealthy were forced to comply with some level of propriety towards the average person are both rare and brief.
In the US, the New Deal era was by far the most prosperous era in US history, and many of the wealthy people HATED it. The whole modern anti-politics as politics started shortly after WW2 as a response to the whole thing. The video I linked has more information on it… and it is far from the whole story. What I am saying is that it is really fucked just how powerful the propaganda apparatus of capitalism has grown. This isn’t to say that it was somehow unbiased in the past. Prior to WW2 the liberal media basically aided fascists gain power even when fascists were killing many of the same liberal journalists and shutting down their newspapers.
It isn’t impossible. It is just fucked is what I am saying, and things will get a lot worse before things get better… and the sad reality is any recovery will be very brief since that is the way how humans work.
Fuck cars!
Once I was in NYC and saw a little pack of motorcycles doing wheelies and running red lights.
Sounds like a lovely Tuesday afternoon
NYPD: The dumbest kid from every high school on Long Island.
I’m in Suffolk and can confirm. Kid got a 680/2400 on the SAT. Not that the SAT is a great intelligence test but damn.
Man, you get a 600 for just writing your name yikes
Based
They used more money in ammunition than the amount of money the shootout started over!
Evidence of why the “Chris Rock solves gun crime” strategy won’t work.
Chris Rock solves gun crime
Make bullets cost $5000 a piece!
A corp strats
Proposed reform measure: Just like teachers have to buy classroom supplies out-of-pocket, have police officers buy their own ammo.
They shot because the guy charged at them with a knife, not because of the fare. OP’s thread title is deliberately misleading, in a desperate attempt to twist this into ACAB fuel.
Unless you have evidence of that, stop spreading it.
Your prejudiced assumptions do not trump the evidence we have. The knife is on body cam.
Until they release the body cam footage, all we have is a blurry photo of someone on the ground holding a knife. As nice as that image is, it does nothing to support the claim that they were “charged at with a knife” and that is the claim people are holding you to task over (and assuming that is true, just allowing this situation to escalate to that point was inexcusably incompetent). The NYPD has been caught intentionally misleading the public with bodycam footage many times before and thus lack the credibility to be believed without evidence, especially when they are being this cagey over releasing the footage. This may very well have been the case, but until they prove it we can’t reasonably take them at their word and you damn well know it.
They have a picture of a knife
That they cannot produce.
The police lie. We’ve caught them lying so many times now that they don’t get the benefit of the doubt much less some higher credibility.
“We will be working through the timeline of today, but make no mistake, the events that occurred on the Sutter Avenue station platform are the results of an armed perpetrator who was confronted by our officers doing the job we asked them to do," Donlon said.
Could we maybe not ask police officers to escalate minor and petty conflicts all the way up to shooting everyone in the immediate vicinity?
doing the job we asked them to do
Ah, so we should pursue this ‘we’ who are asking cops to kill innocent people. Thanks, Donlon!
“armed perpetrator” ah, so any american that commits a crime, then?
Schrodingers pig.
The cop shot an innocent bystander in the head but also shot another cop. Until trial, he is both a bad guy with a gun and a good guy with a gun.
NYPD pays $126,000 annual salary, that’s about $60 an hour or $1 a minute, 4 cops respond to the fair jumper, if they spent more than 45 seconds on this it costs the city more than the fair was worth.
The point is not how much it costs.
The point is that a poor person needs punishment, and if they’re lucky, they might get to shoot somebody.
No way would I do that job at that pay in NYC, especially as long as pretty much any idiot in the USA can own a gun.
Imagine the 2 by standards suing the department getting and 6 million dollars. Because shooting a guy for jumping a turn style worth 2.90.
This is a joke they need to take that money out of the police officers pension.
If they start doing that, and only that, no police officer will ever see a pension ever again within a month
Start giving police officers actual training. You know, teach them how to deescalate, how to actually use a gun (because they don’t even know that part) but also teach them to let go.
High speed chases may look cool but they endanger the innocent until found guilty suspect and hundreds of innocent bastards, none of those chases are worth it. Let them go, catch them later safely using actual police investigation work.
Guns may look cool but they kill at a distance and are a high risk for all bystanders, they should be a last resort, not a first resort.
Also,mgive police officers a mandatory psychological evaluation, filter out the psychopaths and the racists. Those you don’t want in a force that needs to protect and serve.
A lot more improvements can be and should be made, but you get the picture
If they start doing that, and only that, no police officer will ever see a pension ever again within a month
Seems like it’s a whole lot of not my problem.
Garnish their wages too. Fuck these fucking bastard pigs.
qualified immunity says there’s no specific law or statute saying you can’t fire indiscriminately into a crowd of people whilst attempting to “apprehend” someone suspected of not paying their $2.90 subway fare… so they’ll be let off with a warning and a nice long paid vacation. Maybe the victims will get some token amount…
Oh wait, you didn’t even mention the cops getting punished, I guess it’s just a given at this point that they won’t be. We see a headline these days about cops shooting innocent people and we can’t suspend disbelief long enough to even imagine the cops getting punished.
America!
Not only that, the fare skipper will be charged with all the bloodshed.
They would never win. The police were just doing their jobs after all. So what if a couple of innocent people get shot? After all, just because they are currently innocent, doesn’t mean they aren’t future criminals. So really, by shooting them they make it less likely that they’ll commit future crimes!
People win suits against the police all the time. It’s just the police rarely face consequences for it, especially as an institution.
It also exceptionally rare that police officers themselves get prosecuted. Chauvin’s conviction was a surprising twist as such things almost never happen. This is one situation where they threw one of their own under the bus to placate the public while the whole situation actually gets worse.
Like ever since BLM got started, the rate of police shootings have only gone up, and funding has increased AND there are far more laws protecting police than before. In many states it is becoming increasingly illegal to film police officers for any reason. So they might have thrown Chauvin under the bus, but they might make it illegal to film cops in his area, so future Chauvins who get filmed will have nothing to fear, as they will arrest the person filming them and charge them, and since the film obtained is criminal it will be dismissed as evidence.
This obviously has in part to do with the toxic American gun culture and it’s corrupt and untrained police, but alsonwoth it’s misguided need for what it thinks is justice, and revenge for real or imagined crimes.
Shoplift something small? In you go with hardened criminals to punish punish punish, fuck you for daring to do that! No rehabilitation, just punish
A lot of Americans complain about low prison sentences in Europe, not understanding that the focus there is on actually solving the problem of crime, instead of revenge, revenge, revenge.
It makes more sense if you start from the premise that there are “good people” and “bad people”, and bad people need to be punished to protect good people. The people who do the protections–like Joe Arpaio–can do no wrong. Even if they seem to do bad things, that’s just in the service of protecting good people.
This premise is bullshit, but everything follows from there.
The problem is rooted in prison spending moving from a social cost to a private revenue stream.
It’s the classic Cobra Effect of economics. Monetizing the solution to a problem creates an incentive to increase the instances of said problem.
In this case, we have criminalized the free use of public transportation in order to justify more spending on policing.
it seems like you are assuming it wasnt always this way. but perhaps this has always been the function of prison. CIP: Australia
The same thing in Canada. Despite the reputation of Canadians being polite wusses by Americans the Canadian legal system is much harsher than the American system.
Yes! I can’t tell you how many arguments I’ve had with people who genuinely think that burglars deserve to be shot and killed.
Why hasn’t the city released the full body cam footage?
Probably because there was no knife in the footage.
Comments like these are all over the thread…
There’s a still image of the police body cam footage here which shows the knife: https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/nypd-shooting-sutter-ave-subway-station-brooklyn/
Edit 4 days later: And now we have the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EaAraFPzEo
Sorry but I’m not going to take the city or cops at their word because we’ve seen multiple similar incidents in the past where they spun their story then when forced to release the footage it’s a completely different story.
I’m responding to a comment that said there was no knife in the footage.
I linked a still of the footage showing a knife.
But we know whether there was a knife or not isn’t what you or most people on Lemmy care about. You don’t like cops so therefore they were wrong. Facts be damned.
You’re right that a still image of a knife matters little to me, I understand you were responding to a post specifically about a knife being present, and I’m adding that whether a knife is present or not doesn’t change the fact that the city and police are releasing statements and withholding evidence to manipulate public opinion. Why should I have to trust the cops at all if there is video evidence of the events that I can use to form my own judgements from? Why hide the facts from public view?
Fair enough. However, they should release the footage regardless. Especially since 4 people got shot, 2 of which were bystanders, and that this was over a cheap fare. Cops are pretty untrustworthy.
However, they should release the footage regardless.
100% agree.
Since when are stills taken from video that clear? Especially during a scuffle, and with questionable lighting… Something doesn’t add up.
Here’s the video the still came from.
Ok, fair enough, he had a knife. I’ll still criticize the cops for fucking shooting each other and bystanders over it as motherfucker tries to run away.
Go ahead. I responded to comments suggesting there wasn’t a knife and your ridiculous suggestion that the images were fabricated.
There’s no arguing with you if there’s no sources you believe.
You could say the same if I linked the whole damn video.
While they’re being excessively conspiratorial (For fuck’s sake, stills from an uncompressed video are that clear), that image doesn’t tell us anything. We don’t know who the person in that image even was, and it could just as easily have been a bystander, the alleged fare jumper or the cop who got shot that was wearing plain clothes. They could easily answer this question by just releasing the bodycam footage, but they haven’t done that, and time and time again we’ve seen the NYPD refuse to release any of the footage except some juicy still images to cover up gross misconduct of an officer. Personally I doubt this is the case, but the time when I could blindly accept that has long passed.
stills from an uncompressed video are that clear
All video is compressed, it’s just a question of how much. That said, they released the video, someone linked it, it is remarkably clear, so I concede that he did have a knife. However, it doesn’t look like he “charged at the cops” with it, rather he was running away, but didn’t realize one of the cops had gotten on the other side of him. You can really see his oh shit moment when he realizes the person he’s running toward is another cop, and he stops, but they’re already shooting him (and each other, and several passengers) by then. What was the rush? The train wasn’t going anywhere.
that image doesn’t tell us anything.
The comment I responded to says,
Probably because there was no knife in the footage.
So, I provided a still of the footage showing a knife.
Sure, we don’t know for sure who it is but I have a pretty good guess.
I too await the full footage.
In the most pedantic and exacting way, you might be right!
The topic here (and my original point) is that the image you’ve linked doesn’t tell us anything except that the NYPD have claimed it’s a still from the bodycam footage. We don’t have any of the context it occurs within, so while yes that is an image of a knife, we don’t actually know that it’s a still taken from bodycam footage of the incident. The original poster’s point was that at the time we didn’t (and as of writing, still don’t) have any evidence that they aren’t just making shit up. We still don’t. And as much as I’d love for the NYPD not to be pulling the same bullshit they always always try to pull, we have no reason to believe that right now. They have earned zero of the credibility you’re affording them.
And, really, a personal appeal: Is it a reasonable use of your time to try and nickle-and-dime the issue until an incident where the NYPD escalated a $2.90 situation to the point that two innocent bystanders were shot somehow becomes palatable? Who cares if he had a knife, even according to them he did not pose a present threat until he was provoked. The NYPD is a goddamn army with the most advanced surveillance system in the entire world and that dude was on a train. They absolutely could have just mailed the ticket to his house like they do with 90% of farejumpers, or if they wanted to be bastards, they could have followed him via surveillance, isolated and then arrested him safely elsewhere. They do that all the time in other cities. Engaging a potentially violent subject on a fucking subway train is beyond inexcusable no matter what the guy did, because while he’s a shithead for (in all likelihood) trying to stab the cops, the cops should not have allowed themselves to be in that situation in the first place. It’s basic shit, volunteers at comic-con can do it, why can’t these inept SOBs?
Can you?
This is an age old American tradition of shooting people who try to stow on train cars. There is an image in American culture of the freighthopping hobo who is trying to find a better place to live and work despite not having a dime to his name. Of course in reality many people have been shot for doing that. Property and a few dollars is worth much, much more than a poor person’s life.
Can we just go back to having a legitimate conductor who also has a protected union job that is properly staffed so that they can do occasional walks through the train to be able to offer ticketing services that allow for rapid and mass transit for the masses that connect us in a way that allows for fucking easy travel.
Please! Or can we at least stop treating trains like an old existing extension of the singularly for profit monopolies paid by the government they were and just straight up have been allowed to become again!
Not even just conductors, these trains need staff period. One of the things about crime in general is that people are less likely to do it if they feel like the area presents itself as safe. Even things down to cleanliness, lighting, staff presence, and noise level will affect crime.
It seems like the city just doesn’t care at all about their transit because it’s extremely dirty, staff are basically nonexistent, the stations are loud and have no boundaries, and every part of them seems to be decaying infrastructure. Japan knows this well, your passengers will reflect the expectations you put upon them by their environment and staff.
This is like an unfunny onion article. The fact that there can be civilian casualties in NYPDs war on fare jumpers is just shameful. It’s not for the money. They spend $150 million a year to recover $100k. Beyond an embarrassment.
Can’t we just make the Subway so cheap that it’s not worth jumping the toll? Or make it so low income people get free fares.
We could spend millions of dollars on making fares cheaper for people, but have you considered we can instead give that money to the police so they can prevent mere thousands of dollars in free rides?
Thousands? Maybe closer to hundreds.
The actual answer is likely under 15
Most americans believe the entire point of transit is to sort people who can afford it from people who cant.
If mass transit is affordable for all it is literally considered a threat to these pathetic people who would means test their own kids before they gave them food and shelter if it was socially acceptable.
I was in NYC recently and the amount of wealthier people who just ubered everywhere (or actually just demanded to own a car and drive themselves in the least car friendly place IN THE US) with no consideration for ever using the subway underneath their feet was pretty disgusting and appalling especially coming from somewhere without magic train tunnels underneath my feet that run 24/7…
Notice all of these narratives run essentially in parallel with a nebulous fear of the subway being stoked by Eric Adams and centrists, they provide a convenient impulse to rationalize taking the easy way out and clogging the streets with another useless car. Kind of like convincing yourself as a kid not to do a chore in the basement because the basement is scaryyyy, I mean look at this video from somebody in another basement experiencing a freak scary incident that would likely never ever happen to me!!!
I live somewhere with free bus transit in the US, and it is shocking how different it feels and yet also how many successful people around me with working cars just categorically ignore the use or possibility of using busses. The US is really really deeply fucked on this point and it makes me feel awful for the rest of the planet having to deal with our horrendous carbon footprints.
New York City has so much potential, but it is utterly ruined by rich conservative money suffocating the city in a chokehold.
I hate the US so much sigh
People love to point at crime numbers on the subway but ignore the percentages, like yeah there’s (making shit up , not actual numbers) 15 crimes a day but its NEW YORK CITY thats out of 50,000 rides or some shit. I did the actual math once and it was like 0.005% chance of a crime on the NYC subway, beats the hell out of auto numbers.
I live in Taipei and the subway system is amazing. There is literally no crime on the MRT system here.
So less crime is possible. The USA needs to invest into the social services like we do here to get lower crime.
Agreed, did you know the NYC subway system moves about the same order of magnitude per day as the entire continental US air travel networks does. All those planes flying back and forth between countless different airports… the subway beneath NYC moves more people.
I think this statistic both puts into context the incredible order of magnitude power of subways for mass transit, and also helps put in perspective how dangerous they really are based on scary content uploading that is happening within a single subway car… you gotta zoom your brain out to see the sea of perfectly boring subway cars transporting people to work and back every single day.
That sounds nuts but having been there I wouldn’t be terribly surprised. I think the crazy part is (living in a bible belt rural city surrounded by pro-car everything and the various internet fearmongers) how mundane it all feels even at it’s peaks. Just a bunch of fucking people getting where they’re going. I’ve never understood the allure of sitting in gridlock for over an hour over just sharing space with a bunch of other boring normal assholes for 30 minutes (or whatever.)
My best friends are very pro car and liberal in that “sure better public transit is needed but ‘I’d’ never use it it doesn’t work for me cause XYZ” sorta way. I dragged them on an amtrak to DC, and took em on the subway up to our hotel and they’re just like “…oh that was chill.” Yeah, just fuckin people getting where they’re going it’s not a bath salt zombie apocalypse down here.
pathetic people who would means test their own kids before they gave them food and shelter if it was socially acceptable.
Ahh… I see you have met my dad, who decided only after I called him after having failed my suicide attempt to offer to take me back in after having kicked me out promptly at 18 and then only housed me for 2 months before driving me out to a random street corner and dropping me off saying he had lifted me back up enough for me to handle my own live because I was ruining his “vibe” while having a 3 bedroom house and a job that makes more than half a million a year.
A man who wouldn’t let me get a drivers license because I wasn’t allowed to touch one of his cars and needed to buy one on my own and figure out how to do it by 16 despite his first 3 cars being bought for him by his parents after he wrecked each previous one.
Americans are the worst culture. Truly fucking despicable what they think is sane. You only get to buy how you want to be treated and the threshold for the floor of basic human dignity is more than most of us can afford.
Ahh… I see you have met my dad, who decided only after I called him after having failed my suicide attempt to offer to take me back in after having kicked me out promptly at 18 and then only housed me for 2 months before driving me out to a random street corner and dropping me off saying he had lifted me back up enough for me to handle my own live because I was ruining his “vibe” while having a 3 bedroom house and a job that makes more than half a million a year.
A man who wouldn’t let me get a drivers license because I wasn’t allowed to touch one of his cars and needed to buy one on my own and figure out how to do it by 16 despite his first 3 cars being bought for him by his parents after he wrecked each previous one.
Seriously, when people say it is a distraction to blame generations and focus hatred on boomers I think it is a good reminder to keep the eye on the ball of extreme wealth inequality, but I think there is a really weird nut of truth in that generational hate in that wealthy, successful US boomers of a certain type really did completely abandon the “social contract” so to speak of passing the world on to their kids. Which wouldn’t be that weird if society was always like it, and I am sure the “upper middle class kids” of every generation has felt this way to a certain extent, but it really feels like wealthy boomers just foreclosed the future of… literally everybody and when you meet boomers like your dad or one of my parents or countless other wealthy boomers I have met it really becomes far more “comic book” evil than it is reasonable to assume with some of these sad losers. There is no reason for the cruelty, and for the severance of resources and support other than a bunch of cynical political ideologies that amounted to barely anything more than lobotimizing a father’s capacity to actually empathize with their child about basic life needs. It is like the condescending judgement of some wealthy boomer parents cancerously grew into a deep seated belief that their kids don’t belong to be in the same economic class as they do, whether those wealthy boomers will consciously acknowledge it or not. I mean… not the worst problem to have, I am just pointing out how pathetic and sad US culture really is among superficially “successful” families.
Americans are the worst culture. Truly fucking despicable what they think is sane. You only get to buy how you want to be treated and the threshold for the floor of basic human dignity is more than most of us can afford.
As someone from the US I wholeheartedly agree but I also want to qualify this a bit.
US culture is the worst culture given how rich it is. You might go to another culture with a HELL of a lot less money in the society/less GDP (…because it has been extracted by countries like the US but different conversation) and be able to find aspects of that culture that are way worse… but more than any other country on earth the US has been able to choose the world it wants to exist in instead of being existentially forced to accept the terms set out by more powerful countries, and holy shit what the US has done with that is not only dumb it is catastrophic.
The US is the richest country on earth, we could be treating each other like royalty, we could be saying “it is unamerican to let homeless americans starve!!” and just start giving people housing and food for free, we could do whatever the fuck we want with all of our incredible amount of power and just ignore the consequences for the rest of the world… but instead not only do we ignore the consequences of our life style on the rest of the world (again, utterly catastrophic in terms of carbon footprint, ecological impact and just plain wastefulness) we ignore the consequences of our life style on our own damn selves, our family, our kids, our parents, our neighbors and our friends.
Like yeah I know I am not saying anything original but damn I just feel like it needs to be said over and over again, the US is a very shameful place in the sense that the amount of unnecessary suffering here is quite extreme (again, not making claims about absolute suffering… not that it is ever helpful too beyond pointing out big disparities of privilege).
Hey man, suicide is no joke. I hope you found the right help to combat your thoughts and emotions. Just remember that us people here on the internet will miss you if you’re gone.
Imagine if we had to pay money to use elevators
give it time
I think a better example is if we had to pay money for Fire Services.
"Ohhhh shit son, your apartment is on fire. It will cost you um… Tree fiddy to put it out. It would be a shame if your family dies if you can’t afford our services. " - Trump Branded Firefighters, probably
With the settlement money they are about to get ripped up for I’m sure they could.
