PicoBlog

In the universe of Warhammer 40k there is a something known as a Dreadnaught. For the uninitiated Warhammer 40k is a tabletop war game in which players command armies of miniatures against one another in simulated combat and was arguably the most nuclear armament in my arsenal in the war against losing my virginity when I was a teenager. In the year 40000 AD, mankind has spread across the galaxy, and found itself at constant war. Against Space aliens, space orcs, space elves, space demons, space mummies, space nuns, the list goes on. The civilizational conflict between the Imperium of Man and the myriad of extraterrestrial threats branches across thousands of planets, with millions upon millions killed daily in an unending war that has lasted tens of thousands of years, yet nobody wins. At the tip of the spear in humanity’s fight are Space Marines, legions of 8 ft., tall genetically modified superhuman space knights who are religiously devoted to the Emperor and the eternal crusade of human universal dominance. For the millions of Marines who are killed in the meat grinder that is war in the 41st millennium, the lucky few whose bodies aren’t entirely disintegrated are denied the peace of death and instead will have their central nervous systems “harvested” from their bodies and placed into Dreadnaughts; giant mechanical battle suits piloted by the remains of a soldier so that he can continue fighting for hundreds, even thousands of more years until they are once again destroyed on the battlefield in hopes of knowing the peace of death. “Even in death I still serve” is a common quote tied to these heavily armed mobile coffins. Like all things in the Warhammer 40k universe, it wraps an incredibly badass shell around something deeply dystopian.

Early Monday morning on October 2nd, 31 year old Ryan Carson was brutally murdered, stabbed to death in front of his girlfriend in Brooklyn, New York as the couple walked home from a wedding by 18 year old Brian Dowling. The attack was unprovoked, video shows Carson and his girlfriend simply walking down the street when Dowling in a fit of rage starts screaming at Carson and attacks him with a knife as Carson attempted to diffuse the sudden situation and protect his girlfriend. As of writing it appears Dowling has no criminal record, he was neither homeless nor mentally ill; though I think you can argue that these are not the actions of someone who is mentally well. It appears that Carson was simply, tragically, in the wrong place at the wrong time when his attacker chose to murder him in cold blood and then proceeded to spit on his girlfriend before fleeing the scene. Carson died protecting the woman he loved, bravely putting himself between her and the attacker.

It’s a shocking, heartbreaking story. It should be a sobering reminder of the fragility of life, of the the selflessness and heroism of everyday people. But of course, because we live in hell, ghouls all over the internet descended onto the story, trying to fashion his body into a political football before it had even cooled. The conversation surrounding crime in America has been a major talking point, both reform and enforcement, in the face of a rising crime rate in America’s cities, and here was as fine an opportunity as ever to harvest one more news cycle. You see, Ryan was a progressive activist, and because he was left wing, he deserved it. Progressives don’t believe a carceral state prevents crime, therefore they are soft on crime, therefore they deserve crime.

There absolutely is a conversation to be had about crime and punishment in America. America has a particularly high violent crime rate for a developed nation as well as an incredibly high prison population. American prisons are incredibly inhumane, and result in one of the highest recidivism rates in the world. I personally believe that police abolition is absurd, but I’m in favor of prison reform, American prisons remain hell holes, crime and recidivism data simply don’t indicate they’re working when compared to the better outcomes prisons produce in other developed countries where they are notably more humane. However I also believe the move towards more lenient sentencing right now is misguided and putting the cart before the horse when the societal factors that create crime haven’t been addressed. Most importantly I believe we have more options than “don’t charge anyone with a crime because society” and “turn every cop into Judge Dredd”. But these are important conversations that societies need to have, and a society functions best when all those viewpoints are discussed, and everyone is entitled to their viewpoint. I also don’t believe really anybody “wants” crime, there’s just a disagreement on how to address it, sure there are some people on the fringes who either want a green light to take anything they want from anyone or to murder anyone they think is breaking the law, but those are the fringes, everyday people want solutions that are both as effective and humane as possible. Even if a viewpoint is wrong or misguided or results in poor outcomes doesn’t make the person who holds it any less deserving of safety. Forgetting to lock your doors doesn’t mean somebody has the right to go in and take everything. Someone who is in favor of restorative justice principles, or police or prison abolition doesn’t deserve to be murdered by a criminal anymore than some guy with a blue lives matter punisher sticker on his truck deserves to be murdered extrajudicially by a cop. Both parties simply seem naive about cops and criminals. If you’re looking for ways to justify somebody’s unprovoked senseless murder you’ve already lost the plot, you’re straying away from your humanity and I’d caution you to start making your way back. And of course there is also a conversation to be had about the politicians and elites who have pushed utopian, soft on crime policies in recent years from their gated communities, while the conditions in the poorest parts of the country worsen as police are stretched thin by budget cuts, mass retirement, and catch and release practices.

But Ryan wasn’t a politician. He was just a guy, and by all accounts, a very good one. Ryan’s activism wasn’t even in the arena of criminal justice. He founded “No OD NY” after his best friend died of a drug overdose in 2016. The group sought to create overdose centers across New York, to train people on how to use Narcan in the face of what is a full blown opioid epidemic in this country. These details are of course left out of the reporting, simply referring to Ryan as a “left wing activist”. Ryan may have had anti-police sympathies, maybe they’re misguided, but he’s certainly allowed to hold those sympathies. And again, even if he had been Captain ACAB, it still wouldn’t have made him deserving of being murdered in cold blood.

It’s not really super clear how more police support would’ve directly stopped the sudden attack on Ryan. There’s obviously an argument to be made about police presence and crime deterrence, but that generally refers more to crimes of opportunity (theft, mugging etc.) whereas what happened to Ryan, a suddenly enraged man without warning snapping and attacking him with a knife, I think is more a crime of passion, heat of the moment thing by definition, and people can get stabbed by a person who snapped in countries and areas with heavy police presence. Obviously if a police officer happened to be there at the time, they could’ve intervened and perhaps stopped it, but that’s true of any crime and still a gamble that a cop on patrol would be on that particular block in the largest city in the world during that particular 20 second interval even if you doubled the police budget. It’s better odds, sure, but you’ve got to start talking about an actual police state before can concretely say “yeah this would’ve been stopped.” Brian Dowling, as of writing, appears to have had a clean record, he was not out on bail, he wasn’t not charged for a previous crime, he doesn’t appear to be someone who otherwise would’ve been off the streets if not for more lenient policies from leftist DA’s. Obviously if those details change, if Dowling had a record he should’ve been incarcerated for, or if it was a mugging gone wrong, I’ll update this, and I do feel like I’m repeating myself a little bit, but Dowling could’ve been wanted for a parole violation, and it wouldn’t make Ryan any more deserving of what happened to him.

The head ghoul leading the charge to try and find a reason why this man who sacrificed his life to protect someone actually deserved it was none other than sentient afterbirth Andy Ngo. While other commentators had started painting it as “progressive gets his deserts” Ngo bravely took it upon himself to scour the social media of a dead man who wasn’t even buried yet for evidence that Ryan had bad politics, and therefore his death was not worth mourning. You can find all his evidence here (don’t worry, I’ve archived it so you don’t give them clicks), but I’ll give you a preview. Ryan laughed at the death of Rush Limbaugh (which I still think is objectionable on the grounds I’ve talked about, but I think there’s a lot of difference between commenting on the death of a pundit or politician who spent their entire life and livelihood provoking reaction, and just some normal guy). He made a few very mild statements that could be construed as anti NYPD and a few obvious jokes about politicians that were mildly aggressive, but again, clearly jokes. His girlfriend owned a shirt that says ACAB. All of those things are well within your first amendment rights, none of them particularly damning as far as political statements, and barely register compared the kinds of extreme rhetoric one sees on the internet. Of course, that didn’t stop Ngo from painting him and his girlfriend as whatever monsters they need in order to justify their cruelty.

If your response to seeing someone being brutally murdered in cold blood is to start crawling through their social media to find posts to use reasons why they deserved it, you’re an insect, you’re subhuman, reverence for the dead is what separates us from the animals, and even they seem to show a level of mourning. There is a rotting hole in the place your soul should be. I hope you find light or God or something that brings you back into the fold of humanity, I don’t believe you’re beyond saving, nobody is, but make no mistake, you are evil.

I want you to imagine the person you love most in the world, I want you to imagine them murdered in front of you while they try to protect you from someone who for no reason intends to do you harm. I want you to imagine holding them, looking for a pulse, trying to apply pressure to wounds, trying to keep that person you love conscious, trying to tell them it’s going to be okay, while you pray somebody gets there in time. They don’t. This is the last moment you’ll spend with them, terrified, confused, hopeless and you don’t even know it. There will be a moment when you’re told they didn’t make it, maybe they die in your arms, maybe on the hospital ride there, maybe at the hospital, but its final, that person is gone, your hope extinguished, along with that entire person, their life, their future gone, their past fading, an entire universe of thoughts and hopes and dreams and memories simply ceases to exist. You now have to ask yourself what humans are of course going to ask themselves “Is there more I could have done? Maybe we could’ve run? Maybe I could’ve applied more pressure to the wound? Is this my fault?” and I hate to be the one to tell you this, but no amount of people telling you the truth, that it isn’t, will ever make it feel less like your fault. You have to make it through maybe the hardest thing you’ll ever go through, without the person you would’ve looked to for strength and guidance, For a long time, maybe the rest of your life, you’ll wake up, disappointed that this new reality you have to navigate was not a horrible dream.

Now imagine, while you’re trying to process all of that, before the blood has even dried, a bunch of cretins have decided to comb through your internet footprint, every picture, every post, trying to find a reason why actually, you deserved it, that actually, you got what was coming to you. That somehow your opinions on how a democratic society should be run, or a joke you’ve made, or a t-shirt you wore was actually you sewing the seeds of holding your loved one as they desperately gasped for their last breath, looking to you for reassurance. You had this coming they insist, and they’re more than happily to kick you when you’re down in the name of Justice or whatever ideology they’ve given themselves over to. It’s not enough that you suffer this ultimate loss, some psychos on the internet need to rub salt in your wounds.

It’s a level of unconscionable cruelty from coward emboldened by the distance the internet creates. Will Andy or any of these other people using Ryan’s death as a political football show up to Ryan’s funeral and make their point there? Will they say with their full chests, look the surviving girlfriend, the mother, the father, the family in the eyes and say that “actually, your son deserved to die because he didn’t have the right opinions.”? Of course not because they’re all chickenshit losers and they know they’d rightfully get the pulp beat out of them. They’re happy to dance on the grave of a grieving family from the safety of their phones because they’re fucking inhuman losers. If we want to talk about who is “deserving” of violence, I’d say those who gleefully celebrate the death of a stranger as some kind of cosmic justice while twiting the knife in people going through an absolute nightmare are far more deserving than some poor guy who had opinions about how the world should be run that you disagree with.

Ngo focuses on a handful of fairly mild tweets to somehow paint Ryan as a villain, while totally ignoring Ryan’s work to stop drug overdoses, an issue that increasingly affects everyone no matter what side of the aisle you’re on. Andy will clutch pearls over offhand comments or jokes Ryan made about politicians and pundits, yet does, or at best enables, the exact same thing because he is too much of a spineless coward to lead by example. Ryan likely saved lives with his drug activism, but because he had opinions about how crime should be dealt with (again, entirely his right in a democratic society), and because those are the wrong opinions, in Ngo’s world, he got what was coming for that unforgivable sin. As long as you have no integrity there’s nobody whose life and death can’t be casually dehumanized into a story to get you a few more likes and retweets, to push your political football a centimeter closer to an endzone you’ll never see. The response “well other people do it” absolves you of nothing Andy. If conservatives are such bastions of morality and compassion before God’s creation now is a great time to fucking act like.

There are those who will point to all those killed who don’t make the news, whose deaths are blips on the radar for the public at large, while they leave just as big a hole in the lives of others caught in the tragedy. They’re right of course, even if I suspect most don’t really care, Ryan is in the news because he’s white, while black kids getting murdered daily is an accepted fact of life. My “think of the person you love most” absolutely applies to anyone affected by violence, including those murdered by an offender who obviously should’ve been in jail. Their deaths are tragic, they should be honored and their surviving loved ones cared for, but that doesn’t make what happened to Ryan any less a tragedy. My heart can barely contain the sorrow for all those who leave us that I know about, to speak nothing of the anguish that there are those who leave the world just as horrifically as the ones I do know about that I’ll never be able to mourn.

This instinct to celebrate the death of others obviously isn’t solely a right wing tendency, I wrote a previous piece on the left doing it and it’s just as ghoulish when then. The obsession with Leopards Eating Faces has greatly increased in recent years, it seems that people actively look for excuses to be cruel as the internet has turned into one giant Milgram experiment. There absolutely have been leftists on the internet who derived joy from talking about how conservatives who didn’t take a vaccine or didn’t take proper precautions with regards to COVID “deserved” the deaths that came to them, while they gasped for air alone in a hospital. And that was equally abhorrent, and my response to them, had I been writing at that time, would be the same. People have all kinds of opinions in their lives, they vote all kinds of ways, they make all kinds of mistakes, they act in what they believe is the correct way and they are ultimately proven wrong, none of that means they deserve to die. I’m looking at the Right currently, but I’m sure I’ll have more than ample opportunity to make this point again with Leftists, the number or wide variety of political allegiances that partake in this kind of behavior doesn’t make the impulse any less wrong. Here just for the sake of posterity, so nobody can accuse me of turning a blind eye: leftists reading this, you see how unhinged and cruel these people look right now? You know how bad this feels to watch? You have looked like this I want you you to remember this next time you want to dance on the grave of some “MAGA Chud” or whatever. This isn’t to scold anyone, I’m begging you to please, find a way to other people as people.

Death and crime have relation to politics, they’re shaped by policy, every murder is a personal failure, and often a policy one as well, but we can do it without reducing the victims down to crass “told ya so”’s for one side to mourn and one side to celebrate. If all Ryan is to you is a citation in an argument, you don’t really care about crime, the same can be said if you feel Ryan, or anyone simply isn’t anything more than eggs you need to make for your policeless utopia. You have to grapple with the real human damage. American politics has dissolved into nothing but about how we distribute misery. Leftists ignore the misery caused and laugh at coal miners forced out of jobs, insisting that they simply learn to code. Rightoids laugh at those same Leftists as the misery comes for them via mass tech layoffs, their coding knowledge now useless, while wages and opportunities for both stagnate. Conservatives cheer on the expansion of the police state when it targeted Muslim terrorists, then recoil in horror when that apparatus starts looking at them, while leftists cheer until the scope starts looking at environmental activists, but none of them deserve it. The machine of misery churns on and on because nobody cares enough about principle to stop it, they’d rather just see it eat their enemies while they delude themselves it will never come for them, or maybe they simply believe nothing will stop it. It only stops when you’re willing to see the humanity in everyone, even the people you despise,  even the people who it’s most difficult for you to see the humanity in, in fact especially those people. That’s the only way the world gets better.

Ryan Carson was a hero in life, and a hero in death. He oriented his life around pursuing what he believed was the right thing. He was more than his political opinions, as is everyone. In his 31 years on this planet he took many actions, and it appears that lots those actions were deeply humane and aimed to make the life of those around him better. Ryan’s last, final action, when faced with the evil of man and asked to give everything in order to protect someone else, he gave the ultimate sacrifice as an answer. That’s the measure of a person, not their tweets, not what policy they endorsed. We should celebrate people like that, not check their voter history.

Whatever the right solution ends up being to the political questions of crime, Ryan and his loved ones deserve support through what is no doubt going to be the most challenging period of their lives, as does everyone struggling. His life nor his death should be repurposed as some kind of political weapon, because that’s not what human life is. And if you can’t muster the human decency to give them that, the least you can give them is peace from the eternal crusade of the culture war.

You can find me on instagram at @jacktorrancefakeshisdeath and on twitter @jtorrancesghost

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