The Two Rings
September 10, 2025·54 comments
Two days. Three days tops.
I’d say that’s about how long we will be able to have a substantive discussion about the gruesome, entirely preventable murder of Iryna Zarutska on a train in Charlotte last month.
It’s a discussion we need to have, too. Policies and laws drafted in the name of social justice – largely promulgated by Democrats – have gutted the capacity for American cities to grapple with the recidivist nature of many kinds of criminality. Multiple blue states, including the one I live in, have successfully rolled back or resisted sentence enhancements for repeat offenses. Others have pushed back on “three strikes” laws by eliminating them, requiring much higher standards for qualifying offenses, or providing expanded capacity for similarly social justice-minded judges to exercise judicial discretion in reducing sentences. The GOP doesn’t get off the hook here, either. Republican lawmakers in several states have reached across the aisle to gut sentences and repeat offender laws in response to overcrowded and expensive prisons that placed strain on already stretched state and local budgets.
How we grapple with the intersection of mental illness and criminality is very much a part of the same issue, even if the alliances are a bit different. Democrats and civil libertarians have pushed back for decades on the involuntary commitment of those whose mental illness poses obvious threats to themselves and others. Republicans talk a bigger game on the importance of addressing the role of mental illness in criminality more broadly, but in practice that passion rarely extends very far into budget deliberations. There’s a reason “mental illness” is a sort of throwaway issue for those of us in the 2A camp. It is inconvenient, but very obviously true, that the inalienable right to bear arms that makes our republic safer from oppression also makes it less safe from criminals. Mental illness is a useful tool for deflection from these rhetorical soft spots in our politics, and when it comes down to it, most of us aren’t really willing to do anything about the actual problem. Doing something either makes us feel icky and oppressive toward less privileged groups (Democrats) or well, darn, we looked at it and it just seems so expensive (Republicans).
The bigger reason it has been impossible to do anything about the concentration of criminality in recidivist or mentally ill populations in recent years, however, is that the real-world questions simply got co-opted into a much larger symbol. It’s a process we have previously analogized to Tolkienesque rings of power – seductive, powerful tools we think will allow us to achieve our well-intended ends but which inevitably lead us to serve the very different ends of someone else entirely.
There are magic rings in our world, too. Yet they are fashioned not from gold and sorcery but from symbols.
With one hand, these symbols guide us to perceive them as the product of our own reason, yet with the other they supplant that reason with meanings determined in the minds of other men.
They bind our will not to the reason which first led us to our beliefs, but to the symbol with which we now identify them. Once the symbol becomes our point of attachment, we no longer have to be convinced to follow those who determine the meaning of the symbol to some new end. They need only tell us the new meaning of the symbol.
If we are not careful these rings will make wraiths of us all.
I, Nazgul (Epsilon Theory, November 2024)
The Ring of Social Justice, as you might call it, didn’t cause people to believe in the persistent existence of systemic sources of injustice embedded in our policing, legal, and justice systems. The fact that those things actually, really do exist did that. What the Ring did, as a symbol, was permit the evidence-free ascription of any social ill to these systemic sources. It permitted the a priori presumption that any claim of systemic causality was true. It permitted an entire political and social class to redefine racism from a personal act of discriminatory animus against another on the basis of an immutable property to any act of disagreement with any public policy proposal that would ‘dismantle’ a social institution deemed by the Ring to be such a source of systemic injustice.
It all seems academic to the people who made a career out of bloviating about this stuff for an associate professorship instead of doing something about the actual problem, but the consequences are anything but. A couple years back, I served on the jury of a murder trial in a small city with a murder, violent crime, and total crime rate that all rank in the top three in New England. It was one of the most open-and-shut cases that I can imagine was ever presented by a prosecutor in the state, and yet we deliberated for nearly a week, only escaping a hung jury after two pleas from the presiding judge to continue our deliberations. One of the jurors, despite being an otherwise lovely young woman who I think was earnestly trying to do the right thing, was effectively unwilling to consider any evidence or testimony presented as untainted by these systemic forces. Not just the testimony of law enforcement officers, but the testimony of corporate employees and technicians and the raw data retrieved from GPS systems, cell towers, mobile phones, cameras, and forensic investigators.
It will take years to draw the poison this Ring injected into the veins of our education system.
It will take even longer to draw it from our political system.
The Ring made it impossible for anyone left-of-center to survive within the Democratic Party if they proposed anything which seemed remotely amenable to sequestering convicted criminals from the general population as a legitimate policy aim. It demanded instead that they accept at face value that actually the more important thing is the systemic inequities at play here and we should really be looking at root causes that repeat offender laws actually exacerbate and haven’t you seen how our incarceration rates compare with Norway’s, etc. ad nauseam.
We talked about George Floyd for a long time. But we only had substantive discussions for a few days. We could have been talking substantively about police training budgets and timelines, increased emphasis on de-escalation, and mental/drug crisis management. Instead, after a day or two, the Ring started whispering about Defunding the Police and how its bearers should go full revolutionary LARPer by breaking the windows at the local Starbucks. And they did it.
Because that’s what the Ring of Social Justice demanded.
Republicans correctly hated this lawlessness every bit as much as they loved that it meant they didn’t really have to consider any of the real-world questions about how we could be doing policing better.
What’s about to happen is going to look a lot like that.
We need to have an ongoing conversation about recidivism. We need to have an ongoing conversation about creating clearer avenues to the commitment of dangerously mentally ill people, and yes, funding those efforts. We need to give lawmakers and leaders in cities and states that went wild in service to the Ring of Social Justice the political cover to fix the laws.
Instead, we’re going to get 2021-style LARPing from the White Nationalists and vindictive torture porn from the Christian Nationalists. We’re going to get Elon Musk-funded murals across the country born not out of grief for the actual human victim of a senseless crime but because of his concerns about the erasing of whiteness by cultural institutions – and because he gets culture war lulz from turning the BLM playbook against them. We’re going to get broader support for National Guard occupation of American cities to temporarily suppress crime for short-term political gain (despite overall crime rates that are much lower than most of modern American history) instead of doing the hard work of addressing a narrower but entirely solvable issue.
Because that’s what the Ring of True Justice will demand.
And just like the Republicans who secretly delighted in the self-destructive LARPing of the left, the Democrats will breathe a sigh of relief that they won’t be held accountable for the insane policy theories scribbled on a napkin at a Columbia Sociology Department cocktail hour that are leading directly to the deaths of innocent people. Instead they will be able to rail against the racism, the fascism, the response to the event.
And they’ll have the full cover of the news media as they do it. You see, Republicans Pounce Mode has already been engaged.
I’m not sure there is much to be done about any of this. In a socially networked, politically bi-modal world, there isn’t really a politics outside of symbolic attachments and associations. As individuals we can try not to become wraiths ourselves, but none of us possesses the craft to unmake these rings. I am hopeful, at least, that in a few cities and states there will be enough residual political will from the visceral response to lead to some change. Maybe the rage so many of us felt when we came across the video can be harnessed into a real response before it gets used for something else.
But if you find yourself a few months from now wondering how the political energy generated by such a horrific event seemed like it was largely diverted into other tangentially related aims of political actors, well, at least you’ll know.
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Comments
You are right. They all kinda suck. And I agree, you should lock up criminal murderers. But if society keeps going the way it has been, don’t be surprised there’s always another thief who steals because they are poor, another murderer who released on the street because private prisons prefer slave labour in the form of misdemeanour drug offenders, another mental health patient who can’t afford their drugs. A sick society creates sick individuals. Until you construct a society that isn’t sick these things will keep happening.
As for the mechanistic argument of targetting high value financial crimes to pay for “for profit” prison, I think it just makes sense. If left unchecked, they’ll keep cutting taxes that pay for the health services and or take bribes from the private prison lobby and they’ll keep recreating more scenarios like the stabbing on the train. Heck if you have ever watched the movie Nightcrawler, you should also realise the parrallels in our media that has been captured by moneyed interests love the buzz that comes from the culture war created by this stabbing. Elon is there parading the Ukrainian girl as a paragon of white virtue while undermining her country at the same time.
I find myself waffling back and forth on this issue through the years, and as older age sets in, more and more comes down to the exercising of judgement, or a lack thereof in my mind. Everyone wants to make decisions, but they want those decisions to be easy and point to a black and white decision tree that effectively tells them what to do or which script to follow.
Most reasonable folks would say career criminals and the repeat violent offenders are issues and we shouldn’t let them wander around. Most reasonable folks would seem to agree that mental health is an issue and some compassion and assisting those people earlier and throughout their lives would be a positive thing. But judges, officers, political types on both sides abdicate their responsibility and look for everything to be black or white - let all the criminals run around or lock them all up. There should be the expectation our leaders and civic representatives have the capacity and desire to exercise good judgement overall. It removes the burden of responsibility and difficulty when you point to whatever precedent and blindly make a decision. These things can be difficult.
I am probably a bit over biased in the topic as I am currently dealing with a related issue on a personal level. I have a teen daughter in high school. She has some mental health issues in the form of anxiety and depression. Not exactly uncommon in teenagers nowadays. For reasons irrelevant and unexcused, she got into a physical altercation at school the 2nd week. In the midst of it breaking up she had a panic attack and started flailing her arms around. Yada yada, in flailing made contact with humans trying to break it up. In our state, physical contact of any kind to anyone associated with a school is an automatic felony. As multiple people were around her, multiple felonies for a 15yr old “resulting in injuries”. The injuries associated “redness to arm from an open-hand contact” from the flailing, make the felonies stick. She is unable to attend school in person as a result, not only at that school, but schools in the state, unless one of the few schools where violent offenders are able to attend to isolate the danger to society. Home school or online or try again next year. 15yr old, 95lb female, prior honor student - dangerous, violent felon effectively out of the school system.
Not condoning, excusing, minimizing anything my daughter did. And clearly more than a little biased in this instance. But it did make me think about disproportionate responses and impacts to people when judgement is removed from handling individual cases. One side of the argument sees the word felony and determines a danger and to remove from being around others before the potential for harm increases. The other side of the argument sees an individual who has never had anything like this, should have a lesser punishment. Again, clearly biased, but there will never be a simple answer to any situation as humans aren’t simple. The best we can hope for is some true judgement and common sense.
Reading the article and comments just made me think about how both things can be true at the same time, but if you put into place either “sides” preferred solution/response, you further remove the middle ground, polarize everything we do, and in reality most situations are these shades of gray. It’s hard.
Dunno. Just my thoughts in reading.
Yep good point - leadership by example is always key. We have many dirty players on both sides who seem to be able to skirt proper due process.
To pick on one example - HC’s attorney was granted immunity in the illegal use of personal email case and while able to represent her. A witness with immunity representing the defendant. Wha?
We witness too many players at the elected trough that seemingly escape the clutches of justice.
And then they play games with the rules of our system to put the other team in the penalty box…no need to explain what we saw over Trumps 2 terms - just win - for their respective side - not us who voted.
But all the shit up top shouldn’t give the populace free pass for violent crimes.
I think any justification about locking up car jackers goes out of the window while corruption is running rampant. There is a very credible reason to believe that pedophiles are being protected by the most powerful people in US right now.
The problem here cannot be solved bottom up while top down is actively undermining the idea of law and order. They need to be held to higher ethical standards- not less.
This is the largest problem that left undealt with leads to every other problem being worse- your DA story isn’t that special considering we watch every day as politicians fabricate evidence and lies and work against everyones interest. They also aren’t alligned towards solving societal problems like the one you are discussing, it’s too hard and they get paid the same doing nothing anyway.
I think you are right that this is the way it used to be, but there are at least a handful of counties and cities where this is no longer the case and where the criminal justice system has been completely and deliberately broken down.
A very good friend of mine who lives in Washington DC (and FWIW is a lifelong Democrat who used to be an aide to his hometown liberal Democrat Congressman) told me a shocking story that happened to his next door neighbor last year. The neighbor’s 16 year old son was carjacked at knife point outside of his school in a nice part of this city by a gang of youths. The police knew exactly who did it and arrested them, and said this group of kids are repeated carjacking offenders, and the son/victim confirmed their identity in a line-up. But there was no consequence for these offenders.
The neighbor called the detective who handled the case some time later and asked what was going on with the case, and the police told him that the DA was not pressing charges and had dropped the case. The neighbor was understandably not happy about this. The neighbor then got a call from the deputy District Attorney assigned to the case who left a voicemail which the neighbor played for my friend. The DA castigated the neighbor (remember, he is the father of a 16 year old who had been carjacked at knife point), and told him that “the police are not the criminal justice system, they are an armed occupation force. I am the criminal justice system here period.”
There have always been idealists who become district attorneys because they think that the criminal justice system has been unduly harshly applied, and they want to be in a position to help deliver better justice. But recently in some places such as Washington DC, this has gone to such an extreme that radical activists are being put in powerful positions in the criminal justice system, and destroying the trust placed in them by the governed. My friend’s neighbors case may be an outlier, but it’s probably more common than we think in places like Washington, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, etc, and it’s the type of thing that can easily lead to a massive backlash and an overreaction, leading to proposals such as Desperate Yuppies here.
I think there are serious problems with Desperate Yuppies proposal here, and that it would be far better if existing mechanisms within these systems were used to get rid of the extremists that are acting in bad faith within these powerful institutions.
In a normally functioning system, my friend’s neighbor would have been able to complain to the deputy District Attorney’s superior, who would have taken action and likely fired the young deputy DA in question. A DA who describes the police as an ‘armed occupation force’ by definition is not objectively viewing the cases before him, and therefore cannot perform the duties for which the public thinks they have hired him.
And if that didn’t work, he could have gone to the media, which at any point in this country’s history before 2016 would have agreed that this is newsworthy. But the mainstream media has been completely taken over by the same type of ideological fanatics as this DA, who openly called the DC police an ‘armed occupation force’ to the father of a 16yo carjacking victim.
There is a larger issue here that moderates and the center/left need to retake control of these institutions from the leftists that have been allowed to set and execute policy and which has led to excesses like this, or moderates will have nobody to blame but themselves when the reaction by the voters is to implement radical right wing policies as an (over)correction to the current status quo, or nod quietly while Trump deploys the National Guard. The moderate middle needs to step up and stop being silent and complicit. They are perhaps the only hope of narrowing the widening gyre and preventing descent into the Great Ravine.
I think if you reduced incarceration related to misdemeanour/recreational drug offenses, improved health services and mental health services you are likely to improve the situation (more space for more meaningful crimes). Would cost the government less, and I think theres billions of dollars in corrupt funding that you can go after to improve those services.
I think symbolic skin-in-the-game is a worthwhile thought experiment. I’m not wild about the first volley, I think, but it’s a thing of value to continue spitballing here.
People die all the time due to UNH denial of health service with their unfair denial practice. I watched a doctor record her conversation where she was talking to a cosmetic doctor as a UNH rep trying to inform her how to do a surgery she was a specialist.
The only difference is that the death caused in this manner affects the poor while deranged crazy man stabbing on a train can happen to anyone equally. Ultimately you can see institutional murder as permissable, but a better society could probably see that as not quite adequate a standard. The same healthcare system that is probably underfunded or misalligned to help this mentally individual who did the stabbing or lock them up in a psyche ward.
I’m just saying it probably makes more sense to lock up financial crimes and improve mental health services and these attacks would be more effectively dealt with.
No I’m just mapping reflexive problems in advance. Being more thoughtful how one solution could lead to problems down the line. In any case, I think my premise is sound in this.
I think extreme solutions have a place in society, but maybe this is just not an effective implementation and maybe there’s a link between crappy mental services and health care + increasing wealth inequality. Not really sure, but everything looks like a nail when you have a hammer. Would make sense to make different solution than keep cracking on with the same ones.
I think this is only a helpful argument if someone is saying ONLY X. I am not saying ONLY X.
That is, I am NOT saying that more incarceration is THE solution. I am NOT saying that there are not all sorts of things - from better addressing inequities in sentencing of non-violent (esp. minor drug) crimes, to increasing access to financial resources and credit in underserved areas, to working on education, to working actively on fatherless homes issues, to changing prisons from a punishment model to a true rehabilitation model, to whatever else we might want to call “root causes” or “contributing causes” of some kinds of criminality - we could be doing to resolve and reduce certain kinds of crime.
Sometimes a single variable analysis gives you a simple answer. Taking people who have committed multiple violent crimes off the streets for much longer periods of time WILL reduce violent crime, whether the circumstances warrant doing that in a long-term psychiatric care facility or a prison.
If we want to layer on some other things, too, I’m ALL for that.
Amen and amen. It’s too much.
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