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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 29 days ago

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By: Kayla Katin

Published: Dec 31, 2024

Jordan Neely was murdered…by NYC Democrats’ failures

Apparently, I’ve got to be the lone voice of sanity. The veteran Marine, Daniel Penny, was found not guilty of criminally negligent homicide in the death of Jordan Neely, the homeless black man that he put in a chokehold on the subway in New York last year.

I see that people are well vexed about that, so I need to come and spit some facts.

[ BLM of Greater New York co-founder Chivona Newsome was not happy about the Daniel Penny verdict. ]

The jury did the right thing. The ruling is correct. Penny is not guilty. The only problem is that he wasn’t cleared of the charges sooner. The injustice is that this trial was even a thing in the first place.

Here are the facts. Jordan Neely was being belligerent, and threatening, and launching at people, and throwing things on the fucking subway. He said that he was ready to die, wanted to go back to jail, and was going to fucking kill people. The people were scared on that train. The passengers were scared. The mothers were trying to cover their children. That is when Daniel Penny intervened and put Neely in a chokehold to restrain him.

And guess what? I really don’t see this being reported, but there were two other guys helping Daniel Penny to restrain Jordan Neely, and neither of them looks white. Plus, Penny’s fellow passengers, including a black man and black woman, have said that Neely was terrifying and that Penny did the right thing. Yet, for some reason, the media seized on a race narrative.

[ Daniel Penny restrains Jordan Neely with the help of two other men. Video of the incident can be seen here. ]

Maybe I’m mistaken but I’ve seen the video and it doesn’t look like that chokehold was strong enough to cause asphyxiation. The forensic evidence found that Jordan Neely was still alive when that NYPD finally pulled up. Cops refused to resuscitate him because he was dirty and the police understandably didn’t want to risk catching hepatitis or something. So, Jordan Neely died.

We found out that he had a fuck-ton of drugs in his system and he had underlying health issues. All of that predisposed him. But the chokehold and the stress from the struggle probably just pushed him over the edge.

Maybe he would still be alive if it weren’t for that chokehold, but it’s really unfair to try and pin his death on Daniel Penny. The intent clearly wasn’t to kill. And Jordan Neely had to be restrained in order to stop him from attacking the passengers and following up on his threats.

The media, like some fucking vultures hovering over a corpse, couldn’t wait to make this into a race issue based on literally nothing except for the skin colors of these two guys. Guess what? Around the exact same time, a black man, Jordan Williams, did basically the exact same thing as Daniel Penny, except he actually ended up stabbing the homeless guy to death, because the homeless guy was harassing the passengers on the subway and harassed his girlfriend. Jordan Williams walked free after a month, but this Daniel Penny trial took a whole year.

That’s smelling really fishy.

As a black woman in the New York area, who had a run-in with my own “Jordan Neely” last year, I am really, really, really fucking frustrated at all of this hashtagging for this nigga.

Last year on the very first day of school, I was in downtown Newark waiting for my bus home, and some lady started mumbling shit at me. At first, I was trying to reason with her, asking what was up. But then I realized, she’s too far gone, she’s clearly on some shit. So I backed away, putting some distance between me and this lady.

But she kept being belligerent toward me. I was basically just ignoring it until she pulled a fucking baseball bat out from her backpack and threatened me with it. I’m dead ass. And there were multiple fucking people standing around, also waiting at this bus stop with me, and nobody gave an F. Nobody came and did jack shit.

This went on for minutes and minutes. Eventually, one middle-aged lady did come to stand by me to protect me. She said that she has daughters my age so she felt sympathy for me. And then, finally, the bus came. I thought that would put a stop to this, but the fucking crackhead got on the damn bus with me. I thought maybe she would get out but no, no, no, she stayed on all the way to my town and got off at my same stop. Thankfully, my mom was waiting for me in the car, so I ran into that car and I told my mom what happened.

I am so, so, so, so fucking tired and frustrated by these race-baiting politicians and naive liberals, who act like some hugs and free cookies can solve all these altercations. The mentally-ill, drug-addicted, and homeless of the world can be dangerous and violent. And it's not, right or fair for the rest of us to be put in danger because of their problems.

The bitter, bitter, bitter irony of everyone calling Daniel Penny a white supremacist is that the people who are most put in danger by the Jordan Neelys of the world are other working-class black people who have no fucking choice but to use this shitty-ass public transportation.

As a black New Yorker, I will stand on this. Daniel Penny did nothing wrong. He’s a hero. He deserves a key to the city. Y’all are so desperate to follow a narrative and create another George Floyd that you’re just overlooking facts and justice and common sense.

The New York Democrats were so, so, so desperate to let Daniel Penny take the fall for their failures. They wanted this trial to be a distraction, a smoke screen from their failures to address drug addiction, homelessness, mental illness, and transit safety.

Those are all very real problems, and instead of being mad at Daniel Penny, we should be mad at the politicians. We need to get mad at the politicians, but they want to divert the people’s anger to cover their own asses. Pretending like that was an act of systemic racism is a really easy way to take our eyes off of the other systemic problems that they’re presiding over. Every single fucking politician and law enforcement official that participated in this sham trial of Daniel Penny should be required to pay him reparations out of their own damn pockets.

Oh, and I forgot to add: Jordan Neely’s family is disgusting and fake as fuck for coming out the woodwork to cry crocodile tears over his death, when they did nothing for him in his life. They didn’t give a fuck.

Some closing thoughts from my X account:

youtube

BLM are con artists and opportunistic grifters. They don't give a shit about black people. They don't give a shit about the people Neely - on a bond after his 44th arrest - was threatening, they don't give a shit about the people who were glad Penny stepped in.

BLM always martyr the worst people in the world, seemingly because they can't find any legitimate incidents that service their narrative. Everything they have to say should be treated as a lie by default, until proven otherwise.

#Kayla Katin #Daniel Penny #Jordan Neely #BLM #BLM con artists #Black Lives Matter #BLM fraud #transit safety #homelessness #drug addiction #justice #mental health #mental health issues #religion is a mental illness #Youtube

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 7 months ago

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By: Kimi Katiti

Published: Jul 3, 2024

The eruption of fireworks made me want to crawl out of my skin. I fully believed that the night of July 4, 2017 was a celebration of white supremacy, and I couldn't understand why anyone would participate in a festival of hatred. The power was also conveniently out in my apartment for the entirety of the evening, which made the jarring pyrotechnics all the more inescapable and amplified—as garish as a performance of sirens and headlights in my living room, unrepentant in their hours-long parade. Red, white and blue—over and over again.

The people on the outside celebrated a country that was not only founded on slavery, but used the 13th amendment to preserve it. A country that also maintained the lynching of black men like Michael Brown and Philando Castile through the shield of law enforcement. And even though it elected its first black president, it slipped on the familiar when it elected Trump as its leader—a President who had no qualms with using xenophobic dog-whistles to rally his base.

And these were just the visible warts on the face of the nation. What about the abscesses that oozed beneath its stripy, starred garb? The invisible system of racial discrimination and microaggressive harm? The walls built into every industry to keep the marginalized away from the American Dream? The emotional labor required by black women like myself to educate anyone on all the above?

From my 2017 perspective, those who celebrated the 4th of July reveled in the murder of the innocent, and clapped in the defense of the assailant. Anyone who waved a flag, might as well brandish a whip. Anyone who took the day off to corral friends and family around a grill and under an umbrella of explosives or worse—under the presidency of Trump—might have as well donned a swastika pin and raised an arm into the sparkly skyline.

This was my lens for a good number of years, and one that I look back on with grief. Why did I let a holiday wreck me so well? In hindsight, I have a few theories as to why, and it boils down to a worldview I unintentionally adopted—one that only lent to the fragility of the observer.

For the race-essentialist, the 4th of July is a semiotic nightmare. Oftentimes, interpersonal gestures and words take the spotlight when discussing microaggressions, but in the emoji-age, we ought to consider the role symbolism plays in drilling in groupthink, deteriorating meaning and expanding the modern idea of harm. What made the celebration of American independence an abyss of grief for me was the meaning I placed on every sign that marked the day.

Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure defined a sign as any motion, gesture, event, or pattern that conveys meaning. The green light at a traffic stop means 'go', and blue on a faucet indicates 'cold' water. Meaning has been given to these shapes to form signs, and through repetitive use and education of the meaning behind the signs, we can add it to our symbolic lexicon.

After two-dozen revisions, our current Star-Spangled Banner is meant to represent the nation of the United States of America. But how did it go from a mere symbol of a nation, to a symbol conveying conspired hate—at least in the minds of a radicalized few, my former self included?

I'd suggest it has something to do with concept creep—a term Jacob L. Mackey referred to during a previous conversation I had with him on microaggressions. Concept creep, coined by Nick Haslam, and popularized by The Coddling of the American Mind, refers to the ever-expanding meaning of harm-related language, such as trauma, or even the word 'harm' itself. In my case, harm came to include the symbol of the American flag. And in a reciprocal sense, the flag didn't just represent a nation, the concept behind it crept to represent a bad nation. Sure, one can look at a flag and think critically about the flaws of its country's government or systems. In my case, however, I felt like I was under attack at the sight of it. So what energized that progression of meaning—what taught me to reinterpret the meaning behind a symbol to the point of physical distress?

I'd like to nominate the mainstream media narrative for that progression of definition. Everything from social media to sports told me exactly what kind of meaning I should ascribe to the American flag, and its companions. One of fear, not fondness.

With the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, followed by the catastrophe-confirming appointment of Trump, the media streets in the mid twenty-tens were saturated with posts on police brutality, the national anthem and white America. This came with a flood of symbols to aid the viewers' dissection of events. Images of symbols such as the MAGA hat, The Thin Blue Line flag, the Trump posters, and The BLM fist—to name a few—often accompanied stories detailing the brewing cultural tension.

Law Enforcement and the Thin Blue Line flag existed in opposition to the BLM movement. So if one was only familiar with the pro-BLM argument, and was as disheartened with grief as I was to hear any opposing cases, the meaning assigned to the Thin Blue Line flag no longer communicated the courage and bravery of law enforcement, but rather that the bearer of that symbol sided with police officers who murder innocent, unarmed black men.

If you supported athletes' choice to stand during the singing of the national anthem, rather than kneeling in protest, in over-simplified reasoning, you supported the killing of black men. The further this meaning-to-symbol relationship was exacerbated through fear-mongering media—especially social media, where news travels best when laced with negativity—the further the meaning ascribed to certain symbols waxed sour.

Therefore, the progression of meaning in my mind, energized by the media, devolved this way:

Wearing or waving the American flag is associated with patriotism.

If you're patriotic, you're most likely a conservative.

Only conservatives oppose BLM.

Opposing BLM means that you support the killing of black people.

Therefore, waving the American flag means you support the killing of black people.

We also see this same re-education of benign signs into something indicative of harm in the recent lawsuit filed against Penn State at Abington, where the boss of plaintiff Zack K. DePiero, Liliana Naydan, allegedly told writing faculty that “white supremacy exists in language itself, and therefore, that the English language itself is ‘racist’ and, furthermore, that white supremacy exists in the teaching of writing of English, and therefore writing teachers are themselves racist white supremacists…”

Now imagine that it's not just the American flag that warrants this ungracious interpretation of meaning, but other icons of American culture: an eagle, American football, a pair of cowboy boots. For those steeped in critical social justice ideology, interfacing with these objects (and I'll speak for my former self) is aggravating on an average day. But seeing these concept-crept-visual-ideas all in one weekend, over and over again, paired with loud explosives and laughter, distorts the character of loved ones opting to celebrate the 4th of July, and as a black individual, lends to a sense of distrust because once more, bearing the American flag with pride means you support the killing of black people—with pride.

All of this—the concept creep, the concentration of offensive symbolism, the narrative—contributed to a sense of catastrophization on the 4th. Catastrophization is a cognitive distortion that leads you to assume the worst case scenario out of a relatively generic circumstance. In my case, I was brought to tears under a burden of anxiety because I allowed my brain to interpret every sign of America, including a date dedicated to the celebration of its independence, as something just left of a lynch mob dancing on my lawn.

What Changed My Mind

If you aren't familiar with how I broke the grip of cultish indoctrination as a whole, forgiveness played a key role in setting me free. But my attitude shift towards the 4th of July began amid the insanity of 2020.

I was hit with the sting of cognitive dissonance after COVID-minded public health officials failed to call George Floyd protesters back indoors. The protesters were instead given the green light to do what we had been warned against repeatedly out of love for others. I couldn't quite tell—did these people who declared support for BLM, actually care about black lives?

They allowed good people to go outside and do the thing we had been warned would kill us all. That transcends inconsiderate. The people that were supposed to be the 'good guys' were no better than Derek Chauvin. And that forced me to think more critically about who the 'good guys' were, and what exactly caring for the marginalized really looks like.

I started to question what was in it for them to maintain such dangerously contradictory positions. Somehow, somewhere, someone was lying. But why lie? Why distort the compassion of well-meaning individuals? This line of questioning led me to the obvious-–money and power.

Around this time, I turned to a refreshing pair of news anchors, Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti, who at the time had a segment on The Hill's YouTube channel called Rising, and I was impressed by their similarly aligned remarks concerning the contradiction of stay-at-home orders—especially since Krystal and Saagar's observations were from both the right and left—and felt some peace and validation in questioning the powers that be.

I questioned the fear that fueled media, and the censorship machine that went to work to squash varied opinions on COVID and quarantine measures. I questioned the power that tech corporations had to minimize voices at will. I questioned every one from Don Lemon to Patrisse Cullors, to the celebrity cohort that marched in lockstep with the 'right' idea. I had always questioned Donald Trump, but I allowed myself to question Joe Biden—why was a white old guy all of a sudden the arbiter of blackness?

I questioned so much that I began to question questions—specifically why people were paying dearly for merely voicing them? That led me to revisit a little American idea called Free Speech—once a textual sign for intolerant rednecks, and now, my last hope towards freedom from a form of slavery that I had no idea was slowly choking out my mental health.

I realized that it was this freedom to think, to express new paths of reasoning, to outwardly question those in authority, to protest injustice, or to express oneself uniquely, that many Americans remembered and honored when they beheld the symbol of the flag.

Over many months, I meditated on the reality that the United States is ultimately structured to protect the smallest minority—the individual. There is something to be said about how even the collective identity of blackness turns on its own once certain questions threaten sacred cows like the Black Lives Matter movement or the status of oppression. Anywhere that groupthink can be formed, totalitarianism has a chance to consume the participants of said group.

Being told what to think by conforming to group ideals made me a slave to fear, and allowing myself to reorganize how I thought set me—the individual—free. Learning how to think has afforded me the freedom to reinterpret symbols with more grace. It's also placed the control to assign meaning to symbols, signs, gestures and words back into my own hands. I don't need to depend on cash-hungry newscasters to tell me who to love or hate. And I won't leave it to billion-dollar corporations to manipulate me into surrendering my ability to reason—they won't get me to roll-over on command. This freedom to question popular ideas, re-evaluate their truth and efficacy, and communicate my findings without jail time—as I am doing now—is partly why those annoying fireworks pop-off as fiercely as they do.

For those who have grown up here in the United States in struggle, I'm not diminishing your experience by declaring my old beliefs completely moot. The economic disparity grieves me. The American Dream slowly fading away from my generation and the one to come, frightens me. Wrongful sentencing in this country's brutal penal system breaks my heart. The glaring disparities that rip through various demographic lines infuriate me. No, rather, my new position is founded on the reality that without American ideals—voting rights, freedom of speech, checks and balances—those issues will be so much harder to address, let alone fix. (Trust me, I'm ethnically Ugandan)

While the United States has a lot to work on, given its checkered past, maintaining the freedom to progress towards a better future, or preserve what has worked for us in the past, is worth celebrating. This year I celebrate freedom from the lens that was my own imprisonment.

#July 4th #independence day #patriotism #patriotic #american flag #BLM #black lives matter #catastrophizing #paranoia #concept creep #mental health #mental health issues #antiracism #antiracism as religion #religion is a mental illness

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