Outrage, Part II
That's What It All Comes Down To
What outrages you?
That’s what it all comes down to.
Between the time I started working on this and the time I got the energy to put it up, I learned about this awful murder. I’m not a true crime fan1. I dislike focusing on the seamy side of life. I know what’s out there, feasting on it 24/7 is bad for the soul. I mention it only because it’s relevant to the issues I discussed yesterday.
The killer, a man who abducted and stabbed a toddler to death, has been deemed incompetent to stand trial.
As his lawyer stated, “He will now get the help he needs.”
Of course he won’t, because, as I pointed out in Part I, there is no agreed-upon definition of mental illness and no agreed-upon way to treat it. The mental health industry is a fraud and when it becomes entangled with the criminal justice system, which in the US it is every step of the way, it becomes an insult to the concept of justice.
The conceptual framework Dr. Thomas Szasz propounded in The Myth of Mental Illness is a basis for far sounder social policy than the one we are using now, even as I think there is such a thing as mental illness, or at least, profound mental discomfort. His theory works. The one we’re using doesn’t. We distinguish between “competent” and “incompetent,” with no objective standards as to what constitutes “incompetent” (apart from age or outright dementia). Szasz says the hell with all that: distinguish between the violent and the non-violent and proceed from there.
I agree.
We’ve constructed a bullshit system that profits a caste of opportunists. They profit monetarily and in status. Just look at the expression on the face of that defense lawyer as he says:
“My client will get the help that he needs so that he can assist us in his representation.”
How does someone who is incompetent assist a lawyer “in his representation”?
The prosecution agreed that he was incompetent. If he is incompetent it’s because the legal caste gets to make the rules based on interlocking myths of “mental health” manufactured by the mental health caste.
“Competency” is a giant case of confirmation bias.
This creature abducted and murdered a four-year-old and had apparently done something similar before. Isn’t there a point where we can separate people like this from the rest of society? Like maybe after the first attempted abduction?
The prosecution tossed this tar baby in the dumpster because the case was an embarrassment. Who needs this? Careers are on the line. Yeah, they’d get a conviction, so what? A case like this stirs up a lot of bad juju, best to sweep it under the carpet.
This has zero to do with justice or mental health. It’s all a rigged game. The killer will probably end up like Jordan Neely.
It all comes down to what outrages you.
Are you outraged by the death of Jordan Neely or by the death of Kristal Bayron-Nieves?
I’ll bet you don’t even remember who Kristal was because the media didn’t pound her name into your amygdala incessantly, so I’ll refresh your memory.
Nineteen-year old Kristie’s life was cut short on January 8, 2022 by a thug as she worked the graveyard shift at a Burger King in East Harlem.
I was outraged when I heard about it, and I am outraged anew as I type these words. I cannot express in words the disgust and contempt I feel for the political establishment of NYC, which allows itself to be jerked around by nonsense like two birders arguing in Central Park, and is silent in the face of this wanton slaughter.
I will be outraged for the rest of my life when I think of it. I choose to be outraged. I don’t want to get over it. She was NINETEEN. Wiped out by a thug with four priors.
The New York Times has pages of articles about Jordan Neely. I can’t count them all.
For Kristal?
Four. Pages, not articles. One of the pages contained her name, so three articles.
They didn’t actually cover the murder. They deigned to take note of it on January 14, 2022, when her murderer was arrested. But the actual crime was too trivial for The Paper of Record to note it.
The NY Post for all its faults, covered the crime thoroughly. They’ve also kept up with the legal proceedings (which grind exceeding slow in NY State). The Paper of Record has dropped it.
What accounts for the disparity in coverage? The outrage machine. AOC didn’t tweet once about Kristie, while she tweeted four times about Neely. I don’t have the heart to look up the rest of the gang, I hate them so much I have to limit my exposure to them.
If Google is a proxy for how much interest there is in a story, “Kristal Bayron-Nieves” gets 7,500 results. “Jordan Neely”: nearly five million.
AOC didn’t write a thing about Kristal.
She didn’t write a thing about the Michelle Go, who was pushed in front of an oncoming subway train by a person with “mental health” problems:
Michelle’s murderer, by the way, has joined the happy crew labeled “unfit for trial.” Presumably he will now “get the help he needs.” He’s already a veteran of the criminal justice system, so he’s been kicked upstairs to mental health:
Martial almost certainly has no functional intelligence, not even the kind that would fit a person for the most routine grunt work. By definition, he’s incompetent.
See what I mean by making the rules and then profiting by the rules you make?
Winston Glynn, Kristie’s murderer, compares himself to Jesus and Mandela. Perhaps soon, he, too, will be judged incompetent.
I get outraged by this.
I guess a nineteen year old girl getting shot by a career criminal or a woman shoved in front of an oncoming train doesn’t outrage people.
Or rather, it doesn’t outrage the right people.
As Larry Auster said, “It’s their country now.”
I realize that Larry’s words sound despairing, and I think that when he said them, he was in despair.
I choose to give it a different meaning. I mean it to be a call to arms. Before you fight, you have to get real about the terrain.
Daniel Penny has been charged, but he hasn’t yet been indicted. That’s important to keep in mind.
I’m clinging to a slender hope that Alvin Bragg is being sly and that in due course, when the grand jury (handpicked, I hope, for a modicum of perceptiveness) is presented with (exculpating, I hope) evidence, they decline to indict:
A retiree who witnessed Marine veteran Daniel Penny fatally choke an erratic homeless man on a train earlier this month called him a hero and slammed Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg for prosecuting him.
"He’s a hero," said the passenger, who has lived in New York City more than 50 years.
The witness, who described herself as a woman of color,2 said it was wrong for Bragg to charge Penny with second-degree manslaughter.
This has happened.
The Goetz case, which everyone remembers as a simple case, wasn’t. It was extremely protracted and complicated. The first grand jury refused to indict him on the more serious charges; it was only because the then DA, Robert Morgenthau3, pushed it, that a second GJ indicted him—and even that was a process.
We shall see.
Congratulations on reading to the end!
From now on, I’m going to be what my writing coach Ros Barber calls an “idiot.” I’m going to actively hawk my product like everyone else does. Like Ros does.
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Here’s my deal. Write to me at techniumbook at gmail dot com for a review copy. I’m happy to give the product in exchange for an honest review.
My Amazon author page, which has links to both books, is here.
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This doesn’t even rise to the level of true crime anyway. The true true crime genre focuses on sexy, photogenic crime. This is banal and depressing.
Probably the wrong shade of color, though.
BTW, the reason I’m so bored with the “Soros-backed” Alvin Bragg is because he’s got nothing on Morgenthau in terms of sheer rottenness and corruption. Morgenthau is the scoundrel who vacated the sentences of the so-called Central Park Five, all guilty as hell. But that’s another story for another day.