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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   30911 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 7, 2022

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This tweet by UN Women.

Of all journalists killed in 2021, 11% were women. In 2020, this was 6%. (Source: @UNESCO)

On the International Day to #EndImpunity for Crimes against Journalists, let us say out loud:

π’π“πŽπ

π“π€π‘π†π„π“πˆππ†

π–πŽπŒπ„π

π‰πŽπ”π‘ππ€π‹πˆπ’π“π’

I am still confused as to whether this tweet is a sincere sentiment felt by someone somewhere or an A/B tested string designed to be maximally infuriating/alienating to the largest number of people.

Here is my dissection as to why this tweet is especially infuriating.

  • No mention of base rates. Which would be a crucial piece of information to parse such a statistic. FYI, women tend to make up ~40% of journalists.

  • (Probably intentionally) misleading the usage of a ratio instead of a percentage. A percentage is a meaningful statistic when comparing a rate change of something. If x journalists were killed in t year, and x+a journalists were killed in t+1 year, you could say that the "more journalists were killed, a increase of b %"

    Instead have a look at the numbers.

    2020: 62 journalists killed (58 men, 4 women).

    2021: 55 journalists killed (49 men, 6 women).

    This is textbook 101, lying with statistics. Less JOURNALISTS were killed. Unless you don't care if male journalists are killed. Bonus: They calculated the percentages wrong (: - They rounded down so.. thanks for the fig leaf?

  • No regard for as to whether this change is "statistically significant" (FYI, well within less than 1 stddev).

  • Just goes without saying, the tone-deafness of it. Why not "π’π“πŽπ π“π€π‘π†π„π“πˆππ† π‰πŽπ”π‘ππ€π‹πˆπ’π“π’"?

  • The childish assumption that people who LITERALLY KILL JOURNALISTS will be swayed in any way whatsoever even with a LOUD proclamation of "Don't do bad thing!".

Now jaded you might say "but this is the CW, this is what always happens and will continue to happen". I agree.

In the landscape of twitter/msm only the most ragebait of headlines grab any attention, however I would say that a lot of that ragebait can be just made by applying the principles of making the best clickbait, and they might occur to someone with a certain creative bent naturally.

This tweet on the other hand isn't mere creative distortion. It has all the trappings of being intentionally crafted. Think of it this way. Someone had to go through the statistics of various professions deaths by gender, probably something like;

SELECT occupation FROM occupational_deaths WHERE 2021 > 2020 AND gender LIKE 'Female' GROUPBY occupation;

and "journalist' was the only field that returned.

That is just especially hilarious to me.. The best trolls of our generation might not be 4channers but instead working for various corporate activist organizations.

Shouldn't the call to action be to target more lady journalists, for equality?

I would have thought women would be as capable of dying as a man.

That's about what I would expect from UN Women, I assure you they're quite sincere and behave with similar intellectual rigor in more consequential ways than just tweets. Off the top of my head their responses to the 2014 Ebola outbreak comes to mind, a search finds this blog post summarizing it. Archive of their report:

In Ebola-affected communities and quarantined areas women should be prioritized in the provision of medical supplies, food, care, social protection measures and psychosocial services.

Women are "vulnerable" and thus need to get priority, you can count on that being their conclusion regardless of situation. Some news articles reported this as if they were more medically vulnerable, but mostly UN Women meant they were vulnerable in some vague social sense, along with implying they might be more medically vulnerable based on some dubious early data (ebola deaths by gender ended up being around equal). That blog post also has some links regarding the UN's decision to only distribute food to women after the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Good luck getting food if you don't have any living and friendly female relatives.

On a lighter note, the "Cyber Violence Against Women and Girls" report from the UN Broadband Commission with "editorial inputs by teams from UN Women, UNDP and ITU" was laughably terrible. Most blatantly regarding the citations, which ranged from "literally blank" or "citing a file on your own hard drive" to referring to "Recent research on how violent video games are turning children, mostly boys, into β€˜killing zombies’ 118" based on citing a 2000 article published on a LaRouche website raving about "killings which are caused by the use of Nintendo-style games, such as the game PokΓ©mon,", "satanic video games", etc. For whatever reason feminism within the UN seems unusually incompetent and written without considering potential criticism, the tweet doesn't seem too surprising with that history.

Women are "vulnerable" and thus need to get priority,

I think this may be a utility monster in the wild. That is, due to a group's vulnerable/marginalized/oppressed status, their situation as a whole is more tenuous, and so every harm hurts worse and every help helps better. Therefore they ought to be prioritized for protection from harm and allocation of benefits, because for them, every unit can do more good.

Sort of a triage situation: you want to help the ones (who can be helped and) who need it most.

The tricky thing is that sometimes, this may be true, but it is also something advantageous to get away with claiming whether it is true or not. See, in inverse, "privilege."

Yep, beat me to it. The UN has a history of gender-discriminatory policy favouring women, and justifying these policies with sophistry and extremely flimsy arguments. In Haiti, the UN's justification for distributing the food to women was to claim (without a shred of evidence) that women were more likely to distribute food equitably, and also that most men had women who would give the food to them. Here's a CNN article reporting on it and laying out some of the UN's justifications.

For my part, I would say it's incoherent to justify this policy with the idea that most men have women who will distribute the food to them, since it's not as if women don't also have men who will distribute food to them too - it can be used to justify it both ways. I for one also think it would have been infinitely better if they distributed the food equitably themselves instead of crossing their fingers and hoping the women would do it for them - maybe they should consider completing their job instead of only doing half of it. But it's mainly covered in a positive manner, with the gender discrimination brushed over as an afterthought or even justified. Even the CNN article approaches it from that angle, despite indications that there were men who were excluded from necessary aid (quoting one who stated "What about me? I didn't get anything. I need food. ... Many people could not participate", completely in contrast to the UN's lip-service claims that they would try to make sure no one in need was excluded).

Additionally, as this blog post from the same author notes, a lot of their already tenuous justifications for women-only food aid in Haiti might have actually been even more questionable in the context of that specific disaster because "due to the timing of the earthquake at 4:53 pm, a high percentage of casualties were women who remained in the household, while men and children were at work or in school, leaving a high percentage of single-male headed households and households with only one, or no remaining breadwinner."

Other mental gymnastics that the UN offered up to justify their actions in Haiti was to claim (again without any substantiation) that women were being pushed out of food lines, but even if we are to charitably interpret the UN and the WFP's statements and assume women being pushed out of line was actually a problem instead of a rationalisation created by an organisation desperately trying to justify their actions, they could've solved this by establishing different food distribution centres for men and for women instead of prioritising women, thus reducing clashes between men and women through sex-segregation while creating no such gender discrimination against men when it came to their food distribution. This is such an easy solution it's hard to imagine them not thinking of it unless all their staff and policy-makers are mentally challenged, and so this is not a satisfactory justification or explanation for the policy.

Rather, I think this is a blatant example of the UN's gender ideology bleeding into their aid programmes. Placing food in the hands of women is part of their attempts to Empower Women. In this 2001 discussion here they talk about the prospect of utilising humanitarian crises to push their gender agenda - and in it, specifically targeting women for the distribution of resources is touched on as one of the possible methods for "empowerment". The concept of using disasters to promote a gender agenda has existed in the UN for a very long time, and the 2010 Haiti earthquake and the 2014 Ebola outbreak were just the instances which the mainstream reported on.

EDIT: clarity

It's a UN entity working for the "empowerment" of "women," safe to say absolutely nobody who doesn't work for it gives one shit what they do, including those who fund it. If it's an entity that only exists for the benefit of its own members, I would expect it to become dumber and dumber over time. Women do not like hiring other women who are smart or disagreeable.

Out of context my first instinct would have been to assume this is a smear campaign designed to make feminism look daft. But I doubt such a smear campaign would have been authored by @UNWomen, unless there is some serious levels of internal fuckery going on.

You're giving me flashbacks to Angelina Jolie's campaign to stop rape in war zones. I mean why not just stop war itself while you're at it?

As to whether this tweet is a product of gross incompetence or malicious competence is going to remain a great mystery. Duck test is certainly not working here.

The violent death of women (and, in this case, presumably most of them are young and single) normally elicists an emotional response the violent death of men doesn't, so I think the sentiment is sincere in this case.

That's a context dependent ingroup justification for why we, the ingroup, happen to deserve our privilege. These arguments don't fly in any context where women are getting the short end of the stick.

The only sentiment that is sincere from feminism is that women are the ingroup and men are the outgroup.

That's basically the same thing. Whoever posted the tweet rather obviously starts from the assumption that the percent of female journalists getting killed in a normal world is 0.

I doubt someone went through various occupations. I think the occupation being journalists is definitely part of the rage. If the statistic was over an increase in number of woman welders who died, that wouldn't spark the same response in the intended audience.

The tweet is a little confusing though, because these small percents really highlight how many of the killed journalists were men, so I'm not sure most people who see this will feel outraged at the dead journalists.

E: cursory glance at comments shows yes most people are a little annoyed it is about women, as opposed to just journalists. If this was crafted bait, it specifically was crafted to have a very slanted gender ratio. If nothing else, this is an effective way to talk about the number of journalists killed.

this tweet seems aimed at, like, trump supporters on twitter, when the people who have journalists killed are mob bosses in foreign countries. just very out of touch.

Uh, what? How do you get 'aimed at Trump supporters' out of this?

How do you get 'aimed at Trump supporters' out of this?

We know it's aimed at Americans because Americans represent (a) most people on Twitter, and (b) the cultural / financial hegemon, by that token capable of actually doing something about it (like giving the UN money)

We know it's not aimed at Blue Tribers because Blue Tribers already handle "minority groups" (like women) with kid gloves.

QED, Trump supporters on Twitter

This is very strange, and I feel like to any normal person this should sound strange to them, even without knowledge of base rates. I think anyone looking at this would immediately say "wait, doesn't that mean that ~90% of journalists killed each year were men?". I also think that most people would make the assumption, if not stated otherwise, that women account for 50% of journalists and men account for the other 50%. And for it to seem like women journalists were being disproportionately targeted, women would have to account for less than 11% of journalists on a year that 11% were killed. So according to how I believe a normal person would think, anyone should look at this figure and either not care, or get outraged by the fact that they interpreted these figures to indicate there's some sort of epidemic of women journalists being killed or something.

This is one of my big issues with those do-gooder Β«world governmentΒ» type organizations, whether incumbent or aspiring like the Effective Altruism blob. Β«Frightfully distant they are from the peopleΒ»; they aren't just echo chambers as a result of their evolution, but they are born out of the disconnect with the hoi polloi. Their attitudes and aesthetics turn out alien to most of their subjects and one must wonder whether their values – not just formalizations, but deepest moral intuitions – are as well. They are unaligned collective intelligences.

I don't think this in particular is alien to most of the people. Male expendability is mainstream, and maybe apolitical.

UN Women is just what you get when there are no men adults in the room and funding is guaranteed. Just a bunch of ladies trying to out-left each other.

EDIT: To elaborate, when there is zero external feedback, the organization's activities are purely internal status games. Whoever came up with the Tweet may very well have been daring some colleague to criticize it to give the author pretense for an attack.

EDIT: pretense for an attack.

That very well could be the case. However, I am not entirely sure if lowering the sanity waterline for office politics is any better than doing it for the express reason.

Does this dissection mean you’ve taken the bait?

Assuming that it’s trolling, writing a detailed takedown is a bit silly. If it’s serious, well, Twitter delenda est.

It is the UN (Women's) official tweet. That gives it some gravity_.

Yes, I know that channel has posted other braindead things (is it weird that I can probably write that on reddit, but not 'retarded'?), but it's still kind of shocking to me that something so clearly bad got posted.

My argument is more along the lines of this is scientifically crafted bait, because you can't make up bait this good without effort.

The cynic in me says it could be serious. It's not like there aren't any priors for the woke coming to absurd conclusions in the past.

It seems likely that this is crafted bait to elicit a reaction that they can use to argue that the problems facing women stem from β€˜misinformation’ or β€˜lack of awareness’ or something else where the solution is hiring college educated women in first world countries to β€˜advocate’.

Yes. From the companion Guardian article pimping the report:

The authors of The Chilling are calling for governments, as well as the news industry and the giant tech corporations, to do more to tackle what they say is β€œa crisis of online violence towards women journalists”.

It calls out β€œthe victim-blaming and slut-shaming that perpetuates sexist and misogynistic responses to offline violence against women in the online environment, where patriarchal norms are being aggressively reinforced.”

Globally, the research found that nearly three-quarters of the female journalists surveyed had experienced online violence in the course of their work.

the abuse was highly gendered and designed to β€œhumiliate, belittle and discredit” the journalist on both a personal and professional level.

Bontcheva called for the much-delayed online safety bill to be passed urgently as the report laid out a series of other recommendations.

TL;DR, journalists report that criticizing journalists should be a crime, and you criticizing this proves it.

No mention of base rates. Which would be a crucial piece of information to parse such a statistic. FYI, women tend to make up ~40% of journalists.

I'm guessing women are a much smaller proportion of journalists that report from war zones, piss off mob bosses, etc. It's possible they might get killed at higher rates than men when exposing themselves to such dangers.

However, agreed, this tweet is absurd and smells of p-hacking.

It's also possible that female journalists on average are getting more bold/desperate as the whole industry goes deeper and deeper into shit, and these are more likely to get clipped.

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