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I'm calling it, this turned out to be an excellent Scissor Incident.
There is insufficient context to judge the situation or the participants, but taps into multiple underlying prejudices that audience has to impact the personal conclusions they reach. For some this is clearly a creepy brown migrant perving on vulnerable girls. For others, clearly a delinquent with illegal weapons harassing a relatively innocent bystander.
The arguing over whether carrying bladed weapons is 'normal', or at least understandable given the potential dangers, or actively a sign of a juvenile delinquent, the inability to truly ascertain the race of the guy filming, just going off the accent, the somewhat muddled story about what led to the incident. The various cultural cues that read different ways to different people.
The question that we definitely can't answer is what would have happened to this girl and her friends if she weren't armed, and the incident wasn't filmed. I personally doubt that this particular migrant was actually going to assault this particular girl, but yeah, the background information that girls like this have gotten raped by gangs of actual migrants sort of has to color this discussion.
Just, epistemic humility demands that you acknowledge the uncertainty and don't make bold statements of certainty when the reliable information is still very limited.
But even our generally rational forum has got people digging in on both sides, expressing high confidence in their assessment.
As far as I've gathered, the background information is that girls have been typically raped by gangs of migrants through gradually grooming them in, not jumping them on the street. I don't think carrying axes would've helped against that.
Yeah, but I'd accept "this girl heard the stories of migrant rape gangs and her response to the threat is to carry weapons around" as a feasible explanation.
Of course, if its an actual organized gang, the knife and axe won't ultimately protect her either.
Indeed, the gang putting its explicit stamp of approval on the migrant rape gangs- that being the British government- has tanks and fighter jets.
What will an axe or sword do against them?
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I mean, it's hard to gradually groom someone who's attacking you with an axe, isn't it?
More to the point, pre-/low-teen girls (or boys, for that matter) aren't known for great epistemics or rationality. It's possible for a 12 year old girl to incorrectly but reasonably, by 12-year-old definitions of reasonable, to believe that an axe would provide her with some significant amount of extra protection against grooming gangs.
After all, even fully grown adult women with brains that have had time to develop often take inconvenient steps to protect themselves against the stranger-jumping-you type of rape, despite the fact that those are quite rare. I think it's the viscerality/salience and availability bias, like how people often get more paranoid about flying than about driving, because plane crashes are severe and usually fatal to most people involved, and the news tends to report on them more than any particular banal car crash.
Now, these specific girls? Not having seen the video, I cast no vote, but my default presumption is that, outside of what's directly seen on video, there's no meaningful wider conclusion that can be made just from a brief out-of-context video that takes place as part of a longer interaction. Too many unknown unknowns.
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Yeah, I was thinking it’s very Toxoplasma of Rageish. Like, if I wanted to pick/manufacture the perfect heroine and villain for my long-planned rising, these aren’t the ones I’d choose.
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