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A new Jussie Smollet case? Another Nurse Karen versus black kids on rental bikes?
Former 'The Bear' writer handcuffed on train after alleged complaint from white woman
Alex O'Keefe is a writer for FX's The Bear and a former speechwriter for Elizabeth Warren. He's also black. On September 18 he was apparently arrested and taken off an MTA train when a white woman told him to correct his posture and he refused.
At least, that's how it's reported on Black Enterprise, which obviously has the most inflammatory version. Most other news sites, such ABC (above) and Newsweek ('The Bear' Writer Arrested on Train After Complaint From White Woman) also seem to be describing what at first glance is a pretty egregious case of "White Karen sics cops on a black man for being uppity." So egregious that I was immediately suspicious. I mean, really? A white woman just points her finger and has a black man arrested for his "posture"? In 2025, in the Bronx?
Well, reading the ABC and Newsweek articles, there are a few additional details.
So he was not actually arrested - he was cuffed and "detained," then allowed to board the next train.
Supposedly one of the woman's friends said "You’re not the minority anymore.”
There is plenty here to make this another scissors incident. I have watched enough bodycam footage on YouTube to imagine it going several ways. Maybe Karen really was being a bitch and didn't like seeing a black guy "manspreading." The cops arrive in authoritarian asshole mode, O'Keefe protests, winds up cuffed and taken off the train.
Alternatively, O'Keefe was spreading himself across two seats, the old lady wanted to sit in one of them, O'Keefe decides no white lady is going to make him move, and when the cops arrive and ask him to please move his feet, he goes into Aggrieved Asshole mode.
Or something in-between. I have seen variations of both these scenarios play out. I doubt this will blow up into a huge story since O'Keefe wasn't actually arrested, but I have definitely seen it in several places now, in some cases described as a near-lynching and something something Trump.
The woman's friend saying "You’re not the minority anymore” is one of those details that strikes me as so on the nose (remember "This is MAGA country"?) that I just don't know what to think. Is it fabricated? Did someone really decide to offer up the perfect soundbite like that? Or was it in the context of a longer exchange between her and O'Keefe (a context conveniently omitted in all reporting)?
Regardless of the merits of his claims:
I see this behavior (on bodycam videos) from my clients all the time, and it's always counterproductive. Even if someone is 100% in the right, there is no situation made better by being argumentative and belligerent with the cops. Once cops have shown up, the situation has gone to shit, and being a dickhead doesn't improve things. Passive resistance, petulance, argumentativeness, active resistance, outright assault on the cops... not going to help. It sucks, but being polite and pulling the "yes, sir, no sir" card generally keeps things from getting worse.
It's especially baffling from clients who claim they are in fear of the cops killing them at any second due to their race. What, the cop is going to decide to not kill you because you're so obnoxious? Very logical. It's reinforced every time I see bodycams of bored, time-killing cops doing a traffic stop during daylight where they're trying to give a speeding ticket (and do the usual cop thing of sniffing around for something else). Instead of giving a name, getting a ticket, and going on about their lives, that's the time clients decide the smart thing to do is refuse to give a name (or give an incredibly fake name and DOB), refuse to hand over a driver's license, and get belligerent, thus turning a speeding ticket into PC for arrest and a search of the car.
What's baffling? The cops are trying to make them eat shit (that is, to yield in a monkey dominance game) with all the 'yes sir' and 'no sir' stuff, and in the moment they would rather take the risk of greater consequences than do so "voluntarily". Probably especially culturally relevant to blacks, though I suspect all but the most beaten-down milquetoast PMCs dislike showing their belly that way. Law-n-order conservatives claim to think it's fine, but I think mostly they don't envision themselves on the wrong side of that.
Only a small fraction would have no dislike for it. But a much much broader class of people, actually the majority, would suck it up and do it anyway. Part of being a civilized adult is the ability to set aside your instincts and short-term desires and impulses in favor of the rational, long-term concerns. When I was a child and my brothers would annoy me I would hit them to make them stop. After getting in trouble enough times I learned not to do that. I don't enjoy obnoxious and annoying behavior any more than I used to, and if possible will seek non-violent solutions to end it such as politely asking, or avoiding people who do it. But at the end of the day if I am near someone being deliberately obnoxious and I can't extricate myself from the situation then I will suck it up and deal with it instead of violently attacking them. Because I am an adult and I have the emotional maturity to do that.
Every middle class white child is taught to be respectful and defer to the police. Because your natural instinct is to fight people who oppose you, especially when they're in the wrong, and this instinct leads to predictably bad results, so it requires being taught the correct behavior in this scenario so that you know when to suppress your instincts instead of following them. I am not black, I did not grow up as a black child in a black household, so I don't know first hand what they are taught. But it seems to be some combination of "the police are dangerous and will shoot you, they are your enemy" and "a real man fights their enemies instead of submitting to them like a weakling." Which even if taught as separate messages, and the latter is implicit in the culture rather than explicit, combine to create this sort of behavior.
Which makes it not exactly baffling that this happens, though it is baffling that nobody seems to be trying to fix it on the cultural level. There are lots of attempts to blame the police and reduce their aggression towards minorities, but I don't see the same level of impetus towards teaching minorities "Don't fight the police!" When this is the obvious and easiest solution to the issue. It's not that minorities need to be extra submissive towards police, it's that everyone needs to submit to police, but certain subsets of minorities haven't caught on yet and need to be brought up to the same level as everyone else..
Is this really that baffling? The last several decades have seen the continual rise of an ideology that is based on dividing populations into groups, declaring some of them "oppressed" and others "oppressor" and declaring that the former has zero responsibility to improve things and the latter has full responsibility to improve things. A prominent example of this phenomenon in a different topic (with mostly the same players) is "rape culture," where even advising a woman against putting herself in a position of vulnerability around strange/potentially malicious men with alcohol or other drugs involved is considered full-throated justification for her being raped. Heck, even pointing out the fact (citation needed) that this raises one's odds of being sexually assaulted has been equated with explicit condoning of rape.
As such, any sort of recommendation that black people adjust their culture such that the rates of violent or otherwise troublesome encounters with police go down is verboten. That's condoning White Supremacy which we can always invoke as blame-worthy (of course, abstract concepts like White Supremacy can't really catch blame - people that you think of when you think of White Supremacy, such as white people, or brown people who disagree with you, OTOH...) in any troublesome encounter between any black person and any cop for any reason. Whatever culture that black people have, it's either innate - and good and to be supported in and of themselves, because everyone (that we've deemed sufficiently oppressed) deserves to be not just tolerated, but celebrated, intrinsically for who they are - or an adaptation that they had to take on just so that they could survive in this oppressive White Supremacist world they were unjustly thrust into, and so it's 100% the responsibility of White Supremacists to modify the policing system such that black people have to spend zero effort to change their culture and the rate of troublesome police incidents involving black people goes down to zero.
I think the simple but effective filter for "is this the bad kind of victim blaming?" boils down to:
Is victim blaming the only significant, or always first reaction? If so, it's at best tactless and at worst racist/sexist/callous/lowers freedom/etc.
Is victim blaming accompanied by other sympathy, solutions, or blame? If so, it's at worst tactless and at best good advice.
That's probably oversimplifying a bit, but I don't think the idea that "victim blaming can be bad" is wrong per se, just misapplied.
Indeed, absolutely. The key thing here, though, is that "victim blaming can be bad" was already the default state of modern culture, heck even BEFORE the 1st 2 waves of feminism. The idea that "X can be bad" no matter what X is is a pretty good default that almost everyone has about anything, and the idea that blaming someone for something can be bad had already been built into society for centuries, as evidenced by legal justice systems.
The part that progressive idpol added was the enforced misapplication.
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Lately I have been reflecting on the strange parallels between this and the recent cancellations for improper reactions to Charlie Kirk's assassination. I have to admit I have maybe found a bit of hypocrisy in myself and I'm unsure how to feel about it.
When I was perusing Reddit in the immediate aftermath of the assassination, I saw a lot of reactions along the lines of "Well if you're spreading hate and antagonizing people you can't be surprised when somebody snaps and kills you shrug." And to be honest, yes, at the time this seemed to me to be a justification for his assassination and an expression of implied support for it.
But truthfully, this isn't that different from responding to news of a woman being raped by saying "Well if you're going out doing XYZ you can't be surprised if somebody rapes you shrug." I was never viscerally angered by people offering such rape commentary the way I was by the Kirk commentary I saw last week. Obviously, there are object-level objections that could be made here, Was Charlie Kirk really "spreading hate"? and so forth.
I think it has caused me to have greater sympathy for the feminist side. While I won't go so far as to say that well-meaning advice on avoiding rape is never appropriate, I think, like comments on Kirk's death, it should be done with exceeding care and sensitivity which I myself lacked in the past.
To be fair, there are/were indeed a handful of rightist/alt-right hardliners who dismissed Kirk as a cuckservative Zionist shill and did/do advocate for political violence and spread hate; if it were any of them who got assassinated, this sort of leftist reasoning would at least have some legs to stand on. But in this case, it really doesn't.
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One thing that caused me to have more sympathy for women in particular is getting punched in the face.
No, really. Some crazy and/or homeless person, in the middle of an otherwise decent suburb, punched me in the face as he walked past me in a crosswalk in the middle of a street between the bus stop and my student housing half a block away. No, they didn't find him. Yes, it hurt like hell, but didn't break my nose thankfully. No, I didn't do anything to provoke him, I was looking down at my phone reading, surprised me completely.
I knew that this happening again was realistically highly improbable and irrational. But I couldn't help but feel vaguely nervous and vulnerable at the bus stop for a month or two afterward. And so I thought, "do women feel this way all the time?" Maybe? I still don't know. I'm sure some do, though, and it sucks, so my sympathy-meter got a minor tune-up that day.
There are political parties advocating for cracking down on such violent men but curiously single young women are precisely the demographic least likely to support them.
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You're right, but also, this just fits more into the pattern of "They say lots of things, but anything that's good isn't new, and anything that's new isn't good." The idea that saying "Well if you're going out doing XYZ you can't be surprised if somebody rapes you shrug" to someone who's been raped is rude or bad doesn't come from progressive idpol, it was already baked in to the existing system as just a form of manners that much of American culture already bought into. The innovation that progressive idpol added is that even neutrally stating that, empirically and physically, certain behaviors can influence one's vulnerability to being raped, in any context even without any specific or hypothetical rape or rape survivor involved, is still exactly the same as explicitly saying that rape victims deserved it because they were asking for it.
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Former moderator @ymeskhout pointed out that, 100% of the time when someone complains about their bike having been stolen, the first question everyone asks is invariably "did you lock it?"
Pointing out that the manner in which the victim of a crime comported themselves may have made them more vulnerable to being the victim of said crime is considered a perfectly legitimate thing to do, except when it comes to a woman being sexually assaulted after getting blackout drunk at a party full of men she doesn't know, or when a black man aggressively resists arrest and the officers attempting to subdue him unsurprisingly assault him - in which cases it becomes "victim-blaming" and beyond the pale. It's a bizarre identitarian carve-out.
I'm rather confident that there's virtually not one cyclist anywhere in the world who leaves the bike unlocked in any town or city with a known reputation for having bike thefts.
Not for long, anyway. Either they're pedestrians in very short order, or they no longer leave their replacement bike unlocked.
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Or if they answer the question "did you lock it?" in the affirmative, the follow-up question will be "how good of a lock did you use?"
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Not to disagree with your main point but I’ve never seen anyone get asked that after having a bike stolen. They might be asked how heavy duty lock and cable they used to lock it to a concrete holder etc but half the time this would be just to find out exactly how thick steel is niwadays vulnerable to cutters.
Yes, bike theft is a major problem over here and has been for years.
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Rape is an unavoidable danger. Political assassinations are novel. Most men are suitably anti-rape already. Redditors are neutral to positive on assassinations.
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It's also just that government officials are easy to blame while parents are at least technically your customers. On schooling this flips and the liberals are the ones defending schoolteachers and their unions from criticism for failing kids. You get it on both sides.
There is a significant difference in the degree of difficulty in avoiding misconduct. One person's job is legalized kidnapping, it is within the nature of mistakes that someone could be seriously injured or killed. Teacher misconduct is almost always intentional actions. I dont think any teacher has ever been giving a lecture, slipped on a banana and fell serendipitously getting impregnated by one of her lonely male students.
Cops are not just blamed for cases where there's misconduct. People of a certain ideological stripe assume there is misconduct in situations like the OP because of cops' failure to maintain equitable arrest records or to fix the underlying problems of those they police.
Teachers similarly get criticism for the state of students despite not having control of their lives for the majority of their time. The school might get leaned on for disciplinary gaps (as Obama did) or apparent bias, teachers might get blamed for being lazy or unmotivated due to the outcomes of some group of students and so on.
Most of those issues for teachers are self-inflicted wounds. If they stopped pretending school can solve social problems as part of their demands for ever increasing funding such expectations wouldn't be imposed on them
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You know, I feel like I haven't heard this one in a while now. Odd how fixations on these things fade, sometimes surprisingly quickly.
Feminism was previously a class interest group for college educated women- that is, young women living away from the protections of their families. This is the demographic most likely to get raped(although feminists were generally not very concerned about the most vulnerable members of that demographic, such as enlisted women in the military- only college educated ones).
Feminism is now mostly concerned with 'women' whose rapists give up and switch to beatings instead when they discover the truth.
Oh, come on. This is a pretty lazy sneer, and it's barely even coherent. Do you think #MeToo was about college?
And I could have sworn I'd seen you arguing trans violence stats were fake. It's not happening, but they're fixated on it anyway?
Metoo was about professional women in high status settings. This skews educated even if the examples that are highest profile mostly arent.
I have not, to my knowledge, argued that ‘trans panic’ wasn’t a thing that ever happened(although I have argued that it has not applied to murder). I have argued that it’s less common and less random than trans activists like to portray. But MTFs getting beaten up/attacked by a potential partner is a very plausible thing.
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What? A decent number of self-described feminists I know disliked the military primarily because they viewed most of them as potential or likely rapist douchebags. That's such a strange accusation to make. I'm sure feminist activists devoted less energy to enlisted women, but that's partly because there aren't many of them, it's not relatable, and a decent number were probably conservative anyways, so that's not really all that strange.
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That's largely because trans subverted and devoured feminism wholesale
Whale cancer.
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It's baffling that this progressive idealogy has been allowed to persist within the black community and survive contact with deadly consequences. Luxury beliefs are ones that privileged people can hold because someone else has to pay the costs. It does not baffle me that lefty white people believe that black people are oppressed and should fight back against the oppressive beliefs, because this doesn't cause lefty white people to get killed. It does not baffle me that college educated black people believe that they are oppressed and their lower class brothers should fight the police, because the college educated black people are much less likely to get themselves killed. It does not baffle me that black people believe that white people owe them and they should be given free handouts from the government or are morally blameless when they steal things, because this benefits them.
It does baffle me that lower class black people who get are at risk of being killed by police believe they should fight the police. This is not a luxury belief, this has deadly consequences. This is the kind of thing where skin in the game usually causes people to set aside their silly biases and obviously false platitudes and go "oh crap, this is wrong, something needs to change." Even if they verbally adhere to the same ideology, people at least turn hypocrite to avoid the consequences themselves. Someone who claims that homeless people should be given free homes balks at the thought of actually sharing their own home or neighborhood. People who want more government spending even if this requires higher taxes almost always want the taxes raised on someone else. The ideologies mutate into the most consistent and coherent form that just so happens to be compatible with avoiding negative consequences for the believer. I would not be baffled to have black people going on about how police are evil oppressors but you shouldn't physically fight them because they'll kill you. I would not be baffled to have black people going on about how police are evil oppressors that you should fight, and then not actually fighting them and hoping someone else will do it. I am baffled at them actually fighting the police in non-negligible numbers. The ideology, at least the version of it held and professed by black people, should have mutated to avoid this outcome the majority of the time. But it hasn't.
Most deadly police encounters are men and boys, young adults and teenagers. You know, the demographic group least likely to use their prefrontal cortex, most concerned about appearances, and least concerned with potential benefits of police help. It's totally skewed. It's not like their mothers and (non-criminal) fathers are telling them to confront police, and hell they probably tell them the opposite regularly. I hesitate to call it a broader problem because the people most likely to constitute the problem are also the least likely to heed said beliefs.
For example you can notice a bump in preference for decreased police spending in the 18-49 demographic. Now, they don't break out a figure of "among Blacks, what percentage of the 15-25 demographic prefer lowered police spending" but I bet it's an even bigger bump.
The people talking the biggest game on police oppression game are largely white knights, and are certainly not the people directly producing violence directly, much less those who are most affected (middle aged to older adults and women)
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It's worth noting that lower/underclass black culture is just all about being confrontational and loud, and not doing this puts a young black man at a severe social disadvantage. I'm pretty sure that all of these people have more contact with their fellow lower class blacks than the police, and young males are really bad at backing down out of risk aversion.
Furthermore, I don't think it's actually the majority who get extra aggressive and confrontational with police. Most of them who get arrested get arrested peaceably.
I'm pretty sure the underclass is normally confrontational and loud everywhere it lives.
The difference is that white rural underclass lives in areas with low enough population density that the police learn their faces and treat them as neighbors, like the "I know my rights" guy.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1C58B3C1E08108CF
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I don't think it's directly downstream of progressive ideology, and is instead actually a consequence of the honour culture that many lower class black people seem to have grown up with in the hood. Honour cultures form in places where a strong central authority either doesn't exist, is unwiling or unable to enforce order, or is so resented by those subject to it that they're reluctant to call upon it and will punish any of their peers who do. This situation has occurred in many times and places historically, but today it often shows up in prisons, and everyone has experienced a kiddie version of it on the playground. It also seems to be common in black American ghettos.
Since people in these environments can't call upon a central authority to defend them, they have to defend themselves, and one method they use is to dissuade aggressors by signalling that they'll strongly retaliate against any attack. This is why they escalate to confrontations, threats or violence in response to minor, even unintentional slights. If they didn't they might look soft and be intentionally targeted for abuse or exploitation.
This is a potentially adaptive behaviour for people in such environments when dealing with their peers, but is at times maladaptive when dealing with authority figures. However, they can't simply choose not to behave this way towards authority figures like cops, because if they did then they would look like a bitch and a collaborator and be subject to ostracisation by their community, which would again endanger them. Besides, it's not as if this is necessarily a rational strategy they knowingly apply, it's often just a subconscious attitude they've learned and cannot simply unlearn at will.
TL;DR they fight the police because they fight everyone who challenges them to preserve their honour and reputation, even when it might have negative immediate consequences for their physical health or legal standing, and because they really don't want to look like a collaborator any more than a prisoner, a concentration camp detainee, or a middle schooler does.
Also it bears mentioning that for all the talk about US police brutality or discrimination, I'm pretty sure American police beat people up less on average than say an Eastern European cop. In other words, some other countries have police that directly participate in said honor culture directly, within the norms of such. Possibly, the normal expectation that American cops are more rule-abiding and lawful backfires in this kind of culture, where following rules is (mis)interpreted as weakness. Assuming your thesis is true, of course.
I don't know. EE cops probably beat more people on average inside the precincts ("what other flats have you burgled? Tell us! smack 69 Freedom street, that was you, wasn't it?! smack come on, heartfelt confession means lenient sentence! smack").
But there's no such culture of individual defiance. If a Polish cop honks at a dres walking down the middle of the street and yells "move your ass, fuckface", the dude won't attack him to defend his honor if he's sober.
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It can look like a luxury belief to you, but a better way to look at it is low time preference. Sure, tomorrow you might be better off if everyone was more complaint with police, but today you has a gun or drugs or both and doesn't want to be arrested.
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