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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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