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A 30-year-old pregnant nurse attempted to steal a GPS-tracked rental bike from a young black man right outside her workplace, and when a group of onlookers surrounded her and started filming she had the audacity to start acting strangely, call for help, and briefly cry. Don't worry, justice has been served: she has been identified and suspended, and she will never be okay again.
I'm posting another comment because this is my favorite story in a long time. It just exposes so many things that are insane with American culture:
Why is she getting fired for this? Is there any evidence she did anything wrong, inappropriate, immoral or illegal?
Why isn't the behavior of the black man considered sexual harassment? He's deep in her personal space.
Why is a sixth month pregnant woman traveling on NYC streets on a rented bicycle? It's 2023 and we can't get reasonable transportation for pregnant women? We're on the verge of having home robots (and a massive unemployment crisis) and we can't even keep a pregnant woman at home where she is most safe?
Why on earth are people, in this thread, complaining about white women's tears? I'm a 100% hetero man and I'd break down crying if this happened to me. She was accosted by multiple huge men who were scamming her and humiliating her on the internet. Seriously, if you aren't on her side, I think you lack empathy or something.
Imagine showing this to someone in 1900. We have instant global film-making and we use it to ruin the lives of pregnant nurses, briefly following a massive global pandemic where nurses were on the front lines. And the powers that be decided to side with the teenagers and ruin this nurse's life! (And that's without the racial angle, obviously.) I'm going to be laughing about this story all day. It's just so absurd. I can't imagine anything more ridiculous, but the simulation is manifold I guess.
I'd say that says a lot more about you than it does the alleged story.
Are you going to keep shooting varmints from your porch like this until we have to ban you?
If the sole content of your post is to express how much contempt you feel for the poster, don't post it.
I intend to "keep shooting varmints from my porch" until someone provides a compelling argument as to why I should not. If doing so results in my getting banned, that is a consequence I am prepared to live with.
The argument is in the rules you used to enforce. You're expected to be civil here and address the arguments, not the poster. You know this. Of course saying "You're stupid and you suck" will get you banned.
...and as I keep arguing, the rules are a means rather than an end.
One of the major differences between myself and most of the other users here is that I have always viewed "Consistency" and "Rationality" as overrated.
Well, I can't make you do anything, but you don't decide how the rules are enforced.
Actually, I don't think most of the users here are particularly consistent, and I have doubts about many genuine rationalists are left.
But you, I'm afraid, are just making the same argument our polemicists and shit-stirrers do when they decide the rules is a stupid.
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Questions 1 and 2 have the same answer, which is that America's civic religion is the worship of black people. If he'd walked up to this woman and shot her in the head, the same people who are her detractors today would try to argue that she did something to deserve it, because the underlying premise of all negative interactions between black people and white people is that black people are always in the right, and can never do anything wrong, no matter how sociopathic the behavior in the latest rage video circulating on Twitter may be. As a nation, we've just brainwashed ourselves into accepting that there's always going to be this class of violent lumpenproles wandering the streets of our major cities, doing as they like, and that there's nothing that can or should be done about it.
I was confused as to why a 6-month pregnant woman is even still working as a nurse, since I imagine that involves a lot of standing and walking around for long hours, but maybe I'm wrong. As to question 4, sure, on some level I do feel sorry for her, but I'm absolutely sure that if this had happened to someone else she'd default to the mindset I described for questions 1 and 2, since she likely falls into that demographic of white liberals who are simply incapable of crafting a mental model for people who are just malevolent and antisocial by nature.
I get that you in particular really want this to be the case but repeating it doesn't make it so.
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The friends I've had who were nurses usually worked up to about 8 months or birth. They know that time they are out is extra burden on their peers, miss the patients, and would rather take more time with the baby; if physically possible.
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White voters in NYC have an extremely high likelihood of voting for the politicians who enabled this situation. For many on the right, this situation is someone are getting what they voted for good and hard.
In SF I would agree with you, but NYC is a city which normally votes for the tougher-on-crime candidate. Looking at recent mayors, Koch, Giuliani, Bloomberg and Adams all ran as conventional law-and-order candidates. Dinkins ran on a platform of hiring more cops and getting the mafia out of City Hall, which is still a platform of being tough on crime. Bill de Blasio was the only soft mayor since crime became a major political issue.
You can say that Adams is fundamentally a corrupt machine politician and that his pro-cop positions are performative, but if so he is definitely putting on the performance - he is gratuitously pissing off the type of soft-on-crime white liberal you are calling out as "likely to vote for the politicians who enabled this situation." FWIW, I would give Adams, his team, and his supporters the benefit of the doubt on a "too early to tell" basis - it took years for Giuliani et al to get crime in NYC under control last time.
Do you think Adams is tougher on crime than Curtis Sliwa?
He got into law enforcement in NYC at the tail end of it being a dangerous city. So yes?
Sliwa was a vigilante leader through long periods of NYC being a dangerous city.
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The Soros DA confounds your position.
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Biking is good, pregnant women are still capable of light exercise, and rental bikes are sensible in some situations.
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I really dislike this argument that's becoming increasingly frequent here and elsewhere, that is basically "Even if what happened to this person is unjust and morally wrong, they probably voted for Biden so fuck them." (Obviously the same argument is made everywhere else on the Internet about Trump voters.)
Yes, I get it, war to the knife and it's fun to munch popcorn while watching leopards eat faces, and @FCfromSSC will say this is just the sound of inevitability.
I know expecting people to show empathy for a (presumed) member of the enemy tribe is too much, but ffs we don't even actually know if she is in fact a woke liberal BLM-supporting enemy tribeswoman, we're just doing some sort of pseudo-Bayesian reasoning where she probably is so fuck her.
Eh, I can split that baby.
Yes, the blue cities deserve what they've voted for, no that doesn't mean it isn't tragic for the individual people it happens to. No, it doesn't mean I need to defend or get excited when blue cities get what they voted for.
I'm not outraged by this, on either side. This is Covington all over again. Nothing fucking happened.
Aside from whatever the politics of some rando nurse in NY are, the right really needs to stop getting outraged when commies do what commies do to other commies. Y'all need to listen to Napoleon, and not interrupt your enemy when he's fucking up. Here I'm thinking more of Weinstein, Christakis, etc.
Think long and hard about who deserves your support, your defense, your outrage. Mostly it isn't going to be people in viral videos.
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I'm of two minds. If what had happened to her was significantly worse and had a long lasting impact I would definitely feel bad for her. If it turns out she has never and would never participate in the kind of campaign that was levied against her I would definitely feel bad for her. But I think both of those are unlikely and watching these people eat their own in a mostly safe environment is what pure upside looks like in the culture war. It is the tiny burn a child gets which instills the life long lesson that fire is hot multiplied across likely tens of thousands of people who will see themselves in this unlucky ladies shoes. My only mitigating hope is that the update is not too extreme, that we only roll back that you shouldn't always mindlessly apply the progressive stack and not reverse stupidity.
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Did you think the hard times were going to create strong men by getting everyone to do more pushups?
My hope is that this shifts her beliefs to strongly support giving her the means to actually threaten a hostile crowd and she becomes a GoA life member and CCW holder in a better city.
I'm pretty sure that's been fairly strongly debunked.
How?
That isn't what he said, and you very well know it.
Frankly I have no fucking idea what else it could mean. Enlighten me.
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CCW in New York is impossible. You used to not be able to get a permit. Now after Bruen you can get a permit but it's not good in a huge list of places which make it impractical to use, including hopsitals I believe. Also I think it would be illegal to carry while riding a Citibike.
The difficulty of CCW varies by by body-type and wardrobe, not by state.
The only wardrobe which will allow CCW in New York City is a police uniform. Yes, I know what you mean, but the chance of you successfully concealing a weapon in NYC indefinitely while going about your business day after day and year after year is pretty much zero, unless you stick to bad neighborhoods.
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Yes, that's what I meant by a better city. I'd like events like this to get her to move to a nice Midwestern city after learning about what qualities in a politician make their new home a good place and leave NYC to the Subway psychos and bike hasslers.
NYC has (and has had ever since the Giuliani era - the de Blasio murder spike was part of a nationwide phenomenon) unusually low crime for US medium-large cities. Non-NYC cities make it easier for a white middle-class hospital employee to personally avoid the crime by commuting by car from their home in one all-white suburb to their job in another all-white suburb, but the core city of the "nice Midwestern city" is going to be somewhere between St Louis and Detroit.
To check numbers, Indianapolis is the reddest big city in the midwest, and has 24 murders and 871 violent crimes (per the FBI definition) per 100,000 residents per year. The Bronx is the worst borough of NYC, and has about 6 murders and 650 violent crimes per 100,000 per year. Jacksonville FL, which recently voted out a Republican mayor for failure to control crime, was a red city in a mostly red state and also far more violent than the Bronx.
One of the problems with the crime discourse (and the problem predates the internet) is that there is tonnes of medium crime in a big city - even a low-crime one like Zurich. So anyone with a megaphone can create the impression that crime is out of control using summer-of-the-shark techniques. Very Online red tribers do this for NYC because performatively hating on NYC is part of red tribe identity politics. They are helped by NYC-based media doing the same thing because it sells newspapers. But that doesn't change the fact that "America can't police big cities the way Europe and 1st-world Asia can" is a nationwide problem, not a partisan one, and that NYC is in fact an island of minimally competent policing in a cesspool of dysfunction.
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The argument that you should show empathy even to an enemy is noble, and I wish I had the generosity of spirit to really do it in this situation. I'm impressed by the people who still have to fortitude at this point in the culture war to do it.
That being said I don't think it's correct to say people cannot correct infer likely tribal affiliation in this case. In the canonical formulation blue tribe and red tribe do not necessarily perfectly align with political affiliation. Being a professional class, urban, person who cycles to work is already enough to fully establish blue tribe. Even if someone does occasionally vote Republican. In addition to that, her official gofundme, which admittedly is managed by her uncle, says:
That's enough to move from probably to almost certain in my book.
I'm not sure "empathy" is the right word, but if you do not recognize that you owe something to your enemies, some level of consideration, some measure of restraint, you are missing something humans cannot, in the long run, do without. I get that it's hard, but good things generally are. Being hard doesn't make them less necessary.
The last several years are best modelled as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble. Learning to see everyone around you as an avatar of their tribe is a big part of this process. It's not even untrue. It's probably even strongly predictive! That doesn't make it any less destructive in the long term.
I'm not in any position to judge your mind. On a bad day, I sweat tribal hatred, can taste it in my spit. It's still bad for us and for everyone around us.
Can you be more specific or provide successful examples from history?
Is not disingenuously piling on enough?
This looks to be an example of the left eating itself. Silence from those who might otherwise suggest this is the bed they made is all I'd expect an enemy to muster, at least until there was more penitence.
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I don't think I disagree with any of this. I certainly recognize the importance, and do feel sympathy and sadness for the situation. I would say that I have "empathy" in the sense of an intellectual understanding of what the people in the scenario are experiencing, but not in the visceral sense. When I see the video I only see something I would absolutely never want to be involved in.
Just to be clear, I'm not the person @Amadan was responding to. My main objection was to the "don't even actually know." I thought it was clear that we do know, but that doesn't mean I endorse embracing tribal hatred.
I will say one of my guilty pleasures is novels like Sharpe's Revenge, where Sharpe teams up with with his long time battlefield enemy Calvet to defeat his nemesis the duplicitous Ducos. I realize its fiction, but I do think that kind of justice resonates with me strongly. That there is a right way and a wrong way to do battle with an enemy, and that in a just world those that do it in the wrong way would be the ones to suffer.
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I'm not questioning the probability of such a guess being right (even without seeing her GoFundMe), and I don't think I'm noble.
I'm just watching the spread of accelerationism with equal parts anger and sadness.
If The Happening happens, I have little expectation that I will be one of the ones who makes it out the other side, but if I do, I will remember.
What is "the happening"?
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It's exactly the behavior in the Crump tweet linked above. Ditch the particulars, go straight to the tribal pattern. This shit will be the death of us.
I wasn't terribly impressed by her behavior in the brief section of the video I watched. I think it's certainly possible that the kid and their friends were actually trying to scam her. Maybe she's a progressive and this is just desserts. Whatever.
The rage mob is a vastly larger problem than any of that. The rage mob is a vastly clearer problem than any of that. These people are making a living off generating large-scale hatred, and no one has the slightest idea of how to make them stop. I am convinced that the hate they generate has serious, long-lasting consequences in the real world, and the harm they inflict is reliably rewarded, and on a vast scale. This is a career now, with significant growth potential.
...And people tell me we're peaked, and it's gonna get better from here. Yeah, sure.
A-fucking-men. Calling this woman an enemy based on how she looks and no other information is just identity politics. It might not be incorrect, but that doesn't mean it is correct. Hlynkawasright?
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I don't understand this attitude at all. Can't you just let a woman in an awful situation respond in the totally reasonable way which is to cry and try to get help? How do you want women to behave in these situations?
No because it's not reasonable and you as a human (regardless of whether you are a man or a woman) are supposed to be better than this. The Gom Jabbar only kills animals.
In reality the Gom Jabbar would kill everyone; there is no one who cannot be tested to destruction.
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I watched maybe fifteen seconds of the video, and the bit I saw wasn't her crying, but trying rather ineffectually to issue orders. I have no actual opinion on her behavior, other than a firm confidence that she did nothing wrong. At the absolute worst, she got in a silly argument over a misunderstanding, and that is absolutely not the sort of thing that people should be judged on. There's no need to valorize her. This incident does not appear to say anything useful about the nature of society. People are going to get into silly arguments, and we should be able to handle that fact without resorting to tribal warfare.
I think it says a lot about society that random people are victims of this kind of thing on a regular basis. She lost her job and had to delete her socials. Her husband had to delete his socials too. There is still an active mob of people who are seemingly trying to kill her over a bicycle rental. She won't get her job back. The hospital is not going to face any consequences. Nor are the young men, or the hate mob on Twitter. I think that says a lot about American society.
Having watched a number of these, I think it's entirely possible that she will get her job back, and that within a month this will mostly be behind her. I've seen no evidence anyone is actually trying to kill her. The hospital definately will not face consequences, as they've done nothing really wrong. It's not entirely clear that the young men did anything wrong either.
The hate mob is absolutely the problem, and its existence says woeful things about our society's future. Still, it could be at least a little worse.
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Real freedom is being able to express your real feelings. Like crying for help when you're being accosted. Would any sane society set up a system where six-month pregnant nurses have to make snap decisions in the face of simultaneous physical and social threats, and then punish them for crying? This is just more evidence that America is not a free country (anymore?) and is also no longer a serious country. (This is a deeply satisfying revelation for me personally, because it demonstrates that all the people in my life who though I was a "threat to women" due to my slight awkwardness... well this is evidence that those people are literally insane.)
That is an interesting one. There's the Poisoned Skittles idea...which is that predators that are new to being predators are going to be jittery. And then there's the idea that women are more vulnerable than men and so an awkward man (who might be totally harmless) is something to be afraid of. How would you feel if you were around, say, a guy like the Mountain, or prime Shaquille O'Neil, or some other huge, fast monster of a man that could trivially overpower you. And: he's gay. And awkward. Maybe guys like that need to work hard, signal that they're not going to be threats or pursue sex or relationships...in exchange for ordinary social inclusion.
On the other hand: we don't have enough information to make a determination on who was trying to get over on whom; however, the youths did not handle the situation well. He should not have been that close to her; if the bike really was his and he needed to get it returned he should have taken control of the bike, perhaps by pushing the rear wheel or seat. Then, he should have allowed her to use the bike, whether he got there first or not. He's a strong young man; she's a pregnant woman; it is not a good look for him to get in an argument over something like that.
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