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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023

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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.

  • -29

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.

Because this woman is almost certainly part of the problem. Yes, yes, we don’t know, but do you really think she’s voting Republican? You think she has a Blue Lives Matter flag in her living room? I’d eat every hat I own if she did.

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.

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.

the hard times were going to create strong men

I'm pretty sure that's been fairly strongly debunked.

cyclical history as an idea has been falsified

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.

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.

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.