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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.

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.

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.