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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024

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Rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment (including on college campuses) are all types of crime. School shootings are crimes. Hate crimes are crimes (the hint is in the name). Revenge porn and certain kinds of cyberbullying are crimes in many jurisdictions.

Just the usual Who? Whom?, where persons who consider themselves Empathetic care only for the victims of crime depending on who the perpetrator and victim are (and often care more for the perpetrators than the victims) and are somehow suddenly devoid of Empathy and compassion when it comes to understanding someone who’s wary of crime in general.

Crimes where stereotypically (regardless of the actual statistical accuracy) the perpetrator is white or a man and/or the victim is a non-Asian minority or a woman are Problematic in ways that crime in general is not. #StopAsianHate started off strong when the acts of hatred were blamed on racist white MAGA men; it quickly got disappeared when video after video showed who the actual perpetrators were.

Moreover, it makes far more statistical sense to be afraid of crime in general than to be afraid of any particular subtype of crime. A woman's likelihood of being raped in a calendar year cannot be higher than her probability of being raped or mugged or having her car stolen etc. If you are X% scared of being a victim of a specific type of crime, you should be >X% scared of being a victim of any kind of crime, as there is no circumstance in which the former is more likely to befall you than the latter. This is just basic statistics.

Indeed, an amusing instance of Linda the Feminist Bank Teller.

The idea that a disproportionate share of hate crimes or active shooter-style school shootings are committed by white men is a myth that stubbornly refuses to die.

There was a recent shooting by a transman and one by a teenage girl. Nothing wholesome like some gender diversity.

In addition to the selective empathy of Kind and Decent Human Beings, also amusing is the irony that the type of people who pride themselves on being interested in other people—especially from other cultures—are so often ignorant of other people and other cultures. Many Latin American cities, for instance, feature houses with spiky fences and barred windows, rifle-in-hand military/police scattered around places from ATMs to McDonalds. Clearly these stupid Latinx need some tsk-tsking from a smug effete western leftist calling them paranoid pussies and fascist bootlickers. Don’t they know how unwelcome, uninclusive, and inaccessible their houses and public spaces feel to Persons of Justice Involvement?

Conjunction fallacy was the exact one I was looking for while writing up the post, thank you!