Actually do something?
Disturbing. Really disturbing. The whole and only point is to frighten people, to make them terrified and upset and even bereft (the one where he grabs a woman’s small dog and dashes off with it). The whole and only point is to make people miserable, and this vile man giggles like a loon the entire time.
There are sadists in the world; did I not know that? I did know it. I guess it’s the social media thing – now there are sadists in the world who share their sadism on TikTok. Yay human progress.
He comes back later and hands over the dog, giggling sadistically.
Women get arrested for saying men are not women, and this guy bounces around London free as a bird.
This is so weird. How is he not getting arrested?
Meanwhile, in similar news from the other side of the pond, a group of five adolescent males try to take a hire bike from a pregnant woman who has just hired it and — ludicrously — much of the mainstream media leaps to the conclusion that the woman is the one at fault!
How warped does the world-view of the media have to be that it considers it even remotely plausible that a lone woman (let alone a woman 6-months pregnant) would try to mug a group of five bigger, stronger, adolescent males? How often has that happened in all of recorded history?
Then, after a couple of days of criticism of the woman (she’s suspended from her job and in hiding), after the media grudgingly admit that receipts show that the woman was indeed in the right, there’s then absolutely zero criticism of the boys for attempting to steal her bike.
… as though that’s just expected and routine. But then, if it’s expected and routine, why did the media discount that possibility from the outset? Baffling.
I begin to believe the script for our current world has been written by the Marquis de Sade, writing for Mad Magazine.
Well, duh, Coel. She was crying white women’s tears.
On a lark, I described the incident and the media response to ChatGPT (in a completely fresh context) and told it, “Analyze this scenario from the perspectives of (1) Critical Social Justice, (2) Critical Race Theory, and (3) Critical Whiteness Studies. According to each field, who was in the right, who was exercising systemic power, and how should the media have reported the incident? Then contrast these conclusions with those of traditional liberalism, 2nd wave feminism, and Civil Rights Era activism.”
This was its response verbatim:
@Coel,
Source?
I can’t find a single decent source reporting on this story.
Found one: CBS:
https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/citi-bike-fight-video-woman-attorney/
I can’t find enough non-rabid reporting on this story to figure out what really happened. It seems to be angry shouters in all directions.
Here’s the video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlJ71WfwCfc
I can’t tell who’s the asshole here. It’s not at all clear why she keeps yelling “Help!!”
That nurse has since come out with receipts, showing she was the hirer of that bike and the ladz recorded themselves taking it from her while framing her as the ‘karen’ crying white female tears, which we know to be highly poisonous.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaQQ-n8w_0I
So, a group of large men approached a pregnant doctor as she is about to go home, surrounded her, pressured her to relinquish the bike she had hired, and framed her distress as ‘weaponising’ tears against them. And because the woke have gone mad, this framing is unquestioningly accepted and she is hounded across social media.
And NBC investigated and confirmed that she had the confirmation number for that bike.
I guess that makes sense of her yelling – there wasn’t anything else she could do. Apparently it’s a known ploy: wait until someone picks up the bike then grab it. Charming.
What bothers me most is the immediate acceptance of the assertion that the woman was the one at fault, that worse she is intrinsically evil and deserves nothing short of social annihilation.
The CRT/WS/intersectionality view of things is totalizing. It pushes out all other viewpoints. When you just look at the video, there’s no ambiguity at all about what’s going on. Even if she weren’t pregnant, even if she were some sort of racist bike thief, that’s a group of men, and they’re making obvious use of their physical superiority in a very threatening manner. Like, I don’t give two corn-studded shits about the bike. There are things that men should not do.
Thanks for the links. It’s hard to look at that video and imagine any scenario in which she isn’t the victim.
Too far in your description, I think. I would describe this as: “In a viral dispute between a group of young black adolescents and a pregnant woman over a rental bike, much of the mainstream media leaps to the conclusion that the woman is the one at fault!”
Fact is, we simply do NOT know from the video who is the one at fault (in terms of taking a bike that wasn’t theirs to take). The recording gives us no information about what happened prior, only about what happened after the dispute began–and nothing in it would tell me who was responsible. I agree that the media has immediately leapt to the assumption that the woman was at fault, but I’d say it’s just as big an error to assume that the woman was totally blameless, too.
And since I started writing that post in the wee hours, y’all have found much more information–okay, yeah, the guys were to blame, and I withdraw my objections.
@Freemage:
Indeed true. The story here isn’t really the bike theft (an attempted bike theft would only be news in the parish magazine of the smallest of rural villages), the story is the media reaction.
As just one item, all the way across the Atlantic in the UK The Independent (a mainstream newspaper) led with the headline: “New York health worker placed on leave after falsely accusing Black man of bike theft”. No caveats there. (It seems they have now deleted this article without even placing a notice of this.)
Given the utter unlikelihood of a lone pregnant woman deciding to try to steal a bike by arm-wrestling it off a group of five, bigger, stronger males, the only way they could leap to that conclusion is through a worldview of “blacks always good, blacks never to blame; whites always bad, whites always to blame”.
And yet we’re also supposed to accept that America is “systemically racist” against blacks (despite there being rather little evidence of that these days).
This insanity over race in the US these days is spilling over into the UK and other Western countries. It’s already affected most universities, the media, and similar institutions.
PS … if only the “CitiBike Karen” had been a “transwoman” rather than a woman. It would be fun watching the media adding up oppression points to work out which way to spin that one.
It occurs to me that Genderism and Critical Whiteness Studies impinge on women’s and girls’ safety in the same way. In the former, actual females are told that their self-defense impulses and mechanisms are transphobic manifestations of systemic cisnormativity, and the proper response is to repress such impulses when faced with, say, obvious males where males should not be. In CWS, females are told that their self-defense impulses and mechanisms are racist manifestations of systemic white supremacy, and the proper response is to repress such impulses when faced with, say, males acting in overtly threatening ways typical of male violence against women and girls. In both cases, the effect is the same: a woman or girl is made to feel shame for her normal, healthy, adaptive instincts for self-preservation, and she’s made to fear the consequences of giving voice to her self-interest. The result is demoralization and loss of her sense of agency. As each ideology spreads, the expectation of social censure becomes stronger and more reliable. Eventually every woman and girl is left between Scylla and Charybdis, between male violence and social punishment.
Don’t women and girls already have a hard enough time staying safe, a hard enough time speaking up, a hard enough time being heard? Doesn’t the well-being of half of humanity merit some consideration?
Ah, but no, that’s the problem, isn’t it? Neither male nor female is a small population subset, and the currently ascendent moral intuition is that bigger groups’ interests must yield to smaller groups’. Consideration of the majority, even (or perhaps especially) in a raw consequentialist frame, is presumed a priori to be a tyranny of the majority. It’s precisely because subsets like male and female are large that they are inextricable from systemic power and privilege. That power and privilege must be examined Critically, interrogated, disrupted, and dismantled. Members of privileged groups cannot see these systems in action, because the systems are constructed to be memetically resilient, their concepts and epistemologies structured so as to exclude any other paradigms. Women and girls must therefore rely entirely upon the epistemic charity of the minority groups they marginalize through systemic violence.
And so to the shame and fear and impotence cultivated by these ideologies in women and girls, we must add the result of gaslighting: learned dependence and distrust of self, the. Haven’t women and girls been made dependent long enough? Hasn’t the female mind been denigrated enough, been reduced to mere emotion and intuition enough?
I tend to think so. But what do I know? I guess nothing. After all, I’m a member of a privileged majority, so I can’t know and have no right to speak. Better check my privilege, educate myself, do The Work, and do better.
Or maybe that’s horseshit stacked so high that it would’ve counted as two of Heracles’s labors.
Not surprised that her behavior is being picked and pecked over while the behavior the five young men is not be questioned. I mean, we can’t suggest that the man holding onto the bike that she rented to keep her from leaving is a form of kidnapping. Or suggest that the fellow laughing about how if she doesn’t calm down then her “baby going to be retarded” is enjoying his abuse of her. Dare we even question what the plan was for the bike if these guys could have stolen it from her? Was one guy going to ride it or were they going to take turns or are they a team of acrobats who would all ride the bike at once?
Guess “karen hunting” is the new sport against women to keep us from getting uppity and thinking that we are actually human beings.