On Bears, Reincarnation and How Apparently the "Racial Reckoning" is Decidedly Over
It's been a weird week on the internet folks, strap in.
This past week has seen more than its fair share of wackiness. This is a quick rundown.
Bears, Not Diamonds, Are a Woman’s Best Friend.
The very serious issue of domestic and sexual violence got very unserious treatment with bear discourse. The essence of this, in case you missed it (and bless you if you did), was that if women were walking along a hiking trail, they’d feel safer coming into contact with a bear than with an unknown male on the same hiking trail. The gist of this is that far more women are killed by men than are killed by bears. This is technically true.
Of course, this is because women spend 0 time with bears and lots of time with men some of whom, sure, are absolutely awful. But the whole analogy was goofy on two levels. First, of course any given bear is more dangerous than any given man on a hiking trail. To illustrate, we have to standardize the scenario. Cross a random dude’s path from 20 feet on a hiking trail, well that dude is probably also out for a hike and 99.999% of the time the woman will be fine. Cross a random brown bear at 20 feet on a hiking trail and you’re pretty well screwed. Fortunately, there are only about 55k brown/grizzly bears in the US, so yes, bear attacks are pretty rare. But this is a base rate fallacy that tells us nothing about the relative dangerousness of bears and humans.
Second…the hypothetical works in reverse too. More men are killed by women than they are by bears. Should men quiver in fear of female violence on the hiking trail? Should we all go live with bears?
People will inevitably retort, “Well, why do you think women are so scared of men?” Maybe because you keep telling them they’re safer with bears? We should definitely talk openly about sexual violence…but we can also admit that some of that conversation has gotten less-than-constructive.
Look, sex-based violence is a serious issue, one that deserves considered treatment. It’s also a nuanced issue (although men are overwhelmingly perpetrators of sexual violence, for domestic violence, considerable evidence suggests women perpetrate this as much as men). Most violence occurs within relationships, not on random hiking trails. But these kinds of silly internet memes mostly serve for self-aggrandizement. Inevitably we’ll get the Good White Men ™ loudly proclaiming the dangerousness of their own kind (but not them personally, of course). These memes are a clever mix of goofiness with moral sanctimoniousness that seem to dare people to point out the obvious logical flaws, only to be accused of being sexist or whatever. But yes, it’s entirely possible for an issue to be an important one and, simultaneously, the way people are talking about it to be absolutely brain dead.
Credulous Parents.
Also, this week the Washington Post created a minor stir when they released an article that seemed to give credence to the idea that some children might be remembering past lives. Beautifully written by Caitlin Gibson, it’s nonetheless a weird take…some kids churn up some vague details that happen to distantly match, say, some real-life Holocaust survivor (“Hey this kid remembers the name Nina and some numbers on her arm…we got any of those in the historical record?”) The parents, and some scholars apparently, begin to wonder…could this actually be reincarnation?
No. Most likely someone left the TV on with background CNN during Holocaust Remembrance Day or something. Even the article acknowledges these cases are more common in cultures that believe in reincarnation, something that should be a red flag (if reincarnation were a real phenomenon culture wouldn’t matter for who experiences it). And why is no one ever the reincarnation of an average plumber to died of heart disease on his couch while watching A-Team reruns? The whole article has a but what if reincarnation is real? undercurrent to it which is a bit off-putting. That’s just not how science works. As they say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and there’s really none on display here. But at least it was a break from wall-to-wall campus protest coverage. Speaking of which…
I guess it’s Ok to Scream at Black Dudes Now?
…apparently the 2020 “racial reckoning” is officially cancelled. I say this given the plethora of rich white kids screaming in the faces of (and sometimes assaulting) black dudes, whether maintenance staff, cops, or university provosts. That’s a pretty stark turn from the summer of 2020, when rich white folks were standing in line to wash black people’s feet and we got cringe images like this one:
Look, nobody should be screaming in anyone’s face. It’s actually an awful strategy for protestors to seem this unhinged. But I think this points out how vacuous the 2020 “racial reckoning” was and how equally vacuous much of the campus protests today are. In the end, most of these exercises have little to do with any global issue, and merely offer bored, entitled people an opportunity to LARP as some kind of hero even as they’re calling on their universities to cater their protest.
Fortunately, I think we’ve learned from 2020 that even a passionate mass protest movement can be blatantly wrong on the issue they’re protesting (claims of “systemic racism”, even in policing, proved to be nonsense). I don’t think anyone is taking these campus protesters very seriously…and given their volte face on the cause du jour from 2020, why should we?
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This post originally appeared in Professor Ferguson’s Substack Secrets of Grimoire Manor
Thanks for reading. For more from this author, read No, Black Men Are Not Inherently More Violent
BREAKING NEWS:
A new long-form essay by Dr. M - Fulcrum and Pivot: The New Left Remaking of Toronto School Policy
James Pew has contributed a chapter to the new book Grave Error: How The Media Misled us (And the Truth about Residential Schools). You can read about it here - The Rise of Independent Canadian Researchers
Also, for more evidence of the ideological indoctrination in Canadian education, read Yes, schools are indoctrinating kids! And also, Yes, The University is an Indoctrination Camp!
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I recently read an article that pointed out that protesters have apparently moved on from climate change as well, although that's supposedly the most urgent issue as the planet is burning....or something like that
When you say women perpetrate domestic violence "as much as men", do you just not care about the relative rates at which women are KILLED by their male partners versus men being killled by their female partners? How often do men land their girlfriends and wives in the hospital vs. the reverse? Do you actually think the same kinds of violence are being measured in that stat? Or is it that you somehow think you are being cute or funny and you are smirking when you put that link in? What actually is the matter with you?