The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Violence Against Women Update

Posted on | August 7, 2021 | Comments Off on Violence Against Women Update

In the comments on Friday morning’s post (“The Dangerous Clichés of ‘Empowerment’”), someone mentioned the phrase “rationalization hamster” as a description of the way women justify bad decisions such as getting a tattoo on your cleavage or dating a convicted felon.

These two examples of bad decisions are not chosen entirely at random, but we’ll get to that part in a few minutes. First, I want to digress to explain my habitual tendency to follow research down weird paths, bringing me to surprising destinations. When I started Googling the phrase “rationalization hamster,” one of the links was to male feminist David Futrelle’s site. So I then spent some time Googling about Futrelle, who once up a time was actually a journalist, a staff writer for Money magazine, but then became obsessed with the “manosphere” and now spends all his time writing about anonymous incels on Reddit. This in turn led me to Futrelle’s review of a book by Laura Bates called The Men Who Hate Women. So then I found an interview with Laura Bates, in which she was asked, “Why as an issue is misogynistic extremism still not being taken seriously?”

I think that there’s a number of reasons. The first is that it’s a relatively emerging threat in terms of mass killings, so people are failing to join the dots and make the connections between them. But I think a big part of it is that misogyny is so normalised in our society that we really struggle to recognise this as something extreme. We are so used to women being murdered by men. One woman is killed on average every three days by a male current or former partner in the UK — that is literally the backdrop to our daily life. So I think we struggle to see these as atrocities and it is a huge blind spot. It’s also because of who often commits these offences — educated white men and so the criminal justice system finds excuses for them. Look at the recent Georgia shooter for example. The police officer giving a press conference explained, ‘He was having a bad day’, after he had massacred eight people including six asian women. The way in which we collectively excuse, condone, normalise and ignore these white men when they commit mass shootings and terror atrocities really hampers us as a society in tackling the problem.

Some of these assertions bothered me. Are we really “so used to women being murdered by men” that we have a “blind spot” toward such crimes? And what about this “every three days” statistic about women in the UK being killed by male partners? The population of the United Kingdom is about 67 million, so if there are about 34 million women in the UK, and if there are about 120 women killed by male partners annually, how many zeroes after the decimal point are needed to express that as a statistical probability of risk? Do the math, see, and you realize that men murdering women isn’t a crime so common as to be “normalized,” rather that such murders are relatively rare. Contrary to Ms. Bates’s claim, we are not “so used to women being murdered by men.” Even in places where murder is astonishingly common (e.g., Chicago), we find that males are disproportionately the victims. Of the 2,660 people shot in Chicago so far this year, 2,158 (81%) were male. Of the 459 who died from gunshot wounds in Chicago, 398 (85%) were male, so that the male-female ratio of victims is nearly 6-to-1. And 83% of the victims were black.

This is another problem with Laura Bates’s claims. Is it really true that these crimes are “often” committed by “educated white men”? I’m pretty sure university graduates aren’t doing most of the drive-by shootings in Chicago, and I don’t believe “educated white men” are disproportionately overrepresented in domestic-violence incidents. Perhaps some sociology student can dig up the actual data on this, but what Laura Bates is doing (and what David Futrelle praises her for doing) is a familiar trick of propaganda: Find a scary-sounding statistic — every three days a woman in the UK is killed by her male partner — and then assert that this represents a social problem (misogyny) which is illustrated by atypical examples, e.g., “incel” Elliot Rodger on a shooting rampage. This tendentious method is then used to argue that we must suppress “hate speech,” because misogyny is causing the mass murder of women.

It should not be necessary to explain why this argument is invalid, but because logic is no longer taught in our schools, I’ll do it anyway. Most obvious is the fact that among the thousands of guys spewing “misogyny” on the Internet — the Reddit creeps with whom David Futrelle is obsessed — certainly more than 90% of them will never commit an act of criminal violence against a woman. Most people who spout offensive nonsense on the Internet are not violent criminals, and the obverse is also true: Most violent criminals don’t spout offensive nonsense on the Internet. That is to say, of the total number of men who commit violence against women in any given year, only the tiniest fraction of a single percentage point of them have ever visited any of the “manosphere” forums that David Futrelle writes about. If you could illustrate this with a Venn diagram, set A representing “Guys Who Hang Out on Manosphere Sites” and set B representing “Men Who Perpetrate Violence Against Women,” the set AB would be so small as to be statistically insignificant.

In a nation of 325 million people, however, statistically rare incidents may happen on a monthly basis. I have previously illustrated this by compiling “The Year in Dog Sex” — at least 11 people were prosecuted for having sex with dogs in 2016. And this explains how easy it is to exaggerate the danger of “incel” murders. No matter how statistically rare these incidents may be, there are certain to be at least a handful of cases that fit within that definition every year, and if these cases get enough publicity from the national media, it can be made to seem as if “incels” represent a dangerous terrorist threat, but the media could do the same thing with bestiality, if it suited their purposes.

So, having made that 1,000-word digression, we now return to the main topic, Joana Peca of St. Petersburg, Florida.

The tattoo on her (remarkably abundant) cleavage could be cited as evidence of Joana Peca’s defective judgment. The “rationalization hamster” must have run itself silly attempting to justify such a choice. And I’m sure that David Futrelle and Laura Bates would accuse me of misogyny merely for calling attention to this, because any criticism of any woman for any reason is always misogyny, according to feminist logic. “Equality” seems to require that women go through life without ever encountering negative feedback, no matter how foolish or harmful their actions may be, so the effect of feminism in public discourse is to make women off-limits to criticism (unless they vote Republican).

The problem with this, you see, is that without feedback — including the kind of feedback that might persuade a woman not to get tattoos on her breasts — all sorts of foolish behavior are likely to proliferate because, without critical feedback, bad judgment tends to become generalized.

Say hello to Benjamin Robert “Bambi” Williams, age 38:

Williams has a Pinellas County arrest record that spans about 20 years. He has been arrested in cases ranging from grand theft auto, possession of drugs with intent to sell, robbery and fleeing police. He was most recently arrested on charges of being a felon in possession of a firearm in January 2020. The state attorney’s office did not seek a prosecution.
In 2007, Williams was arrested on charges of principle to attempted murder and strong-arm robbery, but those charges were dismissed, court records show.

Now, if you had a daughter, wouldn’t you advise her to avoid associating with anyone who had such an extensive criminal record? Yes, but then again, if she’s got already tattoos on her cleavage . . .

Detectives have identified Benjamin Robert Williams aka “Bambi” (DOB 12/31/1982) as the suspect in Saturday’s (July 31, 2021) shooting death of Joana Peca.
Williams and Peca were involved in a romantic relationship and had a baby together. Peca was holding the infant when Williams shot her multiple times in the face. Her older child was sitting in the backseat during the shooting.
A warrant has been issued for William’s arrest and SPPD is actively searching for him. Crime Stoppers is offering up to $5000 for information that leads to an arrest.
Benjamin Williams is deemed to be armed and dangerous.
He is linked to several open homicide investigations.

More detail about the death of Joana Peca:

Peca was found dead in the car, and the children did not suffer any physical injuries, which took place just outside Woodlawn Cemetery.
At the time of the shooting, Peca’s [infant] who she shared with Williams was sitting on her lap while her older child, a 4 year old from another relationship, was in the back seat. The woman was shot multiple times in the face before Williams fled the scene police said in a Facebook release.
‘The children were unharmed but terrified at what had just happened,’ said Sandra Bentil, a spokeswoman for the St. Petersburg Police Department, according to WTVT. . . .
St. Petersburg Police Chief Anthony Holloway told ABC Action News that Williams lured Peca to the cemetery.
‘He called her and asked her to meet him at that location cause she was bringing the children to him to see,’ Holloway said. ‘Once they got to that location that’s when he decided to gun her down.’

“Meet me at the cemetery,” says the career criminal, and what kind of fool would accept this invitation? Alas, a dead fool, one whose “rationalization hamster” was running an endless marathon.

 

The fugitive killer Benjamin Robert “Bambi” Williams wasn’t spewing misogynistic nonsense on the “manosphere” sites that David Futrelle writes about. He wasn’t an “incel” or one of those “educated white males” that Laura Bates warns about. No, he was merely a regular criminal, “linked to several open homicide investigations,” and maybe he should have been locked up in prison a long time ago, but this is just more violence against women feminists won’t notice, for some reason.




 

Category: Florida, Violence Against Women

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