The Crowhill Journal

This is pretty cool.

I heard a discussion on the news tonight where a woman was asked for proof that it’s a man’s world.

She said (I’m quoting from memory) “a lot of my male colleagues were promoted ahead of me.”

Why do we put up with this sort of nonsense?

If a cop pulls me over, and I think he was a jerk, I say, “Gee, that cop was a jerk.”

But if a woman gets pulled over by a cop, and she thinks he was a jerk, she says, “that cop was sexist.”

You’ve probably heard that dentists commit suicide at a disproportionately high level. Whether that’s actually true is subject to debate, but for my purposes here it doesn’t matter.

When I was a kid, my sister had this theory (I think it was mostly a joke) about why dentists allegedly commit suicide at a high rate. She said they’re getting in close with people, and when you’re that close to someone you have an urge either to kiss them or to kill them. Suicide is a consequence of that daily tension!

Again, I think she was joking, but there’s an underlying lesson there — i.e., there are situations that mix and confuse our sense of distance with our sense of intimacy.

I thought of that when I heard a comment about the problem with Twitter.

In normal life, you don’t have many conversations with random strangers, and when you do, it’s about the weather, or directions, or something like that. You don’t talk about controversial issues.

On Twitter, you do precisely that. So it could be that part of the problem with Twitter is the disconnect between intimacy and distance.

Consider how easy it is to get angry with other drivers when you feel as if they’ve slighted you, or didn’t follow the rules. You would never get that angry in a crowd of people, and certainly not among people you know. The problem is the sense of anonymity you have when you’re driving. You don’t know them and they don’t know you.

It may be that Twitter is the perfect storm of all these things. You feel anonymous, but too close. You’re talking to strangers about intimate things. When someone is mean, if feels like a friend has betrayed you. It’s a toxic mix that our brains aren’t trained to handle.

What do you think of this?

Lawyer Roy Den Hollander, who shot federal judge’s family, specialized in ‘anti-feminist’ lawsuits, had cancer

Whenever there’s a horrible crime, people have the natural but kinda weird hope that the perpetrator was from “the other side.”

Somebody shoots up a school, or commits some hideous crime, and while we all feel terrible about the tragedy, we also have this secret (or not so secret) wish that the bad guy was from the other party, or other ideology, or whatever.

It’s natural, because we like to think that “our side” is good and righteous, while the other side is sick and twisted and evil.

This is a stupid reaction because everybody is sick and twisted and evil, and no matter how you divide up society, you’re going to get bad eggs in every group.

When you see a horrible act committed by the other side, you think, “see, I told you! This is what their hateful rhetoric leads to!” But when someone from your side commits a crime, you think, “there are crazy people everywhere.”

We need to stop that.

There are ideologies out there that promote violence, and we need to keep an eye on those people. But it’s another thing to assume that an ideology promotes violence, and that seems to happen far too often.

This guy was an anti-feminist. Does anti-feminism promote violence? I’m sure there’s some gender theorist out there who’s made that case, and I suspect the media will come up with a way to blame this on their favorite bogeymen.