Antisemitism in Hungary

 When you read about antisemitism in Europe, Hungary always comes up in online conversations: the accepted wisdom (for whatever reason...) is that Hungary is a very antisemitic country. The fact that there are hardly any incidents (-and none of them were violent, compared to the "non-antisemitic" UK), does not really matter.

Interestingly, certain rabbis have a very opposing view to this narrative. Perhaps we should listen to them.

Female hunters and how to claim victory over the Patriarchy

 

Apparently women can hunt. Who would have thought? Seriously, here we are, sitting in our male privilege, telling women to go to the kitchen, and boom, a news like this happens.

Damn. It is a good thing that all these popular science portals present it in an easy-to-digest way, already positioned for fitting into the narrative of identity politics so popular nowdays, posted on their facebook pages with short tags, like "sexist scientists". Or with "The idea that men always hunted and women gathered in ancient hunter-gatherer societies is a myth."

Well, of course it is a fucking myth. It is a myth you just made up, because a cursory glance at the academic papers and wikipedia will tell you that the whole issue of sexual division of labor was not viewed in this simplistic, "Patriarchic" manner by all those sexist, white male scientist people. Let's also ignore the fact that present hunter-gatherer societies (you know, what researchers used as the closest available to model how early humans lived) also very much have gender roles present (as the author of the original paper admits). Let's also ignore the fact that it is not actually a clear-cut evidence, and 'a few female hunters' does not equal to the sweeping generalizations even the study's authors are making (which is kind of telling about their findings... somehow I do not believe they can be partial when they say things like this: "Labor practices among recent hunter-gatherer societies are highly gendered, which might lead some to believe that sexist inequalities in things like pay or rank are somehow ‘natural.’ But it’s now clear that sexual division of labor was fundamentally different — likely more equitable — in our species’ deep hunter-gatherer past". This sounds like some activism mixed with science to me. I would also like to get an explanation how this "genderization" happened in all known stone-age level societies present on this globe.) To be honest, even some common sense thinking would tell you not to expect strict gender roles in a society that is balancing on the edge of survival: whomever can, will hunt. Nobody will tell a female hunter not to hunt when she brings home an elk.

But this, of course is beside the point. Let's ignore the decades-long scientific discussion. What we need is articles showing how we stick it to the Patriarchy, so people who have absolutely no fucking clue what science is can happily share it on their facebook, generate clicks, and, as a side-effect fight the gender wars which are only deepening the fissures in our societies. (Just reading those posts will melt your brain, by the way. People did find a way to inject some anti-European -anty white under a more palpatable name- sentiments there as well if the whole male-female discussion was not enough for you.)

Finding your backbone

So apparently White House reporters now started to ask difficult questions from the President. Like why he was lying during Trump's presidency. (Sorry for the belayed post, life and all takes precedence.)

 Which is all nice and everything, however, where were these very same reporters in 2002 when a different president (who was then looking like an absolute dolt, but compared to this one he was an intellectual giant) was lying about the reasons of a war of aggression - you know, something international law recognizes as a war crime. Only a comedian had enough balls to say uncomfortable things in front of the president.

There has been a really pathological interplay between politicians and the journalists who were supposed to keep them on their toes: in exchange for access, they agreed not to ask them difficult questions. This abandonment of their duty, this perversion of everything what journalism stands for had a major role in the rise of Trump.

So I guess congratulations, Huffpost reporter, you are awesome, but don't suck your own dick just yet. Your whole profession has failed in their one role that mattered (and no, it was not "make money for investors"). You are about fourty years too late.

 

When negative stereotypes are OK

 This has really been bothering me for a while. You keep reading how stereotypes are bad (even good ones), now D&D has done the right thing (depending on your point of view) and removed negative race ability score modifiers  (whatever they might be -but what is important to be more inclusive and not to hurt our Orc and  goblin player's feelings)…

But every time you read an article about abuse -physical or mental- it is almost guaranteed the photos will show a female victim and a male abuser.

Just do a search:

This article has links to further articles which all show female victims, and if shown, male perpetrators. IKEA? But of course!

The Guardian is  obviously following this trend -how could they not? Psychology Today?  Of course Always… 

Foundations? Obviously

There was one exception I found in this non-representative search. One.

This article does not even try… it flat out uses the male pronoun.

Why is this a problem? Well, apart from the usual "stereotyping hurts, it is bad, you should not do it" any time it comes up with anyone who is not white and male (but any time you complain when it is about white males, you get the "you are such a snowflake" comments), it does help pushing a false narrative of male perpetrators and female victims. (Even when it is about male victims, it is somehow the Patriarchy's fault...) This has real-world consequences on how society relates to male victims (or men accused of being perpetrators) - as it was  many times discussed even on these pages. 

But apparently this does not really ring the alarm bells the same way as stereotyping Orcs or Sand People does. 

Depp and Heard again - #believeallwomen and the hypocrisy of reporting

I know. It is a bit tiring to talk about these two: this mess of a trial did bring out a lot of dirty laundry apart from the whole domestic violence issue which makes you really re-evaluate what you feel about the rich and privileged. In short: not good. They are frankly disgusting, and it is obscene how much money they waste on menial, stupid things. But bear with me; this Depp vs Heard situation is a perfect demonstration of what is wrong with today's so-called progressives.

Variety came out with an article discussing whether Depp's career survives this trial, and there were a couple of issues I could not help but notice.

Let's forget the fact that the author only took look at this mess from one perspective: Amber Heard's. We can't even entertain the notion that perhaps Depp may be innocent, and the woman is lying. In fact, all the people who are quoted are staunchly on the side of Heard.

But the real interesting part comes when Allred is quoted. You know, when people say #believeinallwomen was never about believing whatever women said? Well, this is what Allred has to say about this

“I look forward to the day where it doesn’t take 10 or 20 women for one women to be believed, but I’m still not sure if that’s going to be enough,” Allred says. “We’ll have to see how far we’ve really come in 2020. As much as we think we’re progressive, culturally, there is still a lot of bias against women – especially if she makes any accusation against a man, and especially if that man is a celebrity.”

So I guess no. It does mean that progress is when a woman accuses someone we automatically believe her, no trial necessary.

This is an interesting take in light of all the insistences to the contrary; I suspect this really is what these progressive fourth wave feminists truly believe. (But now desperately deny. Allred did not get the memo, apparently.)

The article is problematic from another angle as well. Nowhere is it discussed that Depp lost tremendous amount of money and a lot of opportunities due to mere accusations, had petitions to cancel his contract as a Dior celebrity, and overall his reputation took a deep dive, while Heard is still a Human Rights Champion for the Stand Up for Human Rights campaign by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) ambassador, and also is a L'Oreal spokesperson.

The sheer double standards of this does not occur for the author. It seems like the media is creating a reality independent of facts -a reality, that is more real than facts are, nevertheless. 

Johnny Depp, Amber Heard, the issue of domestic violence, and the motte-and-bailey fallacy at work

It is interesting how even the wokest papers change their tones without acknowledging how they jumped the gun in the past.

It seems like in the Depp-Heard soap opera it was the woman who was abusive, not the man -hardly the stereotype The Guardian likes to discuss, but something unsurprising if you read a little bit about domestic violence in peer reviewed papers.

In the past they were quite happy to condemn Depp as a wife-beater based on hearsay. (There are a lot of articles which take his guilt -or any other men's guilt in domestic violence or rape cases- as a fact; you can search for them for your heart's desire. Start with Mattess Girl if you want to see something really surreal -and people are still defending her.)

#Believeallwomen, right? Oh, wait, now it is a right-wing trap. We never said that. Exept we still do… And yes, I do understand that a couple of people's statements cannot be used to indict a whole group -fourth wave feminists, in this case- except if the group in question does not actually stand up against these individuals. When that does not happen you may start to think that these statements do reflect on the group as a whole. Normally the most vocal fourth wave feminists do not actually disavow outrageous statements made in the name of feminism.

 

It is the perfect example of the motte-and-bailey fallacy: make an outrageous, indefensible claim, and then fall back to an uncontroversial one, claiming you never thought otherwise. (This is when the whole "we did not say that, and we are not responsible for what others have said" routine comes into play.)

The truth remains: somehow lately the Guardian talks about how difficult it is to determine who is telling the truth in these cases (when it is not blaming the victim, of course), while, as mentioned, they were quite ready to declare guilt previously based on hearsay. It is unfortunate for the paper that in this particular case it is really not that hard to determine potential guilt from the evidence presented... it is not merely he-said-she-said: Depp has testimonies, CCTV evidence and doctor's statements at his disposal, and Heard seemed to be quite irrational during her testimonies, going as far as to seemingly fabricating stories of past abuse by Depp.

Now that the evidence is weighted against Heard, now it is suddenly difficult to determine who the guilty party is. Now we do not believe the victim (Depp in this case), possibly because he has a penis and we only believe what women say, since women, as we all know, never lie about these matters. (They do not lie especially when they have something to gain from lying as we know, for example during divorce proceedings… Women are like that. Honest to the fault.) The same thing was going on in the Hungarian News portal, Index.hu. From the absolute certainly of Depp's guilt we arrived to the "well, they both are abusers, it was a toxic relationship" in a couple of weeks. The narrative changes subtly but the overall message does not.

Nice. I guess we can count this as progress.

New York Times: Europe Said It Was Pandemic-Ready. Pride Was Its Downfall

So the New York Times published a deep article about how Europe, as one single entity, has failed in its response to the pandemic.

I mean what the actual fuck. Is this what goes as journalism these days? Simply bunch together a whole range of countries regardless of how successful they were in responding to the pandemic, and make sweeping generalizations based on three?

Europe is apparently Britain, France and Italy. That's it. The rest is inconsequential -after all, they do not support our narrative, so we can safely ignore them. Even Germany only got a cursory mention, even though their response was not good, but it was not the unadulterated shitfest the UK managed to do.

The fact that many European countries (mostly the Eastern members of the EU -figure that) DID respond successfully, is completely forgotten.

Journalism these days are on the level of high school papers. And you wonder why people do not trust these papers any more, turn to 'alternative' sources. At least the Karens railing against wearking masks on Facebook are a bit more entertaining than this elitist crap. Not since 2002 do I trust anything the NYT writes, because they showed their colors publishing the obvious lies about Saddam's WMDs to trump up support for the war, but this article was just insultingly stupid.