January 6, 2013

Outrage on Outrage

Wasn’t it depressing?

What?

The whole Nirbhaya thing.

Is that her real name?

No

Then why is everyone calling her Nirbhaya?

The media gave her this name to protect her privacy. Some people are calling her Damini too.

It is interesting that the media can give anyone any fictionalized name they want. How come she is “fearless”? Who gets to assign these names? Is there like one person whose job is to assign random names to various victims and then write (name changed to protect identity) next to it?

I’d love to have a job like that.

Maybe they don’t leave such delicate matters to the whims and fancies of one person. I am guessing there is a Victim Renaming Committee in each media organization that assigns names to victims whose “privacy” they want to “protect”.

I can already imagine the meeting that came up with the name ‘Nirbhaya’. Some corporate looking manager fellow must have said, “Alright guys, Hindi news channels are already calling her Damini. Let us brainstorm a list of appropriate names and then we’ll pick the best out of it. Just throw your ideas around, be creative, and remember: No idea is a bad idea!’’

I am even willing to give you away to another cat just to get a hold of that list.

Woah! You are MY cat. I am NOT your human. Haven’t I made it very clear?

Let’s not get into that. How did Facebook people take the news?

1 Like = 100 slaps for all rapists” said one and got a hundred likes. “Death for the rapists” cried another to greater applause. Chemical castration, public lynching, cutting off the wiener with a pair of scissors and feeding it to rodents… everyone had their own idea of justice and most of them included invoking vivid imagery ranging from 13th century Sharia style stoning to Garuda Puranam style torture in the afterlife.

*cough* Wahhabi regime *cough*

The Political Correctness police have decreed that she’s a rape SURVIVOR now, not a rape VICTIM because, you know, being a rape victim is a stigma in our society.

I don’t think the word ‘victim’ is the problem here. There is no shame in being referred to as a riot victim or an accident victim. Technically, it is the word ‘rape’ that is taboo. Why not replace that? Let’s go Carlin all the way and refer to her as an unwilling sperm recipient!

Political Correctness only makes the violence seem subtle

It is interesting to see the different forms outrage takes

Yeah, some people take it personally like how the rapist is a sick, perverted psychopath who ought to be punished in colorful ways based on their favorite era of barbarism to show future potential rapists that we mean business!

Just a short tempered reaction…

Yes, and the anger goes away real quickly too. This guy is shouting KILL THEM, HANG THEM, RAPE THEM BACK and all sorts of things and two minutes later he is commenting on his friend’s engagement pictures with a lot of smileys. That’s weird.

Facebook Turing Machines, all of them ;)

The second category is the Outrage Machine. The mainstream media strokes it wonderfully well. They have truly capitalized on this high intensity drama.

They make sure they never pick a side. That is how you maximize profit… by pleasing all the parties involved: the victim’s family, the “market base” they are trying to entertain, and the government which protects and bails them out during tough times.

First, they spin the story into a sob fest giving her names like Nirbhaya, Damini, Amanat and then they come up with the usual neutral, non-threatening, non-inquisitive, ass-kissing narratives like, “HOW UNFORTUNATE… OH! HOW BRUTAL… SHE WANTS TO LIVE… PRAY FOR HER… THE BRAVE ONE… INDIA’S FAVORITE DAUGHTER… LET US SALUTE THIS MARTYR… LIGHT A CANDLE… OBSERVE TWO MINUTES OF SILENCE… and hey, while you are at it… CHRISTMAS SALE!

No wonder they were chasing ambulances carrying rape victims. I am sure it improved their Q3 profits

And as the protests intensified, there was consensus among all the news channels that the people’s anger is not against one rape incident but it is outrage against all rapes, the way women are treated in our society, the apathy of the police, lack of respect for due process, the snail paced courts, the paralysis of our parliament, the state of the world, the chaotic nature of the Universe and humanity’s collective failure to unify the General Theory of Relativity with Electromagnetism into a Unified Field Theory!

It's in their interest to prolong the issue and maintain the confusion as long as possible.

The other thing they passionately did to fuel the Outrage Machine was to fish for misogyny. They have searched the length and breadth of the country to find MLAs, MPs, ministers, policemen, senior bureaucrats, scientists, religious people, film stars and all kinds of people who made insensitive, asshole statements like “DENTED AND PAINTED… SHE WAS ASKING FOR IT… WHAT WAS THE GIRL DOING OUTSIDE HER HOUSE AFTER SUNSET? … SHE SHOULD HAVE RESISTED… SHE SHOULD HAVE SURRENDERED… WESTERN CULTURE… BAD PUNJABI RAP and published them with anguish about the times we live in.

The irony…

Okay, the guy’s “music” is disgusting but what is point of directing all the anger towards one person? He just happens to be on the fringes of an industry that makes its money by objectifying women. You can’t celebrate “Munni badnaam hui” and “Shiela ki Jawani” by giving them Filmfare Awards and then call Honey Singh an asshole!

One standard is enough for everybody, we don’t need a double.

The Outrage Machine consumed all the news and outraged at a scale we haven’t seen in recent times. “If this SON OF A PRESIDENT talks like this… what else do you expect?”; “Did you hear that? She is a SCIENTIST and she is a WOMAN… this is disgusting!” MLAs, MPs, POLICE, TEACHERS, GOD MEN … yes it is not very hard to find assholes in this country. We already know that.

Aren’t people tired of this shit?

People are, but the Outrage Machine never gets tired. The third kind of outraged people get emotional and take themselves too seriously.
The Internet Revolutionaries who are draped in their pajamas, lying on the bed tweeting as if they are part of this new-age secret society on the boundary-less internet and all smug about how they wish they were getting Lathi charged and tear gassed while they are going to light candles and shout slogans at Freedom Park or Jantar Mantar and be part of a “revolution”, you know like Rang De Basanti.

They are like the ones who “woke up this morning in Addis Abeba wishing I was at India Gate, wanting to be tear-gassed, wanting to be lathi-charged, wanting my holiday to end and to be standing with people like me…“

haha... కడుపు నిండిన బేరాలు as they say in Telugu ;)

Clearly, she has never been on the other side of a policeman’s lathi. Else, she would never wish it upon herself.

Louis CK captures this Internet Revolutionary Liberal mood beautifully

The next category has people who belong to The Battalion of The Completely Useless. These are the people who keep saying, “Men get horny all the time… The real problem is human nature… Unless men change their attitude towards women, things will remain like this… We should educate children to treat women well… Mothers should raise their sons to be sensitive towards women… We should look inwards and ask ourselves … is this the world we want our daughters to grow up in?… we should be better role models for our kids starting tomorrow… and for tonight, let us all hug a little extra tight as we sleep… and be thankful for what we have… to keep the spirit alive… hopefully one day, we’ll learn to love each other” or whatever the fuck all that means!

Haha… they add no value to the debate. They are not giving us any new facts, neither are they are not giving us any new insights. Except comedy or entertainment value, this point of view has no practical value at all. It is fun to have such colourful characters though.

To be fair, people were genuinely outraged. I mean we are the 123rd safest country to be a woman and that is bad. Even by our standards. And our government also handled it in the worst possible way.

Their first reaction to the protests was suppressing – Shutting down public transport, cordoning off areas, deploying additional security for the politicians, Lathi charges, water cannons, tear gas (optional) and Section 144.

The usual Police State Style

Then they flew her out of the country as a preemptive political move to prevent the on-going street protests from intensifying. And now that she died, they are giving her a state funeral, special aircraft, special postage stamp, flags at half-mast and other memorial shit as if she is some kind of a war hero.

How is she a martyr? That doesn’t even make sense. A martyr is someone who voluntarily chooses to suffer death rather than renounce their principles. War heroes are heroes because they volunteer to take the risk for a higher cause you are cool with. There is no higher cause here. She did not volunteer for anything. There is nothing ‘fearless’ about getting into a bus at 9 o’clock in the evening. She was just a normal girl who was going home after watching the movie. Let her be that “human” person.

Our political class is clearly afraid of its own citizens. That is why they send out poorly trained police force to crush any small sign of dissidence.

As far as the police are concerned, it is just another day at work. That is how they deal with every protest. Farmers, price rise, labor rights, women’s rights, nuclear plant, corruption, land grabbing, child malnutrition, water…. It doesn’t matter what you are protesting for, this is what you are going to get.

Have you noticed that the media rarely talks about the unnecessary use of force by the police when poor people protest?

They don’t cover most of the people’s movements to begin with. Those protests happen in “Bharat” you see, the third world country where people hold signs and placards in vernacular tongues saying they don’t want mines, nuclear plants, dams and factories built on top of their houses. They don’t want “development”.

But we live in this country called “India”, an emerging market and rising superpower where these protests are a “nuisance” because they create a “bad investment climate”.

The recent Delhi protests happened in “India” with urban middle and upper middleclass people holding sign boards in English and that is why the “Bharat” Sarkar’s methods of dealing with dissent are being questioned now.

It is good that they are being questioned at least now.

None of this outrage is gravitating towards finding an effective fix to the rape and sexual harassment problem. The criminals win more often than not because they know exactly what they want. A rapist knows what he wants. It is the same case with a company that exploits their workers; a politician who scams the public; corporations that rape mother earth; or a Bhopal gas tragedy.

Look at how well the criminals are organized. The big criminals I mean –- politicians, corporations, media and the bureaucracy. They are organized at the global level. They cover each others asses when they are facing the heat. The police provide security to the politicians. The politicians protect the police from scrutiny, the corporations write labor laws and mining companies are in charge of environment regulation.

yeah

The reaction to the crime on the other hand is always spread out all over the place. Some want all the rapists to be hanged. Some want us to look inwards and meditate. Some people are happy that Congress is going to pay for it in 2014. And right wing people pretend that rapes don’t exist at all!

You don’t even know what you’re protesting for. You don’t even good mechanisms to collect statistics that might help nail the criminals. All public debate only happens in the emotional space. We rarely see any arguments backed up by real data.

Yeah, emotional responses in short bursts cannot bring any meaningful change

You humans suck at democracy

We have failed to develop that scientific culture. Elections here are primarily won by vote bank politics, not through debate and reason.

But democracy is not about voting your favorite feudal lord and hoping that he’ll be benevolent. Democracy is about dialogue. Democracy is about humans organizing themselves and demanding what they want and getting it.

Historically, all the rights and freedoms you have today like your fundamental rights, freedom of speech, labor rights, judicial rights… all of them have been the result of hard won and often bloody struggles. They weren’t “given” to you by your rulers because “it was the right thing to do”. Bullshit, the rulers of the time did everything in their power to deny you those rights! And given a chance, they’ll take them back again and that is what they are doing.

Democracy is a continuous process of imposing the will of the people and making life difficult for those in power unless they do the right things. Elections are just one aspect of it. Democracy has been around for 2000 years and still you don’t get the essence of if!

Now, that is a lot of democracy coming from a cat!

Cats are Anarchist. We know better.

But there is only so much the government can do. The problem is just not a question of law enforcement. It is about the society that we live in, our patriarchal mindset itself. I mean, we are a culture of Goddess worshippers who burned millions of women along with their dead husbands. If you are a woman and made of stone, you're revered. If you're made of flesh and blood, you're on your own!

Bullshit doesn't get any finer. There is something fundamentally wrong with a society that gropes women who are protesting against sexual harassment!

Yeah, there are no easy solutions. There is no giant off button that says “Press to stop all rapes” that we can go and click. The brutality of this particular rape is almost unimaginable. Why are such psychopaths roaming free? How alienated from the system must one feel to even think of doing something like that to another human being? What are the conditions that create such maniacs?

Is it the rising income inequality? The conditions of horrible poverty, objectification of women, economic policies that accelerate these conditions, apathy of the majority, dowry, female infanticide…

The only way to go about is to take scientific approach of collecting data, crunching and empirically arrive at feasible solutions that make the roads safer for our women and make those specific demands. Any solution that doesn’t include these two processes will end up belonging to the four categories of outrage.

Which one do you belong to?

My allegiance is solely to The Battalion of the Completely Useless!

Co-written by Flawsophy

20 comments:

  1. 1 ) she was called braveheart ony after day2 or 3..not from day 1 as the girl was hardly dettered by the incident. She is just as stubborn with broken bones, bruises,no intestine and uterus . I dont know why they call martry. But her courage to giv statement to police with all details..i mean ALL ...that twice needs one to be stoic

    2 ) u say democracy is people uniting and demanding what they want..isnt that what they are doing now

    Having said that...i dont follow you much but i have a idea how a loser ike u thinks. Just watch people are doing and mock it...be it anna hazare or whatever. Yea mocking is always fun but you are sub standard even by simple standards.These days it is a fad to oppose anything conventional . shavam mida maramaralu erukune mohamu nuvvu !what is so fun to mock the protest. 2 degrees C in delhi, but, people protesting and hunger strikes since 15 days for a girl who is nothing to them ( i mean no relation ).

    sure 1like=10 slaps and all are silly but then i m against opposing what everybody is doing now. Demanding stricter laws and women safety .

    Look at the last line "completely useless" and then you must laughing saying " Bach gayaaa" because thats the most safe option in life. Baboi nakem telidu , nenem chudaledu policy !Loser !

    You have covered peoples's reaction so comprehensively and neatly categorised it and an anaysis on it. GET A LIFE !

    Who on earth would want to do that !

    Lastly, If u were raped, sodomised , beaten, cut and then thrown out naked on cold night by a gang of gays and then hospitalised 3 hrs later, all you would be thinking in hospi is " what any other rape victim would do/behave now " because u want the opposite of it to do/act .

    By d way, what is your ideal expectation of a reaction from people who read your posts like these ? i would love to know . "WOWW You are a cool guy jayant. Thanda matlab tadinada" ???..happy ? esa ga...eruko inka..!

    look at the post..in the begining you opposed what ppl said and in the last you did just the same...talking about culture, goddesses, stone , women ,matti , boodidha sodhi ! ..



    your humor is no where near average atleast. Sheer waste of ur and our time !

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  2. appreciate ur sense of humour again but do not agree with u on some points.
    actually it's good that the upper middle n urban classes have come out. good amount of anger n energy out there but no proper leader to direct them.
    news channels do not and should not take sides. they just have to show us what's happening and leave us to take our own opinion although the way they're doing it now is questionable.
    what data r u talking abt? as u said, rape is a taboo in r society. so wat % would've come out n filed a case? n given the way things work here the data we have is very neglible.
    do u by any chance run an analytics firm and market it here?

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  3. Various human rights organizations routinely send fact finding committees and volunteers to collect various statistics including rape, torture, state suppression etc. most of which are not reported in the police stations. It is not very easy but it has been done with reasonable success.



    I completely agree that it is good that urban middleclass is coming out on the streets to protest. As you pointed out, the response to the crime is spread all over without much focus or direction. I believe we should look to scientific methods to provide us the direction rather than ideology or emotions. A short lived emotional outburst can only achieve so much.


    The fundamental points I was trying make was that we need
    1. A scientific approach to solving problems like these.
    2. A sustained campaign to ensure that we understand the root causes better.


    And no, I don't run an analytics firm. I just waste a lot of time :)

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  4. Dude, haters gonna hate. g2, ur my treu inspiration!!!

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  5. I usually like your posts a lot. As I went on reading this one, I was hoping atleast the next coming para would make some sense. And at the end of it, I felt the whole thing is so pointless. Not funny, not cool.

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  6. Not sure why my comment is not showing up. Anywyas trying to post again:

    I usually like your posts a lot. As I went on reading this one, I was hoping atleast the next coming para would make some sense. And at the end of it, I felt the whole thing is so pointless. Not funny, not cool.

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  7. Protesters just do what makes them feel better, they dont think whether their actions have any real consequence. They are good people, but not smart.

    People blame what can easily be blamed (Bollywood, media etc) and not search for the root cause. Don't they make stuff that sells, stuff that people watch, so "Munni" is just the nations demand ( I also wondered how many of the portesters danced to it in night-clubs and parties)

    Indians are so sheepish, we always look for a leader to unite us , lead us, we dont do anything that is not validated buy a huge group.



    And frankly i think most of these parties, media, protesters dont care about outcomes or results, all they care about is how good/concerned/thoughtful/ideal citizenish they look while doing it.


    So India is fucked, I dont think i can do much about it, women wont feel any safer, police will be come more totalitarian. Girls will be blamed for dressing the "western way" . But there is hope as with any unstable natural system , it will destroy itself, our society will die out, hope something better replaces it.

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  8. I am sorry to see this G2. This is disappointing.

    It is okay to make fun of fury that doesn't translate to action, but in this case it is too early for that fun. If all this media, anger, translates to change in behaviour of one person for one day it is better than nothing.

    May be you see all these tides of people getting together too many times that result in nothing. But for me, people responding to a rape case with anger at all is progress in a disappointing world where suicides of rape victims were routine.

    May be it is fact that it happened to the girl in a city bus that is the problem. One has to live through the scary part of being a lone woman in the bus during non-rush hour route with conductor and bus driver. Many many girls and woman live through that mental alertness every single day.

    May be the cruelty towards that girl that is the trigger. It is one thing to subscribe to human nature when men rape and put it under biological urge, it is entirely another thing to shove metal objects into a woman. It is like blue beard letting dogs spend the nights with his wives. It brings natural disgust in normal humans.

    May be it is mishandling and one after another statements with the underlying feeling of "it is no big deal" to "it is natural/human nature". It is that sly attempt to excuse something so inherently inhuman.

    May be 'cool' heads prevail with long term solutions later, but let people 'feel' the disgust and anger. Cultural shifts happen due to feelings of majority of people, not by the statistics published by an agency. Diana still got royal funeral after all. While you are at it, look up how NTR won in 90s on liquor ban in AP, or girls reservation in Engg colleges or what happened after stricter dowry laws. Going through those statistics may tell you something about how often women's issues become "issues" at all, and how deep a problem should be before it is acknowledged.

    There is no need to "understand" root causes right this moment. Let's begin by treating "symptoms" first. Do your diagnosis when the symptoms have subsided a bit.

    I am just sorry to see that you don't get it. You don't get the gravity of it at all. And you are one of the guys who saved lizard's eggs. Sad.

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  9. I was trying to make 2 points


    1. The emotional outburst of the urban middleclass that we see happening once in a while is not resulting in anything substantial. Take the Anna Movement for instance. Lot of people with good intentions took to the streets emotionally which is a great thing but the debate was so all over the place that we did not go even one step ahead to solving that problem.


    And the same pattern is repeating in this case also which is the reason I have tried to categorize the way people outrage because there is a lot of energy and good will but nothing is coming out.. so something must be wrong in the way we're doing it.


    2. Rape is a much deeper issues and we need a scientific outlook to find long term solutions to the problems. For example, the govt. passed a law that public transportation buses should not have black film on windows. What was the scientific basis for passing a law like that? How can they be sure that this is effective in preventing future rapes? Do we have any studies done to see what are the conditions (ex: lack of street lights, lack of police presence in the neighborhood etc.) that make women more vulnerable to these things and how can we fix those?


    To arrive at effective long term solutions, we have to adopt a scientific outlook of problem solving. Short emotional bursts can only achieve so much and the media will forget when a new story comes up.


    These were the two points I was trying to make when I wrote all that.

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  10. I don't think it is fair to paint all the protesters in the same color. There are quite a few genuine people, activists who have been working on this issue for quite sometime now. And also people who have sent their suggestions to the Justice Verma committee.



    I think we have enough good people fighting against the system. It is just that their work is being drowned in the noise of emotions. I think it is safe to assume that people in power don't care but people still do. I somehow don't share your pessimism yet ;)

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  11. Well the society is stinking right now and is growing through an evolutionary process, the ugly side of which we are witnessing right now. These small little incidents, lets call them 'atrocities by people in power', we see in Maruti plant at Manesar, against the Anna movement, against the protestors at Jantar Mantar, the growth and decline of Naxalbari movement etc.. are few examples of it.

    If you drill down you will see there is a constant war against abolishment of the system which has been prevalent in this country for the past 2000 years, was it good or was it bad?..heck I am too young to judge that, but one thing is for sure it will take a lot of time and there will be a new sunrise. Will it be good or bad, who knows, the society will decide and suffer the consequences itself.

    In the meantime, you can make fun of whats going around to ease the process though :p

    PS - G2 paid me to write the last line :p

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  12. I personally feel that what happened and is happening in Delhi is the most genuine citizen movement (among the urban middleclass) in recent years.


    The reason I wrote this article is because I have seen some of the patterns emerge in the way people react and how the media manipulates. We see people coming out to protest out of genuine anger at the state of things but then the movements get hijacked by various political outfits and the media who insist on not having a mature conversation.


    We can see pretty much the same pattern in the anti-reservation protests that happened a few years back, the anti-corruption movement (neither of which I personally supported) and is happening again now. And in the end, what we get are a couple of token fixes for the symptoms from the government and catharsis for the people.


    I don't always agree with the "something is better than nothing" argument. Of course, something is better than nothing in an absolute sense but in our quest for something (that is better than nothing), the real violence and injustice of the system gets completely ignored. Charity is the best example for this.


    This kind of catharsis seeking attitude of people and how the media manipulates it was what I was trying to point out. I have followed the outrage machine on the mainstream media (and the social media) and I personally felt that their usual over the top slow-motion shudder effects and candle light protests was actually drowning the good things that were coming out of it.


    I agree that we need to treat the symptoms with immediate affect but at the same time, we also have to ensure that we set up systems in place which improve the safety of women in this country which was the second point I was trying to make.


    I wanted to stress the importance of having a scientific outlook to solving these complex issues (rather than passing arbitrary, knee jerk reactions like banning dark windows on public transport buses etc")... which involves setting up mechanisms for collecting all sorts of data so that the next time people hit the streets over some issue, we have some data and we know what kind of laws to demand.


    In an attempt to show these patterns, I might have overlooked the significance of anger and emotion in this particular case. Rape is a very emotional issue because it is hauntingly personal and at the same time a part of our culture too. It was never my intention to undermine or make fun of people who actually hit the streets on cold mornings when public transport was shut down. Also, I am not ruling out the possibility that "I don't get it" :)


    P.S: I usually don't write about topical issues as a policy (because we get new information everyday and the articles end up looking half baked or stale when we revisit them a couple of months later) but I made an exception to the rule in this particular case.

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  13. I appears to me that scientific approach and empathy can co-exist.

    It is the empathy that is lacking in all of your points. When you write "There is nothing 'fearless' about getting into a bus at 9 o' clock in the evening." it comes across as an off-hand put down for all women who go through hassles of travelling by city bus.

    Heck, one need to be 'fearless' to even get in to a city bus at 10 AM in an empty bus. I always consciously picked to stand by the door if I have to take a bus with no other woman. I am risking jumping out of a speeding vehicle with every trip 'voluntarily', as you put it. Do you think all women are so dumb as to be unaware of the risk they are in each time they venture out? You may want to put a number on that risk by collecting statistics. But non-trivial amount of this risk is enough for requiring an action for me.

    You act blind to that everyday reality of harassment for many women.

    And I see that you don't even propose any solutions or develop even a hypothesis based on culture, human nature and existing law and order level. We are not in a vacuum where only the statistics will help us to get some immediate solutions.

    One can begin with stricter law and punishment. At least having a law with life-time imprisonment will work half as good instead of 10 years that gets reduced or only fine (like slap on the wrist)! May be special court only for rape cases (as it happened with dowry cases)? May be women only police centers where no derogatory questions about rape complaints (this happened with domestic abuse)? Wouldn't it make a legal precedent if these rapists are strictly punished?

    But you offer nothing. This does not bolster your case for scientific approach when you didn't take even the first step to look into what is already available.

    Your talk reminds me of NRA and gun-control in US. It is not about "zero-occurrence". It is about minimization and some kind of deterrent for lesser evils. A first step to "risk management" is to include deterrence, resilience, and rehabilitation, not just prevention and only prevention.

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  14. I agree that the tone was lacking in empathy.


    However, I think it is unfair to scrutinize this article word by word. This was written as a casual conversation between me and my fictional cat. I was assuming people would read it as a badly written play and not as editorial commentary or something like that :)


    I think proposing solutions is also beyond the scope of this blog because I didn't want it to get too long. We can have a separate discussion somewhere else on this.

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  15. I didn't mean to scrutinize it word by word. It is to take a scientific
    approach and show evidence for my statement that this does not reflect empathy. I am not into fisking. :)



    Our writing reflects our thoughts. Casual writing is the best to show our attitude. The attitude of trivializing sexual harassment belies all the statements on dismissal of protest. I hope you will give more thought about your casual conversation with your fictional cat.

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  16. I should clarify that this was not "casual writing"... It was written as a casual conversation. I have been consciously trying to create distinct personas for the cat and fictional g2 and I am probably not good at it yet :)


    Please do not assume this is a summary of my personal opinions towards the issue.

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  17. I consider blog writing as "casual writing" because you aren't beholden to any guidelines other than your own, not that you didn't put any effort in to it.

    As a reader, I can only assume words you put in the mouth of your characters are stemming from your own thoughts as a writer (even with some editorial support). Perhaps, fictional g2 can have a different name than moderator/writer g2 so that readers like me won't confuse between the opinions of those two.
    Best wishes to your comedic and fiction writing efforts.

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  18. G2, I see your point. There is a pattern...in media, facebook...the candle walks...but what after that? The whole focus is on getting the govt to do everything. But what about individual responsibility?

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  19. This piece is timeless ! Because this media drama has been and is going to repeat itself everywhere, every time!

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don't be lazy