No Opportunity To Blame Men Left Unturned
Gregg has been kind and generous to me, as usual, during the COVID lockdown, shopping for groceries for me, making me food I can heat up while writing this scientific monster of a book, picking up my prescriptions and mail and dropping them off.

Other than going to the blue USPS mailbox a few blocks away and taking out the trash, I haven't left the house since March 15, thanks to Gregg.

Gregg is a man, so I guess I should be worrying he's a mass killer instead of calling him up to tell him how sweet it was that he sent me an Instacart delivery of a bunch of groceries yesterday.

In the Toronto Star, "Race & Gender Columnist" Shree Paradkar leapt to tag the horrible recent Nova Scotia mass shooting as a telling example of "toxic masculinity." ("Passion for policing" is also tied in.):

The Nova Scotia gunman disguised himself as a police officer in a replica police cruiser and killed 22 people on April 18 and 19. The shootings provoke at least two troubling reflections: toxic masculinity -- "passion for policing," and what society deems dangerous -- in other words, who gets to get away.

"Maybe someone can explain to me why it's normal and healthy to collect police cars and outfits," Taylor said. "I feel that is a signal from that person that they feel disempowered and they'd like a special car and a special outfit to make them be able to have absolute power.

"Of all the uniforms people can collect, why police? Because of what it symbolizes -- alternate power, above the law. You can make anyone open their door, and you can make anyone stop their car."

...Mass killers are often described as loners, angry, quiet. Sometimes they're part of a hate group, sometimes involved in abuse. But many don't cause alarm.

"The reason police officers do not create profiles around these guys is because they resemble them," Taylor said.

"The majority of law enforcement in Canada are white men who are interested in firearms, who are interested in having control and authority."

Police brutality shows consistently that "you only recognize someone as scary if you can't identify with them. This is the crux of the matter."

The truth is, we don't see who the mass killers are in most case until it's too late. We live in a democratic society where we have a standard of probable cause: reasonable suspicion you're about to commit a crime or have committed one.

This means we can't go all pre-crime and throw people in jail or mental wards. In fact, there are standards around having someone committed so people can't use that to get others out of their way monetarily and otherwise by claiming they have a mental health issue.

Also, police officers are black and white and various other colors, here in LA and perhaps also in Toronto. Unfortunately that this doesn't work to support her argument, which isn't much of an argument -- as we see with many of those employed in the Race & Gender Industrial Complex. Luckily, if you're the right skin tone, they'll probably hire you, weak arguments and all.

via ifeminists