Twitter and Empathy

To be fair, police statistics show that a significant amount of armed conflicts end with an unarmed person disarming or talking down the armed person. It actually happened in my town, an unarmed dude tackled a shooter in a restaurant and stopped him. But of course I don't think that makes victim blaming okay either. Especially when mass shootings were less of a hot news topic these people had no way of knowing what to do. They probably hadn't had to watch Run-Hide-Fight videos in job training yet (and honestly even then "Run" is prioritized over "Fight" so why blame them??)

emily koster

thanks for this one big joel. when i saw that tweet i thought it was absolutely heinous to blame traumatized potential mass shooting victims for not acting like TV superheroes. if i was unarmed and had a gun pointed at my head and somebody said "everybody except the [demographic i do not belong to] get to leave" my self-preservation would kick in. i would likely be thankful that today is the day i get to not fucking die and immediately try to get the others actual, trained help as quickly as possible. it's not my responsibility to get myself killed. if i was armed, if it was a fair fight, i would 100% open fire or walk out the door and then shoot him in the back. but i'm not a fucking idiot, i'm not going to be unarmed and walk up to someone with a gun and a deathwish and pretend like i'm not just adding another body to the pile.

kendall

Like most bad ideas which gain traction, the good parts (building community, men caring for women) are not novel, while the novel parts (men are all cowards for not charging an insane gunman) are not good.

Dendriti

Yeah, not a fan of this video. Even if you don't agree with the initial premise of “the freshmen boys should've done something to protect the girls,” the general message of building stronger communities and supporting one another is valid and probably why a lot of people liked it. I really don't see why a whole video about this tweet was necessary: they're bad takes on Twitter every second and if this "bad take" just had an “invalid” premise but a pretty harmless conclusion, why the anger? Like, Richard Spencer and Trump have a whole twitter account but THIS was the tweet that crossed the line?? It just seems like you and everyone else in the comments just took what the premise said so personally, as if ya'll feel low key, for a lack of a better word, guilty that if ya'll were put in the same position, ya'll DEFINITELY would've walked out the classroom lol. I take this tweet as an allegory for today’s polarization: there was only one shooter and many male students; the shooter was only targeting the women in the class and told the men to go; if the men, who are greater in numbers, just fucking use their numbers to overwhelm the guy, those women would probs still be alive. I see this as “the 1% are literally ruining the environment and civilization while the 99% are polarized af and not banding together to easily overwhelm the 1%” Now, this is extremely un-nuanced and shit and not a perfect allegory -- but its just a fucking lefty tweet, who gives a fuck (well, obviously me and ya’ll now lol).

Hi Joel, this is your best video yet. Up there with greatest hits such as The Wasteland of Jordan Peterson and Trolls: Dreamworks' trashcan of ideology. Thanks for making videos and good luck with things in the future!

Peter Bedford

Great video Joel. I think your take is very important and the discussion about empathy influencing behavior (i.e. Twitter likes) is interesting. It's important to look past buzzwords and see the subtext of texts like this. Emotions are manipulable! I love the art style too.

This video was fantastic. Please do more dynamic production like this! It’s really good. Maybe let a fan draw a different art style for each of your new videos. Just an idea! Cheers :)

Shawn, I don't think that this video has terribly much to do with Canada. I understand that Canadians may feel a strong connection to the community. However, what these tweets have done is put the responsibility for the death of these women on 42, 19 or 20 year old men who are somehow magically supposed to understand how to deal with an armed gunman. The killer is no longer responsible, it's now these college kids. People frequently create this kind of fiction because it makes them feel better about horrible things that happen. A child gets kidnapped...that would never happen to me since I never take my eyes off my child. A plane is being taken over and headed into the the World Trade Center, I would have beaten up the hijackers. We create an illusion where we can make these things stop. Any yet we empathize with these 42 students because we want to be in their position and somehow have a different outcome. Big Joel is actually demonstrating the very real and very cruel side of empathy.

I quite enjoyed the video! Particularly the assessment of the original take treating a anti-feminist shooter as an unavoidable natural disaster.

Golderado

I don’t really see why your ideas about “ideal Canadian behavior” should necessarily be applied to all Canadians any more than American ideals should be. Or than Canadian ideals should be applied to Americans. Honestly, if disagreeing with (is your view supposed to be the official Canadian position?) is bigoted and anti-Canadian then aren’t most people anti-pretty-much-every-country-in-the-world? I mean, name one country whose zeitgeist doesn’t have some problems, in your opinion. I think an unarmed person standing up to a gunman to defend their fellow humans would be admirable and heroic. It would certainly count as a “good death” in a kind of Homeric or Edda sense. But I don’t think not being that kind of hero makes you morally wrong either. And if the Canadian Cultural Authority disagrees with me, then I guess I’m anti-Canadian.

I’m sorry. You’re simply wrong here. The biggest problem with your video is that you’re failing to engage with the Canadian cultural context of École Polytechnique massacre and the place it holds in Canadian culture. Instead you just refer to “the zeitgeist” as if there is only one. Imposing you cultural perspective on us. This is cultural imperialism is it’s purest form. We are not of the same culture as you, American. Do not interpret us in your cultural context. To do so is simply bigoted and anti-Canadian. The massacre played a major role in how feminism developed in Canada in stark contrast to the US. The men should have refused to leave. This makes sense in the Canadian cultural context. We value the role of community more than American culture does. As the saying goes: the American dream is to get rich, the Canadian dream is that we all survive. In that context, the tweet not only makes sense but is the correct sentiment. Honestly, it bothers me that you so completely don’t understand the situation. Yes, the tweets are less than perfect, but, man, your commentary here is insanely off base. You’re not Canadian and clearly have made 0 effort to understand out culture and the contexts of this shooting. That fact you don’t even name the massacre or talk about it’s role in Canadian culture really underscores your failure here. Secondly, there were 14 women killed not 8 as you claim.

Shawn MacIntyre