The 90% Minority

The BBC reports that yesterday, in the Punjab province in Pakistan, a couple was killed by an angry mob for blasphemy.

“Yesterday an incident of desecration of the holy Koran took place in the area and today the mob first beat the couple and later set their bodies on fire at a brick kiln,” local police station official Bin Yameen told the AFP news agency.

A security official told the BBC that local police had tried to save the couple, but they were outnumbered and attacked by the angry crowd.

The majority of these people believe that it perfectly all right to barbarically beat two people to death because they may have done something unsavory to a religious book.

I would love to hear Ben Affleck explain why that isn’t a bad idea – or how this local-police-overwhelming mob is a minority.

Cat-callers go apeshit

It all started with a video: a woman walking down some New York streets, being the target of a lot of cat-calls. Even if parts of the video are fake (as was accused, but not proven), it definitely made an impression. To many men, the number of cat-calls was surprisingly high; most women say that it feels about right. Even if parts of the movie were staged, it points to an actual issue. So silly me thought that the issue was clear cut: the video shows that there are a lot of men who say things like ‘hey babe’ to a strange women, believing they are doing her a favor, while women think this behavior is bordering on harassment. Condensed into the short movie, the point, I thought, was crystal clear. I thought.

Enter Steven Santagati, who considers himself god’s gift to womankind. In a discussion on CNN, Steven went on to give new meaning to the term mansplainin’: not only did he explain to the two women on CNN what they really want, he also advised them that their best course of action to counter every-day harassment would be to carry a gun, and blow away the cat-callers.

Now, contrasting the original video to the sentiments of a knuckle-dragging Neanderthal, who explains the world as perceived by a single-digit IQ brain, I thought this was a slam-dunk – one of those rare cases where everyone agrees.

Reading the comments on YouTube (a bad idea even on a good day), I found further proof against evolution: if you think humanity has evolved from monkeys, you are dead wrong. We are still apes.

Then again, using a gun to get rid of cat-callers is a surprisingly Darwinian approach to this problem.