The "Bike Karen" story looks more and more like a case of mutual misunderstanding (each thought the other was trying to steal the bike), but what I find much more interesting are the reactions to the story, which seem to vary depending on whether the person reacting is an anti-white racist or an anti-male sexist. The inspins and harpies at TwoXChromosomes seem split on it, which is hilarious. The "Establishment" TradCons are just infuriating:

thefederalist.com/2023/05/19/viral-out-of-context-clips-make-victims-like-pregnant-citi-bike-woman-into-villains-simply-because-theyre-white/

The writer downplayed her affected histrionics and noted that the woman was pregnant NINE TIMES (although her condition is 100% voluntary and completely irrelevant) and absurdly suggested this:

Ideally, the men at the bike station should have acted chivalrously and assisted the pregnant woman on her journey home...

Yeah... because a white guy squaring off with five young black dudes over a bicycle is likely to end well... /sarc

Meanwhile, the usual suspects on the left are pretending that a white woman being accosted by five young black men trying to take a $1200 bike that she had just paid for had no reason to feel physically threatened. Yet those same people use words like "unsafe" and "danger" to describe a 12-year-old wearing a shirt that says, "There Are Only Two Genders."

So based on what the current state of our knowledge, it appears that everything about this story is fake, from the allegations of white supremacy to the allegations of misogyny to the feigned outrage on all sides.

@Lone_Ranger interesting story relating, came across this website by chance, so might be as well blue

sciencehistory.org/distillations/podcast/love-hate-and-sex-from-the-history-of-science

We begin our story in France, in December of 1771. Madame Lavoisier isn’t Madame Lavoisier yet. She’s Marie-Anne, the 13 year-old daughter of Jacques and Claudine. But she is about to get married to Antoine Lavoisier, who at 28, is 15 years her senior.

Her other option was to marry a 50 year old man. You see her father, Jacques, was a tax collector.

And he worked at the whim of some powerful people. When Marie turned thirteen, she got a marriage proposal from a well-connected count. Marie’s father couldn’t outright object, so he got one of his colleagues to ask for Marie’s hand in marriage instead.

For one thing, the financial security provided by

combining their family’s finances allowed him to build a state-of-the-art laboratory. So by the time Lavoisier does incredible things like discovering the role oxygen plays in combustion and naming hydrogen, his wife, Marie, is right by his side. She translated works for him and included her own notes on interpretation. She was also an accomplished artist who did detailed renderings of their equipment and lab which is how we know so much about the set-up. She received formal training in the field from Lavoisier’s colleagues and hosted gatherings where scientists came together and discussed ideas.

After his death, Marie-Ann Lavoisier spent 65 days in prison herself. She was thrown into bankruptcy. And the government seized all of their laboratory equipment and their notebooks. Also, her father went to the guillotine too. None of this stopped her from doing everything she could to protect her husband’s reputation as a chemist, and protect the legacy of their work. She managed to get

Antoine’s final memoirs published