First: yes, the title is plural. I’ll get to that. Trigger warnings for discussion of sexual assault and rape.
I’m fairly certain I have a grasp now on why exactly there’s so much pushback against even the merest inkling that these allegations of serial sexual harassment might be true, most especially with regard to the allegations against Michael Shermer hosted presently at PZ Myers’ blog. It’s complicated, and nuanced, and will take a lot to unpack. Starting, of course, with human beings.
Humans are social animals. Every interaction requiring any level of trust therefore requires a commensurate history of social interactions one can rely upon that this trust will not be broken. Some small interactions like transactions at a marketplace use money as a proxy for that trust — exchanging money for goods and services suggests that you’re a contributing member of society by having obtained that money to begin with. It’s for that reason that so many people get hung up on the idea that if you’re poor, you’re morally failed somehow.
We are also political animals, and each of us wants our personal viewpoints on the world to spread and to fight for our respective causes. Every interaction we participate in is political in some way, even if not explicitly so. You participate in forums that involve topics you care about; you argue for or against viewpoints that are brought up. Even simple actions like buying media can be politically charged — you could buy games from indie developers in defiance of the big-budget ones which are often calculated to pander to the widest audience but that invariably ends up propagating societally-damaging memes, like that women are objects to be rescued and not autonomous entities. You could give money to movies that are otherwise terrible, just because they happen to star an actor you like; you could boycott movies by actors who do demonstrable harm to the world by espousing blinkered and antiscientific claptrap like Tom Cruise or Jenny McCarthy. Or even something as simple and seemingly apolitical as choosing one soft drink over another just because it tastes good, and you would be sad if it disappeared. Someone next to you might convince you to do otherwise, because of that soft drink manufacturer’s stance on gay marriage, for instance; overriding the one political message for another more important one in your mind. The politics of each interaction might be subtle but they’re there, always.
In computers, there’s a concept regarding privacy and encryption that uses a decentralized model for trusting one another’s private/public encryption pairs. Rather than having an authority storing all the keys that pair with a person’s personal encryption codes, each person you communicate with under the PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) method shares the keys that that person trusts, and eventually by being trusted by a lot of people, you can be reasonably secure in the knowledge that newcomers into the network will already have trust for your keys. The better connected you are, the more trusted your keys are. However, like in meatspace, that trust could be violated by any one person, and the more trusted that person, the greater the breach of the trust web.
The entire concept of morality is based on trying to improve humanity’s lot without inflicting undue suffering on its members (or any other entity, to a lesser extent). The reason that sexual assault and rape are morally repugnant is that it is an abrogation of a person’s self-direction, and it does violence to another person in exchange for the aggressor’s pleasure. Even if that violence happens in such a way that the person is not physically harmed, it’s still violence — it’s the overriding of one person’s will for another’s pleasure, and it often comes with a gross violation of trust.
Humans place a high priority on preventing breaches of trust in interactions — the script goes, if someone is a known scam artist, we take pains to inform people to watch out for their tricks (and thus the entire skeptic movement was born). If someone is a known thief, we take pains to inform people to stow their valuables in their presence. But for some reason, when we talk about rape and sexual assault, the desire to warn people to be wary around them is superceded by fears that any particular warning might be *wrong*, because then you’re doing damage to a person without good cause. And when that person is popular, there’s a lot of trust, no matter how small the interactions individually are.
Except, that person may have done grievous damage to someone else, abusing that high level of trust. The saying “power corrupts” springs to mind. They may even have violated people’s autonomy, and we put a very high priority on discouraging that sort of action.
Only, somewhere that script got flipped: it’s more grievously harmful to name the person on the off chance that they fall into the ~6% of false rape claims than it is to screw up that person’s chances at harassing or raping even more people. The cries of “innocent until proven guilty”, which are appropriate in a courtroom or when facing jailtime, are brought up — which are never brought up when someone tells you to watch out for that person who picked your pocket. The cries for physical evidence drown out the testimonial and corroborative evidence that are brought forward. The victim-blaming for putting themselves in the position they were in where they got raped flow freely, where in a parallel situation where someone’s car is hotwired nobody blames the person for choosing an inviting colour of car.
It seems there’s a drive to create a false dichotomy where, because of the grievousness of the crime of breach of trust and breach of someone’s autonomy that rape represents, either the person is completely innocent and free of all charges, or is thrown in jail. Most rape and most assault and most harassment — while criminal — never results in true justice where the perpetrators are put behind bars, even if the victims do go to the police and even if there is physical evidence and even if there is a known suspect. Therefore, most rape and assault and harassment is entirely unpunished, and grossly underreported because everyone knows how the system is skewed.
People forget that there are not merely two options here. There’s not just “jailtime” and “completely innocent”. There’s not just “guilty” and “witch-hunts”. Another possibility is for people to be made aware of these creepers and to know that they cannot trust them as much as they might other people — to warn them that the trust placed in them might not be warranted.
Our ability to trust one another is built on a series of interactions with one another. Over time, you build up a reservoir of trust and if you trust someone enough, when they are faced with a claim that they are untrustworthy, it might be hard to swallow. It might cause you to backlash against the accusations. And when others trust a person, it can amplify that trust. If enough people trust a person despite the alleged breach, no consequences might come of a claim about a person — it might be dismissed as “so much locker room banter” or people “regretting their sexual exploits”. Or it could even legitimately have been an attempt to tear down the trust a community has in a person for no other reason than simple spite.
I understand this dynamic well. When I was 16, my first girlfriend accused me of rape in order to preempt any acrimony over her sleeping with someone else, and the only things that saved me — unpopular kid as I was — were the facts that she’d repeatedly and demonstrably lied to a lot of people about a lot of things very often, eroding anyone’s trust in her, and because she happened to tell a lie integral to her accusation that I could disprove.
Her accusation ruined her own reputation amongst her then circle of friends, but she moved on, built new trusts, violated them as well, and generally made a wreck of her life as far as I cared to follow.
I vowed then to be as honest as humanly possible with people, to the point of it becoming a character flaw. I have a reputation for being blunt with people. I can be short with people. I have no patience for people intentionally abusing one another — and I’m not talking about namecalling, I’m talking about advocating for ideas I deem genuinely ruinous for society, like religion, bigotry, or unchecked greed. I walk away from people who are damaging, even at great personal cost.
This has earned me trust and it has cost me trust with a lot of people in a lot of ways.
In that respect, I am a good deal like PZ Myers to a far smaller degree (in that I am less popular, and therefore have less interactions with which to build my web of trust). I have never seen him flinch or skulk away from a fight over what he believes to be right, nor — more especially — over what he believes to be wrong. Even where I disagree with him, he is a man with the courage of his convictions in my experience. He has earned a good deal of my trust in him to deal with certain issues with ferocity and calm rationality in equal measure. And as far as I can see, he is slow to come to trust others, having likely been burned a number of times by a number of people over the years. My own personal web of trust includes him as a result of my own dealings with him over the years, as do many other folks’. He has built up a strong reputation amongst most of us for being unflinching and self-sacrificing when faced with difficult decisions.
Except, some of these convictions come in direct conflict with some other community members’ own convictions. Some of the actions he has taken — disagreeing publicly and loudly with people over seeming trivialities (which are nonetheless important to him, and evidently important to people who agree with him on the matter), or banning people from his blog for harming the (rather free-for-all) discourse he governs there — each earn him enmity, cost him trust for some folks, even where it earns him trust with others.
There are people who are doggedly determined to prove that he is the secular Antichrist for daring to disagree with certain secular Saints, for daring to (extraordinarily infrequently) ban people from his blog. And these people think that those of us who’ve dealt with him and found his dealings to be fair, well, they think he’s hoodwinked us and that we’re hero-worshipping him in the same way that they hero-worshipped some of the people of whom he’s been critical. They think there’s some kind of cult like hivemind groupthink at play, when what they’re really describing is the fact that we trust him to act in accordance with our own personal beliefs. That we trust him to vet and thoroughly corroborate any claims he makes in public, that he would not stake his hard-earned reputation without damn good cause.
So when someone whom PZ trusts, who also trusts PZ to do the right thing, comes forward and tells PZ her story of having been coerced into sex by the big-name and well-trusted Michael Shermer, and he realizes that to do anything at all about it he has to risk taking a hell of a lot of splash damage to his own reputation in bringing it to the world at large. He’s fully aware that even putting it forward to the degree that he has, stripped of any identifying details that might result in retaliatory harassment of the victim by Shermer’s fans, he’s not only risking his reputation but he’s giving ammunition to the people who want his reputation to evaporate entirely, who will not hesitate to use this event to destroy him and everything he stands for.
There’s a lot of people complaining that these anonymous claims are ruining people’s reputations without sufficient cause or evidence. The deck is actually stacked against people ever coming forward with rape claims, though, and lowering the bar too far can make an environment that’s easily gamed by people who like the system the way it is.
Things like the anonymous tumblr “More Will Be Named”, which was deleted and replaced with a parody by someone who snapped up the domain when it became available after the deletion, actually are damaging to the cause of preventing these big names from taking advantage of the trust they themselves have built. These tiny and untrusted-because-anonymous voices coming forward and being given a megaphone to say what they will about big names might serve as innoculation against anyone ever believing the claim against a well-trusted person. The trolls time and again try to make sure that it’s impossible to ever come forward with a rape case by providing the very false rape claims they decry as the reason we can’t trust people to be honest about their rape claims. They fulfill their own prophecies to throw up chaff and keep people from taking rape claims seriously.
But there’s always another option, as I suggested. There’s “trust implicitly”, there’s “distrust”, and there’s “trust but verify”. And in “trust but verify”, you can know to be wary of certain people without necessarily pointing at them in horror and shrieking “rapist” every time they’re nearby; or throwing them in jail on the least unsubstantiated word.
This is all I, or anyone else fighting for victims rights with regard to rape, have ever advocated. The repercussions in this case are not that Michael Shermer will end up in jail — seriously, even if all six victims were to provide ironclad evidence that he did what they said, at this point so distant from the crimes, it’s grossly unlikely he’ll ever face any jailtime for it. All he has to do is throw up doubt that sex with an inebriated-beyond-consent woman is not actually rape, or that they only decided it was rape after they decided he was skeezy after the fact. He’ll get off on the charge of getting off on someone without their permission.
So the best we can hope for as far as repercussions are that because his name is so popular, the accusations against him will give his potential future victims pause against trusting him enough to drink with or spend time alone with him. This might hurt his feelings, but it will not ruin is career or his life.
And the reason I’m willing to trust PZ to have vetted his claims before making the accusation public like he has, is exactly because I know he treats these accusations seriously and trusts the victims but verifies the stories before putting his own sizable bank of trust on the line.
That’s why anonymous trolls’ stories against people, unverified and unvetted and impossible to corroborate, don’t gain as much traction as the big ones like this. The problem is, the same effect happens with regard to any claim that any rape victim might bring forward — there’s massive public pressure against ever coming forward with your own name, because you will face all the consequences of that interaction. People who don’t trust you will be horrified that you’re impugning the motives of the good decent person they trust, and they’ll rake over your life history looking for any shred of misdeed by which to dismiss you and the entire story. So most rape victims never come forward.
When rape victims DO come forward, it’s because they’ve found someone they can trust. And sometimes the person they trust with the story trusts them back, and sometimes they’re willing to fight that fight on their behalf. Remember, this anonymous accuser is only anonymous TO US.
That’s why PZ can’t give more details than he has; and that’s why the people who don’t trust either PZ or the anonymous (TO US) rape victim are fighting back so hard against the very idea that maybe, just maybe, Michael Shermer actually did it.
And as for the strength of the evidence at hand, the fact that PZ received post-hoc corroboration of the events in question, from someone well-placed within the community enough to be trustable themselves and to have been in a position to know the truth of the statement, from someone, I note, who even admits that they don’t much like PZ and the strength of their belief in the events is strong enough to override that distrust, is excellent evidence that the events actually happened. That’s why there’s a plural. It further cements in my mind that I was right to trust PZ, and that I’m right to trust Jane Doe, at the expense of the reputation of yet another so-called pillar of our community.
Sure, it’s not photographic evidence, but you know how well even THAT works amongst those primed to deny any rape allegations ever brought forward.
You know what? It’s really hard for a civilian to join in on these threads and make any kind of comment. I did so out of a long-developed sense of enlightenment justice or fairness. I don’t know if this accuser/victim was raped or not, and nor do I know whether Michael Shermer committed that crime. Neither do you. My sense of natural justice that no one should be blamed without due process is evidently way out of date, and the new norm is that any accusation of a sexual assault must be believed, or you reveal yourself to belong to some secret society of which I have never heard, which consists of ‘rape culture apologists’ and individuals somehow earning adjectives related to ‘slime’ or sometimes ‘slyme’. All this is alien to me. I am the kind of feminist who believes in complete and automatic equality. I ignore your sex when I assess anything you say, but that doesn’t seem to work for some of you (it has worked nicely for me as member of the so-called ‘caring professions’ this last thirty-plus years.) By pointing that out I become ‘a lying fuckwad’ (I’m not sure what a fuckwad is, but I doubt any of you want to explain it to me in case you make someone so old have a stroke). Cannot any one of you stand back from the mob mentality and ask if this is reasonable? I abhor rape. I despise sexual discrimination. And I don’t believe any claim about anything without evidence. If evidence is unlikely to be forthcoming (which is certain to be true in any case of this kind), I make my own judgement and keep it to myself. In my case that judgement would advise any young females to keep well away from Mr Shermer. Perhaps I am over-cautious, but I want to protect those I love. I know the statistics, but I don’t assume guilt on the basis of statistics (nor should any of you prats in the USA who seem to assume skin colour has something to with with guilt! Get the analogy?) I would not publish something to that effect as I respect his rights as much as I respect yours. That, by the way, is why they are rights. We all have them, and no one’s rights trump someone else’s.
At the end of all this, I believe myself to be a reasonable person in his sixth decade, who has been faithful to his one spouse – and yes, that means I have raped no one, attempted to rape no one, and failed thoroughly to approve of anyone else’s rape attempts. It seems that isn’t good enough for some of you holier-than-thou types. I still defy you and say you ought not to publicly condemn someone without evidence. And now you will describe me in awful language once again that I cannot begin to believe. I have not lied. I have not ‘fuckwadded’ as far as I can tell. I only recognise slime in the garden pond and wish it wasn’t there. Can not any one of you understand that there might be a reasonable opposition to the hive mind here without that opposer being a rapist or a ‘lying fuckwad’? Now, go ahead and dismiss these ideas as thoughtlessly as you have dismissed them before. Add some more offensive and rude epithets. Those words will shrink in comparison to the harm done to Michael Shermer’s accuser (yes, I believe her in my mind, but I don’t think I can publish that based on my gut feelings). I don’t mean to hurt her further by staying judgement, but it just isn’t my role or yours to publicly assume and state the legal guilt of another. She might be in the right (I believe she is) but that doesn’t mean we can do what has been done here. Please don’t go on again about how this isn’t a court, not a legal judgement, and that there are no consequences from what you have posted. There are consequences. It might take a defamation of character lawsuit to bring that home to you, but that is exactly what you risk. Want to be that brave? Go ahead, and be prepared to pay your share of the damages. There are always consequences! Remember that, all of you, if you learn nothing else from this. Don’t be such simpletons, no matter how much you believe in feminism. I was a feminist before most of you were born, and I can tell you there is a problem with this kind of mob justice.
Finally, if there is no room here for my comment, or if I should be banned for making it, then you have proven yourselves unworthy of the enlightenment ideals I have fought for, advocated for and agitated for all these years. Damn you all, you don’t deserve what I have fought for.
What exactly have you fought for? I mean, women still earn $.75 to every dollar that a man earns. When women actually report rape they are blamed for their own rapes. Or they are told that because they wear makeup or look at a man or had a drink or had several drinks or were wearing heels, etc ad nauseam that they deserved to be raped. It was recently that marital rape was even discussed as a crime. Or oh say, their rape kits were actually tested. You’re so proud of your work as a feminist, tell me exactly what I am supposed to be be enlightened over.
So, Shermer’s lawyers have chimed in. He claims he is innocent of any wrong-doing. Now it is a case of “she (whoever she is) said, he said.” Does anyone think this was not a predictable outcome? At what point does evidence and accusations of libel matter to people? Making serious and damaging accusations without any evidence to back it up is a dangerous game to play. And now it appears that PZ did so without consulting with a lawyer, first.
Can PZ use journalist’s privilege and get away without naming his source if this becomes a civil case? This is particularly relevant in respect to Shermer’s claim that PZ is a beneficial party due to increased traffic on his blog. PZ also admittedly has no direct or personal evidence that the claim is true. If such a case were tried in California then Mitchell v. Superior Court would likely apply: “Disclosure by a reporter of confidential sources is appropriate in civil cases, especially when the reporter is a party to the litigation.” If Shermer pushes for defamation, the only way to determine if defamatory statements were made would be to subpoena the source. Source disclosure in a civil case is denied unless the information goes to the heart of the plaintiff’s claim. In this case, Jane Doe is not only the source of the claim, but also the only avenue to evidence.
If this were tried in Minnesota the same applies, the applicable law as it relates to defamation would deny journalist’s privilege where the person seeking disclosure can demonstrate that the identity of the source will lead to relevant evidence on the issue of actual malice. The identity of the source can be compelled if there is probable cause to believe that the source has information clearly relevant to the issue of defamation and the information cannot be obtained by any alternative means. Well, that is exactly what would be happening in this case. PZ’s “outing” Shermer may result in “outing” Jane Doe, exactly what he said wanted to avoid. I might suggest that PZ has acted negligently.
Hey dogberry – go read this and think about it for awhile.
Anonymous13, could I just pass along my appreciation for addressing my points before morphing into a MN (or is it CA) libel lawyer, thanks!
Dogberry:
Soooo, no answer to the long ago posed question then?
hotshoe @ 195–
Well, yeah, I believe the women, too.
I was responding to statements that the women involved should have known better than to get drunk. Having been in exactly the same situation (@ 194) — my glass never being empty– that one of the women described, I know it’s not that simple.
I love wine, but I’m a pretty careful drinker. When I order in a bar, I also order water and I stop at three glasses. But the night I got so drunk I didn’t finish even one glass. So the usual rule, a three-drink limit, didn’t ever get into play.
That “just know your limit and quit,” or “just make sure you also drink some water” can be deliberately subverted by sexual predators, even without spiking drinks. Putting all the onus on potential victims to keep total control of the situation, when the victims are dealing with someone who has studied and practiced ways to undercut that control, is a clear cut example, in my mind, of exactly how rape culture operates.
The potential rapist is allowed to use any trick in the book to get the victim drunk. It’s up to the victim to see through every trick and remain sober– but of course, all the while not even *suspecting* that the person manipulating her is a rapist until that’s been proven in a court of law.
Tilted playing field, much?
I still defy you and say you ought not to publicly condemn someone without evidence.
For the umpteenth time: multiple statements by more than one witness (who have not been shown to be untrustworthy) IS EVIDENCE.
Finally, if there is no room here for my comment, or if I should be banned for making it, then you have proven yourselves unworthy of the enlightenment ideals I have fought for…
IF you want to be taken seriously, I suggest you drop the preemptive crybaby self-pity (since, as any fool can see, we HAVEN’T banned you), and tell us HOW you fought for those “Enlightenment ideals” we’re supposedly unworthy of.
Because I don’t know Mr. Thibeault and I have no interest in making assumptions about what he believes based on a single blog post.
Oh grow the fuck up, kacyray. Since when was it impossible to understand what a blogger is saying in one post without investigating his entire history? Seriously, how much more do you you need to know about him before you can stop bouncing off the walls and deal wtih what he said? Just start with the default assumption that what he says is what he believes, and respond to that.
All you’re doing is trying to change the subject; and your cowardice is showing.
Yeah. When ordering your own drinks, stopping after two (my limit) is pretty straightforward. You just don’t go up to the bar and buy drink number three. But when drinks keep appearing in front of you because someone else is buying them, it may be easy to forget and start sipping. (Also, as a previous poster pointed out, if you aren’t getting up and fetching each drink, you are missing out on some physical feedback on how impaired you are.)
The more famous the person I was drinking with, the more I would hesitate to just pour an unwanted drink into a potted plant.
A person with a very high tolerance for alcohol, who is still fairly functional after four rounds when others are fucked-up, is in a position to take advantage of people. In some cases, a pair of people will be equally inebriated after the same number of drinks. In other cases, one person has a metabolic advantage or a size advantage. The size thing is visible. The “I have a high tolerance for alcohol thing” is not visible. Not everyone who can hold their liquor is a rapist or even sexually pushy, but it’s easy to see how a pattern of taking advantage of a drunken other person could get established. (i.e. the person who is more resistant to inebriation keeps buying more drinks and at the end of the evening starts touching the much drunker person).
Raging Bee said “For the umpteenth time: multiple statements by more than one witness (who have not been shown to be untrustworthy) IS EVIDENCE.”
Who are the multiple witnesses? We have one anonymous person who claims she was raped after voluntarily drinking with Shermer and then slept with him. And she reports of 5 other anonymous accounts. Then we have an anonymous person who says the first anonymous person told her about this. Then we have an anonymous person who said Shermer flirted with her and refilled her drink. Other than the original woman, what are these other people witnesses to? And who is to say that any of these women are trustworthy? We don’t even know who any of them are. On the other hand, there is Shermer who has never had a single charge brought against him or any sort of formal complaint filed. Doesn’t that lend a bit of credibility to his claim of no wrong-doing? This is why people who makes claims of criminal activity need to actually file a report even if they feel the police might not do anything. It will create a history to build a case against the criminal.
We have one anonymous person who claims she was raped…
No, we have MORE THAN ONE person, and they are KNOWN TO THE PEOPLE WHO HAVE CHOSEN TO PASS ON THEIR STORIES. That’s not the same as “anonymous.”
On the other hand, there is Shermer who has never had a single charge brought against him or any sort of formal complaint filed.
Bullshit. Read some of the actual stories, instead of mindlessly brushing them off without even a first thought. Several people have filed complaints against Shermer, only to have them minimized or dismissed. Seriously, boy, that last sentence proves you haven’t actually read or listened to anything.
This is why people who makes claims of criminal activity need to actually file a report even if they feel the police might not do anything. It will create a history to build a case against the criminal.
No, it woldn’t, especially if the cops don’t follow through. If you actually cared enough to read any of what’s been written here, you would know this.
Anon13, your willful ignorance is appalling and insulting. You’re clearly not mature enough to participate in an grownup dialogue.
Announomous13,
“One’s own behavior”? She raped herself? She was out of control?
You’re a flaming misogynist and if you think you are hiding that fact at all, you’re wrong. It is clear as day.
Drinking does not cause rape. Rapists cause rape and people like you keep them safe and secret so they can keep raping.
Hey, Anon13, if you really do care about standards of evidence in cases like this…(waiting for the rest of you lot to stop laughing)…you can check out this new post by Greta Christina:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/greta/2013/08/12/harassment-rape-skepticism-denialism/
AND by “check out,” I mean READ AND UNDERSTAND, get the hint? And don’t come back here until you can prove you understand it.
To Anon13 and all the other clueless people saying “She should have just gone to the police” Please read this –
Trigger warning –
..
.
.
.
.
.
..
Norfolk’s rape policy was assume the victim is lying until last week
This is the part that makes me want to punch a wall (also brings back some “wonderful” memories of something similar that happened to me when I was 19, I was lucky it was just an attempted rape, but it did teach me not to trust the police ever again):
“The rules changed in the wake of a case involving a 22-year-old woman who reported a sexual assault only to be told by police, “If we find out that you’re lying, this will be a felony charge.”
The woman was attacked in her home by serial rapist and diagnosed sexual sadist Roy Ruiz Loredo on April 22, 2012. Over the course of reporting the crime, police repeatedly expressed skepticism that the woman was telling the truth, even after the woman submitted to an exhaustive physical exam.”
I don’t think I want to be in this environment where only one side of a discussion is respected. I have seen reasonable positions supporting the actions of PZ, but they are lost among the horde of chorus-folk chanting insults, accusations and jingles.
Thanks for taking the time to write about this, Jason. You have not added anything of use. Your horde has only made me more sure that a witch-hunt mentality is damaging and corrosive.
for everyone saying ‘just got to the police”:
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/08/13/2457991/virginia-law-enforcement-rape/
jeez.
You mean I have a horde now?
FINALLY!!!
Horde, make me a sammich.
Pudendum @214:
I haven’t done any of those, and yet you seem oblivious to me. Weird.
Witches don’t exist. Here’s a quick quiz for you, just to see if you’ve been paying attention:
1. What is the lifetime risk of being raped for a woman living in the US or Canada? Rough estimates are fine.
2. How common are false rape accusations?
3. How likely is a claim to be false when multiple people have come forward to back up that claim, and a pattern of behavior has been shown which is consistent with that claim?
All the answers are in this thread, so this should be a cakewalk of a quiz.
Horde, make me a sammich.
I did. But…
… I eated it.
sudo dont_eat_my_sammich?
Bah.
Jason, you need something snazzier.
Avengers Assemble…my lunch.
I’ve warned you to be careful of your setgid bits before, but did you listen?
… [grumble young hackers think they know security grumble mumble] …
Anonymous13:
Turn off the Vulcan Logic and crank the empathy up to 13.
You comments treat rape as if it were a crime like burglary or arson. You imagine a rape victim can turn off their PTSD and calmly walk into a police station right after they have bern raped and fill out a police report.
No. Nonononono!
You deny the breadth of human experience .
You deny the coping mechanisms people have to deal with trauma.
You act is if people are automatons, able to dispassionately deal with traumatic events without those pesky emotions.
Stop.
These are only some of the effects rape victims may be dealing with. After all that, you actually think it is a good idea to make any demands of a victim?
Your way basically says “I pretend to know how horrible an experience you went through. I am going to tell you what I think is best for you, rather than offer my support however you desire.”
Uh, oops.
Jason, any way you can edit that?
Wait a minute…an anonymous commenter is bitching about “anonymous” allegations?! How did I not get the joke until now?
Tony: done.
Raging Bee: gods but I hate the word “bitching” used to mean “complaining”.
@206 Raging…
Nah, I was just trying to peel back the onion a bit. As I’ve explained, it is important to understand where someone is coming from. As Hitch once said, “The first requirement of anyone engaging in intellectual or academic debate is that he or she must be able to give a proper account of the opposing position.”
Cowardice? Surely you jest. I’ve been trying for a long time to have an actual conversation with one of you professional FTB commenters about these sorts of topics *away* from your little safe-zone here at FTB, but I never get any takers. Gee, I wonder why…
Care to be the first? Or are you just going to keep calling me a coward from the security and safety of your tribe here?
I didn’t claim not to understand what he was saying *in the blog post*. I said I didn’t want to make assumptions on the entirety of his belief system based on that one post.
Don’t worry, I’ll be generous and assume that you just weren’t able to understand plain English, rather than automatically assuming that you were being less than honest.
See how easy that is? I wonder if you would ever consider being so generous, compassionate social-justice-warrior that you are.
Let me know if you’d ever like to demonstrate your courage by having a one-on-one conversation away from the noise and temporal nature of a comment section. I’ll create a page where you and I can discuss these very important issues. It’ll be isolated from anyone else. You’ll have to deal with the fact that I’m a real person with actual ideas rather than the troll boogeyman you like to pretend I am. I’ll send you the invite. Then we can have a conversation – just you and me. Up for it?
Or, you can just keep calling me coward from your nice little safe zone and pretend no one notices the irony.
kacyray @226:
I’m amazed; not once in your post did you discuss a single one of the arguments we’ve presented here. It was all bluster about what cowards we are.
I’m curious. What would you call someone who continually ducks arguments, instead trying to draw one or two people away to an area they control?
@227
I wasn’t aware that I’ve ducked an argument. As I recall, I asked a series of questions designed to locate a specific point of ideological departure, with the intent of then applying that baseline to the present discussion. I clearly articulated the nature and intent of those questions. There was nothing hidden. (@66)
I also recall that rather than the questions being addressed, they were deliberately distorted and then attacked based on the distortions. (@168)
Then I recall being called a coward for deigning to ask those questions. (@206)
Now you’re complaining that *I* have ducked questions and instead resorted to calling people cowards. You have it exactly backwards.
Typical tribal behavior. And you wonder why I would be very interested to see how well any one of you holds up outside the tribe? This is why. Because I know you couldn’t.
And this is why not one of you will ever try… because you know it too. You know that the only thing you have going for you is the ability to make enough collective noise that you’re able to drown out what anyone who think independently is actually saying. Without that, you’d be left in the undesirable position of having to argue against my actual points, rather than throwing stones at caricatures. I realize that’s the last thing you’d want.
Incidentally, this also is why I frequently engage only the blogger and avoid wasting time with other commenters.
kacyray @ 226–
I don’t know what you have in mind when you say you’d like to have a conversation with FtB commenters “away from your little safe zone.” But it sounds really creepy to me.
We all know about what kind of “conversation” Rebecca Watson got for saying “guys don’t do that.” We’ve heard what happens to a woman who suggests putting Jane Austen’s picture on a bank note. Ophelia Benson just reported that the same guys who have been harassing women on the Internet showed up in person to drown out a team of women debaters with booing. Do you really think this is all going to remain jolly, good fun (for the harassers, not the women) and never escalate into physical attacks?
You’re damn right I’m going to stay in a safe zone.
You are the second men’s rights advocate I’ve observed on FtB trying to get information about the identities of posters here. In the present climate of threats against anyone who supports women’s rights, I consider that, at best, dangerously careless of other people’s safety.
@229
I’m sure it sounds creepy to you. Please, don’t accept my offer. In fact, you are specifically not invited.
For the record, it is pretty easy to get information about.me. I’m a US Marine Officer currently deployed on the USS Kearsarge. My handle is my actual name, and (I believe) my FB profile is accessible if you click on it. I keep my profile wide open, so feel free to visit and look at picture of my dogs and everything.
And if that’s not enough to assuage your delusional paranoia, I don’t know what would be. I’m on a ship in the Middle East. Still scared of me?
What I was offering (not to you) was a place to discuss the issues that directly impact this topic, in the post, away from the noise of misleading and loaded comments. Away from the tribe. And away from the constant lies (for example, I’m not a goddamned MRA).A place where the only words being exchanged were arguments, ideas, and information. A place where the only words being exchanged were arguments, ideas, and information. In other words, away from the useless bleating of people like you.
I’d like to have an actual discussion. But not single professional FTB commenter will accept. Telling, isn’t it?
hoary, please … if you find me all scary and stuff, just ignore me. And we’ll both me content.
kacyray, I wish I knew you better. You sound like a clear, sensible person.
I don’t think you are trying to get information about the identities of posters here, but I will accept your invitation, or counter with one of my own. I frequent a site called mindromp (it’s a dot org). That forum has a focus on freedom of speech. Or I’ll join you where you are. My guess is, that I have lots of disagreements with almost everyone about this. I aim to keep them friendly.
I would suggest it here, but I don’t know how to get enough quiet to maybe dig in and learn something about you.
I found kacyray’s “invitation” hilarious enough I thought I’d actually comment.
See, to me, it’s pretty obvious why you’ll almost certainly never get any takers. Your ‘challenge’ is, after all, full of insults to the bloggers and commenters. Poisoning the well and all that with talk about “constant lies”, “useless bleating”, “delusional paranoia”, “noise of misleading and loaded comments”, and so on. And the whole idea that you can’t have a rational discussion here just screams condescension and arrogance along with a deep seated bias.
Why on Earth would anyone want to run off to take you up on such a challenge when there’s nearly as many red flags as word count? Don’t worry. That’s a rhetorical question. I just find it really amusing that you think the fact that no one is taking you up on it is telling something other than how ridiculous you sound.
(I’ll grant it doesn’t sound much creepy to me. Just an attempt to isolate away from support so kacyray doesn’t have to deal with people supporting each other. But, while not creepy, it mostly just looks delusional to me.)
lol
Pudendom,
Thank you for that – I will be very happy finally get to have a dialogue on this. Props to you for rising above.
I just went to MindRomp and it appears I’m not filtered out, so I registered the handle KacyRay. Then I got the following message:
“Thank you for registering, KacyRay. Your account has been submitted for moderation by an administrator and will be activated shortly. You will be notified by email when this happens.”
I expect it won’t take long for that to happen. Once it does, I’ll let you know.
What I’m really looking for is to have a one-on-one discussion with a supporter of the A+/gender-feminism issue regarding some of the specific issues that I personally have with this subset of the movement. The issue of victim-blaming and how it relates to the OP here would be a great place to start.
I don’t know if this site provides the option of opening up forums specifically for the exclusive use of a limited number of members. Hopefully it does. If it does not, I may recommend other options. FB offers the ability to create “groups” which can be limited to only very specific people (who need not be on each other’s friends lists, incidentally) and I’ve found that those are fantastic ways to have productive conversations with specified participants. It keeps the riff-raff out and enables the participants to stay on topic. It also lasts as long as you want them to, rather than slowly fading into obsoletion the way these blog comments do.
These comments sections are great for interaction with the blogger, but they are *horrible* places to interact with other commenters. Especially if you happen to take a dissenting viewpoint.
I don’t know your MindRomp handle, so if you don’t want to broadcast it here, please find me there. Handle is KacyRay
kacyray @230–
“Delusional paranoia” is about par for the course. Word to the wise, Sweet Pea. Slinging around terms in abnormal psychology or any other technical subject without knowing what you’re talking about may snow some people on your boat. But it isn’t going to impress anyone around here.
John-Henry, if you’re going to rationalize away cowardice, I suppose your comments works as well as any.
hoary – why would you imagine yourself relevant enough to my life that I would seek to impress you? That’s some pretty serious projection.
Pudendom,
I’m in.
Interesting place. I’m not sure it would be endorsed by the commentariat here… heh. First thing that popped up on my screen was a welcome post by someone called C***. I wasn’t expecting that.
Anyway, see you there.
I’ve been trying for a long time to have an actual conversation with one of you professional FTB commenters about these sorts of topics *away* from your little safe-zone here at FTB, but I never get any takers.
In other words, you prove how brave you are by demanding to have a conversation with us in some place where we don’t feel quite as “safe?” If you have something sensible to say, how does your “bravery” prevent you from saying it here?
kacyray, you make a fool of yourself every time you say anything here, and then you try to use childish phony machismo as a substitute for intelligence. Do you really think you’re fooling anyone here?
I’m sure it sounds creepy to you. Please, don’t accept my offer. In fact, you are specifically not invited.
So kacyray boldly issues a challenge to all of us…but then, when one of us points out how bogus the challenge is, he suddenly changes his mind and starts recinding his invitation.
Yet another immature buffoon trying to sound tough and manly, and ending up sounding ridiculous instead.
Ooooh, “projection,” too! Why did you imagine I thought you were trying to impress me, specifically?
For that matter, why did you assume, when so many other women are receiving rape and death threats, that I was afraid for my own, personal safety? It never occurred to you that, with all the toxic hostility being expressed on the Internet, somebody could go off the deep end and decide to act it out? Why did you jump to the conclusion that I thought I would be the victim? There are a lot of reasons to think the victim would be somebody much less obscure than I am.
Just a suggestion–if you want to keep doing these off-the-cuff Internet psychoanalyses, you might want to get a little more solid training than reading “Sigmund Freud for Dummies.”
kacyray is trying to follow the same script as other Internet propagandists, most notably that famous creationist liar Salvador “Wormtongue” Cordova: waltz into FtB or SB with a pile of idiotic and/or dishonest arguments; when the arguments get cut to shreds, smugly invite one or two commenters to continue the conversation somewhere else; then start calling people cowards if they don’t oblige. We’ve seen this manipulative BS before (and Cordova did it a lot better than kacyray anyway), so don’t be surprised if no one is fooled by it.
I don’t know if this site provides the option of opening up forums specifically for the exclusive use of a limited number of members.
Why would you want to do that? If you have something useful to say, wouldn’t you want it to be heard by as many people as possible? And if you’re confident that your arguments can stand on their own merits, wouldn’t you want to prove that by letting all of us respond to them?
And if you really think we’re such a worthless bunch, then why are you here at all?
The answer is simple, and obvious: you know damn well your arguments are crap, and the only way you can “win” an argument is by rigging the game and controlling who gets to say what. How dumb do you have to be to think we can’t see this?
@dogberry
My 2 cents:
1. As good democrats we are taught that, when a criminal act occurs, we are to suspend our judgment until a court of law passes sentence, which we than take as fact/truth. This of course assumes that the system is working properly. If you look at the literature and the statistics you will easily see that that is not the case with rape. We have a largely dysfunctional system here, so we have a problem.
2. Even if you don’t want to hear it: journalism doesn’t work like a court of law. Your idea that one must have enough evidence about something to be certain it’s true or one has to keep it out of the public realm is a false dichotomy. That’s not how journalism works. Rather, if you have SOME evidence (a victims testimony IS evidence) you can decide to go public and write about it and talk about it. Which is what people are doing here, AFAICT.
I’ve already explained. It reduces the noise-to-substance ratio to an acceptable level. That’s the last time I’m going to explain it, as I don’t expect to to be any more effective than the first sozen times.
Because, as I’ve demonstrated, it never seems to be my actual argument that gets attacked. Rather, it’s me.
My original comment, along with all the questions, was specifically and explicitly intended for the blogger. Not you or anyone else.
Every comment I’ve made since that point has been in response to the nonsense that followed.
And every single comment you make demonstrates why I’d like to have a discussion away from the noise. Few people in this network create as much useless noise as you do. Sally Strange might be in first place, but you pull a close second.
Even if you don’t want to hear it: journalism doesn’t work like a court of law. Your idea that one must have enough evidence about something to be certain it’s true or one has to keep it out of the public realm is a false dichotomy.
If journalism DID work like a court of law, we’d never have heard jack shit about drone strikes, NSA surveillance, high-level corporate malfeasance, high-crime areas, or, for that matter, any natural disaster of which certain details were not yet firmly established. All of which, I’m sure, would be perfectly okay with those who support the status quo, but utterly disastrous for the rest of us, who need whatever information we can get to make sensible day-to-day decisions.
@Raging B. #241
Eh, I wonder if you’ve noticed…. I haven’t presented a single argument in this entire dialogue. I haven’t argued a single point. But don’t let that stop you from making lots of useless noise.
Ouch! My argument got cut to shreds? Gee, I wonder what conversation you were listening to. Because I haven’t argued anything at all in this thread.
Oh, I know, I know… the whole “argument cut to shreds” line is cut and pasted from your little “handy dandy argument winner spambot” that you use to just throw out random insults and accusations right before you pick up your bingo card.
How about you wait until I actually argue a point before sticking your fingers in your ears, closing your eyes, and declaring at the top of your lungs that I’ve lost? That’s what most folks ’round here do, anyway.
Pot, meet kettle (comment 206 – Raging Bee)
Curses! Once again I’ve failed to fool people into falling for a trap I haven’t set. And I’d have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for those Raging Bees!
My original comment, along with all the questions, was specifically and explicitly intended for the blogger. Not you or anyone else.
Then you should have just emailed Jason. You don’t get to just walk uninvited into a roomful of strangers, blurt out your ignorant opinions to all in earshot, and then dictate who is or is not worthy to talk to you. When your chest-pounding temper-tantrum subsides, I suggest you go to bed, and start learning some manners in the morning.