Do I place a higher value on reason, critical thinking, and skepticism or on the interpretation of feelings as accurate indicators of truth (e.g., if I feel harassed, I was harassed), arguments from experience, and the uncritical acceptance of third wave feminist ideology?
Some tendentious derpwad on the internet
All claims require evidence, whether they are extraordinary or not. And a claim, in and of itself, is not, by definition, evidence.
Some other derpwad on the internet
I don’t know what it is, but some skeptics have adopted this calcified attitude towards what constitutes reasonable evidence and reasonable claims. It seems to me that these are nothing but excuses contrived to justify denying reality, and that they are actually toxic to any kind of functional, societally useful version of skepticism; this is the skepticism of the status quo.
What if people actually operated as these advocates for purblind skepticism suggest? So I paid a call on SkepticDoc, M.D., the very acme of this form of skepticism. Here is how the visit went.
PZ: Doctor, lately I’ve been experiencing shortness of breath and an ache in my left shoulder when I exert myself…
SkepticDoc: Whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down! See the name on the shingle? It’s SkepticDoc. Do you have anything other than your feelings to justify wasting my time here?
PZ: What? I’m telling you my symptoms…
SkepticDoc: Yeah, yeah, your feelings. Do you have some physical evidence that you felt pain? Some independent corroboration that you felt this remarkable “ache”? So far, this is just gossip.
PZ: It prompted me to come here, pay money, face some physical discomfort, and apparently have my condition mocked and dismissed. But what you’re supposed to do now is test me, find evidence of the cause of the problem and help me get better.
SkepticDoc: Right. Sure. But why should I bother? Look, people live to be about 70 years old on average, that’s over 25,000 days without dying of heart disease. The odds that you’re actually experiencing these symptoms is really, really low, so it’s a waste of my time to take you seriously. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
PZ: But I’m a 57 year old man with a family history of heart disease and a prior incident that required hospitalization! This isn’t extraordinary!
SkepticDoc: A professional victim, eh? Your kind are always in here giving me your sob story. Well, boo hoo hoo. Look at all the people who aren’t having trouble with heart attacks, and try to be like them. They aren’t in here taking up my office hours.
PZ: So you aren’t even going to examine me?
SkepticDoc: Oh, all right. I’ll take a look at your chart.
Hmmm.
Says you’re a college teacher, right? Made these same complaints a couple of years ago, same time of the year…right before classes start? Interesting.
Your job is a little stressful? You think another couple of cushy weeks in a bed with pretty nurses waiting on you hand and foot is looking pretty good right now? Yeah, I’ve seen your type.
PZ: Getting stuck in a hospital isn’t a vacation! And I like my work!
Wait, what are you doing? You’re supposed to be interpreting my medical history, not trying to psychoanalyze me. Yes, I have a history of heart disease. That’s why I’m being careful and coming to you now.
SkepticDoc: Aha, you admit it!
PZ: I admit what?
SkepticDoc: That this is your personal problem, and that you’re expecting someone else to help you. It seems to me we have a little problem with personal responsibility here. Grow a spine!
PZ: But…but…you’re a doctor. This is your job.
SkepticDoc: That’s right. I’m in charge. But my first job here is to find a reason and place the blame. By the way, I notice you’re a bit overweight.
PZ: Yes.
SkepticDoc: Stop it. Just stop eating. When someone comes by with a cookie or a hamburger or a carrot or something, just don’t eat it. If you find it hard to say no to a second helping, just leave some food on your plate. It really is that easy.
PZ: OK, mea culpa. I’ll watch the diet more closely. But this is a problem right now, I’m worried and I need your help.
SkepticDoc: What problem? I just checked the heart transplant registry, and your name isn’t on it. If this were a really serious problem, you’d have gone all the way to applying for a transplant immediately, so I think the fact that you’re taking a lesser step means your problem can’t possibly be that bad.
PZ: Huh? Are you suggesting I need a heart transplant? You haven’t even looked at me! I’ve detected symptoms of an onset of a possible problem, and I’m here taking an appropriate first step to diagnosis and treatment.
SkepticDoc: I don’t know. You look fine to me — you don’t seem to be having a heart attack now, your color’s good, if a little flushed, all the observable evidence says you’re not in need of any kind of medical attention. Why are you bothering me?
PZ: I told you! Chest pains!
SkepticDoc: And I told you, I don’t believe this personal testimony nonsense. And hey, didn’t you earlier say the pain was in your shoulder? Now you claim it’s your chest? You’re not very credible, liar.
PZ: <storms out>
A few minutes later…
Nurse: Dr. SkepticDoc! Dr. SkepticDoc! That man who just left your office … he has collapsed by his car, his face is turning purple, I think he’s having a heart attack!
SkepticDoc: You say. Do you have any evidence to back up that unusual claim?
[and…scene!]
This story has been entirely fictional. There is no SkepticDoc, M.D. in my town, and no humane and responsible doctor would express the kind of absurdly hyperskeptical attitude we see in the cited derpwads. Also, I’m in fine health and am not experiencing any chest pains…I mean, shoulder aches!
Actually, I think it’s useful to point out that “compliments” are often harrassment in disguise, and the people who make them are often the type who have big problems in respecting boundaries.
True. It’s a known tactic to muddy the waters and steer the conversation away from the topic at hand. Thanks, rape culture!
made a few more posts this morning at the answers blog (‘no one can get you drunk’, ‘we need more information before deciding’)
I am encouraging pharyngulites to link to stuff that has the same message in the comments, if you know of a post or an article that you enjoy please share. I think the website will be more effective if there are multiple ways of getting the same message across.
Shit, that is quote a trend, isn’t it? You bring up sexual harrassment, and some jackass tries to weasel in “totally just a compliment that anyone can ignore.”
My one concern is the victim. She represents all victims, how is she through all this? PZ can you give us an update? Is she getting legal advice? I hope that PZ and everyone else concerned is helping this young woman, may not have the money to hire a lawyer and strength to be in this battle by herself.
This one person, let her not be forgotten.
Hope not standing alone with legal rumblings or are people standing with her? Her mental and financial health must be supported. Please, don’t forget her.
It’s rather revealing when men (and it’s always men, so far as I’ve seen) say they’d rather be raped than be falsely accused thereof. Being more concerned about your reputation than your bodily autonomy seems like a very privileged attitude.
You bring up rape, and some jackass tries to weasel in “totally just a drunk date, regret, etc.” And around and around the mulberry bush.
Boy, everything is Watson’s fault, huh? Sorry, oldgeezer, Watson has nothing to do with this story. Good post otherwise though, very illustrative of the nature of power in organizations and “movements”.
Just re-entered the skepchick/ftb world over the weekend to find this shitstorm going on. Yeah, could’ve predicted it from the initial reactions to Rebecca’s video. Still bloody fascinating, somehow, the depths of denialism.
@skeptifem: Would you please repost the link for your new blog? I’d like to check it out.
no. intent never actually figures into it.
I shudder to think what kind of working environment Mjolnir is responsible for. Because fuck no, there’s no such thing as a right to contribute to a hostile work environment. Joe may be lucky and be the only dude making a sexually suggestive comment like that; or he may be part of a pattern of dudes making a comment like that, and which point his thoroughly fucked up idea of a compliment would absolutely become part of a claim of having created a hostile workplace environment for Jane.
@505 Rey Fox
It seemed to me that it was the “elevatorgate” thing which kicked off the entire discussion of harassment and that discussion led to others coming forward with much more serious allegations. If I’m wrong, I apologise.
http://answersforrapeapologists.blogspot.com/
yeah and you can email me at skeptifemblog at gmail dot com if you have some ideas or something to contribute. I am basically online when the baby is napping and thats it so it will go faster if people want to contribute. let me know if you want your name added or not. You can just add stuff in the comments too- thats fine. I will moderate them more than once a day.
I’m so sleep deprived yesterday I tried to use a self-scan at the grocery store and I was trying repeatedly to scan a box on a spot that didn’t have a laser at all. like 8 inches to the right of the glass part. -_- took awhile to figure out what was wrong and a lot of people saw. so if something i wrote on the blog doesn’t make sense please point it out to me so I can fix it.
For those who seriously don’t understand why we don’t simply take victims’ words for it:
http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/08/18/19936408-daughter-i-lied-and-sent-my-dad-to-prison-for-rape?lite
Probably most people who claim to be victims are telling the truth. A few aren’t. That’s why we have trials.
THIS IS NOT A COURTROOM
THIS IS NOT A COURTROOM
THIS IS NOT A COURTROOM
THIS IS NOT A COURTROOM
THIS IS NOT A COURTROOM
THIS IS NOT A COURTROOM
THIS IS NOT A COURTROOM
THIS IS NOT A COURTROOM
@abewolk
Kindly indicate, while keeping this comment from Beatrice upthread in mind, what evidence you would regard as sufficient for a woman to publicly warn other women about the person who attacked her.
Or fuck off. Either one works for me.
Prove that a criminal indictment has been handed down. Or you lie and bullshit. This was never about guilt. But warning women about a well-known predator and his MO. Show otherwise with something other than your bullshity opinion.
Alissa, #504: Yes, she has legal representation.
@abewoelk
Please provide evidence that anyone here is seriously suggesting Shermer be sent to prison. Because then we’d need a trial.
Also, without even reading the story you linked to (I can’t be bothered, no one denies false allegations exist so I don’t even know what you’re trying to prove), I can tell from the link that he’s in prison… so there must have been a trial, dipshit. So tell me again about the stella arbiters of justice that are trials?
Wasn’t there an abewoelk-ish name on some of the hyperskeptic bullshit in the grenade thread? It sounds awfully familiar.
no, that’s why we have trials before hitting them with the full force of the state penal system. Since that isn’t what’s going on, the costs of believing vs. not believing an accuser are entirely different.
Why the bloody fuck is this so hard for you dipshits to understand?
Wow, I see I arrived late o the comment party but just want to applaud the original post. Great way to illustrate hypocrisy of the “I demand evidence” crowd.
Hypothesis: Women are un-people. The idea of women speaking to other women about issues not immediately relevant to men is as absurd as the idea that the house cats are secretly plotting one’s downfall. Therefore, Anonymous’s story can’t be directed at other women for the purpose of keeping them safe. She must be addressing men, or at the very least a male-coded institution, like the legal/penal system. So she must be calling for MS to be tossed in jail. QED.
Nobody is claiming that this is a criminal proceeding. However, the stakes are still fairly high. Losing one’s employment, one’s income, one’s reputation, one’s ability to be taken seriously, that’s not peanuts, and all of those consequences are potentially real for anyone accused. And thanks to the Internet, once an allegation has been made, it never goes away, even if it later turns out to be false. Twenty years ago I was falsely accused of theft; even after the alleged victim admitted to having made it up, it still took me five years to find a decent job.
If this were nothing more than women warning other women to avoid a predator, that would be one thing, but it isn’t. This is more akin to picketing the house and passing out flyers announcing that someone is a sex offender: The real intention is to make sure he isn’t allowed to live anything approaching a normal life. Sorry, but I inherently distrust mobs.
@abewoelk
You neither answered my question nor fucked off. How disappointing.
Go fuck yourself.
Confusing blogs and general discussion for a courtroom should become a bannable offense. It is a sure sign that the person making the argument has nothing at all to fucking contribute to the discussion and sure as fuck didn’t bother to read or understand any of the conversation up to this point.
none of that will happen just because PZ published Jane Doe’s accusation. especially not the “reputation” part, since the dudebros are siding with Shermer, and his reputation among many women who went to conferences regularly has already been that of a skeezy guy to better stay away from
I am a bit late returning to the thread. First off, SC (Salty Current), OM @ 112;
Thanks for the link. It did help to neutralise a little of the nasty aftertaste of the rampant arsehattery in the Mr Deity video, and was highly amusing. Shermer really does like to toss out not very credible legal threats at the least provocation, doesn’t he?
——————————————————————————————————————-
On a more general note – this has been another depressing thread where large numbers of hypersketical jerks find it necessary to engage in revolting rape apologia and JAQing off (with maybe a little light sock-puppeting added to taste), before going on a kamikaze run straight into PZ’s banhammer. And it is obvious that not one of them bothers to read this thread, or any of the others on the topic, first. Every time I hear yet another smug misogynist open with a variant of ‘these anonymous accusations aren’t enough for a convction’ or ‘the accused has a right to face their accuser in any court of law’ it is like nails down a chalk board. I would have thought it somewhat difficult to confuse a blog thread with a court proceeding, but those brave skeptical heroes found a way…
Worst of all are the hypotheticals – ‘would it be rape if we changed variable ‘x’ a little? What if we tweeked variable ‘y’ a bit? Would it still be rape?’ It sounds altogether too much like they are trying to sound out any possible grey areas; trying to find what they imagine would constitute ‘borderline’ cases even in the minds of the more liberal feminists among the atheist community. Which leads me to wonder why they are so interested in trying to define where sex without consent, or where consent is unclear, notionally no longer counts as rape.
If I were currently wearing such garb, I would take my hat off to those members of the Horde who have stayed in the trenches and fought back the tide of misogynists, MRAs, clueless dudebros and inane hyperskeptics. You are an inspiration.
you suck at mindreading
I’m sure all of that will totally happen. It’s not like there is a surplus of defensive, denialist “skeptics” doing their best to ignore accusations and preserving Shermer’s reptuation. Weep for Shermer, and the “potentially real” things he maybe might suffer, for crimes that he maybe didn’t commit, because bitches lie.
And this is an example of false accusation outside of the legal system? How did it affect your ability to find a job if never suffered any legal repercussions? Are you just counting the fact that you couldn’t rely on your previous employer to give you a good recommendation?
“Women allowed to warn each other predators. But just don’t it so loudly, gosh! How rude!”
Again, go fuck yourself.
PZ’s analogy works well. Not simply to show that hyper skepticism is ridiculous, but that the real issue isn’t skepticism at all – rather that “bitches aint shit”. There are plenty of women who have had real conversations with their Drs just like SkepticDoc above. But it’s not skepticism on display, it’s a double standard about who gets to have crediblilty, who gets to have their experience taken seriously. Women, no. Men yes. The skepticism is just a smokescreen for their deep and horrible misogyny.
That is:
now I’m picturing a group of people with torches and pitchforks, who do nothing other than point out to women that this one dude? he’s got a shittastic reputation and has even been accused of raping women. and then the mob escorts the woman to her car, so she doesn’t have to be in a dark parkinglot by herself.
Meanwhile, outside, the decidedly un-mob-like crowd of dudebros is angrily screaming about how unfair it all is, that women are warning other women in public now.
*dons The Manskeptic Googles*
AAAAAH!! IT’S A SLANDEROUS WITCH HUNTING LYNCH MOB!!!!
*shits pants in terror and rage*
Fionabhair While I’m generally totally on PZ’s side, his story is not a good analogy.
SkepticDoc refuses to look at evidence that’s there, right before his eyes , like in your story.
I the Shermer case, the skeptic community demands evidence beyond the victim’s testimony that probably cannot be provided.
I wouldn’t want to be treated by a doctor who relies only on an anonymous description of my symptoms without actually examining me. Doing so doesn’t mean he does not believe me, it’s his goddamn job to listen to me first, then see for himself what’s wrong with me. That’s very different from dismissing a rape victims’s report of what happened because it’s difficult or impossible for her to prove what happened.
Hey look, here’s a post by someone who was falsely accused of rape. If’ you’re sitting here going “What about poor accused Shermer”, GO READ IT.
Today’s FASCINATING observation:
Creationist: Teachers should not teach evolution as true because if they do it undermines the godly moral foundation for those people and society and thus they will rape, pillage and murder. (Thus evolution is not true!)
Various “sceptics”: People should not publish rape accusations about prominent men like Shermer because if they do Shermer’s reputation, career and life will be ruined. (Thus the rape accusation is not true!)
Ladies and germs, the argument from consequences! Still going strong after all these years! Bravo! Bravo!
Louis
Nepenthe, in answer to your question, I would require a standard of proof high enough that the person making the allegation would be willing to have a civil judgment for slander be entered if it turns out to be wrong. In other words, are you confidant enough in the accusation that you are willing to be bankrupted by a slander suit if you’re wrong? If you’re that confidant, then accuse away. If you’re not that confidant, then maybe you should hold off.
@520 abewoelk
Demonstrate that any of these things are likely to happen. Ever. Seriously. Give us an example of a famous man being accused of some kind of sexual impropriety (guilty or not) and then actually suffering in any way remotely close to what a rape victim suffers. What is The Skeptic Who Shall Not Be Named actually going to lose here? Is he going to maybe sell a few less books? Maybe get a few less invitations to speak at conferences? Maybe lose a few magazine subscriptions? Maybe find it a little more difficult to get laid at cons? Lay it out for us.
And when you’re done detailing that for us, explain to us why we should care more about that than we would about the women who will almost certainly be raped by You Know Who if this accusation is true. If this is true, this guy is a serial rapist. He’s done it 6 times and will almost certainly keep doing it til he feels like he can’t get away with it. Explain to us why avoiding some as-yet-undefined damage to his reputation and/or career should trump avoiding a lifetime of suffering for his future victims if this is true and we choose to sit on the fence.
Ready, set, go.
There’s also a huge disconnect between their position of rape being no big deal (so what if it happened, they wouldn’t mind if it happened to them), and the idea that being labelled a rapist is the worst thing in the history of all universes ever. How are they squaring that particular circle ?
Chie Satonaka @478:
Thank you for that. You gave enough information for me to find references to the case, some of which referenced other cases, so now I can provide citations to back that up. (Note: search with caution due to all the MRA sites that come up as well.)
Pennsylvania – blind woman raped in 1997, jailed for false reporting, DNA kit never tested, exonerated when her rapist was caught for another rape and confessed to hers as well:
Source
Washington state – woman bullied into recanting, fined for false reporting, case reopened after pictures of her rape were found on the offender’s camera:
Source
Alternet post
Oregon teenager convicted of false reporting because the judge found her less credible than her alleged attackers. Original source removed, but many blogs reference and quote it, such as:
here and here.
The friends he used to convict her were the ones who convinced her to report the rape to police in the first place.
Searching for any of these cases, or for unfounded false rape claims in general, brings up MRA sites denying the problem. Here’s a typical example. Note the similarities with the “arguments” and underlying assumptions being spammed all week long during this discussion. (Not linking directly to these sites.)
I’ve already linked several times this week to research and articles about how police and investigators routinely dismiss rape reports as unfounded or false, based not on evidence, but on mythology and ignorance about the credibility of victims. Research shows that across the board, 30 to 90 percent of reports may be dismissed this way. Some regions even codify disbelieving the victim into their procedures (see: Norfolk, Virginia state.) But since we’re at it, here’s yet another reference, directly from David Lisak. (PDF link; remove — to use)
—http://www.icdv.idaho.gov/conference/handouts/False-Allegations.pdf
Congratulations on your contribution to rape culture and your enthusiastic approval of silencing women who have been victimized but can’t prove that they have been to the satisfaction of our incredibly fallible legal system. You are well on your way to officially becoming a horrible human being.
Did I ever mention that you should probably go fuck yourself?
@abe
OFFS, don’t pass the buck. What do you consider that standard of proof?
Your unwillingness to make a stand is especially obnoxious given what happened to me. That man did the same to at least two women before me and I would be shocked if he were not planning on raping a wife or girlfriend this evening. But I’ll be nice and quiet and never say his name, not because I think he would kill me if I did, but because I can’t prove in a court of law that it happened.
Re: 534 @piegasm
Just one?
“One of the most high-profile cases, however, is that of Atlanta Falcons linebacker Brian Banks. Banks was poised to attend the University of Southern California in 2002 on a football scholarship when a classmate, Wanetta Gibson, accused him of sexual assault. Faced with the prospect of more than 40 years in prison, Banks took a plea and spent five years in jail. Fortunately, Banks was eventually able to clear his name, but there are undoubtedly other innocent men currently serving time for assaults they didn’t commit.”
Your criteria of guilty or not is also asinine and really shows you don’t believe there are any innocent men out there that have been accused of rape. If you did you wouldn’t have asked for an example where the accused rapist suffered more than the victim. If no rape happened there is no rape victim, the only victim is the one being falsely accused.
kenithadams, your example is a person who had his name cleared anyway and thus suffered nothing at all? And that the worst he would have gotten was 5 years in jail? And that is supposedly as bad as rape? You are a fucking idiot. Go away and save yourself more embarrassment, you clueless fucking clown.
Re: 538 @anteprepro
Your comment would imply that you think liable and slander laws are tools of the rape culture. If you took your head out of your ass you would see these principals apply far more generally than just rape allegations and for a good reason.
Yours is apparently a very myopic view do you think because the legal system isn’t perfect so we should just abandon it?
abewoelk @ 520;
And what of the ‘stakes’ if women are not made aware that a person has an ongoing history of accusations of improper behaviour toward women and outright rape? Or don’t those count? Why should a potential risk to a man’s reputation outweigh a risk to the physical safety and bodily autonomy of women?
And so I assume that you stood four square against the mob of misogynists that have been harrassing Rebecca Watson for over a year with regard to her mild admonition ‘guys, don’t do that’? And you have taken an equally strong stance against all the screeching sexists that have made it their business to to try to force prominent women within the skeptical and atheist communities out of public life? Right?
If not, then you would be nothing more than a hypocrit who only has a problem with ‘mobs’ when it is a man who is on the receiving end…
Bonus stupidity for kenithadams: The person piegasm was talking to was talking about the harm caused to a person accused of rape outside of a legal context . No charges brought against them. No courtroom.
There is something so very, very wrong with these “skeptics”.
Re: 541 @anteprepro
Well thanks for proving you have very selective reading skills. The snippet clearly states he was facing up to 40 years, so no 5 years is not the max he could have faced. He was cleared of all wrong doing AFTER 5 years in prison when he should have been going to school on a scholarship. So not only did he lose 5 years of his life during his prime he also missed the opportunity to attend university on a scholarship he worked his ass off to achieve.
So you think some woman who was never sexually assaulted and maliciously fabricated everything somehow suffered more than him? Get real and learn to read, you are a fucking embarrassment.
And your view is that the legal system isn’t perfect, but shut up, we should just accept it and never want anything to change anything for the better, or point out when it is flawed.
I think I’ve found the Manskeptics’ One True God.
Unsurprisingly, I don’t take your word for it. Citations, or shut the fuck up.
Re: 544 @anteprepro
So are you trying to maintain the assertion that no man has ever suffered outside of the legal system due to false rape accusations? I just want to get your position on the record so I’m not putting words in your mouth. Is that the claim you are making?
@540 kenithadams
a) I didn’t give a criteria for guilty or not. I asked what damage abewoelk expected MS to suffer as a result of this whole situation.
b) Non sequitur.
Non-sequitur-ception.
Pure, unmitigated, weapons-grade bullshit as evidenced by numerous studies and articles linked throughout this thread and the multiple others on this topic.
Like that, is it? All righty, have a few more of those things called ‘evidence.’
http://www.shakesville.com/2010/09/senate-subcommittee-hearing-will.html
From those sources:
http://inquirer.philly.com/packages/crime/html/sch101799.asp
http://articles.philly.com/2010-09-07/news/24979478_1_report-assaults-philadelphia-police-john-f-timoney
More individual cases cited at the Shakesville link.
Let me guess. You’re about to pull one or two stories where this did happen out of the hat, and generalise the hell out of it…
So this is the hill you are going to die on, huh? 5 years in prison is equal to or worse than being raped.
Speaking of reading skills…
piegasm:
Why don’t you just fuck off, keith? You have no idea what the fuck you are talking about.
Also: Blockquotes, fucking how do they work?
Also also: Shout out to Pteryxx for the excellent fact-finding you’ve been doing.
Re: 546 @anteprepro
Your argument is very adolescent, how exactly do unidentified rape accusations help or better the legal system? There are reasons why one has the right to face one’s accuser or that evidence beyond a reasonable doubt be presented in order to ascertain a guilty a verdict.
Let’s not let those very real issues get in the way of your narrative right? Who cares why those things are in place, down with the man, am I right?
Re: 554 @anteprepro
So, it isn’t your claim, you just wanted to clarify that it was the stupid claim of someone else that you don’t agree with, got it. That was just a really long way of whining about facts being presented for no good reason since you don’t even agree with the original stance.
Good job!
Yeah, you can’t read and can’t think. There’s really no point in bothering with you. Dunning-Kruger made flesh.
This is not a court. There is a striking lack juries. Prosecution and defence lawyers are notable by their absence. There are no judges handing out sentences. The legal system is not being resorted to.
Please tell me if there is anything in the above paragraph which you find hard to grasp.
So kenithadams, you really seem invested in getting us to admit that somewhere, at some point in time, some man suffered due to a false accusation of rape. But what you don’t seem to grasp is that your obsession with focussing on this tiny minority of men and insisting that we use their existence to determine how we respond to all accusations of rape is just proving what a repulsive fucker you really are.
Because it’s obvious that to you, this *tiny* number of men MUST take primacy above the thousands upon thousands of women who a) have been raped and either not believed or were (for any number of reasons ) unwilling or unable to report it, and b) the number of women that might be spared this horrific experience if public reports about men like Shermer are true.
You’re unbelievable.
And again: do you get up in the faces of people reporting the rapes of children by Catholic priests? Because a lot of the accusers in those cases have not made their names public. Or do you just accept those as true? ‘Cos if you’re not there on the front lines, defending those priests with the same fervour that you’re defending Shermer, you’re a hypocrite.
re: 552 @antiprepro
Well I can see now that you are just a lying sack of shit.
She wasn’t raped which is the point. So your comparison is just an outright lie.
5 YEARS IN PRISON AND LOSS OF AN EDUCATION IS MORE SUFFERING THAN NOT BEING RAPED!
NOT RAPED = NO SUFFERING
NOT RAPED = NO SUFFERING
NOT RAPED = NO SUFFERING
Hopefully you won’t be able to read around the facts in that statement. The final question that you think is somehow profound is foolish. It might as well just be reformulated as why should we judge someone innocent until proven guilty and not guilty until proven innocent?
The answer is because innocent people will suffer. Beyond the legal system there is also a very real harm of being accused of rape. You even tacitly agree that innocent men have suffered from false accusations otherwise you would have agreed with the claim to contrary. You didn’t agree to the claim because you know the fact that men do sometimes become the victim of false rape accusations.
That’s a weird way to say “I’m sorry, I was wrong”.
It’s even weirder when I didn’t say I disagreed with that claim, or if I did, to what degree I might disagree. Your mind-reading abilities are about on par with your mundane reading abilities.
For the fuckwits who claim rape allegations are bad: One in six women are raped. This is a well established fact if you bothered to read the required reading. Show me from legitimate sources outside yourself where there is even close to the same number of men being accused falsely of rape. Or, shut the fuck up about it.
Do you know what the word “if” means? If you do (look, I used the word in a sentence!), read the rest of the comment you quoted again. Especially the part where I quote piegasm. Then shut the fuck up, you simpering fuckwit.
QFFT.
re:559 @Crys T
My original foray into this comment section was in response to someone that claimed there isn’t a single case where any man has ever suffered from false rape accusations.
The rest of your comment amounts nothing more than a pathetic attempt to minimize anyone daring to bring up facts contrary to the pre-ordained narrative. Not surprisingly you know absolutely nothing about my views outside of this one tiny issue but have chosen to characterize me how you see fit anyways. Good job making shit up!
Fixed it for the unrelenting dumbass.
Are you trying to maintain that men suffering from false rape accusations occurs statistically on a par with people being raped? Is that what you’re saying? I mean, I don’t want to put words in your mouth.
abewoelk,
I do wonder what you would consider to be “nothing more than women warning other women to avoid a predator”. No, really, I do wonder. Because I’m pretty sure anything a women could say in order to warn other women would get the same shit from you. “Hush! Can’t you women warn each other without opening your mouths, or at the very least make sure no men hears you? Think of the poor rapist and his reputation!”
Yeah, interesting to note that, implicit in abe’s statement, is the assumption that women’s opinions of someone don’t count in regards to “reputation”. Abe only seems to take offense that people other than women (i.e. real people, i.e. men) might see it and start to think poorly of The Accused. When it is just women to women, it doesn’t matter, no matter how many women wind up aware of it. When it is women saying something loud enough that men might hear, suddenly things just got serious.
So let’s sum up what I’ve learned in a brief time in these comments:
1) Men never suffer outside the legal system from having rape allegations lodged at them whether they are true or false.
2) Even if the man didn’t rape anyone it is still okay to make allegations because he probably did in fact rape her due to his being a man and even if he didn’t it’s still okay to accuse him of it because of point 1.
3) Anyone that disagrees with point 1 is either a rapist themselves or a rape apologist working to further the rape culture. Anyone that tries to bring up facts that strike against point 1 have no other interests in life and all their views are centred around pro rape stances because they decided to look objectively at point 1. It is not possible for anyone disagreeing with point 1 to ever have sympathy for a woman and must be misogynistic on every other issue.
4) It is okay to mischaracterize and lie about anyone questioning point 1, intellectual honesty and objective review have no place when fighting a broken system, this is WAR!
If this review-page were nothing more than Amazon users warning other Amazon users to avoid a Dan Brown novel which they found to be a complete waste of time and hard-earned money, that would be one thing, but it isn’t. This is more akin to picketing Dan Brown’s house and passing out flyers announcing that Dan Brown is a shite author: The real intention is to make sure Dan Brown isn’t allowed to live anything approaching a normal life.
I think arresting Shermer and putting him on trial is a swell idea.
LIAR!!!
We all know that you are incapable of learning anything.
Hey, kenith, in the name of intellectual honesty, answer my question.
Does the false rape accusation of men occur statistically on a par with people being raped or not?
Yes or no?
Me @571
And yes, I really do mean that the consequences to most accused rapists are no worse than the consequences of a bad user-review to Dan Brown.
@570 kenithadams
Well that explains everything. Instead of reading what people here have said in response to your bullshit, you hallucinated a completely different conversation and believed it was real. Well done.
…I didn’t know that rape crisis centers became a thing because so many police departments brushed off the victims of serial rapists.
http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2010/03/history_shows_sexual_assault_c.html
kenithadams,
Oh, you mean this?
Note, a rape victim. Not necessarily his accuser. A victim. And either way, that’s not remotely close to what you’re saying you were responding to now.
Goddamnit, can’t these hyperskeptic assholes fucking read?
@abewoelk
Please explain: How could Jane Doe have warned others in a way that would have found your approval? If going public is not an option, what could she do?
abewoelk
Huh, maybe I should pay more attention to this shit. I had another idiot in the Ian Murphy’s thread tell me that, if Jane Doe wanted to warn the skeptic community, she should have done so without making it public. I never did get an answer on how one is supposed to warn an international community without being public. I don’t supose you’d be willing to tell me how the hell one is supposed to warn others in the public without maing the information public?
kenithadams>/b>
You know, I checked, and that didn’t happen. You seem to be either full of shit or unable to read.
It’s amazing how common that is. Again, making the parallels to creationism are unavoidable.
Working my way to caught up.
Johan Ronnblom @413
We can’t make it harder for a serial rapist to rape without causing him “serious harm”.
Well, isn’t that a revelatory phrase, so I thank you for using it.
Yes, what possible “serious harm” could there be if his targets are warned of his behavior. The behavior a number of separate women have observed or been affected by. What is lost?
Access.
He loses access to his victims. If he isn’t a rapist but people are warning each other that he is a rapist he loses access to “teh bitches”. The women that are his right by your and the other douchebrigades surmising.
No, dickweasel. No one is entitled to women. No one is owed them for clearing the very short hurdle that is “not being a rapist”. And it is not worth putting them through an unending nightmare of rape just so some rapist can get his “prize”.
Oh yes, I’m sure the asshole brigade would love to get access to their real names. Also, PZ Myers heard this information, as a journalist, and made a decision to support a rape survivor and tell their story while keeping their source confidential and protected from all the assholes who want to rip her apart and make her trauma that much worse in order to punish her for breaking”the code”.
And it’s also worth pointing out that PZ Myers isn’t everyone on the internet. There is a mass of women’s reports going back years saying this same shit with much smaller megaphones. Women in the know have heard the warning before, independently of PZ Myers.
So what you are saying is that PZ Myers spent the last couple of years fabricating a diverse population of women all telling similar stories of Schermer’s behavior in order so he could put himself at risk by lying about Schermer and cause a massive shitstorm of libertarians and MRAs to come crashing on his head for daring to speak about the rape culture. Cause that sounded like something he needed in his life to get as many clicks on his blog as he could have by simply calling out Richard Dawkins on something sexist or something.
Yeah, that’s “logic” and “skepticism” and not the same shit we’ve seen a million times with climate change denialists.
Johan Ronnblom @418
You say that, because you are a lying sack of shit who has never experienced sexual assault.
Thus you think losing “access to bitches” by being known as a rapist is worse than:
TRIGGER WARNING for descriptions of physical and psychological effects of rape
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Complete loss of agency
Complete loss of a sense of safety
Massive harm to your libido if you have a libido
PTSD (like soldier level, PTSD)
Shakes
Massive depression
Increase of suicidal ideation
Massive triggers over areas of your body
FLASHBACKS!
Oh the flashbacks, do you want to have a string of several months to a year long after the assault is over and you’ve tried to move on with your life, flashing back to the scene of your rape over and over again? Forced to relive it viscerally, but now with the added weight of knowing everything you know since? It’s super fun! What with the complete inability to sleep, being knocked into a hellish space while trying not to harm your partner who’s just trying to comfort you. And on that note…
Secondary trauma to your romantic partner
Complete inability to have certain types of pressure or sexual use of affected organs
The self-blame. Your mind wants to regain agency from what was stolen, and what easier way than accepting society’s messages that it was all your fault and you did something wrong by being attacked
Suicidal ideation and self-harm brought on by the self-blame.
Sudden revulsions at the idea of sex usually in the midst of an intimate moment because you are suddenly in a flashback space.
Triggers, all the triggers, possibly for life.
And that’s not even the beginning of the list.
Yeah, there’s no way in hell, having suffered that, you would ever choose otherwise.
I mean, seriously. we’re just trying to confirm Obama’s real birth certificate. If Obama doesn’t have anything to hide, why would people be less than happy to verify shit for the millionth time to abusive shitheads who want to destroy the evidence rather than learn from it.
Seriously, there are at least a dozen independent accounts by now, all saying the same thing about the pattern of Schermer’s rapist behavior. You and your fellow denialists do not care about “verification”, only having access to the “bitch” who “started it” by speaking what happened to her in a space big enough to actually be listened to.
Johan Ronnblom @422
Yes, that is correct. It is quite clear you do not want to be part of a community where anyone can even be accused of rape.
We see that quite clearly here.
And no, they will never be shunned. We see that again. Even with a long list of independently verified accounts, we get an army of people like you willing to do anything in order to protect the rapist from even the most meager of social consequences (a handful of people thinking poorly of him), while demanding the right to abuse and vilify the woman actually traumatized.
And the sick thing is that you bastards will have won that. This object lesson I’m sure has not escaped Jane Doe and I’d be shocked if she wasn’t suffering secondary traumas based on what has been said of her and the access rape apologists have demanded to her. This object lesson is also transmitted to others who are on the fence talking about their assaults by people more powerful than them.
So congratulations on doing your job of terrorizing rape victims. I’m sure it really helps you sleep at night.
And this is where you demonstrate being a shadow of a doubt your bad faith.
You’re aware that at least 6 independent cases have been made and yet you instantly disbelieve all of them and want access to them to abuse them.
No, birther, you don’t get access to the “original copy of Obama’s birth certificate” or any of that other bullshit because it’s quite clear that you would burn it just to try and make the offending reality go away.
And we’re sick and tired of that.
Johan Ronnblom @426
If you believe this, you are either a liar or a sociopath.
So, either you are lying about not being able to understand why people might try and lend their voice to the powerless and take an issue sadly taken not at all seriously by society seriously. Or you genuinely cannot process why one human being would aid another and lower his station by doing what is right.
And if it is the latter, then dear Bob man, get some fucking help, because currently you are a danger to your loved ones.
You disbelieve PZ Myers and the huge number of independent women making similar statements because…
There’s a vague possibility that he could be the mastermind of a years-long smear campaign and the greatest conspiracy author known to man.
This must be treated as the more factual reality than the one reported and verified because… uh, reason that isn’t sexist conspiracy-theory-driven bullshit that wants to intimidate rape victims into being silent.
All signs point to “No”.
Hey, kenith, still waiting for an answer to my question. I know you’re lurking out there.
[crickets] chirp chirp chirp [/crickets]
Pssst… Kenith. If you’re gonna make shit up, it neads to look plausible.
You’re number 4 is just funny since it was you who mischaracterized.
Yeah, I agree. That’s why it is so important to let other women know this man’s history. More women could be raped by Shermer. His victim(s) trauma may be compounded by her being forced to remain silent.
Oh…you meant the stakes were high for Shermer because his victim spoke up. Riiiight. He might not sell as may books or as easily secluded and rape women. Gosh, that’s rough. After all, he is owed our time, attention, money and trust. Not giving him those things is such a violation!
Of course you meant the stakes where high for the powerful, wealthy, white, man. He might be unduly inconvenienced and we can’t have that.
But what silence does to women, that’s not important. Why worry about that? Who cares about a few more of us being raped, shamed and silenced? Who cares that survivors are reading this and seeing how many people are quick to say those survivors don’t know whether or not they were “really” raped and that women are just liars anyway. Who cares about the damage it does to read people blaming victims for their own rape while being extremely concerned for the plight of the rapist. How can those things compare to the desires of a very important dude?
*spit*
There are 11,000 untested rape kits in the city of Detroit. After prosecuting attorney Kym Worthy fought to get funding, they’ve finally started testing them. Of the 569 kits tested so far, they’ve found 35 serial rapists and 1 serial killer. That’s right, a serial killer was allowed to go on to kill five women because one of his first rape victims never had her crime properly investigated.
To sum up — Detroit has tested a mere 5% of their backlog of untested rape kits and found 35 serial rapists and 1 serial killer. They still have 95% of the kits left to test.
But yeah, let’s keep pretending that we take rape seriously in this country.
For those of you trying pathetically to straw-man my opinion it was in response to this:
After I called out that comment some of you veered off-topic trying to compare the statistics of actual rape to false rape accusations. Blah blah blah, it’s not relevant to this one very important point. It should be established that there are indeed men who get falsely accused and do suffer from it.
We can go on to discussing how this impacts the overall problem of women actually getting raped which is a very real problem. But denying the objective fact that men actually do receive false allegations which can have a drastic impact on their innocent lives only hurts any other arguments you are trying to make. As it brings into question how dishonest you could be about the other issues if you were willing to lie this simple one.
I was sleeping with my partner one night, felt a little cuddly and put my arm over her. She woke up screaming in terror. Turns out she’d had a flash back to her rape that happened about a year ago.
But no, women avoiding you because they think some allegations might have some merit is totally equal.
got it: rich people can say whateverthefuck they want; poor people can STFU; if they can’t afford good lawyers, they’re clearly lying anyway.
glad we cleared that one up.
But don’t forget the movement! Think of the movement! It cannot survive without Michael Shermer!
You have a quote of this yes?
So answer my question. Do men get falsely accused of rape as often as people actually get raped?
It’s a simple question. Y/N
@588 kenithadams
We know it was in response to that, fuckweasel, as evidenced by multiple people quoting exactly that and pointing out various ways in which nothing you’ve said addresses the point.
Still not acknowledging that the comment was about consequences suffered outside of the legal system? Still not acknowledging that the comment specifically says consequences that are as bad as the consequences of rape?
Haha. Hee. Ha. Heh.
GO FUCK YOURSELF
Still waiting, kenith.
[whistles to pass the time]
These articles just keep on giving.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-md-ci-rapes-20100519,0,2195896,full.story
but but but MEN UNJUSTLY ACCUSED EXIST THEREFORE STATISTICS ARE IRRELEVANT /kenithadams
The invisible hand knows the truth-tellers are smart enough to take responsibility for future claims against them by utilising their freedom to maximise their need-fulfillment in the form of powerful cash (preferably in gold standard bullion).
No, it’s just the suffering of the rape VICTIM is magnitudes greater than the alleged rapist. In fact people have posted links to rapists being lauded at the expense of their victims. Rape victims suffer tremendously even after the fact, often the public will side with the rapists asking people to “Think of the MENZ!” Rape victims suffer social stigma for years after bringing their suffering to public attention. Culture has to reach a point where the rapist suffers the same social repercussions as the rape victim. This is why it is called “Rape Culture”, because it acts in defense of rape.
This is so far out of the bounds of reality it is not even wrong. You are attacking a strawman with this “lesson” that is so far beyond what anyone in the thread has said it can only be understood as a direct attack. No person has ever said that false allegations of rape are anything but NOT OKAY. However people have pointed out that the massive social burden undertaken by accusing a rapist in our Rape Culture, the criminality of filing a false report, the incredibly low odds of any repercussions to the rapist, and the available statistics means that the report of a rape should be considered to be true until shown to be false.
Sentence one is about correct, but no one here is going to false allege someone is a rapist. But the rest is correct, by marginalizing the suffering of the victim you are a rape apologist promoting rape culture.
Sentence two is a powerfully inaccurate strawman. Being a defender of rape culture doesn’t mean you are a professional rape apologist spending their every waking hour fighting for the rights of the rapist. You’ve done a bang up job being a rape apologist in this post kenithadams and I doubt it took more than 10 minutes of your time to lob this downright vile attack at the victims to defend the menz. Also if you have some facts that somehow contradict the existence of Rape Culture please provide them because I’d desperately like to learn that a culture that marginalizes and harms at least half the planet isn’t real.
Sentence three is also a powerfully inaccurate strawman. I’m sure that you can interact on a daily basis with women kenithadams, however here and now you are deliberately mischaracterizing efforts to fight rape and rape culture and therefore are stewing in Misogyny. It isn’t too late to change either kenithadams, we live in a very VERY sexist culture. It is entirely possible for you to read what has actually been written in this thread and in the links that Caine was kind enough to post in the first page, take stock of your acculturated sexism and decide to change. But first you’re going to have to engage the debate honestly and making shitty shitty comments in favor of rapists like this isn’t a promising direction to go in.
Unfortunately kenithadams I don’t need to mischaracterize rape apologists, your post speaks well enough for itself.
Well, poor people can make that gamble if they want, and when they lose because the house always wins, we can comfort ourselves knowing some of the profits are supposed to go toward public education.
… Whoops! I was thinking of something else. My mistake. None of the profits go toward education.
I’m starting to hear all kenithadams’s comments as “MEN MEN MEN MEN MEN MEN” to the tune of the Monty Python Spam song.
Legit LOL, Pteryxx!
Next time on MANSKEPTIC: Watch as Kenith manages to repeat himself to the point where ears will bleed! The True Skeptic will consistently misread or blatantly ignore other people, and it will reach a boiling point! Expect some more rapid-fire allusions to the names of logical fallacies that may or may not apply! But will it be enough? Will our #bravehero be able to fight off the Horde in their home turf, The Echo Chamber of Blood and Thunder? Find out next time, on MANSKEPTIC.
@Pteryxx
And let’s put that into perspective. I work in insurance and handle police reports a lot, most of fender benders, including innumerable incidents where the claimant alleges that someone scratched their car in a parking lot and drove away withnoevidenceatallthoselyingbitc–er, pardon. In summary: a dent in the fender of Ford Fusion > rape.
so to sum up: keith butted into a convo about non-legal consequences for accused not being as bad as consequences for actual victims of rape; with a link to legal consequences that weren’t worse than what actual rape victims suffer.
but it’s everyone else who can’t read and errects strawmen.
ok then.
Again, working my way up, but, I’m sick and tired of all the rape apologists and denailists pretending there is a social consequence to being a rapist.
Our rape culture protects and enshrines rapists. When rapists go to jail for their crimes, which is at a criminally low number simply to the amount that is reported, much less the amount that the rapists themselves report occurring, it is for less years than the average minor drug possession charge. You will serve more time smoking a joint than being a serial rapist.
Again, these percentages of even that actual consequence are tiny. Most police forces do not take rapes seriously. Most juries do not take rape seriously and unless you were dumb enough to video tape your entire crime and send it to the media and the cops, you’re probably going to be able to get away with it. And even then, you’ll probably get away with it. The Stuebenville rapists actually videotaped their assault and yet they very nearly got away with it and their accuser went through much more hell and public shame than the rapists.
Which brings us up to the instant reaction for rapists. Rapists get sympathy when they rape. Oh, those poor boys. Their lives will be ruined by some uppity bitch. Look how nice they are. They could never have.
Even when it is video taped, the entire news media was kissing the booboos of the rapists and crowing about the future they lost. The terrible suffering they were going through. Penning hagiographies to how “good” and “loving” they must be for having been accused.
It is fascinating to watch, because once a rape accusation is made, the sympathy instantly goes behind the rapist, seeking to protect them, crowing everywhere about how what they are suffering is the worst possible suffering, that no one actually checks to see if they suffer in the slightest. I mean, they get an outpouring of public support and huge numbers of people willing to demonize their victims just so the world can pretend that rape isn’t something we tolerate politely and gleefully.
And that brings to the punishment to the victim. Bob help you if you try and report. The cops won’t believe you at best and will abuse you and try and make you believe you deserved it at worst. The cop who took down my partner’s girlfriend’s report didn’t even begin a report until he had spent a solid hour trying to get her to recant her story and admit she definitely consented because she’s totally a slut and why did she wait a whole day before reporting, clearly there is no such thing as trauma and this proves she’s a liar.
That happened even though the man who assaulted her was a homeless man with no social capital. Even when the perpetrator is the fulfillment of the bullshit “dirty man in alley assaults woman who walks past” trope, the official sympathies are entirely with the perpetrator and the hatreds go to the victim.
This happens on every level. Even if, as is more likely, a survivor doesn’t report, just instead lets someone know, they are treated like shit for “smearing” someone’s name. Even though the rapist has already gotten the boon of getting away with rape. Again, the sympathies go towards the rapist and the social revulsion goes to the victim.
Every time, in direct reversal of nearly every other crime known to man.
Hell, the crime of theft is so anti-criminal that we’ve convinced ourselves in this country that it is justifiable to murder a man committing theft in your home, that it is legal to shoot a thief. When a thief is accused, we don’t grill the victim. Ask her what she was wearing that might have attracted the thief’s attention or demand proof she didn’t just hand the thief her wallet because after all, she did recently give a homeless man a dollar and frankly that shows a “loose” way with money, donchaknow? They don’t circle around the thief and lionize him. They don’t swarm comment threads demanding access to the person who was stolen from so they can continue to abuse and denigrate her for being so stupid as to walk where there were thieves. They don’t claim that it is worse to be called a thief than to be stolen from.
And that’s because these fuckers, our whole diseased culture views women as worth less than money.
And it views rape as less serious than drug possession or theft.
We don’t take rape seriously in this country. We do not believe rape victims. We do not demonize rapists. No matter what you do, how brutally you violate someone, people will worship you and justify it.
TRIGGER WARNING for next paragraph.
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After all Polanski makes good films, so that 13 year old he tied to a bed and anally raped in a violent manner must have been asking for it.
So stop pretending we live in some golden society where rape is actually taken seriously, where a victim is always believed and those accused of rape are always demonized and ruined by society.
And stop pretending you don’t see that utopic vision of the future, of what should be, as anything other than a nightmare to prevent by any means.
Stop pretending you don’t fully support the rape culture we have now, where a rapist doesn’t fear attacking people in a crowded party or con. Where a rapist doesn’t fear their numerous victims coming forth and stopping them. Where the greatest consequence to most rapists is eventually earning a reputation that requires them to pick a new pool to target victims in.
Accept what you are. What you support. What you are a part of.
And stop taunting all of us actual rape victims with visions of a better world none of us will ever live to see.
R-amen. *nods solemnly*
what is your position on bigamy? cuz I have a sudden urge to propose marriage…
Oh, KENNNNNNN-ITTTTTTHHHHHHHHHH—
Where are you? You never answered my question.
Does the occurrence of men being falsely accused of rape approach the incidences of actual rape?
I apologize for the repetition. I really want to hear kenith’s answer to this.
My bank account says I’m much too untrustworthy to handle one, let alone multiple relationships.
That was brilliant, Cerberus.
Has anyone ever denied this objective fact?
It’s all there in the amicus brief I filed. How did you get admitted to this deposition anyway?
Thank you for that, Cerberus. That was amazing.
Why do I get the impression that these folks wringing their hands over ACCUSATIONS, shrieking about us as if we are a high court sentencing Shermer to the gallows, salivating over slander and libel laws, have a substantial overlap with the people who bleatingly whine about their absolute and unquestionable FREEZE PEACH rights to say anything they want, anywhere?
I do wonder what the vocal FREEZE PEACH brigade’s opinion on this is, and wonder what the vocal Anti-ACCUSATION brigade’s opinion is on FREEZE PEACH. I’m putting my money on “hypocrisy”, of course.
Also, I’m just now catching up on all of these thousands of posts, and want to give some shouts-out for those holding the ramparts. I know it’s not especially fair to single out contributions, so I’ll just give my thanks to the Horde en masse. Now maybe I can get up the nerve to post something serious on Greta’s “Discouraged” thread.
Finally, the phrase “Echo Chamber of Blood and Thunder” gave me some good lols.
@550 Rape apologist’s armchair philosopher response: “Inconceivable! Because female police officers!”
Anteprepro at 615:
Well we know, the modern American libertarian is pretty much a straight up authoritarian but mostly when it comes to protecting the rich from taxes and the assholes from the consequences of free expression. When it comes to protecting labor from capital or women (and everybody) from patriarchy or minorities from racism etc., then it’s all laissez-faire.
If even the real rapists often don’t suffer, how likely is it that the falsely accused will? If the young men from Steubenville could rape a woman in full view of their class-mates, upload pictures of it to the internet and still have the entire town rally behind them in support, maybe we shouldn’t be overly worried about the consequences of a false accusation.
There may well be cases of people falsely accused of rape suffering horribly as a result, both legally and extra-legally, but anyone with a grasp of reality would have to admit that such cases are exceptions, not the rule.
Thank you Cerberus, I’ve never seen a nail so perfectly hammered as that.
They issued a statement: “False accusations of feminaziism hurt the real victims of feminaziism.”
Okay, that’s just my interpretation. In reality, it was just a bunch of hashtagged tweets with the name Sagan shoehorned in. It might have been a condemnation of the Vatican. Really, who knows?
Every time you post, I newly understand why you have a queue, Mr. Ian Brown.
Oh, there are. They can be found online fairly easily…but, (not so) oddly enough, they appear to be the same limited number of stories. That’s what makes them notable.
There is a complicating issue: a large portion of the “falsely accused” of sex crimes indeed were innocent of them, but were charged or convicted based on mis-identification. The sexual assault did occur, but the wrong person was ID’d as the perpetrator. That is an entirely separate issue.
So, when are you dipshits going to wrap your mind around how evidence, the justice system, and overall human decency works?
Believerskeptic:
“Does the false rape accusation of men occur statistically on a par with people being raped or not?”
I don’t see how it’s possible to know the answer to that question. In order to answer that question, we would somehow have to be able to conclusively and omnisciently establish the precise number of rapes AND the precise number of false accusations.
By the way, most of the arguments I’m seeing here from those who think evidence is unnecessary really boil down to what the law calls Ipse Dixit — it’s true because I say it’s true. Sorry, but “because I say so” isn’t proof. It’s not even evidence.
*loud whispers* humans who aren’t male still count as humans. *nodnod*
Wow. So now it’s not just WERE YOU THERE, it’s WERE YOU THERE AND ARE YOU GOD.
Way to skeptic.
Seriously? Fuck off, you lying sack of shit.
Not really. They are part of the problem, women being raped when they shouldn’t be due to men raping.
@abewoelk
Again, what do you consider evidence? Spell it out for me; I’m clearly too stupid to understand.
@624 antiatheismplus
When are you and your fuckwitted friends going to wrap your head around the ideas that:
1) women are people whose testimony is, in fact, evidence,
2) this blog is not an outpost of the US justice system and,
3) women are people who deserve to be treated decently?
Also: when are you and your fuckwitted friends going to get together and compare notes on what previous #braveheroes have already tried so that you can all stop:
1) making complete fools of yourselves and
2) wasting our time?
Still not seeing one whit of third party evidence that the incidence of false rape accusations is anywhere near the amount of women being raped. Until that is shown, it is an apples/oranges situation, with the greater amount of offense, namely rapes, being that which must be avoided.
abewoelk @625
The rapists themselves confirm the percentages those uppity bitches say (there’s a comment a couple of posts with the exact number calculated from this exact source, so unless someone decides to be super nice and save you the effort, looks like you’ve got some searching to do). This is confirmation by the rapists themselves, no reason to believe a single woman or any research looking into the amount they were raped. Just the number of incidents that are rape, admitted to by the abusers thsmselves.
Which brings us up to the follow-up. The fact that you either dismiss this reality in order to pretend that rape is not as big of a deal as it is.
Or that you consider the rate of false accusations to be equivalent (note this is an extremely high rate of incidence), which spoiler warning, others have pointed to surveys noting that it is not even close to being in the same ballpark (though consistent with false reporting on any other crime), with most of the errors being due to misidentification rather than nonexistent attack.
So which is it? Denialist or denialist?
Also, P.S. Ain’t our job to do your homework. You want to learn something that you think is critical to your participation on a topic? Then go do the fucking reading, especially when people are kind enough to aggregate it for you.
P.P.S. From a rape survivor dating two rape survivors who are in turn dating rape survivors. Fuck all of your rape apologizing asses. No sympathy to how badly you want to pretend to be smart while being deliberately intentionally ignorant.
*offering hugs and cocoa-shell tea to Cerberus and Nepenthe and Pteryxx*
…Under what definition is he straight if he…???
Win.
Perhaps the anonymous caller did – perhaps that was the rapist.
*facepalm*
*blink*
Fuck the dictionary. He’s right on this: snakes have fused, transparent eyelids, as do caecilians for example. The transparent skin that covers their eyes is homologous to the eyelids. A transparent window in the lower eyelid is found in some burrowing lizards.
What are you on about?
Indeed it does. For me, it’s the other way around…
How could he do so without massively endangering the anonymity of his correspondents?
Also, to the tune of 2 1/2 Men.
Progress!!!1!
So, when are you dipshit going to read this thread?
Let alone the 3 previous ones on this topic…
Keithm @ 623
As research – these threads passim – confirms that the majority of rapes are carried out by people known to the victim and other research – again passim – shows that a very high proportion of rapes are never reported (for all the reasons indicated) and as the court records show a percentage conviction rate of those reported in single figures, please tell me how we arrive at
I suggest remedial maths as a matter of urgency.
You have evidence that we don’t understand these things? Evidence accepted by a court in a trial?
Nerd @632
It’s a pretty common denialist tactic. Basically, argue as if the assumption that they were equal is true, then demand extraordinary evidence to the contrary, refuse to accept any and continue to state the assumption as if it were true, despite now being clearly false, without ever showing one little piece of proof.
It’s the way creationists argue constantly under the assumption “goddit” and then demand scientists jump through endless hoops to prove “their version” while ignoring all the evidence and continuing to assume “goddit” with no evidence in support.
It’s really quite a cushy position for someone without shame, without any shred of good faith, and doesn’t mind being considered an immeasurable tool in the war of wasting people’s time.
I mean, why do you think, every time an issue of sexism comes up, the feminist or feminist adjacent blogs get flooded with sexists trying to derail all conversations to one centered around an assumption that CANNOT be true given the evidence.
Because they are hoping the mere repetition of the argument will both silence those who have the evidence and will make their arguments seem “correct” in the general society.
Cause after all, they’ve “heard” that all over the place, so it must be true, right? Otherwise, why does it keep coming up?
cerberus @633:
That was my comment, first made in 2011. I keep it for easy pasting since I need it so often.
I’m not seeing any evidence that the effects of being falsely accused of rape are in any way equal to the effects of actually being raped.
Nor is there any evidence that the number of false accusations are anywhere near the number of rapes.
There are two incredible inequalities, and the hyperskeptic menz are denying both, switching from one to the other as convenient.
Many of the “skeptics” are believers, just as much as the most slobbering creationist is a believer. They believe they are smart, they believe they are skeptical, and they believe they are making sense. Protip, boyz: You are wrong.
Look, lads, the difference between raping a woman and consensual sex with a woman is whether or not she has said, “Yes.” (All kinds of illustrative scenarios skipped.) What the woman says is what makes the difference—what she says is what makes it a legal issue. Her words are the defining difference. That’s legal, guys, and it’s all based on what she says. Her words, in other words, and her word on it.
What the woman says about the act, beforehand, is the legal definition of rape. There is no other.
So why dismiss so utterly what she says after? She was there, she would be the star witness by any definition, she is the one who knows what she said beforehand, and why she did or did not say it.
It’s still her word above all, legally.
—-
Look, guys, if you don’t trust women, don’t have sex with them.
Thanks Pteryxx.
So yeah, abe, do you want to pretend to believe that 1 in 5 women make up a false report of rape, considering that number would eclipse the reported number total or do you want to pretend that the rapists are working in cohoots with their victims to make rape seem like a big deal?
Which denial of reality would you like to make your own today?
I mean, it’s not like it’ll matter much seeing as how you’re not really invested in giving us an honest answer rather than just feeding your rationalization for there being something inherently wrong when women talk about realities that abusers used to get away with and that feels vaguely unfair in a bad way.
Rape is a form of abuse and control, not a form of sex. It’s often more about their power, not about their attraction. Ask my male rapists, who I’m sure identify as completely straight and were bigoted so that they’d be offended if anyone suggested otherwise (though admittedly I’ve had no contact with them for years, so it’s hard to know what they’re like now).
But a lot of it depends on the definition of “rape,” not the definition of “straight.”
That “imaginary” SkepticDoc conversation pretty much mirrors every interaction I’ve had with my so-called prescription insurance plan administrators, EVER.
adding to cr’s #642… see also male-on-male military rape, and rape as part of hazing in fraternities, gangs, and sports teams.
QFT.
Being as the assorted assheads are simply repeating the same old bullshit from the last however many threads now, there’s nothing new to add on that front, and others have done better than I have on that anyway, I’ll go back to the personal insults:
You know who you are, you filthy scumbags. You know what you’re doing. If you had the faintest shred of decency, empathy, or conception that people not just like you are indeed people, you would actually be fit to live in a civilized society among decent folk. Instead, you bend your every effort to ensuring that no one gets to live in such a society, because you hate the very concepts of equality, fairness, and safety for the disadvantaged, weak, or less privileged than you. The world would be a far better place if you would take yourselves off somewhere far in the wilderness, and then stay there forever, so you won’t inflict yourselves on the rest of the world anymore. You disgust me beyond words.
I keep getting the feeling the rape apologists are those males who engage in rape activity, but can’t be honest enough to say they are rapist. The “R” word is very offensive to them, if it describes what they see as normal male behavior….
You people don’t understand what skepticism is all about. It’s not about weighing evidence and making a determination whether a claim is or isn’t reasonable. Skepticism is knowing Bigfoot doesn’t exist and Uri Geller is a fraud and feeling superior to people who believe in Bigfoot and Geller’s psychic powers. Mundane, real world issues like rape are not part of skepticism because that would upset a sizable portion of skeptics.
Fortunately we have real skeptics like kenithadams to show us the way to True Skepticism™. Remember the True Skeptic’s Rule: Common events require extraordinary evidence if I don’t like what the ordinary evidence tells me.
*Shoves a fuming tankard of grog Al Dente’s way….*
Nerd of, you are most likely right. According to that study someone linked to, men would admit to a lot of coerced sex, and forcible sex, and just about anything, honestly, as long as the word “rape” wasn’t used.
Me, I see a spectrum of male sexual behavior that certainly includes rape, with no gap between. Guys will talk about fucking women, and tricking women, and disliking women, and lying to women, and all kinds of things that if all added together are clearly rape, yet any and all are perfectly acceptable to them. Rape itself, even by men’s definition isn’t a crime, really, unless it is done to their woman by another man, not themselves.
The rape apologists are rape supporters, and they have no healthy definition of sex. There is no dividing line between normal sex and rape, for them, because to them, rape is normal.
—
I apologize for ignoring male victims of rape, here. My understanding of “straight” men raping other men is that they are forcing femaleness upon their victims.
It’s at least believing that Bigfoot may not have psychic powers, or that spoon-bending is most definitely psychic but not very impressive. I mean, as long as you can manage to claim you’re skeptical about something, that’s what skepticism is all about — doesn’t really matter what it is.
Please, first, the scare-quotes aren’t helpful, because while I get that it means something to you which you don’t want to express verbally, in order to comment on it I’m forced invent some meaning that you’re not using any word to convey.
Also, I do think this is a case where patriarchal concepts like that do also hurt men in exactly that way, but I don’t think you can generalize so much to all such rape cases. It isn’t that simple.
consciousness razor, excellent points. I didn’t mean them as scare quotes, and I need to be more careful. Thanks.
Look at the balance of the evidence, skeptics! As a friend wrote,
With all due respect, I believe you misinterpreted what I stated. What I was saying was that of those single-digit percentage of convictions, a single-digit percentage (or less) of those were false/wrongful, but a good portion of those false convictions weren’t due to the assault being faked but the wrong person being accused. The fact that the advent of DNA testing has overturned and released people serving time for, among other things, sexual assault, has kind of made this a non-controversial statement.
My point is that the false identifications (less common these days thanks to DNA testing, one hopes) get lumped in with the rare false reports of rapes when people start bringing up “Hey, look at these guys falsely accused of rape!”in order to pump up the “Men wrongly accused of rape!” stories.
In other words, what they’re trying to do is combine the rare “False accusations because the assault didn’t happen” with “False accusations because the police screwed up the lineup”. Those are, as I said, two different issues.
I was leaning that way for a long while. But the statistics on repeat rapists, only 6% of men, inclines me to the view that it really is about rape culture. Most men have a couple or several groups where they know, or knew, 20+ men – sports teams, a school or college class, workplace, pub, church, neighbourhood. So it’s very unlikely that any given man hasn’t ever known another man who is, in fact, a rapist – and that rapist is/was also likely to indicate that in conversation without ever having said “I’m a rapist”.
For men to acknowledge that statistical likelihood if they’ve not thought about it before is pretty challenging. They may not recall any specific statement or action of their own or of the others around them that supported rape or rapists, but they’d feel uneasy that they have a vague recollection of conversations or interactions that are distinctly off now that they think about it. Or they now wonder if some of the jokes and tall tales that they happily went along with at the time should now be revisited with these new insights.
Not a happy place to be in – especially if they’re thinking about men who are friends or relatives currently in their lives. Much easier to dismiss and deny the whole idea of rape prevalence and rape culture.
[blockquote]
Being as the assorted assheads are simply repeating the same old bullshit from the last however many threads now, there’s nothing new to add on that front, and others have done better than I have on that anyway, I’ll go back to the personal insults:
You know who you are, you filthy scumbags. You know what you’re doing. If you had the faintest shred of decency, empathy, or conception that people not just like you are indeed people, you would actually be fit to live in a civilized society among decent folk. Instead, you bend your every effort to ensuring that no one gets to live in such a society, because you hate the very concepts of equality, fairness, and safety for the disadvantaged, weak, or less privileged than you. The world would be a far better place if you would take yourselves off somewhere far in the wilderness, and then stay there forever, so you won’t inflict yourselves on the rest of the world anymore. You disgust me beyond words.[/blockquote]
I think some of them… a very few… are sincere in that they see themselves as Captain Civil Liberties. They’re sooper sincere in educating us about Innocent Until Proven Guilty! And Better a Thousand Guilty Men Go Free! And Due Process! See, we just don’t understand these precious core concepts. It’s a little bit of inter-species recognition. I used to be Captain Civil Liberties when I was 19 years old.
I think my ACLU card is probably older than many of them. Still a member. Civil liberties does NOT mean “we let the guilty go free to make a point.” We still want the *actually guilty* to be appropriately punished. It’s not that hard a concept to wrap your minds around, young civil libertarians.
Those aren’t entirely incompatible.
I don’t drink very often, and while I’ve been slightly buzzed a handful of times, never really drunk. Holds no interest for me. But drinking is, generally speaking, accepted behaviour, and I certainly have nothing against people who choose to do so now and then. So not engaging in something isn’t incompatible with seeing it as normal; it’s just something that you, individually, choose not to do.
I’ve also been in locker rooms on assorted sports team and in the military mess, and the macho posturing is all over the place. I’ve seen men brag and go on and on about sexual exploits that I knew damn well were total bullshit. I’ve seen men who I knew were complete gentlemen, polite, and kind, either carefully stay out of the conversation or play down those aspects of their personality to fit in to the general Studly McSexMonster atmosphere. Yeah, I did it too.
So what happens? The good guys think that they’re the odd ones out. “Hey, I would never do that, but hey, that’s obviously just me so I won’t speak up because everyone will think I’m some sort of pansy.” Even though the good guys are in the majority, it is a literal, silent majority, and the predators take advantage of that and keep the conversation rolling in such a way that it covers their activities. As long as they can stay away from the R-word and convince everyone that what they’re doing is just well in the spectrum of normal male behaviour, they get cover.
Hey, dood, NICE TRY!
But, you know.
FAIL.
Because your argument, by demanding complete omniscience denies the validity of the entire field of statistics!
Surely, you don’t mean to assert something so obviously and categorically asinine as the denial of the validity of the entire field of statistics, do you?
By the way, my question was directed at kenith, not you, abe. But points for stepping up to the plate. It sort of reminds me of those situations where someone forgets which sockpuppet he or she is and then accidentally answers as someone else.
I admit I only come to Pharyngula occasionally, but why such hostility to Less Wrong that Bayes’s Theorem is tainted by association?
#422:
Shermer exists, the accuser exists (I assume; at any rate, PZ appears to have reason to believe she does), rape exists, there, we’ve established plausibility.
Daz @ 459:
That principle breaks down if someone considers “the person is reporting rape” and/or “the person is female” good reasons to believe someone is lying.
#477:
Whether you were injured depends on a lot more than whether or not my car struck you. It depends as much on whether I intended to hit you.
omnicrom @ 600:
True, but if someone doesn’t consider rape to be bad, that is what “false accusations aren’t as bad as rape” sounds like.
@mildlymagnificent
1) The percentage of undetected repeat rapists varies significantly with the population sampled.
2) These studies only capture those rapists who both understand explicitly that their victims did not want the “sex” to happen and who don’t have the self-awareness to lie on the survey. Rapists who believe that their victims wanted it won’t say yes.
I would also venture a guess that actual rapists have more motivation to muddy the waters and explain how what they did doesn’t count; even if we accept that only 6% of men are rapists, the likelihood that any given apologist arguing about how drunk women are fair game is a rapist is probably higher.
I was reasonably sure we had moved on from that, but, what the heck, I’m here, it’s directed at me, might as well answer a fair question. It’s because lesswrong did the tainting by appropriating B’s T as their exclusive shibboleth. If I go to a math convention, sit down, and attend a lecture in which the presenter is building corollaries on Bayes’s Theorem, I’m not thinking lesswrong, and I don’t have an iota of a problem with Bayes’s Theorem. But if I see Bayes’s Theorem pulled out of somebody’s ass in the middle of a conversation that has absolutely nothing to do with probability theory on a skeptic site? I’m thinking its a dog-whistle proselytization for lesswrong, who dearly would love to be taken seriously by the skeptic movement in particular and by science in general. I’m not saying that’s my conclusion (errant mention of B’s T + skeptic site = lesswrong), I’m just saying I’m very suspicious. It’s sort of like how if it’s Saturday morning, and I see two sharply dressed men with little black books coming to my door, I’m not going to answer because my suspicion is that they’re religious proselytizers. They might not be. But I’m too wearied from arguments with religious proselytizers to bother taking the chance.
As for why the hostility to lesswrong itself, that’s not exactly a long story, but longer than I would want to take here.
Yeah, I know I’m the guy who brought lesswrong up, but I kind of suspect everyone would rather just keep pounding the shit out of these rape-denialist turds.
No, that’s beleiverskeptic’s particular hobbyhorse.
Borked it.
Granted. But I still needed a mechanism to understand the real desperation I see in some of these commenters who clearly aren’t sexual predators themselves to deny this stuff until they’re blue in the face. I now tend to think in terms of them maintaining the OKness of keeping their view of their relationships and social groups intact and continuing to think of themselves as a moral person.
Much easier to smile and chat easily with your brother, cousin, friend, boss, neighbour if you’ve blanked out of your mind any doubts about their character. They really don’t want to do the balancing act of saying that I keep this person as a friend because I like them – despite their moral nastiness or, as these people do, therefore they can’t be a reprehensible sexual predator. It’s a reverse ad hominem with two and half somersaults in pike position – degree of difficulty 9 and a half.
If you want to discuss it, take it to the Thunderdome, an open thread.
I own it. I do not apologize for trying to alert people to a proto-Scientology.
I keep coming back to that comparison, and I think that it’s not resonating with a lot of you. I lived in Los Angeles for seven years. Scientology is LA’s mafia. If you’ve never lived in LA, or if you’re below a certain age, you might think of Scientology as just a harmless kooky thing that John Travolta and Tom Cruise are part of. But it’s not harmless. They ruin lives. They intimidate people with actual mafia-style violence. They suck tons of money from gullible people, and they have the backing of a lot of right-wing money. They have an infinitely bankrolled legal fund and they will bankrupt anyone who criticizes them in the media— which is exactly why more people don’t know how unbelievably dangerous they are. They are out on a campaign to discredit the legitimate field of psychotherapy, and they convince a lot of gullible people who need real help from real experts that they can instead get “help” by reading Dianetics, buying into the e-meter and engrams (the greatest bullshit woo ever invented), and spending themselves into bankruptcy on Scientology.
And if Lesswrong wasn’t backed by Peter Thiel (libertarian billionaire inventor of PayPal), I too might be more dismissive of their potential to become Scientology 2.0. Also, Richard Carrier, who blogs here at FtB, is an enthusiastic exponent of Lesswrong, lending his scholarly heft to their cause.
I’ll spare you the nutty, pseudoscientific crap they actually believe, because, believe it or not, despite this being my so-called “hobbyhorse,” I actually do get a little tired of talking about them.
Question for the pseudoskeptics…
What will it take for you to
A: read a thread to get a fuller understanding
and/or (preferably AND)
B: click, read, and comprehend links
? ? ? ? ? ? ?
In catching up to this thread, I am reading ABEWOELK’S comment @535. I know that several people, myself included, have linked to Lousy Canuck, En Tequila Es Verdad and Greta Christina’s Blog for very detailed explanations about standards of evidence required for accepting claims.
Have any of you read these links?
Or do you just think your standards should be held by everyone?
Well.
There’s also an actual Italian Mafia, plus a number of other ethnically-identified organized-crime networks operating in L.A.
But point taken.
anteprepro @604:
That was awesome.
Two thumbs up.
Each judge awards a ’10’.
You rock.
@believerskeptic: have you noticed that you, yourself, are actively working to make Bayes’ Theorem and lesswrong synonymous? You can’t see a reference to Bayes’ theorem without talking about lesswrong, and you’re trying to forbid people from using or mentioning Bayesian reasoning outside some abstract mathematical context. Stop it.
This from you:
“But if I see Bayes’s Theorem pulled out of somebody’s ass in the middle of a conversation that has absolutely nothing to do with probability theory on a skeptic site? I’m thinking its a dog-whistle proselytization for lesswrong…”
You need to realise that this is not your superpower, it is a character flaw and you need to stop doing that. Bayes’ theorem is, among other things, the correct way to update your beliefs in the light of new evidence. Ergo, you’re going to meet in a lot in contexts which involve evaluating evidence. Such as on skeptic sites.
Stop insulting all those of us who (a) understand the theorem and (b) have nothing to do with lesswrong.
@Hershele Ostropoler #659
I like you. You can stay.
I’m joking; I am not the arbiter of who gets to stay and who has to go. But seriously, good post.
keithm @ 654,
Sorry about the delay. We are clearly in different time zones.
So your estimate is that of the single figure percentage of reported rapes where someone goes to jail maybe 1% of those are convicted on false identification. Which would mean that with a perfectly functioning police department, well trained counsel on both sides, properly instructed jury and no political jiggery-pokery, each wing (capacity 100) of your local jail would contain 0.06 of a person who had been wrongly convicted because of mis-identification. (Now I read that I realise that a perfectly functioning police department would not be using the largely discredited line-up method for so serious a crime, nor subjecting a rape victim to the ordeal.) But no matter, let us proceed.
I first became aware of the idea of a systemic problem of mis-identification (or scape-goating) of supposed rapists in about 1960 but only because I had a sociology professor from South Africa who saw it as part of the problem of trying to run a society with massive economic and legal disparities between visually identifiable ethnic groups. It would not take too much of a leap to transfer that analysis to the US and ask how many of the African-Americans lynched up to the 1950s actually raped anyone. (I am decades out of touch and don’t know where to even look for later work.)
So, I am perfectly prepared to believe that “your” problem exists. The thing is, I want it properly quantified with more than one piece of research. I want to know where it happens, why it happens and which alcoholic police inspector or tired judge needs to be gracefully but swiftly retired so that it stops happening.
Given, though, that right now we have to guess at all those, especially the numbers, and you have clearly given this some thought, I have questions for you, for you personally, Keith.
Is the problem of conviction through mis-identification bigger than
* the proportion of rapes of both men and women never reported at all (best estimate at least 50%)
* the 11,303 un-processed rape kits stumbled upon by one of Kym Worthy’s team in Detroit and the hundreds of thousands more known to exist in the US alone
* the rape victims who pluck up courage to report a rape only to be faced with police officers who refuse to write it down, who make lewd jokes or who, in the worst cases, rape him or her again
* the Veterans of a dozen wars, including vanity wars, who spend the rest of their lives disadvantaged because the stamp on their papers says “dishonourable discharge” when it proved easier to dismiss the person who complained than to investigate the behaviour of supposed comrades or even officers. (Only the Australian armed forces and to a lesser extent the US seem to be trying to get to grips with this and that only in the last couple of years)
* the people dismissed from their jobs or manoeuvred out of them because they asked a company to act in accordance with the law
* the Armies of Arseholes who turn up in every thread like this and, reading from the same manual on thread-disruption, parroting the same garbage, do everything they can to ensure that people trying to discuss sensibly are worn to shreds – the people who do not want this subject discussed EVER! AT ALL! BY ANYONE!
* and the several dozen other problems possibly larger which my comrades in arms here could present to you in a trice?
You, Keith, do it more civilly and with better constructed sentences but you are still queering* the pitch. You are still asking us to fixate on one small aspect – probably local, probably time-limited by technology – to the annoyance and disadvantage of those who want to discuss the subject in the round or, in this case, a particular aspect of it – denial as part of rape culture.
There’s a lot more denial going on than mis-identified rapists languishing in jail. Why can we not address that one which by the number of instances identified and the number of people adversely affected is by several orders of magnitude the bigger problem?
————-
* Explanation of this expression lest any be unfamiliar with it – http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-que1.htm
No. The problems with police investigations do not have anything to do with alcohol. The problems are in the protocols. Line ups, for instance, are known to be a poor way to identify criminals, especially since the police have a tendency to pressure witnesses into picking someone out even if the witness is uncertain.
Maybe I’m reading Keith differently? He seems to be poking holes in the “falsy accused, therefor no rape” reasoning by pointing out that the victim or a witness may misidentify, rather than making everything up.
Jacob,
I think that Keith believes that mis-identification followed by conviction as a rapist is a significant problem. There may well be some instances of it but I have seen no figures, no studies, no explanation, procedural or psychological, of why it might happen.
As the majority of rapes are acquaintance rapes where are these mis-identifications coming from? Does it tie in with what little research has been done, for instance by the CPS? Does it help any of us fight back against the excess of skepticism which is confounding this discussion?
Does it line up neatly with the worldview which says the bitchez be lying? Yes.
I like the “but atheism is more important!” argument.
Because as we all know, if too many atheist bigwigs get held accountable for their actions, then everyone has to start believing in God.
@674, Maureen, Jacob is correct in what I’m saying. You are not.
You’re misreading what my intent was, well, completely and utterly. I really have no idea where you got to where you did from what I said because I thought I was being clear that I was going after the claims that false accusations and/or convictions for sexual assault were a significant problem when, overall, they represent a tiny fraction of sexual assault incidents, and that actual false claims (that is, no assault happened at all) are an even smaller subset when you take out the false ID’s.
I was pointing out the people who conflate the two issues and who, in doing so, thus promote “bitchez be lying” worldview by misreading or manipulating the number of such cases, which then get hauled out as “examples” to make the claim there’s some sort of vast problem when there isn’t.
Unfortunately that’s one of the major themes the MRAs like to misrepresent and bring up at every opportunity. On refresh I’m inclined to agree that’s the point Keith was trying to make.
Basically, mis-identification mostly happens in “classic” stranger-rape cases, which are both much rarer and much more likely to be prosecuted and result in convictions than acquaintance or family rape; and because of the pressure to convict, these cases fall afoul of the usual problems of race and class bias, sloppy police work, and both victims and suspects being pressured into giving stories that match the investigation’s narrative. From the literature I’ve read so far, there’s very little overlap between the rare false accusations and more common convictions of innocent individuals. Apples and oranges, basically. I’ll also say that decades ago, before all this research and the rise of acquaintance rape as a concept, there used to be a scenario where a “good girl” (generally white) would try to cover up an acquaintance or domestic violence situation by inventing a story of rape by a stranger (generally described as black) and police departments would sometimes take that very thin story and run with it. Since the advent of rape kits and DNA testing, and investigative techniques that cover non-forcible rape, that scenario seems to have fallen by the wayside.
The best resource I know for misidentifications that can be disproven by DNA testing is the Innocence Project, which MRAs love to misquote and cherry-pick. Obviously the Innocence Project rarely handles cases where convictions happened in the absence of evidence, but the investigative and prosecutorial misconduct they uncover applies just as well to cases lacking evidence.
http://www.innocenceproject.org/know/
Note that last – there WAS an actual perpetrator with DNA on record for a successful match.
A sample case of DNA exoneration: http://www.innocenceproject.org/Content/Bruce_Godschalk.php
Non-DNA exonerations with links to sample cases: http://www.innocenceproject.org/know/non-dna-exonerations.php
Pteryxx:
Yes, to all of this. There was, particularly before the discovery of DNA testing, a higher likelihood of misidentification of a *stranger* rapist. This has nothing at all to do with the majority of rapes, which are committed by a person known to the victim. It’s well known that eye witness identification is unreliable, however, when a person committing a crime is known to the victim, that’s not relevant. A mistaken identification is not a false accusation, either, and if those stats are mixed together, it will give a higher read on the false accusation front. As Pteryxx said, apples and oranges.
@677
Yes, that is exactly what I meant when I stated those are two different issues. I’m arguing that misidentification/wrongful conviction for sexual assault doesn’t belong in the same grouping as the very rare “sexual assault didn’t happen at all”, it mostly belongs in the “people wrongly accused/convicted of any crime” grouping, thus many of the stories MRAs like to circulate to “prove” false accusations are supposedly so prevalent are, in fact, erroneously pumped-up stats.
I don’t understand – “rape” has a simple and widely agreed-upon definition (in present circles at least); does “straight”? Even assuming strict binary gender identities for the sake of the argument, how straight is straight – does only 0 on the Kinsey scale count (that would contradict most people’s self-identification, of course), does 1 count, does 2 count? How bisexual is bisexual – does only 3 count?
Seeing how few people are actually 0 on the Kinsey scale, I wouldn’t be surprised if those few turned out to be… underrepresented among the perpetrators of such.
But what I’m really asking about are bigots: aren’t they, by their own definitions, committing a gay act? Is this a case of Our Homophobia Is Different (which isn’t a TV Trope, but should be)?
…Has perhaps the Roman attitude, where gender roles mattered to bigotry while orientation did not, survived in the US much more strongly than in the environment I grew up in?
David:
No, because rape is not about sex. It is not about getting laid. It’s about power and control and oftentimes, about putting someone in their place by performing an act which is the most humiliating thing they can think to do. In the case of hetero men raping other hetero men, it is most definitely about humiliation, it’s a clear message to the victim as to their place, and that they had better not dare to indulge in defiance or step out of that place.
You’d find, for example, in prison populaces, that the notion of raping an openly gay man is often repulsive to hetero men, because there’s the chance the gay man might enjoy it, which is utterly stupid, because rape is not enjoyable, but that doesn’t affect that particular mode of thinking.
David M: this is personal to me, so I have to keep it short, angry, and probably oversimplified. No, HELL NO, because rape has less in common with consensual sex than preferring happy-male-partners does with preferring happy-female-partners. And that’s because toxic masculinity, which shows up in everything from sports to religion to sitcoms, defines “masculinity” as “the power to dominate and rape and break everything insufficiently masculine”. In that view there is no such thing as being feminine for its own sake, no such thing as being lesbian or gay or trans* or asexual; there are only dominators and victims, bullies and bullied, with a gender-identity label slapped on as cover. Again, look at male-on-male rape as part of bullying and hazing. The RAPISTS don’t get called gay, the victims do- even when they’re not and never were. The rapists just proved how Manly they were by demonstrating their twisted view of gay-femmy-ness on someone else’s body.
Blaming gayness for rape of men by men has a long history, I’m sure you know if you just thought about it for a minute, and that’s one of the reasons ANY men raped by men have hardly any narrative EXCEPT internalized homophobia to explain what’s happened to them.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/04/03/the-military-s-secret-shame.html
…That really looks like the Roman attitude. I’m honestly not used to it.
I only learned a year or two ago what a wedgie is, or that that’s even a thing. Over here, any bully who tried that would immediately be laughed at for years by his fellow bullies, because touching another guy’s underpants, let alone while he’s wearing them, would count as teh unambiguous ghey. (…Plus as having a thing for someone as despicable as a victim of bullying – more’s the ridicule.)
Maybe that’s also why prison rape isn’t talked about over here – in the US, it’s an expected part of the punishment! I was very surprised when I first saw people gloat about the prospect all over teh intarwebz.
Trigger warning: rape, victim-blaming, and callous discussion of it
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From the link in comment 682:
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Under the attitudes I grew up with, that doesn’t even compute: it would require that the victim successfully convinced the perpetrators that he was a woman, and then that he wore a skirt that was too short or something. “You’re making shit up as a laughable attempt at revenge or whatever” would compute; “gah, I have a gang of teh ebil ghey [full erasure of bisexuality!] in my unit, do I nuke the site from orbit or do I hush everything up by silencing the victim” would compute; “yup, it happened, and it’s your fault” plainly doesn’t.
Our homophobia is different.
Additional trigger warning: description
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Also from there:
Ah, that computes: they didn’t soil teh mighty peen by bringing it into contact with a man.
:-O
*facetalon* I really think your confirmation bias is showing. Lots of gang-rapes with any gender of victim involve both rape-by-peen and escalation to rape-by-object because they’ll use anything and everything available because why the hell not. There’s zero reason to assume that because the object’s mentioned in a magazine article that peen rape did NOT happen. You may as well assume anal rape of women has anything to do with gayness (HINT: NO IT F’N WELL DOES NOT.)
Point taken. Not confirmation bias, I’m just naive – I tend not to think of such things.
…and by “computes” I mean “computes under the attitudes under which I grew up”.
Pteryxx:
QFFT and Emphasis. David, you often draw erroneous conclusions when it comes to subjects like this, so please, try to understand this is not about your personal experiences or personal take on situations. You also seem to be on the oblivious side when it comes to all too common behaviour on the part of others. It’s not something you get to to nail down into unwavering black and white, with specific adherence to some sort of rules.
David M; well, you may want to research military and hazing rapes local to you, then. Almost all my info is from the US. Like I said, this is personal to me so I take it very badly when male-on-male rape gets framed as “gay”, anal gets framed as “gay”, use of objects gets framed as “straight” et cetera. Orientation’s got nothing whatsoever to do with it except as a handy excuse.
…and I just happened to find an instance from the UK.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7622102.stm
Uh, exactly: projection from my experiences failed to make sense of what I’m reading here, therefore I asked questions. If they looked like rhetorical questions to you, I have to apologize.
Yes! What can I do about that? I don’t know others! Most people know more assholes than I know people in total!
…Not sure what you think I’m thinking. ~:-|
Not my intention.
Not that I think it never happens there, but that article only mentions beatings.
David M, look at that article again.
I know that; that’s why I responded as relatively calmly as I have. Good intentions don’t mitigate the splash damage done to gay people by wondering if rapists might be gay because of how or who they rape.
David, I think (could be wrong, of course), that you are always struggling to fit everything into your personal frame of reference. It’s not always possible to do that, so it’s good to be aware on that front, so that you not only understand things outside your personal frame of reference, you don’t end up with splash damage all over the place.
The Marines’ guide to handling sexual harassment gives the lie to the claim that all sexual contact is counted as harassment or rape. First, it’s clearly defined as unwanted sexual attention; second, it’s linked to reward, punishment, extorting sexual favours, power differential, and the like. The standard of evidence is the Reasonable Person standard.
I like that it is acknowledged to be a bad thing:
Yeah, I know I’m late to the thread (lot of posts to catch up on), still needed to get this of my chest:
@ abewoelk, 511
Ah, but you seem to have missed one important aspect of the case you linked to. That father was also guilty of “walking around while being non-white”. So of course the prosecution, judge and jury believed the accuser in this case (especially since the alledged victim was a child), after all “n***** be criminals”, just ask Trayvon Martin.
@ Keinthadams, 571
F-
See me after class.
To all you denialist a-holes:
1) Believing the alledged victim is the default position of any decent human being in any case where a claim of a crime is being made until such a point where the evidence indicates that no crime has taken place. (as has been mentioned several times before, you’d believe the victim if they said “my car was stolen”; “my house has been burglarised”; “I’ve been robbed”; “I was beaten up at a bar” etc … )
2) Nobody on this thread (or the ones preceding it) has ever denied that false rape accusations do indeed happen. What we do point out is that number is statistically very low. The number of false rape claims that end in actual conviction is even lower still.
Based on that number and the very undeniable fact that rape victims are treated horribly in most judical systems, it is a simple cost/benefit conclusion to default to believing rape victims than to “not simlply take their word for it”.
A lot more people will (and do) suffer from society not believeing valid rape claims than people will suffer from society believing false rape claims.
Or to keep it “skeptical” … ask any risk-assessment professional what’s the worse risk: false positives or false negatives. I can’t think of any field where they accept to err on the side of the false negatives.
Full disclosure: I’m “native European”, live in Belgium, I’m male, recently divorced, I have a decent middle-class desk-job, have legal assistance insurance and the worse crime that ever happened to me was having my wallet nicked. That said, from all the descriptions I’ve encountered so far, I’m damn sure that I would prefer being the subject of false rape allegations over being the victim of any kind of actual rape.
Oh Gods. This article reminded me of the worst doctor I’ve ever met. Real story.
Conversation:
Doctor: (referring to the results of the new treatment) “How much better do you feel?”
Patient: “Oh, I think, about 25% better.”
Doctor: “I don’t think so. I think you feel 75% better.”
Patient and patient’s significant other stare gawping at doctor….
I still feel bad for not getting that doctor’s license to practice medicine revoked. Some people’s standard of evidence is frankly insane; this doctor apparently literally believed that he could read minds. He’s probably retired or dead by now; he was very old.