A woman says she was raped by Neil deGrasse Tyson in grad school. She contacted me and asked me to share her story. But here’s the disgraceful exploitation that’s going on.
She did not know who I am, at all. She came to me because she was advised to…by slymepitters. The same people who have been indignant for years that women might speak out against harassers. They are trying to deploy this woman as a weapon.
Now, unfortunately, I looked at her story. I can’t say she’s wrong, and she’s definitely sincere, and I can’t rule out the possibility, but her supporting evidence is terribly weak: it’s her personal testimony, which I do not reject, with no other evidence. Her web page does not help her case at all, either — it’s a lot of astrology, and a scattering of youtube videos that are completely irrelevant to her claim. That’s it.
I told her that I won’t go on the record supporting her accusation, because there is no corroborating evidence at all to support it. I took her story seriously, read the case she made, and found no independent evidence to back up the claim that she even knew Tyson.
You can guess where this story is going next.
Now those same assholes are howling that I accepted the accusation against Shermer with no evidence, and that I’m not accepting this one because the victim is a black woman. They must believe their own lies.
I treated this case in exactly the same way as the one against Shermer. What these people have forgotten (or are intentionally lying about) is that before I posted that story, I got independent evidence that the woman was at the conference, that she was interacting with Shermer, that she was in his hotel room — there was opportunity. I further got accounts of the distress the woman experienced afterwards. Without all that, I might have been willing to believe her, but I would not have been able to step forward and present her account as true, believable, and supported by witnesses.
It’s the same story here. I am willing to believe Tchiya Amet (although I’d rather not believe such a thing of Tyson), but there is no corroboration of any kind, and I cannot go before the public and state that a good case has been made that this crime occurred. It hasn’t.
But I can say that the exploitation of this woman’s pain by a group of people who have been consistent in denying the difficulties women face is one of the more cynically despicable acts I’ve seen them commit.
I have much the same reaction as PZ, but I suspect that Tchiya Amet did know Neal Degrasse Tyson. That is, judging from her age, the personal information on her website, and her appearance, I think that she went by another name when she was younger.
There was an astronomy graduate student, with a physics degree from Oberlin, who looked something like a younger version of Tchiya Amet, who was in Austin while Neal was a graduate student there. She talked to Neal quite a lot. She left the program and became attracted to astrology.
Same person.
OK, so that’s confirmation that there was opportunity.
Oh wait, that’s the very same people who wish me to be raped by “1000 goat fuckers”*
Definitely sincere in their fight against rape.
*You can guess who they mean
Ethan Vishniac
Thanks for that information
Also PZ, the fact that this story is linked to the Slymepit is a huge flashing sign that it’s completely fabricated bullshit. That alone is enough to dismiss it out of hand.
No, I don’t think we should dismiss it out of hand. We can’t say that victims need to be heard, and then dismiss rape allegations out of hand because we don’t like the source.
PZ, given the information Ethan dug up, perhaps you could edit the part that says ‘found no independent evidence to back up the claim that she even knew Tyson.’?
QFT. Their goal is to see FtB ground down into nothing, and they’re willing to do anything to further that goal. Intellectual consistency? Respect for people as independent actors, instead of pawns? All of that is secondary to building up dirt on people they don’t like and pursuing their wild conspiracy theories. This instance must have seemed like a total gotcha to them: either you’d endorse the story wholeheartedly, and sign up for more harassment from N.D.G. fanbros, or reject it and thus be a hypocrite for believing another woman’s story.
I wonder if any of them realized a nuanced response was possible.
Artor
No we fucking can’t. Her being sincere AND them using her are not mutually excluding options
If she is serious, why not go directly to the police? Why bring her case to a biology professor / blogger, other than try to score points? Serious accusations indeed.
Maybe in the future you just ignore these emails, no reply, frankly I wouldn’t even bother finishing reading it. It’s just an email, it could be from a Nigerian prince for all you know.
If it’s that important they can call you. And if it’s that important to THEM, they can go to the police. And then you can blog about their police report.
Quatguy
Maybe for the same reasons many other women don’t report rape or sexual harassment? The police’s often fairly nonchalant or downright dismissive treatment of reports of sexual harassment? Women, and black women more so, don’t have much reason to trust that reporting abuse, assault or rape is taken serious and investigated.
Not knowing the law there might also be a statute of limitations, not sure whether this applies here.
There are certainly very good reasons to be cautious but to dismiss it out of hand? Absolutely fucking not. it’s definitely not past these festering pieces of shit to use an entirely real case as a weapon, they really are THAT awful. That they would, no doubt, be perfectly willing to make one such case up is not evidence that this is it.
@9 quatguy
There are excellent reasons for many people not to go to the police, specially if the case is lacking demonstrable evidence and is based, apparently, largely or solely on personal testimony (not that evidence makes a lot of difference in many cases). We don’t know this woman, but yes, there could potentially be other reasons for doing such a thing, that it doesn’t make sense to you, is not in itself evidence of bad faith. Now, the slymepitters are doing it solely to score what they think are points, that’s for sure, but those are two separate things.
sigaba and Quatguy
Fuck that shit. Not again. We’ve had this discussion time after time again. There are good reason why somebody might only seek to be heard but not to report. They apply regardless whether you like the guy who’s accused or dislike the woman who’s doing the accusation
Expecting her to go to the police is terrible. Law enforcement are not known for handling rape well.
Also, you know not every victim speaks up because they want their perpetrator *arrested*. Sometimes it’s just for peace of mind, which everyone deserves regardless of whether they have enough evidence to convince a court of law.
This is another one of those times when I am grateful for what I have learned here. I need to be able to see the excuses that pop up hundreds and thousands of times too.
@ quatguy
1) Go to this thread and read the comments responding to Penny L. It has been exhaustively dealt with.
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/11/30/deja-vu-man/
2) Going to the police and communicating with community outside of law enforcement are not mutually exclusive.
@Beethovenfangirl: sharp, flat and natural
Texas has no statute of limitations on rape per a quick Google search.
This is kind of a weird one. I strongly believe that all reports of sexual assault should be taken seriously and strongly prosecuted. I also have a hard time believing this of Dr. Tyson. But then I am reminded of other people who have used their celebrity to commit sexual violence and get away with it.
Realistically, I think the best thing would be to report the incident to the police and let the investigation take it’s course.
Although I am afraid that this is one of those cases where, even if the suspect isn’t ever charged, there is a lurking stain on their name. But then, I really don’t want to just ignore a rape allegation.
Crud! Really a tough one. Just ignore the slymepitters they’re moron’s anyway.
Beethoven…
I understand your points, but why take it to a blogger? Is Neil DT to be investigated, tried and convicted or pronounced innocent by a mob? The effect either way is to sew suspicion and impugn a well respected person outside the law? There can be no justice for the alleged victim if the case does not go through the proper channels, and no certainty of innocence for the Neil DT if he is innocent either. If she is serious she must go to the police.
My response at #15 can also be directed at sigaba at #10 and erichoug at #16.
Just one more point: The indisputable fact that police have handled some rape cases poorly in the past is not a good reason to not report rape and sexual assault. It is an excellent reason to demand better procedures and more professionalism from the police. But, eroding confidence in law enforcement does nothing to improve the situation.
@ quatguy #17
The reasons are stated in PZ’s post. He was helpful in supporting other people in situations like this when there was corroboration from other people in the community so it’s plausible that this is a similar situation..
Also GO READ THE THREAD I POSTED. “Official channels” are garbage socially speaking and often just as or more traumatizing to people who have been raped.
@ erichoug #19
GO READ THE POST I LINKED.
The fact that the police handle rape so badly is in fact a very good reason to avoid them. Why would anyone want to be traumatized farther? It’s one of the reasons we choose to support public discussion and expression by people who have been raped, and about rape cases in the media here.
Providing support for the alleged victim is great, I understand that. Good on PZ for looking into it in a thoughtful manner. But this is very clearly a matter for the police. If they don’t do their job, or re-victimize the alleged victim that is awful. But lets not descend into mob rule. These are very serious allegations and a lot is at stake for all of the parties involved. The justice system is far from perfect, and may be totally fk-ed up but i think it must be given a chance.
But this is a crime we’re talking about, she’s not saying the NDGT passed he up for a promotion, or called her names behind her back or have her a bad grade, the word is “rape.” That’s a really serious charge, the least we can ask is she’d make a sworn statement.
The bare minimum of a civilized society is when someone breaks the law, they go to the police. We aren’t Mafiosi sworn to uphold an Omertà, we don’t settle criminal acts amongst ourselves, and even if we did a bunch of sniping of people’s blogs seems like a pretty dumb way of handling it.
Repeating someone’s criminal accusation, when that person won’t call the police, is dishonorable and it puts the counterparty in the impossible position of having to respond to claims that can change daily and are litigated in public with every crackpot and nut chiming in.
@Brony #19
Sorry, but I have to disagree. There are a lot of people in jail for rape and there are a lot of people who feel like the system actual did what they are supposed to. If you don’t go that route than it’s just he said she said or some variation of that. A trial allows all the evidence to be presented and a rational verdict to be reached. You’re saying that because some police have handled rape cases badly, that nobody should report rape or sexual assault to the police. So, again, I have to disagree.
If you really feel so strongly about it why don’t you work to help improve the justice system instead of just telling people who have survived sexual assault to go home and blog about it?
@Brony Is going to the police and reporting a rape more traumatic than having a bunch of bloggers mock your rape, by using your story as a political football in a totally unrelated dispute?
@Erichoug #19
Not everyone who is raped wants to be a champion for justice reform… If you feel that strongly about it, why don’t you drop everything to be an activist?
Of course she couldn’t go to the police and report it at the time – you think the cops would believe a black teenage male is capable of rape?
Haha yikes, literally everyone on the “tell the cops or It’s bullshit” side are fucking gross.
I’ve yet to ever tell anyone the specifics or put the name out there because even if the cops had done something, in the meantime I’d have to deal with retribution from my abuser and their crew. Sorry, but I like being not dead.
@
The information posted in that thread indicates otherwise and you have yet to substantively deal with that.
Then why are you here? We are trying to help people who get raped and work to try to fix the rape problem as best as we can and you are effectively making things easier for rapists on a social level.
You just tacitly gave us permission to be start getting rude. Fucking prove that this is mob rule.
This is a country (a planet actually) that NEEDS a social factor to fix the rape problem because the “proper channels” are utter shit. Objectively this is a person who is willing to support someone who says they have been raped and a community trying to weigh the complications in doing that best. Mob rule? Fuck off.
So are allegations in many other areas but it only seems to be allegations related things like rape, harassment, racism, transphobia, homophobia and similar that get people like you showing up in numbers significant enough to attempt to stifle reasonable public discussion of rape. Again, the context of how badly this issue is actually dealt with rationally requires public discussion.
Only if the person chooses to go that route and then they should get support and society should pay extra attention to make sure the stuff in that link I posted does not happen. Society does not get fixed by sending rape victims into a process that is rigged against them. Your suggestions make things easier for rapists.
28. So what are you saying,…. NDT is going to beat her for going to the police?
I have no experience with sexual assault and do not pretend to fully grasp the feelings involved in being victimized. But I don’t understand what you might see as a solution.
*sigh*
Jordan, J. “Beyond Belief?: Police, Rape and Women’s Credibility.” Criminology and Criminal Justice 4, no. 1 (February 1, 2004): 29–59. doi:10.1177/1466802504042222.
Yung, Corey Rayburn. “How to Lie with Rape Statistics: America’s Hidden Rape Crisis.” Iowa L. Rev. 99 (2014): 1197–1431.
Women have good reason to avoid reporting to the police, as decades of research has shown they’re incapable of handling sexual assault fairly. I don’t have any figures for women of colour handy, but I suspect they’re worse.
May I gently suggest that this kind of topic creep serves the purposes of the Slymepit, and no one else? It’s not that the resultant thread doesn’t need discussion; it’s that such a discussion needs to be separate from what Our Gracious Host started.
The key point is really this: PZ listened and was not convinced; that’s how this “communication” thing is supposed to work. Note that he did not state that he cut off the conversation; I suspect that if RV (Reporting Victim) had come forward with more, he would at least have listened. And that’s how both communication and science are supposed to work: If one’s stated evidence does not get the response one wants, come forth with more evidence. How much more is, of course, a judgment call… but if one is told “there isn’t enough evidence there,” one presents more (until there isn’t any more or bad faith becomes apparent, as in tobacco or climate denialism, or conversely the Army-McCarthy hearings).
There’s a remarkably accurate* aphorism among lawyers that when the facts are against you, argue the law; when the law and the facts are against you, pound on the table. There’s a lectern in danger of getting splintered here.
* That is, it’s not mere rumor from the days when all lawyers were white men arguing on behalf of white men.
@#26, Siggy and everyone, really.
Not everyone who is raped wants to be a champion for justice reform, but this person who claims to have been raped wants a somewhat prominent blogger who has aired the allegations of another woman before to do the same for her and to what end? Her allegations are very poorly supported and they have not been vetted in any way.
What, exactly, is to come of this? The results the last time something like this happened were a mixed bag. Seriously mixed. I don’t think anyone would call the outcome ‘good’. I’m not sure other than alerting people to the behaviour of Shermer, there was any good that came out of it.
I can see that PZ, in that case, had reason to air the allegations. The only reason to air the allegations this time is to expose the slymepit, rather than present a victim and a credible story.
I’m not even sure we should be discussing the veracity of the allegations or the allegations. Taken on face value, and even with a little digging, they seem dubious. We have only a responsibility to hear out the allegations and to take the person bringing them seriously. I, for one, won’t presume truth. I also won’t presume untruth.
What rather has my attention and what I think is more relevant is the path by which this allegation got to PZ and the motivation and intentions of the people on that path. Something has happened here. Something important and deeply concerning. The slymepit is no joke and this is no joke. This is, I think, rather more serious than some of the comments here seem to indicate.
Quatguy being an asshole:
Many women find dealing the police when reporting a rape to be just as bad or worse than the rape. Why are you being such an asshole? Women have reasons to avoid law enforcement, very good reasons.
The Slymers demand only law enforcement deals with it to shut women up. Why are you abetting them?
Brony, You don’t know anything about me. I am all for social justice and bringing things out into the open. Rape is a massive problem that requires significant cultural changes on many levels. My point is that to make accusations is serious and if the victim wants justice, they need to go to the police.
@30.
Do you not think someone that publically, legally accused NDT would not immediately become a target for every hero-worshipping NDT fan?
Even if he did get put away and didn’t attempt a libel suit against his accuser ala Cosby, you’d instantly become a public figure and open yourself up for all kinds of abuse.
Even mentioning you are abused AT ALL is bravery above and beyond what shpuld be expected. Seeking legal action is simply an unrealistic standard to hold exteemely vulnerable survivors to.
Gods this is annoying and exhausting.
1. Just because you like sbdy’s public persona does not mean you know them.
2. Even if you know somebody, it doesn’t mean you know what they did 20 years ago.
3. Even if you’ve been knowing somebody for a long time does not mean they’re not a rapist.
4. Just because somebody favours equality does not mean they’re not a rapist. How many “this feminist guy raped me” stories do you need?
5. The internet is not a court of law. Nobody is tried and pronounced guilty or not guilty. People form their opinions
6. If your first concern is the guy’S reputation and not the woman’S wellbeing, your priorities are fucked up.
7. If you treat this as a “anti-feminists proving that false rape accusations exist by making false rape accusations” without any evidence, your reasoning is fucked up.
8. If you demand that a woman risk becoming one of the badly handled rape cases just to satisfy your sense of justice regardless of her own wellbeing, your empathy is fucked up.
As a law school graduate, I’m incredibly leery about any time we make a firm conviction in our minds based solely on opportunity. Eg: Hillary Clinton is speaking at an event in Iowa. A mentally ill conservative person is mugged at or very near said event. Said person says Hillary Clinton mugged them.
In that example, we might have very good reason to suspect the claim. On the other hand, they could be telling the truth. There might be a bias to not believe the mentally ill person simply because they’re mentally ill. Or because of their politics. It’s super weird, but we ought to at least give it a look. Maybe you don’t bring Hillary in for questioning just yet, but you at least look for some corroboration.
@Ethan Vishniac did a good job, but we’d also like to know if there’s anyone that knew both NDGT and said woman at grad school. PZ should probably ask an open ended question to Tchiya Amet like: Hey, did you go by another name? Just don’t lock in a time period.
On the other hand:
1. The nature of the crime is such that we probably ought to start from a viewpoint of maybe this did happen.
2. From there, we look at Ethan’s evidence and see if it actually relates to Amet. If so, the narrative might actually fit. She dropped out of the program, (we don’t know why), and she went to a completely unrelated discipline. Physics to astrology does seem like kind of a jump, but it might fit a trauma narrative.
3. Might we be defending NDGT because he’s one of our own? Trying to be completely rational about this doesn’t necessarily mean we don’t have some kind of group bias. Remember, we’re scientists, so we have to follow the data even if it leads us somewhere we don’t want to go. I like NDGT, I follow him on FB and I love his writing, but maybe…
The point is probably moot by now, though. She already put it on her blog, I’m sure Google’s search bots have picked up on it. It’s probably more up to whether a good reporter or a bad one finds it first.
What Jaws said. Also, please note, I’m not dismissing the allegations. They must be taken seriously and seriously examined. What we have read here, if this is the only information available to us about this, is not compelling. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t justify attention. It means there’s far more left to learn.
And really, what Jaws said. Also, again, the big deal here may actually be slymepit. I strongly believe that the big deal here is the slymepit.
erichoug
NDG was a grad student at the time of the alleged offense, not a celebrity. RTFOP
Being unable to provided sufficient “beyond a reasonable doubt” evidence to get a conviction would be a valid reason to not go to the police.
Does anyone know if she found the slymepit or they found her?
I haven’t seen anybody on this comment thread yet claim that this rape did not happen. I don’t think anyone here has enough information to come to a positive conclusion one way or the other. I think that’s a reasonable position.
@Thomathy,
For the most part, this thread has not been discussing the veracity of Tchiya Amet’s story, and instead we’ve gone off on a tangent about whether victims in general should report to police. I don’t know whether Amet should have reported to police.
All I know is that in my experiences with sexual assault, I did not press charges, for many reasons, some of which could plausibly apply in this case. I am affected by SIWOTI when I hear people say things like, “I strongly believe that all reports of sexual assault should be taken seriously and strongly prosecuted,” because that is not very respectful to victims who choose not to press charges.
I don’t have any answers in regards to what the solution might be if victims are failed by the justice system, other than massive changes to the system. I just believe making accusations on-line without filing a police report helps no one.
My comment at #29 should have been addressed to quatguy
@sigaba 23
See my response to quatguy at 29. I don’t give a shit if it’s a crime or serious charge, we get to talk about them as a society and what matters is finding good ways of doing that in order to fix the rape problem. We talk about criminal cases and claims of crimes all the time but for some crimes we get lots of people like you that try to stifle public discussion about these issues. Fuck that. Fuck asking them to do anything until they know what they want to do, and then we support them because they have to take this shitty culture into account.
Now if you and the others like quatguy get to question our desire to support claims of rape on the mere suspicion that someone’s reputation is going to be harmed, we get to do some questioning of you based on any suspicions that we may have because you are effectively helping rapists and making it harder to solve the rape problem. I’m not going to do that yet but given the context that we live in I gotta wonder why you and others here are so keen that we stop.
IF we had a civilized society when it comes to rape, which we do not.
Now I have reason to be rude to you too. Fucking prove that we are “settling criminal acts among ourselves”. We are trying to support rape victims by publicly supporting claims of rape in order to counteract the social biases that make rape all but impossible to investigate and prosecute. In no sense is the public discussion and communication a legal phenomena. Fucking prove it.
Supporting claims of a crime that is massively under reported because of the shitty justice system and social biases that lead to suppression and dismissal of discussion by people who want to talk about their rapes is honorable. The position you describe is actually the complete opposite of what happens because people tend to peck at the people making rape claims and bring up the 1001 shitty excuses for why it’s not rape, or why it’s their fault and other crap. The accused has a PRIVILEGED position in this and your suggestions simply make things easier for rapists.
Unless you can actually make realistic, effective suggestions you are simply going to be ignored, and possibly banned if it becomes impossible to discuss the situation that we want to discuss because prevention of the discussion of rape claims and cases is the primary effect regardless of intentions.
@sigaba 25
What the fuck are you even talking about?
I’m a lawyer and work in a small town in Appalachia. I was a legal aid attorney who represented women in domestic violence situations and am now a defense attorney and am on the other side. Here allegations of rape are taken seriously and treated as real crimes. Perhaps we are just more progressive than Austin, I don’t know.
I would also add that every large city and many small towns have domestic violence centers and rape counselling crisis centers. They are staffed by people who are trained to support people who claim to be victims of rape and other types of domestic violence. Further, they do not cross examine or investigate in the sense that their job is not to question whether or not something happened but to support the person who says it happened. The information concerning these places is all over.
Just saying.
@42, Siggy
I can read. The veracity of Amet’s story is exactly what’s in discussion here so far. I do not think that that discussion is relevant or necessary to have right now. She deserves to be taken seriously and we have very little information from which to move forward from that point
It wouldn’t matter to some people whether she has gone to the police or not if the truth of her allegations weren’t already in question? It’s clear that some people believe that the truth, or the absence of it, is something that can only be ascertained by police and the justice system. That is, simply, wrong and that wrongness has been elaborated on exhaustively here and, I’m sure, will be again in this very thread. You’re own experience adds to that wrongness.
Let me clarify my original post.
I said that they were the same person (Tchiya Amet and the astronomy graduate student I remembered) because I managed to remember the student’s name and did a google search on her. I found a statement about her time at Oberlin, under her original name, on the weblog of Tchiya Amet. She hasn’t tried to conceal her original name.
At the time in question Neal was a popular and charismatic TA, well-liked by his peers. Since then I have spoken to him many times. We are not close, but we are friendly colleagues. I admire and respect his work. In contrast, I have not spoken to Tchiya (or Staci) in over 30 years. I remember her as being friendly but somewhat introverted. That may reflect her behavior around faculty as much as anything else.
None of this amounts to an argument one way or another about this allegation. Sometimes people are a complete mystery. I’m definitely not ready to join an internet mob directed at either of them.
quatguy @ #43,
You may believe what you will. However, there have been benefits to airing these types of allegations with no intention that a person be prosecuted through the justice system. The justice system does need massive changes. It cannot, currently, affect the outcomes that are necessarily desirable to reduce the crimes that it (poorly) prosecutes. Sometimes, for instance, it’s enough to get a story out there in order to warn people and hopefully reduce a person’s ability to victimise people.
Please, don’t continue on in this thread trying to convince people that you’re right here. You’re just not. And, actually, it’s you who is helping no one.
quatguy @30
Neither do I, which is why I usually listen those do before sticking my oar in.
@36
Yeah, I kinda have the suspicion that regardless of guilt/innocence, no action sympathetic or retaliatory by NDT could affect how some of his hero-worshippers treat her.
Jesus Christ. Police or GTFO has been so thoroughly debunked before that I’d thought it could be given a rest. Apparently I was too naive and optimistic about that, though. Is it just me, or is it, once again, mainly men who argue that the police are safe havens of crime prevention and ethical conduct|?
@quatguy
I know what you posted, that is all I need to respond to you. How you feel about social justice issues is not relevant to what you post here. On can want to support social justice and still take actions that are counter to that goal.
On what grounds do you believe that this is not taken seriously by people here? Frankly your sole objection seems to be that we are talking about a rape claim outside of a legal context, something that is required to fix this problem. So at some point you are just going to have to accept “we know it’s serious and are taking steps we feel are appropriate, too bad if you don’t like that”.
I have a question for these guys. A woman gets raped by a man. In court, the case gets thrown out on some administrative legal technicality, so the man is technically not-guilty, even though he actually did rape the woman.
Did the rape happen or did the legal technicality leading to the case being thrown out mean that the space-time continuum was affected to such a degree that the rape was magically erased from the previous timeline?
Back when my abuse was going on, does anyone think that I didn’t want justice? If I had some kind of magic wand at the time, that asshole and everyone that helped them abuse me would be rotting in prison or dead. I still didn’t report, because the risk of retaliation and even further victimizing was too great. The fact that I didn’t report out of fear for my own safety and wellbeing doesn’t have jack shit to do with how earnestly I wanted them to stop or be brought to justice.
If the history of other celebrities accused of sex offenses is anything to go by, if it’s true, other accusers, with corroborating evidence, will soon appear.
Thomathy, Mandatory Long-Form Homo @33:
Here’s an analogy. Say I flip a coin twice, and both times it comes up heads. The hypothesis that the coin is biased is more likely than it is not (OR 4:1), if we ignore your priors for the moment. Does this mean we can confidently say the coin is biased, though? No; the evidence for both hypotheses is weak, and a few more flips could dramatically change that around. But we’re also not justified in saying that because the evidence for the coin being biased is weak, we can conclude the coin is unbiased.
Likewise, this report does raise the odds of NGT being guilty of sexual assault, relative to him being innocent. At the same time, the evidence for both sides is quite weak. The answer is not to dismiss the story as incredible, nor conclude NGT is guilty; it’s to say “I have a report, though the evidence is weak. Keep an eye out, but don’t overreact.”
NGT? NDGT? Bah, you get who I was referring to.
Quatguy:
And how does one go about protecting other women, as it was in the case of Shermer? Publicity is the only way. Otherwise, more victims.
Brony-
“We are trying to support rape victims by publicly supporting claims of rape in order to counteract the social biases that make rape all but impossible to investigate and prosecute.”
Does giving public support for rape victims require ruining the reputations of the accused? If the claims are never proven, never go to trial, and Tyson simply has the epithet of “rapist” hanging over his head for the rest of his life, is that just a price we have to pay as a society, in order to show rape victims the support they need?
If Tyson’s a rapist I want him to go to jail, I don’t want Amercia’s Favorite Nerd to to be a known creeper that never paid for his crimes. I don’t want his career ruined just because a bunch of people started gossiping about him on blogs, either. And yeah his reputation is a consideration, that I weigh his interests against the interest of a rape victim sharing her story does not make me a monster, sorry.
“I have a question for these guys. A woman gets raped by a man. In court, the case gets thrown out on some administrative legal technicality, so the man is technically not-guilty, even though he actually did rape the woman.”
You mean like Act 4 of a Law and Order episode?
54……… I understand what you are saying. No one should have to go through that or be put in that situation. What was your solution, is there a solution?
Ugh …HJ Hornbeck, read the whole thread. Read all of my posts, at least. We have very little evidence from one side and nothing at all on the other. All the information we have about this, in fact, is in PZ’s post. Also, rape allegations are not maths. We need more information, that’s plain. The point of this post, though, clearly was to get ahead of the slymepit. Vetting the rape allegations was done as well as it could have been at this early stage. There was much, much more to go on in the prior case.
Just …don’t make maths analogies about this. It seems somehow misplaced.
@60
My solution is to reform the justice system, while simultaneously not expecting incredibly vulnerable people to put their head on the chopping block in the public square.
I will always reject the proposition that reporting is a reasonable expectation of survivors, but beyond that I am willing to discuss solutions.
sigaba, please, please PLEASE tell me you did not just turn this into “but what about the poor mens”….
If he’s a rapist he’s no poor man in my eye, but that’s the dispute, right? On the one side you have a man who doesn’t want to be known as a rapist, and on the other you have a woman who wants to tell what happened.
But she wants to tell the story in just such a way that almost guarantees we’ll never actually know what happened, it’s to traumatic for her personally for us to engage in any sort of process that would help anyone know what actually happened. I mean if NDGT says this didn’t happen, what are we to do with that? Is he just another rapist liar? Or is she a liar?
I admit if he was just some random dude it wouldn’t matter much, but he’s a celebrity and the public face of a huge charitable institution. Showing Amet “support” could mean the end of his career, wether he was a rapist or not. Don’t we at least owe it to ourselves to know that if he’s going to be ruined, it’s for something he actually did?
I fail to see how that is a meaningful distinction. What’s good for the former should be sufficient for the latter, or you’re just being arbitrary.
Because that’s what typically happens. Some woman makes an accusation, two dozen folks on the internet have some sympathetic words and *whoosh*, career is over.
Totally reasonable prediction…
I agree I suppose, even the guy packing groceries at the Safeway deserves to either have has name cleared or go to jail. But in the worst case for the guy packing groceries, maybe he has to get a new job in a different town. I’m not sure that’s an option for Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Of course, if the guy at Safeway IS a rapist, he should just go to jail. But for some reason people arguing on Amet’s behalf insist that this option is off the table.
Fucking options, how do they work.
OR, or or or… it could be that if this did indeed happen, that NDGT did not think it rape. For example, a rather depressingly large number of men do not consider having sex with someone while they’re completely drunk to be rape. They truly, honestly, don’t think it is. So, there is an option that they did indeed have sex and the woman considered it rape, and he did not.
Now, a respectable person would, when confronted with this accusation when they had thought everything okay, would be horrified to realise they had apparently raped someone. An example apology could be something like “I am terribly sorry that my actions caused you to experience something like that, and I know that know amount of ‘I’m sorry’ can fix this entirely. I vow that I will do all I can to never again do an action that would cause such experiences to others.”
I want to commend Ethan Vishniac and that approach. Women who claim they have been victimized should not be attacked just because they make a claim — it doesn’t matter who they accuse. It’s possible that this claim is true, and it’s possible that it’s not. It’s up to individual women whether they choose to report to the police, though police have a lot of improvement to do to be friendly and approachable advocates and protectors of victims, and thus it’s understandable why some women choose not to do so.
The fact of an accusation, with no other evidence, does not automatically reflect poorly on the accused, but it also does not automatically reflect poorly on the accuser. No one should be attacked because a woman decides to publicly discuss incidents in her life… except assholes who try and manipulate victims for their own ends.
@Giliell
I would cite this case of Fatty Arbuckle at this juncture, who even though he was exonerated in court of a rape, after three trials, still had his career destroyed, mostly because the Hearst papers got ahold of the story and decided to use the salacious details of the story to sell papers. Arbuckle and Tyson are similar in that both have made their appeal to children a part of their public image; it’s really easy to ruin a child’s entertainer or teacher with rumors, as PZ might attest to.
Arbuckle’s alleged victim herself had died the day after the rape that wasn’t a rape; all we knew of her side of the case was the, it turns out, mostly fabricated and conjectural story she told her friend before she died. Her friend testified to it all in court, this was her way of showing support.
@sigaba #59
If you don’t start actually doing something that functionally works towards solving the rape problem instead of these things that help rapists (regardless of your intent) you are going to continue pissing people off. Despite the social context that makes this discussion rational you are choosing to complain about something that is going to be a problem even if the legal system were functioning properly.
You are choosing to re-focus this on a possibility despite the fact that people accused of rape already have a privileged position. While there are some people who have suffered from reputation damage, creating public behaviors that work on that is a separate issue which you can discuss in a place devoted to that subject instead of functionally making life easier for rapists bu trying to suppress the discussion here.
Fuck off. We are not saying that he is a rapist, we are supporting that ability of people to make a claim that they have been raped. Until you see any of us say he is a rapist you are literally making shit up. If you are worried about people who say he is a rapist YOU NEED TO GO TALK TO THEM.
This was not me. Start citing who you are responding to.
@ Rowan vet-tech #63
We need a bingo card for this.
Nope, you are misleading about what was said. Amet has the option of going to the police, and most regulars will support that decision either way.
But it can’t be mandatory. It is her decision. That is where you get lost. Women making decisions without your input. Happens daily.
@Ronald(#46):
What do you need to take a rape allegation seriously?
You probably don’t know the horror that the police will put a victim through? Most of the time it is (s)he said (s)he said and if the police don’t side with the perpetrator (the victim generally is a woman and those are emotional, unreliable, gold diggers, vengeful, asking for it, drunk, etc.. You don’t want to know how police can react to male victims) then they put the victim through what amounts to torture to get more evidence.
And if it goes beyond that to an actual trial that is just a walk in the park compared to what you should be doing to the accuser if you were defending the person accused of rape. There are (generally speaking) 2 people witness to the crime. And you wouldn’t be doing your job defending the accused by turning the accuser into an unreliable witness which mean drilling as much as you can into the pain to get them to make mistakes.
So even if the police takes rape allegations seriously there are compelling reasons on the side of the victim to not do so because it forces them to relive a traumatic event over and over and over and over and over (repeat ad nauseum) while being turned into a social pariah.
@sigaba 67
This is the opposite of the typical social dynamic.
@70
Still not the usual social dynamic. Creating a way for people to talk about their claim without enormous push back and creating a public that does not over-react to something before a legal verdict are separate issues. There is nothing wrong with addressing that second issue, but if you do it in a way that hurts the first issue you are helping rapists.
Seriously, you are proposing that the public avoid talking about claims of rape. THAT IS FUCKED UP.
HEADS UP EVERYONE:
Tchiya Amet reported the incident to the police in 2014. Here is a quote from a June 15, 2014 entry on her blog:
@Brony I’m not sure when I tried to silence anybody; I said repeating gossip was dishonorable, and I think that’s totally true and PZ made the right decision. I hope the pride of the commenters here is not so fragile that the shaming of Anonymous Internet Guy destroys their will to comment (and I didn’t even swear at them, unlike some people).
I mean, apart from this discussion you and I are having, what exactly is there in this issue to discuss? It sounds like what you want is not a discussion, but an uncritical and supportive recitation of Amet’s story. What exactly do you see as the dispute here? What should we be talking about if not this?
sigaba
1. We are not a court of law
2. Your own example contradicts you: Even though the guy was falsely accused the career was over.
3. You got one fucking example as opposed to all the rape victims who have come forward, shared their stories where nobody was ever even prosecuted
It must be nice living in a world where every rapist who is reported is actually convicted and every guy who is not convicted is not a rapist. Please send us a postcard. I want to know what colour the sky is.
My question stands: If someone who really, actually raped a woman is found not guilty in a court of law, did that mean that the rape magically didn’t happen? Or do you believe that it is impossible for a situation like that to occur?
Thomathy, Mandatory Long-Form Homo @61:
They’ve been quite good, good enough that I hesitated before typing up that comment.
Human beings are bad at handling low-evidence situations, and even worse when strong emotions are involved. We’re tugged towards the extremes by our instincts; either NDGT must be guilty and punished severely, or the allegation must be false and the accuser must be punished severely. We quickly pass over more nuanced approaches, like rehabilitation or guarded acceptance. How do you combat that?
Move into the abstract. Call it “sexual assault” instead of “rape.” Invoke maths and analogies. It’s the only humanly possibly way to be as fair as possible to both the alleged victim and to NDGT.
I used to think the ‘Pit was on a gradual decline. As more numbers rolled in, though, I saw it was falling into a sawtooth pattern; whenever something vaguely controversial happened at FtB, their numbers would shoot through the roof, only to decay away as months rolled on without controversy. There was too much variation to draw a trendline, and I’d need several more years of data to push past that.
You don’t see that pattern from a robust, self-sustaining community. You see it in a small one united only by hatred towards FtB and wild conspiracy theories. So why, exactly, should we make them the focus here? Why should we bow to their desire for recognition and legitimacy, and consider them more worthy of discussion than allegations of sexual assault against a well-loved member of the community?
Two comments about them are more than enough. I’d like to focus on something more important.
Btw, if you read Ms. Amet’s blog, she doesn’t write in a linear, event-by-event style. So far, much of what I’ve read is written in the style of stream of consciousness and free association—potentially an effective way of sorting through deep emotion but not necessarily efficient in relating factual information and experience to the outside reader. My interpretation of what I’ve read is of someone who is working through a lot of emotional fall out because of trauma that she has experienced. According to her blog posts, she was drugged and raped—an awful experience capable of wrecking the emotional stability of many people. Elsewhere in her blog she mentions having PTSD.
Also—and I think this should not be held against the validity of what she relates about her trauma—she is most definitely not an atheist. She is partly Native American and seems to practice a form of religion/spirituality that draws from a medley of indigenous sources and many other practices. I worry that this might aid in forming prejudice against the possibility that her experiences actually took place. Keep in mind that both atheist women and non-atheist women are raped everyday. Holding one’s cosmological perspectives against a victim is a game that theists can play against atheist victims of sexual assault as well.
I hope no one is swayed toward that particular bias but I figured I’d mention it given that PZ alluded to that possibility in his OP. (I’m not accusing PZ of that bias, btw.)
@sigaba
I repeatedly mentioned a dynamic where people who try to make claims of rape, talk about their rapes, or try to talk about ongoing rape cases get lots of people showing up and derailing the discussion. It’s not about intent, it’s about the de facto reality of effect.
So talking about a rape accusation and/or creating a space where those accusations can be made at a public level is gossip ? That’s another fuck you.
Oh noes! Da swears! They do….absolutely nothing to the content. You came here and made accusations of extra-legal justice and talking about a person as if they were a rapist and did not even take the time to point out where that actually happened. That is offensive.
You came in here and tried to get people to stop talking about a rape accusation at a public level when that is what is needed to fix the rape problem. That is offensive.
You can handle some swear words and it’s far more likely the one with pride issues is you.
What the fuck does this even mean? I discussed things relevant to the concerns of people here and relevant to fixing the rape problem? You can go wonder about other things all you want.
You kept going on about damage to reputation of the accused and did not say a damn thing about Amet’s story. When you want to actually look at their story in a way that assesses truthfulness without making things easier for rapists or harder for rape victims feel free.
Your need prevent people from talking about a rape accusation or providing places where those accusations can be talked about at a public level without derails that make things easier for rapists. Among other things that I have mentioned above. I did actually make points up there and challenged things you said, you read that right?
Ask others here. I’m a member of the privileged aggressive masculine male class. Whatever is discussed it needs to be done in a way that does not make things harder for rape victims or easier for rapists.
So many usernames I don’t recognize arguing “police or GTFO.” How surprising.
I would really like to direct readers to this blog post. You’re unlikely to stop a rapist who you don’t know and will never know, and honestly it’s not on any of us to decide whether this particular accuser is telling the truth or not. But what you CAN do is learn to identify rapists in your peer group and support victims/survivors: https://yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com/2013/10/20/cockblocking-rapists-is-a-moral-obligation-or-how-to-stop-rape-right-now/
Does anyone know if NDT has responded in anyway yet to Tchiya Amet’s posting?
While I wouldn’t go as far as to say that justice is literally never served – the police do manage to do their job right once in a long while – this is by and large true.
@sigaba
Predators don’t want their prey to have a forum to express themselves without challenge and predators like rapists set a tone in how they direct their corner of our society. Have you ever looked at the comments to most stories about rape cases? It’s full of people like you taking all the attention off of the social reality that rape victims deal with and trying to fill the communication space with noise that tries to refocus things on anyone but rape victims.
So even though they have every other space in society to try to create advantages for themselves of course rapists will hate the idea of a safe space. It’s not just on this issue, I mentioned race and a bunch of other things too for a very important reason.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/04/cbc-racist-comment-section-canada-prejudice-indigenous-people
So I really don’t care what you think about safe spaces and the effect of public discussions given your performance here and the reality around the issues.
Bullshit. Again, it is very common for the social dynamic to effectively distract from things helpful to rape victims and towards things helpful to rapists. This even goes for situations involving non-celebrities or other well-known people. In any group of 50 or more it’s rational to try to be aware of what a sexual predator would do to gain social advantage and remove a victims social advantage.
You have no fucking idea what you are talking about when it comes to the effects of rape and a society actively biased against confronting rape and rapists and supporting people who are raped. There are no “proper ways” for a rape victim to react (in reality the range of reactions is very large) so I don’t give a fuck about your abstracted emotional impressions about how their behavior lines up to how you think a rape victim should act.
This blog post is confrontation of societies resistance towards claims of rape. Safe spaces are confrontation of similar social biases. Too bad for you.
We can’t get there without dealing with social biases and defensive social crap that feeds into the justice system.
MRAs and PUAs also spend time doing what you are doing in here, and they also tend to oppose safe spaces. Blog posts like this are a response to them and you are doing nothing here to make them any less of a problem. You are sharing their behavior in point of fact.
Society must prevent rape and prevent bias and motivated reasoning from fucking with investigations and trials. Society must confront what rapists do in social spaces to create advantages for themselves and removes advantages their victims have. This blog post is a way of dealing with unreasonable men and woman.
Like our right to publicly discuss accusations of rape and ongoing rape cases without people filling the conversation space with rape enabling noise.
I sympathize with this position, and a lot of people I really like and respect might agree with it, at least in part. But I don’t think it’s a belief that is compatible with reason or skepticism. It’s just cynical, by all reasonable standards we live in a world that’s one of the most crime free in human history.
I detect a slight slipping here from the discussion of “privilege” as merely a bad social problem that we can remedy, into accepting “privilege” as a sort of social dogma.
I guess if anybody who disagrees with you on this point is just a “rape enabler” maybe I should just call it quits now. You win.
I was curious so I looked at her site. I also spend just couple minutes looking at Tyson’s history. I’m sure something I write will cause some outrage by someone but my impressions..
• Her timeline matches Tyson’s in Austin, though another poster confirmed this. Even details like him speaking to his future wife while she drank a drugged cup of water are plausible since they met there.
• Her story is hard to follow, she writes in a stream of consciousness style. It’s not much more than a collection of thoughts which don’t always seem to be related to adjacent thoughts.
• It’s not always easy to determine what exactly she’s saying because she seems to rely on innuendo when I’d hope that someone accusing someone of Rape would stick to facts. For example, following a video by Tyson, she writes ” DO NOT TELL THEM THEY CAN PASS ASTRONOMY 101 IF THEY GIVE YOU A BLOW JOB.” She makes no attempt to clarify who she’s talking about but I’m not sure if this is supposed to be about her. She was supposedly an Astro Grad student at the time, so why would she be taking Astronomy 101? Further.. in the same section [apparently directed at Tyson].. “NO MORE SEXUAL HARASSMENT ALLOWED OR TOLERATED BY ANY FACULTY MEMBERS OR CLERGY”. Tyson was neither Factulty at the time, he would have been a grad student [possibly a TA for under-grad classes] and he wasn’t Clergy. Why is this directed at Tyson?
• She writes in two places that she was given a glass of “water” with a “Mickey” in it. No claims that it was anything but water & some drug.
She describes the affect in very similar terms to a date-rape drugs like the combination of Rohipnol & alcohol or possibly GHB, or Ketamine. Disassociation/Unconsciousness and short-term amnesia. I’m not a doctor [briefly flirted with being a pharmacist] but my understanding is that Rohipnol is effective as a date-rape drug only when combined in high dosages with alcohol.. without alcohol you’d need to take too much of it to be inconspicuous. I defer to anyone with more expertise with these compounds though.
• She attributes her amnesia to being something like 24 hours. The drugs I mentioned above only appear to be effective for up to a couple hours. I’m not sure what the effective span of these drugs are when mixed with alcohol but she didn’t indicate she drank anything other than water before she blacked out.. though, at least with Ruffees, the amnesia is purported to be retrograde so it’s possible the water wasn’t how a drug was delivered.. she could have drank an alcoholic beverage and had no memory of it.
• It’s not obvious whether any of the common date-rape drugs would be detectable in water. Do they have a taste? Do they require something like an alcoholic beverage to hide their taste? I have to assume, if it were in the water, she would stop drinking it if it tasted like there was a drug in it.
For obvious reasons, I don’t plan to do too much internet searching on whether it’s possible to hide a date-rape drug in water. :-/
• She admits to having mental issues. She notes she believes she suffers from undiagnosed PTSD and that one of her daughters hasn’t spoken to her for four years [as of 2014] because of it.
Having some experience with someone with a mental disorder, I have to say she writes like she has mental problems. At no point does she lay out exactly what happens. The page is just a scatter shot of disjointed thoughts. She writes like a more coherent version of my schizophrenic Uncle.
It has to be mentioned.. this could simply be delusion. Between her own admission of mental problems [which she claimed to be PTSD] and her frequent reference to mythical Egyptian [and other] gods as if they were real beings, she does seem delusional.
I want to point out that there’s a slight difference between the mission of supporting survivors, and the mission of punishing perpetrators. If you can somehow confront all the perpetrators and magically make rape disappear that would be great, but also it wouldn’t necessarily help people who have already been victimized.
Survivors need spaces to “come out”, to tell their stories, regardless of whether any of it leads to retribution or not. They need the support of peers, without people immediately picking apart every detail to determine the “proper” fate of their perpetrator. (In this situation, btw, we are not her peers, and frankly I would recommend that she avoid reading this thread.) I get that you’re all fired up about rape, but you’re letting it get in the way of compassion for victims.
You sound like an expert in PTSD recovery, so I’m sure you have a citation on hand.
What about a victim’s duty? If not to all of us, to the next woman her rapist attacks?
@sigaba
READ THE THREAD I LINKED TO AT THE BEGINNING.
That very issue was brought up and dealt with by many many people.
@numerobis
| So many usernames I don’t recognize arguing “police or GTFO.” How surprising.
Almost as if a group of malcontents set this women up then just couldn’t help themselves and HAD to keep stirring the pot rather than wait to see what the end result of their scheming was.
(nobody is going to recognize me either… I’m just a lurker, usually)
“Victim’s duty”?
I see we’re starting already with victim blaming.
Sorry, it’s not her responsibility.
Great on her and on us all if she does, but being a victim is already a burned enough.
@Brony As far as I can read, Penny L was being totally reasonable and everybody just called her names, drew all kinds of tendentious conclusions out of her argument and demanded she “stop posting forever.”
A lot of the argument seems to come down to the idea that it doesn’t matter if the victim reports or not, because police just ignore them, or shame them, or further hurt them. But the whole point of a “duty” is that you have to do it, even if it’s hard, even if it doesn’t work, and even if it hurts you more. I know deontological ethics is really unpopular among atheists and freethinkers but that’s the basis of the position.
You can look at it this way, in terms of Kant’s categorical imperative: You are obliged to act in the way you would demand everyone else act. If you are raped and you do not report the rape to police, then your moral imperative is that no rapes need be reported, ever.
I do see, if you’re a utilitarian individualist and seek only to minimize concrete harms, the whole legal process is sortof beside the point, and the important thing is to stop all the trauma NOW, even if there are speculative harms to women in the future, and the victim is the best person to make these decisions, because her estimate of her own needs totally overrules any other community values.
In my personal opinion, I think this puts the weight of one person’s feelings way above community interests. Look at Bill Cosby, he raped dozens, perhaps even hundreds of women; should they all have gone to the police? I admit I don’t know, it might not have made a difference. But if nobody acts, then more rapes are the guaranteed outcome.
@F.O. Wait, is saying someone has a duty the same thing as blaming them for something?
There is evidence for this.
—“Trauma Centrality and PTSD Symptom Severity in Adult Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse,” Robinaugh, D. J., & McNally, R. J., Journal of Traumatic Stress,
Sigaba, when I had some guy try to break into my house to rape me, I had the option of letting my large and very angry dogs into the backyard. I did not do this, because I was busy hiding in abject terror.
I called the cops 3 hours later, when I was able to make myself stop hiding.
The cop who came called me a liar.
Because I had a way to stop that guy from committing further rapes, am I at fault for his future actions? What percentage?
Commenting on te OP – I thin this is Slymepit attempt at Catch 22. PZ shows support to the reporting woman and they scream “you are accepting shoddy evidence, you are poor skeptic” and the whole spiel they have already shown. PZ says the evidence is shoddy and they scream “You hippocrite, you said the reporting woman should be supported” and the whole spiel they have already shown. So basically they set it up so no matter what PZ does, says, or does not do or say, they can always point and accuse him of something.
That is at least my opinion based on last few years of observing their behaviour from afar.
I am unable to form opinion on the veracity of the accusation, because the website linked in OP is unreadable mess of (to me) totaly incoherent babble.
Ah, the Slymepit. Five years of mean-spirited obsession and harassment, culminating in trying to make a “gotcha” out of a troubled woman’s distress.
Way to go, boys. You must be very proud of yourselves.
Doesn’t exist. Survivors have no obligation to report.
@sigaba
There is no duty for a traumatized person to face even more trauma by dealing with a broken justice system.
There is no duty for a traumatized person to report the event of their trauma to a justice system that in point of fact has problems with the same behavior under discussion in prisons, holding facilities and among it’s officers.
There is no duty for a traumatized person to make a report when the ones that do get pecked at by rapists and those receptive to the tone they set in society such that officers become subject to biases from the social environment . That crime is massively under investigated for a reason and there is no reason to think that a report will make a difference. The neglected rape kits alone are good evidence of this, there are many things working against every report of rape.
I don’t believe that you read the thread at all.
There is a duty to socially support rape claims and socially pressure behavior that prevents claims from being considered fairly.
There is a duty to work against the social biases that contribute to the mess where we are now.
There is a duty to prevent rapists from having the social advantages that they do.
Where did Penny L identify as female?
@Sigaba,
I very much disagree with your ideas about “duty”, to put it lightly
But aside from that. Suppose that a victim isn’t fulfilling their “duty”, as you see it. What are you going to do about it? In your very first comment, you suggested we ignore them. In a more recent comment (#83), you criticized safe spaces and storytelling. Your compassion for victims is apparently very conditional.
For the record, I’m not super cpmfortable with this being framed as a solely man-on-woman deal. I’m not a woman and none of my abusers were men.
@sigaba
Sadly, that’s a fallacious argument. The first and last sentence aren’t mutually exclusive. We do live in the best world so far, but it’s still shitty from many points of view. Yes, we have progressed from rape happening all the time and not even being thought of as a crime in many situations, to it happening a little less and being generally regarded as a crime, but handled very poorly by police and the legal system, and still tolerated or even encouraged by some. We’ve made particularly poor progress in the way we treat the victims, alleged or proven. There’s still a long way to go.
@Rowan
It doesn’t work that way, it’s not about responsibility, if you fail to do it you’re not “responsible” for other crimes, that would be consequentialist. In your case you told the police and it didn’t matter, they ignored you, but wether your efforts succeed or fail doesn’t actually matter. All that matters is you do what you would expect everyone else to do in your situation, ceteris paribus; if you don’t, you’re breaking a compact with others — in the sense that, you are expecting that others will do something that you would not do. Maybe you don’t expect anyone else to report rapes either, or maybe you hope that some heroic, strong person who you are not will do the right thing and save us all. Or maybe we just accept the future rapes as the price society must pay in order to allow victims their counsel in what to do; future rapes are no more your fault than buying a book makes you responsible for deforestation. It’s a personal question of how you’re going to feel about it, I just don’t think the position, from an ethical standpoint, has a lot to recommend it.
Can you state your ethical position without tearing mine down? Can you make a positive case for yours, or why other people aught to do what you did in your situation?
And understand, nobody here is faulting you or anyone else for anything you or anyone else has done. What I’m trying to figure out is what do we expect people should do in these situations. It just feels like we’re talking about rape victimhood as if it were a cancer diagnosis, or being struck by lightning, that it’s horrible and the most important thing is to palliate the afflicted, and I’m not sure that’s the most important thing.
@cvoinescu
I remind you that Vivec agreed with my fatuous characterization of our legal system as almost perfectly broken and said that it only did the right thing “occasionally”, as if by accident. My position was not that it was perfect, but that it was more than a mere fabric of lies.
Nailed it in one. Survivors do not have an obligation to report.
A recap of what sigaba wants people to do or role-models in here. Would this help rapists or rape victims more?
1) Ignore emails by people claiming they were raped.
2) Make them call instead of email even though email would allow some people to avoid the pressure that a conversation with someone might create.
3) Pressure them to go to the police despite the fact that at every step of the process there are many problems that lead to such reports being dismissed and that the experience is often as traumatic or more traumatic than the rape itself.
4) Don’t publicly discuss claims of rape and if you see connect them to people taking actions reserved for the legal system.
5) Don’t create spaces where marginalized people like rape victims can speak without opposition or contradiction.
6) Keep bringing up what might happen if we talk about a rape claim when people are not doing that instead of criticizing people actually doing the thing.
7) Compare discussing rape claims to people using rape claims for political gain and don’t feel obligated to point out evidence for where this might be happening.
8) Act upset that people are not claiming the rape did not happen even though people are not saying that it did either.
9) Keep bringing up the reputation of the accused even though this is a problem with every crime and it’s a separate issue from communicating the existence of a rape claim independent of its truthfulness.
10) Worry about how you feel about celebrities more than people that may have been victimized by celebrities.
11) Appeal to a “right way for rape victims to act” and give skeptical emotional impressions of the person claiming they were raped.
12) Point to anecdotes instead of data when continuing to refocus the discussion on people accused of rape even though they have a lot of social privilege even when they are not celebrities.
13) Refer to discussions about a claim of rape as “gossip”.
14) Claim that the people don’t want to discuss the claim of rape while you spent the overwhelming majority of your time trying to talk about other things.
…and I stopped at #76 because I need to make dinner. Some social justice supporter huh?
Also, the “once in a long while” thing was more hyperbole than anything. Nonetheless, I would argue that for a great many groups – people of color, the poor, disabled people, abuse survivors, etc – the expectation of justice or fair treatment just isn’t there, and with good ample evidence to support that lack of expectation.
Brony about Sigaba:
Their script was straight out of the ‘pit. Why do they always believe we don’t recognize it from their very first posts?
Right, but do you understand ethical problem? Why should anyone else do something that you yourself would not do? So if you yourself would not report a rape, that just means you expect nobody to report a rape. So rape would be a horrible, disgusting offense, and it might even be a crime, but it would be a crime without victims. Obviously it is a crime with a victims, so your position is inconsistent.
Would you agree that some people, from time to time, need to report rapes? How do we reconcile the need to report and prosecute rapes, with the belief that no particular rape victim needs to report them?
I wasn’t going to respond to this, and I’m still not going to respond to the OP since, frankly, what I know of dealing with or talking about rape, I know because of commenters here and similar places, and attempting to comment on it in the past has almost invariably resulted in me being wrong until I read responses either to myself or others.
I’m commenting purely for the benefit of the sigabas of the world.
If you’re going to respond to someone, read what they’ve written.
You (sigaba in particular) have made a surprising number of non sequiturs that not only fail to follow from the comment to which you’re responding, but are also directly contradicted either in the text or the discussion as a whole for someone commenting in good faith. If this topic is making you too angry to accurately read what’s being written, there’s no shame in stepping away and doing something else for a while. Meditate (the relaxing kind, not the “one with the universe” kind). Read 17th century French poetry. Play through the entire Mass Effect series. Whatever. Just get to the point where you can accurately read what’s written, because making insinuations that are directly refuted by the words you’re quoting is a really good way to convince people that you’re not arguing in good faith.
(And feel free to accuse me of being a raging hypocrite for this comment, since I very often fail to follow this advice myself.)
Artor @ 5:
Absolutely fucking not. You should be ashamed for thinking this way. The fact that this woman is being exploited and blatantly used by a group of nasty assholes does not give anyone license to dismiss this person out of hand. FFS, I’d expect you’d know by now just how difficult it is for so many rape victims to even tell one person, because they are so often accused of lying or making shit up. A great many people do not report because they know there isn’t enough evidence to prosecute, or the circumstances will lead authorities to settle on a form “well, you were asking for it.”
I don’t know the circumstances of this particular case, however, unless this case is proven to be smoke and air, I believe Tchiya Amet, and I support her. This has to be beyond difficult for her.
***
To everyone making the same old “must report” apologetic: please, shut the fuck up. You do not have the slightest idea of what you’re talking about, and people here are not obligated to take you by the hand and spoon feed you the reality or rape and sexual assault.
Yes, that is correct. I do not expect survivors to report.
I think that it is a good thing if they do, and I think they’re very brave for putting their head on the metaphorical chopping block, but I do not consider it a duty to do such, and do not consider it morally wrong if they don’t.
I’m not sure how unambiguously I can say that I do not have any expectation, at any point, ever, for a survivor to report.
Reminder that women reporting rape risk being further victimised by police.
https://www.propublica.org/article/false-rape-accusations-an-unbelievable-story
http://thefreethoughtproject.com/your-favorite-victim-woman-reports-rape-nypd-cops-show-sexually-assault/
I daresay those risks are heightened substantially for black women and for those liable to be read as mentally ill/eccentric.
Where does the slymepit element come into this? Did they urge her via twitter?
What a stupid analogy. You fail logic 101. You haven’t added anything to the discussion.. You don’t tell others, who might be traumatized, especially women, what to do. Trying to do so is mansplainin’. Time to shut the fuck up.
Victims are not obligated to do anything. Victims, by definition, did not agree to anything and thus are not ethically bound to react in any or no way.
@118:
that’s where it came from.
@sigaba
The whole point is we don’t expect victims of rape to report it. It yields for everyone.
If it happened to me, I would not feel obliged to do it. Happens to someone else (as it seems to be this case), I don’t expect them to do it.
It wasn’t that long ago that articles were published about a woman who reported a rape, was disbelieved, pressured to say it didn’t happen, prosecuted and convicted for a false rape accusation was found to have actually been an early victim of a serial rapist.
@ffakr, #90
Oh, wow. How, exactly, does someone with mental problems write? I have ‘mental problems’. Does my writing give this away? Could someone tell from my published, peer-reviewed research papers and other technical and artistic work that I have severe mental health issues? Seems no one has, so far, at least not that it has anyone openly using it as a reason for questioning my veracity.
However well-intended your comments may be, please don’t do this. Do not suggest that a woman who claims she was raped is delusional. Its a standard response by rapists and their apologists and misogynists everywhere – “No consent? Bull, it was never rape, she’s delusional”…
Donald Trump claiming he has what it takes to be a great American president? Now THAT’s a delusion, but we have an absolutely massive amount of evidence for that. A bit of mythical nonsense on a person’s website? Not quite enough, and certainly a really shitty thing to say in this context.
Yes that plainly visible. I mean how did they contact her to urge her to go to PZ? I’m hoping it is something publically visible, but if not then that’s that.
Oops, that was in reply to #121 Icthyic.
my guess would be twitter, followed by comments in their blog to the effect.
but I’m not going there to find out.
I don’t know what Penny’s gender was either, I stipulate it was female just because of the name. I never use the singular “they” because I hate it. I usually follow MLA style by using my own gender, but in this case I did otherwise, I shall be more careful in the future.
@Nerd of Redhead “Time to shut the fuck up.”
No, we’ve only gotten started. So we say there’s no obligation, but how can we possibly justify that? I’m not saying you can’t, but are you just saying, a priori, that a victim doesn’t have to do anything? What’s the principle behind that? Is it what serena says? :
@serena “Victims, by definition, did not agree to anything and thus are not ethically bound to react in any or no way.”
Not all of our obligations the result of our voluntary decisions. When did a rapist ever voluntarily agree to never rape? That’s not how it works, we’re bound to do some things even without our consent. Or maybe you have some way of squaring this circle, I don’t know.
@Brony I just don’t think you understand. I think your position just perpetuates rapes, I don’t think the actions you recommend will change our culture. All it does is preach to the converted, and it infantilizes victims. I think the level of sensitivity you’re demanding is just palliative — it makes people feel better, it’s open, in its way, and it makes them more comfortable, but it doesn’t actually fix the underlying problem. It’s more concerned with making people feel safe than actually making their situation safe. It’s not activist and and it’s not progressive, it’s just therapeutic.
And all you can do is accuse me of being a rape apologist. I’m sorry, while I accept that privilege exists, I think most of the current tactics of social justice advocacy are self-absorbed, individualistic and naive, and are the progeny of self-help gurus and abstruse academic philosophy. If the Germans are marching you onto the train, you do not demand a consciousness-raising exercise.
Is it a Godwin if I merely allude to Nazis, or do I have to call someone a Nazi? If the former, just change the last line to “If Milosevic is marching you to a ditch…”
@128
My real life pronouns are they/them, so I kinda resent the implication that you’d avoid using the correct pronouns for me because “you hate the singular they”.
In regards to victims having a duty, provide evidence that they do, in fact, have a duty. I have yet to be convinced that they do.
this is nothing but codswallop.
it’s gibberish.
Yup. Twitter. As a matter of fact, you can still see it plainly displayed on her Twitter page, and her subsequent realization that these people are using her.
@mudpuddles, #90
I explained why I said she wrote like she has mental problems but you either didn’t bother to read everything I wrote or you chose to ignore it.
In what appears to me to be a web page devoted to her claim of rape, she does little in much of the page to actually make or try to substantiate that claim. The page is full of non-sequitur. It’s a mishmash of seemingly random thoughts. As I specifically mentioned, it reminds me of what I’d expect from a schizophrenic like my uncle.
BTW, I finally figured out what the weird numbering was in the middle of the page since my last posting. She’s making comments on a pretty non-controversial video of Tyson.. and those are the time stamps where she feels the need to comment. Her comments are seconds apart and even assuming she’s responding as a rape victim, they don’t all see tethered to reality.
Assuming this happened, Tyson would have been a grad student with her at the time. he was working on his Masters degree. Why the talk of Faculty and Clergy? What is she talking about with the Astro 101 reference?
Does this seem like the writing of someone who does or doesn’t have some issues?
Excessive use of caps, referring to ones self as a “Black Goddess”, a “true Celestial Being”, “DEMONIC ACTS”.. this is TimeCube’esq writing. Do you write published peer-reviewed work like this?
Do me a favor. Try to remove the rape from this to look at the rest of her writing in a less biased light. Perhaps consider it a web page about some other crime that doesn’t understandably light up your moral outrage circuits as much.
If She wrote the Web page that PZ linked to about someone stealing her cabbages, and you left all of the other non-crime related stuff in there, would you suspect that she might have some emotional or mental issues?
photo that follows is a line drawing of apparently egyptian figures.
Maybe she’s got issues because she was raped. Do you think this is the writing of a ‘normal’ person though?
sigaba:
Having had four close friends all be survivors of rape, I would like to note that there are not enough “Fuck you”s in the universe to respond to this statement. All four women had their own ways of processing, coping with and healing from their trauma, and they were unique–much moreso, even, than the circumstances of their assaults, which invariably boiled down to “trusted male acquaintance abused that trust”. For some douchebag shitlord to decide which approaches to healing from trauma that they clearly know jackshit about is a clear sign that somewhere, there’s a pair of parents who failed their duty to raise a decent human being. They should feel bad, and you should apologize to them for wasting whatever efforts they did put into raising you.
“When did a rapist ever voluntarily agree to never rape?”
What? Lol? I already know, as demonstrated throughout the thread, that you’re not arguing in good faith, but srsly, lol cuz the answer to that is “When they engaged in any interaction with any living thing ever.” You wanna talk ethics and “duty”? Lol “duty”. You’re duty.
@133
Let’s say, hypothetically, she’s mentally ill, so what? You do get that mentally ill people are wholly capable of being sexually assaulted, and are often singled out for the exact reason you’re currently demonstrating?
That being said, referring to oneself as a “goddess” and calling sexual assault “demonic acts” doesn’t seem any more mentally ill than any other religious nonsense. I don’t think the christians that talk about burning bushes and talking snakes are necessarily mentally ill, so this doesn’t really ring any warning bells.
Well this is a shitty situation isn’t it? I have nothing but sympathy for Amet, and I would hope that whether or not her allegations are true, Tyson takes this opportunity to either accept the consequences of his behavior or to take a stand on the various issues and support victims of sexual assault.
And as for the pit, whatever the truth of the events, they should be ashamed of themselves for taking further advantage of someone who is clearly in a vulnerable situation just for the sake of sticking it to PZ. That’s just despicable.
@132:
thanks for ferreting that out.
ffakr @133
Another explanation exists that you seem to be ignoring: she could just be a bad writer.
If everything ever posted on the internet had to be up to peer review standards, then the entire internet could probably be hosted on my laptop. Arm chair internet psychology is bullshit and that’s what your doing. Additionally, as Vivec pointed out @136, it is frankly irrelevant to the matter at hand. Please stop.
@ffakr
I did indeed read your post. I gather from your post that she herself says she has mental problems – with PTSD being, by definition, a mental health issue. But does her writing identify this? No. Maybe she’s just not a very good writer. So its your generalisation that is inappropriate, the suggestion that people with mental health problems write in a certain identifiable manner: quite simply, we don’t.
Not the conclusion I would have reached. This is GamerGate style arguing, the accusation is just a cudgel to thwack you with because they didn’t like you to start with. They don’t give a toss about this victim or any other victim, just about tossing some poo and hoping it sticks.
sigaba @96:
In 1960’s Nashville, it was illegal for a black person to sit at the same lunch counter as a white person. Would you argue that black people had a duty to obey the law, even if doing so was hard or hurt them more than protesting segregation? I ask because some people might disagree with that view.
Sheesh, yet another person who’s ignored the evidence presented in front of them and instead clung to their own pet theories.
@88:
Oh, you’re a skeptic? That explains a lot.
I admit I generally do not see the people who write blog posts as human beings. I usually interpret what they’ve written as self-constructed personal narratives, not the real person, but the person they wish they were. I think I’m right, too.
People think that the confessional style of blogging makes us all more connected and that sharing brings us closer to knowing each other. I say it’s the opposite, it really just encourages us to manufacture false personalities for public consumption, that we then promote to each other as “the real us.”
I don’t know this person. You don’t either. And I tell you, nothing we read here will get us closer to any truth of who they are or what their experience is. But reading it gives you the idea you know them; it’s like celebrity, how people think they “know” Neil DeGrasse Tyson. But the sense of intimacy and familiarity is an illusion.
This is why I don’t think consciousness-raising or sharing stories helps. When you make something into a story, it has a protagonist and antagonist, and everyone, even the slimiest prison rapist will always see himself as the protagonist, as the aggrieved, as the wronged. It fits people into narrative boxes when we should be putting them in concrete boxes.
YOB – Ye Olde Blacksmith@139
Now it seems that you are just grabbing at straws to defend a weak position. Have you read her writing at the website? It goes way beyond bad writing. This is incoherent, mystic, mumbo-jumbo writing. The analysis offered by ffakr’s may be flawed but your proffered explanation is, I think, even less likely.
lolwut?
there wasn’t a position being defended. merely pointing out that no alternative explanations were even considered.
amuse me by attempting to put numbers to the relative probabilities.
What’s legal and what’s moral are different, I don’t think people should be legally required to report rapes.
People see duty different ways; if you’re a legalist you might say that the law required you to not sit at the lunch counter — a position that would have been accepted by people like Booker T. Washington, who was satisfied to compromise with Jim Crow as long as he believed his people were afforded “safe space”, you might say.
On the other hand, if you were a follower of the noted doctor of systematic theology, Martin Luther King, you would have believed it was your duty to sit at the counter, be arrested, and spend the night in jail. All of these things were dictated, because civil disobedience required you take no act against your persecutor, and you accept his punishment as an example of the persecutor’s harshness to others. The example of Christ is patent.
Ah, gotcha. “I’m not JUST skeptical of rape survivors sharing their stories, I’m skeptical of EVERYONE sharing their stories!”
This is more or less the point I stop wasting my time with an asshole like you and do something more productive with my time.
To the various people arguing that the odds of a sexual assault occurring are less likely because this person is mentally ill…
Khalifeh, H., P. Moran, R. Borschmann, K. Dean, C. Hart, J. Hogg, D. Osborn, S. Johnson, and L. M. Howard. “Domestic and Sexual Violence against Patients with Severe Mental Illness.” Psychological Medicine 45, no. 04 (March 2015): 875–86. doi:10.1017/S0033291714001962.
… people with mental health issues are more likely to be sexually assaulted than the general public, which means that it’s actually more likely she was assaulted, not less.
It doesn’t mean we can’t have a conversation, about very serious things. But there are real limits to how much we can talk about each other by correspondence. That’s always been true.
ffakr and dogfightwithdogma:
I’ll thank you both to shut the fuck up. As you both seem to be a bit hard of thinking here, once more: shut the fuck up.
Why? You’re both indulging in rape apologetics, and no, I don’t give a fuck of any kind whether or not you see it that way. Assuming mental illness? Don’t do that, not only because you don’t know whether or not it’s the truth, but it’s one of the most convenient ways to other someone, and decide they aren’t trustworthy. And gosh, most rape victims are considered by most everyone to be untrustworthy, of course they are liars, yeah? So, stop fucking doing this. As for “incoherent, mystic, mumbo-jumbo writing”, you can fuck right off with that one, too. “Oh, look, she’s a shitty writer and she believes some seriously wacky stuff, so of course, she’s not reliable!” Gosh, most rape victims get hit with that one from most everyone, too.
As neither one of you have nothing better to do than to publicly rip into this person, perhaps you could, oh, stop being assholes rolled in smegmarmalade.
No, it doesn’t. @110 has a pretty good list of reasons I’m not interested in having any further discussion with you. I’d add the “genders people based on their names due to a misplaced distaste for a legitimate singular pronoun”, though.
sigaba @146:
So you think people have a moral obligation to report, but not a legal one? They are morally obligated to seek justice via an injust system?
You don’t seem to have thought that one through.
I think you are on to something there.
@sigaba
Society expects an individual not to harm another individual.
This is taught to children and enclosed in law, an *explicit* part of the social contract.
A rapist voluntarily chooses to infringe this social contract.
Not reporting rape is, at best, allowing someone to be harmed by inaction, and while bad it is on a whole different level than directly harming someone.
You will find plenty of examples in our society where inaction from preventing someone else’s harm is not sanctioned.
Hey, why is there rich people when the poor starve?
People are dying of mosquito bites, why don’t you give all of your money to buy mosquito nets?
In fact, action usually carries a cost, and society accepts inaction when the cost of that action would be significant.
The “duty of reporting” that you cite, carries a significant psychological and social burden for rape victim, burden that you seem to be grossly underestimating.
It is up to the victim to decide whether to pay the cost of action or not, exactly as it is up to you to decide whether to allow people to die because you didn’t buy them a mosquito net.
@F.O.
Exactly, but we don’t voluntarily join social contracts. The obligations of social contacts are prior to our own interests.
I don’t really believe in social contract theory because it implies that societies can “breach” the social contract. If your brother is murdered and his killer is never prosecuted, is the state in “rescission” of it’s side of the social contract, and are you then entitled to revenge? I don’t think so. If you lived in a state of anarchy, that wouldn’t mean you were entitled to rape whoever you wanted, the absence of the state wouldn’t make it moral.
(I don’t think social contract theory is actually what you want to argue here.)
This is the utilitarian account I gave in #96. I don’t accept it, I don’t think anyone else should either, it’s monstrous to weigh the two harms against each other and decide one is worse than the other. Also it places upon the victim the task of choosing one or the other, and no one has the right to decide for the rest of us which harm is the worse. If you’re an individualist and you hold the victim’s individual right to be held free from harm as paramount, your position makes sense, but a person’s morality only makes sense in relation to their community. Preventing individual harm can’t be the overriding virtue in every case.
But is it right that these examples exist?
What would it possibly matter if Tyson made a statement? I said it re: Shermer, and I’ll say it here: the statement of the accused presents us with almost no information. If they’re innocent, they’ll deny it. If they’re guilty, they’re also motivated to deny it. The alleged perpetrator’s denial tells us nothing.
On the other hand, the commonality of rape, the social, emotional, and legal costs of making accusations, and the rarity of false accusations, come together to tell us a lot. This is upsetting to say the least.
Ichtyic@145
I concede that my words were poorly chosen here.
I think, however, that the one possible alternative explanation cited is rather weak when compared against the actual writing on the website. Her writing is not best or even adequately explained as bad writing. It is, I think, an example of someone whose thinking is very muddled and incoherent. Whether this means she has some mental illness, I am not qualified to say with any certainty. It is the kind of writing you would expect from someone whose critical thinking faculties are not functioning anywhere near maximum. Is this indicative of mental illness? I don’t know. It certainly does not strike me as equally or more likely that the explanation is bad writing. Looks to me like, if not mental illness, then very defective thinking.
I’ll not be dragged down that rabbit hole. You know as well as I that such an attempt, as much as it might amuse you, would be futile. I think her writing clearly indicates at the very minimum a very confused mind. Again, whether that confusion stems from mental illness I am not qualified to say. When I said that ffakr’s analysis may be flawed, I should have been more transparent. I think that determining that she is sufferning from some form of mental illness, such as schizophrenia, from what she wrote would be a flaw. And if that is what ffakr was doing then I think ffakr went to far. But I am not sure that was what ffakr was claiming. Ffakr said that she writes like a person with mental illness not that she is mentally ill. Based on what was written by ffakr, it seems more likely that ffakr thinks it more likely she suffers from delusional thinking which is not necessarily a mental illness, unless one thinks delusional thinking is always a mental illness. I am of the view that it is not, but then I will defer here on this point to any mental health experts that may following this thread.
As to her accusation that she was raped by NDT, I make no final judgement as to the veracity of this charge. The very muddled, incoherent way in which she presents the charge does give me reason to approach the charge with greater scrutiny or skepticism than I would a charge that was not clouded by such confused writing about the charge. I accept that her accusation may be true. I also accept that it may not be. Speaking only for myself, and suspeccting that this may arouse the ire of some, there is not enough provided in what she wrote for me to draw a conclusion either in favor or against the accusation.
@Hornbeck
How so?
I don’t grant the system is universally unjust or even casually unjust, but assuming I spotted you this point arguendo, where is the problem?
Thanks, gmacs. That twitter feed is now filled with utter garbage from gleeful slymers and GGers, several familiar faces. Amazing levels of shittery, using a rape allegation to score points.
Where’s the problem?!
sigaba @128:
sigaba @146:
In the span of twenty comments, you went from arguing victims had an obligation to report to saying they don’t have an obligation to report. So which is it?
They have a moral obligation, not a legal one. Just like you have a moral obligation not to lie to your SO, not a legal one. (I HOPE rape is immoral not just because it is illegal, despite what you seem to presume from the first citation.)
You understand the difference, right? The thing I don’t really like about Brony’s account in particular is it sorta seems to celebrate the non-reporting decision, it’s not just a terrible compromise that some people have to do, or do so out of weakness or fear, but it’s something to be defended and elevated, as a completely reasonable part of someone’s healing process, and the emotional well-being of the victim is somehow more important than catching the perp. I think this is sorta pathological, like a bizarro-universe “Stop Snitchin'” campaign. It is not good, it is up to someone’s conscience but if someone asked me what to do, I could not justify to them keeping silent. It’s indefensible as far as I’m concerned, because what if everyone stayed silent?
sigaba @161:
Then I repeat my question: do people have a moral obligation to seek justice from an unjust system?
@Hornbeck
As far as this goes, yeah you have to break down where the problem lies. Why shouldn’t rape victims feel an obligation to report to an unjust system? Because the report won’t result in a prosecution? That’s not enough — just to cite the Martin Luther King example again, people who sat at lunch counters knew they wouldn’t be allowed to sit there, they knew they’d be arrested and they knew they’d get thrown in jail. But they did it anyways; Thoreau knew that by not paying his taxes, he wasn’t going to end the Mexican-American war, in fact he’d have no effect on it whatsoever, and he knew he’d go to jail. It didn’t matter, he did it anyways, because he wouldn’t knuckle to a corrupt system, no matter how much it hurt him. Because he believed if he served his own conscience, and did right, he would be vindicated, that his example would serve others, and that he was compelled but his own moral imperative.
This is why we can’t make it a legal requirement. It’s a really high standard; and in fact for rapes to be taken seriously, I expect a lot of women will have to protest, sit in, and get arrested.
@159
I think the worst might be the original, the one that affects a veneer of sincere concern. It betrays that the slymers don’t care about right or wrong, just winning and shaming their opponents.
Seeking justice from an unjust system is how we expose the injustices of the unjust system. Make them hurt you, make them lock you up, make them laugh at you, make them into such monsters they hate themselves for what they do to you. That’s how real change will happen — frankly I think it’s the only promising strategy. It’s not a question of consciousness or awareness, everyone knows rape is bad, the real arguments are over who’s claims get taken seriously and who’s don’t.
@sigaba
“we do not voluntarily join social contracts”
But we voluntarily decide to break them.
“no one has the right to decide for the rest of us which harm is the worse”
But this is exactly what you are doing: you are deciding for the victim.
“But is it right that these examples exist?”
I made two examples.
Every time you can help someone and decide not to is an example.
You still fail to support your positive statement about the existence of your “victim’s duty”.
I don’t think you are too stupid to imagine my responses above, so I’m left with the idea that you choose not to.
You pull out Kant and Latin and philosophy, which makes me suspect that you are more into showing your wits and studies and wooing crowds than actually discussing practical ideas.
I tire of your sophistry.
Are you seriously suggesting that a person suffering PTSD should willingly do this?
Really?
I see sigaba is still engaged in mansplainin’. Nothing to be listened to….
@sigaba
You seem to be implying that all African American US citizens had a moral obligation to sit at lunch counters or at the front of segregated buses. Am I understanding you correctly?
Personally, I would agree to the extent that a moral obligation does exist in relation to this sort of situation, but it isn’t with the people who have been raped, or the people who’re beaten or lynched for sitting in the wrong place or associating with the wrong people. It’s with the system that allows it, and those who maintain that system. The people who have put themselves in harms way in the past were not stepping up to some duty of their own – they were reacting to the dereliction of that duty by those with the power to do something about it.
When the abused are standing up for themselves and taking the beat downs that come of it, that is not a moral good based in the performance of their duty. It is an outrage based in the refusal of others to perform theirs. It is because we put the responsibility to fix the world’s problems onto those who are suffering most under them that so many of those problems persist. We ask people who are already fighting one battle to take on another, knowing full well that yet another is coming their way the moment they engage with the second, that they’ll have to fight all three at once, and that more will continue to pile in over time. How can we possibly judge them if they feel that one battle is enough?
And that’s assuming that one battle is their starting point.
@ Nerd of Redhead: Mind the Danth
@F.O. : You’re a philistine, if you don’t feel like you need to have learned any of this I don’t know what you can add, apart from your opinion. For which I am sure all are grateful, as they say, “everybody has one.”
@Athywren: It’s a high standard, and I don’t think most people would live up to it, but that’s not the point. If someone in 1963 or so told you that sitting at lunch counters was pointless and only got people hurt, that everyone supported equal rights but that blacks were simply “too traumatized” to engage in true Direct Action, and what they should do instead is engage in constructive dialogue and awareness-building with the Klan? Is that the sort of message we should send to people? Is that the sort of ideal we should set forth for people? Or wouldn’t that attitude just perpetuate weakness and victimhood?
Again, the example of Booker T. Washington, a great man who argued that blacks should make their peace with Jim Crow, shouldn’t confront it, and should work toward self-improvement of “their race,” as he put it. This was the right message in the 1880s, but by the 1920s it was mocked. I think rape denial is past the “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” phase of activism, people don’t need to hear the stories anymore, again, everyone acknowledges rape is bad, what we need to break through now is people’s doubletalk and hypocrisy. And the social activist strategy of engagement won’t do that.
The whole point isn’t that people must do a good thing, otherwise they’re monsters, the point is people need something to aspire to, the model of good they use must actually be good, it must be a model that can accomplish the mission. If they champion accomodationism and half-measures, as I believe modern social justice movements now do, they will achieve nothing.
sigaba @163
Correct, when confronted with an unjust system, the best course of action (and thus the moral action) is refuse the legitimacy of the system. It asks them to avoid the lunch counter? Then they should sit there, and seek justice outside the system via activism, in this case by appealing to Congress.
So by the same logic, women who are confronted with an unjust system should refuse its legitimacy as well. It asks them to report? They should not, and instead seek justice outside the system via activism, in this case by warning other potential victims via a popular blogger.
sigaba @163:
Oh, I see why you’re so confused. You think women are lunch counters. For reference, this is a woman. Please note the lack of places to sit in and protest, which make it somewhat difficult to get arrested.
PZ…At this point it is irrelevant whether or not this woman was raped. The bigger issue at the moment is whether she is a danger to herself. Her writing strongly suggests she is mentally ill, perhaps seriously enough to impair her day-to-day decision-making. Is there a way to determine if she has adequate resources to mental health providers? Is there a way to ensure that she does?
It may or may not be true that she was raped. In her apparent current condition, however, she does not appear capable of cogently presenting and supporting her allegations. One of the most helpful things that could be done for her is to see that she gets the supports she needs. That way, she will be able to deal with these issues and form reasonable decisions about what she wants and needs.
It changes nothing, nothing is reformed. What happens to the next victim, someone who doesn’t have the good fortune to be raped by a celebrity? They can’t go to a blog, nobody will report the story. And even if they do, it’s just “he said, she said.” Your solution to rape is “be raped by someone who’s good for clickviews.”
Also, @HJ, do you know what a sit-in is? This is a sit-in. It’s what a rape victim (and perhaps 30 of her friends) should do at the police precinct, and the DAs office, until they get what they want.
Uh, yes?
People don’t turn into hateful bigots for no reason – beneath every klan hood was a normal person with the potential to be good that bought into some really stupid shit.
Like, I agree, civil disobedience is a good tactic, but I see no reason to dismiss the possibility of dialogue out of hand. If you talked to me 10 years ago, I’d be a homophobic bigot that thinks feminists need to shut the hell up. Thankfully, people engaged in dialogue with me. Now I’m a nonbinary real-life activist in a relationship with a person of the same gender.
Also, yes, some abuse survivors are indeed too traumatized to report and deal with the blowback and unhelpful justice system. Note my previous story where I was ~literally afraid of being killed by my abuser- if I came forward.
Holy shit fuck off with that crap. You’re not her doctor, you’re not her therapist, and you’re not in any fucking position to speculate about her mental health.
Asshole, check to see what happened in Malheur.
I never saw where such action really accomplished what the protesters wanted, even during the anti-war protests of the sixties/seventies. Other than getting them arrested.
You are one delusional fool. Stop your mansplainin’.
@Vivec – I appreciate your experience, but I don’t think what you’re suggesting is liable to work with what women are really up against, institutional problems can’t be solved in the same way that a person’s conscience can be changed. Institutions don’t have a conscience, they can’t be reasoned with, in every case they choose the laziest path that causes the least number of people who complain. Complainers drive institutions, accommodators do not.
sigaba @173:
So crime victims are obligated to reform the justice system by endorsing it, even as they recover from the crime committed against them?
sigaba @174:
… Hang on, is this how you think things went down back in 1960?
1. Black people disobeyed the law and sat at lunch counters.
2. The police arrested and mistreated them.
3. Black people disobeyed the law and sat at lunch counters.
4. The police arrested and mistreated them.
5. Black people disobeyed the law and sat at lunch counters.
6. The police went “aw shucks, you got us,” and changed the legal system so that segregation was no longer legal.
None are so blind as those that will not see.
WTF Eman Resu. Just… wtf honestly. No, Bad. You need to sit in a corner and think things through.
@178
Really, really uncomfortable with continuing to frame this as solely a women’s issue. This does not solely concern women, and does not only apply on the axis of gender. As I mentioned before, mentally ill people, poor people, people of color, and LGBT people all also are affected by sexual assault and the dangers of reporting.
Legislation can change institutions, and believe it or not, it is possible to get progressive legislation passed without requiring vulnerable groups to put themselves at risk of further victimization.
sigaba @ 97:
Only if they fail to meet you expectations of them.
That’s what a duty is, after all: something for which you should be blamed if you fail in performing it.
In saying it is the victim’s duty to report a rape, you are blaming each and every rape victim who failed to do so.
So, the answer to your question is – in this particular instance – yes.
How it went down in the sixties:
1. Black people disobeyed the law and sat at lunch counters.
2. The police arrested and mistreated them.
3. Black people disobeyed the law and sat at lunch counters.
4. The police brought dogs and billy clubs, and the black people brought reporters.
5. The reporters reported what they saw.
6. Repeat a few hundred times with ever increasing violence.
7. The country is so revulsed LBJ passes the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
If the cops arrest 30 women sitting in at a police station they won’t need to bother with blogs. They’ll have the 6 o’clock news following them, and they’re only too happy to tell the reporter why they’re being arrested: “Because the cops won’t arrest my rapist.”
Eman Resu @172:
Unless you’re a mental health professional, you can’t make that diagnosis or even hint at it with a shred of credibility. And if you *are* a mental health professional, you’d know you can’t make such an assessment by reading her writing. You’d have to talk directly with her.
sigaba @184:
8. Black people still experience racism, discrimination, and oppression because of their race. Even in areas where they are ostensibly protected from such by the Civil Rights Acts, bc racism is embedded into the fabric of society and cannot be eliminated by a law.
@184
I still refuse to accept any moral system that would make it a moral obligation for me to almost certainly get killed by my abuser for the sake of activism. I’m sure plenty of survivors would feel the same.
I’m new here, and I hope I’m not opening a can of worms, but…who are slymepitters and why are they trying to “gotcha” PZ?
So damn much fucking privilege showing. Gah.
It sure is easy to tell other people “you must take this shit for the greater good, and if you don’t your a bad person.”
I ain’t got the spoons right now, so just Fuck you.
Oh noes, a naughty word.
@186 I dunno, what do you want, rapists to go to jail and the judicial system to be refomed, or a revolutionary spiritual enlightenment? I think direct action can bring the former, I don’t think refusing to testify will bring either.
@187 People must have more to live for than to merely survive.
Tony @185
Don’t ya know, they have access to her complete psychological profile and her deepest thoughts just by reading some of her blog. And saying “b!tch be cray-cray” in a polite way totally makes it ok.
@190
Nah, fuck that. Still rejecting said moral system, snappy aphorism or not. If other people want to put their life on the line for a slim chance at marginally improved conditions, more power to them. I fail to see any way in which that is a sound moral obligation.
Hmmm… I may have crossed a line @191. If I have, I apologize and please let me know.
@188 I don’t know who they are either. Some commenters seem obsessed with what they’re doing and what their machinations are.
@189 Accusing someone of speaking from privilege is an argument ad hominem.
Yeah? For reals? How about you put yourself in a position where “mere survival” is actually in question and see if that little nugget of “wisdom” still applies.
Wanker.
Wrong. It is a statement of fact.
That is you mansplainer. You offer nothing of substance, as you fail to shut the fuck up and listen to the women.
If you won’t do that, you can’t contribute to any intelligent discussion.
@195 I’m losing track of who’s mansplaining now. I say rape victims need to have some recourse to mere survival and you’re saying they don’t?
@197
We’re saying that they have no obligation to put their lives in literal real life or death danger for a tiny chance of positive social change, when there are venues that don’t require them to do such.
@196 I don’t know who here is a man or woman. If either holds the opinion that it’s better to let a rapist go free than for the victim to participate in a trial, I don’t care what their gender is, they’re wrong. And if there’s some material condition that makes this the case now, we have to change the material condition.
And if people want to accuse me mansplaining or privilege, it just means they can’t argue with me on the merits, they just want to say I’m wrong because white penis. I have no privilege here, I can’t stifle anyone here. But all you want is for me to shut up, because I cause you some sort of discomfort. Maybe you’re wrong.
@198 venues like whisper campaigns and blackmail?
@sigaba: your assumption that I don’t know any of those is wrong, and is the whole of the problem. Get off of your fucking pedestal, you’re nowhere near as clever as you think you are.
@199
Okay, legit, stop that. Those aren’t the only two options, and I’ve pointed out that I don’t fall into that dichotomy like twice now.
Citation needed on anyone fucking saying that. As of yet, almost all of us have said that it’s really, really good if someone chooses to report, but that it is understandable if they don’t because it can directly lead to the reporting person dying or being put in further danger.
1. What merits?
2. Pointing out that a person who is white and male in a system that privileges whiteness and being male might not really have the most unbiased point of view about the struggles oppressed groups face is a statement of fact.
I couldn’t agree more. I must say that it is nice to see the horde in action on sigaba and their contention that rape victims are failing in their civic duty if they don’t report to a system that will expose them to further trauma.
Dishonest fucker, I already said legislation like, what, twice now?
You do know that people can like, make campaigns and engage in advocacy to point out the abuses of a system without requiring the people to put their lives in jeopardy, right? Just because those have been tactics used in the past doesn’t mean that they’re a prerequisite for social change.
sigaba @184:
The Plessy v. Ferguson case of 1896 legalized segregation in the USA. This led to legislatures enacting Jim Crow laws, such as the one which governed lunch counters. This led to the arrest of many people for violating the law. And yet the country didn’t revulse in terror at that.
You’re missing a key ingredient here. Lemmie give you a hint:
Still not getting it? Here’s another one, from a page I linked to:
As I’ve said repeatedly, you do not seek justice through an unjust system. Your demand that people do exactly when it comes to sexual assault simply perpetuates injustice, and is immoral. Hence why this woman was justified in avoiding the police.
timberwraith @75:
What’s this? She did exactly as you instructed her to do, and failed to obtain justice?! It’s as if several decades of academic research into police attitudes of sexual assault accurately captured the situation…
@Vivec I’m not saying I’m not biased, but if your only evidence of my bias is “you’re a man”, that’s an argument ad hominem. If you think I’m biased because of my tone or because of anything specific I said that’s different, but you can’t summarily write off white males as biased, on the basis of their skin color and gender.
“What merits?”
People keep riposting, and with some people the point keeps moving forward, I must be making sense. Or are people just replying because Someone Is Wrong On the Internet?
@206
“You do not have the prerequisite experience to comment on the experiences of abuse survivors that belong to oppressed groups” =/= “Writing off people because white penis”
@205 I don’t know how you come to that conclusion from the cited background, the nonviolent protest movement was absolutely essential to putting pressure on Congress. There were several tracks, but LBJ and Kennedy would get ulcers whenever MLK announced another march, because they knew there’d be a huge backlash among northern Democrats and they’d have to act. In the end Johnson was desperate. And they lobbied norther politicians too, but if they’d done that alone I don’t think they would have been successful.
And she reported her attack to police, but she said herself she didn’t care if her assailant was ever caught. So that no progress was made shouldn’t be any surprise. That she reported it 30 years after the fact doesn’t help either.
sigaba
Maybe you have neglected to consider that some of the people you are debating have been raped, and do not appreciate being informed by you that they are morally derelict for not reporting?
I’m subscribing to stay updated.
I want to chime in on a couple fuck offs:
1. No one has any right to judge a person’s mental health from behind a keyboard.
Fuck off.
2. No one has any right to tell a victim what their “duty” is, whether it be moral or legal. VICTIMS HAVE NO FUCKING DUTIES, PERIOD!.
Fuck off.
@209
Especially given that some of us have been outright fucking saying such for like 200 goddamn posts
@207 I know but your position is incompatible with reason; you’re saying it doesn’t matter how good or bad my argument is, how much or little I know, who I know, who I speak for, or even if I’m right. You’re saying that men and women effectively don’t have knowledge; they have man-knowledge and woman-knowledge respectively, and a man can never speak to a woman problem.
There is only one knowledge, there is only one reality, we are only one people. The very foundation of liberalism is the faith in a universality that links all of us in common interest, common values and a common dream; we may have our differences but they aren’t insurmountable, and they aren’t defeated by people shutting up. Without that, we’re just tribes. You can fancy up the concept academically, but that’s what it comes down to. Tribes.
@209 I don’t think anybody’s really related themselves here, I’ve found this argument very stimulating and I think I’ve learned a lot
(I mean “repeated” themselves)
@212
‘Kay. I’m done. Third time I’ve pointed out that there isn’t a Man/Woman dichotomy. If you’re gonna stick with that, I’m done.
sigaba – SHUT THE FUCK UP
You are clueless, pretentious, you don’t know what “ad hominem” means, you’re an enabler of rape culture. I’m sure you think you’re a good person and you’re just arguing logically, but you’re a fuckwit who is actively making things worse.
sigaba @208:
You’re not even reading what I’m quoting.
Note that other social justice organizations existed before then, fighting the same fight, and failed. This new group combined publicity stunts like sit-ins with lobbying of various levels of government, and with the help of shifting societal attitudes managed to change the laws…
… four years down the line.
Good gravy, if you were any more dense you’d fall to the centre of Earth and slowly consume it from within.
She goes to the police: no progress was made.
She goes to a popular blogger: multiple potential victims are alerted to a possible danger, saving them years of anguish.
She organizes a coalition of other people to do a mass sit-in at the nearest police station: at best, she triggers the formation of new social justice organization which begins lobbying the government in a way no other has managed to up until now, and in a few years reforms are enacted that retrain every police officer across the country to be better equipped to deal with sexual assault, which leads to a gradual shift in attitudes over the span of a decade.
Which course of action would you chose, in her shoes? Which course is most likely to result in accomplishing some level of justice?
See, here’s the problem, Snowflake; your “argument” has no merits. You’re victim blaming using philosophical jargon to try to sound profound. You can throw Kant and King around all you want, but it still comes down to victim blaming.
You are actually part of the problem.
@215 I did not mean my list to be exhaustive. I find your constant hang-up on the issue pedantic. I mean you not anyone any offense. If you want to tell yourself I’m offensive, and this is the pretext you use to convince yourself of it, you’re welcome.
@218 my evidence is totally reasonable, but my conclusion doesn’t match yours. Burn the witch.
@216
Yeah, and I find your insistence on using terminology that erases my gender after having it pointed out multiple times really fucking shitty.
oh damn. It took me a few, but now I got it. Sigaba is just another philosphowanker. It is all about the argument now, not the experience of another human being.
I’m out.
Tosser.
Vivec
Yup, anytime the subject of rape comes up there has to be some fool whingeing on about how the victims are obliged to change our culture and justice system.
@217 I feel like “possible danger” here is sort of a euphemism, what you mean to say is “Everybody now thinks NDGT is a rapist.” That’s what you mean, right, by “warned of a possible danger”? We’re all supposed to be totally okay with that, no trial, no investigation, we just all assume that. All good.
What makes you think this particular person has the wherewithal to organize anything. She says herself she doesn’t care.
What is this line people can cross where responders now have free reign to be uncivil? It seems Robespierre and Danton’s threadjack started with a single line in #10 about email credibility and response triage, followed by outrageously disproportionate indignation about implications drawn up from its phrasing. From there it would have been open and shut, except #10’s author apparently meant everything people read into it. In any case, this is not as interesting to me as the rather important claim in the title.
I have this bizarre hope people willing to follow a 200 post discussion are at least as willing to read the original claims by Tchiya Amet, which are far shorter, and talk about it.
The thing that jumps out to me is a seeming inconsistency in description of claim. The claim seems to be Tyson drugged her and she was unconscious with memory lapse. However throughout the site is the repeated idea (not sure if it is a claim) of Tyson offering grades (as TA) for blowjobs or other sexual favors. These are pretty wide of each other’s margin and I don’t see how they can both be true. Making two claims in which only one can be true tends to undermine both.
The other thing is while the Astronomy > Astrology might make sense in a “trauma narrative” (#38), there are other possibilities. An astrologist (which it seems this is a source of employment for Amet) can have original reasons for leaving astronomy or making claims like this about a prominent astronomer – whether this is from distrust of the profession or obsession of a celebrity, or something more intentional nobody can have any idea.
So with little to go on on first pass it looks unsubstantiated. Of course if there is no statute of limitations in Texas they can file (and of course they aren’t obligated to), but even if Austin police had the best track record in the country for investigating and prosecuting sex crimes, nobody should expect anything from a 35 year old case, which makes most of this thread utterly moot – does it not?
As for the slymepit aspect, I don’t like to dwell on things that haven’t yet learned how to walk on land and shed their vestigial tails, but I doubt Amet had any contact with them willingly or with knowledge of their agenda.
The fly in the ointment is Tyson did leave UTexas Austin shortly after. Having done the phd track thing, short of completing it, I can attest a high attrition rate where your first school is rarely the one you end up in, for a variety of factors, usually the least of which is social. Most people either resubmit elsewhere, transfer with partial credits or an MA, or go into another line of work. Tyson went on to U Maryland and Columbia. But it is easy to see how this could *look* like a quiet escape or cover-up to a media ignorant of academia’s ins and outs. And of course, maybe it is. In any case since he obviously spent time with her, even if just in a tutoring capacity, he ought to make a statement at some point.
OT:
Before I go for good though, I want to say to you, Vivec, thank you.
I feel like I’m a better person because of commenters like you.
@221 I feel like I’m eating with a vegan and he’s staring accusingly at the honey on my toast.
@223 With all due respect, I might be a philosiwanker, but I’m not the one taking every hip postmodernist cliche at face value. Everything contrary to me I’ve heard is DEEPLY indebted to a philosophical worldview, the question is do you acknowledge your worldview, or is everything you believe just “common sense” that doesn’t even require a defense, it’s so self-evidently obvious.
Well shit I need to go to bed and there is do much wrong in here to slap around.
*Pointing out privilege is not an ad hominem because that fallacy has to do with irrelevant characteristics, not relevant ones.
*Anyone claiming that another person just has to be mentally ill because they just feel it based on how wrong what they are doing seems better be able to cite a paper or the DSM-V as their next action and getting very specific. That shit actually exists, I look at the Tourette’s version on a regular basis. It’s one of the laziest and most fucked up dismissals of a person that we have in society right now.
*What is it with the worship of suffering as some sort of noble thing that must be done among the people in the more privileged group? I did not get that particular bit of cultural software from my part of masculine male America. Again we have another thing that a rapist would just love to see become a cultural expectation for their victims.
At some point when a person’s entire routine would be what a rapist would do I start collecting data to add to the “possible addition to profile” pile. That is another person who would not see the usefulness (to themselves) of what victims need in support.
*WTF was that BS about civil rights actions last century? Civil rights activists were clearly acting from outside the system with allies and some people inside the system. It was a complex thing and each of the pieces was necessary. Discussing and doing activism about the rape problem and claims of rape requires public involvement putting pressure on the system from outside in addition to other things.
*Is it a fair generalization of philosophical wankers to say that they hyper-focus on their little rules and ignore the context that modifies the expression of any rules? That seems to be what I just witnessed.
Now to vomit and go to bed.
@sigaba, it’s been a while since I’ve read Kant, but did he not, in his mature moral philosophy, recognize a distinction between perfect and imperfect duties? If memory serves, a perfect duty obtained only when the universalization of an act would be self-contradictory in a fairly strict sense. For example, we have a perfect duty not to lie, on this view, not because of the mere fact that if everyone lied all the time all public trust would dissolve, but because the very concept of lying is only intelligible against a backdrop of truthtelling, which would be unavailable in a world in which lying had been elevated to a universal law. This is why failing to abide by a perfect duty, on Kant’s view, is quite literally irrational.
Now, what you’ve claimed is not that the universalization of the maxim that rapes not be reported would be self-contradictory, but that it would lie in tension with the shared aim of reducing the incidence of rape. Now, this might be true (though as others have argued, there are other ways one might successfully act to reduce the incidence of rape), but any argument to this effect is going to have to at least tacitly appeal to consequences. More importantly, because the “contradiction” at issue isn’t self-contradiction (a world in which rapes are never reported to police isn’t by any stretch inconceivable, alas), the duty for which you’re arguing can’t be a perfect duty. There’s a reason almost all perfect duties are negative (i.e., of the form “DON’T do X” rather than “do X”).
Now, if the duty is only imperfect (and I’m not sure whether the imperfect duty at issue here is really “report rapes to the police” as opposed to “do what you can to help reduce the incidence of rapes”; if the latter, then take what follows a fortiori), then there is some personal leeway vis-a-vis the hows, wheres, and whens of its fulfillment. A person is has in imperfect duty, according to Kant, to cultivate her talents. This doesn’t mean she is evil if she fails to seize every possible opportunity to do so. She has other duties, perfect and imperfect, that place rival demands upon her time. An unflagging commitment to report a rape to authorities regardless of the additional harm such an action might bring upon the victim might be praiseworthy, supererogatory, but it would not be morally obligatory.
sigaba @224:
Well, that narrows things down somewhat. So what’s her best avenue to earn justice?
She goes to the police: no progress was made.
She goes to a popular blogger: multiple potential victims are alerted to a possible danger, saving them years of anguish.
She organizes a coalition of other people to do a mass sit-in at the nearest police station: at best, she triggers the formation of new social justice organization which begins lobbying the government in a way no other has managed to up until now, and in a few years reforms are enacted that retrain every police officer across the country to be better equipped to deal with sexual assault, which leads to a gradual shift in attitudes over the span of a decade.@224:
You’ve been making false dichotomies and grandiose claims through the entire thread. Everyone thinks NDGT sexually assaulted someone. All victims are obligated to become activists. The police never screw up an investigation. Activism leads to change in every case. And yet you think…
@128:
… despite several academic studies being shown to you, no glowing self-help advice in sight, a naive grasp of morality and ethics, and an inability to see the arguments of others beyond your own “feelings” of what they may be.
You lack the basic skills necessary to work in social justice. I predict a fine career in organized skepticism, however.
With all due respect, Bwahahahahahahaha *sniffle* they think I’m taking them serious at this point.
Peace.
@Caine #150
No.
Who the fuck are you to tell me whether or not I deserve to participate?
And No.
I’m absolutely not indulging in rape apologetics. Point to where, exactly, I’ve made any rape apologetics. When you can’t, I expect an apology or, in your own vernacular you can go “shut the fuck up”.
In my past two posts I’ve entertained the possibilities that she could have been raped. I’ve offered some conjecture about how her seemingly odd assertions might actually support her claims.. like perhaps she wasn’t drugged by the water but could have been dosed later and forgotten because of the retrograde amnesia often associated with common date-rape drugs.
Well, I avoided pointing out more of the common tell-tale signs of an internet crack-pot but yes, she really is a shitty writer. That’s not apologetics, its true. And it’s not all the bad punctuation or the weird use of CapsLock.. it’s that she writes in a way that isn’t alway coherent. Her webpage doesn’t remind me of a bad writer. It reminds me of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Cube
But lets look at the rest of your above comment. Do you seriously not believe that it’s relevant that someone making incredibly serious accusations also “believes some seriously wacky stuff”? If someone is delusional about some things [and I’m speaking generically, not specifically about this person] do you not think it’s worth asking if they might be delusional about other things?
There are two sides to this specific accusation and I’ve avoided mentioning this to try and be fair to her, but I think it’s time we got real. Either she was raped by Tyson or she was not. It follows, either Tyson is a rapist or he isn’t. This isn’t a game. This isn’t an abstract discussion about rape culture or how rape victims are poorly served by the justice system [we’d agree on those issues]. This is a public forum that seems to be attacking anyone who dares to take a critical look at an incredibly serious accusation.
You’re so outraged that I dare ask questions about the accuser that you’re effectively taking the position that Tyson is guilty until proven innocent.. but don’t anyone dare try to determine that.
Me, I’m a little more concerned with determining whether her accounting is at lest plausible before we libel someone who our justice system presumes to be innocent at this point.
I haven’t seen that discussion here, at least not much past the person who confirmed she was in fact a colleague of Tyson at Austin. We don’t have the investigatory powers of the Police so we’re not going to determine the truth of the matter but we might at least have an honest and critical discussion about whether or not the claims are reasonable and plausible.
What’s really sad is that you’re doing exactly what you accuse others of doing. You claim people who ask questions are dismissing her out of hand. The implication is that we’re biased in favor of Tyson and even worse you’ve blown this up to insinuate we’re biased against all rape victims [we’re just rape apologists after all]. Your attacks on me demonstrate to me you won’t entertain any discussion of whether or not her claims are even plausible let alone credible. You’re showing unwavering bias for her, and by extension against Tyson.
I’m not the one blinded by Bias here, you are. I was just curious about the truth, no matter which way it shook out.
@229 your absolutely right, I never claimed that someone who failed to uphold their obligation was evil, only that upholding the obligation must be an ideal, I think it should be the highest ideal but
What is pernicious is the defense of not reporting as a virtuous act. It is not evil and the person not reporting is not bad, but it is an absence of virtue and should not be encouraged. At best it should only be tolerated with forbearance.
I can find nobody that can defend not reporting as ethical, except as a way of avoiding some harms at the possible expense of others. And I just don’t accept the utilitarian rationale. That’s basically where it stands.
But it seems that, if I don’t accept the utilitarian harm calculus I’m a monster that protects rapist and should shut up.
Oh FFS, enough. Shut the fuck up you asshole. You are clearly invested in believing your own rhetoric, and either blithely or intentionally are here happily repeating rape apologetics to real live rape victims. If you truly are interested in justice for victims, I suggest you start right now by ceasing to be a sadistic asshole with a special theory of rape , as per their request.
@230 “You’ve been making false dichotomies and grandiose claims through the entire thread. Everyone thinks NDGT sexually assaulted someone”
But that’s what you mean, right? Isn’t it necessary for everyone to know, and the message to be disseminated as far as possible, to protect the greatest number of people? That’s the goal isn’t it, for everyone to know? It is it a secret? Some kind of sub-rosa thing people in-the-know whisper to each other in the cloakroom “Don’t be alone with Neil.” That’s atrocious.
darkrose @188,
Short version here: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Slymepit
@234 The White Knight makes his/her/a appearance. All you do is perpetuate the stereotype that victims are helpless and infantile and cannot fight for themselves.
You know what it is: it’s Charles Bronson’s daughter from the first “Death Wish”. She’s raped and for the rest of the movie she’s mute and has to be pushed around in a wheelchair.
I do admit. I don’t really care about other people’s feelings… I don’t know why people bother call me names, I don’t know you, what difference does it make? It’s like the thing with these slime people- what do you care what they think?
sigaba:
Yeah, you do: for the same reason you call other people names, such as “White Knight”.
(heh)
sigaba #237
Your use of “White Knight” in your response to Tethys has made me uncomfortable.
As does your pretended ignorance of the slymepit.
sigaba:
I don’t. I do care that they decided to use a person who is in obvious pain, trying to cope with the aftermath of being raped. It’s despicable behaviour, which will add to Tchiya Amet’s trauma. Just as you’re doing. You took over this thread, with zero concern for any victim of rape or sexual assault, you’ve derailed your derail, managed to insult the hell out of anyone who isn’t binary, then wandered back to not giving a shit about anything except the sight of your own pixels. Your behaviour is every bit as despicable as that of the ‘pit, it’s beneath contempt. It’s obvious you’re without much decency, because if you had any at all, you would have stopped making this thread all about yourself.
*spits*
Tchiya Amet is a woman, a black woman, reporting a rape done by a famous celebrity, and she does so under her full name. Not only that, but she has also reported that to the police.
Given how statistically unlikely rape victims are to make false accusations (both FBI and British Home Office put it at 8%, but both acknowledge that those numbers are based on counties with varying definitions of “false”, making the actual rate much lower – 3% in the case of BHO), how difficult it is and how much personal danger there is in making such an accusation, it’s almost certain that she’s telling the truth and NDT has a lot to answer for.
Whether or not she’s being exploited by rape supporters from the slymepit is irrelevant.
—
As for sigaba:
We’ve heard “police or GTFO” (while ignoring that she did go to the police), “rule of law”, “post modernism” and “white knighting” from him. I only need a “cultural Marxism” to fill out my bingo card.
John Morales #236
That really is the ‘short version’, eh?
Oh sigaba is clearly a slimer. Who else would completely ignore actual victims right in this thread, but then claim that being called out for such is white knighting? I’m always amazed at how they have so many opinions about what victims shoud do, but get all bent out of shape at a little harsh language.
@194
“They” are the actual topic of PZ’s post, which you’ve ignored in your ongoing attempt to make this all about you while repeating the same old shit that comes up every fucking time the topic of rape is touched upon here.
Well done.
sigaba @233,
But is the alleged duty here “report rapes to the authorities” or is it “do what you can to help reduce the incidence of rape”? Isn’t the former merely derivative of the latter on some consequentialist calculus? For Kant, imperfect duties arose not from the inconceivability of the worlds in which a contemplated action would be universalized, but from the irrationality of still willing such an action in such a world. I don’t see a duty to report rapes to the authorities as satisfying this criterion.
If the imperfect duty is the more general one, then whether or not a given decision to report/not report a rape puts one in dereliction of that duty will depend on case-specific circumstances, and the victim is in all likelihood the one in the best epistemic position to take stock of those circumstances. On this view, victims may sometimes be wrong as a matter of fact (“wrong” here understood as working against the imperfect duty at issue)–and perhaps that’s still rather more than many of your critics here would want to grant–but, importantly, we–qua third parties–are not in a suitable position to make such judgments case-by-case. Neither party knows much w/r/t whether the decision will further the aim of reducing rape incidence in the long run, but the victim knows quite a bit more than anyone on the sidelines about (1). the personal harms filing a report might bring about; (2). what other options for redress/curbing any future harm to others from the assailant are realistically open (because this will also be a function of the victim’s particular circumstances).
Confession time: I’m not a deontologist myself. It does seem to me, though, that a reasonable case can be made for a take on this issue that’s not too far removed in practice from that of Vivec within a robustly Kantian framework.
AlexanderZ #241
I spent about a half hour at her web-site.
I couldn’t find an actual accusation.
linky?
Trying to wrench this topic back around to Our Gracious Host’s original post…
First, some background. I have, sadly, considerable experience being in Prof Myers’s position on this one, with actual responsibility: I spent the better part of a decade as a commanding officer, and (unfortunately) received and had to evaluate sexual misconduct reports concerning both victims under my command and accuseds under my command. It’s all well and good to argue in the abstract… but the burden of the decisionmaker (“of command”) is not something to treat lightly, especially when the decisionmaker knows that he/she doesn’t have anything approaching a complete set of facts.
Too, one must keep in mind (a) that memories change over time (even with the best of intentions), and (b) eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable even as to events directly concerning them (again, even with the best of intentions). Dammit, that’s why we keep lab notebooks with contemporaneous records of exactly what was observed and the environmental context (e.g., noting the barometric pressure and ambient temperature before beginning a fractional distillation). And that’s why decisionmakers, when faced with incomplete information while knowing that’s all they’re going to get, struggle with these things. Just because a decisionmaker doesn’t do what y’all in your armchairs away from the burden claim you would have done doesn’t make the decisionmaker wrong, or a traitor, or anything else. General principles — “police or GTFO,” “always believe the complaining victim,” “there is/is not responsibility to report,” whatever other buzzphrase one can think of — can only guide in evaluating evidence in a specific instance to reach a specific course of action; they cannot, as a general rule, be allowed to predetermine the outcome (and all reflexiveness in this sentence is intentional).
In my judgment based on what has been described here, Professor Myers responded appropriately. That the rest of this discussion went off into name-calling, suspicion of motives, Olympic-caliber conclusion jumping, etc. serves only the slymepit… regardless of the merits of the accusation that began this whole thread. Indeed, allowing this discussion to turn into such disserves any potential victim(s) (because it’s entirely possible that there was both unwanted contact/conduct of some kind and no intention to engage in it or actual misconduct by the accused… if there was a 24-hour period of no recall, there’s no way to know who might have been involved; the victim might have been assaulted by someone else whom she simply does not recall, and that’s the simplest variation). Professor Myers — whose experience with the lab-based grad student environment is far more extensive than mine — wasn’t convinced by something that he merely summarizes here. If I learned more, my opinion might change… but that “learning more” would have to include having direct contact with the victim and an opportunity to tease out more information (something that I’m pretty darned good at) and judge for myself. I don’t expect that; it’s nobody’s obligation, and indeed entirely unreasonable.
Hi, I’ve been reading the site all night. Here’s a link: https://tchiya.wordpress.com/tag/staci-alison-hambric/
Link to victims story
I forgot that you can’t edit here. Here’s a link to the actual straight-forward accusation: https://tchiya.wordpress.com/2014/10/08/end-the-silence-end-the-violence-chapter-6-austin-texas-1983-1984-the-blue-lotus-speaks/
sigaba
Why does your nym link to a dead end?
Hello, I joined just so I could provide my perspective on this that I haven’t seen yet. I spent a couple of hours writing it, then decided not to post it because I’m a lawyer and providing my perspective meant walking a little too close to possibly violating confidentiality for my comfort, so I guess I won’t be able to defend Mr. Tyson. The confidentiality I was in danger of breaking had nothing to do with him, but with a client I once rejected who accused someone of sexual harassment. I think I could have written my response in a way that didn’t even come close to revealing anything about her, but it involved a specific mental illness diagnosis and I worry that she could research her diagnosis one day and my post could come up in her search and cause her harm, and I don’t want to do that. This is a rambling introduction. Sorry. The accusations made in this post are very distressing to me. I’m still getting over learning about Bill Cosby.
Sigaba-
Is it strictly rape victims who have an obligation to make martyrs of themselves to solve problems in society, or is it everyone at all times?
Like, if someone shoplifts from my store, am I obligated to call the police and bring charges against them for taking a 5 dollar scarf, and when the trial rolls around, am I obligated to take a day off from work and lose money over this strictly to make an example of them to fulfill your idea of a social contract?
If I am a victim of circumstance not maliciousness, am I, by my suffering, required to devote my energies to ending the menace? As the child of a cancer death, must I become an oncologist, or can I simply donate to American Cancer Society or something? If I stub my toe and it swells up and turns purple, do I have to devote my life to crafting a perfect pair of shoes which will graft to your feet and reinforce the limb so that it will not suffer such injury again?
If my parents are murdered by a criminal, must I devote my life to becoming a genius detective superathlete, dress up like a bat and stalk criminals to break their limbs (thus setting off a vicious cycle, forcing those criminals to invent limb-armoring clothing to prevent fractures in the future?)
Or is rape unique in this?
Please respond quickly, as my mother and father’s blood is pooling and I need to know whether I should contact a funeral home to arrange for services or leave for Tibet to train in mystical ninja techniques with immortal wizard assassins.
jaws
Um, how could drugging someones drink NOT be intentional misconduct? Are you seriously suggesting that NDGT (or any adult) is unaware that drugging and raping people is criminally wrong? Ooopsies, I didn’t know better? What utter bullshit.
regret #250
No.
There is nothing straight-forward in that link.
@255 I meant straight-forward in the sense that she says his name and implies that something was done to her. I agree that it’s difficult to decipher.
My nym is not @255.
254: Tethys, please reread the rest of that paragraph, which points out that the drugging (etc.) may well have occurred, but that the victim may be mistaken as to who, or even how many, did it (entirely understandable when drugged). Contrary to your apparent misreading, I do not claim that “drugging someone’s drink [might] NOT be intentional misconduct” — only that “she was a victim of misconduct” does not inevitably mean that the victim, admittedly under influence of a memory-affecting drug (indeed, that’s a critical part of the misconduct), correctly identified the perpetrator (and correctly recalls the singular perpetrator thirty years later).
More bluntly, I’m a lot more inclined to believe “I was rufied and raped” than I am “and it was him and him alone, and therefore he must be punished severely on my unsupported word” on the basis of what has been stated. There’s a big difference between compassion and treatment for a victim and vengeance wrought upon insufficient evidence; unfortunately, however, they’re not mutually exclusive… in theory or in reality. Perhaps that’s a systemic indictment — that it’s too hard to show or accept compassion without some punishment/shaming/vindication of a perpetrator — but that’s not this argument or this instance or what Professor Myers was discussing.
@sigaba
You know, I’ve always been of the opinion that this sentiment meant that survival alone was insufficient… I never thought it meant that survival was irrelevant.
So here’s a thing, I’m white, and while I’m non-binary, you’d still think “male” if you looked at me… and yet I can’t actually remember the last time anybody called me out because I’m privileged (which is not to say that I’m not privileged, because I am, greatly). There’s a reason for this, and I think I can identify what that reason is – it’s because I make the effort to listen to the people who have experiences that I do not, and who also, coincidentally, have decades of research backing up their points.
You think “you’re a man” is the evidence of your bias? Nope. The evidence of your bias is that, in the face of several people explaining why your position is incorrect, you are apparently refusing to take a moment to wonder whether the people who have experienced the things you’re talking about and who also, coincidentally, have decades of research backing up their points might know more about this than you do. You’re also either making a point of deliberately misunderstanding and misinterpreting pretty much everything that’s said to you, or you’re actually, genuinely failing to understand what the majority of the people in this thread are saying to you and, whichever of those is the case, this is apparently not giving you any pause.
You may believe that it’s an ad hominem, but it’s very much about the arguments you’re making, the efforts you’re not taking to understand what you’re talking about and your refusal or failure to actually listen to the people who do understand what you’re talking about.
sigaba @213,
The other commenters are already doing a bang-up job of handing you your arse on a platter, but I want to point this one out:
Yeah, mate, that’s pretty much the issue. You’re enjoying the “stimulation” of JAQing off regarding the terrible experiences of others. Fuck off back to whatever slime-covered hole you crawled out of.
John Morales @236: Thank you. Not sure I could stand the long version.
AlexanderZ @241: I actually think the issue of whether Ms. Ahmet is being exploited by the slymepitters is relevant, because it sure seems to me that in the process of using her to further their vendetta against PZ, they’re setting her up to be further victimized. That’s revolting, especially since the slymepitters Likely don’t really believe her.
Someone from segment of the skeptic community known to be contemptuous of women and people of color happens on the blog of a black woman writing about religion and mysticism. Reading posts with allegations of criminal behavior by a famous black male scientist, this person responds by saying, “You should report this to a white male blogger you don’t know who’s part of a community that is opposed to what you believe in.”
For them, it’s a win-win. Not only can they point fingers at PZ for being a hypocrite, but they can drive a wedge into the community here, and exploit tensions around race and gender.
Correcting myself: should be Ms. Amet. Autocorrect regrets the error.
It’s ironic how many people need to discuss “the victim must report to the police out of civic duty” when the person in question did that and obviously nothing happened…
Well, hey. As long as rape survivor’s experiences of injustice is “stimulating” to sigaba, it’s all good in the hood, isn’t it?
God, what a fucking asshole. Who still hasn’t answered my question at all, btw. I have a feeling that to people like him, if a court of law says “not guilty”, even if it happened to be wrong in its verdict, it magically means that no rape happened at all.
Darkrose, you absolutely nailed it. “Revolting” is not even a strong enough word. I don’t actually know what is.
@darkrose, 261
There’s also the possibility of winning another big voice over to their cause. NDT stepping up beside Dawkins and speaking out against “the SJW menace” would be a pretty big win from their point of view too. Hopefully he’s enough of a skeptic to look into who and what propagated it, though – hopefully sliming around Dawkins has given them a false impression of how easily manipulated scientists are. And, if the allegations are accurate (not to be mistaken with true, since, unless this is some conspiracy theorists’s wet dream of a long con, it doesn’t seem likely that she’s lying) hopefully he has enough integrity to own it instead of lashing out against it.
Gen @264,
Yeah, the important thing is that sigaba has found a way to feel superior to *all* of us.
Sigaba
Makes no sense whatsoever. Unless you think a victim who does not personally report is somehow magically not a victim any more.
If what you actually mean is that “there would be victims who are not currently included in official records”, try expressing yourself more clearly.
… and that was before I managed to read a couple of kilometres further down the thread. Sigaba continues to show themselves in an ever-worsening light. (and in a very minor PS: #165 “who’s claims”? Once is a slip of the fingers, but twice in two sentences, really?)
Sigaba keeps insisting that people here say victims should not report. Nobody has said that, ever. People have said (and they are right) that victims are not obligated to report and that only the victim is in a position to know what course to take (which may well include reporting, in which they need and should be given full support). Considering that Sigaba clearly fancies themself as a professional logic-chopper, they really ought to be able to tell the difference.
Slymepitters continue to impress with their stellar grasp of ethical behaviour.
I went looking for some info on the huge number of untested rape kits that are sitting in police departments around the US. It’s a depressingly large number, somewhere in the hundreds of thousands range. I also learned that Mariska Haggerty of the tv show Law and Order SVU has a non-profit called Joyful Heart Foundation dedicated to fighting sex crimes and domestic violence. They helped lobby congress for $41 million in Federal funding to address the shameful backlog problem. Why processing a rape kit is left to the police’s discretion is also an issue of concern for them.
sigaba @ 233:
I guess I believe that the best course of action to take towards rape victims is to minimize harm to them.
Until you can put yourself quite literally in the shoes of every single rape victim and feel what they feel, you cannot know what going to the authorities would mean for them.
Given that I understand this to be true, I would argue that listening to any given rape victim as to what would be be best for them trumps and assumption about what I think would be best for them.
In other words, your argument assumes that you know better than any rape victim about their own circumstances, simply because they are a rape victim. I haven’t seen where you’ve demonstrated that superiority. The issue isn’t if there is a trade-off in terms of potential harm – there is. The issue is who gets to make that decision for a given rape victim: you, or that victim.
I’m not sure why it should be you.
@270
I mean, when I pointed out going to the authorities might literally get me killed by my abuser, he just said “we should have more to live for than to merely survive”
So it’s not that he’s unaware of what the consequences might be, he just doesn’t care. It would have been the moral decision if I reported and was summarily beaten to a pulp, don’t you know.
I can’t believe I finally made an account just for this, but we all know exactly what slime-covered hole he crawled out of. I was going to comment last night but honestly couldn’t stop shaking (not that he would care). I don’t read the comments so I can see rape apology. Leave the rest of us alone.
Vivec @271
It’s the privilege of safety.
It’s easy to sit snug in your little office, typing away on your keyboard, pontificating on how others should put themselves in harms way for the betterment of all.
Sigaba is a classic example of an arrogant cis-white-male asshole who thinks they know more than anybody-not-them about the conditions and experiences of anybody-not-them. They will mansplain’ to women. They will tell POC what they should feel and how they should act. They will tell Hispanic Americans, who may have had family in the US longer than his, what they should believe about immigration policy. Utter and total arrogance, and because of the arrogance, abject ignorance of what they speak for one simple reason. They refuse to shut up and listen to those with a more expert opinion than theirs, like women on women’s issues and POC on race issues.
I will listen first to POC about their experiences, and believe them. I will listen to women first about their problems, and believe them. The last person I will listen to is the arrogant asshole who pretends they can speak for those less privileged, and those who will suffer from any actions the asshole proposes.
Sigaba, your opinions are not dismissed outright (which would be ad hominen), but they are not considered as seriously as those who are more expert in their opinions. I don’t listen to tax advice from my barber, or legal advice from my mechanic. I go to experts, not lay people. Sigaba, you are the ignorant lay person with respect to women’s issues, racism, homophobia, etc.
Which is why Sigaba you were told repeatedly to fuck off. You were trolling, and you know it.
@ opposablethumbs 268
I think I see what is going on there. I was right about hyper-focusing on a philosophical rule or other pattern and ignoring context, but they are also making an assumption that the rule operates universally and in isolation.
They are taking Kant’s categorical imperative and not simply using it as a way to try to figure out what might be moral for one’s self, they are acting like it’s some cognitive algorithm that human beings use as a matter of course. So the assumption is that every position you take in an individual case is the same position you would take in every case.
It’s something from the following list affecting assumptions about other people based on a faulty use of philosophy.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/in-practice/201301/50-common-cognitive-distortions
And it amounts to psychological projection because they themselves are being “black and white” about the positions of people here and projecting the same onto us. I think that something like “projection” is an automatic part of how we operate in conflict situations except that a rational use is to assume that others may use the same tactics that you use, but here they simply assume that the other person is using them.
I think this alone would be enough to tell us plenty about sigaba.
There speaks the voice of oblivious, invincibly ignorant privilege. I share sigaba’s privilege, but by listening to people who don’t, I’ve learned a lot. Like: women do actually pass on this kind of warning about harassing or rapey men, all the time. The actual consequence here is likely to be that women who are known to have spent time around Neil De Grasse Tyson will be asked whether they have had any such unpleasant experiences around him. If no-one else comes forward with a similar claim, and the answers are uniformly “No”, then the whispers will die out, and Tyson’s reputation will be largely undamaged. (That wouldn’t necessarily mean that Tchiya Amet’s allegation is false, of course – but it would make it unlikely Tyson behaves in that way now.) If, OTOH, a significiant number of answers are more along the lines of “Well, there was this time when…”, then the warning will get passed around considerably more widely than it would otherwise have been, and a lot of women may be saved horrible experiences.
Brony @ 275,
To the extent that sigaba is engaged in any projection here, understand that it’s a principled projection (this isn’t, of course, to say it’s correct). Kantian perfect duties are supposed to hold regardless of context. This is why Kant was willing to bite a major bullet and say he’d refuse to lie to a murderer at his door inquiring after a friend he was sheltering (truthtelling was a perfect duty, according to Kant). Utilitarianism, of course, has exceptionless moral principles as well; it’s just that these are rather general and focused on consequences rather than acts-in-themselves (e.g., minimize harm/maximize happiness) and so permit of a good deal of context-dependence as far as appropriate action goes in any particular case.
One response to this, of course, would be to argue for utilitarianism against Kantian deontology, but that’s a big debate that would amount to a large additional derailment (how many derailments deep are we already?). A more immediate issue (and thus a more promising target of rebuttal, imo) is that sigaba has either elevated to the rank of perfect duty an imperative that fails to meet the necessary Kantian criteria, or else has underestimated the degree of context-dependence that imperfect duties allow. Of course, Kant’s isn’t the only deontology in town, but if there’s an extra-Kantian argument to be made for a context-independent duty to report rapes, we have yet to see it.
@113 sigaba said:
You have spent several posts in this thread eliding many differences; I don’t know whether or not you are doing it on purpose, or because you’re not thinking rigorously. You’ve actually done very little espousing of your own position and much more objecting to the positions of others, so it’s a bit difficult to really nail down where you actually stand versus what you claim are problems with the positions here. I have some issues with what you wrote above.
1) “Right, but do you understand ethical problem? Why should anyone else do something that you yourself would not do?” As written, you are not pointing out an ethical problem: I myself would not eat oysters (I do not like them); other people may or may not and it would be ridiculous of me to insist that others eat them. “Would not” is not a sensible part of an ethical construction; “should”, “can”, “must”, and “cannot” are among the words you should be using. E.g., “why should anyone else do something that you yourself should not do?” So did you mistype, or did not notice you had confused a matter of taste (would) with a matter of ethical obligation (should)?
2) “So rape would be a horrible, disgusting offense, and it might even be a crime, but it would be a crime without victims. Obviously it is a crime with a victims, so your position is inconsistent.” A couple of things here. First, you are implying that someone is asserting there are circumstances in which rape may or may not be considered a crime; please tell us who in this thread is claiming that. If not, please reword for clarity. Second, crimes by definition have victims. You have claimed that a victim has an ethical obligation to report being a victim (presumably in all cases). I am assuming that you would agree that victims incapable of reporting a crime cannot be ethically at fault (murder victims, the comatose, etc.), which means that your argument rests on the premise that capacity to report implies the obligation to report. Do you take that as a premise of your argument? Is that a global premise, or are there situations in which that is not true? If “capacity -> obligation” is not a valid construction in all cases, can you demonstrate why it must be valid here?
3) “Would you agree that some people, from time to time, need to report rapes? How do we reconcile the need to report and prosecute rapes, with the belief that no particular rape victim needs to report them?”
Answer to the first: no. As to the second, you have two problems. First, you are smuggling in the premise “we need (read: must) report rapes” into your construction; that’s what we’re discussing, and you have yet to show is a valid conclusion.
The second is, the position I’ve read repeatedly here is better described as “all reported rapes should be investigated properly, and all segments of society need to change to improve the likelihood that a victim may choose to report their attack.” You are arguing (I’ll use that term even though you have not laid your reasoning out all in one place for analysis and have instead posted piecemeal criticisms of your understanding of the positions of other posters) for an imperative regarding reporting, and support it mainly through a straw man (presenting the position at least once as “people must not report assaults”) and other rhetorical errors (the unsupported premise I pointed out above). Also implicit in your position is the idea that this is a situation in which a person must risk harm to themselves in an attempt to lower the risk of harm to others in the future. Do you also hold this to be universally true?
So, my request would be: as clearly, simply and cleanly as possible, write our YOUR position, complete with initial premises and conclusions. Then do the same with what you see as the argument to which you object, and ask for clarification if needed.
After all, you’re here because you have valid objections to the chain of reasoning and aren’t just trolling, right?
Nick Gotts @ 276:
Same here. I wasn’t even (consciously) aware of the concept of “privilege” until I read about it here – posts and comments.
This very thing was brought up during an episode of the Weekly Space Hangout after a recent incident. Two of the regular panelists related that exactly this type message is circulated among their group.
shikko @ 278,
Minor nit:
The claim that if one is unable to X, then one is not obligated to X does not entail the claim that if one is able to X, then one is obligated to X. It entails–is in fact equivalent to–only the claim that if one ought to X, then one is able to X. “Ought implies can”, in other words, and “cannot implies don’t gotta.”
@280 einsophistry said:
You are correct. I was not nearly as clear as either I thought I was or should have been. My statement about “those who cannot are not obligated” was a kind of prolepsis, and I (incorrectly) thought that was clear in context. I blame my feeling about already having written a wall of text and not wanting to make it worse.
What I said:
This list of possible combinations of capacity and obligation is exhaustive:
1) those who cannot are not obligated to
2) those who cannot are obligated to
3) those who can are not obligated to
4) those who can are obligated to
I was trying to anticipate that sagaba would agree that 1 is true (as do I), and home in on position (4) being a necessary premise for obligated reporting (with some caveats about universal applicability and the limits of exceptions). I didn’t deal with 2 since it is absurd on its face, and didn’t deal with 3 because that’s my position, not sagaba’s.
shikko @ 281,
Ah, understood. I was reading a simpler argument where you’d intended something more complex. Makes sense now; thanks for clarifying. I take it you know what follows from simultaneous commitment to (global readings of) 1) and 4), yes?
#282
I believe what you are alluding to is the odious conclusion that any person refraining from pressing charges must automatically be assumed to be lying. (A conclusion I hope everyone here rejects.)
Holms @ 283,
That’s certainly an odious conclusion, but I don’t see how it could follow from 1) and 4) alone. I was alluding only to the logical point that assent to both 1) and 4) would commit one to the (pretty clearly false) position that “one can X” and “one ought to X” are equivalent statements. The take home, imo, is that anyone who agrees with 1) really shouldn’t, on pain of absurdity, agree with 4). But if “can implies ought” doesn’t hold globally, we need a particular argument as to why it should hold locally in the case of rape reportage. We haven’t really seen this argument yet, and I don’t think one is actually possible within the Kantian framework sigaba has avowed.
@282 einsophistry said:
Hmm, hadn’t thought about it. The statements differ in a truth table only when exclusively one of the predicates is true. That means holding both positions simultaneously doesn’t present a no-win scenario. So the conjunction becomes if you can, you are obligated; and if you can’t, you are not obligated (i.e., “you may”; you are neither obligated nor forbidden). Which means incapacity is the only way out of obligation, and that a lack of action would presuppose a lack of capacity. So that means the statements “if you can, you are obligated and if you cannot, you are not obligated” is reducible to being obligated to do anything of which you are capable.
Ugh. From a global perspective, that’s horrifying.
Hello, I am one of the people who signal boosted the tweets of Ms Amet. The truth is I have respected and admired Neil D. Tyson for many many years. As a young person of color interested in Astrophysics how could I not look up to him.
Another truth is I also know what it is like to have accusations made against me which, even once proven fictitious in court some still believe. I know what it is like to have been raped because I was… and I am a transwoman of color.
I BELIEVE IN DUE PROCESS OF LAW FOR ALL ACCUSATIONS NO MATTER WHERE/WHEN/WHO. At the time the hashtag #astroSH had many people who unlike PZmyers never ever met the women accusing people, tweeting like they knew something. I saw a tweet
from MS Amet with the #astroSH tag and read her blog. I retweeted her. I wrote a blog post where like PZ based on what I knew of the bio of Dr. Tyson, and from reading her blog … the story had the ring of plausibility. It is plausible
that NDgT raped someone… THAT DOES NOT MEAN HE DID IT. It is just plausible.
As for it looking like a race thing. The racial issue does not arise from one person deciding not to retweet. It arises from the lack of the general belief of the #astroSH group. If I had a impure motive it was this. To show that
what was going on with that # was not so much a movement, like #blacklivesmatter, but a personal beef combined with a mob mentality by hundreds of people who knew nothing and did not want to read anything. i.e. People who would say the
UCB report on Marcy said he did X and Y when it said no such thing. OR on the other hand, that the report did not say he did Z when he admits to Z. My favorite being the accusation against Marcy that he touched someone’s private area
being characterized as harassment when that would really be a sexual assault smacks of a political agenda. The fact that someone not in the club, per se, making an accusation gets the kind of reaction it did here affirms my suspicions.
The fact that since one of those who made said allegation now sits on a committee and #astroSH seems to have gone away affirms my suspicions. I just hope that person now that they have power uses it to make a real difference. Otherwise all the sound and fury over #astroSH was just total BS.
SO yeah, I signal boosted this for the reason of wanting to TEST #astroSH and see if those who were such big online SJW’s would rise to the occasion. #astroSH and so many of those people failed that test when a black woman made the accusation against a black man.
As for the notion that someone else would need to tell either myself, Ms. Amet, or Dr. Tyson there might be a race issue in the way this has been reacted to is absurd. Each of us has been black in America all our lives. We all know a racial disparity when we see it. That’s NOT the whole reason for this disparity. However, when it comes to the lack of a mob reaction by #astroSH in this case race is a big factor. There is no other explanation for why those who say #Ibelievethevictims, without qualification, when the victim is white would question it when the victim is not white.