Better a thousand women be raped and not see justice, than one innocent man be unfairly investigated and cleared by the police?
I’m just gonna chime in and concur - Black Twitter is a thing. I’ve never heard of Feminist Twitter or Gay Twitter, which would be surprising considering the large percentage of my friends that identify as being a part of at least one of those groups.
Kimstu, first off: you strike me as a feminist. How do you feel about this claim (now, to my surprise, coming from two different people) that there’s no “feminist Twitter”?
Anyway, just to clarify: by “rights” I don’t only mean the minimum of protection against incarceration. That’s why I like the Mill quote I posted above. Again:
“Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.”
So how do you apply this? Take Aziz Ansari. He has not disputed the Babe account of the “worst night of [a 23 year old’s] life”. To me, that makes him a creep (though not a criminal) who deserves social shaming. But let’s say it’s someone else, anonymously accused of full on rape (or robbery, or whatever) and the uncorroborated accusation by a single accuser is widely disseminated online, but he vehemently denies it. To my way of thinking, it’s not ethically right to join the Internet mob who just declares him a criminal, end of story. You just don’t know if it’s bullshit.
I see signs #MeToo, though an important watershed moment in many ways, may be sliding into moral panic territory. I don’t know the full story on Garrison Keillor, for instance, but MPR has not so far demonstrated to my satisfaction that he deserves to have his life and career just wiped away like Winston Smith did to yesterday’s news stories.
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Is sexual assault something in which society “ought not meddle”?
Seminal work for paternalistic racists, you mean - Mill is the epitome of the colonialism apologist, no surprise you admire him:
“Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians provided that the end be their improvement and the means justified by actually effecting that end.”
That’s also a quote from On Liberty.
Note that the “barbarians” Mills had at the forefront of his thinking were the Indians - he spent his entire working life in the East India Company - the very engine of British imperialism, which brought the world such benefits of colonialism as the Indian famines and the opium trade. I can see why *you *are an admirer.
FWIW, I think you have made a good case, but a lot of us “visitors” were all sleeping when Slacker started using reverse argumentum ad populum like it was going out of fashion…
Oh jeez. :rolleyes: The liberal* writer Adam Gopnik wrote the following about Mill in The New Yorker (one of the most impeccably fact-checked publications of all time) in 2008:
:dubious:
*Here is the cite for Gopnik’s liberalism:
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Sigh. Okay, let’s try it like this.
The capsule summary of the scenarios (in the media, for instance) would generally be, respectively:
Scenario 1: Michael Jones was accused of raping a 19 year old female student he met at a party (her name is kept anonymous). He has maintained his innocence.
Scenario 2: Matthew Smith and Joshua Anderson have each accused the other of assault and attempted murder related to an incident on the rooftop of a hotel, where they were both attending a wedding.
Note that in Scenario 1, there are two asymmetric aspects: only one of the two of them is named in the media, and there’s a sort of implicit idea that either he’s a sexual predator and she’s an innocent victim (and this is seen as more likely nowadays, whatever the practice in bygone years), or maybe his protestations of innocence are valid. But in that latter possibility, unless people really think about it carefully, the implicit idea is that then they are both innocent.
But au contraire: the two scenarios are actually much more similar than it appears. In both cases, two people are each accusing the other of a heinous crime. We have passed the rubicon: there is no way to put this toothpaste back in the tube and get back to a state of mutual innocence. In Scenario 1, Hannah is accusing Michael of a serious crime: rape. But Michael is not only denying this, he is also accusing Hannah of a serious offense, of slandering his name (without having to reveal hers), and putting him in potential jeopardy of serious prison time, a lifelong status as a felon, and certainly a big lawyer bill and a shitload of stress. And she too is (implicitly) maintaining her innocence.
So let’s say the criminal cases in both cases are dropped or dismissed for lack of evidence. Here’s where the social aspect comes in. I assume all of you agree that it would be unfair for large numbers of people, who don’t even know the two people involved, to go around dragging Hannah’s name through the dirt (if they could even discover her identity) as a false accuser. We don’t know her accusation was false, and it would be awful to imagine her being put through that kind of public shaming if she’s truly just an innocent victim.
But why doesn’t the same hold for Michael? Michael may be a monster who brutalized Hannah that day. Or he may be completely innocent, the victim of a malicious smear.* We just don’t know, and we should not make him pay that social price, in case he is innocent.
*That 3% false report statistic, BTW, is not what you all (and nearly everyone) make it out to be. Even if we take it at face value for what it is, it doesn’t mean “97% of women’s allegations are fully substantiated.” That’s impossible: far too often, it really does come down to “he said, she said” in a private moment behind closed doors. So what it actually means is “3% of the time, police find proof that the accuser was lying.”
That’s quite a different thing entirely, as this proof is going to impossible to get in the many cases where the person accused of rape does not deny having sex with the accuser, and there were (as there usually are not, even in this day and age) no witnesses.
So the real number is: (3+x)% of accusations, where x represents all accusations which an omniscient being could tell us are false, but which we otherwise will never know for sure. All we know is that it’s going to be significantly higher than 3%, unless you think there’s something about false accusers that makes them significantly more likely to accidentally provide airtight evidence that they are lying. And that would be a highly dubious supposition that does not fit with any reasonable “prior”, nor with Ockham’s Razor or plain old common sense.
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Who will speak for the accused rapists?
Aside from the patriarchal culture and society, which has generally protected them for decades and centuries.
Implicit in your snark is the assumption that they are guilty. What about those who truly are not? Even if you argue on utilitarian grounds for sweeping then up with the guilty (a valid position, even if one I strongly disagree with), you might have the basic decency not to add insult to injury by holding them up for contemptuous ridicule, on their way to the pen, or at least to career ruin and outcast status.
I mean, you do seem to be liberal/left. Do you not have any sympathy for the decidedly left of center Innocence Project? What happened to the liberal stance on the rights of the accused?
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I certainly have sympathy for the falsely accused. I think that being falsely accused of rape is very rare, and having a false accusation of rape do significant harm is even rarer.
And I think that society generally protects accused rapists far, far more than it protects accusers. This might be just starting to change, hopefully.
How can you say “very rare”? 3% is already not that rare (more likely than rolling snake eyes with two dice); and I don’t see how you can dispute my logic as to why the true number must be significantly higher (but if you think you can, let’s hear it).
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I couldn’t find your cite.
Also, how is publicity for the accused and anonymity for the accuser evidence that society has been protecting the former far more than the latter? Stop mindlessly regurgitating these talking points and engage with facts and logic, man!
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It was the number given upthread by someone arguing your side.
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I’m glad you spurred me to find my own numbers. Others in this thread may not be so appreciative (“Thanks a lot, Andy!”). Per Wikipedia:
My mathematical/logical point from upthread still applies in that there is a huge group of cases we can never know how many of which are false; but certainly it has to be some of them. But even if it’s just 5 1/2%, that is far from “very rare”.
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Note also that “five times higher” than other crime reports. Meaning, instead of “believe women” (who report rape), we should be much more skeptical of them than people—male or female—who report other crimes. I am actually shocked to learn this, and appalled—in part because it does a disservice not just to the men falsely accused, but to the woman who are honestly reporting real assaults!
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I’m unaware that all accusations become public.
As for the 5.5%, “false or baseless” doesn’t necessarily = malicious or dishonest. And considering our history and our society, I’m not sure if numbers like this tell us much more than police conclusions in the Jim Crow South told us about crime by black people.
You ask for a cite, then dismiss it when it hurts your argument. Whatever, dude.
And yes: anyone being booked on a criminal charge is a matter of public record, which used to get routinely reported in the newspaper, in the “police blotter”, even if not covered elsewhere in the paper.
Could the Internet age afford more anonymity? The information is still public record, but your grandma might not— well, scratch that: your grandma still reads the newspaper. Maybe I should say your niece might not see it because she doesn’t read through the newspaper.
On the other hand, rape arrests are still fairly big news unless you are in a very large city. So they are likely to make the TV news, and whatever local online sources you look at on Facebook. And of course, if even one person in a social network sees it, it will spread.
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That’s nice, and all, but what in it says that Mill didn’t write what I quoted?
And personally, I don’t give a shit if you think he was the “benevolent kind” of British imperialist flunky. That’s just code for paternalistic racist oppresion vs any other kind. He directly said that the people that his own administration lorded it over were like children: