You and your flack accuse other posters of being “likely rapists” and you take offense when it’s pointed out to you that you’re jerks? That’s funny, in a sad, very sad, way.
No, I don’t take offense at you calling me a jerk. I am honored by it. It is a compliment coming from you. Really. If the late Polycarp called me a jerk, I would be hurt, because I deeply respected him. You are a trolling and ignorant bully, stupid and misogynistic without a sense of humor. You know, like Sean Hannity. Being disdained by you is a badge of honor as it would have been to have been on Nixon’s enemies list. That assumes that you are more important than an expatriot who lives in the basement of a stranger’s mother in Beijing spending your days pretending to teach English while indulging in fantasies about your charges.
You really are a piece of crap.
Thank you. Badge of honor coming from you.
I have to say for someone who claims to be a lawyer your skills at debate leave much to be desired.
Where did you get your law degree?
Goodness me. Is the bolded passage what passed for logic where you went to primary school?
I wonder if anything being said about Cosby is ever going to stack up in a court of law. You know, where they’re supposed to decide who is and isn’t going to prison.
I was making the same kind of point about the guy I was quoting, “levdrakon”, but it seems you haven’t bothered to read it in context. Absent a new lawsuit over defamation claims, this isn’t going to court and Cosby won’t be going to prison. But if you’d read the thread, you’d have already seen that.
I have read the thread, thank you. No, levdrakon points out that a number of people can make the same claim in the same words without there being a shred of credibility to what they say, and gave an instance that backs his assertion - and someone in this thread that you think I haven’t read has already explained a plausible mechanism for the similarity - but you’re the one who hastily generalised it to mean all rape victims.
I don’t think you’ve paid attention to levdrakon. Check out posts 109, 244, 246, 306, 323, 329, 481 and 507 in this thread for a sample of his special brand of misogyny.
It is one thing to withhold judgment when there is one accuser. It’s another when there are now two dozen. And the bit about a vagina as the ark of the covenant was especially hateful. But if you want to hitch your star to levdrakon, that is your prerogative.
And how especially hateful do you really think accusing other posters of being rapists and pedophiles is? Nah, don’t bother to answer that as it’s already evident what you think about that.
You’ve piqued my curiosity. Would you perhaps be able to post a link or few to show such protection?
What I think is that you are the sort of person vigorously defending one particular serial rapist beyond the reach of the law by intentionally conflating him (Cosby) with all people accused of rape. Cosby is not “innocent until proven guilty”, he is accused of two dozen druggings and rapes. You bring your arguments and insults in threads about Cosby, who has raped so many people that there is no doubt about it. He is deserving of public condemnation, and in these threads you hide a serial rapist behind a platitude about the burden of proof that doesn’t apply. There is a reason for that. You are a misogynist pervert of low character that thinks Cosby’s victims are being unfair to him. You don’t even know the difference between good and evil.
Forget how the quote button works? Too lazy to even cherry pick out of context? Are you drinking or something?
That post you quoted and #532 seem to show that particular poster might just be insane.
Oh, and The Second Stone, speaking of insults, who was it who got warned for insulting?
In retrospect I was out of line, unfair, and shouldn’t have mentioned. That said he is quite dumb and if a lawyer, is shockingly ignorant of the law.
I was annoyed at the mods letting him explicitly accuse me of being a liar but I should have just let it go.
This thread is confusing because of the conflation between the Bill Cosby situation and the extension of that particular situation to all rapists/rape victims.
On the one hand, it’s said that it’s important to have an opinion on the Bill Cosby case because it supposedly shows how people think of rape in general. On the other hand, people don’t want the mechanics of the Bill Cosby case to be extrapolated for all rapists in general.
Those two views don’t match. If the opinion of the Bill Cosby case matters because it shows what people think of rape in general, then it should apply to the general case. If it’s just a one-off media scandal that doesn’t apply to anyone else, then it shouldn’t show how people think of rape in general. It just shows what people think of this one media scandal, and possibly how it’s being handled in the media.
There have been some interesting developments in the media recently. After the Cosby rape allegations were in the headlines, the UVA case also came into the spotlight. There was a story about how the media has changed its reporting of rape and how it is much more willing to take the accusers’ stories without waiting for a trial. The story went on to say how this shift has really made things better for women and how women can tell their stories more freely.
Now that Rolling Stone has distanced itself from the UVA story, the conversation has shifted. In an article critical of the lack of scrutiny of the journalists before the article was published, some of the explanation given for how this happened include:
Sound familiar?
It goes on to add:
If these attitudes are already assumed in the culture, it’s hard to question any claims. And yes, it’s easy to see why society has gone in that direction when the opposite of disbelieving victims was the norm. But the opposite extreme of believing every victim’s claims has its problems as well.
If the problems with the reporting of the UVA case was affected by these types of attitudes, it’s possible that the reporting of the Bill Cosby case was also affected by these types of attitudes. It’s possible that some of that obscured parts of the truth. I don’t believe that the general public who is only taking a passing interest in the story is the appropriate arbiter to answer the questions about what really happened in an accusation as serious as rape. But if it doesn’t really affect anyone else and stands as a media scandal, it’s also not very important except as a media note on how one person’s reputation stands in the public’s eye.
I personally think that the Bill Cosby case will have no effect or a negative effect on people believing other women who have been sexually assaulted. I don’t believe that the average woman who has been raped will be believed more because of this media scandal. It’s not safer for women to tell their story now than it was before. It’s only safer for those women who are accusing Bill Cosby. Until and unless it’s safer for the average woman to tell her story, then the Bill Cosby story is a media scandal that has little relevance to people’s attitudes on rape in general. For me, that’s one of the reasons that trying this case in the media hasn’t helped women in general.
As to whether people are hiding behind intellectual arguments to justify their attitudes about rape, I’d like to think that people aren’t doing that, but I don’t see how calling people ‘likely rapists’ is changing anyone’s attitude. but I’m not a guy, so maybe I don’t qualify to decide that. Some of that behavior has the appearance of a pissing contest where some men are attempting to show other men how enlightened they are by insulting others. If it’s not that, I’m not seeing how people deciding on the Bill Cosby case shows people’s attitudes on rape in general. Of course, if someone makes a comment on rape in general, that’s a different story.
And the awesome logic continues. I disagreed with one particular thing you said, which was in response to something levdrakon said, so now nothing will do for it but I must agree with everything levdrakon has said in this thread. And, since you’ve established in the comfort of your own head that levdrakon is a hateful misogynist rape-apologist, I suppose that means that I must be one too, and you can either ignore everything I say or see if you can bully me into silence. :rolleyes:
You really think out of the thousands of people Cosby has known there might not be a couple of dozen crazies who are happy to grab their consequence-free five minutes of fame? I’m not saying that’s for sure what went down, but it’s not out of the question either.
As a male, the “scary” thing about rape is just how easy it is to get yourself into trouble, and just how easily you could find your life, if not ruined at least significantly affected.
Go out partying, have a few beers, then have sex with a women who has similarly had a few beers, and you can find yourself on the wrong side of the law.
Go driving, park up somewhere secluded and ask for a blowjob and you can be accused of intimidating someone into sex - even if she didn’t object at the time.
Naturally, you should be sure to get consent before sex, and that consent should be a "high standard’. If you’re going to hold men to a “high standard” however, you should also be holding women to a “high standard” of being unequivocal when they don’t want sex. Aren’t they both different sides of the same coin?
Part of the problem (in my mind at least) is that even an accusation can be destroying for a man - in all sorts of roles and professions (eg: teacher, doctor, coach) a rape accusation is going to have a huge effect - but for a lady, making the accusation has little professional fallout.
Looking towards the Cosby case …
a) with so many having come forward, you have to wonder how many other “questionable” encounters he has had
b) with the details that have emerged - in at least some of the instances that are being painted as violation / rape - Cosby honestly (and possibly legitimately?) believed that he wasn’t doing anything wrong (accounting at the same time accounting for different attitudes of the time, and also that alcohol is seen as a social lubricant - often by both parties)
I’m interested to hear other people’s take on this. Since I’ve read in this thread that some women don’t know they’ve been raped until after the rape occurs, how does the man know that what he did wasn’t consensual?
That’s only true if the women accusing him of rape were conscious. If they were unconscious when he had sex with them as some have reported, then he couldn’t have had a “high standard” of consent or really any consent.
Honestly, after reading that one Slate article ITR linked to a while ago, if I was in a college in the US, I’d make it a point to get it on record, either written or recorded as a voicemail on my phone before actually going through with it, that I had her clear consent. That’s fucking scary. Not as scary as, you know, the thought of getting raped, but the way they deal with it, I’d be terrified of any drunken fling for weeks after the fact.
And the worst part? That still wouldn’t be enough! Consent is fragile, so making it clear at the start of the act that there’s consent isn’t enough to protect someone from frivolous accusations!
I realize this is a minor issue compared to, well, rape, but I’d just like to throw out how glad I am that my girlfriend isn’t also a student at my college, and that I live in Germany, because there have been some things that could easily be misconstrued by an overzealous administrator.