The reason that past behavior, in conjunction with other evidence, is a good indicator of present behavior.
Seriously, you all are so blinded by your own agenda that you won’t admit what is absolutely bleeding obvious. If someone drank your bottle of wine, and only two people could have done it: your teetotaling neighbor, or your alcoholic brother in law who has stolen your wine in the past, would you seriously argue that you would suspect each one equally?
After all, the brother in law could have make a decision to seek help with his alcoholism, and the neighbor could have decided to begin drinking. Yes, those are possible, but what is more likely in evaluating the situation, absent any additional evidence? If someone suspected the brother in law, would you accuse them of hating alcoholics?
You are so committed to the factually true statement that any woman can be raped at any time, that you refuse to apply simple common sense to these situations.
So you are saying that, as a general rule, a woman who has had consensual sex in the past (how often?) has likely again consented this present time, despite her testimony to the contrary?
That’s not saying much. It says more about the board dynamic on this issue more than anything. I doubt the vast majority of Dopers are watching this thread, and even fewer care enough to post.
Just because I was curious to see if the Bill Cosby case is getting this same kind of attention across the internet, I went to a couple places where a lot of people hang out and searched on Bill Cosby. From my (possibly biased) reading, the discussions on this topic were much smaller and much more even-handed.
As an aside, one of the arguments that had me laughing was when someone made the argument made earlier in this thread about how there are a lot of reports of alien abductions, showing that a lot of reports doesn’t necessarily mean that the reports are true. The counter-argument was: Yeah, but not about the SAME alien. (Makes me laugh every time.)
One could say the same about you. You’ve already made up your mind. You think Bill Cosby is guilty, so you overlook details that might not fit with your preconception.
What would make a contradiction in a story substantial?
Hyperbole is exaggeration. You’re good with people telling exaggerated stories in accusations of rape or other serious crimes?
Maybe not physical strength, but it takes some emotional strength to start yelling curse words at someone who is bigger than you and is more economically powerful than you are. Maybe she had that strength. It’s possible. But she didn’t take the next step to report him or even have the confidence in herself to think her story was important. I’m not doubting her story, but the inconsistencies play out in her favor.
On the flip side, if one asks why the others didn’t yell for him to stop, I would suspect that one of the participants in this thread would say that victims of rape and of intoxicants would probably be too impaired to do it.
Hyperbole is not straight truth-telling. Lots of distortions of the truth can be made in hyperbolic statements.
Well yes, that’s because it’s all the evidence that’s available. In order to determine the truth or falsity of something, I usually look at the evidence to see if I think it’s credible. If I don’t look at it skeptically, then I’m just accepting something because someone said it. If everyone did that, it would just be a matter of accepting all the accuser’s words or not. Then the only question would be whether people believe accusers or the accused in rape allegations. It may not be completely black and white, but the degree to which I look at the evidence differently than you doesn’t necessarily show that I’m on one side or the other.
Money is not the only motivating factor. It happens to be a pretty big incriminating factor, but people do all kinds of things for the smallest of reasons.
For instance, people argue and pile-on other people on a message board just for the feeling of being right. They will sometimes put tremendous amounts of time and energy into that endeavor for the smallest of rewards.
It’s not hard to imagine that other people would put some energy into something for something other than money. I noticed this statement by Johnson in her interview on The View:
It gave me the feeling that Johnson felt like she was coming forward as a public service in the fight against violence against women. It doesn’t make her story any more or less true. But it does give a motivation for her telling her story.
Change Cosby to the accusers and you could be describing yourself, in my view.
What places? Are there places with better discussions and emphasis on facts and evidence than the Dope?
No. Not all of the accusations are equal. But there’s nothing in Johnson’s account that doesn’t fit – SA’s just wrong about that account.
For one thing, there’d actually have to be a contradiction.
I don’t know if it was hyperbole – it was one phrase, “completely limp”. She either felt that literally, momentarily, or she used it as a phrase that in common parlance would mean “I felt very weak and limp”. Either explanation is possible, and neither one makes the story weaker in any way – both would be “completely” normal uses in English.
Those aren’t inconsistencies. In that time period, reporting rapes were much more rare, and much more difficult for the victim. Where does she say she didn’t have “the confidence in herself to think her story was important”?
Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren’t. Sex with a intoxicated victim who didn’t consent is rape whether or not she yells “stop”.
There were no distortions of the truth – it was a normal use in English. See above.
Nothing in Johnson’s story fits any of these concerns. Maybe there are reasonable things to think that don’t fit in some of the stories – but Johnson’s account doesn’t qualify.
Having a motivation to tell her story doesn’t make it any less likely to be true.
In my view you’re full of shit on this. There are no reasonable concerns of these sorts with Johnson’s story. That doesn’t mean it’s true – maybe she’s a great liar and storyteller. But these “concerns” are nitpicks and not reasonable points of challenging her story.
jtgain I seem to recall from other posts of yours here (though I have a terrible memory for this kind of thing to be sure) that you’re a basically reasonable conservative poster. I have vague feelings of “he’s usually wrong, but I quite respect him anyway” when I see your name.
But what you’re doing here is breathtakingly awful.
It is not at all obvious, nor is it “common sense” (at least, it shouldn’t be), that a woman who has accepted money for sex countless times in the past is less likely to be telling the truth about having been raped. There’s literally no logical connection, nor any probabilistic connection, between those two propositions, whatsoever.
The very best I can make out of your argument is the following, please let me know if it’s accurate. If so, I’ll respond to it as summarized. If not I invite you to clarify your argument.
Are you saying that since the woman has shown generally bad behavior in the past (by prostituting herself), it is more likely that she’s exhibiting bad behavior now (by lying)?
Look, you may be succeeding in fooling yourself with this tactic of sticking your fingers in your ears and denying the obvious, but you’re not fooling anyone else. Johnson is a woman of dubious character as evinced by her drug use and the fact that her husband was given primary custody of her children, and therefore it makes sense not to take her at her word as people who are of poor character and who are drug users are frequently manipulative and dishonest.
She also made claims that are more than a little dubious (he invited her as a stranger to come to his office on the set of one of America’s most popular TV shows to talk for a ‘bit’ about the hell she’d been going through in her marriage? Come on.:rolleyes: ), and attempted a bit of semantic sleight of hand to try to make Cosby seem skeevy and manipulative in asking her to portray a drunk when her character in his show was pregnant and wouldn’t have been drunk…this despite the fact that he clearly said he was interested in how she’d handle “various” roles.
Then, after she was allegedly drugged (“but good”) and felt her body go “completely limp” she still was able to stand upright while Cosby stood in front of her continuing the reading of his part, which he was still doing and not trying to rape her when she went ballistic and started yelling that he was a motherfucker. She even states that he looked at her like she was insane. I would imagine that if he’d really drugged her he would have known by her woozyness that she’d picked up on it and that was why she was calling him names, but he seemed not to have a clue.
So, he allegedly had her drugged but didn’t try anything. He continued trying to rehearse his part with her up to the time she started yelling insults at him. And he was perplexed as to why she was doing that.
Sorry, but you can deny there’s anything out of the ordinary about all this and it’s just the way normal people relate everyday experiences from their lives, but I’ll guarantee you’re the only one who thinks that way, even if no one else will admit it.
Of course she is. Prostitutes are overwhelmingly involved with drugs and as such are almost always deceptive and manipulative and desperate people. And by definition they are people because they earn their living outside the law, and the odds are good they lie to the families and friends about both their profession and their drug use. And I have no doubt they lie to their johns and to their pimps and to the police and to anyone else whenever they think it will benefit them in some way to do so.
Certainly prostitutes can be raped. But I’d imagine that if you talked to most cops they’d tell you that more often than not whenever a prostitute claims she’s been raped, what really happened was that the guy either didn’t pay her or ripped her off for her money or drugs.
Past drug use is not an indication of dubious character, nor is a court order about custody.
No they aren’t. Things like that happen in the entertainment world all the time.
Yes, this is entirely believable. She either felt literally completely limp for a moment, or felt very limp and weak and used the word “completely” to mean that. Both are normal uses in English of that word and phrase.
One of the stupidest nitpicks so far, and that’s a lot of stupid nitpicks.
Apparently. Drugging someone is incredibly weird and skeevy, and who knows how the drugger would react when called on it?
There’s definitely something out of the ordinary about it – drugging someone. Drugging someone is way out of the ordinary. The rest all fits.
You keep saying words like “guarantee” and “normal people”… I don’t think these words mean what you think they do.
Considering the things you frequently imagine, I don’t think anything you imagine about prostitutes is linked to reality.
Just for kicks, let’s apply Starving Artist-style logic to other personal accounts… like, for example, John McCain’s account of his POW captivity:
He says “I didn’t realize it at the moment, but I had broken my right leg around the knee, my right arm in three places, and my left arm.” Come on… are we supposed to believe anyone could have multiple breaks in their arms and legs and not realize it?
He says, about the crowd that gathered after he went down “About this time, a guy came up and started yelling at the crowd to leave me alone. A woman came over and propped me up and held a cup of tea to my lips, and some photographers took some pictures. This quieted the crowd down quite a bit.” Come on… are we supposed to believe that some random villagers in Vietnam had cameras and just took pictures of POWs as standard procedure?
He says, about some of the poor medical care “This experience was very fatiguing, and was the reason why later, when some TV film was taken, it looked to many people as if I had been drugged.” Come on… how would he know how it looked to many people on TV?
He says about his solitary confinement “I was in that place for two years.” But then he talks about the bathing during his time in solitary: “I had a real rat for a turnkey who usually would take me out last. The bath was a sort of a stall-like affair that had a concrete tub.” This is the real kicker – he says, literally, that he was in solitary confinement for two years. He didn’t say anything about being let out for any reason at all, much less a bath. But just a few paragraphs later, he says the jailer took him out last. Out. If you’re taken out, then it’s not really solitary, right? And he wasn’t “in that place for two years”, since he says later he was taken out of that place for baths (among other things). Obviously, John McCain is lying*. And if he’s lying about this, how can we take any of his account seriously?
There’s pages more. Using SA logic, I could point out dozens more questionable turns of phrase and statements by John McCain about his supposed POW captivity.
*Note: John McCain is not lying and served honorably, including during his POW experience.
Y’know, if after “pile on on other people” you insert “or go down in one-man-against-the-world defiance”, we would have the text that should go under the heading of every web forum.
Yes, absolutely. I’m not sure why this statement is the least bit controversial.
Again, I am not saying that a prostitute cannot be raped. That seems to be the implication, so I’ll say it again: a prostitute can certainly be raped.
However, the fact finders are put into a situation where they must decide who to believe. A person with a history of selling their bodies for a sum certain of U.S. currency, who has shown a propensity to consent to sex with anyone and everyone with money in their hands, is going to have a hurdle to climb to establish credibility that in this one instance she did not consent.
This rule applies in every other type of evidentiary hearing except rape. Just like with the pajamas, it’s not dispositive that she was there for sex, but that fact supports an inference that she was there for sex and not for a business meeting. It is a “minus” against her story and very relevant. It still doesn’t mean that she conclusively was not raped.
Unless we are on completely different thought planes, I don’t know why this causes shock or alarm.
This causes alarm (to me, at least, though I wouldn’t say I’m particularly shocked) because it’s unjust. A woman’s past sexual history, or sexual reputation, should have nothing to do with determining her honesty. Only a history of dishonesty could reasonably reflect on her honesty.
jtgain has a history of exchanging currency for goods and services. He has shown a propensity to give money to anyone with gasoline, cheeseburgers, or Blu-ray movies to sell.
Now he claims to have robbed? Clearly jtgain has a hurdle to climb to establish credibility that in this one instance he did not consent. He says he was on his way to a meeting, but we may infer he was there for commerce.
Well, he’s improved on the “marrying your same sex partner and marrying your washing machine are really really similar. Prove me wrong!” gambit, but actual dead people put forth better arguments than that, so I’m unimpressed.
(Makes me laugh every time.)