Yeah I didn’t want to go there, but now that you did, I have your back. 
The comparison is basically apt, in terms of the logical point I was making in what you quoted.
No. Your arguments are not as blatantly silly as Gack’s were, but it remains true that you are committing the same kind of fallacious thinking. That no part of a body of evidence establishes something does not itself establish that the body as a whole fails to establish the thing.
Oh no, we just got nuked by Godwin’s Law. I guess it is game over then. Somebody call in the National Guard stat!
You know you just make “your side” look like amoral fools when you completely devalue witness testimony without supporting physical evidence, right? Like neo-Nazi Holocaust-deniers, only not quite as morally repulsive.
Can I have your permission to put that quote on a t-shirt? It is pleasantly trippy.
Not much of a bestest friend, then.
Thanks.
(And right on cue - the cliché, “Oh noes! Somebody mentioned da Nazis! Godwin, Godwin, Godwin! Durr, durr, durr.” :rolleyes:
Because of course, as we all know, any semantic arguments related to the Nazis or the Holocaust are completely dissimilar to all other arguments everywhere, always. :dubious:)
Permission granted, but you’re going to cause some collisions.
I can promise you with complete honesty that I have never been a neo-Nazi or a Holocaust denier. I have never even been invited to a meeting.
That doesn’t follow. Being a great friend does not mean ignoring the truth about a person. In fact ignoring the truth is incompatible with the most valuable kind of friendship, since often it’s only by being confronted by the truth about oneself that one can develop as a person.
Person A: Ya know, you kind of look a little like Hitler?
Person B: What? How DARE you! I wasn’t even alive 70 years ago! I never put anyone in a gas chamber!
Person A: Maybe you should lose the toothbrush moustache, then? Just sayin’…
Serious question. Is there ever a context where that shouldn’t be the rule?
Your kid comes home, and says they were sexually abused. Lacking proof, you what? Take the side of the accused?
What if the accuser is your cousin? Your coworker?
Does the person being accused make a difference? If it’s Uncle John vs. the Mayor?
And I’m not trying to be deliberately provocative here (nor am I saying your position is irrational or wrong.) A lot of sexual crimes can’t be proven. That puts the victims at a decided disadvantage in reality. I know this from personal experience, and I know a lot of victims who have to deal with the fact that their abusers/rapists are paragons of respectability in the eyes of their community. There are times you are tempted to post flyers in the neighborhood because the negation of that lived experience well and truly sucks. Being called a liar when you’ve been truly victimized? Worst thing ever. For me, worse than the actual crime itself.
I have tremendous empathy for people who are wrongly accused of crimes. In a way I can relate because I was wrongly accused of lying. My story is extra shitty because I told a therapist something with the explicit understanding of confidentiality so that I could begin to deal with it for the first time in my life, and she ended up reporting it to social services that same day. The accused was my step/adopted father. Everyone found out and blamed me. People I trusted demanded details, and I told them even though it was painful, and they promptly took everything I said and twisted it to rationalize why I was wrong or lying (I don’t give details any more.) It was so fucking humiliating. That was 14 years ago and I can still be there, in a second, feeling that shame and anguish as if it were happening right now.
It was fascinating to see how quickly people attributed motives to me for making such a story up. It was fucking unreal, actually, like alternate reality fucking unreal, how quickly people attributed character traits to me that never had existed in me before that story came out. I hesitate to post the details of how unfair people were to me because it sounds make-believe. It sounds Lifetime movie bad.
Oh, why didn’t I report it? I had a cop show up at my door when I was home alone and in my pajamas, kid couldn’t have been five years older than I was at the time, clearly extremely uncomfortable with the types of questions he had to ask me, and I didn’t even really grasp that what was happening was a police report. That’s how out of it I was. When I asked him if I had to talk about it, he said I didn’t have to report it, and I asked him to leave. I had no evidence anyway, other than the fact that I was losing my mind.
The kind of shit that was slung at me as a result of that one accusation permanently altered my understanding of human nature and the notion of a benevolent God. I mean it fundamentally rocked my worldview. Even the people who believed me couldn’t look at me the same way again. My reputation was ruined. That’s heavy shit for a 17 year old. Hands down, the single most traumatic experience of my life. I consider my issues largely resolved and I’m shaking right now typing this out. You don’t ever get to leave that shit behind completely.
I’m not saying people should or shouldn’t be coming down on one side or another in this case. I’m just trying to point out that no matter which side you choose, someone is getting fucked over. I think it’s easy for most folks to imagine how you can get fucked over as the unjustly accused. But as someone who has personally experienced it I’d argue being unjustly accused of lying about sexual assault is pretty fucking bad too.
My own feeling is that, when making a personal judgment like this, context matters. What bothers me about this case isn’t the fundamental, ‘‘innocent until proven guilty’’ principle but the fact that we feel the need to justify that principal by tearing apart the women’s stories, doubting everything they say, and clinging to patent falsehoods about the way rape occurs (returning to someone who has assaulted you, for example, is not uncommon. Being forced to give someone a hand job is totally within the realm of plausibility.) They reflect a fundamental misunderstanding about how rape happens and what it is, and a fundamental lack of empathy for the psychology of a traumatized rape victim.
How could that happen? Anyone making any kind of argument that would be skeptical of a woman’s statement accusing Bill Cosby of sexual assault is considered a bad person by you.
Can you name the 16 women who have accused Bill Cosby of sexual assault? I’m going to doubt it since as far as I’ve read, only 12 of them have spoken publicly. Based on the source I read, there are 9 other statements from the civil suit in 2005, but those women haven’t spoken out, and it’s not known what their statements allege.
Meh. You can sacrifice a friend without tearing apart your family. If you want, you can turn that example around and make it your wife. Women can commit sexual assault also, especially if drugging is involved.
Nope. You have not read what I wrote, you have instead read something else in your own mind and laid that over what I wrote.
I didn’t use my wife in my example because of the gender swap, but FTR, if 4 people independently accused my wife of sexual assault, despite the fact that this is unimaginable to me, I would tend to believe them, as I said before at least in the sense that I’d consider her to have some splainin’ to do. Considered in the abstract, it is far more likely that she has somehow pulled the wool over my eyes (even though, again, this is unimaginable to me) than that four people would independently target her with relevantly similar stories etc.
Whether this would tear our family apart or not has no relevance whatsoever to the question of what I should believe about the situation. If you find yourself thinking in terms of loyalties, such that loyalties will determine what you will affirm or believe, then you are doing this wrong.
Great. Could you explain what you wrote again? I read it over probably a half dozen times. It comes across the same way to me. Your subsequent posts do nothing to change my opinion. You give the impression that your conclusion that Bill Cosby is a rapist is the only possible conclusion to draw. But you’re not willing to name the women whose statements you’re basing that opinion on.
What if her explanation is that she doesn’t know anything about it and that it didn’t happen? What’s next? Who are you to believe?
Here’s what I wrote:
See that phrase “by this point”? It means that there was a time prior to this point where this may not have applied. Similarly, it should be clear that there could be times later on when this may not apply. See also the following.
It should have, since I have throughout this conversation constantly referred to the totality of the information available. That totality changes over time. And as it changes, what can be reasonably concluded from it also changes.
If information came to light such as the kinds of things I listed in Cosby’s hypothetical defense, that would change the totality of the information available, and new conclusions would be appropriate.
I can’t name even a single one of the women. I could google it up but I honestly don’t see your point here. Let’s say I named all the ones that can be named, and stipulate that I can’t name the others, and let me know what the point of your highlighting this is.
There are a whole lot of scenarios that can fit this description but there are certainly central cases in which if that’s what my wife said, I’d tend not to believe her.
Again: in the abstract, without anything else to go on, it is far more likely that she has somehow, unimaginably pulled the wool over my eyes than that four people independently came up with similar sexual assault stories about her.
By this point, the more people that come forward, the more that I would expect there to be some sort of contemporaneous supporting information coming out.
A letter to a friend, a visit to a clinic, psychologist visits, not necessarily an official report (because it’s well documented how difficult it was to report such crimes in that age) but at least some sort of supporting information.
I also remember as a child, (maybe 12 or 13 or so) being accused of pulling a knife on somewhere. It was a pretty small deal - the school called my parents, and that was the end of it, I was never interrogated or punished or anything. But it is a reminder - how would I ever disprove such a thing? If the accusation had “gone public” the way things can know, how could I have defended myself?
This is NOT a defense of Cosby, but rather just an observation that more accusations doesn’t necessarily make the accusations more true. Before we pillory him, there needs to be more evidence than just an accusation.
Naturally though - if this is put in front of the “authorities” they should be investigating vigorously regardless - as the “general public” we should be refraining from judgement of either side till we know more - with a slight bias in favour of the accused because it’s HARD to prove that something didn’t happen, much harder than it is to give a convincing account that it did.
He didn’t have lots of “affairs”, he has committed a lot of rapes you completely mendacious toad. Nobody here gives a shit if he had zero, one or more consensual affairs.
And I prefer that you neither like nor respect me. It’s kind of an endorsement coming from your perverted view of the world.
You aren’t whistling past a graveyard here, you are vigorous defending a serial rapist by attacking the credibility of over a dozen women who said Cosby drugged and raped them by redefining evidence to exclude the statements of complaining witnesses, and now a man who paid them off at Cosby’s instructions.
This isn’t about intellectual honesty on your part, you’ve demonstrated that you have no intellect, morals or ethics many times. Frankly, you come off, at least in print, as a sociopath that in fact redefines what the word evidence means so that live testimony of a victim is useless in rape cases. And then to further compound it, you invent that you have talked to several women whom you say I raped in 1997. You sir, are a goddamned liar and fantasist who would make up any facts and any definitions to suit whatever lie you choose to spout on a particular day. In fact you lie when you say you you know women who will say I raped them in 1997. You don’t know who I am, and you don’t know any women who would trust you with information on whether they were raped, and just assume that you can find women to make up rape allegations. You are a woman hating misogynistic sociopath.
Spice Weasel, thank you for sharing something so personal and so traumatic. Hearing from someone who has lived this nightmare is definitely beneficial to this conversation, in my book. I say this from personal experience though I have never been molested nor raped. Someone who was very close to me was, repeatedly over a period of years. It also involved family. I (and others) have not seen or heard from this person for 25 years. I hope more than I can begin to say to see this person before I die (I’m not near death.)
I’m sure you know that therapists have a duty to report behaviors such as this when they are currently ongoing. I posted to say this one tiny thing, but much more to applaud your courage in speaking about it publicly. Thank you.
Perhaps I am in the wrong to make this post in a Pit thread, but your post touched on something intimate to my life (“Yanked my chain”, if you will.) I did not want to leave what you posted unacknowledged.
It is extremely difficult to prove you didn’t do something and it is actually harder if the accusation is completely fabricated. When I was 16, a man accused me of destroying a construction site by shooting up heavy equipment with a shotgun and then setting much of it on fire with fuel stored at the site causing hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage (how many felonies can you count there?). The thing was, I wasn’t just a little innocent, I was 100% completely innocent and had never even been to the place that the police were describing. Still, an eye witness had given my name, truck description, physical description and license plate number swearing that I was there and the one that did it. As luck would have it, I had an iron clad alibi for the time in question because I was at work with a time card and many witnesses to prove it but even that wasn’t enough because the description was so detailed.
After lots of questioning, the police concluded that it probably wasn’t me but my younger brother instead. He must have taken my truck to the site in question and done it while I was at work. That is the one time when me being an asshole worked in my favor. I never, ever let my little brother let my younger brother ride in my truck let alone drive it and everyone knew that. The police eventually accepted that fact as well but even that wasn’t enough. The eye witness reports were too detailed and pointed directly to someone in my family so the police got a search warrant and searched our entire house. Of course I had shotguns that matched the general pattern as well just like everyone in the region did so those had to go off for forensic ballistic testing. Thankfully, I had been too busy to shoot anything for several months and the results showed that and we were all finally cleared and didn’t hear any more about it after that.
About that really detailed report that implicated my license plate and specific description, I later learned that was done well after the fact. The construction site owner who I didn’t know personally but knew me, saw someone that looked a little like me driving off shortly after he discovered the damage. He came to take notes at the supermarket where I worked after school to make the report really specific because he knew what happened.
Without a few pieces of luck, I could have ended up in juvenile detention or even real prison for something I knew absolutely nothing about. When that type of thing happens to you, it makes you think more than twice about how concerned the judicial system or even the general public are about arriving at objective proof of anything. It can happen to anyone at any time.