The rest of your post was good, and **information you should have included in your original post. ** As I pointed out to SlackerInc, his post did not actually include any information to support his claim. Yours didn’t either, so it was a bad post. I don’t entirely agree with your post, but at least you finally made an argument, rather than assume your audience agreed with you.
Unfortunately, this upends all of that. You’re using hostility to substitute for argument. You did not at any point in your entire rant argue why redefining an existing term to ignore cases that would be called “sexual harassment” in real life is a good thing. Just because you attack the post with your insulting language does not make it any less argumentum ad hominem.
I argue that it reduces the rights of the accusers, that it is designed to allow de facto cases of sexual harassment to be swept under the rug. I challenged you to prove that wrong. The redefinition includes weasel words that seem to allow them to decide that a particular case doesn’t count.
And, what do you know? The ACLU agrees with me. They’re suing to stop this. They argue that the redefinition of “sexual harassment” violates the rights of the accusers. You seem to have neglected their rights in your analysis.
If you’d actually read the other posts I made in this thread, you’d know that I actually generally support the other changes, but think they added those to make the reduction of rights of the accusers seem more palatable. They added things that anyone with any common sense would realize were necessary to protect the accused so they could point to those whenever anyone pointed out how bad the one horrible change was.
Now to briefly cover your other argument (without post parsing): preponderance of the evidence is the standard for arrests, and so does not mean that any accusation will be assumed true, as the accusation itself would be balanced against the statement of the accused. If schools were using it that way, then it was what I said–schools being incompetent, covering their asses rather than enforcing the rules. And, unfortunately, I see nothing in the new rules that would stop them from doing that.
The rest of your post just seem to be confirming my interpretation that the schools are being incompetent. They make for a great emotional punch, but do not actually disagree with what I argued. My argument was that you had not established that the cause of the situation was because of the Obama era law.
The only part I capitulate is that the argument that this increases due process has been so advertised about this new law. Unfortunately, it seems that it is designed to do so only for the accused and not the accusers.
Finally, I note that I am engaging with you in the way I wish to be engaged with. I could respond with hostility due to your focus on the accused and leaving out the accusers, something that rape activists have been arguing for decades now is part of the problem, and is a key part of #MeToo. That people still seem to care more about defending the accused makes me angry to this day. But I have responded without hostility.
I ask that you respond to me in the same fashion. And, if you have a personal problem with me, I ask that you bring that up in a more appropriate forum.