And who said I’m terrified of anything? I’m not terrified, I’m opposing ideas like "“women should be believed” or “an accusation is evidence enough of guilt because women won’t lie about such a thing”.
So, your position isn’t that we should use a low bar of evidence in the court of public opinion? Because it seriously looked like this. I assume I don’t need to quote you.
Or you don’t actually want people to follow the idea you promote? Because when people promote an idea, they usually would want it to be implemented and expect that things will be better once it will be. If you’re promoting the idea that business profits should be taxed at 100%, for instance, and I answer you “if you tax profits at 100%, nobody will run a business anymore”, you don’t get to say, “But look, there are plenty of people running a bussiness and making a profit now.” That’s not an answer to my argument. And that’s exactly what you (and some others) are doing here.
You’re advocating for a low bar to determine guilt outside of the court system, stating that it just impact “reputation”, and when I point out that if people were actually following your lead, any accusation would result in the social death of the accused, you refuse to answer this point, saying instead “look at how things are now”, and refuse also to state whether or not you, personnally would socialize with, hire or date someone you believe is a rapist. Instead of answering my argument, you say "you keep coming back with “well, what if it actually does”. Yes, I do, for the same reason I would keep saying “what would happen if we actually implemented a 100% tax on profits?” if you kept refusing to answer. I say that your position is a bad one, because if it was actually followed it would have bad consequences. And you keep refusing to discuss these consequences.
I’ve read about the SCOTUS case only here, but it clearly appears that there’s nothing against him apart from an unsubsantiated accusation by a woman, who even have a blurry memory of the circumstances. It is credible in the sense that it conceivably could have happened, but there’s no objective reason to believe what she says rather than what he says (if anything, there are more reasons to believe him, because other people supposedly involved have no memory of the events, either). If that’s a high enough bar to deny him the job in your opinion, then yes, I’m totally opposed to your views. Following this principle, as I already pointed out repeatedly, would mean that someone would never be able to get a job again as soon as any woman would have brought an accusation that isn’t obviously and blatantly false.
As for assuming that a false accusation is going to be “obsenely rare”, you believe that purely on faith. I already pointed out that if only 2% of rape accusations were false, as some people state, it would mean that only 1 woman in 100 000 is willing to bring such a false accusation. How many women are evil scumbags, in your opinion? Obscenely revengeful? Willing to do anything for gain or fame, or to protect their interests? Pathological liars? Psychopaths? Simply seriously disturbed? If you assume that the total of all these is less than 1 in 100 000, then I’m afraid that you are seriously deluded about human nature.
Nothing in your experience contradicts anything said in this thread. All you have in this post is someone who, when angry at you, threatened to do something but didn’t follow through.
You just seem to have this problem separating out a court of law or a workplace investigation with what ordinary people think. Of course the average person isn’t going to do an investigation! Your work will before firing you, because you can sue them if they don’t. And there is always an investigation and trial before you are found guilty. Both require evidence before any bad actions happen.
Sure, people in general may decide to believe your accuser and not to believe you. But that’s true when you have any fight or disagreement. Ideally, they would believe her, but not disbelieve you. And, because they disbelieve you, you may face some social consequences.
But that’s true any time people have a fight or disagreement. And, more importantly, it will be much less bad than anything an actual rape victim experiences. And that is why it is worth it.
It’s worth a slight increase in the number of false accusations that are believed to make sure that more actual rape victims get believed. If the situation ever changes, and accused rapists face worse problems, or the whole system is balanced to hurt them more, then we can talk about changing it.
What we cannot do is insist on applying the requirements of a court of law to real life. Again, courts of law let 100 guilty people go free to prevent one innocent person from being harmed. We don’t need to accept that 99% of rapists go free.
I wonder what the hundreds (thousands?) of men (and likely a few women as well) who have been released early from prison, some from Death Row, convictions overturned due to incontrovertible DNA evidence unearthed by the volunteers at The Innocence Project would say to the intellectual titans here on the good ol’ Straight Dope Message Board ("…the smartest, hippest people on the planet!") who grandly assure the world that false allegations are virtually non-existant and guilty until proven innocent should be societies default position when it comes to women claiming harassment or assault.
I don’t know. Do you? Or are you Just Asking Questions?
Also, your mischaracterization of the view that accusations of rape and sexual assault should be taken seriously indicates that you haven’t really read this thread. Admittedly “guilty until proven innocent” has been, and to some extent continues to be, the default approach to the victims of rape and sexual assault (rather than to assume that a crime may have been committed and then to investigate,)so perhaps you’re assuming that those who do want such allegations to be taken seriously rather than handwaved away are operating on the same principle, but such is not the case.
No, I do NOT know, but I suspect they would assure you that false accusations do indeed happen, and not altogether infrequently, for a multitude of reasons, and that they can and do destroy innocent people’s entire fucking lives, but unlike many here, I do not fancy myself an articulate, erudite, brilliant master debater, so I will just leave it at that.
“Should”? With basically everything else, we already do! If I tell my friend, “Hey, Bob told me something really shitty and racist the other day”, my friend’s response usually isn’t going to be, “Got a recording? I won’t believe you until you prove it beyond the shadow of a doubt!” Maybe if they’re also friends with Bob, they’ll ask Bob about it. Sexual assault is one of those things that seems not to follow this social convention.
I directly answered at least a version of that:
“If there were credible rape allegations against me I expect it would harm me. I’m okay with that, because credible accusations of rape almost always indicate an actual case of rape. And I will gladly take the world where I have to be worried about obscenely rare credible (note this word, it’s important) false accusations than the world where a rapist is the president, another two sexual abusers are on SCOTUS, and victims of sexual assault almost never face justice.”
I don’t associate with rapists.
Because the consequences are imaginary. They’re not the way things work. There’s no reason to believe that, even in the most absurdly strawmanned version of “Believe women”, they’re the way things would work. I’m not going to engage with hypothetical consequences that are obscenely unlikely to matter.
It’s absolutely a high enough bar to keep him from ascending to a lifetime appointed position in the highest court in the land. Not to fire him from his current job at the time, which was “merely” one of the judges on one of the highest courts in the land. It turns out that when we’re hiring someone to a lifetime appointment in an incredibly powerful judicial position, our standards are really fucking high. Or at least, they damn well should be. There are plenty of highly-qualified judges fit for the job who weren’t accused of attempted rape before they were nominated.
No, it wouldn’t. It would mean that when evaluating people to lifetime positions of obscene power and influence, we should consider that, all things being equal, those without rape accusations are better off than those with. And there are plenty of people equal to Brett Kavanaugh in judicial clout - and that was before he went off on an insane partisan rant; the kind that would have gotten me fired from my job (and my job has fuck-all to do with “supreme”).
(At this point it is useful to keep in mind that 1 woman in 5 is raped in their lifetime, and 1 woman in 5 doesn’t report being sexually harassed during their lifetime.)
Wow - so the best available evidence we have about false rape accusations pin the range in 2-10%, and your response is to come back with “BUT HUMAN NATURE”? It’s one thing to complain that it’s unfair to extrapolate from rape to sexual harassment - okay, fine, you’re not wrong, but it’s the best available evidence we have, so we’re kinda stuck extrapolating from it unless we can offer something better - but to just throw out all the available studies because “human nature”? Because more women than that are “evil scumbags” or “psychopaths”?
You have. You keep on using appeals to fear to make your argument. You use fear of losing one’s career or ruining someone’s life as the reason. You use it even in this very thread to make a low percentage chance seem bigger than it actually is. Fear is the underlying basis of everything you have brought up.
I’ve told you before that you were making emotional arguments, and that these are less convincing, but you have not chosen to stop doing so.
The court of public opinion is not a real court. It is merely a metaphor for what the majority of the populace believe. There are no “standards of evidence” in such a situation. There is simply information which each individual on their own uses to make up their own mind.
Our position is simply that, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, the accuser should be believed, just like with every other situation out there. Rape is not some special case where we should default to disbelieving the accuser.
In attempting to argue that, you have always included extra evidence, and then asked us why we should still believe the accuser. But we never said we did. If I am friends with Bob, and he is accused, I have the evidence of our relationship to help me decide of the accusation is credible.
You have used the religious definition of “believe” to try and say we mean something that we don’t. “Believing” is simply a lesser standard than “knowing.” If I say “I believe he is in the bathroom,” that means I don’t know for sure, but I currently think it is most likely that he is in the bathroom. If more evidence came around that showed me that he wasn’t in the bathroom, I would change my belief.
By ignoring what actually happens when people say to believe, you’ve come up with this false meaning behind the term. No one has said that you should continue believing an accusation that does not seem credible. But that is what you accuse us of saying.
This comparison is inapt. The “believe women” standard has already been adopted in many places, and it is working. The consequences you are afraid of have not happened. The situation before this was much worse.
So, using your analogy, it would be as if some companies voluntarily changed to a 100% tax rate and the businesses were perfectly fine. You are then arguing that it is impossible, but we simply point to the reality that it’s working just fine.
Granted, in reality, a 100% tax rate could not work. But that’s the metaphor you chose, likely to make it seem absurd.
No. He avoided your question because your premise was faulty. We have shown that your claim about the “social death of the accused” is false. The “believe the accusers” standard already exists, and yet your doomsday scenario has not happened.
“What if it does?” is a meaningless question when such has not happened, and you have provided no evidence showing it would happen. It is merely an appeal to fear.
If we answer the question, we have to tacitly accept your framing of the situation. It’s a common enough rhetorical strategy. (See “will you stop beating your wife?” as the quintessential form.) And we are refusing to walk into that rhetorical trap.
If you’d just argue rationally instead of appealing to emotion, we wouldn’t need to do this.
You are indeed not aware. Only one other person was actually there at the time, and that one person tried to run away from having to testify, claiming the stress would lead him to drink again. The others were not in the room, doing their own thing.
When facing the actual hearing, Kavinaugh repeatedly used emotionally manipulative tactics, avoiding answering questions or explaining why those questions shouldn’t be answered. He yelled at people. He brought up a calendar that he claimed showed that he and the accused did not meet, but then, on the very day she said, was a note about getting together to drink.
He prejured himself about never having drank to excess, while at the same time emotionally crying that he likes to drink beer. And he got so emotional that he claimed that the whole thing was a conspiracy by the Clintons who were out to get him. Either he believes that, or it was an attempt to get Republican conspiracy theorists on his side.
What we have on her side is that she reported this to her therapist, that other people backed up her claims that he did get sexual when he drank heavily, and the fact that there was indeed a party on that date, which he tried to gaslight people into thinking there wasn’t.
The actual situation there is not “he did it” but “he may have done it, and if he didn’t, he still has shown himself to completely break under pressure, and to have a partisan bias, while being either manipulative or a conspiracy nut.”
Still, even if all we had was the accusation, your argument is still flawed. He was not being hired as the cashier at McDonald’s but a member of the Supreme Court of the United States. The job was for becoming a member of the most powerful part of the judiciary, and one of a handful of the most powerful people in our country, and some of the most powerful in the entire world. Said judges need to be of impeccable character.
If this were a criminal trial, sure. It would not be enough. But when there are other candidates who are just as qualified but don’t have this accusation hanging over them, or the other problems we stated, that’s all the reason to not choose him.
But the Republicans did, after trying to prevent an investigation, and then only allowing one that was so hobbled that it was impossible for it to find anything. And they threw a party about it, while pushing the narrative that the Democrats just made this up to try and stop the guy. All while the people, via polls, were known to not want him to be judge.
They violated democracy to put him in. Why did they need to do that if they didn’t think he was guilty?
No, it’s based on the statistics. And then supplemented with proof of how, even when false accusations do happen, the accused rarely face consequences. You can’t bring up a single case, despite being asked many times. So none of this matters.
What matters is that this is much less frequent and much less devastating than actual rape, and that your counterproposal of going back to the way things were means that many rapists will not be stopped. You provide nothing to fix this problem.
All you care about are the falsely accused, despite their rarity and low likelihood of significant consequences. It doesn’t matter that we’ve been able to stop more rapists and sexual abusers without any serious consequences.
And, to put it simply, we aren’t going to let the status quo remain. If there ever does actually become an actual problem with false accusations ruining lives, then we can talk about caring about them. For now, we need to fight for the accusers–which requires us to believe them.
Yes, and I already explained why. I’m saying that they’re stating so proeminently only because it’s the “cause of the day” so they opine along with everybody else because that’s the popular thing to say. As I pointed out, if they were acting solely out of the goodness of their hearts, how do you explain that out of the bazillion of “good causes” out there, only half a handful of them would be “advertized” in people’s presentation, and strangely enough only the ones that are discussed all over the place, and clearly on the winning side? Why are there so fewer proclaimed supporters of the eradication of malaria than of gay rights on social networks? You think it’s random?
Furthermore, as I also already said, I don’t trust the slighest bit people who feel the need to proclaim high and low their support for the “trendy cause of the day” when it has become popular to do so. I’m fully convinced they’re the same kind of people who would have proclaimed their support for the exact opposite if they had been born at a time when that was the popular thing to say.
I don’t believe for an instant that it’s “part of their identity” (of course, there has to be some exceptions). How comes that the gay right issue is so much more important to them that the death of an untold number of people in the Syrian civil war, and, again, any number of other causes that are important too. You definitely can want to show that gay right cause is important. But how comes that so many people happen to think that it’s so much more important than anything else? And why now and not 40 years ago, I wonder?
And an untold number of other issues aren’t settled, either. But somehow, nobody seem to think they’re worth mentioning in their presentation.
Tumblr might be predominantly American, but Tumblr isn’t America. The average Tumblr denizen is rather unlikely to be a Christian fundamentalist who has an issue with gay rights. If they were posting on their lawn in a rural area of the bible belt “I support gay rights”, I wouldn’t think it’s “virtue signaling”.
You probably don’t want to know what I think of people writing “I support the troops” in their presentation, and reblogging an american flag every other day (of which there are many, indeed). Anyway that too is virtue signaling of a different kind.
Maybe, but there’s no rule saying that I should respect people who support a cause en masse when it’s safe, popular and trendy to do so, either.
Bradford was arrested six months later in April 1996 in connection with a series of indecent exposure incidents in the victim’s neighborhood. Investigators believed Bradford may have been connected to the rape and interrogated him for eight hours and subjected him to a polygraph test. After five hours, Bradford admitted that he “probably” committed the rape. Bradford’s confession, however, contained numerous inconsistent details concerning the crime. An attorney sent by Bradford’s wife was denied access to Bradford because police said Bradford could only speak with him if he requested an attorney.
The victim in the case never identified Bradford as her attacker. Two neighbors said they had seen a white Toyota Tercel similar to Bradford’s near the scene of the crime; one said she had seen Bradford driving the car around the neighborhood that day. Based on his admission and the neighbor’s identification, Bradford was charged with the crime.
The police showed the victim a series of photographic lineups. On June 20, 1995, she identified Allen Coco from the second lineup that she was shown.
There were several discrepancies between Coco’s appearance and the victim’s initial description. The victim described the perpetrator as wearing shorts and a short-sleeved shirt. She did not describe any tattoos. Coco has large tattoos on both of his arms, including a 3 ½ inch tattoo of his own name. Coco also did not have a stab wound on his buttocks.
Yes, we have some serious problems in our criminal justice system. Lineups and mug shots kinda suck. Victims’ memories fail. Innocent people get sent up the river for quotas. Racist juries convict on shoddy evidence. And so on and so forth. But “false accusations”, as in “there was no crime committed, but I’m saying you raped me” is not one of the main reasons for that.
Sigh. I thought since you’d skipped my post I wouldn’t still have to deal with the virtue signaling thing. I’m gonna try something different and just keep it simple.
The idea that they are just doing it to be trendy is entirely something you have pulled out of thin air. You have no evidence to back that up. You just have after-the-fact rationalizations that don’t actually add up. This is a common tactic when you can’t actually argue the ideas are bad. Instead, you and the US right have chosen to attack their character.
Your first “argument”: Why would they care only about this one cause?
Answer: 1) All humans prioritize causes. You cannot argue “what about this other cause?”
2) It is a cause where fighting in the social sphere actually can have an impact. You can’t fight hunger by spreading awareness–you need charity. Which people actually do.
3) This is a cause that directly affects them or someone they care about. You use Tumblr as an example. You know, the social network that is made up of like 50% LGBT people. Do you think that gay people (or their friends) might care about gay rights?
Your other argument is even worse. You use the popularity of a cause to indicate a lack of validity. But that’s exactly backwards. That’s another purpose of crying “virtue signaling.” You can take the obvious, that a more popular cause is probably one that has convinced a lot more people, and turn it into a negative for why you don’t have to care about it.
There is a reason why nothing in your argument argues that actually fighting for gay rights is a bad thing. No, just that the people who use social media to advocate for gay rights are bad people, who only care to be trendy. That gay people and their friends don’t really care about gay rights.
Like I said before, “virtue signaling” (as defined by the right) is not a real thing. It is a rhetorical device to discredit causes the user cannot directly attack.
Indeed I can’t prove it. But it really doesn’t give you any pause that people flocks en masse to just 3-4 causes, and then only when they’re super popular and on the winning side? If so, you have more faith in human nature than I have.
I’ve no interest in arguing that the ideas are bad because they aren’t. I myself have proclaimed my support for gay rights at a time when it was less fashionable to do so (even though already risk-free and perfectly acceptable if you hanged up with the right crowd, it’s not like the issue of gay rights or whatever was discovered by the last generation of college students as many of them seem to think), and I’m not sure where all these people enamored with gay rights were back then, let alone in the 50s. Well, I of course answered my own question. It wasn’t fashionable. So, they were proclaiming their support for whatever cause was. Ah yes, I remember. They were wearing “Solidarnosc” and “Touche pas a mon pote” ( an anti-racist statement) pins. There was a distinct lack of “I support gay rights” pins (wearing a pin would have been the closest equivalent to a statement made on your social media page, I guess).
Oh, yes, they do prioritize. It’s just…a bit strange…that so many people would privilege the same causes among so many possible causes, and that it so happens that these causes are precisely those on the winning side.
You can have an impact about a lot of causes, including yes by spreading awareness, and yes including issues that aren’t at your doorstep, even if you don’t have money. But of course it’s not nearly as pain-free as writing “I support the cause” in the middle of a crowd of like minded people when the issue has been making the headlines for years and everybody is aware of it. You know what has zero impact? Writing “I support the cause” in the middle of a crowd of like minded people when the issue has been making the headlines for years and everybody is perfectly aware of it (and probably also signing online petitions). I deleted a long, even less nice, rambling. Let’s just say that I’ve been an activist, I know the kind of people who proclaim their support for the cause in the middle of a crowd of like minded people and what their proclamations are worth.
My activism is long past, so you could say that at least, they’re doing more than I do. But no, I don’t think they’re doing anything. Their statements aren’t worth the pixels they’re written with. There’s no need to advertise your support for gay rights all over the place any more than your support for the Syrian victims, or malaria victims, or once again any of the hundreds of good causes you could be supporting. I’m sure that they aren’t in favor of homophobia. I’m also sure that they’re aren’t in favor of hunger, torturing Syrians, malaria and unemployment. But somehow they don’t feel the need to post a long list of all these other things they support/oppose, only a select few. Why is that, in your opinion? Why specifically these causes?
I don’t demean gays or their loved ones for focusing on gay rights. Gays and their relatives will talk about gay rights, muscular dystrophy sufferers and their relatives about muscular dystrophy, Syrians and their relatives about Syria. That’s perfectly normal and can be expected. But once again how do you explain the focus of a vastly larger crowd on a small number of issues if not because these issues are trendy?
I mean, you think they don’t have someone they care about who’s unemployed? Why don’t they mention in their presentation the evil of unemployment? They don’t have someone they care about who is ill? Who is handicapped? Who is poor? Who has been hit by a drunk driver? Who has been jailed? Who is an addict? Their loved ones only face struggles related to their gender or sexual orientation?
No, I don’t take popularity as an indication of lack of validity, it’s essentially entirely unrelated. But I take support for a popular cause as more likely to indicate a person who just follows whatever everybody else says and/or who wants to signal his virtue at no cost for himself than as an indication of selfless support for a carefully considered issue.
Do you actually believe that people never say things because they think it will make them look good or because they’re parroting whatever everybody else is saying in their peer group? Do you believe that the issue of gay right is objectively of such upmost importance that it dwarfs pretty much all the others, so explaining why people, after careful consideration, will naturally mention it en masse in their presentation, rather than any other issue? If people are so nice, thoughtful and considerate, how comes that so many evil ideas have been equally popular?
In my opinion, “virtue signaling” is a perfectly apt name for what a lot of people are doing.
Maybe this is beyond your comprehension skills, but it is literally impossible to be falsely convicted, assuming you were truly, factually innocent, without first being falsely accused.
Perhaps you are not familiar with The Innocence Project, but the information on their website will speak for itself to anyone who really wants to learn about false accusations and not just try to relive their 8th grade Debate Club glory days with strangers on the interwebs.
With that said, there is no need for you to respond to this post, as I won’t be engaging with you anymore, as if I had a desire to dialog with someone who likes the “music” of Marilyn Manson, I’d just find a 13 year-old kid who was trying to impress his 11 year-old friends.
Your first paragraph may have been okay but for the comprehension skills comment.
Your second paragraph may have been okay but for the reliving 8th grade comment.
Your third paragraph has nothing in it that’s okay.
You’re relatively new here so I’m going to give this a pass. I suggest you familiarize yourself with the rules of the board and of the forum which is stickied at the top of the forum page. Personal digs and insults are not permitted anywhere on the board except for the BBQ Pit. If you feel you must, that forum is right around the corner.
I mean, I literally quoted a case from the Innocence Project where that happened…
Bradford was arrested six months later in April 1996 in connection with a series of indecent exposure incidents in the victim’s neighborhood. Investigators believed Bradford may have been connected to the rape and interrogated him for eight hours and subjected him to a polygraph test. After five hours, Bradford admitted that he “probably” committed the rape. Bradford’s confession, however, contained numerous inconsistent details concerning the crime. An attorney sent by Bradford’s wife was denied access to Bradford because police said Bradford could only speak with him if he requested an attorney.
The victim in the case never identified Bradford as her attacker. Two neighbors said they had seen a white Toyota Tercel similar to Bradford’s near the scene of the crime; one said she had seen Bradford driving the car around the neighborhood that day. Based on his admission and the neighbor’s identification, Bradford was charged with the crime.
Y’know I was planning to ironically respond to this by quoting Marilyn Manson lyrics at you, but the most apt ones would probably get me in trouble with the moderators. Isn’t hating on Marilyn Manson just horribly trite in this day and age? They haven’t even qualified as “edgy” for the last decade or so. The people who liked Marilyn Manson back when he was relevant are in their 30s, man.
Does the current social climate in the US with the force of the #metoo movement behind it make it easier to make false accusations against men that will be believed by the masses? When I say easier, I don’t mean in a legal sense, although that may be part and parcel of it. I mean is it easier to ruin a man’s life via social media these days before he even has his day in court?
And I was soooo looking forward to engaging more with you too!
The people who liked Marilyn Manson back when he was relevant are in their 30s, man.