I said, in so many words, that the concern is not about making sure that no victim of anything anywhere, etc. I already answered that question.
The answer to your followup question is that there’s no reason to say you’re “sick and tired of men constantly being vilified and accused of things,” as a sports commentator, if you’re interested in whether there’s a slight partial mitigation of the degree of assault committed by a professional athlete. The only reason to drag the victim into the equation at all is to effectively excuse or lessen the guilt of the person who is the reason the story is a sports story. No reasonable person would believe that if she had said “you a ho” to him or something, he should have head-butted her.
I don’t know; you tell me. What’s the other reason that I’m missing to say you’re sick and tired of men being vilified, if it isn’t the glaringly obvious and commonplace explanation, which is that you think the victims in these situations bear a substantial amount of responsibility for their occurring, to such an extent that the actual wrongness of what the other person did is lessened? What the hell does “take into consideration” mean in a three minute conversation about the fact that a celebrity whacked the shit out of some woman?
Thinking about it further, it occurs to me that one reason that it’s difficult to “be as specific as possible” is that the entire thing is hypothetical. I mean, you can’t call for something to be taken into consideration unless you just flatly assume that it exists. In this case, Stephen A. was just assuming that there was some kind of important contribution that needed to be considered in the first place.
But he didn’t do that with all the other ways the situation could be mitigated. Maybe it was mistaken identity. Maybe he was drugged. Maybe he had a kind of breakdown. Maybe the entire thing was self defense. Maybe his wife turned out to be an impostor. All of those things are also things we might take into consideration if we had reasons to. But he wasn’t sick and tired of people vilifying dudes without taking into account mistaken identity. He was sick and tired of people vilifying dudes without taking into account instigation by the victim.
The difference between those two things, I think, lies in the degree to which he assumes they’re likely to have occurred. Where’s that train of thought end up?
It would seem that in the incident being referenced the woman hit the man first, by her own account. If you don’t want to get beat up then don’t hit people bigger than you. We need to teach women not to bring beatings upon themselves by starting fights they can’t win.
It is pertinent to accusations of “victim blaming” whether the person in question was actually a victim or a violent criminal. In this case it would seem to be the latter, thereby freeing the Smith personage of any wrongdoing, “sincere” apology or not.
Rather, this thread should be about someone wrongfully badgered into apologising without having done anything wrong and then being punished for speaking only a very mild-mannered version of the truth, which is that it’s wrong to blame men for being the victims of violent crimes.
I think I’ll regret asking, but you’re saying Janay Palmer is a “violent criminal” who hit Rice first on video, therefore it’s not his fault he beat her unconscious?
Yes, it “would seem,” to someone who had no knowledge of the situation five minutes ago and was only interested in it to the extent it could be used to advance a particular agenda.
Repeated declarations that provocation “does not excuse or lessen guilt” is like repeated declarations of “I’m not a racist, but”. It doesn’t mean a damn thing unless the subsequent statements fit the initial claim.
When the entirety of the discussion is regarding the punishment of the perpetrator, what purpose does it serve to talk about provocation and instigation, if it has no bearing on the degree of punishment? Prefacing the comment is just a way to cover your ass and still get to imply that provocation does excuse or lessen guilt.
I do believe that provocation, instigation, putting yourself in a bad situation has it’s place in a discussion of the event. But ONLY as it regards how we feel about the victim, how much sympathy I’m willing to give them, what sort of recompense they deserve as a result of their misfortune, etc.
I think reasonable people can disagree on this point, but I think given the mitigating factors in this case, two games was about right. The nearest comparison here in terms of actions (not optics) are NFL players who have gotten into fights and been arrested. Many of those guys don’t even get suspended AFAICT.
Well in this case there are many:
We have not seen the full tape, but apparently there was enough evidence to arrest BOTH Rice and his now wife for simple assault and domestic violence. Police have acknowledged both parties struck one another.
I think we pretty much assume that she started the physical altercation given the fact she was rendered unconscious moments later when he stuck her.
The charges were essentially dropped pending his completion of a pre-trial intervention program.
His wife apparently appealed to Goodell to go easy Rice.
Rice has no history of arrests or violence, and has generally been a model citizen and athlete.
All of those things and more certainly mitigate his responsibility and/or the severity of the punishment he should be subject to from the NFL.
While the strength disparity between most men and most women, and the long history of domestic abuse being perpetrated by men against women should give us pause in assigning any blame to the women in situations like this, I think we need to also not let that baggage cloud our judgement in every case. Why should this case be looked at any differently if it were Ray Rice knocks out male friend in elevator during fight than the actual circumstances?
If you just want to back a blanket policy that men can never hit women regardless of the circumstances, that is fine. But I think have to own that, and the irrationality that stems from it. I think most acknowledge that society has changed enough that such a attitude is unfair in many circumstances, yet we still operate under that paradigm while incorrectly insisting it’s about the violence rather than the double standard (right or wrong).
Hope Solo, the US Women’s team goalie, has been arrested at least twice that I can recall for assaulting both men and women in a domestic situation. How much of any uproar did that cause? Are people trying to get the USWNT to suspend her? How mad do we get when male NFL players assault other men? Would anyone fault Rice for punching a fan who struck him or spit in his face?
Legality aside, I think many if not most men would physically assault someone spitting on them and punching them. The fact that it is a women doing that is mostly immaterial.
In both the Chad Johnson situation and the Rice situation (among others), the speculation has been that both women assaulted the men first, either spitting on them or hitting them, or both. In cases like that, assuming the victim is the one with worse injuries, or that there even is a victim in the traditional sense is presumptuous.
In the most darkly hilarious moment of this saga, a source says she asked Goodell to go easy on Rice because a big suspension could ruin his image and his career. Not the video of him attacking his wife - the suspension.
If you hit someone you are a violent criminal, yes. DuckDuckGoing her also reveals that she is a thief.
Of course it’s incumbent on a victim of violent crime to use the minimum necessary force to defend himself, but I’m obviously going to be willing to give more consideration to someone who commits violence because he was himself a victim. So he was probably justified in lashing out, although a punch causing unconsciousness is an unpredictable thing.
Certainly if I, a physically unimposing man, hit a much larger man I would expect retaliation, and I am a firm believer in sexual equality, which sometimes means women getting punched in the face.
Well, obviously I have no idea who these people are. I’d just seen the name on another board, so seeing it here as well I thought I’d look at it.
If we wish to have equality then giving one group impunity to assault another is not the way to do it, even apart from the entirely non-existent nature of this history of domestic abuse being mostly perpetrated by men against women.
I dare say he was stronger than her, but again that doesn’t give her the right to assault him.
That is not at all fine, but reprehensible, and unfair in all circumstances. Black people were once oppressed in America in a way that women never were, which was characterised by lynchings and other acts of violence, but no matter how much society has changed there’s no acceptance of violence by black people against white being acceptable, and rightly so.
If someone is punching you it isn’t assault to punch them back. Affray, maybe.
That because he didn’t attack her, he retaliated against her attack. Of which the whole video doesn’t seem to have been seen by the public, which renders it ineffective in terms of impact on his career.
They become subject to uncontrollable violent urges? The theft thing is from several years ago, did the forces of patriarchy travel through time to slur the good name of a woman who assaulted her husband so they could excuse the retaliation her husband dealt out?
This is the thing that’s most frustrating about this - we can talk about whether or not it can be an assault to knock somebody unconscious if they’ve first spit in your face or hit you (the answer is certainly yes), but it won’t get us anywhere because the victim is just some lady. Nobody anywhere has said that the lady that got knocked out is a paragon of virtue. Nobody has even said she shouldn’t be in jail. There’s this immediate and super-political leap that we make – oh, Ray Rice did something bad? What about this?!
Nobody is saying that Ray Rice knocking a woman unconscious being bad means the woman was a good person; she can have done something bad, too. But he still did something fucked up. The entire line of discussion is a massive dodge.
The English among us will remember Eric Cantona launching himself from the pitch to perform a flying karate kick on a Crystal Palace supporter. He seemed to get most of the sympathy. Also, a very lengthy ban. The fan was banned from football grounds for life, I believe, for the provocation he had offered against Cantona. No doubt that was victim-blaming too.
If you’re going to play this card, don’t you also have to acknowledge that we don’t know what happened prior to the video?
I suppose you could call it that, yes - fans are seized by an uncontrollable urge to smear them.
I assumed it was. As I said, this kind of character assassination is par for the course in these situations. A woman gets beaten into unconsciousness by a professional football player… but wait, she was accused of theft years ago! This changes everything!
Nobody has said that other people who commit assault shouldn’t also be prosecuted (and suspended from their jobs if they are also super-highly-paid to be public figures).
You genuinely don’t even know what you’re arguing about.