- Above: A poster for “It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” by scratchboard artist Nicolas Delort. More info about the poster (including alternate versions) here.
- A round-up of some well-reasoned, civil critiques of #GamerGate.
- And here’s another #GamerGate Link Roundup, this time from Brute Reason.
- We’re All Tired Of Gamergate
- At least 8 women in gaming have had to flee their homes due to threats.
- The Only Thing I Have To Say About Gamer Gate | Felicia Day
- Actress Felicia Day Opens Up About GamerGate Fears, Has Her Home Address Exposed Minutes Later
- Did you know that Disney, Pixar, Dreamworks, and others have been involved in a major wage theft scandal? The companies conspired to not compete for employees, so that wages would be artificially held down. The conspirators included George Lucas and Steve Jobs – people who clearly didn’t have enough money already. Assholes. Pando Daily has an archive of their stories on this subject.
- Occupational Licensing of Strippers Isn’t Just Unnecessary, It’s Dangerous – Hit & Run : Reason.com
- The People’s Climate Change – Windypundit Shorter Windypundit: When right-wingers claim climate change doesn’t exist, that’s the fault of left-wingers for using left-wing rhetoric or advocating left-wing policies. The idea that right-wingers are responsible for their own choices and views is, it seems, inconceivable.
- Voter ID laws in Kansas and Tennessee dropped 2012 turnout by over 100,000 votes – The Washington Post
- EconoMonitor : Ed Dolan’s Econ Blog » Could We Afford a Universal Basic Income? (Part 2 of a Series)
- “Yes means yes” is about much more than rape – Vox
- In defense of John Grisham – The Washington Post
- What Happens When Hasidic Jews Go Secular — Science of Us
- Ursula K. Le Guin on Being a Man | Brain Pickings
- Immigrant Rights Groups: Obama Administration Runs ‘Deportation Mill’ in New Mexico
- Protests Greet Metropolitan Opera’s Premiere of ‘Klinghoffer’ – NYTimes.com Appallingly, the protests have succeeded in getting the producers to cancel a planned nationwide broadcast on movie screens.
- Serena and Venus Williams Battle More Body-Shaming
- The common law tradition says that shopkeepers have no right to discriminate : Lawyers, Guns & Money
- New Research Exposes Myths About Voter Fraud
- Kurt Busiek Addresses the Misconceptions of the Marvel/Kirby Legal Dispute
- South Carolina prosecutor argues that “Stand Your Ground” law doesn’t apply for victims of domestic violence.
- ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES: More Men Are Raped in US Than Women? Spoiler: No.
- To say: “we fought the war on poverty and lost” is to reveal your contempt for facts.
- You can fight City Hall (but if you take them to court, they get lawyers, too). A good post about the claim that a city is trying to take away the first amendment rights of Christian Churches by issuing a subpoena.
- Obama’s war on leaks – and on free speech – is unbelievable
- Whites are more supportive of voter ID laws when shown photos of black people voting – The Washington Post
- Poor kids who do everything right don’t do better than rich kids who do everything wrong – The Washington Post
- MRAs please take note: A comprehensive study of shipwrecks has shown that “Women have a distinct survival disadvantage compared with men.”
- Chart of the Week: Politicians Following, Not Leading on Same-Sex Marriage
- The evidence on travel bans for diseases like Ebola is clear: they don’t work
- Studies suggest the overwhelming motivation behind voter ID laws is hyper-partisanship, not racism.
winning the pumpkin carving game forever. seen in williamsburg this weekend. pic.twitter.com/vWxUBaKVGN
— Rachel H. Smith (@rachelholliday) October 20, 2014
I have absolutely heard people use “that lady” when referring to people they perceive as their social inferiors, when they wouldn’t use it for people they saw as equals.
Fair enough. That’s what you’ve heard. So that would validate that at least some people’s usage of the term fits that definition, although it does not answer for how common it is. But that still leaves the fashion in which I’ve heard the term used – one that was excluded in the definitions given, and which was certainly common when and where I grew up. I question the authority and data by which the author excluded that.
http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2913#comic
Saw this, wanted to propose a new threat Amp or anyone else thusly empowered. “political cartoons mocking the existence of politics!” Rare, but they are out there.
In totally unrelated news: I was at my parents’ in the suburban Midwest for Thanksgiving. We went out to a newish shopping center. Outside the sporting goods store were four statues: Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln…and Reagan, complete with cowboy hat.
Wouldn’t it be cool if the four statues were built so that kids could switch the clothing – put Washington’s wig on Lincoln, Reagan’s hat on Jefferson, etc?
It would be cool, not least because pretty shortly you’d have three naked statues…
Grace
Which one would stay clothed?
Ahem. Four. Four naked statues.
Grace
It would be interesting to see how recognizable the statues would be sans clothing/wigs–I’m so used to seeing the presidents dressed certain ways I’m not sure I could recognize facial features…well, maybe Lincoln.
I think I’d recognize Reagan’s hair anywhere. Damn, that was some hair.
So, have folks been following the UVA stuff?
It started with a Rolling Stone article by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, detailing a horrible set of occurrences, resulting in a violent and premeditated gang rape. That article was widely publicized and fit very well into the narrative of current politics w/r/t the need to focus on stopping campus sexual assault.
Then some various folks began to question the accuracy of Erdely (the author who wrote the article,) and started to wonder whether Erdely had properly investigated before writing her scoop. To raise those questions they started talking about what they believed were inaccuracies in the article; one example is Richard Bradley, an editor, who wrote this post pointing out what he sees as some problems.
Bradley, somewhat unsurprisingly, promptly became the target of a post on Jezebel entitled “‘Is the UVA Rape Story a Gigantic Hoax?’ Asks Idiot”. It’s an interesting read (and for those who like to rely on Jezebel’s reporting, it’s also a interesting comparison to look at Bradley’s article, and compare it to the Jezebel summary.)
Bradley then, also unsurprisingly, responded with a post of his own, which is also worth a read.
Now things are really starting to get interesting.
Erdely has been interviewed a few times and hasn’t really come up with the answers that the skeptics are looking for. Whether or not you think that’s relevant is an interesting thing,
Some defenders are treating “this is bad journalism” attacks on Erdely (an investigative journalist) as akin to attacks on the victim even though that makes little sense.
Others are treating it as an attack on the politics of sexual assault–which it surely is, in some cases.
More recently, Erdely has stopped answering questions and is referring those things to the Rolling Stone publicist.
Some other people who do research on frats (and not always from a “frats are good!” perspective) are now saying that this concept of a sober frat-initiation premeditated gang rape is way, way, outside normality and seems very unlikely. And they are also taking the position that it does matter if it’s inaccurate, because if it’s made up it will set the cause back quite a bit.
Some other folks are, also unsurprisingly, taking the position that it doesn’t actually matter whether the report is inaccurate, because even if it was not entirely accurate it serves to put a valuable spotlight on the whole rape culture problem and the generic responses of UVA. (It seems very likely that UVA has horrible rape reponses. But this may have been a bad place to hang a hat if it turns out not to be true. “The university had a bad response to my report of rape” has more teeth if the report was accurate, for obvious reasons.)
The Washington Post has run at least a few articles in which its position changes from relatively positive to increasingly negative:
This one on 11/28;
this one on 12/01; and
this latest one on 12/02.
Enjoy!
I’ve been following it. I was horrified to read the story. But as others have been asking questions and not getting answers, and as I reflected on some of the details, I decided to await the results of investigation.
“Some other folks are, also unsurprisingly, taking the position that it doesn’t actually matter whether the report is inaccurate, because even if it was not entirely accurate it serves to put a valuable spotlight on the whole rape culture problem and the generic responses of UVA.”
Yeah, I’ve heard this. I have absolutely no sympathy for it. It destroys trust. It is the result of people who think that a) they’re smarter and more righteous than the rest of us and that b) that gives them the right to lie to achieve their ends, because they server a higher truth. To me it means that I can no longer trust a word they say – or a cause they support.
Apparently at UVA there’s a movement to get rid of ALL fraternities that has been galvanized by this report. The President of UVA has banned all fraternity activities until January. The particular fraternity has surrendered it’s charter. This is real damage to real people. And as we have seen so very many times before, these are actions that have been based on allegations for which no actual investigation has been done to determine what the truth is.
If this report is true, fine. Act on it. But to act on allegations published in a newspaper – Rolling Stone, no less – without any attempt to verify a word in them first? That’s pretty outrageous.
Things are looking worse and worse for that story.
Key elements of Rolling Stone’s U-Va. gang rape allegations in doubt:
Meanwhile, the UVA administration doubles down.
Does the well-being of students include ensuring that they are not subjected to vilification, censure and restriction of their activities based on unsubstantiated allegations?
Including due process for the accused as well as the accuser?
Yeah, we’ll keep rolling. Never mind those fuckers at Phi Kappa Psi, apparently. Rolling Stone is starting to get anxious, though.
It’ll be interesting to see if this turns out that the magazine abandoned any pretense of journalism in order to promote its narrative. The word “trust” does not belong in journalism.
The local papers in Chicago used to be served by an organization called the Chicago News Service. Think of it as an Associated Press that concentrated on Chicago stories only. Their approach to journalism was famously summed up in a sign hung on the wall of the main newsroom: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” THAT’S journalism. Not “there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie’s account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced,” Discrepancies in Jackie’s story should have been discovered and resolved before one word saw print (or prominently pointed out in the story). It would have in a real newspaper or newsmagazine. Regardless of how this plays out, Rolling Stone stands exposed as a propaganda sheet, not a journalistic enterprise.
Hey – SOMEBODY’S lying. Maybe the guys at Phi Kappa Psi. Maybe Jackie. Hell, maybe both. I am very explicitly NOT making a call either way at this point. But, again, as we have seen in Ferguson and all over the country time after time, people buy into the first story they hear that reinforces their beliefs, claim that its proof of vast injustices and demand the accused be punished before any one bothers to find out the facts.
If it turns out that Phi Kappa Psi is lying, I hope that they get tossed off campus and their house gets razed (or turned into a women’s shelter) and the guilty individuals go to prison. But if it turns out that Jackie’s lying, I hope that Phi Kappa Psi sues UVA for millions (I confess to not be clear on what the basis of such lawsuits would be).
Fascinating NYT article on the effects of acknowledging common bias versus acknowledging common desire to avoid bias.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/opinion/sunday/adam-grant-and-sheryl-sandberg-on-discrimination-at-work.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=c-column-top-span-region®ion=c-column-top-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-top-span-region&_r=0
I hadn’t been following the UVA/Jackie story until after it became apparent that there were problems with the details of Jackie’s story. I think Alyssa Rosenberg’s piece about it is good: The Best Way to Respect Sexual Assault Survivors is to Get Their Stories Right.
In addition to the obvious “printing things that aren’t true is bad” ethical problem here, I can think of a few more problems with the “who cares as long as it get people to work on the problem” view:
–The backlash when the details don’t check out hurts the cause much more than a similar case not shown to be false helps
–It also hurts the alleged victim (which is a very serious moral wrong if the inaccuracies are due to trauma, lying by the perpetrator, etc., rather than it being a fictitious account)
–Strategies to combat sexual violence may be less effective if we base them around cases where important details are wrong. I’m not sure exactly how they would be less effective, but we don’t know what we don’t know.
Yeah. I really don’t know enough to have any opinion on whether Jackie is lying or mistaken or what, but Rolling Stone definitely should not have published this without checking into it first. They could have had a few “These details don’t check out, and here are some plausible reasons why that might be” paragraphs if they did decide that the story as a whole was worth printing, and that the details that didn’t match up didn’t discredit the whole thing. Or they could have decided that those details threw too much suspicion on the entire thing, and decided not to print it, or to focus some of the other victims and leave Jackie’s story out. But printing it when basic details like “Was this guy a member of this fraternity?” haven’t been checked is irresponsible.
closetpuritan:
How about “The incredibly unjustified damage done to the falsely accused?”
Or are victims only important if they are the right kind of victims? And falsely accused men don’t qualify?
Ruchama:
This is known as “Journalism”, a discipline that Rolling Stone is apparently uninterested in.
They never even tried to get to this rather questionable point in the first place. No, what Rolling Stone did was to publish a hit piece, sliming Phi Kappa Psi’s and UVA’s reputations.
Not one word of this should ever have seen print. But Rolling Stone is apparently not interested in journalism, they’re interested in propaganda. And the administration of UVA is apparently more interested in seizing on propaganda to advance particular viewpoints than they are in trying to find out what the truth is, too. The President of UVA should be fired if she doesn’t have the grace to resign.
Well, RonF, there’s two ways you could have pointed that out. You could have written, “You didn’t mention how false/mistaken allegations can affect the accused; I assume you’d include them too and that was an oversight?” Or you could go with “I accuse you of misandry!”
The actual explanation is that I was being more careful about getting my new thoughts down than in summarizing the stuff that people had already pointed out. I do think that the reputation damage is a legitimate harm (in cases where the accused rapist is identifiable), even in the less-serious case where it’s corrected later.
Once someone has publicly been accused of rape, it’s never really fully corrected. There’s a lot of people out there who believe that “When there’s smoke, there’s fire.” The stain on their reputation remains. It would certainly affect their academic progress at UVA, future employment and certainly their social and professional relationships.
For example: when a volunteer in the Boy Scouts of America is accused of assault, child molestation or other crimes, their registration is revoked and they are barred from further participation in Scouting activities. Which makes complete sense. But what a lot of people don’t know is that even if the charges are dropped, or even if a trial is held and the person involved is acquitted – even if the case is shown to have been completely fabricated – that person’s registration is not automatically restored. The BSA may decide that the taint alone is enough to keep the community from accepting that person as a member of the BSA.
Now, if someone is committed enough to go to the police and seek charges against someone else claiming that they are a rapist, fine. Then you’re in the legal system – testimony is taken, evidence is sought out and examined, etc. It’s a public process. But Rolling Stone had no evidence – no police report, no hospital records, etc. – and seems to have resisted gathering any information other than unsubstantiated allegations from this woman’s friends (who did not witness the alleged assault and could not identify any of the people allegedly involved) that would verify the story.
I’m all for not traumatizing victims – but there’s got to be some proof that they really ARE victims other than unsubstantiated allegations before you start publicly claiming that an assault occurred, whether it’s sexual or not. Especially if you publicly claim that a particular group of people were perpetrators of that assault.
I want to stress that when we talk about justice, its important to focus on the fact that everyone involved deserves justice, not just the first person to hold up a claim that they are a victim. If someone is falsely accused, then they are a victim – even if they are rich white drunk frat boys – and they deserve justice.
I agree that they never tried, but I don’t agree that it’s questionable. I’ve seen plenty of articles along those lines: this is the stuff the person said, this is what we were able to verify, this is what we were not able to verify, this is why we might not have been able to verify it, and this is why we think that the stuff that we were able to verify still adds up to an important story. (There was an article in the Washington Post a few weeks ago, about a football player who faked his identity to be able to play college football even though he didn’t qualify academically, that actually prefaced several paragraphs in a row with stuff like “This is true:” and “This is partially true:” and so on.)
The ideal solution would be to turn “believe victims” into something both more widespread and more limited:
Believe that when someone says they were raped/assaulted, there’s always a basis to investigate further.
You can’t just “believe victims” because victims are people, and people are very often wrong. Even if you leave malice aside (though of course it exists), people tend to make mistakes/forget things/”remember” things which aren’t true/misunderstand the law/etc.
I’m all for not traumatizing victims – but there’s got to be some proof that they really ARE victims other than unsubstantiated allegations before you start publicly claiming that an assault occurred, whether it’s sexual or not. Especially if you publicly claim that a particular group of people were perpetrators of that assault.
You may be interested in this, from my Alyssa Rosenberg link:
Once someone has publicly been accused of rape, it’s never really fully corrected.
I understand that; by “corrected later”, I meant in the media.
Bingo. If someone goes to the municipal or college police with an allegation of sexual assault and they get blown off, that’s an injustice and that needs to be addressed. But neither the local nor college authorities have any business actually believing the stories of either the accuser or the accused until evidence and testimony are obtained and evaluated.
Based on what I’ve read I have no problem in accepting the possibility that something awful and even criminal happened to this young woman. But that’s not a basis for accusing a specific organization or some of it’s members of committing specific acts.
I think that the local State D.A. should mount an investigation into this to see what truth, if any, can be ascertained.
I think that I should never believe another thing printed in Rolling Stone – unless, possibly, everyone involved with this is fired and the magazine mounts it’s own investigation and prints everything it can find out, and if all of what they print can be verified.
I think that I will never believe any claim, statistic, study etc. written or cited by any academic or social critic who is currently holding forth the philosophy that it doesn’t matter if this student’s story is really true or not, the important thing is that it’s brought attention to this issue.
Meanwhile, here is a story about child rape. Rape, as we see from the Rolling Stone story, is a huge issue. Child abuse is a huge issue, too – abuse of children under government care has been on the front page of the Chicago Tribune for 3 days now. And the person who (unlike the men in the UVa story) has been formally charged with it is white and rich. Seems to have all the elements for a great story. I wonder why it hasn’t gotten the same media play?
That’s a pretty sensational story, isn’t it? Do you think that if was straight, had founded the Family Research Council, was a prolific donor to Republican candidates and an associate of a GOP president that this wouldn’t have been on the front page of the New York Times and a lead story on CNN and MSNBC?
Let me be careful here to note that I”m not saying that stories of rape and sexual assault on college campuses that are actually true are not important. I’m saying that there seems to be a narrative here and decisions on not only which stories are sensationalized but which stories are not sensationalized seem to be made based on that narrative, not the value or importance – or even the truth – of the information in the story.
I thought this made some good points. http://feministing.com/2014/12/08/on-rolling-stone-lessons-from-fact-checking-and-the-limits-of-journalism/
Based on what I’ve read in a bunch of the “debunking” articles, what seems like the most likely scenario to me was that Jackie was raped that night, but it was at a different fraternity. And the basic facts of that are things that Rolling Stone could have checked without contacting the accused attackers — find out which fraternities had parties that night, find out the names of the members of each fraternity, find out who worked at the aquatic center that year, and compare all those lists. All that information is either public or easily obtainable. According to a friend at UVA, the fraternity houses are all on the same street and all look pretty much the same, so it would be understandable for a freshman, especially one who didn’t know the Greek alphabet and was traumatized, to get them mixed up. It’s not understandable for Rolling Stone to print the article without checking into it.
Interesting link: Parable of the Polygons. “This is a story of how harmless choices can make a harmful world.”
http://ncase.me/polygons/
Fascinating. However, before I draw too much inference from it, I’d want to distribute a bell-curve of prejudice/welcoming across each population and see what that does to the results. Also, I’d like to be able to make the interaction based on shared attitudes rather than shared identities, and see how that shakes out.
But it’s fascinating to watch and play with the sliders.
Grace
Honestly, I don’t know what anyone can possibly conclude from the Rolling Stone story, because the person who wrote it seems to be pretty bad, source-wise. To put it mildly.
Jackie was almost certainly upset by something, but we don’t really know what she was upset by, without actually asking. There’s no reason to assume Jackie’s a lying liar, but there’s also no reason to pick out Erdely’s less-sensational aspects, ignore the ones which seem to be demonstrably false, and assume the more normal-sounding ones are true. Since everything is filtered througgh unreliable Erdely, we just don’t know.
We DO know some stuff unrelated to Jackie, though. We know that UVA took a lot of action immediately; that the frat was damaged reputation-wise, possibly without much recourse. We know that a lot of people in the “believe victims” and “take prompt action” crowd were overjoyed (at the time) and thought it was a good idea (at the time) and attacked the people who even questioned it by calling them rape apologists, or worse.
IOW, we don’t know much about Jackie. But I think we can conclude a bit more–none of it good– about the Jezebel crowd and the rape-on-campus zealots.
Ruchama, how likely do you think it is that a woman who has twice before claimed that she was raped, with a lot of graphic detail, and with a lot of follow-up activism, would behave, after her third, most brutal so far rape, in the way Jacqueline did? Being convinced by her friends not to go to the police, because of their fear of losing their party privileges? Believing that she was the target of a successful conspiracy to torture a vulnerable woman, a conspiracy repeating itself every single year? Allowing the tradition to go on, with more innocent victims… despite being a anti-rape activist for at least 18 months before the Phi Kappa Psi rape?
And are you accepting the story of her rape as remotely plausible? The three hour ordeal, the glass digging into her back, her seven assailants not getting even cut (or continuing the torture while injured), no one noticing her state at the party, the person tricking her into the room not worrying about being prosecuted with eight co-defendants eager for a deal, with no one getting an attack of conscience and talking, etc, etc, etc, ETC?
So now we are supposed to believe that every single detail in her story that is not proved absolutely false is absolutely true? That the guy whose name she gave to the journaleuse is the mastermind of a conspiracy? Who cares if he says that he does not know her?
You may believe her story. I absolutely do not. She may have had some horrible experiences in the past – I am inclined to believe her about her first rape, because unfortunately it nearly word for word echoes the stories I have heard from three women I trust. But I would bet heavily that this latest story is made up of whole cloth.
—–
Gin-and-whiskey, if you do not know a lot about ‘Jackie’, you have not been looking.
Grace, that particular source has four obvious and crucial limitations (among others, but these are pretty obvious ones.)
First and most obviously, none of the happy polygons ever change position, even if doing so would leave them happy (or happier!) while opening up new areas for others.
Second, none of the gaps get filled with new polygons, and no existing polygons leave. This matters because obviously “add a wanted neighbor” is as effective as “move”. Nor do any of the existing polygons ever leave, which has the same effects.
Third, all polygons have the same rule system, which is–of course–not how people work.
Fourth and less intuitive, the system forces you to make everyone happy. But that is never true.
It’s a funny experiment and it’s a bit like Life in that is can model interesting things using simple rules. But it’s not really much of a parable for anything.
Do you have a source for this?
Her Facebook page? The poster that she is holding, with presumably her own experience?
Did I forget to set my time-machine to the right date again? Or has her doxxing not been reported by anyone widely read yet? If she is still under the radar, maybe I should not post her PI until someone once again accuses me of a drive by.
And seriously, what searches did you try? “[pseudonym] doxxed” is the first one I try when I want to know whether an anonymous person has been outed.
Well, Pesho, I don’t think I would ever think to look for the doxxing of an anonymous person. If for some reason knowing the person’s identity is necessary–and I can only think this would happen in the case of actual crimes–I would leave that job to law enforcement . And when I have run across such reports accidentally, I’ve avoided doing further research into that person, at least up until the person chose to speak with their name attached.
So no, I didn’t do that Google search. In fact, I would consider it pretty abhorrent.
gin-and-whiskey:
Good thing I didn’t say it was flawless, then. In fact, I pointed out what I think would be the biggest improvement in a simple model, which you can characterize as a flaw, if you want a more complex model. The code is available from the authors, so feel free to improve on it.
I just said it was interesting. If it’s not interesting to you, well, that’s what makes horse races.
Strictly, this is true. But happy polygons can become unhappy polygons, and then the unhappy polygon has not only life (of a sort) but the liberty to pursue happiness.
There are no polygons springing into existence from off the board, or leaving it, true. But there are polygons popping into existence in the gaps, having vacated their previous positions, and this can have a salutary effect on an unhappy polygon, if the numbers come out right. The impulse comes not from the unhappy polygon which has put down roots and ain’t moving, of course, which is perhaps what you were getting at; there’s no recruitment. That would be an interesting dynamic to add, as we complexify the model.
Yes. I said that when I posted it.
I suppose that’s true, yes. Some folks do seem powerfully difficult to please.
One of the authors has their e-mail address on the site. It is within your power to tell them that, in addition to creating a fatally flawed model, they misnamed it, yea, even to the brink of fraud.
Grace
Do not post her private information, period.
—Myca
@Ruchama:
Yup.
journaleuse
I bet you think you’re real cute.
I bet you think you’re real cute.
Well, excuse me for not keeping perfect track of which words from my third language have not been borrowed by my fourth, as opposed to many, many others which have been. I am sure that you are much better at never mixing words from the non-native languages that you speak.
Pesho –
What’s the source for these claims? I don’t recall them being made like this in the Rolling Stone article, but maybe I misremembering. If the source is a doxxing of her, then never mind.
In case we have read a different Rolling Stone article, here is a quote from the one I read:
Then they egged him on: “Don’t you want to be a brother?” “We all had to do it, so you do, too.”
Two men, bothers in good standing, are not participating and are calling the shots. The one identified rapist is in her discussion group, hinting that he is a freshman.
To anyone remotely familiar with fraternities this sounds like an initiation. So, were the readers not meant to believe that some UVA fraternities engage in this kind of initiation? I’d say that the events following the publication of the article (the protests, the administrators’ actions, the fraternities response) make it quite clear that I am not the only one who made the connection.
In a vacuum, the details of the story are absolutely unbelievable. Publishing the story with a specific fraternity, a specific date and specific classes/jobs, provides enough information to put suspicion on specific individuals. How many people rushed Phi Kappa Psi that year?
I’m glad the mass media is finally removing part of the stain on these people’s reputations. I also hope that Sabrina Erdely and Rolling Stone get sued into oblivion.
As for ‘Jackie’, I am pretty sure (as I have said before) that something did happen to her, at some point. But that did not give her an excuse to target innocent individuals. I know some people will believe that she was just confused from her ordeal, and that she honestly believed what she told Sabrina Erdely. I’m not one of them, but my opinion has been formed in the light of information that Ampersand and Myca have the right to keep off their blog.
Pesho, I think that’s something you can deductively infer from the quote, but not something that deserves anywhere near the level of certainty implied by your earlier comment. For one thing, even if one does accept Jackie’s story, it’s obvious that what the rapists themselves claim and say isn’t reliable testimony. Saying “this criminal claimed there is a conspiracy” is not at all the same as saying “there is a conspiracy.”
That said, your hyperbole isn’t an important issue, nor something I want to spend a lot of time arguing about.
Just to clarify my view, I don’t think Jackie’s story, as told in that article, is true. I don’t know if she’s ever been raped, or if what she reported was a completely made-up story or a hyperbolic and fictionalized account based on a real rape. I also don’t think it’s very important for us, as spectators, to know this stuff. What’s more important (imo) is that that Rolling Stone screwed up epically by printing the story, and how and why that happened.
Saying “this criminal claimed there is a conspiracy” is not at all the same as saying “there is a conspiracy.”
Absolutely true.
But the article was based exclusively on a witness’s testimony. The events in the article, if true, are depicting a conspiracy, even without any of the rapists saying anything. On top of that, we have the witness stating that the criminals admitted to conspiracy.
I would be last one to claim that there actually was a conspiracy. But I think that it would take a lot of compartmentalization to believe, at the same time, that the witness believes that she is telling the truth and that she does not realize that there was a conspiracy.
So, no, I do not admit that what I said is hyperbole.
When she was a junior in high school?
Or, the more logical explanation: that she shared some photos of other people.
ruchama:
Amp:
I propose that it happened because to Rolling Stone a story that is disfavorable to male white fraternity brothers makes it more “good” than one that is disfavorable to other groups. When one of their reporters, who apparently has spent months shopping around various campuses for rape stories, finally found one that seemed to confirm their biases and depicted such people as amoral rapists, Rolling Stone was more concerned about furthering their narrative and social viewpoint than they were about the truth.
They’re pretty open about both having biases and acting on them. Consider comments that the managing editor of Rolling Stone made during a lecture he gave at his alma mater, Middlebury College entitled “The Myth of Fair and Balanced: A Defense of Biased Reporting”:
Ironically, he then goes on to claim that deliberately advancing a particular viewpoint means that they have to be even more deliberate about fact-finding and verification than other publications. Perhaps at one time that was true. Right now it seems that ship has apparently sailed.
Random House hasn’t exactly covered itself in glory with their publication of Lena Durham’s memoir in which she claims that she was raped during college by a prominent campus Republican named Barry. Unfortunately for Random House a) there was in fact a prominent campus Republican named Barry at that place in time, b) many of the details Dunham wrote were found to be lies, and c) he’s suffered multiple bad consequences due to the acceptance of this unsubstantiated and unsubstantiable allegation.
Barry hired a lawyer and started an on-line legal fund drive. Random House claims now that “Barry” was a pseudonym – except that in other places in the book where pseudonyms were used instead of real names they were identified as such. Random House has already offered to cover his legal expenses. Barry’s probably going to get them to tack a 0 or two onto the end of the amount on that check.
Toss in the story about the Duke lacrosse team rape scandal – the scandal ending up being that it was false – and it seems to me that it would be prudent to question any story alleging rape by an individual or group where the story stresses the whiteness, fraternity membership or conservative politics of the rapist. Because it seems fashionable to print such without verifying the truth first.
Pesho:
Well, excuse me for not keeping perfect track of which words from my third language have not been borrowed by my fourth, as opposed to many, many others which have been. I am sure that you are much better at never mixing words from the non-native languages that you speak.
Isn’t it funny how the only sign that you’re not a native speaker is that one word? Isn’t it funny that you haven’t unnecessarily feminized any other English words? Isn’t it funny that in French, that word is also listed as “argotiquement et péjorativement femme journaliste”? (See also: “Et ce matin, une apprentie-journaleuse (je ne peux pas utiliser le terme journaliste à propos d’une demoiselle qui passe son temps à démolir tout ce qu’elle a le malheur de lire ou voir passer sur la Toile…”)
gin-and-whiskey:
The ideal solution would be to turn “believe victims” into something both more widespread and more limited:
Believe that when someone says they were raped/assaulted, there’s always a basis to investigate further.
You can’t just “believe victims” because victims are people, and people are very often wrong. Even if you leave malice aside (though of course it exists), people tend to make mistakes/forget things/”remember” things which aren’t true/misunderstand the law/etc.
Whether I “can” just believe victims depends on what my other responsibilities are. I think that the people that feminists had in mind when formulating/describing “believe victims” was that the person doing the believing was a family member/friend/acquaintance, or, to a lesser extent, someone reading about it in the news; a repeated talking point was that such people are not a judge or a jury member, so they’re not responsible for upholding an innocent until proven guilty standard.
The way you’ve described it (“Believe that when someone says they were raped/assaulted, there’s always a basis to investigate further”) still basically applies to family members/friends/acquaintances/readers, but they don’t necessarily have a responsibility to investigate further. (News readers should attempt to bear in mind that all news stories are to some extent provisional, though.)
This absolutely should be how it applies to people like journalists, law enforcement, etc., who do have a duty to investigate and not take any information on trust. Really, it’s about not being more skeptical of a rape victim than you are of anyone else–as well as knowing and keeping in mind what a realistic response to trauma is.
That’s why when Rolling Stone said that their trust in the student was misplaced I got lit up. That told me that in their quest for advocacy they had abandoned journalism.
Thoughts on the reporting process, and how to get it right after you get it very wrong.
What Rolling Stone can learn from Grantland about explaining a story gone wrong
Grace
Isn’t it funny how the only sign that you’re not a native speaker is that one word? Isn’t it funny that you haven’t unnecessarily feminized any other English words? Isn’t it funny that in French, that word is also listed as “argotiquement et péjorativement femme journaliste”?
I am sorry, but I cannot discern your point.
Are you saying that I am a native English speaker? Thanks for the compliment, but I am not. I know that “no one on the Internet knows you’re a dog”, but I think I can easily demonstrate the kind of proficiency in Bulgarian, Serbian, Turkish and Russian that is extremely uncommon outside the Balkans.
Are you saying that I am a native French speaker, because “journaleuse” is uncommon? I can pass for a native of le Midi, but that’s because my country spent a lot of money on it. Once again, I cannot prove I’m not, so see above.
Are you saying that I should have not used ‘journaleuse’ because it is a pejorative term? Given that I think the ‘poor excuse for a journalist (female)’ is the real villain in the debacle under discussion, I stand by my choice of words. And I used the female form because when English borrows a word, it often borrows the correct gendered one (chanteuse, masseuse)
Are you saying that I should not have used a word that has not been borrowed by English yet? Fuck no, I should not have. And I wouldn’t have, had I known it had not been. I wouldn’t have used if I had known you’d make such a production out of it, either.
By the way, I think that as a French speaker (native, or nearly so, I think – Belgium?) you can count all the words borrowed from French in this post. I swear, I did not realize it until my third paragraph, and then I could not resist.
—–
Woooops! I think that I just saw your point. If this was it all along, I apologize. You are wrong, but this is no reason for me to get upset.
If you thought that I used ‘journaleuse’ to feminize journalist and bring attention to the fact that the author was female, you are neither correct, nor a native French speaker. ‘Journaleuse’ is not the feminine form of ‘journaliste’, it is the feminine form of ‘journaleux’. Journalist, in French or in English, is gender neutral. In French, the article would specify the gender.
Half of all kids experience a traumatizing event, including —
A map indicates that the rate of childhood trauma tends to be higher in Red States than in Blue (indeed, the Big City states of CA, IL, NY all report in the lowest category for traumatic event prevalence), but the correlation is spotty.
I wonder how the rate of traumatizing events has changed over time. Both divorce and the crime rates are down. Incarceration rates are up. We’ve grown more ethnically diverse over time, so there’s more opportunity for unfair treatment based on race — but perhaps fewer incidence due to lower social acceptance of racism? Hard to guess the aggregate trend.
I’ve long wondered about how social groups are influenced by the experience of widespread trauma. Consider sexual abuse of women. Sexual abuse of children. The Holocaust. WWII. Imagine if trauma causes people to adopt characteristic beliefs and behaviors: within any traumatized group, these beliefs and behaviors might not be understood to be manifestations of trauma, but rather simply “the way people are.”
Thus, many people look to the 1950s as emblematic of “normalcy.” Yet the 1950s was an era with disproportionate numbers of people who had experienced war. Good or bad, that’s not normal.
Studies show that women are less likely to accept an invitation for sex with an unfamiliar man then men are with an unfamiliar women. Does this manifest something inherent to women’s sexuality, or is this merely a manifestation of widespread trauma around sexual assault? Or is there any meaningful distinction?
If child sexual abuse has been a mainstay throughout history, then we may have no idea how a population of un-abused people would behave. What we know of “the human condition” may reflect widespread trauma.
Allegedly people who lived through the Great Depression acquired a trauma-induced attitude about risk. hard work, stoicism, and frugality. These became characteristic “American virtues.” As this generation dies off, they are being replaced by a generation of people who embrace greater risk — and risk-taking and entrepreneurship became the characteristic American virtues. Perhaps the recent recession will traumatize the nation into favoring Depression-era virtues again. The point is, the very concept of “American” may have changed over time due to trauma.
Now, as the world grows wealthier, as crime and divorce rates fall, as people grow less tolerant of sexual abuse, etc., — might we observe a decline in the rates of trauma, and thus trauma-induced behavior? If we had a less traumatized society, what would happen to the public’s appetite for prisons? capital punishment? guns? religion? materialism? competition? fame?
Would we recognize “the human condition” anymore?
That’s an interesting rumination, nobody. (…That sounds weirdly like I’m throwing shade at you, sorry!)
My inclination would be that it goes down, mostly because death due to violence or disease is way down, and extreme poverty (of starvation level) declines as well. Divorce is much more common than it was 100 years ago, though.
There’s another factor to weight against when trauma gets less frequent, though. If there’s a thing which is very common, sometimes the coping strategies provided by the society are more effective–there’s sort of a philosophical understanding of the thing, plus a lot of other people who’ve been through it and can help guide you. I’m not sure how to disentangle that from your point about trauma effects just seeming like human nature, though.
As sort of a side note:
Here’s a report by Thomas at Yes Means Yes on a study that tried to tease some of this out. Conclusion: women–well, heterosexual, female, American college students–rated random propositions as higher-risk and also expected that the men who propositioned them would not be very good in bed. Of course, that may be rationalizations on top of a gut-level disinclination. But that study also points out that if you want to know how men and women respond to offers of sex, the walk-up-to-a-random-stranger-and-proposition-them model is the one that results in the largest gender separation.
From Grace’s link:
I am not familiar with Grantland. However, looking around their site a bit seems to reveal a sports news site that, while leaning towards the sensationalistic, is apolitical. That, then, makes it relatively easy for them to publish a straight-forward accounting of how they ended up publishing what they did. The overall intent of the piece was to report on the dubiousness of the developer’s qualifications and possible issues with the person promoting it.
Whereas honest answers to the questions above by Rolling Stone would likely reveal that their intent was at least in part to discredit white male fraternity brothers and the Greek system at universities through a sensational rape story and attempt to get schools to do the very kind of thing that UVa has started to do with their Greek system. They would likely reveal that there were numerous preconceptions that entered into their acceptance and publishing of this story. But unlike Grantland, those preconceptions lie at the very core of Rolling Stone’s reasons for publishing. Admitting those will be to admit that every story they publish is liable to suspicion. My guess is that you will not see RS do what Grantland did.
If RS wants to maintain some facade of journalistic integrity, every person who was involved in writing or approving the publishing of this story should be fired. And every story that this reporter has written should be investigated and verified, and the details of what could be verified and what could not be verified should be published in RS. Apparently there is already a group outside of RSdoing just that for a rather sensationalistic story she wrote (and that RS published) on rape in the military.
RonF:
Oh, well that’s all right, then. (Careful of the pools of sarcasm.)
Other people have written far better than I about why what Grantland did wrong, and how that mistake helped drive someone to suicide. Google “Grantland” and “putter” and you’ll find plenty of material. Kindly don’t excuse them because you suppose that they meant well.
Grace
Woooops! I think that I just saw your point. If this was it all along, I apologize. You are wrong, but this is no reason for me to get upset.
If you thought that I used ‘journaleuse’ to feminize journalist and bring attention to the fact that the author was female, you are neither correct, nor a native French speaker. ‘Journaleuse’ is not the feminine form of ‘journaliste’, it is the feminine form of ‘journaleux’. Journalist, in French or in English, is gender neutral. In French, the article would specify the gender.
Well, more or less. I knew that the modern form in French was ‘journaliste’ for both male and female journalists. When I first saw it I thought that you were using an old-timey (or pseudo-old-timey) English word in order to call attention to her gender (to get kind of similar connotations to “actress”), and when you said that it was due to your not being a native speaker, I looked it up and saw that the French definition had a similar connotation to how I’d originally interpreted it, but did not know about the word “journaleux”. But it seems that “journaleux” is also defined as pejorative. (I speak some French but I’m not a native speaker.)
I had been agnostic on whether you were a native English speaker or simply spoke English so well that it was unlikely that your use of the word was the result of an error–it does seem improbable that the one word you would get wrong would also be a plausibly-deniable comment on the Erdely’s gender. However, I think now that you’re probably telling the truth about it being an honest mistake, so I’m sorry that I drew the wrong conclusion.
@Grace:
Alyssa Rosenberg has really been on a roll lately.
it was unlikely that your use of the word was the result of an error–it does seem improbable that the one word you would get wrong would also be a plausibly-deniable comment on the Erdely’s gender.
It was comment on her journalistic integrity, but not on her gender. Both ‘journaleux’ and ‘journaleuse’ are pejorative – casting an aspersion not on the profession, but on the individual – they are a way of saying ‘a poor excuse for a journalist’.
They are not all that similar to the English ‘journo’ which, as I understand it, is used to convey familiarity or disdain toward the members of the profession as a whole. (I was unaware of that word’s existence before this conversation)
You know, Ron, I think it’s important to remember that fraternities (and athletic teams) did a pretty good job of discrediting themselves when it comes to sexual violence and attitudes towards women—long before this story was published in Rolling Stone. (Check out Peggy Reeves Sanday’s book, Fraternity Gang Rape: Sex, Brotherhood, and Privilege on Campus, the second edition of which was published in 2007.)
I point this out not to defend, excuse or in any way ameliorate the seriousness of Rolling Stones’ lapse—willful or otherwise—and if it does turn out that it was willful, and I include willful ignorance in that, well, you are absolutely right that heads should role somewhere. Nor do I think the fact that there is a problem with rape on campus in any way validates the Rolling Stones piece. At the same time, however, it’s not as if someone somewhere just decided, “Hey, you know what, those privileged, white fraternities boys make a fine target. Let’s go get them.” Given the fraternities’ past behavior, it is in fact reasonable to look there if one is doing a piece about rape on campus.
And, again, just to be clear, I am not saying this to justify or validate anything about the RS piece; I am responding to your assertions about RS’ motives and the implication, intended or not, that somehow fraternities do not deserve, because they have nothing to merit, the kind of scrutiny under which they often come when it comes to issues like this.
BTW, the stalker/scumbag/’journaleux’ who doxxed the woman from the Rolling Stone story has apologized, saying that he may have named the wrong woman.
So there’s that.
I can’t decide if doing something as cruel and sadistic as this to the wrong person is better or worse than doing it to the right person.
—Myca
BTW, the stalker/scumbag/’journaleux’ who doxxed the woman from the Rolling Stone story has apologized, saying that he may have named the wrong woman.
I have to admit that I do not know whom you are talking about. If anything, I am more convinced ‘Jackie’ is the pseudonym of the woman who has been named, or at least uniquely identified, by a succession of journalists, journaleux, and attention seekers, starting at least since December the 6th – this is when I first learned who she was, and I have not seen anything to change my mind, while at least three new data points confirming her identity have come along since.
The first person to really screw up is of course, Erdely, who stated that Jackie was no pseudonym.
Almost immediately, a ‘respectable’ journalist made a big show of how he was struggling not to reveal who the ‘Jackie’ was, and pretty much laid a road map on how to get the info.
At this point, I, driven by my ‘abhorrent’ curiosity took the whole of seven minutes to come up with a list of three names, one of which matched three details of Erdely’s story (the other two were completely unsuitable)
I quickly became more or less convinced of five things:
1) I know who Jackie is, and her Facebook and Pinterest pages shows that she has been a progressive activist for at least three years, long before the time the story in RS is set.
2) She must have been through a horrible ordeal at some point.
3) The specifics of her Rolling Stone story (fraternity, pledges, brutal rape, conspiracy, uniquely identified individuals, creepy friends, horrible administrators) are completely incorrect, and anyone with any experience in investigative anything should have seen it immediately.
4) Everyone at Rolling Stones who was remotely involved in publishing this story needs to pay for their part in the process.
5) Erdely is probably the sorriest excuse for a journalist who has come to my attention in the last few years.
Nothing that has happened since has changed my opinion on any of these things. I am open to anything that would make me improve my understanding of the situation.
Given that we have heard a lot about that report that 1 out of 5 female college students have been victims of sexual assault, and that it’s been cited by numerous people (including people on this blog) in various contexts including this Rolling Stone fable, I think that the following two things should be of interest.
Emily Yoffe, writing in Slate, says that she interviewed the author of that study and that he denied that it should be interpreted as meaning that 1 in 5 female college students nationwide have been subjected to sexual assault.
I’d love to see the full text of that interview, but this is what we have so far.
The second is a DoJ study that just came out. According to it, the incidence of rape and sexual assault among female college students is 0.61%. That’s a little different than 19%. The 2nd and 3rd page of the DoJ report discusses the methodology differences between the two.
RonF, that’s interesting and I’ll look through it later, but I wanted to say quickly for other readers that when you say:
that that IS rape+sexual assault, not just rape, so it’s a less apples-to-oranges comparison that it seems (although what’s included in the definition of sexual assault varies, so it’s not exactly apples to apples either).
I am not saying anything about the validity of the 19% or .61% studies, but I would like to point out that they also use different reporting periods, and different ways of extrapolating.
When you do the “_______ doxxed” search you put so much stock in earlier, he’s the first seven hits, so I’m surprised.
—Myca
Myca, things change in six days.
When I first ran it, it was about ‘Should I tell the world who she is?’ by someone who was at least pretending to journalistic integrity.
When I first posted here about it, most links led to some guy who had published the name I believe is right. That is where I sent Ruchahama.
When I did it this morning, most links lead to people ripping into the same guy, but I saw no sign of him saying that he got the name wrong. I’ll look again.
But seriously, I think we are engaging in spinning our wheels here. Do you disagree with any of the five things I listed above? It does not matter who says what. Do you want the series of steps to follow to get to the name I believe is right, based on details from the story, UVa public records, and Pinterest?(Facebook no longer has the info) Do you want the details from the Daily Mail, Albemarle County, and the UVa statements which match the family of the person whose name you would get from the first step?
That creep is not a genius, and he was far from the first. Once the story was published, it was as easy to find ‘Jackie’ as it was to find the fraternity’s pledges of the year in question whom Erdely’s story accused of crimes that would land them in jail for a decade. Anyone with boots on the ground could have done it. Once Erdely revealed (by accident or by design) that Jackie was not a pseudonym, it became trivial to find the woman in question without leaving your keyboard.
—
Ok, I officially cannot find the retraction in ten minutes. I found seven posts where he admits to mistakes, one of which is related to this story, but it had nothing to do with identifying the wrong woman – it was about incorrectly attributing a poster to the woman he named.
God, people are idiots. When the Daily Mail published Jackie’s father’s account, they pixelated pictures of him and her that they did not, themselves, take. Pixelated pictures that existing, if not freely available, search engines can match to pictures posted by the individuals themselves. And yeah, they matched pictures number 5 and number 138 amongst the ones my 10 line script considered for a match.
You know what? I am not even going to post about this anymore. People who are supposed professionals are not even trying. This wink-wink-nudge-nudge, “Look at us keeping our sources’ identities secret” is just depressing.
RonF,
The Slate article is wrong when it claims that the 0.61 rate is a 4 year cumulative rate. The 0.61 % rate is a per year rate. It comes directly from the NCVS, which asks about crimes committed during the past 12 months.
You just directly compared an annual rate with a 4 year cumulative rate (the Slate article makes the same mistake, so I guess that is why). You (and Slate) also just used the NCVS in a manner that the study you were pointing to makes it pretty clear you shouldn’t (reread page 2 of the report). The NCVS is agreed (by the BJS) to undercount rapes and sexual assaults relative to other study methods, but is still valuable for year-to-year comparisons and demographics (e.g. college students to same age non-college students).
Totally unrelated to anything else being discussed, because this is the open thread.
I just played a really interesting twine game about giving birth called dontPush.
Aaargh. Wrote most of a reply to RonF about Lena Dunham’s book, and then it was lost. I hate it when that happens.
So, to summarize:
1) There’s no reason to assume that Dunham is lying when she says the “Barry” in her book “is a pseudonym, not the name of the man who assaulted me.”
2) There is, on page 4 of a 288 page book, a single instance in which Dunham says she has changed a name (in context, she’s making a joke about how guileless the young man is, saying the name change is “to protect the truly innocent”). From this, Ron concludes with a tone of certainty that no other name in the book could possibly be a pseudoym, even though the book itself has a disclaimer saying “names” (plural) have been changed.
Ron, do I need to spell out how unfair your argument is here?
3) Ron then says that Dunham has been caught out in several lies – by which he means, some details about the real-world Barry don’t match details of the “Barry” in Dunham’s book. Of course, there’s another possibility – which is that Barry and “Barry”‘s details differ because they are not the same person, just as Dunham has said.
4) When I was at Oberlin (86-88), I met several of our campus Republicans (I’d actively seek them out because I enjoyed arguing about politics), but I certainly didn’t meet all of them. For example, I don’t recall meeting Michelle Malkin, who was a student there in 1988. My point is, it’s very believable to me, and I’d wager to any other Obie, that you could attend Oberlin for 4 years without learning the name of every Republican on campus.
5) Ron, you’re doing the same thing you accuse RS of doing – letting your predetermined conclusions shape your conclusions, without regard to evidence. Is it your view that “it’s wrong to publicly accuse people of committing a crime unless there’s strong evidence?,” or are you saying it’s cool when you do that to Dunham, but wrong to do it to Republicans? I’d assume that you’d say your view is the former, but with respect, you don’t seem to be applying that fairness to Dunham at all.
6) By the way, the primary reason people Barry from Oberlin has been associated with the “Barry” in Dunham’s book is that conservative journalists have sought out Barry and publicized his name and the (manufactured by them) connection to Dunham’s account.
But on the subject of prominent Republicans being accused, perhaps falsely, of rape:
Can a Wife With Dementia Say Yes to Sex? – Bloomberg
If it’s a false (or mistaken) accusation – and I think it probably is, but obviously I can’t claim to know for sure – it doesn’t look to me like the case involves political motivations. Rather, it’s a case of some ugly family dynamics mixed with genuinely difficult questions about consent and senior dementia. It’s a good, although depressing, article.
A question for Ron (and others) about the Dunham situation:
A writer was raped years ago in college. Assume, for purposes of this question, that the writer is truthful and really is a rape survivor. However – given how many years ago it was, and that she didn’t report the rape at the time – it is no longer possible to prove that a rape occurred.
In your view, is it ethical and right for the writer to publish writing about her rape, even though she can’t prove the rape happened? Is it ethical for a publisher to publish a book in which she describes the rape, even though the publisher cannot prove the rape happened?
Those are two completely different questions.
If the writer herself was not mistaken as to identity for some reason – or if there is not something else going on – she would know if she had been raped.
The publisher, on the other hand, cannot know if she had been raped given the circumstances you describe (years ago, no report etc.). The risk of some kind of backfire, as in the Dunham case, is high. Aside from possibly unfairly branding someone a rapist.
That sounds more like a practical concern than an ethical concern. Just because something carries a risk of backlash doesn’t mean that doing it is ethically wrong.
What if the writer describes the rape, but uses a fake name for the rapist?
If the writer was really raped, I don’t necessarily see an ethical problem with her writing about it to blow off some steam. She may still get a libel suit, though. You’re kind of putting on a non-real-world metaphysical constraint – third-parties will never know what really happened under the circumstances you describe.
As long as we’re getting metaphysical, however, there have been some mental-illness cases in which the accuser was 100% certain that she had been raped by a specific man. And that wasn’t the case.
What do you think about this tangentially relevant thread on Feminist Critics:
http://www.feministcritics.org/blog/2014/12/08/ally-fogg-looks-at-uva-frat-house-rape-claim-noh/
“That study found that in cases where DNA was dispositive, 15 percent of the convicted defendants of sexual assault charges were exonerated.” – 1 in 6
I think as long as the writer is honest about the limitations–she has no proof, never filed a complaint–affirms that the events are accurate only to the best of her memory, and takes great care to hide the identity of the alleged rapist, she’s on pretty solid ethical grounds. Whether a lawyer would still agree that it’s okay to publish is a different story.
There is also the question of why she’s writing the piece. What the piece’s internal justification is, the point he or she’s trying to make, etc.
I agree – as third parties, we can never know for certain, in many cases. But it seems to me to be too large an infringement on free speech to say that no one should be able to write about being raped – or no one should publish such an account – unless they can prove it took place. (I’m not defending the Rolling Stone piece; I’m saying that some of the pushback I’ve seen against the RS piece has moved too far in the opposite direction.)
I don’t feel up to reading a thread on Feminist Critics today, thanks. Regarding that study, I think that:
1) The most terrifying thing about the study is that there is no effective apparatus in the US for getting provably falsely convicted people out of prison. What should be a routine, built-in mechanism for clearing falsely convictions, is instead an nearly impossible to use system of judicial knobs and levers that for some people are hopelessly out of reach, and for others requires an amazing amount of luck and stubbornness to navigate.
1.5) Of course, we DO have a system that should work for provably, obviously innocent people in prison, which is pardons from governors and presidents. But those people are risk-adverse elected officials, who are very strongly motivated not to issue pardons. Speculation: Maybe pardon-giving authority should reside with people who are appointed, rather than elected, to long but non-extendable terms (so they don’t have to worry about being reappointed).
2) The study looked only at old (1973 to 1987) cases – that is, cases from before modern DNA testing was available to investigators. And then it only looked at cases in which DNA evidence could be dispositive – and about 90% of those were stranger-rape cases. I seriously question whether or not a study of stranger-rape cases from before 1987 can be generalized to tell us anything about current-day false accusations – but that’s certainly how most MRAs use this study. (Not commenting on the FC thread, which I haven’t reread.)
3) That about 90% of these cases were stranger-rape cases suggests to me that most of these cases weren’t purposeful false accusations (that is, a case where someone deliberately accuses someone of rape when they know that the person didn’t commit the rape, or that the rape did not happen), but instead mistaken identifications (a rape actually happened but the wrong person was convicted for it).
http://www.memrijttm.org/islamic-state-isis-releases-pamphlet-on-female-slaves.html#_edn1
Worst. Dating advice. Ever.
Strictly speaking, it isn’t true that “the study only looked at cases in which DNA evidence could be dispositive,” Amp. The study looked at all cases that had been routed to a particular forensics person who handled cases throughout Virginia and had been careful to retain evidence samples, thus allowing the researchers to derive DNA test results in about half of the sexual assault (and homicide) cases they reviewed. The researchers found no reason to presume there was some bias in how these cases represent the outcomes for this polity as a whole.
To be clear, ‘the cases reviewed by this study’ refers to ‘homicides and sexual assaults that were prosecuted and which returned a conviction,’ which could very well — indeed likely do — skew heavily towards ‘stranger rape’ cases in instances involving sexual assaults, as you note.
The reason I’m raising this clarification is that your wording could be incorrectly construed to mean the researchers were themselves specifically focused on one issue (and possibly biased themselves), when in fact their focus was actually broadly concerned with the issue of erroneous convictions generally, and not with what some refer to as the ‘false rape allegation’ issue specifically.
The researchers were obviously unable to exonerate anyone in the half of the sexual assault cases in which DNA would not have been dispositive, so the ‘erroneous conviction’ rate in that segment would have been unknown. If the ‘erroneous conviction’ rate in that segment were zero (a rather unlikely prospect as I would hope you would agree), then the overall erroneous conviction rate would have been about 8%. If the ‘erroneous conviction rate’ in that segment were the same as the rate in the ‘DNA dispositive’ part of the sample, then the overall erroneous conviction rate would have been 15%.
Obviously any conclusion about the overall erroneous conviction rate here would be speculative, other than noting that a minimum of 8% of the sexual assault offenders who were convicted in that time and polity were innocent of the crime they were accused of committing.
Definitely, not “likely.” 92% of the sexual assault convictions the study (pdf link) considered were convictions of strangers. See page 42 of the study.
Really? I don’t think so. In any case, that certainly wasn’t my intention. Thanks for the clarification.
From the right wing blogosphere and parts of the Anonymous collective, some damn fine amateur detective work. Proof that smart people with free time and fast internet can do damn near anything.
http://www.travelerstoday.com/articles/16452/20141216/jessica,chambers,killer,revealed,hacktivist,group,anonymous,new,evidence,found.htm
http://theconservativetreehouse.com/category/justice-for-jessica/
Jessica Chambers: Killer Revealed By Hacktivist Group ‘Anonymous’? New Evidence Found, Man Getting Death Threats
Meh.
There’s nothing substantial there, yet. The police already had the information about the ex-boyfriend, from the shelter’s records. All Anonymous are doing is making law enforcement’s job a little bit harder. You get a lot of good information when you are interviewing people who do not know they, themselves, are under suspicion.
The posting of this investigation’s results would have been useful only if the the police had intended to brush the case under the carpet, and not pursue the ex-boyfriend angle. And I see absolutely no indication of anything like this.
How Academia’s Liberal Bias is Killing Social Science.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/e20/what_is_moral_foundation_theory_good_for/
nobody. Really, interesting find. Essentially, “when your papers can’t pass peer review, research ways to show that your peers suck.” Wishing I had thought of it first.
From the article nobody.really linked:
What kind of loser academics is this guy talking to that he didn’t immediately respond with “millionaires”? Or “stockbrokers”? Or “corporate attorneys”? Or “surgeons”?
As much as conservatives would like to believe that their plight in academia is just like those women/black people/gay people who are underrepresented in various places, the thing that smarmy smug little analyses like these always conveniently omit is that conservatism, like being a millionaire, a stockbroker, a corporate attorney, or a surgeon, and unlike being black, female, or gay, is a matter of the decisions you make and the preferences you possess.
WHY OH WHY ARE ANTI-SKUBS UNDERREPRESENTED IN THE PRO-SKUB CLUB?! It’s so important that we find out, I just can barely stand it.
Please.
Additionally, some of this has to do with the evolving consensus of particular studies. I’d doubt that orthodox Marxists are any more likely to be hired in most economics departments than ‘race realists’ or people who believe that homosexuality is a mental disorder are in most sociology or psychology departments. Do these folks believe that Marxists are being discriminated against, or do they think that the Marxists believe something that Economics as a study has decided is laughably wrong?
Now, I do of course oppose employment discrimination, and if your prospective English professor knows his stuff, it ought to be irrelevant that he voted for Bush. I’d want to ask those who are up in arms about this, though – do you believe that there ought to be a law against firing (or not hiring) someone for being gay?
—Myca
Myca, longer than mine but made the same point. Also, you gave me an idea. I should apply for teaching positions as a phlogiston theory chemist, and a Velikovsky physics expert. Then try to get on Fox News and Murdoch owned magazine covers, complaining about how dem damn librul eggheads are opposed to teaching the debate.
If you can’t beat them, get them to pay you to make fun of them.
Wait, you’re saying that social science ought to be an ideologically biased endeavour rather than an open minded one based on neutral evaluation of evidence? If so, I’m not sure it’s appropriate to use the term ‘science’ to describe the field.
Desipis, do you think the lack of creationists among academic biologists is because academic biology is an ideologically biased endeavor and not really “science,” or do you suppose there might be some other explanation?
From Rethinking the Plight of Conservatives in Higher Education, by Matthew Woessner:
The whole thing is well worth reading.
Ampersand, I understand the metaphore, however I don’t think it is applicable to the political bias in social science.
I tend to see the problem a similar to the problem I see with economics. Those with right-leaning political views will see economic theories as tools to push for and support their pet political ideology. This has lead, based on my observations, to a field that is centred around right-wing ideologies instead of a field that is based on observations of the underlying systems of human behaviour.
The reflex appears to be true for the (other) social sciences. The focus seems to be on how observations of human nature differs from conservative views points in order to justify left political ideologies. I think the ideological bias is detrimental to academic progress in both cases.
Neither economics nor the other social sciences have the scientific rigour and epistemological strength of biology or the hard sciences. To suggest that the ideological biases present in the field are purely the results of the facts conviently supporting one side of the political spectrum comes off as hubris.
This can only be emphasied by some of the theories that come out of social science itself pointing to the potential for group-think and ideological views to cloud judgements. To suggest its important to study society from all perspectives, even those that might be ideologicall uncomfortable for the left, is not the same thing as to suggest that we should give credence to the blind faith of reglious fundamentalists.
Desipis, you are putting the cart before the horse. Evidence and results drive ideology, ideology does not drive the evidence. At least that’s how it works if you want to accomplish anything. If you want the ideology to drive the whole thing, perhaps you would be more comfortable in a place like North Korea?
Desipis, you seem to have switched from discussing alleged bias in academic hiring, to discussing bias in research. It’s okay if you want to discuss something different, but let’s admit hat you’re changing topics.
I certainly agree that there is some biased research out there, from people all over the political map. It’s always useful to look at a particular study, or even a particular and usefully defined group of studies, and to consider and critique bias in the study design(s). I get the impression you do that on your blog, and that’s good.
But in your comment here, in contrast, you use such a broad brush that what you’re saying is useless, except as a way of displaying your own biased, narrow view.
I have a friend who is a professor of political science. In particular, he’s an expert on electoral politics in Vienna centuries ago. The stuff he researches and writes about is extremely technical – it would take an hour to explain the basic outlines of what he studies – and has no possible application to current American politics. That aspect of his work – that is, that he studies things that aren’t even remotely relevant to this year’s partisan struggles – is dead common in the social sciences. Someone out there studies the psychological impact of having a pet on the likelihood of trusting other people – quick, is that a Republican study or a Democratic study?
It’s as if you asked me which was a better tool for inking comics, a hunt 103 nib or a windsor-neuton number 2 brush. My answer would not be biased by politics, because there is no such thing as a left-wing or right-wing answer to that question.
When you’re talking about fields which include so much work with no political implications at all, to say “The focus [of all social sciences apart from econ] seems to be on how observations of human nature differs from conservative views points in order to justify left political ideologies” shows that you’re looking at a field through a very politicized, inaccurate lens.
Social sciences are very large and varied. Just because you’re mainly interested in the most politically applicable research, doesn’t mean that’s all there is.
* * *
Aside: I actually think there’s room for obviously biased researchers. What matters isn’t the bias of the researchers, but if the methodology is sound and the data collected and reported honestly.
No, I’m saying that there’s a lot of self-sorting going on.
I’m saying that it’s not surprising that:
1) People for whom capitalism and wealth acquisition are a primary value are far less likely to take a relatively low pay/high prerequisite job than those who are suspicious of the primary value of wealth.
2) People who are suspicious of the value of public education are far less likely to take a public ed job than those who believe wholeheartedly in the mission of publicly funded educational institutions.
3) People who deride and denigrate the humanities and soft sciences as a waste of time and money are far less likely to take a job in the humanities and soft sciences than those who don’t.
None of these describe all conservatives, of course, but I think if you’re honest you’ll see that all of these describe a significant subset of conservatism that might influence the self-sorting.
And hey, we can test my theory, in a way. Numbers 1 and 3 wouldn’t apply to the business school. What do you think? Are they likely to have more conservatives than the English program?
—Myca
I think it’s reasonable to question the number of conservatives in academia. There are certainly fields where conservative ideas are so against reality that we wouldn’t expect to see any hard-line conservatives to show up, but in something relatively broad like psychology I think there’s probably something to the claim that academia is cliquish in a way that can exclude conservatives–it’s probably the same “good fit for the department” kind of thinking that’s a fine enough idea in general but can be co-opted to keep departments white or male. The most persuasive point I saw on this in the Week article was the fact that fewer people will admit to being conservatives in person than will admit to it on paper.
I’ve read the article RJN linked and found it interesting, but I do think it’s a flaw that they only talk to people who stayed in academia–there are valid reasons they did this, given the data sets they had available, but I would expect that facing discrimination for one’s political viewpoints would make one more likely to choose another career.
There are also many reasons conservatives might be underrepresented in academia that have nothing to do with the bias of the current academics, though, which include the opinions both sides hold about academics; the views on the balancing of personal gain vs public service and the importance of personal wealth; and the underlying attitudes about questioning authority vs accepting authority. Going immediately to discrimination, when conservatives are not discriminated against in other areas of life, is harder to support than going to discrimination when looking at cases of underrepresentation of women/racial minorities/etc, in addition to the points about political conservatism being a choice and not an intrinsic characteristic.
Finally, groupthink isn’t just a problem of ideologically aligned groups. There are plenty of examples from medical science, for example, of incorrect ideas that were widely adopted pretty much without evidence.
desipis:
Sorry, you’ve hit on a hot-button topic of mine: compared to the social sciences, all the physical sciences are straightforward. Of course they look elegant–you can reduce things down to a few principles and explain a large fraction of what is going on. I look at all the variables social scientists have to deal with and despair. Granted, I think most of the methodology could use some work–ugh, the state of the statistics in some of the papers I’ve seen–but even with gold-standard analytic techniques you can’t break down a social science experiment into “thing we want to know and a couple of confounding variables” the way you can a physical science experiment. “Social science is flawed because it isn’t physical science” is not a good argument.
This also makes me want to look at conservative vs liberal self-identifiers at public vs private institutions of higher ed, but the job market is such that most people don’t have the choice so it probably wouldn’t tell us much…
Myca wrote:
I do not disagree at all with the substance or general tenor of Myca’s argument, but I wonder if it would also apply to community colleges—which is, I think, an important question given how central community college education is becoming.
I know very few conservative mathematicians. I’d guess that the conservative people who are interested in math would be more likely to go into business than into math itself.
Hm. I could imagine mathematicians going for Ayn Rand objectivist/libertarian stuff, but I can’t say that I know of any who do.
It’s my understanding that engineers (and business folk, and physicians) tend to be conservative. But do their professors have a liberal bent?
I’m pretty sure that most people who think of making money as a key goal wouldn’t go into academia.
I mean, for me this is like wailing and beating your breast over why there are so few liberal CEOs in the Fortune 500.
Dude. Discrimination doesn’t even need to be a factor.
—Myca
Myca:
theweek.com:
It might not need to be a factor, however there seems to be some evidence that it is a factor. If the numbers were 40% or even 30% then there might be an argument that it can be explained by self sorting. However, once you get to numbers like 6% I think you’ve got to look to other factors as being significant.