A correction, and something for the Ignorant and otherwise hard of thinking out there

First of all, I realise I kept calling whatsiface Donohue "donohoe" in that last post, this was not as a way to make a cheap pun or to besmirch the name of prostitutes by comparing them to that stain, but was a sincere error on my part.

My apologies to all hoes.

Second off, I finally found out why that Duke Rape quote from amanda was referred to by WaPo, here's from the comments at Comment is Free:

I don't know enough about McEwan's previous writing to comment on the dispute, but I have very little sympathy for the other ex Edwards blogger Amanda Marcotte. If she was unfairly smeared as anti catholic then no doubt that is bad but it is not nearly as serious as the smears she was still spreading about the falsely accused Duke Lacrosse players whom she was calling rapists months after anyone could still believe that, at the very least her lack of respect for the truth is startling.

Perhaps it is only a smear campaign when people are making accusations against pampared bloggers, but when the smears are about the victims of bogus rape accusations then it is simply 'fierce feminists' offering strong opinions.

In short if you dish it out you must learn to take it.

Emphasis mine.

Now I'm just gonna ignore that "dish it out" bullshit, because last I checked (in my local reality at any rate) death threats was not the equivalent reaction to someone stating their view of the duek rape case, nor do the rich pampered bleached assholes who joke about flaying strippers alive for giggles and shit really need to be defended - as ankh morpork assassin's guild notes, while they will only accept contracts on the lives of people who can readily defend themselves from such contracts, anyone who has enough money to hire someone to defend them can be considered to be able to defend themselves - and so too were the Duke Rapists readily able to whip out high priced and soulless legal eagles to protect them all from the vile evils of a poor black stripper. Compare this to a feminist blogger's ability to defende herself from threats against her life - and anyone with brains enough to think knows that a threat to their life is nothing less than a threat to the lives of all their loved ones as well, because htey can't afford to be wrong about any silly notions they might have that a person who lacks morals enough to make a death threat has just enough morals to limit their any attempst to kill them only to them and not their immediate family, friends and pets. It ain't stupid for a person to defend themselves, fuck Kant, which in this particular case meant resigning.

But, putting all those things aside, the idiot there does highlight an all too common misconception about the american legal system:

A trial does not prove a person is "innocent", nor does it prove that they have been "falsely accused".

The legal process in america works like this; the court assumes a priori - that is, before any evidence by either side is put forth before the court - that those accused of a crime are guiltless - innocent is what it's called in the colloquial so that legal types and jurors know how they should treat the accused, basically they are not allowed to presume guilt prior to the trial itself, they are however not really supposed to assume that the accuser is a evil conniving whore - the court also assumes a priori that she is not making a false accusation, despite that being the logical conclusion that would be drawn from the accused being assumed "innocent" precisely because the accused is assumed "guiltless" rather than actually "innocent" - the juror and court is supposed to be as impartial and fair as is humanely possible.

This means, in the end, that the court does not even attempt to "prove" anyone "innocent", it instead places the entire burden of proof upon the prosecution - this is why trials that turn up a "not guilty" verdict do not immediately put the accuser on trial for a false claim or wasting police and the court's time, by putting forth a "not guilty" verdict the court is not saying; "this person(s) is innocent", they are instead saying; "meh, (s)(t)he(y) may have done it, but irregardless of all that, the prosecution could not prove, note emphasis, to the standard of evidence that this court requires that the accused was definately guilty."

This subtle distinction can be found with even a quick look over the language used by courts.

For instance, compare these two words; "not guilty" and "innocent".

You may notice that the first once is spelt with an "n", an "o", a "t", a space, a "g", a "u", an "i", an "l", another "t" and finally a "y", while the other isn't.

Feminists who aren't directly on the jury are not held to the same standard of evidence as the court, and can fucking well look at things like the victim being offered a million large to shut up and go away by the defense, note her refusing that, and then make the obvious conclusion that she is either A) clinically insane to degree that the defense would have used such a condition against her with actual honest to god medical witnesses pronouncing her "three fries short of a happy meal" (to use the technical term) and B) telling the truth and was sexually abused in a seriously traumatic manner by several members of the duke lacrosse team, who also decided that it just wasn't fucked up enough and so also decided to racialize the assault as well, and make sure she didn't get ideas above her color.

I view rape trials with the question "why the fuck would this person lie for Sweet Chocolate Cthulhu's sake!?" burning in my mind, rather than to the court's standard, which was even more fucked up in this case because she had to provide proof not that she was raped, but she was raped in a manner that the court recognised as rape.

I of course wouldn't want the courts to assume my standard of "why would they lie though?", because it's not a fair standard for a court to use by any degree, but I also don't particularly like people calling the victim a lying whore because she couldn't prove, without a shadow of a doubt no less, that she was raped in this specific way, and so the rapist scumbags got off because they raped in this over way that the court classed as crime No.45569678/A.

That's also not fair, nor impartial, and of course slanted the whole thing towads the defense, and while the standard of "guiltless until proven otherwise" also does this to a small degree, the bullshit word lawyering that got the rapists off in this case meant that, no matter what had happened, the prosecutor couldn't have ever proven guilt because of the undue and biased standard of proof the rape victim was asked to provide.

And of course the saddest thing of all is that such a ridiculous standard being used in a rape trial is far from uncommon, or unusual, and in fact heads towards being standard practice for the systematic and common secondary assault upon rape victims who dare get uppity and foolishly try to get the system to administer something akin to justice.

And don't get me started on the fact that the so called "innocence" of the rapists is based largely on the overblown wind-baggery of the defense, who proclaimed every bit of non-proof-of-innocences as actual proof of innocence, and strangely enough no one who calls the victim a liar seems to recall how many time such examples of the defense's wind-baggery was slapped down rather easily by the defense, if reality in and of itself didn't make their claims fatuitous and inane in the extreme.

Nor do they note that the defense is legally stopped from fighting such media pandering wind-baggery with equivalent news conferences, even while they point to such absences as undeniable proof of her guilt as the entirely defenceless stripper was accused of every manner of evil the defense could think up to throw at her.

If you didn't know any of those facts before you commented on the duke rape case, please kindly shut the fuck up, no one likes to see someone be ignorant all over themselves.

They certainly don't want to clean up the mess afterwards. The john is that way if you really must spew your nastiness, just don't ask me to hold your hair back while you do, because quite frankly you sicken me even when you're not blowing chunks of recycled shit all over the place.