Bit late to the party but anyhoo...
Everyone has by know heard of the whole thing where some fucking cobwebbed wazzo'd female brain-eunuch of the law has, no doubt due to her republican fairy of a husband no longer putting out for her any more, decided that she among all other of the tokenista judges, vile and hateful though such ranks be, would get to be one of the first female judges in ameircan hisotry to actually slut shame an actual, literal, slut.
Of course this has strangely been condemned by many a folk.
But let me tell you how it's actually a good thing.
Now I'll be writing apologetics for this bloated sack of dyshuman bastardry. not because I beleive any of the crap I'll be shoveling, but because I am sick and fed up and tired of Jeffy-poo, Trexy-poo, Avorosis-poo, Malkin-poo (the new jersey satanic cybertransvestite him/herself) and Hamsher, and Kosimandius King of Kings having all the fun writing nonsensical apologetics for teh infinite evils that they prop up for shits and money.
Also I should probably mention the classism at some point, as it keeps disappearing in the discussion of such things (usually in between the gap made of "but they're such nice boys" and people being able to decode that not to subtle bundle of codewords used to obfuscate the fuckedupness of their inhumanity) so here ya go: classism is at work, along with racism and of course both of those together form up like voltron in this case to also make it sexism as well. So it's a trifectra, made by a woman but evil like a man.
So the judgette has declared that a protitute was raped, but that that's just "theft of services" or whatever. Well clearly that's a good thing, becuase under US law, rape is a misdemeanor, pushing 30 year old teachers is a federal offence and property crimes get the death penalty, especially when folks be wearing shoes.
So what the judge has quite cleverly done in her redefining the rape as a form of theft, is make it a property crime of a kind, and hence something which won't be taken to trial in a way that treats the victim like the criminal and cause a guzzilliion middle aged fratboys to bitch and whine about how the bitch be clearly lying on account of how if this was on CSI they would have pried fingerrpints out of the air, swabbed a passing high pressure front for DNA samples, whizzed it through the DNA verification thingiemajig in about 5 minutes, and it would have all been sorted out by the second set of commercials.
And yes I know the judge actually equated the rape with "loss of services" and made her trying to actually get the bastards convicted of rape akin to macdonalds suing someone for making hamburgers at home, but THAT's the whole point of apologetics, if it at all matched up with reality then it wouldn't be apologetics in the first place.
Now where'd I put my whisky dammit?
Showing posts with label rapefact. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rapefact. Show all posts
3/18/2007
Destructive Criticism Vs. Constructive Criticism: A Comment
A comment left in response to this buffoon:
Admitting bad judgment on your part if you are a rape victim (or victim of some other crime) is also not “blaming the victim”
Well yes but it's completely irrelevent to the issue at hand: which is rape.
We can tell this because... well let's set up two hyperthetical situations where a rape occurs, both of which involve exactly identical conditions and actions on the part of the man and woman, but one has none of this "bad judgement" radiation emitted by the woman, and the other one does.
Okay so one woman is raped, but there's no "bad judgements" involved (let's ignore your rather curiously open ended and generic conception of "bad judgement", which seems to consist of... well... never giving any guy the benefit of the doubt ever and assuming that they're all rapists a priori) on the other hand another woman is raped, same circumstances, same sort of rape, same reaction to the rape as the first time, but there's this "bad" judgement stuff involved...
so?
That's the problem, you and many other bloggers like you have spent exorbinant amounts of time and billion upon billions of pages of text talking about "resposibility" and "bad judgement" and all that jass... the thing is I've yet to see any of you actually provide a point, a woman shows bad judgement this one time; and? A woman slips up and makes a erroneous assumption or makes a mistaken action; yes? What is the point of this exactly?
You see there's two sorts of criticism: one is destructive criticism, whihc is designed to tear down an arguement or person, and then there's constructive criticism, which is designed to help the target improve in some way.
This criticism you and many many others have whipped out again and again, with nearly the same arguements each time mark you, doesn't constitute constructive criticism, because it is useless for preventing rape, on account of it assuming that there is always things that are really accurate "tells" that the man you're with is likely to have sex with you against your will and basically consists of nothing more than conflating asocial paranoia with sanity.
And if we actually apply it in a real post-rape situation, the destructive nature of it becomes even clearer.
Scenario 2: I have just been raped, and I immediately start trying to figure out what tells were presented which I overlook in an attempt to figure out how to avoid such a situation in the future.
What's wrong with this scenario?
Well for one thing, the rapist's tells are unique to him, because everyone is a unique nad precious snowflake. Second off, I've probably gone out with any number of guys who, presented with the exact same situation that this rapist was, didn't rape me yet at the same time, gave off what, in hindsight, would look like a tell when it came from teh rapist - and which would be overlooked the next time I went on a date if I like the guy (and if I like someone I assume they're not a rapists, beacuse I don't like rapists).
This is called sample bias, and when the datum size equals 1, it's pretty much all biased and there's very little actual trustable data to be analysed because your analysis is running off of nothing less than unsubstantiated assumptions. What actually occurs in these silly little peices (which are produced after all news catching rapes) is that people start pointing out things that they think might be common to rapists, or more often, things that were exploited by specific rapists to rape a woman (which have ranged from "getting into a taxi", to "going out in public without wearing something to cover the temptatious female ankle", all the way to the crazy-ville of "being a lesbian") and which are completely useless if you're not being attacked by that singular specific rapist, or if random guess work and social training isn't correct in what it perceives to be "rapist-like" behavior.
And then there's the sheer uselessness of all this destructive criticism for cases of close aquaintance rape that is committed by people you not only know, but in fact have been going out with, or may have even married (which isn't exactly rare you know) because if you're having that sort of relationship with someone, you like them, you not only want to give them the benefit of the doubt, but you trust them enough to enter into a serious relationship with him.
And in fact, what the sort of presumption of him being a rapist would do is poison your relationship, and you would be doing while having no way of knowing if the tells you're seeing are even accurate warnings of him being a rapist.
Which gets to the ultimate problem with these essays: Ever bit of advice they give out is being ignored by millions of women across teh globe as I type, some woman out there is, right now, ending the evening, fucked off her face with a guy she barely knows who is taking her back to her residence, and will proceed to put herself in every situation that might potentially lead to her getting raped.
And in the morning, she will still not have been raped because merely eliminating instances that a rapist might use to rape you, or failing to, is no garuntee that you will/will not be raped.
Because if a rapists really wants to have you, they can distract you for a split second, slip a roofie in your drink, then take you off to the toilets when you're too drugged to stop him, and you'll spend most of the rest of the evening in casualty getting the rips in your asshole sewn up.
Because there are never enough precautions that could ever possibly garuntee that you won't get raped, and so someone will always be able to another variation of this essay explicating how, in that instance where through a wide variety of rather mundane reasons that largely involved you leaving the house that morning, you were in some way responsible for a man slipping drugs into your drink and violently raping you in the toilets.
And unfortunately there are a grand total of two sane ways to react to that information:
1) grab the shotgun, run to the hills, build a logcabin and live off the land avoiding contact with any other human being for the rest of your life surrounded by cats.
2) Accept fate, and focus on actually enjoying yourself considering that at any moment the next person you meet might be a closet ted bundy who'll rape and murder you (and not neccesarily in that order).
So take your pick of reactions, because I don't care because I don't personally feel a pressing need to pat myself on the back while also performing cunninglingus on myself because I have had the good fortune not to have been raped at some point in my life.
And because I don't engage in that sort of self-centred waffling, I don't have people say things like, I dunno.. GIVING DESTRUCTIVE CRITICISM TO RAPE VICTIMS IS JUST PLAIN WRONG YOU ASSHOLE.
because you're right, it's not blaming the victim exactly, but is still wrong in a whole special morally repugnant way all its own.
Admitting bad judgment on your part if you are a rape victim (or victim of some other crime) is also not “blaming the victim”
Well yes but it's completely irrelevent to the issue at hand: which is rape.
We can tell this because... well let's set up two hyperthetical situations where a rape occurs, both of which involve exactly identical conditions and actions on the part of the man and woman, but one has none of this "bad judgement" radiation emitted by the woman, and the other one does.
Okay so one woman is raped, but there's no "bad judgements" involved (let's ignore your rather curiously open ended and generic conception of "bad judgement", which seems to consist of... well... never giving any guy the benefit of the doubt ever and assuming that they're all rapists a priori) on the other hand another woman is raped, same circumstances, same sort of rape, same reaction to the rape as the first time, but there's this "bad" judgement stuff involved...
so?
That's the problem, you and many other bloggers like you have spent exorbinant amounts of time and billion upon billions of pages of text talking about "resposibility" and "bad judgement" and all that jass... the thing is I've yet to see any of you actually provide a point, a woman shows bad judgement this one time; and? A woman slips up and makes a erroneous assumption or makes a mistaken action; yes? What is the point of this exactly?
You see there's two sorts of criticism: one is destructive criticism, whihc is designed to tear down an arguement or person, and then there's constructive criticism, which is designed to help the target improve in some way.
This criticism you and many many others have whipped out again and again, with nearly the same arguements each time mark you, doesn't constitute constructive criticism, because it is useless for preventing rape, on account of it assuming that there is always things that are really accurate "tells" that the man you're with is likely to have sex with you against your will and basically consists of nothing more than conflating asocial paranoia with sanity.
And if we actually apply it in a real post-rape situation, the destructive nature of it becomes even clearer.
Scenario 2: I have just been raped, and I immediately start trying to figure out what tells were presented which I overlook in an attempt to figure out how to avoid such a situation in the future.
What's wrong with this scenario?
Well for one thing, the rapist's tells are unique to him, because everyone is a unique nad precious snowflake. Second off, I've probably gone out with any number of guys who, presented with the exact same situation that this rapist was, didn't rape me yet at the same time, gave off what, in hindsight, would look like a tell when it came from teh rapist - and which would be overlooked the next time I went on a date if I like the guy (and if I like someone I assume they're not a rapists, beacuse I don't like rapists).
This is called sample bias, and when the datum size equals 1, it's pretty much all biased and there's very little actual trustable data to be analysed because your analysis is running off of nothing less than unsubstantiated assumptions. What actually occurs in these silly little peices (which are produced after all news catching rapes) is that people start pointing out things that they think might be common to rapists, or more often, things that were exploited by specific rapists to rape a woman (which have ranged from "getting into a taxi", to "going out in public without wearing something to cover the temptatious female ankle", all the way to the crazy-ville of "being a lesbian") and which are completely useless if you're not being attacked by that singular specific rapist, or if random guess work and social training isn't correct in what it perceives to be "rapist-like" behavior.
And then there's the sheer uselessness of all this destructive criticism for cases of close aquaintance rape that is committed by people you not only know, but in fact have been going out with, or may have even married (which isn't exactly rare you know) because if you're having that sort of relationship with someone, you like them, you not only want to give them the benefit of the doubt, but you trust them enough to enter into a serious relationship with him.
And in fact, what the sort of presumption of him being a rapist would do is poison your relationship, and you would be doing while having no way of knowing if the tells you're seeing are even accurate warnings of him being a rapist.
Which gets to the ultimate problem with these essays: Ever bit of advice they give out is being ignored by millions of women across teh globe as I type, some woman out there is, right now, ending the evening, fucked off her face with a guy she barely knows who is taking her back to her residence, and will proceed to put herself in every situation that might potentially lead to her getting raped.
And in the morning, she will still not have been raped because merely eliminating instances that a rapist might use to rape you, or failing to, is no garuntee that you will/will not be raped.
Because if a rapists really wants to have you, they can distract you for a split second, slip a roofie in your drink, then take you off to the toilets when you're too drugged to stop him, and you'll spend most of the rest of the evening in casualty getting the rips in your asshole sewn up.
Because there are never enough precautions that could ever possibly garuntee that you won't get raped, and so someone will always be able to another variation of this essay explicating how, in that instance where through a wide variety of rather mundane reasons that largely involved you leaving the house that morning, you were in some way responsible for a man slipping drugs into your drink and violently raping you in the toilets.
And unfortunately there are a grand total of two sane ways to react to that information:
1) grab the shotgun, run to the hills, build a logcabin and live off the land avoiding contact with any other human being for the rest of your life surrounded by cats.
2) Accept fate, and focus on actually enjoying yourself considering that at any moment the next person you meet might be a closet ted bundy who'll rape and murder you (and not neccesarily in that order).
So take your pick of reactions, because I don't care because I don't personally feel a pressing need to pat myself on the back while also performing cunninglingus on myself because I have had the good fortune not to have been raped at some point in my life.
And because I don't engage in that sort of self-centred waffling, I don't have people say things like, I dunno.. GIVING DESTRUCTIVE CRITICISM TO RAPE VICTIMS IS JUST PLAIN WRONG YOU ASSHOLE.
because you're right, it's not blaming the victim exactly, but is still wrong in a whole special morally repugnant way all its own.
2/17/2007
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:
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.
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.
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