It's good to hear somebody supporting heaving drinking.
We had a high profile rape trial that ended in an acquittal a few years ago. I don't think people consider this a false report, exactly. Reasonable doubt is a tough standard.
I liked that article. I would really like a punchy, slogany formulation of the idea that while it's obviously not true that women literally never lie about sexual assault or harassment, that the point is that women don't lie all the time for no reason. And that's a good breakdown of reasons someone might lie.
Like, the cultural narrative around the idea that there are a lot of false rape accusations after consensual sex assumes that consensual sex is the sort of thing that leads women to be overcome with bitter rage and wanting to injure their partners any way they can. And, if that's how either party is coming out of an event of consensual sex, someone's doing something wrong.
I think it is very likely that men who think that about women and consensual sex are for the most part doing thing wrong.
I don't have time to read the whole article right now, but the number of false accusations is a really tricky thing to evaluate. For one thing, the study cites the Nat Registry of Exonerations as showing that the number of exonerated murderers is much higher than the number of exonerated rapists. There are lots of red flags here because there are other compelling reasons that that might be the case, other than a disparity in the number of false accusations. For one thing, the Innocence Project, which in many states is the leading motivator for exonerations, focuses primarily on death row and life sentences, which are obviously much more common in murder cases than in rapes.
Anyway, I haven't spent much time thinking about the issue, but it strikes me that a good way to find yourself thinking that women are filled with bitterness after consensual sex is to use deceit, pressure, and false promises to obtain "consent" for sex.
Right -- number of false accusations is a completely weird statistic to throw around, because I can see all sorts of reasons to get both false positives and false negatives. It's obviously possible to get both truthful accusations that are ultimately disbelieved, and false accusations that aren't discovered, and getting at the rate of either is not something that seems like there's any obvious way to do.
7 to 5, and 6 also sounds about right -- that anyone who thinks embittered rage is a normal reaction to consensual sex is intentionally getting at best very close to the line in terms of what constitutes consent.
Like, the cultural narrative around the idea that there are a lot of false rape accusations after consensual sex assumes that consensual sex is the sort of thing that leads women to be overcome with bitter rage and wanting to injure their partners any way they can. And, if that's how either party is coming out of an event of consensual sex, someone's doing something wrong.
On a college campus, it would go, "We had sex and then she regretted it and didn't want her boyfriend to find out, so she claimed rape" or "We had sex and she fell in love because you know how girls are, and then she got so angry because I didn't want a relationship." So the hypothetical projected bitter rage in either case isn't tied to the consensual sex exactly, but rather in things not going her way in the world of love and relationships.
The murder situation is a bit different, as there's almost never an issue of whether someone was really murdered, just who did it. Wrong conviction is a different axis from false accusation. I wouldn't at all be surprised if there's a high wrongful conviction rate for rapes for the reasons in 5, but I'd guess it's mostly cases of mistaken identity.
Really? In the age of DNA testing? It's hard for me to imagine a wrongful conviction due to mistaken identity, unless you specifically mean due to a super racist judicial process.
I was interested in the part about false accusations too. I followed the link and thought they were being pretty rigorous. It's impossible to be sure of anything like this, but the author definitely is using "false accusation" in a way that's stronger and more specific than "failed to convince a jury."
11: Analogous to murder yes I'd assume it's mostly racism-driven, and mostly pre-DNA convictions still on the book. But for both murder and rape sometimes there's still not good DNA evidence
9: the problem with this narrative is always, "why not just keep her mouth shut then, instead of accusing someone of rape and then getting called a lying slut for the rest of her college career?"
And also, just the disproportionality of it. People get angry at each other all the time without framing each other for felonies. For that narrative to make sense, you have to believe that women are poised to make false accusations of major crimes as soon as they're irate -- basically, that women are hair-trigger liars on this issue.
That's the thing I want a punchy slogan for -- not that lying about rape is impossible, but that there's no reason at all to think that a woman is wildly more likely to frame a man for rape than anyone is to frame anyone for any other major crime.
I haven't read the linked article yet, but the thing that I find most frustrating about these discussions (not here, but generally) is that people seem to conflate very different situations under one umbrella:
1. Falsely accusing a specific person of rape when in fact it was consensual
2. Falsely accusing a specific person of rape when in fact there was no contact at all
3. Falsely claiming to have been raped by a stranger/unnamed person when in fact the claimant is trying to cover up some other activity
I get the feeling that a lot of people think #1 is by far the most common, followed by #2, whereas my impression is that #3 is at least as common as the other two. That can still lead to an innocent person being targeted, of course, especially if the claimant selects somebody in a lineup, but it doesn't have the same immediate power on someone's life.
Now off to read the linked article, which probably delves into all of this.
For that narrative to make sense, you have to believe that women are poised to make false accusations of major crimes as soon as they're irate -- basically, that women are hair-trigger liars on this issue.
I think it's projection. People who always try to cheat the system are the ones who are convinced that all SNAP recipients are con artists. People who are racist are convinced that black people are the real racists. People who are aggressively homophobic are closeted. Etc.
You don't have to ever think twice about the interior life of women - you just have to know that you'd lie in a heartbeat to screw over a woman in bed, and then project that she'd do the same.
People get angry at each other all the time without framing each other for felonies. For that narrative to make sense, you have to believe that women are poised to make false accusations of major crimes as soon as they're irate -- basically, that women are hair-trigger liars on this issue.
Especially nowadays in our society. In times and places when a woman's life would in fact be ruined by allegations of promiscuity, becoming unemployable, becoming unmarriageable, disowned by the family, etc, maybe women would be more likely to make false accusations because there was so much to lose.
The college bros might make the claim in (9), but I guara-damn-tee you a good chunk, maybe even most of them are actually worried about not being able to have sex with women who are drunk or high.
I completely agree with everything LB has said. I also agree with 18, with the added bonus that I'm pretty sure a big chunk of men don't see women as human in the same way they are. Women are mysterious hormonal irrational creatures who are completely incomprehensible and need to be trained like dogs or naughty children to be good obedient housewives. Also, women are deep down sexual objects, and men should be allowed to do whatever he wants to one as long as he is of the right status.
but I guara-damn-tee you a good chunk, maybe even most of them are actually worried about not being able to have sex with women who are drunk or high.
Ugh, this is probably right.
It's well written, and the point that it's worth thinking about particular cases and motivations is worth emphasizing, also just how uncommon false accusations are.
That said, to 16 and 18, family law and divorce are another place where radically different perceptions of reality and malice show up pretty often. Actually, bad breakups as well.
I guess at some level this is a "not all men" response, about bad faith rather than violence. Hopefully that doesn't get read as excusing assault.
Framing, basically-- "intimate disagreement is acrimonious," versus "violent liars don't act better with their intimate partners."
I actually think 23 is an excellent point.
Are there any statistics of false allegations of child abuse or child sexual abuse around custody disputes? I actually know a person who went through this in the worst possible way, culminating in their 6 year old taking the stand about alleged sexual abuse from when she was 3.
23 is good from the POV of why people are open to the idea of false rape allegations. I'm not claiming at all that the acrimony that accompanies divorces is at all like the acrimony after a drunk hook up.
That said, to 16 and 18, family law and divorce are another place where radically different perceptions of reality and malice show up pretty often
False accusations of major crimes are still pretty rare, even in that context, and I'm not aware of statistics showing (and maybe they're out there) that women in the course of divorcing are disproportionately likely to frame their ex-husbands for major crimes.
That is, I get what you're saying, sort of, but I'm not sure what you think it means in this context in any kind of detail.
Having had those feeling myself before, I can confirm that in my case the worries were not bad faith expressions of desire to hook up with impaired people, but good faith expressions of an irrational fear that, however unlikely, my entire life could be ruined if someone decided to make a false accusation. We understand how people can be irrationally fearful of other low-risk activities (e.g. flying), and this was similar. I have since lost those fears in part because I have finally internalized how unlikely they really are.
More to 23 -- and even saying that things happen during during divorces and major breakups, this still seems to miss the sense of disproportionality. That is, the breakdown of a marriage is a major life event, and people do crazy things around it (I would never have put soapstone countertops in my new kitchen if I hadn't been off-balance during mine). Consensual sex with someone you don't know well (which is often what people seem to be thinking of when talking about false accusations of rape) is not a major life event unless you're Glenn Close in _Fatal Attraction_, and thinking that any random woman is likely to frame their consensual sex partners for rape seems, again, to impute hairtrigger malignity without much in the way of plausible motivation.
Well, 26 makes sense as well. When you tell a class that a large chunk of them are in danger of failing, the A students panic and the F students assume you're talking about someone else. (Not in MY classes. #notallclasses)
25. pretty rare Sure, and Newman makes the good point in the original article that there are only few women who make them.
Agreed about major crimes, not so sure about accusations of bad behavior in order to come out ahead in a custody dispute or divorce ruling where one side has to be at fault. These accusations are easily made and hard to prove, for both men and women.
The most heartbreaking cases of likely false accusation and horrible child custody I know about personally are not like that-- those are cases where all involved are people barely holding it together and not doing well. Part of what Newman's saying (the way I read her) is that it's not good to extrapolate into or out from those cases.
Agreed about major crimes,
Right, which is what we were talking about -- false accusations of rape.
Certainly, people in divorces say bad things about their ex-partners all the time, but I'm not quite sure how that fits in with the original post.
31: It helps explain why people are quick to believe that women would falsely accuse men of rape - overgeneralizing the acrimony of divorce and break-ups to other sexual encounters.
I think it's projection.
I sometimes wonder if there's anything but projection left on the right?
I hadn't seen 27 when I wrote 32. Nevermind.
Soapstone counters!
I really thought 33 was going to be a dirty pun.
34: They're really soft, and I have cast-iron pans and careless children. I.e., after a little over a year they're chipped all to hell.
There are some benefits to coming out as a victim if you love sympathetic attention. Total strangers will call you brave and maybe even give you heartfelt thanks for helping them summon the courage to speak out. At this point, journalists at most major news outlets will treat your story respectfully.
I love sympathy and attention, so 5 random lowlifes sending me harassing DMs vs. 1 person whose opinion I care about calling me a hero, I'd consider that deal. It's an embarassing motivation though -- kind of like imagining who would cry at your funeral.
I still #believewomen because even from where I'm at, to get to a false accusation you have to add in an extra layer of sociopathy (not caring about the effect on whoever you're accusing) and risk-tolerance (since if you're caught in a lie everyone will turn on you). So maybe this is a counterproductive point to be making.
How do you think Anthony Rapp's drawing power today compares to his drawing power in August?
Many have been falsely accused of rape when they were just innocently busting up a chiffarobe.
According to Google, I have to read a novel to understand that.
37: The point I've been making is about the sociopathy (which I'm not sure is the right diagnostic term, but I know roughly what you mean) -- that that is not a common level of sociopathy at all. Which makes sense, when you think about it, right? People very rarely do frame other people for felonies, even if they might like to on some level.
If you go back to the OP, the researcher who wrote the linked article says that in substantiated cases of false accusations, that sort of casual sociopathy doesn't show up: you get frightened teenagers trying to establish an alibi; seriously mentally ill people; people trying to get revenge on an enemy (although the researcher notes that this category doesn't often include revenge for a romantic injury); and someone with financial gain to be had from the false accusation.
I guess a good first step to protect yourself would be to avoid dating teenagers. I'm looking at you in the back there, the older gentleman from Alabama holding the stone tablets.
More to 37: Also, that's really not what presidentiality is for. If you want to say something personal about your life that you don't want your ongoing identity attached to, that's fine.
Wanting to take positions that you don't want attached to an ongoing identity because you're afraid people will think badly of you? You should either find some more reasonable people to talk to, suck it up and own your beliefs, or maybe think about if something feels too scary to say under your own identity, it might be because it is something that you genuinely shouldn't be standing behind.
Wanting to take positions that you don't want attached to an ongoing identity because you're afraid people will think badly of you? You should either find some more reasonable people to talk to . . .
Ah, but it's the internet. Somebody could be willing to have their opinions attached to an ongoing identity that's recognizable here, and still not want it googleable.
I'm not following you. That is, President Pierce doesn't appear to want his opinions attached to his ongoing identity. Do you have some reason to think he does?
SOME of us even use the same presidential pseud enough that it winks at people here while hopefully coasting under the radar of other people.
Maybe we could use "Opinionated Soviet Tank Commander/Lactation Consultant" for that?
Well, right. You are hardly disguised; Teddy Roosevelt is I think consistently the same police commissioner; if Franklin Pierce is that kind of open secret then 42 doesn't apply. Is it and I'm missing something?
Not missing anything. The rest of the family is out of town and I'm commenting compulsively without contributing.
"it might be because it is something that you genuinely shouldn't be standing behind"
I think that possibility is fairly likely, I posted 37 partially to hear people talk me out of it, and I want to minimize the chance that it'll ever be tied to my real life precisely for that reason.
Maybe "Benjamin Franklin Pierce" would be a better name for that?
Okay -- so, I'm being tetchy with you because what you're doing annoys me, but substantively, am I making sense? Saying "I can imagine a possible emotional benefit from making a false accusation of rape, so it can't be all that unlikely" is nuts. Of course anyone can imagine a possible benefit from pretending to have been hurt, babies and professional soccer players do it all the time.
But that sort of benefit is insanely disproportionate to the size of the injury inflicted by a directed false accusation of rape, which is why it's a terribly unlikely thing to do. People don't stab other people because they think red is a pretty color.
And honestly, once you're being skittish enough to not use your real identity, you might as well say something definite enough to argue with.
That is, what you said is "There are some benefits to coming out as a victim if you love sympathetic attention." Which, sure.
What you implied by saying it in this thread, and by being too nervous to sign your name, is that that's an important thing to consider when people think about the prevalence and causes of false rape accusations. You didn't actually say that, of course, so disagreeing with you about it is terribly rude of me. But I can't think of another reason to bring it up in this thread. If that's what you mean, spit it out.
I have no idea of how often false criminal accusations of rape are made but it seems to me overwhelmingly intuitive that they don't happen much. Using the criminal system to deal with rape means that there are some very strong disincentivizes against false accusation -- your accusation gets thoroughly investigated, the perpetrator has all kinds of rights, you have to go through a brutal cross examination to get justice, etc.,etc. So it certainly feels probable that the main false accusers are either crazy people, criminals, or stupid people being pressured by others (e.g., teenagers being told to report after making up a lie to excuse missing curfew, or whatever).
To me, the harder and more current issue seems to me to be accusations of assault or misconduct in processes that aren't criminal, like campus proceedings, or calls to HR, or civil suits, or publicizing the perpetrator's name on social media. Systems outside the criminal law have fewer disincentives against false accusations. And this is especially true when you're talking about sexual assault broadly, not just rape alone. At the same time, and despite having lower disincentives to false accusation, these same systems have been massively underused: because, in part, of victims' fear of reprisals and perhaps an overzealousness in protecting against false accusations. So you'd like to see them used more. But more use of non-criminal processes almost certainly mans more false accusations. Still, this does not mean that false accusations, while there will likely be more of them, will be a very significant percentage of the total accusations. And the price of suppressing accusations in general as a way of weeding out the risk of false accusations is way too high and lets a lot of serial abusers go free.
So the bottom line, it seems to me, is that we're just going to have to deal with an increase in false accusations (though they will remain a small proportion of total accusations) and (some) moments of (some) unfairness to (some) men in the name of broader social transformation. That will royally suck for some men involved who will have to work to clear their name but the net benefit of allowing people to talk about sexual assault without fear of reprisal will be worth it. I don't see any way way around some tradeoff, though.
tl;dr some injustice to a few men may be the price of a less rapey society and that's probably fine on net.
I have no idea of how often false criminal accusations of rape are made but it seems to me overwhelmingly intuitive that they don't happen much. Using the criminal system to deal with rape means that there are some very strong disincentivizes against false accusation -- your accusation gets thoroughly investigated, the perpetrator has all kinds of rights, you have to go through a brutal cross examination to get justice, etc.,etc. So it certainly feels probable that the main false accusers are either crazy people, criminals, or stupid people being pressured by others (e.g., teenagers being told to report after making up a lie to excuse missing curfew, or whatever).
To me, the harder and more current issue seems to me to be accusations of assault or misconduct in processes that aren't criminal, like campus proceedings, or calls to HR, or civil suits, or publicizing the perpetrator's name on social media. Systems outside the criminal law have fewer disincentives against false accusations. And this is especially true when you're talking about sexual assault broadly, not just rape alone. At the same time, and despite having lower disincentives to false accusation, these same systems have been massively underused: because, in part, of victims' fear of reprisals and perhaps an overzealousness in protecting against false accusations. So you'd like to see them used more. But more use of non-criminal processes almost certainly mans more false accusations. Still, this does not mean that false accusations, while there will likely be more of them, will be a very significant percentage of the total accusations. And the price of suppressing accusations in general as a way of weeding out the risk of false accusations is way too high and lets a lot of serial abusers go free.
So the bottom line, it seems to me, is that we're just going to have to deal with an increase in false accusations (though they will remain a small proportion of total accusations) and (some) moments of (some) unfairness to (some) men in the name of broader social transformation. That will royally suck for some men involved who will have to work to clear their name but the net benefit of allowing people to talk about sexual assault without fear of reprisal will be worth it. I don't see any way way around some tradeoff, though.
tl;dr some injustice to a few men may be the price of a less rapey society and that's probably fine on net.
So pointless to say, and I said it twice.
I would say that while you're right about lower procedural safeguards outside of the criminal justice system is clearly true, I doubt that has all that much of an effect on numbers of false accusations -- I think what I've been talking about, in terms of lack of remotely proportionate motivation for false accusations in most cases holds true even in the campus administrative proceeding context, and I would expect that swamps the effect of the procedural safeguards.
But that's me guessing. There could certainly be a perceptible effect.
Sure, but to the extent you're making it easier for women to come forward in (e.g.) the campus context you're also making it easier for false accusers to come forward. I don't think the cost of a mild increase false accusers is anywhere close to offsetting the benefit of having more women come forward, because as you say there are still countervailing pressures against false accusation, but there's got to be some increase in false accusation that goes along with making accusation in general easier and people should just accept that as the price of making things better. I think.
58 to 56. And I'm not just guessing -- I have no real idea what I'm talking about.
51, 52:
-I agree that the number of people willing to ruin someone's life on a false charge of any kind, murder, rape, whatever, is extremely small. Quantitatively, I agree with 51 that this is the biggest effect.
-I'd expect more false accusations in areas where guilt is harder to prove and disprove. I don't know how large this effect is.
-In the service of a good cause, people often make the argument that being an accuser is all downside, and that doesn't feel emotionally true to me.
-I may be letting sampling bias color my views overly much. To use my earlier example, Anthony Rapp is doing fine now, but there may be other people who also tried to come forward but the journalist they talked to didn't succeed in getting the piece legally cleared, and they face all the personal and professional consequences of crossing famous people without any You Go's to compensate.
Do you think that the possibility of any significant number of women who want to accuse someone of raping them because of the sympathy they'll get for it is a significant issue that needs to be discussed in this context?
Do you think it drives any significant number of false accusations of rape?
If you do think that, I'd like you to say it.
If you don't think it, why do you keep bringing it up?
I'll arbitrarily define "significant" to mean "more than 10% of accusations" so that I can answer with a definitive "no".
I'm bringing it up because it alarms me when people who I see as being on "my team" use arguments that I don't understand or can't relate to.
I'm not following you. That is, President Pierce doesn't appear to want his opinions attached to his ongoing identity. Do you have some reason to think he does?
That was a drive-by comment, sorry. I wasn't thinking of Franklin Pierce, specifically, just making a general argument for broad standards of tolerance towards people choosing to go presidential -- and pointing out that there are cases in which somebody might not mind revealing their identity to us, but still chose not to use an established pseudonym.
That say, I think the following exchange demonstrates your point that Franklin Piece is imposing somewhat on the community (in that he's asking other people do more of the work of making an argument without putting much up himself), but that's also not a terrible offense.
Have you considered that the problem here is that you're an idiot who lacks empathy?
You look at what you imagine the downsides of making a false accusation of rape might be, and think that to you they look fairly comparable to the sympathy you think you'd get for it. People who have actually been in the position of having to complain of having been raped, on the other hand, are pretty close to unanimous in saying that the aftermath was traumatic on a level comparable to the rape itself. That's netting out whatever sympathy they got out of the deal.
Saying that a false accuser gets no benefit out of it (barring freak cases where there's a financial motive, or revenge) doesn't mean she gets literally no sympathy, it means that the expected aftermath of making an accusation of rape is wildly unpleasant for the accuser in total.
18: I know that's something I should have thought of before, but, OMG, that totally explains my horrible uncle. Who totally said that Oprah and Bill Cosby's success prove that there's no racism, but who also took money from a client of his. I found that he was disciplined by the people who regulate insurance agents.
Was he an insurance agent? Because otherwise, it seems worse.
I've definitely read accounts by victims who describe the fallout as utterly horrific, and that's the root of my discomfort with my own point here. On the other hand, if hypothetically one were enjoying the fallout, it would ruin the effect to talk about it.
Anyway, sympathy is great and all, but I think it's generally not compensatory.
Jesus wept. Stick with the part of your brain that told you not to say this shit where you'd have to own it, but stop doing it here.
In other news, we have two more men added to the bad list today, fedora-wearing newsman Glenn Thrush and legendary interviewer Charlie Rose. Both seem to be surprises except to people in their professional networks.
Combined with the stories about the NPR executives, we have gone past the low-hanging fruit of men who have been famous for decades specifically for being creeps (Ratner, Weinstein, Toback, Spacey, Terry Richardson) and into a seemingly random selection of men who have not been the subject of public rumors. From looking at the journalists/academics/etc I always look at on Twitter, today seems to be a bit of a turning point. Men on Twitter in general are feeling compelled to say variations on "I had no idea it was this bad" and women in Twitter in general are feeling compelled to say on "I had no idea men were so naive. I thought they were aware of what our lives are like but it really seems like they weren't".
I go steal candy from the Halloween stash and come back to everybody yelling at me.
I'm still back where I was when I last commented. (I've been away from the computer all day -- when's the last time I rhapsodized about driving US89? Count today as a new installment.)
The acquitted defendant thought (or said he thought) it was a false accusation. It was an acquaintance thing -- he's over at her place, watching movies in her bedroom. Sex happens, and the issue is consent. Acquittal after 2.5 hours of deliberation, of course that was after a three week trial, and many months of disruption of all parties' lives. The University ended up paying the defendant a six figure settlement for the disciplinary action they'd taken based on the accusation.
Our police (city and campus) apparently questioned victims fairly aggressively, looking for any potential reasonable doubt. By all accounts it was awful, and it kept the number of charges quite low. Indeed, why even report to anyone, if no one is going to believe you. Bad old days -- the DOJ came to town and knocked a lot of heads around, and by all accounts, the system is a whole lot better. But the OP looks to me like its using statistics from the bad old days, and taking complaints that did not lead to charges out of the equation altogether.
Charlie Rose - color me utterly unsurprised. Jesus people, pompous narcissistic pretentious ass convinced he is god's gift to ignorant American rabble as sophisticated public intellectual - and you're *surprised* this level of delusion led him to try and fuck over women???
Also, search for "Bernard Henri Levy" and CR, you get 50 videos. The man is clearly capable of anything.
I still haven't read the article. Maybe I'll read L'Idéologie française first.
Apparently, there's a guy who follows Bernard Henri Levy around and throws pies at him. I find that incredibly cheering to know.
This is a refresher on the Msla situation.
I'd be extremely surprised if there's a greater rate of false accusations on campuses despite the lower barrier to finding guilt. The process is extremely opaque to students. Frex, at Heebie U, (where I was recently Title IX trained!), the campus cops are actual cops who happen to have a department on campus. There are a lot of forks in the process where a student can choose to pursue an investigation or not, but the students aren't super clear on that ahead of time, I don't think, and wouldn't know that you could pursue a campus investigation but not hand it over to the actual city to investigate.
Seems like that opacity might prevent (a very small number) of false accusations, but also discourage (many more) people from pursuing genuine ones.
Yeah, possibly. Things have tightened up considerably in the last year-ish in terms of how well we document and educate everyone about Title IX violations. We now have a dedicated Title IX person. My understanding is that Obama put stricter standards in place, but also Texas passed some laws that were consistent (because of Baylor I assume), and so even if Trump rolls things back, I know Heebie U intends to stick with the higher standard.
All this is to say there's a lot of efforts being made right now to educate students, and also towards prevention, and it's steps in the right direction.
This is less relevant than when I started writing.
We now have a dedicated Title IX person
Malcolm IX.
Also, it's like none of you even SEE the PS on the OP.
I keep thinking of two times when i was in the ambit of rape accusations. Both were laughably liberal* contexts, like ur utopian hippie communities.
The first unleashed unrelenting slut shaming with bonus their fair haired boy "couldn't have screwed her bc she isn't attractive enough." It was horrific, and i was only looking on from bystanderville.**
Second incident i didn't know the woman claiming rape or even very well the accused, and indeed all i asked was that in a group decision to provide material support for legal representation for the accused, which I did not oppose as i was happy to make sure everyone was adequately represented, i not be pressured to sign on to disbelieving the allegation. Controversy ensued.
*US definition of liberal.
*same institution of higher learning that told me i should show compassion and befriend the unhinged stalker who specialized in lurking outside the one-way-in & one-way-out basement music library where i did work study in an otherwise usually deserted and isolated building. Ha ha - no.
64: but just because the aftermath is extremely traumatic for someone making a true accusation doesn't mean it would be equally traumatic for someone making a false accusation, since the pain comes in large part from reliving a traumatic experience. If the traumatic experience never happened, there's no pain in reliving it because you're just repeating a lie. I know people with PTSD; they are very loath to talk about what happened to them. But people talk about fictional traumas all the time with no ill effects.
"since the pain comes in large part from reliving a traumatic experience"
Hahaha hahaha...ummm, do you live under a fucking rock?
...befriend the unhinged stalker who specialized in lurking outside the one-way-in & one-way-out basement music library where i did work study in an otherwise usually deserted and isolated building...
Yikes.
Franklin Pierce, when I read your comments in this thread, I get an overwhelming reminder of how many "just asking questions" liberalish men in 20 years of past online discussions have been resolutely blind to the message that their speculation sends to women (or indeed any assault victims) in the listening audience.
There's probably a universe in which I would actually agree that it would be helpful to talk about the fact that some people can't get loving care without a "reason" such as crime victimization to elicit it. In that world, there might be enough of an "incentive" for false accusations that we should explore them more than we already are in public conversation. But that universe is so very far from our current world that it seems astoundingly ignorant to try to raise it, especially in this moment.
We're in the midst of a very painful national cataclysm of people sharing deeply painful, shameful events from their lives, with the predictable result that they receive an avalanche of threats and contempt from total strangers.* And in this moment it seems to you that a good use of your idle blog-commenting time is to speculate about the happy side effects of doing so? For REAL?
Dude, rethink yourself. Pronto.
*Your comments seem to suggest that named accusers are getting believed, on balance, by the people they are interacting with. I think that is an exceptionally optimistic view that shows deep ignorance of how vulnerable people and whistleblowers -- especially women of color -- have been treated in the public eye for the past few years. I follow Monica Lewinsky on Twitter and she STILL gets unbelievable crap handed to her Every. Single.Day.
Bottom line: Don't assume that your idle blog-commenting time is unobserved by (this relatively small) world. We see you, we're taking note, and your trustworthiness score is dropping accordingly.
86: right, yeah, so having to stand up in a public forum and describe a horrible experience in detail under cross questioning is not traumatic at all. In fact women who have suffered rape don't mind doing it at all. Do you live on fucking Mars?
Perhaps Under Rock Dweller i misread you. You seemed to me to be taking the position that a fake rape accusation wouldn't entail a "large part" of the pain bc no trauma to relive. I happily concede the horrificness of retailing a rape to hostile audiences , or frankly a sympathetic audience, over and over. To this Martian, there's a shit ton of additional misery coming the way of every single woman who claims harassment, assault or rape, and we all know it. I suspect the under rock-Martian disagreement goes to proportion of horror attributable to reliving trauma vs all the other shit, so eh whatever, peace from Mars.
re on campus accusations (apologies for not following house rules): despite the lower evidentiary standards, I don't think more false accusations are likely. The campus is such a small, claustrophobic bubble (excepting campuses that are imbedded in their urban milieu) that the social costs of making a (false) accusation are pretty freaking steep. Students making reports are also frequently ambivalent about the possibility and/or consequences of punishment for their assailant-- sometimes because they are still figuring out what their boundaries are, sometimes because their assailant is someone they care(d) about.
Autism is a tragic thing for everyone involved.
When people always get mad at you for violating unwritten rules that seem obvious to everyone else, it's natural to be afraid of being accused of rape when you didn't do anything wrong. Back in the real world this is the fear of committing rape without realizing it and thus a good thing, hard as it may be on those feeling it.
Some of you might be going a bit hard on Franklin, what he's describing is unfortunately a real thing. The article was actually not bad, although I do have a peeve with...
But my research--including academic studies, journalistic accounts, and cases recorded in the US National Registry of Exonerations--suggests that every part of this narrative is wrong.
Articles on crime/law enforcement issues do this all the godamn time. "I consulted every available source...except for the actual professionals who investigate these crimes."
[F]alse accusations [are not] the result of miscommunications taking place in a murky world of casual hook-ups and heavy drinking.
Some false accusations are absolutely this.
It's a shitty world. Legit victims often keep quiet, crazies and narcissists and fabulists feels no such urge and screw up the stats.
I should probably be presidentialish myself but wevs. I've dealt professionaly-ish with some situations I believe to be false allegations. One case fit very well with this article, prior unverifiable at best story of critical illness, clearly something off that looked like early trauma but who can know? It was incredibly tough to deal with in the professional student-support and peer community I was part of and being involved has probably shaped a lot of what I've done since in my various (and now rare) survivor-support roles.
But there are also more complicated scenarios. My daughter has PTSD and when she's panicky she feels physical sensations at an amplified level. There have been many times with witnesses that gentle touch has felt painful to her but isn't anywhere near the legal line for child mistreatment. (For instance I've often had good luck helping her come out of an episode by rubbing lotion onto her arms, but those first touches may prompt screaming about how much I'm hurting her. We've had this happen with a therapist and principal watching and neither was going to call child protective services.) So there have been investigations because if someone asks "Has any adult ever hurt you?" she has a long list. (Or if someone makes her go through a checklist of abuse and neglect, they end up with all the things that brought her into foster care in the first place, so we had to go through one investigation where that was the answer to all the questions. "Right, you know about that. That's part of the initial paperwork on why she was removed." Sigh.)
And there are people who just don't know what words mean. Lee insisted throughout mediation that I was abusive to her because during our relationship I had tried to get her to answer questions when she didn't want to and now that we were separated and in mediation I was doing the same abusive thing and asking for answers. After that the mediator let us sit in different rooms and he went back and forth, but I don't think it's because he was concerned about the danger I present.
And so on. I'll shut up because I should probably have stayed off this thread.
And there are people who just don't know what words mean.
I had time recently, so I looked up "is".
Good point. I definitely meant willful ignorance!
||
From my Facebook feed, this is giving me pains:
"For the record: there is nothing "minor" about Latinx, African American, Native American, Asian American students. #stopcallingthemminorities"
Is this a real movement or just a wayward lefty?
|>
The only good thing on Facebook is the bus driving in front of the explosion.
42 to 94.
Neither one of you comment under a pseud even remotely identifying the way I do. If I want to add a layer of anonymity to my comments I'm going to fucking do it at my discretion. If that's a problem then both of you are FPP's and mods so if you want to set rules on what conditions commenters go presidential then do so and we'll all decide whether to comment or not.
Including LB on the above isn't fair. 47 explicitly says she knows who posts under this handle.
I will fill the sidebar after hours! God, ignore me. I'm short tempered about something in the meat world and shouldn't have let it bleed over into here.
LB, thanks for engaging me for a while at least.
Witt 88.*: Is Monica the best example for your point? She wasn't a whistleblower; her name came up during discovery of the Paula Jones lawsuit. And according to Wikipedia she seems to made out all right, though that Wikipedia article itself could be an example of sexism IDK. And good for her! She doesn't deserve one iota of the vitriol she gets. But that's more about generic women's sexuality-policing yeah?
69, Witt 88.non-*, 89, 98: Taking for granted that one is the type of empathy-stunted, quasi-Damorean tech bro who would go down these mental roads in the first place, what in your view would be a more appropriate place for this type of conversation if it's not Unfogged? I do feel bad that someone might be reading what I'm saying and decreasing their mental estimate of the odds they'll be believed if they come forward, which is why I've tried to emphasize that I do in fact default to believing women when they come forward and that this is just a quibble about one particular argument advanced for a view that I nonetheless hold.
104.2: Can't say.
I think the rules-lawyering of 104.1 is a good example of what I mean, though. Obviously I agree that ML isn't someone who leveled a false rape accusation, and yet she has been paying a pricefor twenty years(see the last three paragraphs of the Wikipedia section "Life After the Scandal").
The fact that you think that Wikipedia article indicates that someone who lived essentially in exile for a decade and is still hounded by people who want stop dragging up her past -- despite numerous statements that she doesn't want to dwell on it -- has "essentially made out all right" is a vivid illustration of the way you are measuring consequences. I measure them differently, and I think relatively vulnerable people (that is, the folks that relatively more powerful people think are making false accusations) are more likely to measure them my way than yours.
At any rate, there may be other folks here who have the energy to engage in the what-if conversation that you seem to want. I am not that person, so I'm bowing out of this part of the discussion.
99: I think that's probably, clumsily, about not referring to a specific person as "a minority" rather than about not saying those particular groups are minorities. Pushback on that is a real thing, since there are a lot of poorly written articles where someone is referred to as "a minority" as shorthand for "not white". It's maybe not quite as bad as when a single person is referred to as "diverse", like a "diverse" candidate for a job (rather than a diverse pool of candidates).
I see examples of this kind of grating use of "minority" and "diverse" all the time but don't have a good one at hand.
That thing where men demand others to do the work of educating them.
As a real-name poster, I have some sympathy for president Pierce's thinking in choosing a pseudonym. And if I ever choose to say anything presidentially, I have to make sure to do it during the hours that most of the commentariat is active, which do not always align well with the time in Central Europe.
Franklin? I think you misunderstood me when I said stop posting. Using a presidential pseud to appeal to the presumption of good faith regular posters get, while expressing beliefs that are so fucked up that you're ashamed to have them attached to your regular pseud is not okay, and the next thing you post as Franklin Pierce I'm going to edit to add your regular pseud.
Teddy- you're doing something different. Anyone paying attention knows who you are, you're literally just googleproofing, rather than trolling with bullshit you're ashamed to have attached to your usual pseud.
On your appeal to professional knowledge, though... look, the last time we had this conversation, one of your paradigmatic examples of a false rape allegation turned out to be a story where, although you concluded (reasonably plausibly) that nothing prosecutable had taken place, the woman complaining also seemed to have been completely truthful throughout. (Anyone who doesn't remember, two people making out consensually in a car, clothes off. He penetrated her, she protested immediately, he stopped, she went to the police.)
At which point, the categories you put stories like that into don't necessarily make sense to me without picking through the details.
109: I'm not sure what you're sympathizing with, but if it's using something meant to allow the discussion of sensitive personal details separately from one's usual identity while still asking people to treat you as a regular commenter, to instead express views that you're (reasonably) ashamed of, I'd think about whether you're sure the sympathy is deserved.
I thought Pierce's comments were stupid (and I have no idea who it was), but acting like this is a major breach of commenting etiquette is over the top.
94
But my research--including academic studies, journalistic accounts, and cases recorded in the US National Registry of Exonerations--suggests that every part of this narrative is wrong.
I think either I'm misunderstanding you or you're misunderstanding the article. Those academic studies and case records are based on police records. What else do you think the author should have done?
112: Dude, he's saying things he's ashamed to have associated with his own identity, but he's saying them in a way that attributes them to any or every other regular commenter here. "Hey, women generally? I don't want to use my own name to say that rape victims are totally enjoying all that sweet sympathy and attention they get from crying rape, because people will think that I, individually, am an asshole for it. But I do want to make sure you all know that that's what men you know -- the regular commenters here -- think about women. So don't start feeling comfortable."
If he just wanted to troll, sock-puppeting with a fresh identity would still be a dick thing to do, but at least it wouldn't be imputing his own bullshit to the rest of you guys.
I would be insulted if anyone thought it was me, but this probably means I radically overestimate how much thought anyone gives to my comments.
I guess I understand what you're saying, that Pierce is vaguely smearing all of the regular commenters, but I don't like the vibe of the meta-discussion. We survived the thread where somebody admitted they liked going to hookers in Amsterdam, and someone else admitted they were working as a hooker, we'll survive this.
We'll survive it, sure. I just want to make it clear that I disapprove and why. (The 'I go to hookers in Amsterdam and like it' was certainly disturbing, but he was at least using a presidential pseud for what it's for -- concealing sensitive biographical facts rather than just creepy beliefs.)
That thread must have been before me or I would have remembered it.
that Pierce is vaguely smearing all of the regular commenters
Just the men who don't have sex with prostitutes.
There was a string of prostitution/stripping posts. I was shrill and humorless.
83: You did exactly the right amount of bracketing. If you had pulled the whole original sentence, you would have been obliged either to include the sentence before the "Neither" (which would have been inelegant; if you had wanted to excerpt that too you would have done so) or exclude it (which would have forced the reader reflexively to skip back and look for the omitted sentence).
LB @69 made me laugh out loud. I chose a presidential pseud here because I realize that this reflects poorly on me and my sense of humor.
And presumably because of the irony?
And also, just the disproportionality of it. People get angry at each other all the time without framing each other for felonies. For that narrative to make sense, you have to believe that women are poised to make false accusations of major crimes as soon as they're irate -- basically, that women are hair-trigger liars on this issue.
That's the thing I want a punchy slogan for -- not that lying about rape is impossible, but that there's no reason at all to think that a woman is wildly more likely to frame a man for rape than anyone is to frame anyone for any other major crime.
I essentially agree with LB here. This is why I dislike discussing sexual assault/rape accusations in the abstract. It just isn't that helpful. (Except perhaps to the extent that I think LB has mentioned before: to counterweigh the preconceived notion that women are crazy liars.)
I liked the breakdown of the article as a framing device. LB gets to the gist of it though: it isn't a normal reaction. So the worry is, are you dealing with someone with some benefit to be had or a not-normal person. Someone with a personality disorder isn't going to act the same way a reasonable person would act.
120: Actually, you could have done "...false accusations [are not] the result" instead of "[F]alse accusations [are not] the result". The ellipsis version changes the source less so I guess is superior, but starting a paragraph with an ellipsis looks like shit.
So my 12-year-old daughter and a friend at school are working on a project related to the decline of print journalism. The friend, through her mother, arranged for them to interview a knowledgeable industry source: G\enn Th/rush.
My daughter reports that he was very jovial and pleasant and not at all inappropriate when they talked to him a week ago. (The mother, a now-shocked friend of Th/rush's wife, sat in.)
123: Only Standpipe knows for sure.
Regarding the "getting sympathetic attention feels good" point, isn't that basically a reference to Munchausen syndrome? People who will claim to be crime victims for the attention exist, sure. People who seriously injure themselves because they get some sort of kick out of being in the hospital also exist, but we don't structure the healthcare system around odd corner cases like that.
Not until Trumpcare starts, at least.
Right -- I think the Munchausen's comparison is solid. Sympathy is nice, but feigning serious illness to get it is still extremely rare, and that's even without the sort of injury to an innocent person you get from a false rape allegation.
Then maybe Munchausen by proxy is better. Because you get to injury an innocent person that way.
When you talk about why women choose to lie about sexual assault and abuse, you inevitably get into tales that are close to ticking bomb scenarios -- hypothetical stories that are designed to beg the question rather than illuminate.
Sure, you can cite social pressures and various other things that could cause a woman to lie, but those pressures are much greater for perpetrators than victims. There's nothing wrong with "Believe her" as a heuristic.
I am outgrowing my old civil liberties absolutism now that we see where US-style free-speech can lead us. Likewise, I am sympathetic to Halford's 53, which is a direct denial of what I was taught in elementary school: "Better 100 guilty persons go free than one innocent be imprisoned."
(Wikipedia tells me that Blackstone's original formulation was: "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer." That ratio gets more worrisome.)
128: I know, right? It would have totally screwed up the project if they had waited a week.
The girls' mothers have decided that it's up to the girls and the school as to whether they can use the interview now. (It's a project with a video component.) I can't think of any reason why not. But maybe they'll want to change the topic.
I think they should use the video after editing it to put a black bar in front of his crotch.
I had totally spaced on TR as an ongoing pseud-pseud. Sorry about that!
I always see your postscripts. #notallcommenters
#thereexistsatleastonecommenter
#whoisblowingthecurveforthenormalpeople
#letsallpostourcommentergradeoutof100
Not if they get the toys made fast enough.
We've had a super-prominent example of what appears to be a false accusation in recent days. Here is Leeann Tweeden regarding Al Franken. She says:
When our C-17 cargo plane took off from Afghanistan I immediately fell asleep, even though I was still wearing my flak vest and Kevlar helmet.
It wasn't until I was back in the US and looking through the CD of photos we were given by the photographer that I saw this one:
[Here she provides the famous picture, and then offers her description of it.]
I couldn't believe it. He groped me, without my consent, while I was asleep.
I felt violated all over again. Embarrassed. Belittled. Humiliated.
How dare anyone grab my breasts like this and think it's funny?
Tweeden, to her credit, shows her evidence. She doesn't claim to have any other knowledge of the incident beyond the photograph, and the photograph doesn't appear to show that he "grabbed my breasts."
Now I understand why this hasn't been pointed out in the media or, indeed, by Franken himself. It's bad form for journalists to interrogate people who come forward with difficult-to-make accusations. Likewise, it's an ad hominem argument to suggest that there is some deeper meaning in the fact that noted ratfucker Roger Stone was apparently privy to this accusation before it was made public. And any alternative reading of the evidence reads like an argument supporting a guy unambiguously engaged in shitty, juvenile behavior.
But still, the picture seems to make a statement that contradicts Tweeden on a key point. Even Trump got it -- he was very careful not to claim that Franken was photographed grabbing her.
The Al Frankenstien picture is really bad, speaks a thousand words. Where do his hands go in pictures 2, 3, 4, 5 & 6 while she sleeps?
The difference between pantomiming a grope and actual groping is a key one -- one behavior is orders of magnitude worse than the other. But by saying insisting on this distinction, I risk being accused of justifying or excusing the pantomime and discounting the other, more credible evidence against Franken.
So to be clear: My point isn't about Franken or his behavior, but rather, the thinking behind what looks to me like a false accusation.
I'm not willing to jump to the conclusion that Tweeden's assumptions are either false or unwarranted, even knowing her politics and the scenario. She knows she can't remember what happened and is open about that. Mugging for the camera in the process of groping someone's breasts and doing so while pantomiming same will look identical. Even if she got reassurance from her other people watching and commemorating the moment on film that nothing physical happened, can she trust people who'd be covering their own tracks in not sticking up for her in the moment? And that's assuming all of them have similar stories and no one DOES remember it as a grope. If he wants to argue this was the full extent of his actions, that seems like his responsibility and not hers.
Huh. That seems to me to be conflating very different things under the rubric of 'false accusation'. That is, you and Tweeden have the same level of information about what Franken did -- you're both looking at the same picture. You think she's either misinterpreting the picture, or misstating what it shows (and to be clear, I think you're right -- that it shows him miming groping her from a distance rather than actually touching her.)
But as you say, she's not putting herself forth as a witness with knowledge of anything that's not apparent from the picture with regard to this incident. That seems very different from any other possible type of false accusation.
it looks more like an exaggerated accusation to me; let's grant she's super-pissed.
And what Alameida said. To put it another way, he deliberately took a picture that would be a picture of him groping her. Even if it appears that he did it by miming the groping rather than going for it, it's still a deliberately created picture of him groping her. Calling her reacting to it as if it were what it was deliberately made to appear to be a false accusation seems like slicing things unnecessarily fine.
There is a definition of "false accusation" that's about as official as this kind of thing can be.
The determination that a report of sexual assault is false can be made only if the evidence establishes that no crime was committed or attempted. This determination can be made only after a thorough investigation. This should not be confused with an investigation that fails to prove a sexual assault occurred. In that case the investigation would be labeled unsubstantiated. The determination that a report is false must be supported by evidence that the assault did not happen..."Evidence that the assault did not happen" might include, for example, physical evidence and/or statements from credible witnesses that contradict key aspects of a victim's account.
The FBI has similar guidelines. There is also a distinction between a false accusation (framing someone for a felony) and a baseless accusation (for example, someone says they were raped while drunk, but they don't remember whether or not there was actual penetration). Tweeden's account, at this point, doesn't fit the definition of a false accusation.
Agree that "false accusation" is absolutely the wrong way to even approach Tweeden-Franken. Two things, however.
1) I do think it is one where I think looking at the overall context is valuable (but it does not necessarily redound in Franken's favor). As various folks have described (and with supporting pictures) that USO tour (and many others) played on a kind of a grab-ass sexual tension with exactly that kind of sexual humor. As evidenced for instance in pictures of Tweeden literally grabbing musicians butts and ones of the kiss itself during the show. Big caveat is *during* the show, and even then Franken would clearly be a big part of writing and setting the tone for the show--as she describes, he seems to be the one who wrote the kiss in--so its not like even that is just some direction and lines he was handed. (Less sure on the role Tweeden would have had in those things.) And even more broadly, Franken was a major player in setting the tone for male-oriented edgy.--well "TV edgy""--comedy these past decades. (All of that said, the rehearsal kiss happening the way she described would be way over any contextual line.)
2) On Stone. As it happens, Joan Walsh was in a restaurant in Harlem when Roger Stone walked in. She asked him about it and she says he very politely told her that the allegation was well-know around Fox News before it came out. So I'm thinking less of some nefarious Roger Stone deal, and more part of Hannity's general "tick-tock" that teo and I discuss in the other thread. (Although the Conyers thing was an actual thing that came up via the f'ed up Congressional process. Which I think is going to cause an absolute shitstorm within Congress. The info *needs* to come out*, but I suspect Repubs/RW media will attempt to weaponize it ways that will cause even more institutional stress on those cursed bodies.)
*Needs to come out in a way that is respectful and not harmful to the various victims I should clarify.
Although I hope it is clear, I should clarify that the fact that the leak of information is being weaponized by jerkholes on the right (like Cernovich for gawdsakes) it does not in any way absolve anything about the acts themselves. But it is a contex tthat we must deal with in our current reactions and actions taken.
I have no idea how.
(Really wish this was in the other thread...not really much to do with false accusations.)
151, 152: She's not the only one making this accusation. I've seen Mark Joseph Stern, Amanda Marcotte and Nate Silver make the accusation. I know there are others.
I think the interesting thing here is that she's had a decade to think about it and, in your narrative, is still so angry that she says something that appears materially false* even while providing the disproving evidence.**
She is plainly not lying.
*But it may be that it is not materially false. Maybe pantomiming a grope belongs roughly in the same category as groping.
**I think the picture is pretty unambiguous, but even if it's ambiguous, it doesn't seem to show what she claims.
156: They're all in the same position she's in in terms of knowledge -- looking at the same picture. At which point, again, calling it a false accusation seems really misleading -- I'd call that either misinterpreting the picture, or speaking loosely about it, but they're not claiming to know more than anyone else knows from looking at the picture.
One would think the USO tours would have a fairly explicit list of how not to act since at least Tailhook.
"Bawdy" humor probably hasn't aged well.
I've had some of the concerns that Halford explained, and dismissed in 54, and I think I'm at the same place. As we move towards being less shitty about this, there's going to be an increase in false accusations but that's a worthwhile price to pay (even though the cost of it will not be evenly distributed). I'm still a little worried that it could be easily weaponized politically, but there's about ten thousand shittier new politically things to worry about this year.
Honestly, at least in our current environment, the "sympathy" thing sounds more like mental illness, at the level of people who intentionally make themselves sick so they can spend time in hospital care. Mental illness was already covered in the article as a rare but real edge case.
Calling it a false accusation isn't right--or at least it obscures more than it shows--but calling what Franken did "groping" isn't right, either. If she had been awake, and he consensually was in the pose he's in in the picture, I'm having trouble imagining she'd call that groping--a violation and mockery, certainly. (The state fair photo thing is totally groping, though.)
157: Nowadays, if you're sympathetic to someone who makes a self-evidently false claim, it's understood that the falsehood is mitigated by the fact that it is self-evident -- that the disproof is right there for anyone to see, so it's not really a falsehood.
In the modern view, we must take our allies seriously, but not literally. I am a bit queasy about this approach.
As we move towards being less shitty about this, there's going to be an increase in false accusations but that's a worthwhile price to pay (even though the cost of it will not be evenly distributed). I'm still a little worried that it could be easily weaponized politically,
Having one political party that represents people who care about sexual harassment and want people punished for it, and one that represents people who don't care about sexual harassment and don't want people punished for it, does seem to make it likely that it will be easily weaponized politically.
159. Krugman tweets: "So, the harassment issue, while it hasn't (yet?) become a problem for anyone I know well, is starting to hit men whose work I respect and whom I know a bit and liked.
And that's how it should be. There has to be a reckoning, and it will involve some men with redeeming qualities."
men with redeeming qualities
#notallmen
I'd say the existence of the photo, shadows notwithstanding, makes her story of the "rehearsal" forced kiss worlds more plausible.
160, in context, seems overstated (although I'd agree with it in general, just not applied to this situation). Like, calling it 'groping' rather than 'miming groping' is, I think from looking at the picture, inaccurate, but not terribly importantly inaccurate -- the big offense here is the humiliating picture, which as a visual shows her being groped. It would have been worse if he'd been touching her, but it doesn't seem to me like a completely different category of offense.
166: but it doesn't seem to me like a completely different category of offense.
I think you've identified our irreducible difference of opinion. I just disagree with this.
Okay, but then be reassured that you're not seeing people with a fundamentally different sense of the importance of truth than you have, you're seeing people with a fundamentally different sense of the importance of the distinction between a picture of a man touching a sleeping woman's chest and pretending to touch a sleeping woman's chest.
Lack of physical contact certainly isn't the same as "innocent", but I think that the distinction between contact/no contact is important in this context.
Though I could see that threatened or attempted physical contact could be the same as contact.
I guess there's a distinction but it's splitting hair all l the same. The point is that it's humiliating and degrading conduct. I mean if he actually touched her would we debating about whether he could really feel her boobs because she's wearing a flak jacket? After the second accusation I really don't have time for this. There will be a third and a fourth you can be sure of it.
And... it's an accusation that he did something to her while she was asleep, but sober and undrugged, that didn't involve waking her up. The maximum possible level of contact in the situation is pretty limited. Which is not exculpatory, but it brings the possibilities where he actually touched her versus only pretended to touch her a fair bit closer to each other.
My own intuition is that there's a categorical difference betwen the touching and not touching. Put another way, the latter is in the category of something tasteless and embarassing but in the range of a dumb drama club "joke" gone too far that one could conceive of a not terrible human being up to. That's not an excuse or an exoneration, but. The former is inambiguously sexual assault. I don't feel particularly strongly about this distinction, have no interest in defending it, and could be very wrong. But that's my intuition.
How many angels could grope a nipple?
OK, now we're getting into the thought experiments the Steven Den Beste types love to do where if something happens to you in your sleep, and it leaves no marks, and it was not recorded, and you are not aware of it, how can it possibly be a crime against you or even be something bad?
Louis CK abused people without touching them.
Sure, but that's extremely different than the non-touching version of what Franken is supposed to have done. It seems silly to think that we need abandon the idea that there are some real categorical differences in these kinds of things in order to condemn them all.
she's had a decade to think about it and, in your narrative, is still so angry
The fantastic thing about recent news is that it's tipped me, for one, from being someone who handles all this stuff with equanimity (fairly regularly, even!) into intense explodiness. Today's children's hospital visit wasn't the location we usually go to and we went past the apartment complex where I had my only weird "here, let me give you a back rub!" interaction back when I was 18 and oh boy was I furious all over again about even mild creepiness. So giant furious shrug.
(I don't mean to imply that the difference between sexual abuse with and without contact is generally unimportant -- just that under the specific circumstances of the Franken picture, the distinction between posing for a picture of him groping her with and without touching seems fairly small to me.)
The difference to me seems pretty big. Without touching (and with that goofy facial expression and exaggerated grabbing pose) it seems plausibly like a dumb joke about him -- like, look what a crazy creep I am. With touching, it's just a documentation of actual assault.
Just because of the vest? Otherwise it seems like a really really huge difference to me. Though maybe as a man I'm missing something really important.
(Not that any of this is relevant to Franken given the rest of the allegation and the second story.)
In the Franken case though I guess you can't really separate it from the rest of the story. That is, what makes the photo especially gross and scary is the way it asserts his power to continue to assault her if he wants to after the initial assault. That aspect of it doesn't depend on exactly what he does. Just taking a picture of her sleeping with him in it not touching her or pretending to touch her could already be pretty creepy. But outside the context of the initial assault it seems to me that they'd be in totally different categories: one is an unprofessional and juvenile prank that doesn't belong in a work place, while the other is assault. But in the context of a prior worse assault I can see how it no longer is a huge difference.
I started out writing a comment in agreement that there was a difference, and I was comparing it to drawing a penis on the face of your passed-out dude bro. By the end of the comment, I had changed my mind.
I'd tried to write something like this: "In both cases, the humor is sexist or homophobic, but the target isn't targeted expressly because of their gender," and once I wrote it out it seemed patently false. She was of course targeted for her gender. It's more on par with Sam Kinnison ripping into some woman on the other end of the phone as a joke for his comedy act, though. She's the butt of the joke because she's female.
I guess... my reaction isn't exactly that it's not a big difference. It's that it's not a big enough difference that Franken or anyone else on his behalf is reasonably entitled to object if it's not clearly drawn. Franken did something sexually humiliating to a sleeping woman -- taking a picture of himself groping her is different from taking a picture of himself pretending to grope her, but not enough so that I can react to conflating the two as material deception rather than simply imprecision.
In other words, it's not quite the same as if he'd actually touched her without her wearing the vest, but it's not just immature physical humor either.
I'm confused a bit about whether you're saying the difference is small because you think the photo is much worse than my intuition, or because you think groping someone in their sleep is much less bad than my intuition. I can see lots of reasons why the photo is bad, but it's hard for me to see any of those as nearly as bad as actual assault. (Again with the exception that in this case he assaulted her previously which changes a lot.)
I think I might be drawing the line between dumb-ass aggressively sexually humiliating joke and sexual assault in a slightly different place than you (and most people here, I'm the weirdo on this) are.
That is, take two different possible worlds. Same circumstances, same picture, same facial expression, same exaggerated gesture, but in one case his hands are four inches above her shirt (which looks to me like the truth), in the other case they're touching her. What's the same is that the picture is goofy-looking, there was a non-Franken photographer present, and she didn't wake up.
Calling the 'touching' version 'groping' would seem fair to me -- non-consensual hands on breasts. But even the 'touching' version would still seem like a dumb-ass joke rather than an act likely to produce sexual gratification for Franken -- it would have had to be brief and fleeting not to wake her up. And in terms of sexual threat, as a picture indicating that he had the power to sexually abuse her while she was sleeping and vulnerable, touching and non-touching are equivalent.
So, sure, touching is worse. But the same picture, even if he were touching her, would under the circumstances look to me like something he was doing to take the humiliating picture rather than to enjoy having his hands on her breasts. Both pictures would be a dumb joke. And on the more severe side, both pictures equally indicate a willingness to sexually abuse a sleeping woman, and implicitly threaten that more could happen after the picture is taken; so both pictures would be a serious implicit threat.
Touching really is a difference, but if it's the only difference between the two hypothetical pictures, they seem pretty close to me.
I think that's nuts, if you leave aside the armor or drop the assumption that she didn't wake up. Because touching someone's breasts has to have a very high risk of waking her, that risk seems like something anybody should know, and I'm guessing that being woken via grope is one of the more unpleasant types of groping.
Right, but we've got the story she's telling, where she didn't wake up and in the picture she was wearing armor. At which point the 'touching' possibility is limited to something that in fact wouldn't wake her up. Which would still have been completely shitty, but not in a way that seems wildly far off the picture as it really exists.
If the possibilities we were comparing were 'miming groping' and 'waking her up by honking her breasts', I'd be saying the second was much worse, sure. But given the full set of facts everyone agrees on, when she says he 'groped' her, she's is unambiguously accusing him of just barely touching her for the picture, rather than of doing something that would have awoken her. It looks to me like she's incorrect to say he touched her, but I don't think that level of incorrectness is any significant injustice to him.
Seems to me it's self-evidently a big difference. If it was a picture of him actually honking her boobs in her sleep, he'd already be gone and might never have made it to office in the first place because there would have been a scene.
If he were pretending to grab the crotch of a sleeping Garth Brooks, would we be arguing whether it was a sexual assault? I mean, it's Unfogged so probably so, but not nationally. I get that the gender relations don't translate well between those situations, but still. If he's grabbing asses at state fairs, dumb mugging for a camera is probably a secondary issue.
In conclusion, only mime groping of women who sleep in armor.
Who here hasn't pretended to grab the crotch of a sleeping Garth Brooks?
I'm so glad I finished college before drawing dicks on faces became a thing.
I am also, possibly, importing a certain amount of impatience with the idea that it is a serious matter to not overstate the severity of shitty sexual things a man has done to a woman. When the USO tour stories were all that was out there, it did make a difference to me that the picture didn't look as if he'd touched her -- it's not no difference. I'm just tetchy about thinking of that difference as important enough that it's unjust to Franken or an offense against truth to conflate pretending to touch her with having actually touched her: he sexually humiliated and threatened a sleeping woman, and that's bad enough for me to find it annoying litigating the boundaries of exactly how bad what he did was.
s/b "it is a serious matter to not overstate at all the severity..."
198 seems totally right and understandable. On the other hand, it seems wrong to conflate pretend-groping with real groping, or for that matter to conflate the alleged Franken state fair groping with Louis CK, or even to conflate Louis CK hardcore grossness with Weinstein's forcible rape, even if all of these things are totally awful and unacceptable. In conclusion, I dunno.
It's possible (likely) that fake-litigating anything real as an online parlor game is terrible and immoral. Not that I and we haven't done that often. But maybe the right answer is to just say no.
As unfogged's foremost expert on physical contact with body armor I really should have been consulted on this one.
This is yet another example of the maxim that nothing really matters unless there are pictures. No one really gave a shit about the stories coming out of Abu Ghraib until there were pictures. No one cared about Wikileaks until they released the "Collateral Murder" video. There's a picture of Franken and there isn't one of Moore, so Franken has to go and Moore will get elected. There wasn't video of Trump on Access Hollywood, just audio, so it didn't matter.
I don't think that's right -- the difference between Franken and Moore is much more that Franken needs Democrats to vote for him, and Moore can get elected with Republicans. Even within Franken (if I'm typical of anything, which I'm probably not) I wasn't calling for his resignation after the picture -- I tipped into wanting him gone after the unphotographed ass-grab.
I'm just tetchy about thinking of that difference as important enough that it's ... an offense against truth
Stern is straightforward on why he regards the touch/no touch distinction as crucial:
Touching a woman's breasts without her consent is not a joke. It is a crime.
[The photograph] appeared to show Franken groping Tweeden's breasts while she was sleeping -- not providing a lot of room for "if true" statements about Franken's conduct.
Franken has basically admitted the photo of him "jokingly" groping Tweeden while she was asleep on an airplane is real.
For journalists (and for the rest of us) factual distinctions should matter, and to think otherwise really is "an offense against the truth," even if it's not an offense against Franken -- even if you think Franken deserves to have this falsehood spread.
If you're a journalist and you spell a name wrong, you're expected to correct it. I think the Stern/Marcotte/Silver type of analysis is unwise for anyone (see 160), but for journalists, it's a disgrace.
I think you should write all of them and demand retractions. Without public pressure, how will they ever learn?
More generally, I don't see any evidence in any of those that they're intentionally misrepresenting anything. The picture was posed to look like he was grabbing her breasts. People reacted to it at face value instead of squinting at tbe angles and figuring out that he probably didn't really in that picture. If correcting this seems important to you, you should get the word out, but I think you're imputing intentional dishonesty where it isn't.
This is yet another example of the maxim that nothing really matters unless there are pictures.
Pics or it didn't happen? In some cases, sure. But this is America, ajay, and LB is surely correct (in 204) to remind us of the difference between Democrats and Republicans.
I don't think there really is much distinction between grabbing her breasts vs. miming it in a photo that is then widely distributed. Both are threats of further harm, and both tell her that even when she is in a supposedly 'safe' space (considering she is wearing body armor) with her colleagues, and exhausted enough to fall asleep, she is still vulnerable. Can you imagine feeling like you can't shut your eyes in that situation without being at risk of god knows what? And that the entire group was complicit? I get that actual contact is worse on one level, but if you look at the larger effect of all the harassment as being one that makes women constantly vulnerable and forces them to modulate their behavior, I'm not inclined to give him any breaks at all.
Is it really the case that touching a woman's breasts w/o consent is a crime? Is it a felony or a misdemeanor? Any of our lawyer commenters have info on this?
I'm both interested in an answer and worried about the distinction between Moore possibly raping someone underage and Franken allegedly grabbing a woman's ass. These don't seem like equivalent offenses to me.
This is off the top of my head, but no, there's not a bright-line rule around unconsented-to contact with breasts automatically constituting sexual assault. I'd have to look it up, the relevant statute in whatever state is almost certainly going to include language like 'for the purpose of sexual gratification'. Any unconsented-to touching is at least civil battery, but if the purpose was to make a stupid joke, that's probably not going to be sexual assault.
Any unconsented-to touching is at least civil battery
Which is why my brother would wave his arm right in front of my face until I got annoyed and blocked his arm and then tell on me for hitting him.
Looking up NY law, you might be able to get Franken for misdemeanor forcible touching -- the required intent includes the intent to degrade:
forcibly touches the sexual or other intimate parts of another person for the purpose of degrading or abusing such person, or for the purpose of gratifying the actor's sexual desire;
But I'd need to look at caselaw to know how exactly that gets read.
That is, if he did (in that incident) touch her.
In California there's a criminal simple battery misdemeanor which is basically the same as common law battery, i.e., touching without consent. There's also misdemeanor sexual assault i.e., groping, which requires some showing that the perp sought sexual gratification. Anyhow, I'm not sure what law would apply because weren't they on some overseas USO tour? Maybe Franken can be court-martialed.
Anyhow, to DaveLMA's question, rape or the kind of assault Moore is accused of* is a different and far, far more serious crime than any crime Franken conceivably could be accused of based on what we know now. Just because both groping and rape are crimes doesn't mean there isn't a big difference in the kind of crime.
*but can't be convicted for, because of the statute of limitations.
Ugh I have a totally OT bleg. I am not going to my annual professional conference, because they rejected my panel (it was probably was some sort of fuck you to my sub-discipline, because they rejected multiple panels from advanced grad students, professors and postdocs at top universities). Anyways, I applied for a job on the 15th, and got an email this evening saying they want to do a conference interview. The conference is in a week and a half, and I'd have to buy last minute plane tickets and very likely fly in and out the same day or try to find a last minute place to stay, plus I have to teach in the middle of the conference. I'm sort of concerned it's a courtesy interview, because I've heard they're looking to hire a senior hire and the other faculty are all graduates of my dept so I sort of worry they're just interviewing me as a nicety but aren't really considering me at all. I'm looking at spending $$$ to spend 20 minutes talking to people about a job I'm not going to get. I sort of want to tell them I won't be there (the email asked if I was going) and ask for a skype interview, but I don't want to commit a major faux pas and ruin my chances of ever getting a job there or getting a reputation for being uncommitted.
I'm not an academic, but it sure seems like you'd be stupid not to go. I doubt the plane fare is more valuable to you than taking the chance.
I don't know - I think a first round Skype is totally reasonable, having been through a lot of academic interviews, and your reason for not attending the conference makes perfect sense. I presume your dept would have flown you out if your panel had been accepted. I know my last place stopped giving any travel money if you weren't presenting at least a poster. Plus, you actually have teaching commitments. If they would be offended that you wouldn't spend crazy money for a last minute interview, they're probably jerks anyway.
"I have teaching commitments" sounds like a really good reason for missing a job interview; you're putting your students first! Well done! "I was rejected from the conference" might sound less good, so possibly don't mention that?
A grad student's teaching commitments could easily be covered if she were attending, and I think it is clear where actual teaching falls in the hierarchy of academic job responsibilities. I would just say "no, I'm not attending this year" and suggest a skype interview. If you thought there was a more reasonable chance of actually being hired, I would say to suck it up and get the plane ticket, but at long odds, it's probably not worth it, and this isn't a move that would engender long-lasting reputational damage.
I just go with a simple, "I'm having my back waxed that day."
You could suggest that they come to you.
I know this doesn't help, but as a science type, the humanities practice of making grad students pay for airfare, hotel rooms and conference registration out of their own pockets in exchange for the privilege of interviewing for a job seems barbaric to me.
I'm surprised that particular aspect of the profession hasn't been reformed.
222: Science jobs are starting to do this in my field.
You could try just tipping the chair.
I guess Anthropology (it's Anthropology, right?) is social science rather than humanities, but apparently they've chosen to follow the bad example of the MLA affiliated disciplines in this regard.
Wait, given the post title is this in some way the wolf cub vs. puppy thing?
I think 219 gets it right.
Math SLAC jobs have traditionally had first rounds at the JMM with students having to pay their way. Though the registration fee is much lower for grad students. More and more they're moving to Skype though.
222
If I were presenting at the conference, my department would cover airfare, which is part of the issue with getting my panel rejected. Now it's the worst of all worlds, where I have to buy a last minute ticket and can't get it covered. I also really hate my association right now.
More generally, I don't see any evidence in any of those that they're intentionally misrepresenting anything. ... I think you're imputing intentional dishonesty where it isn't.
Oh, no, not at all. I thought we had maintained a careful distinction between dishonesty and merely finding a fact not salient.
I think you should write all of them and demand retractions. Without public pressure, how will they ever learn?
You mock, but yes, I did this recently with unsatisfying results.
Josh Marshall wrote a piece quoting and linking this article from Cook Political Report.
Cook reported, according to Marshall, that Dems had a 50% chance of taking the Senate in 2018. Except Cook was talking about the House, rendering the whole premise for Marshall's piece false.
I informed TPM of this through their public e-mail address. They did nothing.
Yes, I know: House, Senate. They're both Congress. What's the big deal? Marshall is certainly no liar. And maybe the Dems really will take the Senate.
Still, these distinctions matter to me, and I think it's a black mark against Marshall's people that they don't care enough about their work to fix a plain error of fact.
224: But not too far, lest you land on your back.
That was not supposed to be salacious at all. Just chair-tipping humor.
As long as there was no salacious intent, nobody here would try to make it seem like there was.
229: I agree with you that the House-Senate distinction matters.
234: The guy has to be a con artist that identified a new mark. He was having trouble raising money for his rocket, but then conveniently he adopted Flat Earth-ism.
Neo-Flat Earthism is so unbelievably stupid that it will probably be a significant political force by 2022.
Logically, if you're a Young Earth creationists, you're need to be a Flat Earther. Or maybe there's a reason one part of Genesis has to be taken literally and another not.
238: Logically, if the earth is round, it must be millions of years old, because it takes a long time to get that rotund.
Another shout-out for the podcast Oh No Ross and Carrie, whose last three episodes have been about flat earthers. As near as I can tell flat earthers are the people who habitually fall for every conspiracy theory; at one of the meetups they went to people had a lot of trouble staying on topic, instead wanting to talk about Clinton or 9/11 or anti-Semitic nonsense; one was even a Las Vegas shooting truther. The "movement" is also highly heterogeneous; they have no shared ideology beyond that the earth is flat. Points of contention include whether the sun is a ball, a disc, or a CGI illusion made by NASA.
I'm obsessed with the fact that NBA star Kyrie Irving is a Flat Earther. He could literally fly around the world anytime he wants, to see for himself. The new theory is that Antarctica is secretly the edge of the world, but he could just charter a plane to fly over it and see for himself.
There is a rather funny Kipling story about a bunch of amoral media types who are driving in rural England and get caught speeding in a village called Huckley and fined heavily by the local magistrate (also the squire), and so decide to make the village ridiculous by convincing the population to vote publicly in favour of the earth being flat.
Thinking about it, it's less funny these days.
https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/k/kipling/rudyard/diversity/chapter11.html
That fits with the first recorded, reliable sighting of the sun being in 1958.
It's shocking how quickly the possibility for satire has been destroyed. The President in Idiocracy is not quite as ridiculous as the actual current President.
243: And it also explains why they are always telling you not to stare at it. If you look at it closely for a while you can make out the NASA logo.
What do flat earthers imagine happens if you go downward? Is it earth forever? Or do you reach outer space?
One turtle per foot? Or one massive turtle per elephant? Are the turtles on their backs, relative to flat earthers?
I guess just one big turtle. Science.
246: No consensus. Some people think the earth is a disc, or perhaps an infinite plane, accelerating upwards through space at 9.8 m/s^2. I guess some believe it goes forever; some admit they don't know.
Oh my god, I love the idea that gravity is because we're a giant pancake hurling ourselves flat-face first at constant acceleration. That seems really unstable and tippy. What if we develop a wobble?
So the sun is hurtling through space along with Our Pancake? But also orbiting us? Or are there infinitely many suns, one that crosses each day, like sheep jumping over the fence?
I suppose the flat pancake could orbit the sun.
Are they also Flat Sunners? Is everything two dimensional? Are these really just characters in Flatland?
You really need to listen to the podcast episodes--they're amazing. Ross and Carrie have interviewed or joined quite a few fringe groups, cults, done weird medical treatments, etc., and they try to be as respectful as possible to genuine beliefs. But they had a lot of trouble acting like these people aren't complete idiots.
They actually went to a meeting the day before the eclipse. The consensus of that particular group was that the sun and moon are objects (maybe flat, maybe not) high above the earth that are moving on invisible tracks that intersect at two points. That intersection causes the mechanism to short out(???) and that causes eclipses.
Flat sun is controversial. Ross wasn't being a pure anthropologist and was trying to argue that the sun was round, since he felt that was at least a possible point of commonality. He brought up sunspots as evidence, which somebody thought was a NASA computer graphics trick. However, another flat earther acknowledged he had seen them.
The most amazing part was when they went to the beach (they were in Orange County, I think) after the meeting to watch the sun set. Ross pointed out that the bottom part of the sun goes away first, but other people said they couldn't see that--that they thought the sun was just receding into the distance (at the same altitude, I guess). If you can't tell the difference between a circle cut off at the bottom and an ellipse, I don't even know what to do.
Anyway, great episodes, definitely worth a listen.
It's sad but Trump has completely killed my sense of humor or even wonderment at stuff like 234/252, which are objectively hilarious. I don't want to laugh at these people and their weirdo beliefs. I want them to either get smarter or have their nonsense silenced.
249: If that picture doesn't convince you, nothing will.
When Trump dies from an aneurysm, they're going to have great troubling finding a doctor who will write "Successful black people did not show proper gratitude to him for all he's done" as the cause of death.
He's even made it hard to laugh at LaVar Ball. I hate Trump so much.
I'm with 236; the rocket guy is a grifter who needs funding for his complicated suicide attempt. The actual flat earthers are mostly people who had their sense of verifiability broken at some point and haven't learned how to cope with our high-information world. It's sad, and I too wish they would get smarter. At the same time, I acknowledge them as fellow adults and citizens who are valid targets for mockery.
It's also fun playing around with their cosmology and figuring out where it breaks. If anything it's disappointing that they don't have more consensus--if they had more thought-through arguments, it'd be more fun demolishing them. (There are some somewhat fleshed out ones on the flat earth wiki, but not many.) And at least it has a bit of innocence to it--there's a non-conspiratorial, non damaging aspect to focus on, unlikely purely ghastly things like Sandy Hook trutherism or anti-vaxing.
256 is the rightest thing ever said.
LaVar Burton is getting attacked on Twitter, because Trump supporters are the perfect combination of malevolent and stupid.
258.2 Is the most 2017 thing yet.
It's his own fault. Those are people he failed to get interested in reading.
244
It's shocking how quickly the possibility for satire has been destroyed. The President in Idiocracy is not quite as ridiculous as the actual current President.
The President in Idiocracy was competent by the standards of the country he came from, genuinely cared for its well-being, and when he found himself over his head consulted the smartest guy he could find and took his advice. That president may be more ridiculous than the current one because it's a ridiculous movie, but he's an improvement over the current president in several respects.
On the other hand they never established that the President in Idiocracy was a member of the WWE Hall of Fame, so he's worse in at least one respect.
The difference between miming and actual groping isn't the harm done (both would be rape-normalizing "jokes"), it's in Franken's mindset. I don't think the difference in intent is insignificant. Of course, if he is habitually groping women then maybe not.
I'm still hoping for some combination of misunderstandings and ratfucking to explain these reports, partly because I like Franken (as a Senator and author, not so much as a sketch comedy writer) and partly because at best politicization of this issue will give cover to Republicans who want to vote for serial predators and will depress Democratic turnout. I mean, we're fucked anyway (under oligarchy my sense is that any anti-corruption movement, process, or law will be used to suppress the opposition) so perhaps the best we can do is collect a few scalps, and perhaps the best way to minimize electoral losses is for some push for purity on our side.
Why Not Me? is a work of genius. It's also a work that provides plenty of evidence that he's the kind of guy who might find a mimed-groping photo to funny.
That last sentence reads too dismissive. I didn't mean to minimize the importance of getting abusive assholes out of power. I'm just frustrated that until representative democracy is restored (or established) the best instincts of good people will be used against them.
265: Yeah, which kind of adds to the hypothesis that humor is destructive and comedians cannot be trusted. Puns excepted, of course.
My advisors say to tell them I'm not attending and do a skype interview, unless I can get my airfare paid for by someone else, but mention I'm going to the specific disciplinary conference in March. Ugh it's still stressful though.
The job is a magical unicorn job, open rank at a top R1 school in a city I'd love to live in. If I got it would be amazing, but my odds of getting are probably .000001%
Magical unicorns are even better than puppies?
268: I think your odds have to be better than that. .000001% is probably the odds of me getting the job.
Well, on the surface my odds are about 5% (say, if they're interviewing 20 candidates). But if they already have in mind who they're going to hire or they're looking for a senior candidate and just interviewing me as a pat on the head, then my odds of getting the job are probably more like .5%
Getting asked for an interview should already put you above the .000001% mark.
And even if it's a pro forma interview and they already have a candidate in mind, if you can find out who that is and assassinate them, you chances will go way up.
Even better if you can arrange for an accomplice to do the job during your skype interview. You'll have the whole hiring committee as your alibi.
274: Now we know how AcademicLurker landed a job.
Buttercup! You have no way of knowing any of this! I don't want to be officious, but allow a friend and well- wisher to warn that "managing expectations" can all too easily shade into "taking oneself out of the running."
Again, non-academic, no idea what I[m talking about, but since I started down this road: I feel like there's no way they would give you even a first-round interview if your chances were so incredibly small. Maybe in academia people have so much free time they waste it on totally unnecessary interviews? And what in the long-term is a better use of that plane fare money. I guess just what 277 says. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. As Dio sings, ride the tiger.
It's possible at this point that they don't actually mind doing a skype interview and are suggesting the conference interview because they think it will be convenient for you. I would at least ask about whether they're open to a skype interview before stressing too much.
The counterargument is that it's still early and you may yet be invited to several more interviews at the conference...
For people who followed campaign coverage closely: Is there anything to the connection suggested in this tweet? I have to admit I had no idea who Thrush was until this week.
I never heard of Glenn Thrush until about 6 months ago. Probably he was no worse on Hillary than any other journalist. He's no Halperin that's for sure.
Thrush was Maggie Haberman's accomplice at the NYT, and while Halperin probably belongs on the top of that list, Thrush has earned his place there. Thrush's other claim to fame is that Bobby Moynihan played him in SNL's Spicer skits.
During the campaign he was with Politico. Joined the Times right after the first of the year. Ha did not necessarily stand out at Politico for badness but he was a regular member of the thin-skinned "tone" police* during the campaign (tweet after Iowa Caucus victory: ".@HillaryClinton in a nutshell: Calling for love and kindness -- by SHOUTING!"). So not Cilizza/Halperin level hostility but a guy pretty well known within the media.
Really did not like his work with Haberman (see for instance their planting Trump with the "Susan Rice broke the law" line. He was a key participant on the project to make the Times the Tabloid of Record for the Nascent White Supremacist Kleptocratic Autocracy.
*About in line with the mainstream NYT politics male mediocrities like Confessore, Burn, Martin, Lichtbau et al--the guys who worked to get Jill Abramson shitcanned.
Franken does not seem to understand with these latest two it really is over.
Link. Two more butt gropes. The second woman told several people ― including one of the reporters for this story,
.. Cut off 2nd half of quote. Told the reporter years ago.
Yep, that's it. Thank God there's a Democratic governor. Time to go.
I chose a fine time to weigh in. 288 gets it right.
Always stand behind a senator when you take a picture with them.
285, 288 Yup, as soon as I heard of the second one I knew there would be a third and more. He needs to go now.
There should be a kickstarter to hire somebody to fondle his ass during his resignation speech. I wanted that man to be president.
Google Senator Ellison and the first result you get is Keith.
Belated comment to Buttercup: The very end of this Q & A might make you feel better about not being able to go to your conference https://pankisseskafka.com/2017/11/17/michael-berube-tells-me-what-to-do-a-solicited-qa/
So, I emailed my committee and asked them for advice. Committee member A wrote back immediately and told me to ask for a skype interview. My advisor B thought skype wouldn't hurt my chances but if I could get the airfare covered I should go. I emailed our department admin to see if there was any money at all, and she asked me what sort of money I was looking for. I told her the plane fare amounts, and then she didn't write back. I emailed A & B and asked them if I would appear to be a not serious candidate if I didn't go. A wrote back and said that I should emphasize that I'm going to the disciplinary meeting later in the year and that skype would be fine and not to spend my own money on this. I was waiting to hear back from our admin about potential funding, when I get an email from the school telling me that they "suddenly noticed I wasn't presenting at the conference, and perhaps I would prefer a Skype interview, which is totally fine with them."
The faculty who are interviewing me are former students of A, and now I'm wondering if A emailed them and told them I was stressing about this, and to tell me that a skype interview would be fine.
So...I guess the moral of the story is have a powerful hands-on committee member to help you out.
Also, thank you for the link 295. I used to read Berube's blog, back in the olden times, and always loved him.
Google Senator Ellison and the first result you get is Keith.
I don't know MN politics, but doesn't it seem veeery likely that the seat will go to a woman?
Thank God there's a Democratic governor.
I think the Republican operatives are being very clever with this. First they release the info about Franken and John Conyers, and we all say "Resign! It is obvious that you must resign because it is not even a difficult moral decision, you will be replaced by other Democrats anyway, there is nothing to lose." Then when they resign, the Republican operatives will start releasing info about other Democrats who will be replaced by Republicans when they resign, and they will have to resign too. Meanwhile even worse stories will come out about a much larger number of Republicans, but none of them will resign, they will just say they did nothing wrong and the women are liars. Like everything else, this will help Republicans stay in power.
as soon as I heard of the second one I knew there would be a third
I think it was a cost-free little hit of transgressive endorphins for these guys--a little sexual charge, a tiny affirmation of their own status; they really act like addicts. And it turns out it wasn't cost-free after all.
300 I'm afraid you may be right.
300 sounded right to me, but then I saw this story, and it's clear that nobody really has control over what stories are coming out (which doesn't exclude the possibility of somebody having a couple stories that they're waiting to release).
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/22/us/politics/joe-barton-explicit-photo-twitter.html
But that's not really the same thing.
No, but the thing that struck me (about 303) was that nobody knew who released the photo or why.
I fear that in six months' time this will all be forgotten
|| Alabama Senate race is too close to call, 538 says. |>
258: sadly that sort of thing isn't new. I was in the audience at the Ox/ford Un/ion when a very earnest member of some sort of socialist group attacked Pik Botha in person for his involvement in the brutality of the apartheid government, and it gradually emerged (amid growing laughter) that she had got him confused with P.W. Botha. He was very polite about it.
261 is an excellent point. In fact I don't think there was a single major character in Idiocracy who wasn't basically a decent person. A lot of them weren't very bright but none of them were really evil.
308 brought to you by Carl's Jr.
300, 302: Yes, in general I think we are in a cycle where everything potentially good turns to shit before our eyes. I don't think the Reps/Foxoids are quite as organized as 300 suggests, but they along with the help of the fuckhead mainstream press will achieve the same result.
A little off-topic but it appears the following exchange is actually real:
Greg Sargent @ThePlumLineGS
21h
New post:
Trump's rage-tweets about LaVar Ball are part of a pattern.
Trump regularly attacks high-profile African Americans to feed his supporters' belief that the system is rigged for minorities:
wapo.st/2hMTdcx
Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
Replying to @ThePlumLineGS
MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
6:31am · 23 Nov 2017 · Twitter for iPhone
Sargent's response: Happy Thanksgiving, Mr. President.
And here's wishing all of us the same.
Oh, what a world! What a world! Who would have thought a blowhard con man like Trump could destroy my beautiful complacency?
Further to 308, President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho would be a considerable improvement over the current incumbent, President Upgrayedd.
300, 302: Yes, in general I think we are in a cycle where everything potentially good turns to shit before our eyes. I don't think the Reps/Foxoids are quite as organized as 300 suggests, but they along with the help of the fuckhead mainstream press will achieve the same result.
I think it's no accident. This one sets the precedent. If they had released info on someone who would be replaced by a Republican if he resigned, there would be a much bigger push to say "We need you to stay in office, We can't unilaterally disarm like we do so often, It's regrettable but this is how politicians have acted for 150 years, there are jokes about how all (male) politicians act this way, and we can't just say it's now a firing offense in one party but not the other one."
By my count there are currently 12 Democratic Senators who are old guys (over 55) and represent a state with a Republican governor.
1 Florida
1 Illinois
1 Indiana
2 Maryland
1 Massachusetts
1 Michigan
2 New Mexico
1 Ohio
1 Vermont
1 West Virginia
(why do Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts and Vermont have Republican governors? who knows)
So, just gonna check out of following the news now for another 8 months.
Edit: 11. I specified "old guys" but one of the guys from New Mexico is only 45. Also, when did this "Gary Peters" appear? He's the one senator I've never heard of.
...We need you to stay in office, We can't unilaterally disarm like we do so often...
I understand what you're trying to say, but I think that's a bad way to phrase it. It implies that the alternative is to be armed -- to fight back against calls that somebody should resign if the face multiple credible accusations of sexual assault.
I think the question of who should or shouldn't resign will be complicated and messy. But, at the same time, I think that calls for resignations are legitimate, on the side of (messy & complicated) justice, and aren't something to be armed against.
Gaming this out, I think if we end up in a world where (1) the D's throw Franken and Conyers over but (2) Moore squeaks through and gets seated and Donald Trump is still President, then (a) it's pretty damn clear which party gives a crap about women and (b) if it turns out that, say, Bill Nelson is a creeper too (at a sub-felonious level), then the obviousness of (a) gives you some space to carve out a hypocritical, "but not when a vote in the Senate is on the line," exception for retiring vs. resigning. (Yes, that's the same exception Moore is arguing for; it's kind of different when it's literally attempted rape.)
Will they be accused of abandoning their principles when it's not convenient? Sure. But they would demonstrably have some principles to abandon.
Yeah, the disarmament metaphor would suggest Democrats declining to remove Republicans from office. Other than that I think Ned's got it right.