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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 29, 2024

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Proving they both actually said yes is impossible.

No, that has actually been done here, there’s video, text messages, no one is disputing that she said yes.

‘He said she said ‘ goes : ‘He said she said yes, she said she said no’ – If he’s telling the truth, she said ‘yes’, so he’s innocent of rape. And if she said “no”, he’s guilty.

That’s not the situation here at all: all agree she said yes, but for some cockamamie reason the consent has been declared invalid so - schocker – he’s guilty, yet again.

You and the radfems don’t accept consent as a defense because you don’t accept innocence as a defense. The way you see it, he may be innocent of rape, but he’s still guilty of being a man and having sex.

This evidence was obviously insufficient to protect the men in question, as they were nonetheless accused of rape and were prosecuted, with disastrous results for their careers and their lives.

Right, and that's absurd. They have overshot the standard for innocence by several orders of magnitude. They should be released with the court’s deepest apologies, maybe teach the prosecutor what a real case should look like.

disagree with the above statement, because it seems to me that the problem is in fact an infinite regress. If you have video of them giving consent, they can claim the video is coerced.

No argument there. @orthoxerox is just another guy on the trad-radfem side, he does not recognize women’s consent because there’s always a man hiding in the bushes, coercing them.

The problem is that sex is not, in fact, a safe source of unadulterated, low-stakes, trivial fun.

I get it, you’re not big on sex, like your prophets before you.

We have no rigorous way of measuring intoxication after the alcohol has left the system, and even timestamped breathalyzers suffer from the same problem as the video evidence above.

I don’t give a shit? Drinking does not put the responsibility for your actions on others in any other context (drunk driving, getting into a fistfight, etc).

You can't prove a negative, and nothing less will be accepted because the accumulated harm demands that something be done.

Maybe the ‘accumulated harm’ demands that all Jan 6 protestors be sent to prison. The accumulated harm is not a real thing here.

People generally sympathize with women for solid, well-founded reasons

You can sympathize with women, admire them, fear them, as much as you like. Their legal ability to turn their agency and reasoning faculties on and off at will still won’t make any sense.

If the employee, the student, the woman, cannot be counted on to make one decision because her body is weak and her mind easily influenced, how can she be counted on to make any?

You want fornication with fewer consequences for men and worse consequences for women

No, in the absence of evidence for a crime, I want no consequences at all.

would not willingly live under either of your regimes.

Not only are you living under the radfem one, you’re a pillar of it.

The radfems have no ability to criminalize the sex I have with my wife.

She could easily accuse you, anytime, of getting insufficiently affirmative enthusiastic continual consent, that one time in boca. Marital rape is a common thing, you know. Oh god, she wasn’t drunk, was she?

You, like them, have nothing to offer people like me, other than to leave us alone.

I originally set out to find where the battle lines really are in this triangle. And I think it’s pretty clear that you are in fact allied to radfems, in your shared hatred of ‘fornication’ and in support of modern rape and harassment laws, against classical liberals like me.

I apologize that it has taken this long to respond to the reports on this comment, but the mod team discussed it and is very broadly of the view that this is a terrible post. It's antagonistic, primarily, but also stuffs a lot of words into other people's mouths. It doesn't discuss the culture wars, but merely wages them. And this will be the sixth time you're banned for it.

I entertained the idea of making it something long term, like maybe 90 days--we used to do a fair number of those back on the subreddit. But some mods suggested a permaban, and it seems nobody could think of a good reason to not permaban you. So, that's what I'm doing.

Why not the 90 day ban, though? Isn't that a more reasonable default?

Looking at the mod log, I think his most recent ban was for two weeks, so it would still have been a pretty substantial step up, six times as long (though maybe one of the others was longer, I didn't look).

I don't know, when people are willing to talk, and seem sincere (which seemed to me to be the case here), it seems reasonable to set cap bans at a few years.

Even if you end up needing to ban them again years down the line, there's a difference in messaging between "you'd be welcome back later, if only you can behave" and "leave, and never come back," and the former seems better. Even if the one in question isn't likely to listen, it sends the message better to everyone else that it isn't about personal antagonism.

Or so it seems to me, but you surely have the experience I do not.

(this is not to say that I disagree that the comment was pretty bad)

Why not the 90 day ban, though? Isn't that a more reasonable default?

Well, maybe. Back on the subreddit, for a while Zorba set a cap of 1 year on bans. We still perma'd spammers and the like, but the idea (IIRC, this was a while ago) was basically that most users who eat a 1 year ban just won't ever come back, and those who do may very well have changed for the better in the interim. What actually happened was, the best posters who ate a 1 year ban just never came back, while the worst posters did come back, as bad as ever--or worse!

At that point the "perma" slowly crept back in, partly because, as it turns out, there's not really any such thing as a user ban--only an identity ban. On reddit, anyone was free to roll up a new user account at any time. We have a few more tools available here on the Motte, but still it's the case that a determined user could probably find a way to roll a fresh alt. There are costs to that--posts have to be manually approved for a while, for example--but a permaban doesn't strictly mean that a person has been kicked off the site. Rather, in this reputation economy they lose the benefits of being a known quantity. And a new user with no reputation has a harder time getting away with the kind of posts that degrade discourse.

It's far from a perfect system--and even here away from reddit, as a moderator my actual options for responding to posts are extremely limited. I've got a carrot that many people don't care about (AAQC reports) and two sticks (warnings and bans). Beyond that, the only way I can hope to modify anyone's behavior is through direct appeal, which takes a lot of time and doesn't always land the way I want it to.

In the instant case, the user just had a long string of bad posts uninterrupted with anything like an AAQC or other valuable contribution. We don't like to lose interesting perspectives, but at some point the amount of harm someone like that does to the discourse just becomes more than the mod team thinks it's worth.

In case anyone's wondering about this ban, the real reason is that fuckduck got into a fight with a mod the other day, but the clique needed another excuse to ban him.
I probably should have made an alt account to say this, because now I'll probably get perma'ed for misusing an apostrophe next week or something.

Edit: called it https://www.themotte.org/post/851/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/184547?context=8#context

I don’t give a shit? Drinking does not put the responsibility for your actions on others in any other context (drunk driving, getting into a fistfight, etc).

"Friends don't let friends drive drunk". While it's not (yet) a legal duty, it's now a moral duty to stop your friend from getting behind the wheel, even if that means they can't give you a ride or that you'll have to pay for their ride home. And yes, this moral duty means you have to drink less yourself if you see your friend getting sloshed and bragging about their driving ability. And if you challenge them to a race, thinking they are more willing to answer that challenge and more likely to lose when drunk, then you will end up in legal trouble.

It's only a moral duty if you accept the state as a moral authority. If you believe in a higher authority or a superseding principle - like the idea that a person is only moral if they are responsible for their actions, then your duty is to uphold that principle. Forgoing that principle to look after your friend then puts the responsibility on you, but that is by choice.

A), it's still their responsibility, even if I have a residual advisory duty to help them avoid death.

B), I have no such moral duty to prevent strangers and friends alike from having sex.