the_others
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User ID: 2680
the_others
2d ago
Yes, I should have looked deeper before giving my personal opinion on the likelihood of guilt.
What else is the college supposed to do? The cops looked into it in 2024 and concluded there was no criminal case, expulsion is then actually the maximum possible punishment. This is actually evidence of hysteria because you can be expelled for things which the legal system concluded had no merit.
When the type of punishment is already maxed out, the next variable is the number of people being punished. They can't expel the expelled students any harder, but if they wanted to project a stronger anti-rape message, they could expel more of them (in this case, other frat members for their alleged involvement).
the_others
2d ago
I hadn't been paying close attention to the details of the story and I was under the impression that her being unconscious (and therefore incapable of consent) was an agreed-upon fact. Upon closer reading it does seem like the unconscious part is under contention, with the DA saying that when the incident was originally reported, she did not report being unconscious, which seems like the classic story-changing pattern.
Maybe I was too quick to update.
the_others
2d ago
An old staple of the culture war has resurfaced: District attorney reopens case of alleged Cornell University 'gang rape'. The core allegation is that the girl went to a frat house, got pressured to snort ketamine, passed out, and was raped by multiple people while unconscious.
I first heard about this case from someone at Cornell a bit after it happened. She was adamant that the frat boys were guilty and that there was conclusive proof (though she didn't personally know what the proof was), but the administration went easy* on them because of misogyny. Obviously, this set off alarm bells in my head because it pattern-matched well with Duke Lacrosse, Mattress Girl, etc. I said that it sounded like there wasn't enough evidence to tell, while in the back of my mind thinking that the accusation was probably false.
I was somewhat surprised when I read today that this conclusive proof does sort of exist, in the form of a Snapchat screenshot wherein someone in the fraternity's group chat posted that there was "free pussy upstairs". It's not quite conclusive proof, but it's much better proof than I expected. At this point my assessment is that the accusation is probably basically real.
This got me to thinking about whether it was time to update my model of the world, and whether the discourse around campus rape has changed over the past 10+ years. In a media environment where Jezebel is dead and Rolling Stone irrelevant, should we still expect the mainstream media to be biased to the point of uselessness? What about the power dynamics? Who is Cornell more afraid of, feminists or Republican OCRs?
There're also the evergreen questions, like what the responsibility of a university should be in cases like this, or what the police department or justice system should do. Seasoned culture warriors will point out that wanting to be hard on this kind of crime correlates with wanting to be soft on other kinds of crime.
Another thing that came to mind was the question of how grievous a crime we should consider rape to be. In my lifetime, rape has generally been considered equivalent to murder in severity ("rape and murder" usually being used to indicate the category of "super serious crime"), and the question of whether that's a good thing has been debated to death. However, Zoomers are famously more prudish than Millennials. Does it follow that Zoomers also regard rape as a greater crime, relatively speaking, than Millennials do?
*I see people claiming on Reddit and other places that the alleged rapists' only punishment was that they had to write apologetic essays, but this is not true -- at least two members of the fraternity were expelled. Whether this is a light punishment is up for debate.
the_others
2mo ago
"Female" being associated with misogyny has nothing to do trans and is more related to normie feminism. Feminists complained that people were using "girls" to refer to groups consisting of at least some adult women, so some people started using "females" to refer to those groups as a hypercorrection. This didn't satisfy the complainers; for an example, see the /r/MenAndFemales subreddit, dedicated to pointing out instances of people using "men" for men and "females" for women and gesturing at the apparent misogyny.
This has led to a hyperstitious cascade where the people still using the word "female" are less feminist than average.
the_others
2mo ago
How often do you clean your shoes? If they're shoes that you wear outside regularly, they're obviously dirty in comparison to a typical indoor space.
the_others
2mo ago
I appreciate the detailed analysis. A few minor points:
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The Japanese school year starts in the spring, so summer vacation happens during a school year, not in between two school years. This doesn't change too much about the quadratic evidence though, since she's also specifically being made to take summer classes because she's behind, so even if she's actually in high school, her schoolwork could be remedial middle school stuff.
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The Japanese cutoff date for when you start school based off your birthday is April 1, which is also around when the school year starts. So most students start high school at 15. If Misuzu turns 15 in the summer, that means she was 14 when the school year started, which would make it her third year of middle school.
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It's been a long time for me, but is it ever explicitly stated that the school is a high school and not a middle school? I remember this being vague. I know that some girls from Kanon make a cameo appearance, but there's no reason to think that the Air versions of Ayu and co. are the same age as the Kanon versions, or that they're the same year as Misuzu (unless there's some "different years have differently colored ribbons" thing going on?).
If I had to give a number for Misuzu's age I'd definitely say 15 as more likely than any other.
I'd be interested to see if you had any thoughts on how old Kanna was during the events of 1000 years ago. Narrative niceness would dictate she be the same age as Misuzu during the events of Air, but 15 seems too old for Kanna.
the_others
2mo ago
After the red card and before this happened, the general sentiment from my mostly liberal social circles was "What's the point of having a corrupt government if they won't step in at times like this?"
Now everyone is pretty happy.
the_others
2mo ago
I think Misuzu is closer to 15 based on a shot we see of her half-eaten birthday cake in the anime (which for plot reasons, we know has the right number of candles), but the bigger point is that she's not a particularly sexualized character and I wouldn't expect someone having her as a profile picture to be thirsting for her.
the_others
2mo ago
"18 and 17 is fine" was not the dominant view when I was in high school (which was not too long ago, and since then things have only moved in the direction of it being less fine). Every adult at school that spoke on the topic explicitly said that 18 and 17 was not fine, and 17 and 17 was also not fine.
It is still the case in some US states such as California that 17 and 17 is illegal.
the_others
3mo ago
It's only standard among people who are in too deep. When US schoolchildren learn about court cases, they learn about Marbury v. Madison, Plessy v. Ferguson, and Brown v. Board of Education, not Marbury, Plessy, and Brown.
I've noticed an increase in single-word references to court cases in the past decade. One particularly irritating one is people saying "Roe" for Roe v. Wade since context isn't always clear in speech and row/rho/Ro/Roe/roe can mean many things.
the_others
5mo ago
Don't most people take the SATs in their junior year? College applications start going out in October so there isn't much time to take them in senior year.
the_others
11mo ago
Depending on your proclivities, it could also be "based outgroup"?
the_others
1yr ago
That makes sense. I think I lost track of the thread's context at some point.
I don't know much about changes to the NSF and NIH so I won't comment there.
the_others
1yr ago
Cut federal grants for diversity, withhold federal grant money from universities that don't toe the line on controlling the woke issues on campus. This is the stance that the admin took with Harvard and has served to keep Hopkins from acting up too much.
I'm confused. Is this not the exact thing that this whole deal with Tao and UCLA is about? The federal government revoking a DEI grant? It may have kept Hopkins from acting up, but it definitely hasn't stopped Tao from kicking up a storm.
I agree with you that this is a decent approach, but to me it seems that it is also more or less what the Trump administration is currently doing.
the_others
1yr ago
If you were part of the Trump administration, how would you punish academics for their woke excesses without negatively impacting useful research? The federal government does not directly control how universities manage their own affairs and any penalties assessed on the universities as a whole can be cast as damaging research in some way.
The only thing that I can think of is some sort of rule like "any university that violates XYZ policy automatically becomes federal property", which would allow the federal government to directly fire and hire, but nationalizing the universities comes with a million other problems.
the_others
1yr ago
My (admittedly clumsily made) point was more that rich women's male peers, including their matches on the apps, are almost universally employed and non-criminal, so such verification would be mostly useless. The distinction would be more useful for underclass women, for whom the verification system would reveal actual information about their potential male partners.
the_others
1yr ago
That would be very ironic, since I imagine the kind of woman who would most value full time employment and the lack of a criminal record in a man would be unlikely to be described as "rich".
the_others
1yr ago
I predict that, contrary to the usual pattern, a dating app which vetted the applicants on basic questions(stable and full time employment, criminal record, etc) would have more women than men, at least if it wasn’t just a matchmaking service.
If true, this sounds like a business opportunity, and not a particularly obscure one at that. Dating apps are basically all trying to figure out ways to get more women to use them, but I can't think of any apps that have tried this kind of verification. The closest I can think of are things like "The League", which requires users to submit an application (which consists of your Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, apparently?) and have it approved by the company before they can use the app, which is much different in that presumably they're not evaluating "basic questions".
the_others
1yr ago
One reason to enforce property ownership of things is to incentivize people to create or improve things. This seems to have mostly worked.
The natural follow-up is, if we made children perpetual slaves of their parents, would that increase the fertility rate and/or the quality of the average person? Why or why not?
the_others
1yr ago
For those curious, the Japanese abbreviation of Assassin's Creed, アサクリ (asakuri) can be parsed as asa ("morning") + kuri ("chestnut"). "Morning Chestnut Problem" is presumably a cheeky way to refer the problematic aspects of Assassin's Creed: Shadows, viewed from a Japanese perspective.
the_others
1yr ago
I definitely agree that control over the accounts is important. I just don't see how that's related to being a breadwinner or a homemaker. Just because someone is the person who performs the labor that leads to money being deposited in an account doesn't mean they're the one who controls said account. In East Asia, for example, the traditional arrangement is that the husband works outside the home to earn a salary and the wife manages the finances, giving him an allowance to spend. So to answer
I don't see how you avoid this if the sole employed partner wants it that way. In the case of a breadwinning spouse who says "It's my money, I'll deposit it in my account and you just let me know how much you need for the groceries" or "sorry, we don't have enough money for Timmy's braces," what is the SAH spouse's counterargument supposed to be?
"We are married and therefore equal stakeholders of this marriage and should have equal say over how our money is spent. If you don't agree with this, I will tell my friends and your reputation will be harmed. If you still do not accede, I will take you to court and you will lose because every institution that deals with this sort of thing recognizes financial abuse as a real and horrible thing, especially when done by a man to a woman, and you will incur their wrath."
There again, I don't know how the non-working spouse's counterargument is supposed to go. "Why are you buying ___ when we can't have a bigger house so Janie can have a yard to play in?" "I told you we couldn't afford the house, and stop nagging me about how I spend my money."
If it's just two people having an argument, no arguments matter. It doesn't matter who's correct unless one of them can use their correctness to convince the other, which is a strategy easily defeated by refusing to be convinced. The only time anything matters is when other people get involved. Therefore, the winning argument is to go to a third party and say "My husband is doing the dictionary definition of financial abuse to me. Please smite him." And unless that third party agrees with the husband that it's his money and not their money (which they won't, as was the point of my hypothetical "You have no right to complain" conversation), the wife easily emerges victorious.
I'm not sure I see how your examples support your view.
Example 1 is a couple where both partners earned money, presumably in approximately equal amounts, yet only one partner (the wife) managed the accounts. This pretty directly disproves that earning money yourself shields you from not having access to money to hire a lawyer with, since judging by your wording, the husband was earning some of the money during their marriage and yet it was the wife who controlled the accounts. That is, in a universe where it was your friend who was abusive and her husband the victim, he would have had no recourse despite earning money himself. This means that having a job doesn't actually protect one from this type of abuse!
Example 2 is a couple where everything is going great and the problem only exists after a series of hypotheticals. There are a few assertions about how the husband holds the power, but power doesn't exist unless it is exercised and you can't know who actually has the power until a conflict happens. In particular, these quotes make me suspicious:
(after all, it's his, he earned it)
(his money, his call)
I've only ever encountered this kind of reasoning in situations where someone wants to paint the man as a powerful abuser and the woman as a powerless victim for the purposes of legitimizing some sort of benefit given to women. If it was truly a principle that whoever earns the money gets more say in how it is spent, you'd see that principle used in other contexts, which I don't. For example, try imagining this exchange actually happening:
Wife: I think we should buy a bigger house, but my husband thinks the smaller one is good enough. He says that he should get to make the decision because he's the breadwinner and I'm a stay-at-home mother.
Wife's friend: He's right. You have no right to complain.
Maybe that's normal in your circles, but it's unthinkable among anyone I've ever known.
My point is, it might very well be that your friend's husband handles the finances in their marriage, but that probably has more to do with the fact that handling finances is a household chore that get assigned and less to do with the fact that he's the breadwinner. In a breadwinner-homemaker relationship, there is very little the breadwinner can do to leverage their position against the homemaker short of threatening to go on "strike" by quitting their job. In contrast, the homemaker typically has a lot of leverage due to their greater influence on the children and greater control over the home environment.
the_others
1yr ago
I agree that good outcomes go to the well-resourced in both law and life, but the average wife is much better resourced than the average husband. The median American woman is, famously, much better socially connected than the median American man, and when we're considering a married couple, their wealth at the point of divorce is by definition equal. That, combined with the well-known bias for women and against men of divorce courts, should mean that the average woman is getting a better deal out of the divorce than the facts normally would suggest by the letter of the law. The common story that comes out of divorce court is that it's the men who are being bullied into making custody or financial concessions, not the women.
I don't know, I feel like there's a severe disconnect between what we perceive to be normal. Having non-joint accounts in a marriage, for example, seems insane to me unless both partners work and have similar earnings, and the other stipulations in your post seem like severe outliers that one could reliably detect ahead of time if a woman were truly afraid of being abandoned.
the_others
1yr ago
My point was slightly different—I fully understand why a husband would want to leave his wife, but what I don't get is how that leads to such a disastrous outcome for the wife that it warrants any significant amount of fear. It just seems to me that the relatively low odds of it happening combined with how mild the downside is means that it shouldn't be a major factor in a woman's decision of whether to marry.
The fact that intoxication itself doesn't legally mean it's rape (at least in some states) is surprising to me given how much it was hammered into me during college that any amount of alcohol meant that consent was impossible (as long as the person was female, though this part I knew couldn't be literally written into the law).
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