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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9520 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 6, 2026

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Maine Senate Candidate Graham Platner Outed as an Actual Rapist.

"Racicot said she had an on-and-off relationship with Platner, who is now the Democratic Senate nominee in Maine, for more than two years before he entered her rural Maine home uninvited one night in late 2021, deeply intoxicated, and forced himself on her while she repeatedly told him to stop. She said she cut off contact with him after telling him the encounter was not consensual.

'I remember him grabbing my pelvis and being really forceful of me,” she said. 'I remember the specific moment where I thought to myself, like, ‘This is no longer my choice.’'"

Platner officially denies the allegations, but you can tell from his statement that deep down he knows it's true. He can't admit to it because he would go to actual jail, but everyone knows his campaign is over.

The haters said he would crash and burn, and they were correct. Honestly great call by the haters.

The Maine Democratic Party has one week until the ballot deadline to pick a candidate while stepping on as few toes as possible. Let the games begin.

I think what gets me about this story isn't the rape allegation, but the fact that after everything else only a rape allegation matters. He made the right mouth sounds, so he got a pass on all sorts of other behavior.

It's a shame Democrats threw out their Christian upbringing. Otherwise Platner would be able to say he found God and it's all good now. Since it's a given that literally every single human being seeking public office is a monster in human looking flesh, they really need to come up with some sort of secular redemptive act. I'm not sure donating to the ADL is cutting it anymore.

Otherwise Platner would be able to say he found God and it's all good now.

In Christianity genuine repentance means it's all good with God now, but one of the things the genuinely repentant want to do is to reduce future temptation to sin for themselves and others, which makes "and so there don't need to be any secular consequences for my actions either!" a huge red flag suggesting non-genuine repentance.

Secular decision theory isn't much different here. It might be possible to rewrite your own mental hardware to be more virtuous from that point onward, but it's rare enough that you can't expect others to trust it's not a fake unless you're putting out signals whose cost exceeds the benefit to you of that trust. Donations are particularly tricky, because donees who don't trust you might just make the signal backfire by returning your money; some of Harvey Weinstein's attempts come to mind.

What sort of redemption is there in secularism even?

Huh. I think the “found God” strategy would actually work, since his main appeal was always to bring in conservatives.

Not that I expect him to take it.

He didn't bring in conservatives, his appeal was that he would juice turnout among the grassroots working class left who are now politically homeless due to the DNC's increasing moderation.

Obviously, it's not based on an accurate worldview.

More likely what mattered is his poll numbers looking bad.

I think you're correct that the poll numbers are the direct lever involved, but my understanding is that just kicks what gets @WhiningCoil about the story up one level, i.e., Platner got a pass (in the polls) on all sorts of other behavior, but what mattered (in the polls) was a rape allegation. It's still a worthwhile distinction, since the relevance and valence of some issue to political higher-ups and to the voting population can differ significantly (cf. immigration), but that might only magnify the frustration.

The closest analogue I recall was a lot of people up in arms that Andrew Cuomo was pushed to resign after a series of sexual harassment allegations rather than his disastrous decision to put a bunch of COVID patients into nursing homes.

Edit: grammar

Sounds like a Babylon Bee headline. "Entire nation in shock as politician who once said that rape victims should take some responsibility for their behaviour accused of sexual misconduct".

The actual Babylon bee headline is ‘Rape Allegations Mar Reputation of Local Nazi’.

Wether or not you want to call this rape in a legal sense, it is beyond normal levels of shitty. (Assuming it's true, and it's messy and mundane enough to be true) On an interpersonal level, I'd not want to associate with this guy and I'd be particularly disgusted at any leftist or feminist that still did, or want to vote for him or fuck him.

it is beyond normal levels of shitty

I dunno, there's a lot of shitty in the world. Read her story and it's possible to take another angle on it. This was back when Platner was drinking. The pair of them hooked up and were on-again off-again. She's at home texting him and tells him "Don't come over tonight, not feeling it". Her door is unlocked. She hears him coming up the stairs. She does... nothing. Lies on her couch. He comes in. She does... nothing. He's groping and trying to get it on, she can tell he's drunk, he's so unco-ordinated he knocks knick-knacks off the table. She does... apparently nothing except tell him stop and no and go away.

She manages to get up and away from him and goes into her bedroom. Where he follows her, because apparently... she didn't lock the door or call a friend or call the cops or anything.

Is this sounding like "Oh no I'm scared he's gonna rape me" or more "Oh crap, I told him I wasn't in the mood"?

They have sex. He falls asleep. She... lets him stay there and sleep it off, because she wanted to wake him up but then changed her mind because she didn't want him driving drunk.

Again, is this the story of "I was just raped"?

Morning arrives, he wakes up, he tries to be friendly, she tells him "Do you remember last night?" but he doesn't because he was drunk. She... tells him go away and don't contact me again. He leaves, it would seem. She... does nothing, doesn't call cops, doesn't do anything so far as can be told.

Because, she says later, she didn't want to think of herself as a rape victim and didn't want to go to the cops. (What the hell would she have done if it hadn't been Platner coming in her unlocked door and walking up the stairs? Which now makes me think she had half an idea he might show up, and was maybe half inclined to be 'well if he does turn up and I'm kinda in the mood we might...' but then he was drunk not sober when he showed up).

Now that last, didn't want to call the cops because that would make her the victim of rape, okay maybe. That happens. But the rest of it? Sounds more like "ugh, it's easier to just let him have his drunken fuck and kick him out in the morning" than what could be called rape. Non-consensual, maybe. Not enthusiastic consent, definitely. But rape? Well, if we stretch the definitions, which seems to be what is going on here.

And I'm going off what her story is in the reports, I've seen nothing of what Platner himself has said.

This discourse gives a lot of "people talking about sex instead of having it" vibes. Even married couples have dry, unenthusiastic sex often. One person is interested, the other isn't. But they'd just do it and be done with it rather than say no and start an argument. Terminally online people who lack the life experience to understand that awkward, iffy, or straight up unsatisfying sexual encounters are a normal, common part of adult life for most people.

The last wave of allegations against Platner purported that he messaged women while being married and used the Kik app, dubbed the "predator paradise". The insinuation was that he may have traded or soilicited child pornography without directly saying something defamatory. It's interesting to see the MeToo language come crawling back and it's the same arguments we've heard before: "women don't lie about such things". Maybe true 20 years ago, but not in the digital age.

But she did say no. Literally, multiple times.

I feel like I’ve fallen into bizarro world. People are bending over backwards to defend this guy, and it’s not even our usual mysogynists.

Ctrl + F "sloot" and "erwgv3g34" getting zero results is the plot twist of the century for this one

I can’t believe we’re on the same page against here and gone on the definition of rape.

To be clear- I believe women, even sexually active women, are perfectly capable of refusing consent, and that verbal statements that they are doing so should be taken at face value.

The story, what we've got so far, sounds much more like "ugh, go away okay just let him get off then he'll go away" than "help, help, I'm being raped, somebody help!"

That she left the front door unlocked after texting him "no, not tonight" is more like "well if he does come over and if he does convince me to do it" than "I'm done for the night, just gonna lie here and scroll on my phone".

Is there any sign Platner did chase underage women? All the ones mentioned so far seem to be adults, is this just more "any stick will do to beat the dog" in order to get rid of the undesirable?

Ok, but this isn't dry, unenthusiastic sex. This is just straight up rape. She told him no and he persisted anyway. That's the central example of rape. The only issue is whether she is telling the truth and I'm inclined to believe her absent any convincing argument otherwise.

I'll reply to you and @hydroacetylene here.

The "no" sounds more like reluctance and unenthusiasm leading to (as @HereAndGone2 puts it) "ugh, go away okay just let him get off then he'll go away". Yes, a sober enthusiastic "yes" (implied or explicitly stated) is the best marker for consent, and no-means-no is a reliable metric for SA. But it's fuzzy and not 100% perfect, awkward sexual encounters and "I said no/I was drunk but we fucked anyway" seemed to be the recurring theme of many MeToo stories. Technically could qualify as rape, but this depends entirely on what this person was feeling at the time.

I'm not such a stickler that I would reject a drunken unenthusiastic "sure", but the biggest deal-breaker for me is that she physically walked away from the living room when he touched her (or at least, that's what she claimed). Absent anything else, that's a clear indicator that she didn't want it. Up until that point I might be willing to forgive him for just having a drunken misunderstanding, but when he followed her and touched her again, that's pretty clearly rape. (Again, assuming she's telling the truth.)

Well, we allegedly got "She texted him that she needed her ass massaged but we kept that out of the story", so yeah: "And it was a night where him and I were texting back and forth and he had taken something that I said as as an invitation and that's not how I meant it."

Before publication, a Politico reporter told the Platner campaign that Jenny Racicot, on the night in question, had been “texting [Platner] about needing her glute massaged.” The reporter added, “That detail didn’t make our story.”

Blurred lines, indeed.

Her: "Man, my lower half hurts after I did something strenuous. I could use a glute massage!"

Him: "Literal booty call, I'll be there in a jiffy!"

If she gave consent over text, then he drove there and she said no, it’s still rape. Acceptable recourse for being led on was to (for example) break up with her.

I feel like I’m taking crazy pills- be entered her house uninvited and forced himself on her while she was saying no multiple times. In what universe is that ‘unenthusiasm’ rather than ‘actual rape’? Literally, what would qualify as rape to the people defending this behavior as ‘eh, hookup culture gets messy’?

It's so weird, why are people defending this.

Is it a j00 poster thing? I hate that that is my first thought.

I agree with @Skulldrinker that "beyond normal levels of shitty" seems like an accurate way to characterise Platner's behaviour based on this description.

And, well, bluntly it seems completely in-character for everything else we've seen of Platner thus far.

Could you convict him of rape in a court of law? Probably not. It is a notoriously difficult accusation, after all. But as something to add to the pile of evidence that Platner is a lousy person. I'm inclined to agree with Josh Barro. He lacks conscientiousness. He has poor executive function. He fails the character test for office.

(And just because I feel defensive, yes, there are a great many people currently elected to office in the US who also fail the character test, including many on the right, and including the president. This is also bad. But one bad thing does not excuse another bad thing.)

Exactly. This is one of those things that warrants social consequences regardless of legal ones. Especially since this is the no-means-no, yes-means-yes-unless-i-change-my-mind-after-the-fact, [11 out of 9 women will be raped by bro at a frat party while making 70¢ on the dollar, I Respect Women (who are the future, and also The Force)] crowd.

Yes, yes, I know, my rules, your rules, >,<,=, enforced fairly/unfairly, who/whom, et cetera.

Big if true.

I’m not going to jump on the hate train, since it’s firmly “too good to check” for a lot of people. Plus, you know, completely unverifiable. But assuming it’s true, this guy ought to be unelectable.

For those suggesting a ratfuck: do they actually have time to pivot, or is this basically tanking the whole party’s chances for Maine? Would that really be worth keeping a center-left populist out of office?

If he drops out of the race before July 13th, the Democrat Party of Maine gets to pick a replacement, which would almost certainly be the sitting governor that Platner beat for the nomination by default after she stopped campaigning.

That's why the Reps have been heavily hinting that they have killshot levels of dirt that only come out after it's too late to replace him.

If they're lying, and Collins just baited the Dem establishment, it would be a legendary act of dirty politics.

The true ratfucking would be to dump this the day after the filing deadline. This is the Democrats defending themselves from the upcoming Republican oppo research dump.

Nate Silver suggests it might be this guy:

Traders at prediction markets think it is very likely that Platner will drop out. As of Monday evening, they give Platner just a 3 percent chance of being the next U.S. Senator from Maine. After Collins, at 37 percent, the next-most-likely election winner is Troy Jackson, at 34 percent. (Jackson, a progressive Democrat, came in third in Maine’s recent gubernatorial primary.) Under Maine law, Platner has until next Monday (July 13) at 5 p.m. to withdraw from the race. The Maine Democratic Party would then have two weeks (until July 27) to replace him with a new nominee.

If it’s not a ratfuck, they will let Platner pick a successor. He did win the primary after all.

What? If it’s genuine, why would they do that? He can only drag down his replacement.

And so long as he denies it, what incentive would he have to help out?

Because he won the primary. He creamed the establishment candidate. She didn’t even make it to Election Day.

Presumably his political opinions are genuine. If he’s forced to quit (which he will be) he should quit on his own terms.

Maybe I was unclear.

The accusation represents new information unavailable to primary voters.

If that’s not enough to lose the general, they don’t need to drop him like this.

If it is enough, then his endorsement is worth less than nothing.

Therefore, they have no reason to drop him but keep asking him for input.

Okay, let me break this down.

  • Maine voters like Graham Platner’s politics and affect.

  • Maine voters do not like that Graham Platner is “consensually careless”.

  • Graham Platner would choose his endorsement based on alignment with his politics but not alignment on date rape.

  • Therefore, Graham Platner should get to choose his replacement.

But what if Graham Platner would in fact choose his endorsement based on alignment with date rape but not alignment with his politics?

This accusation isn’t date rape- he entered a woman’s house after having been refused entry and then raped her. They weren’t on a date(although they had been in the past).

Well then he wouldn’t drop out. No one is better positioned to make date rape mainstream than Graham Platner.

I see where you’re coming from, and I guess I’m just not convinced that the average voter decouples those two things.

The allegation is weak, but added to the others might be enough to sink Platner. I think it's a ratfuck by the Democrats, and so does Freddie DeBoer. Doesn't mean it isn't also true.

My hot take? The Dems have spent so much time equating masculinity with toxicity that when they had to pivot to appeal to men, this is what they came up with. "How do you do, fellow Nazi Rapists!"

In a purely political sense, this is one long series of unforced errors which is deconstructing the moral authority of the party/movement (such as it was). Platner still hasn't faced a Republican. This is all inter-Dem infighting, with popcorn on the right.

so does Freddie DeBoer.

Thank you for adding a moment of joy to my afternoon.

Reading DeBoer's article and comment section is wonderful. It's just so funny to watch the party of "If 9 people sit down at a table with 1 Nazi, you have 10 Nazis" morph seamlessly into, "Look, just because a man has a big Nazi tattoo on his chest doesn't mean he's a bad guy, you know?".

To be fair to the commenters, about a third to a half of commenters are saying variations of, 'screw the electoral dynamics, I'm not voting for a guy with a Nazi tattoo'.

I expect Platner and his supporters to try and blame this all on the Jews/Isreal before the month is out.

Confucius say if you wait by the river, the bodies of your ops float by eventually. Or something.

Wait, Freddie thinks it’s a screwjob?

Revising my estimates down a few points.

My hot take? The Dems have spent so much time equating masculinity with toxicity that when they had to pivot to appeal to men, this is what they came up with.

first_time.jpg?

There was also the humiliation ritual that was “white dudes for Harris,” of which had a wide-ranging AoE in cringe-induction among men across all races and across the political compass.

Unlike the way you describe the link it is not "Platner outed as an actual rapist".

It is "women who dated him says it was rape, kinda, she didn't fight him off or stab him with the sewing needles or go to the cops or anything like that or even try to run out of the house after he was done".

Racicot told POLITICO she connected with Platner on the dating app Bumble in 2019 and had consensual relations with him prior to the night he allegedly assaulted her.

That night in late 2021, she said she had exchanged text messages with him and told him not to come over, saying she wasn’t in the mood for company. Later that evening, she said she realized when she heard a sound on the stairs that he had let himself into her house, which was unlocked.

Platner came up the stairs, Racicot said, to where she was on a couch. He got on top of her and kept grabbing her, she said, while she repeatedly told him to stop and that she wasn’t interested. Racicot said she smelled alcohol on his breath and believed he was “almost blackout drunk” because Platner ignored her protests and continued to grab her after knocking over an antique sewing kit, spilling small needles everywhere.

“And, the look on his face and realizing what was happening, I just realized that, like, I am in a situation where there’s no consent here,” she said.

Racicot said she tried to separate herself from Platner by telling him she couldn’t be in that room anymore, after which he followed her to her bedroom and had sex with her against her will. She said he also ejaculated inside of her despite her telling him not to, as she was not using birth control at the time.

She went to clean herself up, she said, and when she returned, Platner had fallen asleep. She contemplated waking him up to kick him out, but worried he could hurt someone driving in the state he was in.

The following morning, she said, Platner tried to put his arm around her and she pushed him away. She said she asked him whether he remembered what had happened the previous night; according to Racicot, Platner said he didn’t remember. Racicot said she told him to leave and never contact her again.

That's a whole lot of "it was non-consensual but I didn't do nothing about it" going on there. At this stage it's pure "he said/she said" and rests on "could it have happened like that? yes. did it happen like that? who knows?"

She contemplated waking him up to kick him out, but worried he could hurt someone driving in the state he was in.

Are we going to talk about the implication that he was driving a motor vehicle while drunk to her home?

Personally, I do not see a lot of light between "prone to rape when drunk" and "prone to reckless endangerment of others when drunk". Both should be disqualifying for public office in the eyes of the voters if they believe the allegations.

Especially if it is recent behavior, as in this case. If he had done his alleged crimes when he was 17, served his time and then decades later entered politics, things would be different.

Are we going to talk about the implication that he was driving a motor vehicle while drunk to her home?

Which indeed yes, I imagine he was drunk driving and yes, this is a serious claim.

I would be shocked if Platner hadn't been a habitual drunk driver for long stretches of time, given everything else we know about his character.

You could apply this same logic to the allegations made against Trump by Ivana Trump. It's about the same level of veracity, with one difference: Ivana retracted her statements after the fact. I don't believe that people who say this now wants to stick to just the facts - mostly because everyone who tried was sent to the social gulag a long time ago. If you dared make such a argument to those of progressive and liberal leanings, you would have been called a rape apologist. I was there. I lived through the MeToo period. Superficially this is a fair argument to make. But if you lived in the past ten years - if you have been exposed to public discourse at all - you know that this is the left not living up to its principles that it used to oppress men.

Because even feminism is subordinate to the cause, in certain conditions. You can make the most crunchy granola hippy defend a ex-blackwater totenkampf-toting sexual abuser if he says the right platitudes about Israel. People sneer at the right-populists all the time, but at least they have a movement. They get elected. Platner is a man that doesn't deserve any loyalty but every tankie and communist has torched their public reputations to defend him in the past few months. It would be funny, if it didn't make your heart ache.

Look, as unimpressive as I find the accusations…I’m really surprised to see this framing from you. We’ve got a lot of users who have said similar things in the past, and I could have sworn you’d blown up at them.

If the accuser is telling the truth, then it’s rape, plain and simple. That just happens to be a big “if.”

I dont find it that surpirsing. Limited patience with people has always been part of her brand, and the accuser sure is a "come on man" character here.

I think Platner is a louse. I think he probably did behave badly. But as I've said, I've been burned by all the political accusations that only show up when oopsies, looks like The Wrong Guy might get elected.

If she's telling the truth, she was an idiot as well. Unlocked front door, could have been anyone coming up the stairs and unless she knew or strongly suspected it was Platner and not a stranger, things might have gone a lot worse. Maybe the news media are just being careful, but they're all reporting it as "sexual assault" and not "rape". Here is an interview she did where she went into more detail. It's still a bit of a grey area, because (for example) how many posts have we had on here discussing how women put men through shit tests? "Don't come over" after texting with him where he thinks she's asking him over could be seen as "Bro, she was shit testing you. Women want dominant men, you backed off like a pussy? You were supposed to head over and convince her to sleep with you!"

I think rape is wrong. I also think, for example, that if you go out and get so drunk you can't remember who you went home with or if you had sex with them, then you too are contributing to the risk whatever might or might not have happened.

Nonconsensual sex? Yeah. Rape? Depends on exact legal definition in Maine or wherever this might be tried.

how many posts have we had on here discussing how women put men through shit tests?

I think most of those posts fall somewhere between uncharitable and unhinged. I was under the impression you usually thought the same, which is why I was surprised.

Again, I don’t disagree with your assessment of the credibility.

I suppose part of it (a large part) was because I was around for a similar story of "I was raped by X and Y" in my home town that went national, was tut-tutted over by All Right-Thinking People, the accused went to jail to the accompaniment of scorn and derision from everyone from the trial judge on down... and it was later revealed to be all invented for reasons of (a) mental disturbance and (b) revenge by the claimant and the witness she said she had.

Throw in the Kavanaugh case, where we went from Blasey Ford who at least had "it could indeed have happened like that" to the High School Drug Rape Gangbangs (which we were supposed to believe just as unquestioningly) plus at least one accuser who admitted to lying in order to get Kavanaugh off the court, and that put the kibosh on it for me and politically-charged accusations that conveniently come along years afterwards when the guy is on the brink of getting public office.

Jill Schmoe accuses Joe Schmoe of doing bad stuff where the accusation is recent, credible, has some corroboration, and isn't politically or otherwise motivated? I'll give it the benefit of the doubt. Jill Schmoe accuses Joe Bigname just when Joe is going for substantial public office and there are those who would love to see Joe fall on his face? I'm going to need a heck of a lot of proof backing that one up.

Is this the same here and gone?

This woman made a few bad choices(having a previous hookup with platner). Then afterwards he invited himself over and she told him not to come. She unwisely didnt lock the door so he just let himself in. Then she told him to stop while he grabbed her and tried to mount her. If that’s not rape, what is?

Oh, hydro, there are a lot of legal definitions of what exactly is and isn't rape, and judges make comments about it.

I'm now sufficiently burned on "oh wow hey just so happens that at precisely the right moment to help us get rid of this guy we hate, someone comes forward with an accusation of sexual assault that conveniently has no witnesses to support or, for our purposes, prove it never happened, gosh what are the chances, eh?" stories of this kind to be very dubious.

Lack of consent is not in itself rape. Suppose it hadn't been Platner walking in her front door. Would she have fought that guy off, called the cops, tried to get help? Because the story can be interpreted to be "she kinda would have gone along if he'd been sober, but because he wasn't, she just shrugged and let him get some so he'd go away in the morning". There's nothing there about "and I tried fighting him off, and when I got into my bedroom I locked the door but he broke in, and I tried calling for help but he grabbed my phone" etc. in the story.

Could have been rape. Could have been choice she later regretted. Could be "I don't want this guy in office, so here's my story". Could be a lot of things. I don't like Platner, but this isn't enough in the story to say "yep definitely rape rather than dubious consent". A lot of women (and men too, I guess) have sex out of a sense of duty or obligation, that doesn't make it rape.

A lot of women (and men too, I guess) have sex out of a sense of duty or obligation, that doesn't make it rape.

I don't think a lot of men really have much experience with this. Furthermore, I believe that according to human instinct[0] having to do this disqualifies you from being a man[1]. (Which is also why most human societies, bar the ones over the last 100 years, have this baked into their understanding of male homosexual activity, regardless of whether or not they actively prosecuted it.)

That knowledge gap creates some significant problems, though, since you have to guess as to how bad the problem actually is. So you can't tell nearly as well if the opposite side/sex is bullshitting you, and if you default to "just Believe Them" for a few generations, you get this situation, where normal relationship dynamics have effectively become rape (or can become rape arbitrarily), especially in the marginal case (like this one) where that duty/obligation is all that's left in the relationship.

It's understandable that, if this state of affairs is broken to the point it's getting in the way of other political goals, the "side" that gained a sociopolitical advantage from normal relationship dynamics being rape (whose candidate it ostensibly is) would start pulling away from the polemic and towards nuance/reality. The principled ones break first.

[0] Generalizes to 'being taken advantage of', but this is specifically why Samuel Jackson's character says those things in the first place. Bitches are by definition female (shorthand for "obligated/subordinate"- not a prescription), which is why calling a man one in this context can even be a bad thing in the first place.

[1] And is part of why men in that position don't usually like talking about it if and when it should happen to them. (And if it involves a woman, why the response is some variation of "nice" or "how'd you con her into it?", and in either case is followed by disbelief should the man complain about being turned into the obligated/subordinate partner. In conventional relationships other men will mock the complainant by making whip-cracking sounds.)

"oh wow hey just so happens that at precisely the right moment to help us get rid of this guy we hate,

My understanding is that the "right moment" for Platner's political enemies would have been after it was too late for him to drop out and a replacement candidate to run, right? In which case this is only the right moment for Platner's political allies (although you might fairly object that Platner may have enemies inside the Democratic party), and their interest in pushing the story would be to get him to drop out before the story surfaces at the "right" moment.

Or am I wrong on the timeline, or is there inside baseball that I am missing?

I was thinking enemies inside the party. Collins and the Republicans probably don't care so long as he goes, and the second choice is a squishier Dem they can beat.

I could buy this, but I don't know enough inside baseball to speculate on who would count as his co-party rivals. Do you?

My guess is "people who want to win". Knowing or plausibly worrying that there was worse yet to come makes this a rational call from the rest of the party if they want to take the Senate. It could be some kind of Establishment vs DSA war, but there are more extreme standard-bearers for the DSA side, and most of the Establishment seemed willing to support him four days ago. Maybe his white maleness meant that he was the only leftist candidate who was susceptible to shivving, which would be hilarious.

If this woman is telling the truth, then it was rape- she said no(in fact told him that before she showed up at her house) and never changed her mind. I would certainly be willing to believe that she's lying, but it seems a lot more likely that her story- she was agonizing about telling someone because she supports him politically(she does seem to legitimately be a progressive democrat), eventually told NYT, they tried to sit on it, but then it leaked- to be true.

She didn't fight him off because she couldn't, she was scared, etc. That does not equal consent. She straight up told him no.

That does not equal consent. She straight up told him no.

Yeah, but it's much more dubious consent than rape, if I go by the report. She got away from him but didn't run out the door or lock the bedroom door or phone someone to come get him/come get her. Now maybe there will be a fuller account and more details, but the preliminary story is he was drunk and there's no mention of "he broke down the door" or "he grabbed me before I could get away".

Lack of consent is not in itself rape.

I mean definitionally it is:

The revised UCR definition of rape is: penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.

That doesn't mean this story is true of course. But having sex with someone without their consent is rape. Whether they fight back or freeze or do nothing.

If she consents to having sex with Platner no matter how grudgingly then it isn't rape of course, you are correct there. But then there is consent. Lack of consent is exactly what turns sex into rape.

without the consent of the victim.

I think HereandGone is implying a sort of tacit consent. I don't consent to my cat laying me and clawing at my belly... but I don't do much more than call him an asshole and then scratch his ears. I've personally been on the receiving end of similar sexual behavior, and calling it rape feels like it seriously devalues the concept. I was not "forced against my will", I was "annoyed by a drunk wife until I decided that getting her off was the quickest path to getting back to sleep".

I think consent exists on a sliding scale. At a value of zero, escaping the situation is the whole of your utility function, and you would happily order a nuclear strike at your location if you could, evaporating the perpetrator, yourself and millions of bystanders in the process.

At a value of 1, you are enthusiastic about the sex (but likely not to the point where it dominates your utility function, because that rarely happens).

Between these two extremes there is a lot of road, and at some point we put up a road sign labeled "rape" -- which is perfectly reasonable.

In the absence of other complications like diminished ability to consent (e.g. due to age or drugs), obvious coercion or pre-arrangements (like CNC or agreeing to wake-up sex), the line we draw is typically verbal (though voluntary actions may reinforce or negate verbally stated preferences).

If the alleged victim is saying "no" (and not contradicting that by undressing himself or his partner) as the sex begins, that is rape. If his last words before sex begins are "okay, let's just get this over with", that is verbal consent (even if he had said "no" before), ergo not rape. If he says nothing, the person initiating the sex better have a convincing story how based on past encounters or nonverbal signals.

We generally do not require rape victims to make a credible attempt to kill the perp or themselves to escape the situation. "She did not even try to choke to death on her own tongue, so she was likely enjoying it" is not a defense which is very successful. OTOH, violently resisting will typically leave forensic evidence which can be helpful in situations where verbal consent is in dispute.

I will grant you that it is entirely possible that he was simply pleading with her until he got some reluctant consent, which would make this not rape. But the fact that she did not call the cops when he fell asleep is not sufficient.

Obviously there is a lot of road between "not rape" and "enthusiastic consent", and most of us have walked parts of that road at some point. Relationships take compromise, both with regard to what movies to watch and what sexual activities to engage in, and when. Monogamous relationships even more, because alternatives are constrained.

Still, showing up drunk at the home of a previous hookup when she told you not to do so and beg for sex is rather close to the "(barely) not rape" end of the spectrum.

This is a good breakdown. If the story is true, what he did isn't good or acceptable, and may well deserve to be called rape. But at the same time, it's qualitatively different from snatching a woman off a running trail and having his way with her while she cries and begs him to stop.

For the cat example, you have technically been assaulted no (assuming we held cats to human standards at least for the analogy to hold)? Someone else who likes cats less could throw your cat across the room in self defense. The fact you don't take it seriously is your prerogative, but in a human to human scenario that would be assault (or battery or whatever). If a man walks up to you and scratches your stomach with sharp fingernails, I assume you are not going to be as sanguine (though, hey what do I know, maybe that would float your boat!)

For the wife example, however grudgingly you did indeed consent. So that's not the same as "lack of consent"

Lack of consent is the literal difference between rape and not rape. If she does indeed grudgingly consent to Platner then it is not rape I agree. If she doesn't consent at all then it doesn't matter what other actions she takes, it is rape.

After 5 years and with presumably no evidence it might not be prosecutable or provable beyond a reasonable doubt of course, either way.

For the wife example, however grudgingly you did indeed consent. So that's not the same as "lack of consent"

I think this is the line being discussed. HereandGone is interpreting her actions as being closer to "begrudging consent". The problem with

Lack of consent is the literal difference between rape and not rape.

is that, particularly among people who have an existing, ongoing sexual relationship, that line can get blurry.

But in this case she was saying no multiple times and was physically forced into it- assuming her story is accurate. That’s a pretty textbook definition of lack of consent.

It can! But the statement wasn't about why he may have assumed he had consent or similar. Her statement was that lack of consent does not make rape. Not that the line was blurry, or that he may have assumed consent, or that it wasn't communicated well or anything of the sort.

The literal difference between rape and not rape is the lack of consent. The line might get blurry as to whether she did consent, I agree. But if she did not it is rape.

If she just meant the line is blurry then her choice of wording was poor indeed.

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I don’t think he’s saying if that’s what happened it isn’t rape - it’s that it’s all simply she said this happened 5 years ago.

It sounds completely believable.

But also, you know, what if it isn’t true or didn’t happen that way?

Is it consensual unless you stab him or call 911? I sympathize with not trying to escalate if you're in a room with a man who could easily overpower you and kill you and be an ongoing source of misery in your life.

That all said, I love how Democrats really badly need a normal salt of the earth white guy who codes blue collar that you could have a beer with, but it turns out those kind of guys don't attend enthusiastic affirmative consent workshops and "I got this Nazi-looking tattoo when I was drunk in the Marines, what's your fucking problem" doesn't travel well among people where symbols can have meanings.

I sympathize with not trying to escalate if you're in a room with a man who could easily overpower you and kill you and be an ongoing source of misery in your life.

Yeah, but there's no sign she tried getting away or locking doors or the rest of it. She heard him coming up the stairs after getting in her unlocked door, and didn't jump up and try and lock her living room door, or grab her phone and call a friend, or the likes of anything to protect herself. Fear of being overpowered, yes, but he was so drunk he was "knocking over an antique sewing kit, spilling small needles everywhere" and she managed to get him off her and then she went into her bedroom instead of running out the door. That is not sounding like "oh no he came over uninvited and I'm scared", that's "dammit I told him not tonight, ugh just humour him and maybe he'll go away".

Normal blue collar guys aren’t casually raping people.

Presuming her account is the fact of what happened, sure that's rape.

It's plausible it's closer to he forcefully advanced on her and she didn't clearly say no. Rightly or wrongly, a lot of men consider this hot consensual sex.

Affirmative consent workshops teach you to look for an explicit yes and it you don't get one assume the answer is no.

I hate Platner and would not be surprised if he really did, but Democrats somehow manage to drum up convenient rape allegations against just about everyone the moment they become inconvenient. The allegation itself is just yet another he-said-she-said, and as far as I can see, the "she-said"-part is not even incompatible with both getting drunk and not communicating well.

The story is patchy. Front door unlocked? Hears someone coming up the stairs but doesn't even get off the couch? Doesn't mention trying to push him off or fight him off? Gets away from him into the bedroom but doesn't lock that door? Doesn't call anyone to come over and help her? Sticks around while he's passed out/asleep until the next morning, then tells him go home and don't call her again? Doesn't wake him up because she doesn't want him driving drunk but, y'know, doesn't call the cops after he forced himself on her?

It's not impossible, but that sounds less like rape and more like "hook-up I regret".

I would call it a non-consensual hookup. Less bad than an average rape, but still kind of rape. If you've had sex with someone several times and like them, and aren't opposed to having sex with them in general but just don't want to at the moment, you're way less likely to get violent with them than if a stranger attacks and tries to rape you.

I don't know what your marriage/SO situation is, but consider a time when you weren't in the mood for sex (maybe you're trying to get to sleep because you have to get up early the next morning, maybe you literally just had sex, maybe you're over at someone's house going to the bathroom). If your SO corners you, drunk, and tries to have sex with you despite it not being the right time or place, you're not going to stab them with sewing needles to get them to stop. I expect you'd use significantly less violence to make them stop and be much less likely to call the police on them afterwards when they're sober even if you do give them a stern talking to.

Now, in terms of the reasons rape is bad, in particular the physical and psychological trauma, this is way way less bad than a normal rape. But it's still bad, and not the same as a "hookup I regret". The hookup I regret is when the man did nothing wrong and the woman retroactively tries to change the morality of the action. If it wasn't wrong when he did it because he followed all of the rules, then it's not wrong. But if he's not following the rules, if he is forcing himself on someone who does not want it and unambiguously makes it clear that they do not want it, then he is doing something wrong. He is a bad person. Less bad than a central example of a rapist, but somewhere in the same ballpark, regardless of what word you use to describe it.

I don't know what your marriage/SO situation is

To my understanding @HereAndGone2's knowledge of the dynamics of intimate relationships is entirely secondhand, but I'm open to correction.

It's hard to call it a hookup after they've been dating for a while. There's also really complicated feelings when it comes to people you know and trusted up to the point where they did something terrible. Women stay in abusive relationships all the time, and people regularly allow themselves to be taken advantage of by family members. If she knew the guy for two years and he hadn't done anything similar prior to that time, it's probably easier for her to view him as a decent guy who had a bad night as opposed to someone who should go to jail. It's not that different than having a brother who stole $10,000 from you to feed his gambling habit. You may disown him and never want to talk to him again, but that doesn't mean you're going to report him to the police and participate in a criminal investigation.

I don't think it's patchy. From the article, they were in an on-again off-again relationship, so sexual encounters were normal, and maybe even showing up unannounced could have been normal. It's not difficult to imagine the "no" not being a particularly strongly felt "no", more like a "dude you just barged in here and immediately tried to have sex with me, get off" and then a realization "oh he's not taking 'no' for an answer...". Not taking 'no' for an answer is the dictionary definition of rape, but this case seems closer to marital rape than an actual tried-to-fight-him-off-and-cried-for-help type of rape. If that happened, it's very possible to not feel particularly unsafe while he drunkenly sleeps next to you satiated but get bad vibes that your boundaries were ignored and decide to cut him off the next day.

If anything, those details make the story more plausible. It isn't being played up, just plainly stated as basically a "consent accident", which she apparently sees it as, too. As for me, Graham Platner doesn't seem like the subdue-her-and-rape-her type, despite his rough personality. Well, unless he mistook her for a home intruder.

just plainly stated as basically a "consent accident"

"What? She tripped, fell, landed on his dick?"

"Consent accident" is kind of brilliant actually although I'm struggling to imagine many other use cases in which it would carry the same meaning you've given it here.

It's been a meme in certain circles for years.

Platner officially denies the allegations, but you can tell from his statement that deep down he knows it's true.

What about this video gave you the impression he knows the allegations are true? He just recited a paragraph of legal boilerplate and a stump speech, in the exact same flat tone of voice.

I suspect the Kuleshov effect.

The pundit class has been pretty significantly telegraphing that the guy is incredibly radioactive and that the republicans are just waiting for the filing deadline, and the NYT knew about this and suppressed it.

Supposedly the big thing that's being sat on is sexual warcrimes, which sounds absurd but this is a guy who said he wants his house to be robbed so he can rape the robbers*.

*Per one of his sexual assault victims.

the republicans are just waiting for the filing deadline

...with what?

The nuclear warfare option is something from his time on Kik. The platform has a bad reputation for underage users, and while I'd understand the argument that what's been shown so far is much worse than waving his dingaling at a 17-year-old, there's both political and philosophical reasons the latter might be more of a showstopper.

But on top of the question of whether that exists, the trouble is the old "Build your opponent a golden bridge to retreat across". Nothing from this point onward is more dangerous to a Senator than to a random loser; any further threat is just another layer of double-or-prison.

(maybe literally; the statute of limitations in Maine for rape is 20 years)

It's entirely possible they can release some conversations with a young lady considerably younger than seventeen.

I mean I don't know for sure, it sounds like they may have additional sex crime allegations of various kinds. I was hearing from journalists months ago that "everyone" knew about these accusations and that some of them were being held onto or quashed (in the case of the NYT).

Most of the people who were saying that are saying more stuff is left in the tank.

sexual warcrimes

Is this metal band name taken?

Thank you for making me do this google search.

Also, apparently the PC approved term is "Conflict-related Sexual Violence."

I will put that next to "non-domiciled."

The applicable term is simply 'war rape', I think.

Unfortunately the euphemism treadmill does not allow that, see for example "IPV" (intimate partner violence).

Both of which sound more “math rock” to me.

The claim seems like nonsense. From what I can find, the only verified evidence of the supposed assault is this 2023 Facebook conversation:

“I feel morally obligated to warn you if you were anything more than friends with Graham,” she wrote in a message reviewed by CNN. “He’s not all bad, but I ended up in a bad situation with him and I will just very politely call him consensually careless at times.” When the other woman asked if “he forces himself on people?” Racicot replied “doesn’t listen when drunk…”

This is extremely strong evidence that he did not commit any assault. A raped woman is unlikely to convey her experiences like this. He’s not all bad??? Bad situation? Not providing a yes/no when asked directly if he committed assault? No woman since the end of the Ottoman Empire has characterized her rapist as “not all bad”

No woman since the end of the Ottoman Empire has characterized her rapist as “not all bad”

The counterpoint is a fairly common stereotype. "Girl tells her boyfriend she was raped/sexually assaulted, then he finds out it was a guy she still follows on Insta."

I think a fair number of women have, let's say, awkwardly complicated feelings about men who are sexually aggressive.

"Girl tells her boyfriend she was raped/sexually assaulted, then he finds out it was a guy she still follows on Insta."

There was even a recent Obsession meme on this theme that caused much maddening among online whiteknights and womenfolk: “how your gf looks at you when you ask her to block the guy who 'raped' her in 2019.”

Also featured in the above screenshot is a pesky wrongthinker confirming with a female replyer whether she indeed blocked her father on Instagram but not her rapist/“rapist.” Chicks preemptively blocking their fathers lest their Instathottery get exposed is already funny enough in and of itself.

ETA:

While I'll leave the link above in case anyone wants to continue using it for exploring what might be going on with attempted old.reddit auto-conversions, see here for an alternative that should work for everyone, courtesy of @erwgv3g34.

Reason #9854904 to just nuke Xitter, reddit, really all the big social medias altogether man. I don't see any other way to one-shot MeToo and its spinoffs and sequels. Becky says Brad raped her at a frat party 10 years ago, Brad says she initiated by putting her hand on his crotch, Becky says but she changed her mind and resisted yet Brad persisted anyway. Now you, dear reader from Florida (incident happened in Maine!), now that you've heard of this incident that you have no means of verifying, you don't have any excuse to NOT do your civic duty as a kind human being to support Becky and castrate Brad. What do you mean "evidence"? Obviously none exists a decade later, that doesn't mean it did NOT happen! What do you mean she's still following his Insta and blocked her dad? Don't you see the optics problem of questioning the victim? Do you not understand she was afraid, the convenient cheatcode to explain away all the critical queries? Stop GASLIGHTING her you privileged MAN!!

When something as vaporous as optics becomes more important than verifiable reality, we should just declare rule of the mob and be done with it. From approaching a girl all the way to her bed, think about the optics! And you're shocked that an entire generation of men would literally splatter at terminal velocity than ask a girl out?

As for the tweet, I'll grant that a rapist is scarier to potentially confront than a non-aggressive boomer dad but Jesus-tapdancing-Christ her grandkids will be repaying the generational aura debt from that one.

That appears to go to a deleted post from 14 years ago?

Turn off the Old Reddit redirect in your account settings.

Still looks deleted even in new reddit. Weird. And now I feel dirty.

Did you click the old reddit link, and then removed the prefix? That won't work, reddit does some stupid redirect pointing you to that deleted post. If you don't want to change your settings, try copying the link url from the comment, removing the old. prefix, and only then going that cursed site.

No. The link is outright broken. This is the correct link without the old.reddit.com part of the url that the link explicitly had in it.

Your link is broken

Yeah that might have been “meme of the year” for me. I saw the movie and loved it but immediately knew that feminist interpretation of it would be unbearably wrong and annoying.

It’s a horror movie about unwittingly getting exactly what you wished for in a throwaway moment with essentially no recourse to change it.

It’s a simple yet effective straightforward horror movie with minimal subtext, but of course online feminists have to find someway to make the male protagonist take all the blame for what is essentially unknown demon magic and extraordinary bad luck.

Seeing it thrown back at them is hilarious and never gets old.

My favorite tweet about it was in the same genre:

“Horror Movie ideas for 2026. Men: What if your girlfriend was insane? Women: What if you had to be kind to a man you weren’t attracted to?”

I don't think you need to be a feminist at all to see Bear as the villain of the movie and it's deeply disturbing to me how popular Bear-sympathetic interpretations have gotten. I want to say it's feminist-driven negative polarization.

Eh, I think it's wrong to think about anyone as "the villain" besides the evil possession magic. Bear is deeply flawed, most centrally he's chronically passive and indecisive. In TLP terms he wants the company to want to pay him more but not to have to ask for it. The only action he ever took to get what he wanted was something he calculated as being totally unable to help, making a throw away wish. Then he's in the relationship he knows something is wrong but chooses to basically ignore it and just go with it because he's cartoonishly incapable of acting. All of that and more is true of him, but after he made the wish that he had no way of knowing would be interpreted monkey's paw style in the worst possible way there was nothing he really could have done besides killing himself. I'm not quite willing to raise "if you don't kill yourself to right a wrong you didn't intentionally commit" to the level of villain. He's a coward, but that's a forgivable sin.

I mean, basically once the bullshit magic trinket actually turned out to be real and he understood it to be the cause of everything, the only way bear could “do the right thing” was to kill himself or commit murder.

Casting him as the villain is an insane reach despite his personal failings or character flaws; he was 100% fucked no matter what.

The director basically just came out and said Nikki is probably going to prison for the rest of her life after the end of the film.

It’s a straight up tragedy, the need to cast either of the protagonists as “the villain” is indicative of how poisoned our gender discourse is and how abominally privileged women are in western society

I agree that he blundered his way into an extremely fucked situation and that (contra the director's statements) the One Wish Willow company bears more responsibility than he does. But he still basically impulsively asked the devil to help him rape his crush and then spent most of the movie feigning ignorance about it. Medieval peasants would have an easy time condemning him for witchcraft and I think they would actually be 100% justified in doing so. I don't think the line of thought "it is so absurd to think that the One Wish Willow is real that I have no responsibility to consider that any anomalous events might be the result of it working" can coherently coexist with Bear's decision to use it in a private emotional fit in the first place. If it's real enough to make a wish on it's real enough to keep a fucking eye on.

Ah, I see.

A couple things;

I don’t particularly like or empathize with bear, I think he’s a spineless twerp with lots of personality issues. That being said “Satan, please help me rape my crush” is the most uncharitable take on his actions possible.

He wanted her to love him more than anything in the world, without really taking the request seriously. It was in a fit of desperation he said this thing, there’s no evidence that he thought it was actually going to work otherwise even a loser like him might have worded it differently. He, unfortunately, got exactly what he asked for.

Unrequited love / lust is a pretty common, gender neutral phenomenon that just people will experience in their lifetime, we ha level just been culturally trained to find it toxic coming from a man, and really only recently.

Most people in this situation would experience extreme cognitive dissonance, man or woman. Coming to the conclusion that “I, through a magic item that I don’t and can’t understand, directly caused the torture and annihilation of someone’s else will through unknowingly careless action” is maybe one of the toughest pills anyone could ever swallow, both intellectually and emotionally, and 99% of people would only come to that conclusion until everything else was eliminated.

We know he’s in a movie and he doesn’t; if this thing worked on basically any of us it would take a long time for someone to come to the most painful and “logical” conclusion.

We see him go through every step of this process and by the time he’s finally figured it out and accepted it he’s basically forced to either kill himself or commit murder, both things most people straight up don’t have the balls to do.

He’s not a villain, he’s just a garden variety coward. There’s literally billions of people like that.

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Your link is broken

It's not. The site has an old .reddit.com redirect in it's settings, that's broken. Just switch it to reddit.com (without old.) and it will work.

This is the image url: https://preview.redd.it/i-hate-memes-that-use-this-image-v0-upg3gp8rln5h1.jpeg?width=640&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f41ffae8bfae3bf5e37ae67f398546f7a46cc158

Mirrored here: https://i.imgur.com/nKqIi9F.jpeg

I think people should start screenshotting/mirroring reddit considering how much they like to fuck with everything. (For example, reddit now blocks people from viewing old.reddit.com without an account.)

For example, reddit now blocks people from viewing old.reddit.com without an account.

My experience is the opposite. I can browse old Reddit all I want, but new Reddit throws up a sign-in screen about 20 seconds after the page loads.

A few days ago, the company made a post explicitly stating that access to old . reddit . com soon will be blocked for non-logged-in users.

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Horror Movie ideas for 2026. Men: What if your girlfriend was insane? Women: What if you had to be kind to a man you weren’t attracted to?

To be fair, the horror (for women) is not in being kind to an unattractive man, but in being mind-controlled by an unattractive man. Still a banger tweet, though

Yeah the joke is understated on both ends; “insane” doesn’t begin to cover the condition Nikki was subjected to.

Demonic possession more like.

Ehh, one is a difference in degree, the other a difference in kind.

She’s not being mind controlled by a man, she’s possessed by malign man-made sorcery.

If she was really under his control she wouldn’t do half the things that she did, he hated it too. He spent like half the movie utterly terrified of her.

Your link is broken

It works when I hit “edit” and copy the link out to paste it, but it doesn’t work for me either when I click the link from the posted comment.

It’s likely due to the old.reddit.com conversion we have under “Settings.” I don’t know if there’s a way to hardcode it so it opens the same way for everyone regardless of settings.

Just upload it to The Motte.

/images/17834438272360094.webp

Yeah, the movie is about "love potions and love charms are bad and here's why: mind control is not a nice thing and if you call up demons, you get demons".

“Be careful what you wish for”, a tale as old as time. Well told, for sure, but very well trodden ground.

Just because Ms. Racicot said that Platner had non-consensual sex with him doesn’t mean that he did, of course. Right now, it’s a “he said—she said” situation, and there’s no way a prosecutor could charge Platner with no more evidence than her testimony, [1] but since there is a leftist “believe all women” streak in the Democratic party, since she has made the claim, Platner’s career is ruined. If he were a Republican, there’s a good chance he would still be standing (Kavanaugh, Trump, etc.) since conservatives are more inclined to believe in due process and presumption of innocence w.r.t. rape accusations.

About that “believe all women” streak, it’s an open question what percent of rape accusations are false rape accusations. I will list two sources with different conclusions:

  • Source 1 claims 0.2% of rape accusations are false.
  • Source 2 claims 28.8% of rape accusations are false.

Both sources show their homework, so people can look at them and see which source is more reasonable in its methodology.

[1] If she made a complaint right away after the 2021 alleged rape, they could had used a rape kit to prove beyond a reasonable doubt they had sex. It would then be a discussion about whether the sex was consensual, but police could had looked for signs of force being applied in the crime scene when it was still fresh. Five years after the fact, proving it happened is nay to impossible.

Isn't it important to distinguish between formal rape allegations (immediately went to the cops and got a kit, pressed charges) and "casual" ones?

We could take those two numbers at face value and assign the first one to the former and the second to the latter.

For a personal example, I once made out with someone (several times) of an evening, we talked about our childhoods, Fullmetal Alchemist lore, and Noir tropes. I offered her a ride back to her place, we walked arm-in-arm to my car, she said she was "tired" so I dropped her off without anything other than a final kiss and a hug.

The next day she was "So Tired of Straight guys assuming I'm not asexual" and a year later the incident had become Sexual Assault.

Yet I still haven't gotten a knock on the door from the cops.

I’m really sorry you had to go through that.

As someone posted in a sister post, Scott Alexander wrote an article about false rape rates over 12 years ago and I will quote the relevant parts of that article as they apply to your life:

While rape victims have some incentives to report their cases to the police – a desire for justice, a desire for safety, the belief that the evidence will support them – false accusers have very strong incentives not to – too much work, easier revenge through other means, knowledge that the evidence is unlikely to support them, fear of getting in trouble for perjury if their deception gets out. So I consider it a very conservative estimate to say that the ratio of unreported to reported false accusations is 4:1 – the same as it is with rapes. A more realistic estimate might be as high as double or triple that.

Some questionable methodologies claim that all false rape accusations are reported as real rapes to the police, but that kind of thinking comes off as motivated reasoning to me, and the false accusation you have had to endure shows that a lot of false accusations aren’t filed with police.

I have no dog in this particular fight, as I neither live in Maine nor have any plans to do so in the next six years. I am also going to leave aside the object-level concerns, as I don't think estimating general population false accusation rates clarifies much due to the numerous selection effects and atypical—at least in scale—incentives involved here. However, I do strongly object to the blithe implication of equivalent credibility you make:

About that “believe all women” streak, it’s an open question what percent of rape accusations are false rape accusations. I will list two sources with different conclusions:

  • Source 1 claims 0.2% of rape accusations are false.
  • Source 2 claims 28.8% of rape accusations are false.

Both sources show their homework, so people can look at them and see which source is more reasonable in its methodology.

Source 1 shows their homework for an infographic they made (and which doesn't render for me on the archived page—possibly a skill issue), not for any of the surveys or studies providing the numbers which are used in said homework. They arrive at a 0.2% rate by multiplying a 10% reporting rate by a 2% false accusation rate. Yes, it really is just "0.1*0.02 = 0.002 = 0.2%". Where did they get those two factors?

  • The 10% reporting rate is assumed based on two studies, one of which (UK, 2006) estimated a reporting rate between 5% and 25% and the other which covered two years in the US and estimated 49% (2010) and 27% (2011). I don't know how one bases an assumption of "Let's go with 10%" on those numbers, none of the linked studies are accessible via either the archive or copy-pasting the URL, and since the project which hosts the page is "a campaign to bring sexual violence out of the closet and lift survivors to their full potential", this has "just trust me bro" levels of credibility. Regardless, if God were to descend from the heavens and reveal exactly what percentage of rapes result in an accusation, it would be irrelevant to the false accusation rate, because a false accusation requires there to be an accusation in the first place.
  • The 2% false accusation rate is the lower bound of an estimate (2%–8%) from what I believe is a US study from 2009 (a different year and/or country than the studies which were mostly ignored to, charitably, "estimate" the 10% reporting rate figure) hosted here by a different, but aligned, activist organization.

This is certainly one of the methodologies of all time.

Source 2 shows their homework by skewering the very survey which Source 1 used for its 2% false accusation rate, in much the same way that Scott Alexander did in 2013. Both (correctly, as we claim to grant the presumption of innocence in the relevant jurisdictions) bother accounting for inconclusive claims in the numerator and denominator, but I recommend Scott's analysis since it also grapples with selection effects regarding the non-reporting factor.

Regardless of how believable you find the analyses (Source 2 or Scott's; I wouldn't dignify Source 1 with such a characterization), they are at least operating on the level of evidence relevant to assessing accusations, whereas Source 1 is not.

If I am being overwhelmingly charitable, I would say that taking claims made by activist organizations (of any stripe) at face value is unwise, and that if you want to use them in your reasoning, the fine people at Morton have a variety of products suited to this purpose.

If I am being less- but still far from un-charitable, I would say that I suspect you read neither of those sources (particularly Source 1) and just wanted to slap up a couple numbers to make a "but who could say, really" sort of point. One of the reasons I might suspect this is that multiple others still bother to read things as well. I can't imagine that throwing out links without reading them would improve one's credibility, and while I'm just some rando who broke a decade-long streak of lurking during a coffee break, more established members like @phosphorus2 and @FCfromSSC expressing parallel sentiments should motivate exercising more care and deliberation when posting—it certainly would in me.

Most of your post made some excellent points but I feel the final paragraph was not necessary, kind, nor true.

an infographic they made (and which doesn't render for me on the archived page—possibly a skill issue)

Yes, the infographic was removed from that page over the years. Here’s a picture of the infographic. As an aside, when Amanda Marcotte (a radical left-wing feminist, if you ask me) says the infographic is wrong, there probably are methodological issues with it.

Yes, I linked to that study, but since I linked to a contradicting study, I think it’s more fair and reasonable to conclude I don’t have an opinion either way than me making an “implication of equivalent credibility”. My general view is that I am not qualified to have a strong opinion on the issue, [1] although like you I think concluding only 0.2% of rape accusations are false is probably an emotional appeal which doesn’t survive cold logic (and even Amanda Marcotte feels that way, for the record). But I credit the Enliven project for at least showing their homework; most social media graphs like this are completely made up.

The only opinion I have is that there are enough false rape accusations out there that people accused of rape deserve due process and presumption of innocence, not this “believe all women” nonsense.

Something about that study, however, elicited a very intense emotional reaction from you, as evidenced by the bad faith accusations such as “throwing out links without reading them”.

When I read the entire PBS article, as I did when it first came out, my impression was that it discredited Reade’s accusation because, logistically, it just wasn’t possible for Biden to assault her that way in the place she claimed to have been assaulted.

The sense I get from other posters is a negative emotional reaction to PBS, since PBS is a “blue tribe” source of information, and some people here have a negative emotional reaction to any and all “blue tribe” sources. In the particular case of the Reade accusations, PBS had to present a strong case that Reade was full of it, but they had to, since their audience when they wrote that article had a large number of “believe all women” readers, do so in a way without directly contradicting the “believe all women” mantra, which is why the article presents a lot of evidence without making stronger conclusions.

Indeed, one thing I notice is that when I support the red tribe here, I get upvoted, but when I support the blue tribe, I get downvoted. I don’t think it’s helpful to be an echo chamber for either side, but since most places default to left-of-center opinions (where I often get downvoted and/or buried when I question blue tribe talking points), I also come here to try and get a balanced world view, ideally without excessive emotion.

[1] I do have strong opinions on other issues, such as the claim that 80% of the women sleep with 20% of the men, but that’s an issue I have researched deeply enough to have a strong opinion about.

My final paragraph was being kind. It was a description of my own (conditional) internal state, so I can verify it was true. Its necessity is left to the judgment of the reader—though I note that none of what anyone posts here is strictly necessary in the barest sense (and yet...). I do appreciate you linking the infographic, but I cannot help but point out that if it was taken down from its original source and you had to instead link the graphic as part of an article written by a radical feminist saying that it tripped her BS detector in the direction opposite her biases and is probably crap, then it's probably not worth including it at all.

Casually linking to two studies and inviting people (in this case, me) to look at them and see which source is more reasonable in its methodology doesn't engender any particular conclusion other than that you didn't seem to have read them particularly carefully. That I had to click through to find that one of the (as-described) studies isn't a study, but instead yet another innumerate, made-up social media graph which added negative value to the discussion was, in a nutshell, the point of my post. I know the graph was made up, because Enliven did show their homework. I award them no points, and may God have mercy on their souls.

Touching briefly on the object level: I think we are in agreement on due process and presumption of innocence.

I'm not sure what the back half of your response (PBS? Upvotes? Your GitHub?) has to do with anything I said, but after reading through, I think you might be misinterpreting others' disagreement and skepticism as emotional reactions. While I can't speak to others' feelings or lack thereof, you did impute an intense emotional response to me, and I invite you to not do that again.

If he were a Republican, there’s a good chance he would still be standing

I wonder if this will prompt Platner to jump ship.

He wouldn’t be a Republican. His whole schtick is being very progressive.

Funnily enough, while watching the video in which he denied the allegations, it occurred to me how little editing his political speech would require to make it sound like something a libertarian populist would say.

It's hard to imagine that working: Platner's "hype" is mostly around him being willing to speak up on a bunch of issues the extremely-online crowd cares about and be blunt and "manly" about it. "This is what a male feminist looks like, willing to beat up the fascists and protect trans rights".

But the Democrats aren't going to stomach an abrupt about-face in terms of values, even if Platner was mercenary enough to do it, and I think he's a true believer given the post history that's been dug up. They're supporting him despite his aesthetic because he's saying the right things, they're not going to stick around if he switches to the wrong things. Fetterman pulled it off because he's able to stick to his working-class focus and just making the case that the Republicans aren't that bad for that, and the working class to some extent buys it (remember when some major union was voting to endorse Trump?). Platner would have to drop a lot of the culture war stuff that made him popular in the first place.

And the Republicans have no reason to accept him: they already have a fairly unobjectionable centrist candidate, there's no point in risking splitting the vote, especially now when the Democrats are going to drop in whoever the committee approves without a lot of time to get the base excited, and it's just going to be "vote blue no matter who" really pushing for the new person, with potentially people who got excited about Platner staying home when he's sidelined and talking theories about how this was trumped up to cut him out. Republicans wouldn't want Platner even before the allegations: if they wanted to run a blunt ex-military guy with dubious tattoos and ideas about consent, there are probably a few of them available to the Republican party already.

But the Democrats aren't going to stomach an abrupt about-face in terms of values, even if Platner was mercenary enough to do it

Why not? They stomached Platner before now. He has a Nazi tattoo, he has already been accused of sexual impropriety towards women. The difference is that before the Democratic tastemakers decided Platner was in, now they've decided he's out.

Platner going over to the Republicans means that he's going to have to change position on culture war issues: he'd probably have to be positive towards Trump, be negative on immigration, maybe talk about LGBT stuff going too far. If he's not doing that, just changing the D next to his name to an R and changing nothing else, he has all the same problems with the added bonus of losing anyone who's voting blue no matter who. He'd need to actually adjust his platform to appeal to Republicans.

With Fetterman that kind of works: his thing has always been working class economy stuff, and that doesn't really force him to take a position on most of these things. The working class has at least some level of support for Trump, so he can just kind of sit on that, take centrist positions, not talk too much about the culture war stuff. I'm sure there are people in PA that voted in Fetterman as a Democrat and still support him now even when he's often taking Republican positions.

There are other politicians that have a following of their particular brand of politics that might be able to hold constituents crossing the aisle. Bernie could conceivably be very concerned about immigration (there's a quote from him about immigration oppressing the working class or something, from before 2016) and end up as a R: he'd lose a lot of voters but I bet he'd hold some number. Thomas Massie might make it as a D, certainly the Israel focus would go over well. As long as there's something that's orthogonal to the red/blue divide you might be able to be on either side of it.

I don't know what that orthogonal thing would be for Platner. My impression of him is that his unique edge is that he's a "military tough guy" that we'd expect to be a generic Republican, but instead holds generic Democrat positions: he's an unusual delivery vehicle for those positions that might attract voters that wouldn't normally be amenable to them. If he switched sides, that edge is gone: a military tough guy who holds Republican positions is not hard to find in the slightest.

I can't imagine who would be voting for a Republican Platner, over Collins or whatever generic candidate the Democrats end up putting up.

Fetterman also wasn't running for Senate as a political newcomer. He was more prominent as the mayor of Braddock than he had any right to be, and the biggest skeleton in his closet, the incident where he chased a guy with a shotgun, happened after he was already in the public eye. It was on the news at the time, but didn't affect any of his subsequent runs for mayor, or his failed 2016 Senate campaign, or his 2018 election for Lieutenant Governor. Platner's entire life prior to 2025 was a mystery as far as the public was concerned, and there were red flags from the very beginning that he might have a checkered past.

It really is reminding me of the Kavanaugh accusations (complete with Blasey Ford style "mentioned it to my therapist"). Will we get elevators full of screaming harpies and the rest of the circus?

I don't know if this happened at all, or if it happened the way she said. Platner is sleazy enough that yeah, it could have. But if E. Jean Carroll is uncritically believed, why not this woman? Tara Reade accused the wrong Democrat, but the Dems want rid of Platner, the previous scandals didn't shift him, now they can dump him with clean hands and have the progressive Democrat (as per the Silver Bulletin article on this) take his place and... lose against Collins, is my read on it.

This is a little more than the Kavanaugh accusations. Nobody could prove that Blasey Ford had ever even met Kavanaugh! The accusation was 30 years old and even Ford's friends couldn't remember it having happened. At least here the accuser is verifiably someone everyone knows knows him.

There was a credible accusation against Biden and no one cared.

My honest guess here is that the Collin's campaigns insinuations that they have "bury him" dirt to drop in the general have either been secretly verified, or just intimidated the Dem establishment into turning on him. Maybe someone has video of him killing civillians or something.

This is probably the least bad thing the Dem establishment could use to tank him, in a way that could theoretically recover some of the capital they spent getting him this far.

There was a credible accusation against Biden and no one cared.

Ms. Reade’s accusation was taken very seriously and thoroughly investigated. One deep investigation concluded the “rape”, as described by Ms. Reade, was not feasible.

Whether it was necessary to go to that depth to prove Biden’s innocence is another question for another day.

One deep investigation concluded the “rape”, as described by Ms. Reade, was not feasible.

"Trump got me alone in a dressing room in a department store in the middle of the day and managed to get my tights down without tearing them and get his finger inside me and no I never screamed for help or fought him off and no there was nobody, including any sales assistants, around and no I never went to the cops and yes I have the very dress hanging on the back of my door for years and no I didn't say anything about any of this until years later when my career was winding down and I needed the publicity boost", "why yes this poor woman was raped, even if technically under NY law digital penetration is not rape, I'm the judge I can say that" worked for E. Jean Carroll. Reade just picked the wrong guy to accuse.

Carroll may have won a civil verdict, but it didn't seem to have much effect on Trump politically. It's only a good comparison if Platner gets elected and his accuser gets a payout.

I had a fight with a friend of mine who was accusing me of denying reality by dismissing him calling Trump a "rapist" because of this harebrained decision.

It affects people.

Was your friend previously a Trump supporter?

No, so it cannot be said to have changed anyone's mind.

Eh, there's plenty of social media and other commentary about "Trump is a rapist, it was proven in court" and "Trump is a paedophile, he raped twelve year olds with Epstein".

I don't think he helped himself with how he handled it, but if someone accuses you falsely and you say "they're a liar" and then get thumped for saying it's a lie, I do think the deck is stacked. Platner will probably have "he's a rapist" around his neck now, whatever happens, and his political career may be hindered or even stopped.

It could have happened. But "could have" is not the same as "did happen".

Asking a bunch of people who worked or work for Biden if they thought he was a rapist while he is running for president is not a deep or serious investigation.

Also that is not what the article even concluded, the article just ends. They just interviewed a bunch of staffers and a few psychologists, each gave their piece. Where was the conclusion? It ends with a paragraph that suggests biden was too touchy.

Asking a bunch of people who worked or work for Biden if they thought he was a rapist while he is running for president is not a deep or serious investigation.

What constitutes a “serious investigation” in your book?

Keep in mind, the accusation happened in 2019, the alleged event happened in 1993, so we’re looking at a 26-year gap. They interviewed a bunch of people who were there, they checked out the architecture of the place where the rape supposedly happened.

What else could they do to investigate an event that supposedly happened 26 years before?

Now, if you ask me, if someone said “he raped me 26 years ago”, I would be very skeptical unless the person making the accusation had solid evidence backing up their claims. But, today in the post-woke era, there’s the notion that a man needs to prove his innocence if accused of any kind of sexual misconduct.

Keep in mind, the accusation happened in 2019, the alleged event happened in 1993, so we’re looking at a 26-year gap. They interviewed a bunch of people who were there, they checked out the architecture of the place where the rape supposedly happened.

What else could they do to investigate an event that supposedly happened 26 years before?

There was a 36 year gap between Blasey Ford's allegation of sexual assault and her going public with it. They had a whole entire investigation about it.

In response to Mitchell's memo detailing her conclusions, several former prosecutors and legal analysts published rebuttals, arguing that Mitchell erred in questioning Ford without there having been an impartial and full investigation. Others noted that Mitchell's role was "akin to [that of] a defense attorney", and therefore she should not have submitted a prosecution report. Two MSNBC legal analysts characterized Mitchell's assertions that Ford had "no memory of key details" and that others had not corroborated her account as flawed arguments, even going so far as to describe Mitchell's conclusions as "reek[ing] of desperation" and "misleading at best and disingenuous at worst".

Thanks for brining up the allegation against Kavanaugh, who, yes, is a supreme court justice today—we didn’t have a bunch of right wing political colleagues asking Kavanaugh to withdrawal after the allegation was made the way Platner right now is having a bunch of his left wing colleagues asking him to step down.

I actually have already directly addressed the allegation against Kavanaugh, as well as the allegations against Trump in this thread:

If he were a Republican, there’s a good chance he would still be standing (Kavanaugh, Trump, etc.) since conservatives are more inclined to believe in due process and presumption of innocence w.r.t. rape accusations.

we didn’t have a bunch of right wing political colleagues asking Kavanaugh to withdrawal after the allegation was made the way Platner right now is

No, the Republicans all just spent months "very seriously" investigating an obvious farce that was obviously drummed up for obvious political reasons. As opposed to Platner, who already had allegations (lesser, yes, but also purported the current one) being swept under the rug by the NYT.

I think that all this means Collins will squeak home in the election. I realise why the party has to be seen to be Caesar's wife in this case, and I also think that it's not unwelcome for Platner to have to step aside and give a different Democratic candidate a chance, but I don't see this ending in a victory for the Democrats in Maine.

What constitutes a “serious investigation” in your book?

Do talk to the people who were actually there and worked with her, like Ben Savage in the article.

Do try and corroborate or disprove. Like what happened to Tara's contemporaneous sexual harassment complaint? That to me seems like a great way to evaluate her credibility, but they mention it but dont really come back to it.

Do not talk to dozens of people who were not there and stand to benefit very very much ideologicaly and professionally if their boss is not a rapist.

Do not involve a psychologist of violence

They interviewed a bunch of people who were there,

No, they interviewed a bunch of biden staffers, the overwhelming majority of which did not remember her and were not there. I know this becauase I read the article, you do not know this because you did not.

I dont find tara's rape credible. But asking a group of people (with a huge vested interest in joe biden not being rapey) "is joe biden a rapist" is not convincing.

what happened to Tara's contemporaneous sexual harassment complaint?

There was no complaint because, as per the PBS article, people who worked with Biden did not corroborate Reade’s claim in the alleged complaint that she was asked to serve drinks.

What makes you think I didn’t read the article?

What makes you think I didn’t read the article?

You draw conclusions that are not supported by the article.

E.g.:

In interviews, staffers have also raised doubts about Reade’s claim that she was asked to serve drinks at a fundraiser, an incident she said she included in an official complaint of sexual harassment submitted while she worked in the office. But more than 50 former staffers said they didn’t remember ever attending a fundraiser for Biden in Washington, D.C., when they were on his Senate staff. And some recalled an office policy banning most of Biden’s Senate staff from doing campaign work.

This does not support the position there was no complaint, but I almost don't blame you because they wrote it very bad. But I still blame you because even if these were more solid they would point to Tara's claim being not credible, not that it didn't exist at all.

Like they interview 74 staffers, and close to a third of them remember Biden attending fundraisers in DC, which would corroborate Tara's allegation. This is also an example of a problem with interviewing so many people who never met Tara. What use is it asking a Biden staffer from 2016 if Biden had ever fundraised in D.C.? They lump in a bunch of useless data points in with people who were there. Like if the third of staffers who had attended a D.C. fundraiser worked in the 90s with Tara that is obviously a much stronger piece indication than if that third worked with Biden under Obama.

They also apparently had a policy that allowed at least some Senate staff to do campaign work (most is not all), also somewhat corroborating Tara's allegation.

The text in your hyperlink which I am quoting above does not support the conclusion that there was no complaint, it supports the conclusion that her complaint is not credible. Likewise with your second link now quoted below:

I remember talking about him wanting me to serve drinks because he liked my legs and thought I was pretty

This is just an accusation. You should have highlighted this part:

Reade says she doesn’t have a copy of the report, and Biden said Friday that he is not aware that any complaint against him exists. He asked the Senate and the National Archives to search their records to try to locate a complaint from Reade.

This supports the conclusion that there was no complaint because no one actually has the complaint.

More comments

Ms. Reade’s accusation was taken very seriously and thoroughly investigated. One deep investigation concluded the “rape”, as described by Ms. Reade, was not feasible.

Do you agree with that investigation's conclusions? Could you quote the parts of the linked article that you consider authoritative?

Whether it was necessary to go to that depth to prove Biden’s innocence is another question for another day.

What standard of evidence do you believe an investigation of such accusations against someone of Biden's stature should have applied? What do you think of prominent proposals for other standards, or the people championing them?

I feel it was a through and honestly done investigation of what it was like at the time when Reade worked for Biden, and why her alleged sexual assault would had been just about impossible.

The layout of that route and building [where Reade alleged she was sexually assaulted by Biden] has not changed. A recent walk through that area showed the subway tunnel contains no out-of-view areas, like an alcove. The remaining portion of the route includes multiple stairwells as well as corridors lined with offices. It is a main thoroughfare for senators and staffers.

Some former staffers told the NewsHour that if Biden did assault Reade in any of these places, it would have been a brazen attack in an area with a high risk of being seen.

“When I worked in the Senate, it was always crowded [and] packed with lobbyists, staff and tourists,” said Sheila Nix, who was Biden’s chief of staff on the 2012 presidential campaign and previously worked as chief of staff to two other Democratic senators.

"Investigated". Is that what we're calling this PBS election year hagiography?

Purportedly, the NYT had this story weeks ago when they ran the other one*, but excluded everything but that one woman so they could use the article to smear her and her allegations about Platner as motivated by sheer partisanship.

Democrats left and right are deleting all their fervent, avowed support for the man. He should brazen it out. Just refuse to drop out. What are they going to do? Take the L? His party would about face again in two weeks and slut-shame the accuser, just like the double-thought away the Nazi tattoo.

The haters said he would crash and burn, and they were correct. Honestly great call by the haters.

Never got that specific with the hater-ing, but it seems pretty on brand.

*Should be that one, but I don't subscribe to that rag.

Democrats left and right are deleting all their fervent, avowed support for the man. He should brazen it out. Just refuse to drop out. What are they going to do? Take the L? His party would about face again in two weeks and slut-shame the accuser, just like the double-thought away the Nazi tattoo.

I'm reminded of Jay Jones.

Just refuse to drop out. What are they going to do? Take the L?

Rumors are that there is a second story about him visiting an underage brothel in the Middle East that will drop if he doesn't quit. Every other rumor about this guy has turned out to be true so who knows.

Democrats are quite content will people in their ranks visiting Epstein island.

That just sounds like an excuse to do another podcast with Hasan Piker. Talk about their common experience, maybe vlog a Devil's Tower.

but you can tell

How?

Tone and timing. Platner's video statement came out within minutes of the Politico article dropping, too soon for him to have calibrated his statement in response to public opinion about the article itself. Platner's tone is defeated and resigned, which would not be expected if Platner knew the allegations were false. He has shrugged off bad press before. If he believed in himself he could do it again. The simplest explaination is that he doesn't believe in himself, because he knows he's been caught.

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