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I guess it's sex crimes week on The Motte. Here is one I've been puzzling about.
How on Earth was Danny Masterson actually convicted?
This has been a slow boil for me. I'd seen headlines here and there about the slow rolling case against him. I totally missed when the first trial went to a hung jury. Then suddenly I see he was convicted on 2 out of 3 rape charges and sentenced to 30 years. Even saw some headlines about Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis getting dragged for writing a character witness letter for his sentencing. But something jumped out at me.
He was being prosecuted for crimes 17-19 years old at the time the prosecution started. Red flag number one, I don't know the specific law in CA, but surely that's pushing the statute of limitations, right? Indeed it is! Statute of Limitations for rape is 10 years. So how did they still prosecute him?
Well there are a few exceptions.. Namely
What appears to have sunk Masterson's SOL is that there are multiple accusers. Now reading the law myself, the reading seems clear to me. The exception requires a seperate conviction. But I'm no lawyer or judge, obviously.
Or
And I believe this is the part pertaining to SOL
So I donno, maybe it's not as clear cut as I think. I repeat, not a lawyer.
Moving past the SOL concerns I have, what was the evidence against Masterson? Near as I can tell none. There were 3 victim testimonies, some expert testimony, and that was it. Zero evidence corroborating the witnesses, zero physical evidence, zero circumstantial evidence. And this is why SOL is so important. It's not a get out of jail free card. It exists so the defense can practically gather some evidence to exonerate their client. After 20 years, most physical evidence will be gone, alibis will be impossible, witnesses will be difficult to find and their testimony will be even more unreliable than already notoriously unreliable witness testimony. All we're left with is he said/she said, and the biases of the jury pool.
This was an idle, principled frustration for me. I honestly could give a shit about Danny Masterson. However, now that figures more politically salient, like Russell Brand, are in the crosshairs, the precedent set by Masterson's chilling conviction are all the more frightening.
Paging @2rafa, but I share a similar meta-hurdle with her that prevents me from getting too worked up about these cases, or at least tempers my emotional reaction to this kind of injustice.
I can objectively agree with you about the apparent stretching of judicial reasonability, the fear of impossible to defend against, the growing assumption of guilt until proven innocent, and the clear threat of these ideological kangaroocifixions creeping into other aspects of crime-and-justice that might actually threaten me. And I can agree about the campus-rape crisis from a few years back, and more recently Me-Too, etc.
Nothing that follows, dismisses the abstract principled disagreement with these judicial outcomes.
However, I can only laugh at the ideological blindspot from the 'liberal' crowd at these kinds of outrage-at-sex-scandal-outrage. The Motte is the same population, intimately familiar with the I never thought the leopard would eat my face meme, no?
These solution here is not to hook-up, not to have causal sex, not to get drunk and fuck people you're not married to. This is all a bunch of liberals pissed that we couldn't stop the ride somewhere between 1/2 and 9/10ths down the slope. Boo-hoo.
Maybe the progressive's impulse that there's something wrong with a lecherous 31 year old celebrity fucking a 16 year old, their inclination to beleive the legitimacy of her later feelings that she was prey-on and harmed, or their belief that going to a party and fucking drunk people, whether or not you are drunk is an excerise in poor judgement, aren't wrong. Maybe the progressive's judicial response is warped and fucked up, but maybe it's because the people who came before them tore down all the scaffolding and vandalized all the blueprints for a functional paradigm, and those same people are all outraged that those who came after aren't happy standing exposed shivering in the wreckage and be told all about their fReEdOm.
From where I stand, everything MeToo is people trying to put a roof back over their head, while the same people who tore down their original house criticise them for not enjoying the fresh air, and the people who built the original house are too busy tell them they're rebuilding it wrong, instead of telling the wreckers to fuck off.
Eh, I don't find this argument persuasive. I highly doubt the vast majority of supporters of the MeToo movement would be caught dead agreeing with any sort of 'sex negativity.' It's really about women wanting to have their cake and eat it to.
The way these sexual assault and rape proceedings are going, we are hurtling towards a world where young women get to become intoxicated at parties and fuck around as much as they want. But then if a man they slept with (or presumably could've slept with) ever does something they don't like, they can bring the full force of the law against them. Even 20 years later.
Yes conservative courting norms and laws were created to prevent this exact thing, but I'm not sure most mainstream progressives are able to think of anything labeled 'conservative' in a positive light. It's quite strange but the modern media landscape really has made a world where people see a group labeled 'enemy' enough times and they get to a point where they just literally cannot fathom that that group has anything beneficial going on.
The point is that MeToo represents an organic rebellion by a lot of women against the excesses of the sexual revolution, whether they consciously realise it or not (and most, as you suggest, do not). Is it often misguided, does it often harm innocents, does it broadly fail to present viable alternatives, is it still trapped inside liberal ideology? Of course - it represents a dynamic rage, it is largely impotent, those supporting it have little understanding of the real material causes of their suffering.
But, as @iprayiam3 says, that does not mean it is insincere. And so-called conservatives who spend their time defending lotharios and cads are essentially liberals on this issue, no different to those defending ‘drag queen story hour’ or teenage transition. No, some things are bad. Young women raised in a climate of total sexual liberalism are rebelling with the only words they have, in the only way they can. They’re not going to become “trad” overnight, they have no understanding of what that is, they were raised without religion, they are surrounded by a media environment that means they don’t have any real understanding of what reversing it would mean. Still, they know the present situation is untenable.
Just how deep does that lack of understanding run? Do these women actually still not realize that trying to outdo one another in pandering to the short-term sexual proclivities of the top 5% of men will never get them the one thing they really crave, which is the attention and devotion of a worthy man?
Hah, I continue to find it fascinating how so many folks in the Motte/rationalist sphere underestimate the intelligence of the average person, or hell even the above average person.
The people that are capable of having conversations like these on sensitive topics without foaming at the mouth rabidly are a few percentage points, at most.
Lord, selection effects are terrifyingly powerful things.
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They can't get what they want by any means, because there aren't nearly enough "worthy" men by their own standards. Feminists will of course argue this is due to the degeneracy of men, but since this isn't the case, winning that argument doesn't gain them anything.
There aren't nearly enough worthy women either. I'd say the mating marketplace is in balance in that sense.
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You don't think men have degenerated? Why not?
You see the cohorts of NEETs and don't think that means degeneration? I'm surprised at this coming from you Nybbler.
There aren't that many NEETs, they're just horrendously overrepresented on places like Reddit. They used to just commit minor crimes and/or hang out somewhere and smoke weed.
Interesting. I know several in my personal life. I don't know the stats off the top of my head, but it seems to me that the modal young man in America is far less outgoing and just generally capable than in the last few generations.
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Have you met people of average intelligence, let alone the half who fall below the midpoint? The people we most often make fun of here are midwits already in the 90th+ percentile. Expecting average people, especially average young people, to accurately diagnose the complexities of the sexual marketplace is overambitious. They may be aware of their place relative to others, but their collective role in the machine isn’t going to be derived by the average 17 year old.
And in any case, there’s a defection issue here. The average 18 year old boy in modern secular France (for example) isn’t going to wait until marriage to have sex. A girl his age has no power over him, if she tells him she wants to wait, he’ll go fuck someone else who has not fully considered the reality of gender relations and concluded that promiscuity is counterproductive for women. She is left with two choices if she commits to this path. First, she could become a tradcath (or maybe Muslim), which presumably as say a secular Parisian (maybe not even of Catholic background) would involve abandoning the culture in which she was raised and wholesale LARPing to join a completely different largely rural subculture and belief system that will be suspicious of a young single person without a family history in the SSPX or whatever. Secondly, she could find a secular French boy so romantically unsuccessful or unconfident that he is willing to agree to the terms despite living in a promiscuous society. Of course, that young man is likely so shy that he’ll never even make a move, and may otherwise be extremely awkward, stunted or ugly (by which I don’t mean “not the top 5%”, but “in the bottom 10%”).
So in reality, the girl usually has to put out if she wants a relationship [that may lead to marriage] with an average young man in her league of class/education/looks.
I appreciate you always giving a rigorous defense of women when these sexual marketplace topics get brought up. I may not always agree, but it's a needed service! I rarely see these arguments being made anywhere, unfortunately.
Don't you think the argument that the average 18-yr-old girl in modern secular France has no power over the average boy his age is so obviously far-fetched that it basically belongs to fantasy land?
I'd say @2rafa was arguing that she doesn't have power over the situation. Yes a girl has some power over the average boy, but not enough power to get him to commit to her if she won't put out.
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I mean, yes, within the narrow window of said average girl asking said average boy to not have sex. All the power such a girl has over such a boy is because she gatekeeps sex. He'll move heaven and earth if he thinks he has a shot. If the singular ask of that girl is to not do the one thing he'll do anything to do... yeah, she has no power over that.
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Hold up. These are completely different scenarios. Why did you just move the goalposts?
I’m saying that defection from modern sexual culture isn’t a viable solution for most young women in the West even if they thought of it, which they probably wouldn’t. How is that not relevant?
They’re not pandering to the “top 5%” but to the average young man their age, who grew up in the same post-sexual-revolution culture and so is not usually going to accept a single young woman telling him to wait for her.
Again, hold up.
You and @iprayiam3 are specifically discussing the reactions of women supposedly used and abused by Danny Masterson and Russell Brand and, I presume, similar male celebrities and lotharios, i.e. the top 5% of men, not by average young man their age. You're claiming this is the understandable and sincere female reaction to the undesired consequences of the sexual revolution.
In your comment above, you seem to be implying that a modern Western woman putting out in the framework of a long-term relationship on the path to marriage is somehow also an example of promiscuity. I think even on this forum most people would find that interpretation highly dubious.
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I can agree with this point, that broadly the MeToo movement exists due to sexual excesses of the sexual revolution. I can even agree that it's due to rage. But I still find it extremely troubling. I suppose it depends on where you see society heading due to the current proceedings.
I absolutely disagree with this characterization. It has long been a staple of archetypal stories that heroic men with high status can sleep around with pretty much whoever they want, get applauded for it, and fail to have any consequences. It was even common in Christian societies, although the Catholics did tend to have a dimmer view of lotharios. They were anomalous in quite a few respects. (Nowadays they've lost their distinctness because their peculiar outlook has become the mainstream view, imo)
Now I still think that heroes sleeping around with virgins all across society can be bad, unless you have very few heroes who unambiguously do good things. These frail half-men 'pseuds' we have nowadays that have usurped the place and status the hero used to occupy are far from any sort of moral ideal, however.
If a man truly does beat back the chaotic flood, saves society, and pushes us forward into a golden age - he can sleep around as much as he wants, as far as I'm concerned. If Elon Musk wants to sow his wild oats, well, I don't see much wrong with that.
But the Russell Brands of the world are one of the most telling signs that the way our society doles out status is sick. Absolutely rotten.
With your daughter?
…Yes? Perhaps I’d feel different if I actually had a daughter and had watched her grow up, but this doesn’t feel like that big of a dilemma. If you don’t want Elon Musk solving the fertility crisis with your daughter, then you don’t want to win. Your reproductive fitness incentives are aligned with hers.
Now, with my wife/gf? Absolutely not. He can get fucked
I don’t think the opposition in this hypothetical case is to Elon Musk being your son in law and father of your grandchild(ren), it’s to Elon Musk using your daughter as a whore, which is what @TheDag seemed to imply was acceptable to him.
I'll preface this with the fact that I don't have any children either. I'm sure that would affect things.
That being said, from an objective standpoint I think that I could stomach a suitable hero (i.e. Elon Musk) coupling with my daughter if the right story were told about it. If he launched the first rocket into orbit that prevented his company from bankruptcy, and my daughter was at the afterparty, and one thing led to another, et cetera...
This poor rendition of a hero's journey highlights the problem we have in modern times. Even the most credulous and serious depiction of a hero's journey struggles to recapture the gravitas of a story told over a campfire many nights between a group of individuals that have known each other most of their lives. We humans were built to tell stories around campfires, that's where so much of our modern culture evolved from.
Clearly with the pace of modern times, we can't create stories with the same weight, or at least we haven't figured out the trick yet.
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