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Jumping right in with something that may get me in trouble, who knows?
First, obligatory disclaimers. This is a serious question. I am not trying to "boo, outgroup". I don't think Trump is an innocent little baa-lamb, okay? Let's just get all the "but of course he did it, he's the type of guy, grab 'em by the pussy" stuff out of the way. "Reade is crazy, she's a Russian asset, it was all lies". Ignore all that. Try, as far as you can, to put the background and any opinions you have on X versus Y out of your mind. Just go by the statements of what was accused and alleged and no interpretation "well of course A is the type to do this so B is telling the truth but C is not the type so D is lying".
On the bare facts of the allegation, do you think E. Jean Carroll is telling the truth? Do you think it happened as she said it happened, do you think the verdict was correct? And if you believe her, why don't you believe Tara Reade? Neither have independent witnesses. Both allege sexual assault with digital penetration (at least, so far as I understand, Carroll did at first then said he penetrated her with his penis). Both allege it happened in a secluded area. Why does Carroll get an $83 million payout for Trump saying she's a liar while Reade - doesn't?
(1) E. Jean Carroll's account (from The Cut):
(2) Tara Reade's account (from Current Affairs):
Again, no 'afterwards we learned this or we heard that', just judge the two accounts on what is said here and which you find credible, if either, or both, or none. If it's "could have happened but I don't know" or "did happen based on what's here" or "never happened". But base that opinion on what you read here of both allegations, not any political swirling around in the past or present.
I have to stop you there, Trump's alleged defamation was not a flat "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" or "It was consensual." The initial verdict was much, much lower; Trump manages to keep escalating it by continuing to deny the court's verdict in his inimitable manner. Trump will always strike me as an unlikely candidate to be railroaded simply because he could, so easily, avoid the railroading by simply choosing not to do the things he does. "I was acquainted with Ms. Carroll and thought we had a friendly relationship. It is unfortunate that she does not remember it the same way. I will continue to appeal the verdict." There goes your $83,000,000. Trump is trapped in a whirligig of his own creation.
That said, I weakly believe that both claims are more-likely-than-not true in a Rashomon sense of true: they reflect the internal experience of the women who made the claims. I strongly believe that neither claim ought to be justiciable, both because they are old and ought to be out of the SoL, and because as my evidence prof put it "Either Rape law is wrong or evidence law is wrong, but they can't both be correct." The standard of evidence demanded in rape law is so far below the standard demanded in virtually every other felony that the result is absurd, and we've already seen it used tyrannically against regime opponents.
Neither claim is provably true in a way that should lead to legal consequences for the accused. But neither is it provably untrue in a way that should lead to legal consequences for the women involved.
That said, I think you're going to end up just picking a fight here with the theory that:
Because now people are going to conceal that phase of their thinking. Or not. More likely, it seems that virtually everyone in a position of power (except Al Gore and his wife) are liable to become aggressive sexual deviants.
Right.
I want to highlight a stark ideological divergence on the motte: people here often vaguely criticize the modern ‘framework of consent’. It brings to mind feminist consent-a-outrance ideas, where second-to-second affirmative consent in the presence of a notary is the current_year standard for wholesome sex. Haha, so ridiculous, let’s all bond over another pinkhair joke. Wrong. We are not the same. We’re bitter enemies, laughing from opposite sides.
In one corner, the defenders of the rights of the accused , like your prof. They think the exceptional burden on the accused to prove innocence, and therefore consent, is already far too heavy. That people now routinely record consent on their phones before sex out of fear, is a clear sign that the state is way out of line, taking liberties with people’s liberties.
In the other, radfems and traditionalists, who don’t think women’s consent matters at all. Women may keep the neighbours awake with their enthusiastic consent, but they don’t know what’s good for them (abstinence) , they’ve been brainwashed by the patriarchy or coerced by men’s greater physical force . Any non-lesbian, non-procreative sex is prima facie proof of grave societal failure, all hanky-panky pacts are null and void, all people who had unauthorized fun should be punished period.
So the first group laughs at pinkhair’s onerous consent norms because the accused should long have been acquitted, and the second laughs because the accused should long have been condemned.
This is perceptive. I plead guilty: I criticize the consent-only sexual ethic without really having a credible substitute to replace it.
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I would not agree with this characterization or the description that follows it. Of course the woman's consent matters. The problem is that due to the private and intimate nature of sexuality, consent simply cannot be determined in any objective or rigorous fashion in a large percentage of cases. Instead, it is very obvious that most disputes over consent in intimate relationships are going to devolve into a he-said-she-said situation, and that there is no practical way to prevent this, even in principle. And yet we still have to pick a norm, and the choice is between favoring accusers or favoring the accused. Both options appear to enable bad actors about equally, and it's not obvious that being falsely accused of rape is significantly more or less traumatic than being raped. Given the givens, which side should we come down on?
Setting the default in favor of the accused makes fornication significantly safer for those most inclined to engage in it, and setting the default in favor of the accuser makes fornication significantly riskier for those most inclined to engage in it. Traditionalists have no interest in preserving low-risk fornication, as they generally believe it is harmful to all involved, which is exactly why this has become an issue for current- and last-generation progressives in the first place: the norms the previous generation of progressives created and cemented have caused such obvious harm that the current generation is demanding a major overhaul of our justice system as a result. This entire dispute to be obvious fallout from the unworkable sexual norms promulgated by the sexual revolution, which we never agreed to and have no interest in shoring up against its own internal contradictions. We have no interest in helping to minimize risk for those fornicators most dedicated to pushing the risk envelope, because we think that such actions are bad and are happy to see them discouraged. We do not expect the downsides of favoring the accuser to affect us, since part of being a Traditionalist is agreeing that fornication, much less edge-pushing fornication, is a bad idea and shouldn't be done. If those who disagree wish to push the envelope anyway, they can do so at their own risk.
More generally, though, Traditionalists just see all this as not our chair, not our problem. Traditionalists do not generally believe that "affirmative consent" will actually work; it will simply shift the damage profile around. Both solutions seem stupid and awful, and mainly we're just watching in horrified fascination and doing everything we can to keep clear of the fallout zone.
That's only a small part of the problem. Modern rape laws, and further ‘anti-rape’ lobbying efforts, are attacking consent as a defense, like they attack every defense. It’s not just ambiguity. The schema is not : he-said, she-said, what shall we do? ; but he-said-yes, she-said-yes, – still rape. If you’re drunk – consent invalid. If you’re a student or an employee – consent invalid. You agree the woman's consent does not matter to you in those cases?
I think the story is really a straightforward conspiracy by radfems and trads to impose their sexless tyrrany by classifying all sex as a felony. They haven't achieved it completely yet, but they're getting there.
For centuries, for all other crimes, it’s the accused . He gets the presumption of innocence. The acccuser has to prove a crime occurred. But we have allowed our justice system to be inverted and perverted in this holy crusade against rape. The rape our culture encourages, according to feminists.
I don’t think you can contain the damage to your outgroup. Your leaders are constantly being targeted under the absurd rape laws. I don’t think total abstinence or the pence rule can protect you from the sanctification of Woman’s Word. Remember, evidence is no longer required. Evidence Law is an obstacle to victims getting justice.
As you say, “it's not obvious that being falsely accused of rape is significantly more or less traumatic than being raped.”, therefore I’d have to side with any woman accusing you and send you to prison regardless of what actually happened.
yeah, because you don’t believe in consent. Sex is bad and consent is irrelevant, just like your radfem sisters.
Proving they both actually said yes is impossible.
We just saw an example of this within the last few days: a rape scandal in Canadian junior-league hockey. From that thread, we have a description of video evidence recorded by the accused, explicitly to establish consent:
This evidence was obviously insufficient to protect the men in question, as they were nonetheless accused of rape and were prosecuted, with disastrous results for their careers and their lives. Nor is this surprising, given that people here are willing to argue that such evidence is insufficient to establish consent.
I disagree with the above statement, because it seems to me that the problem is in fact an infinite regress. If you have video of them giving consent, they can claim the video is coerced. If you have video of the entire encounter, they can claim they were coerced before filming began, and then the "start" of the video was staged. And of course such coercion is entirely possible, even if one might suspect it unlikely.
The problem is that sex is not, in fact, a safe source of unadulterated, low-stakes, trivial fun. It remains a deeply powerful and fundamentally meaningful act, despite generations of propaganda to the contrary, and with that power and fundamental meaning comes an irreducible capacity for serious harm. You can ignore that fact, as our society strove to do for some decades, but the consequences accumulate and sooner or later must be addressed. Telling people that sex was meaningless fun didn't make it true, it only encouraged them to walk blind into extremely painful realities.
We have no rigorous way of measuring intoxication after the alcohol has left the system, and even timestamped breathalyzers suffer from the same problem as the video evidence above.
This fails for the same reasons the video evidence does. You can't prove a negative, and nothing less will be accepted because the accumulated harm demands that something be done. By all means, argue that the women should tough it out and that if they make the wrong call, they eat the consequences. I won't be the one you're arguing against, but I'm skeptical you'll prevail in any arena more consequential or connected to the real world than this one. People generally sympathize with women for solid, well-founded reasons; the fact that our current social dysfunctions render this sympathy increasingly toxic doesn't mean that withdrawing it will result in anything actually improving on net. Some fraction of men will abuse women if they can, and a much larger fraction of men will take advantage of women in a way that will inflict trauma on those women long-term. Given our current social structure, the women are in a position to do something about it, and woe betide those who get in their way.
"Consent" is necessary but insufficient. That is very different from it "not mattering". You want fornication with fewer consequences for men and worse consequences for women, the radfems want fornication with fewer consequences for women and more consequences for men. I think you both are awful for basically identical reasons, and would not willingly live under either of your regimes.
Or perhaps the current system is a straightforward conspiracy by tits-and-beer "liberals" and people like you to continue getting away with rape and abuse. But wouldn't that be rather an uncharitable accusation?
In any case, your claim of "All sex" is obviously unsupportable. The radfems have no ability to criminalize the sex I have with my wife. The sex they seek to criminalize and you apparently seek to enable is not the sex we are currently having, nor the sex we intend to have in the future. I am safe from the radfems, and my wife is safe from the pickup artists or whoever. Nothing prevents you or anyone else from forming long-term pair bonds based on deep trust and mutual commitment and avoiding the whole mess entirely, all the while enjoying all the high-quality sex you please. Denying strangers access to your wallet and genitals is a simple, straightforward policy with much to recommend it, and safe sex is as much a myth as safe guns or safe liquor. Even if you have no interest in controlling your sexual appetites, you can at least take a cue from Diogenes: "would that I could sooth the pangs of hunger by rubbing my belly."
Alternatively, pay your money and take your chances. Just don't complain when the dice come up snake-eyes.
For centuries, we had strong social and legal restrictions that were effective at preventing and punishing premarital sex, and understood that this was good and necessary. Our societies understood that men and women are fundamentally different, and that "equality" between their legal interests is not really possible. Then we burned all that down because, like all good children of the Enlightenment, We Knew Better. And now those changes that you preferred have created such misery that changes you don't prefer are being forced through anyway.
It is not a perfect defense, and it certainly cannot protect us from a Blue Tribe enjoying complete social and political dominance. Nor does it protect us as well as, say, the favor of the nakedly corrupt actors exploiting that dominance. It protects us better than anything you can offer, though. I am not immune to being me-too'd, but I am as close to immune as I can reasonably be, and probably closer to immune than I would be if I tried to convert to Bluedom, simply from social effects.
Sure. But not living around Blues and minimizing my interaction with them means that I have almost zero social contact with people who actually believe this, or would be willing to exploit it. That's the actual defense, and the fact that it breaks down when attempting to share institutions with Blues is simply more proof that such coexistence is a bad idea in general. In any case, my system gives the best chance of survival available to people like me. The accusations used to smear Kavanaugh were an appalling injustice, but his strict adherence to avoiding stupid antics spared him. If he'd spent his life maximizing body count as opposed to keeping meticulous journals of his day-to-day activities, there is zero chance he would have survived them.
The Pence Rule works, which is one of the reasons that I consider attempts to smear it as sexism to be so appalling.
I'll take my chances, and I like my odds. False rape accusations are about as low on my list of concerns as unwanted pregnancy (we want them) or HIV infection (blood transfusion after a major accident, maybe?). It's not a thing that's worth worrying about.
Consent is necessary but insufficient, which is very different from "not believing in consent". I do not believe that sex is bad; within a marriage, and maybe even within a committed relationship, it's absolutely fantastic. As a potentially-zero-sum competition between alienated atomic individualists, it's dangerous and stupid for everyone involved, like playing Russian roulette. The radfems are fools, and if people like you are successful in wresting social dominance from them, I'll fight you the same as I fight them now. What I won't do is agree that their brand of foolishness justifies your brand of foolishness, or ally with you to help your brand of foolishness win over theirs. You, like them, have nothing to offer people like me, other than to leave us alone.
Then perhaps people like you should side with the sorts of people that will leave you alone (and have a lengthy track record of doing so), rather than the ones that will not, so that when socioeconomic conditions stop being able to sustain liberalism and that freedom dries up it's your brand of [master] morality and not theirs with a better chance of coming out on top.
Reasons which are no longer relevant or correct, but their biological and cultural inertia remains. Traditionalism has, traditionally, never needed to come up with an answer for why women with the same (or more) sociopolitical power as men should obey rules meant to deal with the problems women create when they're the less powerful gender; that's the entire reason why it's been losing ground for the 300ish years since the Industrial Revolution. Traditionalist moral philosophy just isn't set up to handle post-scarcity environments for what should be obvious reasons, and corruption in post-scarcity environments is inherently progressive-biased anyway (as the former masters of North America, being a network of matriarchies that failed to advance technologically in any way over the 10,000 years they had the continent to themselves under functionally post-scarcity conditions, demonstrate).
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No, that has actually been done here, there’s video, text messages, no one is disputing that she said yes.
‘He said she said ‘ goes : ‘He said she said yes, she said she said no’ – If he’s telling the truth, she said ‘yes’, so he’s innocent of rape. And if she said “no”, he’s guilty.
That’s not the situation here at all: all agree she said yes, but for some cockamamie reason the consent has been declared invalid so - schocker – he’s guilty, yet again.
You and the radfems don’t accept consent as a defense because you don’t accept innocence as a defense. The way you see it, he may be innocent of rape, but he’s still guilty of being a man and having sex.
Right, and that's absurd. They have overshot the standard for innocence by several orders of magnitude. They should be released with the court’s deepest apologies, maybe teach the prosecutor what a real case should look like.
No argument there. @orthoxerox is just another guy on the trad-radfem side, he does not recognize women’s consent because there’s always a man hiding in the bushes, coercing them.
I get it, you’re not big on sex, like your prophets before you.
I don’t give a shit? Drinking does not put the responsibility for your actions on others in any other context (drunk driving, getting into a fistfight, etc).
Maybe the ‘accumulated harm’ demands that all Jan 6 protestors be sent to prison. The accumulated harm is not a real thing here.
You can sympathize with women, admire them, fear them, as much as you like. Their legal ability to turn their agency and reasoning faculties on and off at will still won’t make any sense.
If the employee, the student, the woman, cannot be counted on to make one decision because her body is weak and her mind easily influenced, how can she be counted on to make any?
No, in the absence of evidence for a crime, I want no consequences at all.
Not only are you living under the radfem one, you’re a pillar of it.
She could easily accuse you, anytime, of getting insufficiently affirmative enthusiastic continual consent, that one time in boca. Marital rape is a common thing, you know. Oh god, she wasn’t drunk, was she?
I originally set out to find where the battle lines really are in this triangle. And I think it’s pretty clear that you are in fact allied to radfems, in your shared hatred of ‘fornication’ and in support of modern rape and harassment laws, against classical liberals like me.
I apologize that it has taken this long to respond to the reports on this comment, but the mod team discussed it and is very broadly of the view that this is a terrible post. It's antagonistic, primarily, but also stuffs a lot of words into other people's mouths. It doesn't discuss the culture wars, but merely wages them. And this will be the sixth time you're banned for it.
I entertained the idea of making it something long term, like maybe 90 days--we used to do a fair number of those back on the subreddit. But some mods suggested a permaban, and it seems nobody could think of a good reason to not permaban you. So, that's what I'm doing.
Why not the 90 day ban, though? Isn't that a more reasonable default?
Looking at the mod log, I think his most recent ban was for two weeks, so it would still have been a pretty substantial step up, six times as long (though maybe one of the others was longer, I didn't look).
I don't know, when people are willing to talk, and seem sincere (which seemed to me to be the case here), it seems reasonable to set cap bans at a few years.
Even if you end up needing to ban them again years down the line, there's a difference in messaging between "you'd be welcome back later, if only you can behave" and "leave, and never come back," and the former seems better. Even if the one in question isn't likely to listen, it sends the message better to everyone else that it isn't about personal antagonism.
Or so it seems to me, but you surely have the experience I do not.
(this is not to say that I disagree that the comment was pretty bad)
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In case anyone's wondering about this ban, the real reason is that fuckduck got into a fight with a mod the other day, but the clique needed another excuse to ban him.
I probably should have made an alt account to say this, because now I'll probably get perma'ed for misusing an apostrophe next week or something.
Edit: called it https://www.themotte.org/post/851/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/184547?context=8#context
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"Friends don't let friends drive drunk". While it's not (yet) a legal duty, it's now a moral duty to stop your friend from getting behind the wheel, even if that means they can't give you a ride or that you'll have to pay for their ride home. And yes, this moral duty means you have to drink less yourself if you see your friend getting sloshed and bragging about their driving ability. And if you challenge them to a race, thinking they are more willing to answer that challenge and more likely to lose when drunk, then you will end up in legal trouble.
It's only a moral duty if you accept the state as a moral authority. If you believe in a higher authority or a superseding principle - like the idea that a person is only moral if they are responsible for their actions, then your duty is to uphold that principle. Forgoing that principle to look after your friend then puts the responsibility on you, but that is by choice.
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A), it's still their responsibility, even if I have a residual advisory duty to help them avoid death.
B), I have no such moral duty to prevent strangers and friends alike from having sex.
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So…Donald Trump already ought to have been condemned, therefore the trial is ridiculous?
I don’t believe I’ve seen a radfem draw such a conclusion. The closest would be those arguing that even if he didn’t assault Carroll, he’s surely guilty of raping someone. But those people are hardly calling the trials illegitimate. Where are these radfems making common cause with the legal conservatives?
Conversely, how often do you see a hardline traditionalist criticizing Trump? Set aside the general scarcity of such folks. It’s much easier to quietly opt out of politics than it is to shoot your team’s mascot.
I think you’ve built a Moldbug-worthy category, and that it doesn’t actually describe any real ideological divergence.
There's dozens of us! Dozens!
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It's not about trump, it's about the consent discourse on themotte. I thought about posting it on its own, but it was a bit light, and fivehour's prof's quote was the reason I wrote it, so I just plonked it here.
Obviously the massive black hole of the trump culture war angle isn't helpful for delineating the kind of objective doctrinal disagreement that interests me here.
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