Speaking of the womyn's march, let's talk about a "women's problem" that needs to be addressed. When I was young, I noticed something that society told me didn't exist. I noticed a small, but significant number of young girls who used the authorities as a weapon. These girls reported siblings, rivals and jilted lovers to teachers or parents for crimes that never happened. And when they got caught lying, nothing happened.
As I got older, I saw this grow in intensity. In college, I saw young women accuse roommates of harassment and boys who dumped them of sexual harassment that never happened. "They couldn't be lying!! Young women are innocent," said the system, "and they would never lie about this!" So what happened when the accusations were proven to be lies? Nothing, because we were told that harassment is such a horrible thing that we can't blame a young woman who lies about it... the poor dear got confused and didn't know how to handle it. The fact there was no actual harassment and that the girl just wanted revenge wasn't PC to mention.
Soon I began to notice the occasional rape allegation that turned out to be made up. Again, we were told not to judge the woman too harshly because "rape is a horrible thing." But again, there was no rape... there was just a desire to hurt someone. But you can't say this without being shouted down with cries of: "Women don't lie about rape." Except, this one did. "How dare you! You are blaming the victim!" No, the victim is the guy she knowingly, falsely accused. YOU are blaming the victim, feminists!
As an aside, there was weapons grade cognitive dissonance going on here too. At the same time we were told it was a hate crime to suggest that some women lie about being raped, we were taught that white women in the South are evil racists who routinely lied about black men raping them whenever they got into trouble. Ouch, my brain.
Anyways, false rape allegations weren't common, but they did happen regularly enough that one would have thought some degree of skepticism was called for in rape allegations. Yet, we were told it was like victimizing the woman twice to doubt even the most nonsensical rape allegations. Harassment too. Then a whole arsenal of defensive strategies was invented to make it impossible to question such claims: only one in ten rapes is reported (bullshit) so we must treat women delicately and never doubt them, and these things are so horrible that women will react irrationally afterwards like not reporting it for decades or following their attackers from job to job or speaking highly of them or asking them out or telling completely contradictory stories, and how dare you even ask questions about something so personal! You monster! They even passed rape shield laws to warp the rules of evidence to make it very, very hard to question "the victim" and to let judges throw out all kinds of evidence average people would consider very exculpatory. And even when it was proven that these women lied, nothing ever happened to them. Rape is a terrible crime after all... even when it never happened, apparently.
Then things began to pick up speed as the left embraced lies as a political strategy. Virtually every Republican politician is accused of sexual harassment by one or more women now. When feminists get really desperate, this becomes sexual assault. Stories like Duke Lacrosse go published unquestioningly even though they are easily disproven. Every female celebrity must now add an "I was raped" story to her "I was bullied" fake-news sympathy story. Moreover, seemingly every week, you now see stories in the papers about women who falsely accuse someone of rape.
Last week, we had the story of Michelle Hadley. Hadley was arrested and spent three months in jail for supposedly trying to get men on Craigslist to rape the woman who married her ex-boyfriend, a woman named Angela Diaz. The problem is, Diaz made it up. She posed as Hadley as she placed the ads. Then she falsely claimed she had been raped by someone who read the ad, and she pointed her finger at Hadley. For once, Diaz is being charged with real crimes, i.e. kidnapping, false imprisonment, and grand theft, but few false rape accusers ever are. The worst that ever happens to them is a minor charge of filing a false police report and being hugged by an army of feminists who "still believe" even after she admits lying.
Here's the thing. Anyone who has ever dealt with rape knows that rape is not about sex. It is about power and control. It is an insecure man who wants to make himself feel strong/adequate by exercising power of a helpless woman. These false rape claims and false harassment claims are the same thing done by women. These are women who want to use the authorities to gain power over other people by making false allegations. The problem is that these women get slapped on the wrist because society (led by feminists) see women as childlike and not responsible for their own actions. It is time that society recognize this and treat it accordingly.
The problem with groups like the Pussyhead Marchers is that they keep promoting this dangerous narrative: "We are strong and can do anything a man can do except be held responsible for our actions!" This march was highlighted with celebrity chicks telling false stories of harassment, discrimination and rape to weepy gullibles, statistical lies about one in ten rapes being reported and the narrative that all of Trump's lying accusers need to be believed and questioning them is "blaming the victim." This crap needs to stop.
Did you know that a 1996 DOJ study found that one in four people accused of rape are innocent. Some portion are just the wrong guy, but some portion of these were simply made up rape claims. This 25% figure has apparently remained fairly constant throughout the years. Feminists lie and claim that only 2% of rape claims are false, but there's no basis for this claim at all. But even if that number was true, that would be 1,400 false rape claims a year in the US (the FBI figure would put this at 17,500). That is more than enough to worry about the number of lives being destroyed. The problem is, this interferes with the feminist narrative that women are pure, innocent, helpless creatures who need to be believed in all their allegations no matter how ludicrous lest they break. That's unacceptable.
Thoughts?
49 comments:
As an aside, feminists keep bidding up the size of the turnout for the Pussyhead rally. They have gone from 200,000 to 2.5 million worldwide to 2.5 million in the US. Today we have a new bid from a woman in Colorado who is claiming 3.3 million or "just more than one percent of the US population."
Congrats, chickies! That's only 46.5 million below the number who watched the Cowboys last week. You go girlz!
OT: A freebie for you Trump fans here:
From the Washington Post: "A baby named Trump and admiration for a new U.S. president in northern Iraq"
LINK
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IRBIL, Iraq — Hassan Jamil’s love affair with Donald Trump began in the thick of the American presidential campaign, when he found himself glued to his television screen on the other side of the world each night, transfixed by the billionaire’s “beautiful” hair, commanding presence and magnetic speaking style.
Jamil, who doesn’t speak English, couldn’t understand the Republican nominee’s words but said it didn’t matter. The candidate’s forceful cadence told him everything he needed to know.
The night Trump clinched the presidency, Jamil made a decision that took his pregnant wife by surprise.
“I decided that if my wife gave birth to a boy, I would 100 percent name him Trump,” he said.
Two weeks later, on Nov. 23, Jamil’s wife gave birth not only to a baby boy but also to what appears to be a burgeoning Kurdish legend.
His name: Trump Hassan Jamil — a.k.a. “Little Trump.”
----------------
The whole article is a bit interesting. It seems Trump is rather popular among the Kurds.
Andrew, that final paragraph put me in mind of something the left is trying to make a thing. Kellyanne Conway, being interviewed by Chuck Todd, said something about "alternative facts" in regards to the differing estimates on turnout for the inauguration. Todd shot back that alternative facts are called falsehoods. Never mind that this assertion doesn't stand scrutiny; "alternative facts" may be the new "fake news." In any case, we've been treated to alternative facts about the frequency of rape, the pay gap, the number of hate crimes, the circumstances surrounding police shootings, etc. etc. etc. for decades. /rant
On a different note, and not to be disagreeable, but I can't subscribe to the Brownmiller perspective. I forget who said it first, but I'm inclined to agree with the idea that to say rape isn't about sex is like saying theft isn't about property. Since enough time has passed that Against Our Will has lost gospel-status, researchers have dug in and found the latter sentiment more in line with the available data.
Certainly Brownmiller's catchphrase had great influence in how we think about rape as a crime. Unfortunately, how we prefer to think of something is independent of the reality of it.
Give me a definition of the term "alternative fact" in the way that she used it.
The New York Times claimed that crowd size was smaller than Obama's. Spicer claimed it was the largest crowd "both in person and around the globe."
The "around the globe" could be true while permitting the Times assertion to be true but declaring it was also the largest crowd the "in person" flatly contradicts the Times's statement.
Anyway, Kelly Anne Conway said that Spicer's claim was an "alternative fact." Now, if you have two people uttering contradictory statements they cannot both be "alternative facts" except in a far-left post-modern "choose your own truth" view of the world.
One must be true and the other must be false.
For the record, I think the argument over crowds is silly and displays a strange obsession by both the media and the Trump administration with the petty.
I also think Obama's crowd size was likely much larger than Trump's unless Trump managed to have 2 million people* at his inaugural (which he most certainly did not).
*Obama had 1.8 million people at his 2nd inaugural and one million at his first. Both Bush and Bill Clinton were in the 250,000 to 800,000 range.
To try and get back to the original thread, I highly recommend the book Until Proven Innocent, which is about the Duke Lacrosse Scandal.
I also recommend reading anything written by Cathy Young on the subject.
I see no evidence to support the assertion that rape has become a standard weapon against Republican politicians (nods towards Cruz, Rubio, Carson, Pence, Huckabee, Santorum, Walker, Perry and the Bushes).
Trump was hit with such allegations, but Trump kind of dug his own grave on that one. He has bragged on camera/microphone about using his position to enter women's dressing rooms and (in a separate boast) grabbing women by the pussy.
Its kind of like when Mike Tyson bragged about how he liked to fondle women and that testimony was used against him at his rape trial. A willingness to grab women by their privates doesn't prove you are a rapist but it means that up to a point consent isn't something you worry about which of course is a tendency of rapists.
If Trump were Bill Clinton Republicans would be attacking him and Democrats defending him, but he has the other party label so the opposite has happened *sighs*.
As I've said before I was once at a party where I pulled a drunk guy off his equally drunk date. They had been making out for a while, then he decided to try to take it to the next level right there in the packed room, and she didn't want to. She was crying and screaming and fighting and he was trying to both hold her down and remove her clothing. I pulled him off her and then was shocked when a guy (who didn't understand what was going on) grabbed me. Then my date kicked the aggressive dude and the guy who grabbed me in the nuts.
If someone had called the cops the guy would have been charged with rape and I would have testified against him, but nobody called, nobody took either person home and an hour later they were making out again. Sex is messy, especially when there are drugs involved.
Furthermore, people make false allegations all the time ('I think my neighbor is selling drugs!' after the neighbor's dog craps on their lawn one two many times or 'I think my political opponent is the son of a Cuban communist assassin!') but the system doesn't really go after them. Their victims have a theoretical right to compensation for defamation, but the bar is so high few can climb it and few bother. Only swatters seem to get punished, and most of the time they only get a slap on the wrist.
Treating rape allegations skeptically is fine and good, prosecuting people for rape allegations which are demonstrably false is fine and good, but prosecuting people for rape allegations which can't be proven would be a bad idea.
Kit, the transcript is in various places, a sure sign that the media has become sensitive to allegations of "Fake News" even as they continue to make news of trivialities.
For my part, the context is indecipherable, as Conway and Todd (a country duo if I ever) are topically all over the place. There's some arguing over the crowd and the bust of MLK. Conway inserts the idea of falsehoods into the conversation which Todd whips around into a zinger. And that's ultimately the level of discourse.
Meanwhile, what work is Trump up to? Ha ha!
P.S. "Around the globe" is a meaningless metric designed to anchor an unfalsifiable claim. If you're worried about whether unfalsifiable statements are the same as falsehoods, you've been distracted.
Tyranmax,
I think the media and Trump are engaged in a silly battle over crowds. I think "Alternative facts" is a lazy spin term, lazier than Rather's "false but true."
And I think Trump is distracting itself.
I'll follow-up on a point Anthony made. Cads have a surprisingly high tend to be hit with charges of sexual harassment and insinuations of rape.
Reminds me of a quote by C.S. Lewis:
"We use a most unfortunate idiom when we say, of a lustful man prowling the streets, that he “wants a woman”. Strictly speaking, a woman is just what he does not want. He wants a pleasure for which a woman happens to be the necessary piece of apparatus. How much he cares about the woman as such may be gauged by his attitude to her five minutes after fruition (one does not keep the carton after one has smoked the cigarettes)."
And I think Trump is distracting itself.
I'm not entirely sure what you're saying by this, but I think I'm inclined to agree.
Just one more point re: parcipitation numbers. What goes around comes around. Ironically the Chuck Todds and other mainstream press made a point to fudge the numbers downward for Tea Party rallies. Oh, well, it may have LOOKED like there nearly 2M people, but really it was just "hundreds of thousands". And "Obama had MORE at his inauguration so these are just astro-turfing knuckle-dragging racists who hate Obama" and so on and so forth.
Enough about insignificant details. But it is nice to know that the new age of FACTS being objective rather than subjective is upon us. Uh, yeah.
"And I think Trump is distracting itself. "
I think that was a pre-coffee type and I don't even remember what I was trying to say.
I read this book years ago - it was an eye opener:
https://www.amazon.ca/When-She-Was-Bad/dp/1860494889/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1485182256&sr=1-2&keywords=and+when+she+was+bad
Kit and tryanmax, I think it is more accurate to say that the media is distracting itself with arguments about crowd size. That's all they want to talk about as Trump signs Executive Orders and gets people sworn in that they hate. If they weren't fighting over crowd size, they would be focused on the substance of what he's doing.
Bev, That's how the media works. They multiply their own numbers by about 5 and downplay opposing numbers by about 3. It doesn't matter because I don't think crowd size changes anyone's mind.
Again, let me point out: "millions" of smug liberal women march... nothing changes.
Not a single change in policy, law regime or direction has occurred as a result of this march. I doubt a single person changed their mind. If anything, people like my mother just had her attitude further entrenched.
Andrew - Now to be fair, this was just the first and who knows what could happen. But, like OWS, they don't have a clear message with salient issues that are coherent that includes more than "WE ARE WOMEN...soooo there's that!"
At least the TP'ers were very clear about what we were rallying for.
Anthony, A couple points.
First, the guy you pulled off the girl is not the type you generally see charged with rape because the girl will refuse to cooperate because she won't see it as rape either. She will dismiss it as "some jerk trying to go too far."
For her, the left has built the category of "date rape" to try to convince young women like her to make a rape claim even if she consented -- the date rape crowd actually claims you can decide you were raped if you later change your mind about consent.
The people you see charged with rape are accused by the woman herself.
And that brings me to your point about "false" allegations. No one said "mistaken." There is a HUGE difference between "Gee, I think my neighbor is dealing drugs, go check them out" and "this guy raped me." Moreover, I'm not talking about women who are mistaken -- bad lineup leads to wrong identification, etc. I'm talking about women who claim to be raped when there was no rape. That's not a mistake. The problem is that the left has invented this narrative that make it easy and forgivable to make such claims and make it incredibly hard to disprove them.
On the GOP, I didn't say they all had rape allegations against them. I said harassment. And if you watch, you will see that almost every GOP candidate will have harassment accusers appear at election times or when they get nominated for something. Most of these get dismissed because its obviously just a cry for attention, but sometimes it's harder to dismiss even though it still reeks of being false because they will be women who actually met the guy.
Third, while you poo poo the issue, this is a serious problem. Even using the feminist numbers, 1,400 people are FALSELY accused of rape each year (not mistakenly). Every day you read of men (usually black) released from jail after 10, 20, 30 years for false rapes. There are men who have killed themselves after being false accused. Wives leave. Kids get taken away. Jobs lost. Attorneys fees never get reimbursed. Yet, the let keeps lengthening statutes of limitations, warping rules of evidence to make these things easier to assert and harder to disprove, and pushing this social narrative that you are presumed guilty and the very act of defending yourself makes you guilty.
Bev, I can guarantee you that nothing will change. Here's why:
1. This was the choir rallying with itself. This was the far left of the women's movement marching with itself, whining to itself. This was not a broad-based movement like the TP, nor was it people who had never been involved before. This was astroturf... activists led by celebrities in the worst sort of way. Groups like that never catch on.
2. The public already shows it doesn't care. Even being generous, you're talking about 1% of the public being involved. HGTV cable channel shows draw more viewers for every episode. The internet has already turned them into a joke. There's a great meme going around about not liking the result from Sunday's games so we're going to whine and protest at #notmySuperBowl. There are memes about the garbage they left. The main news seems to be Madonna threatening to blow up the White House.
3. They have no focus point of what they want except for everyone to respect their whiny (undefined) views. That does not an agenda make. And when groups like this form an agenda, they go batshit crazy. Look at BLM with their hundred page manifesto about every leftist issue you can imagine.
OWS had the Democrats in charge and they were desperate for OWS to be a real counter to the TP, yet they failed because they had no idea what they wanted and the things they wanted were crazy.
4. More subtly, but much more importantly, this group fails to grasp the concept of achievement. They are what is wrong with self-described "strong women." They think that surrounding themselves with like-minded losers and then tearfully proclaiming that they are "strong" somehow equates to achievement. They think that telling stories about being harassed/raped/looked-at somehow translates into fixing a problem. They genuinely don't understand that (1) respect is earned, not gotten from self-identifying as a victim, (2) that change requires you to work hard to define the problem in a way that people accept, to come up with a solution, and to sell that solution to the public, and (3) that average people disdain whining. "I'm here, I'm a victim, do something to make me happy!" is a loser. That worked with daddy, but not with the public.
5. These people already own the Democratic Party and it reflects their pathos. So there's really nowhere for them to go to make change.
Like so many other leftist "history changing moments," this will be embarrassingly forgotten in a few months once the hat sales fall off.
And more to that, there are a lot of young men who are being railroaded with false accusations. And some are not even accusations by a female student. In more frightening cases, young women will tell someone the details of some mutually agreed-upon physical encounter, and then that 3rd party in turn makes the assault allegation. And at that point it does not matter that both consenting parties said it was completely consensual. However it is also the young man who is threatened with expulsion or worse.
tryanmax, There are different kinds of rape (and rape allegations). "Date rape" is about sex. That's usually a guy who got to 2nd or 3rd base and doesn't want to stop even though the woman does. Child rape is about sex. Again, that's a sex drive gone wrong.
Random rape, what most people think of when they think of rape, is usually about power and control. Its female counterpart is the false rape allegation, which comes up when women are jilted and much more often comes up in custody disputes or divorces.
Bev, Two examples I've personally witnessed.
In college a woman I knew accused her (female) roommate of harassment and got a single room out of it. Great... what fun! So the next year, she accused a guy who dumped her of harassment. The Dean of Students tried to throw this guy out, but he fought back. With progress slowed, the girl decided to raise the tensions. She accused the building RA of helping the ex. Then she accused the head of the campus police of helping the ex. People voluntarily went to the Dean and told her that this girl was nuts. Nevertheless, the Dean kept trying to throw the ex-boyfriend out. She only failed when the guy hired a lawyer.
I got a kid out of prison (after 10 years) for a false rape allegation made in a custody dispute. During the trial, the defense attorney was forbidden from telling the jury that this woman had been locked up in the loony bin for making a false rape allegation against her prior boyfriend. The judge decided that "wasn't relevant." Really? The state supreme court agreed with the judge. I don't know about you, but a history of making identical false rape allegations seems relevant to me.
I think the crowd mess is partly Trump's fault.
That being said, I expect it to fade away from the news cycle by tomorrow morning —tonight at the earliest.
Another reading recommendation on the rape issue would be Wendy McElroy: Being a victim of rape and abuse herself (an abusive boyfriend blinded her in one eye), she is a staunch critic of the radical feminist left.
Bev, In another bad sign for their future, both the Washington Post and CNN have declared them "the liberal Tea Party."
The establishment is notoriously bad at spotting genuine movements and calling this the new TP after one confused rally screams of an attempt to breath life support into something that isn't alive in the first place.
I suspect they will now race out to find "the leaders" and will find the same people they always find and will try to let them claim the "movement"'s mantle a define them so they can work together.
That's a recipe for killing a movement.
This is an issue that I've always found unsettling, especially in light of all the Dear Colleague letter related mess that hit over the past several years. I'm hoping that the next few years bring some sanity to the issue, though I am a bit worried that Trump may not be the best champion for it thanks to his own weaknesses. Of course as crazy as the left's gotten that may not matter. Also Kit I have read Cathy Young's take on the situation and I've enjoyed her work. I'll need to check out McElroy at some point, though what you've said about her injuries make the college left's attempts to shut her up even more galling.
- Daniel
I don't think we'll know how powerful the Women's March was until we get to primary season a year from now. From James Hohmann of theWashington Post. There was a lot of stuff in the article I was skeptical of (dependent on a lot of variables the Hohmann ignored), but this was a good summary of the danger posed by the Women's March:
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But a new protest movement could also upend the Democratic establishment, just like the tea party movement did eight years ago. With the president viewed as illegitimate by so many progressive activists, even small compromises will be viewed as apostasy. This could fuel nasty primary challenges, without a president in the White House to stop them, and prompt a lurch to the left that would make it harder to topple Trump in 2020.
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Kit, I think the Trump-crowd issue is a great example of misplaced thinking.
First, to see this as Trump's "fault" in any way shifts the blame for the left's actions to Trump. Keep in mind, this is a leftist game. They start by screaming about crowd size. If you don't respond, they win. If you do respond, they spin your response as evil no matter what it is. They lie. The smear. There is no good answer to debate them because they aren't debating in good faith. To claim that someone is at fault, even partially, is to play the left's smear game.
That said...
The second mistake is to think this matters at all. This is one of those things that inflames people at political blogs, but which no one else cares about... no one.
Moreover, in this case, Trump is winning because the media is jerking themselves off over "how dare he not submit!" while Trump is busy doing other things they would normally be whining about that might actually matter. Essentially, he is letting them squander their outrage quotient on an issue that only matters to 3% of the population who have already chosen sides as he does other things. So "fault" isn't the right word.
Here is the link by the way: "The liberal tea party movement has begun. What will become of it?"
LINK
Some of it, like his prediction that it could result in election victories that ensure "(Trump) could be the last Republican elected president for a long time" involves a lot more variables than I think he takes into account.
But that is for another discussion.
Kit, The "danger" he spoke of in the article is to the Democrats. He's worried they will shatter the Democratic Party when they try to take it over and drive it left. That's not a danger to the GOP. That would be a blessing.
Moreover, he's bought into some wrong assumptions. The big one being that he thinks this an organic group of outsiders who have woken up and joined politics. They weren't. These people were the activists base that already runs the Democratic machine. Hence, they already own the Democrats and there is no danger of them changing the Democrats.
He also misses the fact that they have no unifying issue. They are OWS all over again, not the Tea Party. We know what happens to groups like that.
Andrew,
Trump and his surrogates were the ones running around saying he had the largest crowd ever. The media didn't handle themselves well but by making a patently false claim, that it had the highest attendance ever, does not help Trump's case. Also, alternative facts is lazy —very lazy— spin.
Proof I'm right? Today in the press conference Spicer said things indicating the White House is (quietly) moving away from the claim of the largest crowds ever by talking about viewership not attendance. Which is what they should've been doing with from the start.
Add in Inaugural Committee chair Tom Barrack's comments last night on NBC that he was to blame for the crowd mess-up because he got the estimate wrong and you have a White House that recognizes it fumbled and is trying to get itself back on the rails.
And, yes, it is a screw-up because it gets him and his surrogates engaged in meaningless battles when they could otherwise be selling their agenda. It makes his administration look chaotic and out-of-control.
Andrew,
"The "danger" he spoke of in the article is to the Democrats. He's worried they will shatter the Democratic Party when they try to take it over and drive it left. That's not a danger to the GOP. That would be a blessing."
No Shit. That is what I was emphasizing by putting the quote there. In fact, if you read that paragraph again you will see that is exactly what he was saying.
Anyway, his larger point, that going hard anti-immigrant could harm the GOP in the long-term, making it hard to win national elections 10 and 15 years from now, is a valid one. But we have yet to see how the Trump presidency, and the Democrat opposition (sorry, "Resistance"), will play out.
By the way, if anyone thinks this treatment of Trump is unprecedented I'm going to recommend they go back and watch Reagan's first press conference. I'm still amazed at how loaded some of the questions he received were.
LINK
Daniel, I'm hoping there is some change too. What it might ultimately take is male students suing colleges and individual administrators. The problem is they generally have immunity. But perhaps some clever lawyers can get around that by calling these things civil rights violations, which they really are.
Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! The Democrats are leaderless and rudderless. Engaging them in petty squabbles is the perfect way to keep them that way or, better yet, to coalesce them around a petty cause. I'm not a part of the "Trump is playing 4D chess" crowd, but he is playing a better game than the left is.
Chess is a bad metaphor, anyway. Chess is a transparent game based on skill. Poker is an opaque game based on guile. If anything, I'd say everyone is playing Holdem while Trump is playing Hi-Lo.
(BTW, Bev, we play a harder card game in Omaha than the wusses in Texas. 😜)
Closer to the topic, my feminist author of choice is Camille Paglia.
"he is playing a better game than the left is."
On that I have to agree. But with the caveat that the left is playing it very poorly.
As Henry Olsen pointed out, “The Clinton/progressive view of the election seemed to be that Trump was so awful that Americans would support a set of ideas they strongly disagreed with to keep him out. There was no effort to make room for the pro-business anti-trumpet or the pro-life anti-Trumper.”
Paglia is awesome.
I don't think we'll know how powerful the Women's March was until we get to primary season a year from now.
Kit - Just for the record, it is going to take more than one rally/protest to make any difference. It is going to take a lot of organizational foundation to turn that into anything coherent. The TP didn't just have a few big rallies and expect results - it was a nationwide network of local groups with a few national groups like Breitbart and TP Patriots vying for control. But it literally was bottom up grass roots organizations working together that used social media communication (Like how Commentarama was born) Really it was not a one-time celebrity event...even if there were celebrities, they had to keep a low profile out of fear of retribution by the liberal industry remember...
Interesting article from Matt Lewis about the rally losing Middle America. While I think he vastly understates the scope and intensity of media bias and he sidesteps the nastier moments of the rally (like Ashley Judd telling suggesting incest between Ivanka and Trump), he does get this mostly right.
LINK.
Speaking of counter narratives, Trump's "Hitlerian" speech got favorable reviews: 53% gave it the thumbs up, 20% gave it the thumb down.
Andrew, that's already starting to happen, actually, right down to turning Title IX against the schools. Offhand I know the accused in the Columbia mattress case has done it though I can't recall others. The College Fix and a few other sites have kept note of the other cases. Some of them have hit snags like the one you reported in your second anecdote but there definitely seems to be some resistance mounting. We'll have to see how things go in any case, though I hope there's some progress towards normalcy in all of this. The longer the radicals run wild the worse off we'll all be.
- Daniel
Counter narratives are really what is at the heart of alternative facts, though I see their primary function as a tool of distraction. Arguing over what the facts even are is a mainstay, but with abundant information, it's easier than ever before to get sucked in.
Andrew said:
Third, while you poo poo the issue, this is a serious problem. Even using the feminist numbers, 1,400 people are FALSELY accused of rape each year (not mistakenly). Every day you read of men (usually black) released from jail after 10, 20, 30 years for false rapes. There are men who have killed themselves after being false accused. Wives leave. Kids get taken away. Jobs lost. Attorneys fees never get reimbursed. Yet, the let keeps lengthening statutes of limitations, warping rules of evidence to make these things easier to assert and harder to disprove, and pushing this social narrative that you are presumed guilty and the very act of defending yourself makes you guilty.
End Quote
I didn't say a word about the percentage of false rape allegations, I said the answer was for the system to treat accusations more skeptically (and the accused more fairly).
Based on what I've read, in many cases of wrongfully convicted rapists there was official misconduct in the form of suppressing exculpatory evidence or even torturing confesses out of the accused.
http://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/Wrongly-Accused-Man-Released-From-Prison-After-30-Years-235409071.html
A man who says Chicago police tortured him until he confessed to a rape he didn't commit walked out of an Illinois prison Wednesday after 30 years behind bars.
Stanley Wrice's release from the Pontiac Correctional Center comes after Cook County Judge Richard Walsh overturned Wrice's conviction Tuesday, saying officers lied about how they treated him.
So, behind the "alternative facts" kerfuffle, Trump reinstituted the "global gag" rule on funding abortion overseas and met with Democrat union leaders. Incidentally, Trump won ~50% of union households in Ohio. Unthinkable for any other GOP candidate. I think the smokescreen is working.
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