MikeT: Well, at least you can rest easier knowing that DNA evidence (you know, that old dead white man notion of due process of law) has proved that they didn’t rape her.

No, it didn’t.

WinstonWebb: Well, whaddya know? The stripper was lying.

The article you linked to doesn’t say that she was lying:

“It doesn’t mean nothing happened,” Nifong said at a public forum at North Carolina Central University, where the 27-year-old alleged victim is a student. “It just means nothing was left behind.”

No charges have been filed.

Nifong said prosecutors were awaiting a second set of DNA results, but did not say how those differed from the tests reported Monday. Nifong added that in 75 percent to 80 percent of sexual assaults, there is no DNA evidence to analyze.

The district attorney said a rape case can built on testimony from the alleged victim and other witnesses. Nifong also said the hospital exam of the woman has led him to believe a crime occurred at the March 13 party.

According to court documents, a doctor and a specially trained nurse found the alleged victim had “signs, symptoms and injuries consistent with being raped and sexually assaulted.”

If you want to work yourself up into righteous indignation about evidence and proof, then you had better learn to read your sources carefully, to represent your sources honestly, and to learn to exercise basic logical distinctions, such as the distinction between (1) the lack of a particular line of evidence for an event, and (2) particular evidence for the lack of that event. What you’ve got here is at the most (1) and not (2).

But hey, don’t let that stop you from your little “women who accuse male atheletes of rape are lying whores” jag.

That Girl:

Personally, I find it more informative to have certain kinds of trolls. Not only do they force someone to clarify their argument and hone it, but they allow a response to be made to an opinion that will be found in the “real world”.

Well, “people who disagree with you” aren’t the same as trolls. (To take a real-life example, can you identify anything that Robert has helped clarify or contributed in this thread, other than contempt and distraction?)

That said, as a lot of people have pointed out, it’s a mistake to think that just because a particular community is, say, limited to feminists (or even some particular faction within feminism) doesn’t mean that everyone is just sitting around agreeing with each other and clapping themselves on the back. It just means that disagreements, and the work in “clarifying” and “honing,” occurs on a different level. Instead of constantly focusing on apologetics to non-feminists (or, in this case, belligerent anti-feminists) and explanations of The Basics to be delivered to people who don’t get them, it allows space for feminists to talk and analyze and argue about different kinds and different levels of disagreements, or to come at it from a different angle than they would have to if they’re constantly trying to anticipate and ward off responses from the bellowing blowhard brigade. That can be valuable too and I think it’s true that there is not nearly enough space for it in public feminist spaces on the Internet, partly due to the deliberate disruption of belligerent anti-feminists.

Amp:

In short, I think there’s room in feminism for a variety of approaches to running a blog. I disagree with the folks who have told me that I can’t be a feminist unless I run my blog the way they want me to run my blog. Feminism isn’t all-encompassing, but neither is there one and only one True Path of Feminist Blogging.

Amp, in principle I’m really inclined to agreeing with this. But it worries me that it just so happens that the two weblogs where this kind of moderation policy is an issue just happen to be the two most prominent weblogs run by male feminists, and I, another male feminists, am ready to defend it. In principle it seems perfectly reasonable to say that we ought to let a thousand flowers bloom. But why is it that this particular style of moderation seems especially to appeal to male feminist bloggers? Even if it is, on balance, justified, it certainly seems like that’s a question that you and Hugo and I ought to be asking ourselves.

Robert, you’re being a prick. You’re deliberately baiting people and disrupting a conversation that doesn’t include you. Please quit.

Ampersand:

The advantage of your kind of personal attack, Sally – that is, making up bullshit about the person you’re attacking – is that it’s impossible to disprove. I know, because I live in my own skull, that I get pissed off at both misogyny and at anti-fat attitudes. But there’s no way for me to prove it.

I don’t think I’m more rational and restrained than “women,” and of course I’ve never said anything of the kind. I don’t think that “women” as a class are any less rational and restrained than men. (I do think I’m more restrained than many internet posters, regardless of sex.)

Amp, I don’t think that everything that’s been said about your weblog or your moderation policies is fair, but I don’t think that examining your own private reactions or beliefs is the end of the story here. Whether or not, in your own head, you get at least as mad about misogyny as you do about anti-fat attitudes, and whether or not you say “I’m more rational than women” to yourself when you make your remarks, it might turn out that your public remarks and public actions come off to other people as selective or patronizing, without your intending to come off that way. Couldn’t it?

Sophist: “It’s not about acting ladylike, it’s about presenting a united front.”

I was under the impression that feminism was a movement, not an underground conspiracy. These kind of calls for Bolshevik party discipline frankly make me pretty squeamish even independently of feminist concerns about “ladylike” manners, etc.

In any case, one of the topics usually at issue in these debates (as I think ginmar and others have pointed out) is whether some feminists’ efforts really are or are not being supported, and whether the terms of “unity” in some spaces are fair ones or whether they reflect various forms of privilege. Just appealing to “unity” when that’s itself part of the contested territory isn’t going to do much of anything for anybody.

Admittedly I haven’t been following every post, but I don’t think that anyone on any side of the various debates has yet accused another participant of being, say, a CIA infiltrator aiming to destroy or co-opt the feminist movement.

There is such a thing as destructive in-fighting, but I think that, as unpleasant as some of these arguments have been, they’ve really been pretty mild, as these things go.

“Actually he was a faculty member…. While he talked the talk, he also walked the walk and taught introductory seminars.”

Well, good for him; my bad at misrepresenting his position.

That said, the position that he was hounded out of was not his teaching of introductory seminars, but rather his position as CEO of the University, and the censure resolutions passed by faculty bodies concerned his “leadership” as an adminstrator, not his teaching or research. In point of fact, I notice that Harvard has been specifically invited to take a position as senior faculty if he wants it.

The substance of my comments stands.

“Summers was well within his rights to lead on this issue.”

It’s not his job as CEO to “lead” research “on this issue.” That’s a job for people who are paid to do research. In his role as a faculty member he would be well within the bounds of academic freedom. In his role as an administrator his “leadership” on substantive questions [of research] is at best intrusive micromanagement and at worst ignorant ranting. If he wants to “lead” research then he’ll be better able to do that now that he’s stepped down.”

“Ask any sociologist or anthropologist how much human biology matters to their work. To put on ideological blinders in research and then create purposely misleading research by not accounting for known factors is a akin to creating Ptolemiac epicycles in honor of false ideology.”

This is a serious distortion of the controversy over Summers’ remarks, in which Nancy Hopkins of MIT (who is a qualified scholar in biology, as Summers is not) played a substantial role. Nobody is suggesting that “human biology” doesn’t matter to sociology or anthropology; only that it doesn’t matter in the way that Larry Summers thinks it does. That said, I’m not concerned with settling that dispute, or the unrelated dispute with Cornell West that you invoke for some reason in the middle of a discussion of this other controversy.

The issue here isn’t whether Summers is wrong or right; it’s whether he deserves any special protections for public expressions of his views without any repercussions from faculty members who think he’s a jackass. If he were losing an academic position, then he would deserve it under principles of academic freedom. But there’s no such thing as “administrative freedom” in the University and there’s no reason why there should be. Too bad for Larry.

“What is not valueless is the conception of a university as a place where questions may be asked — even if they annoy particular sets of people.”

Your concern for academic freedom is misplaced.

Lots of people ask lots of questions; some of the questions are stupid questions and some of the people are not people engaged in the scholarly community. It’s not the purpose of the University to provide a forum for just anybody to ask just any question.

The position that Summers was hounded out of was not a scholarly position but rather an administrative one. He was not a student or a faculty member, but rather a CEO; a position which (if it need exist at all) exists only to facilitate the faculty and students’ research, not to participate in it (let alone ignorantly tread on it).

If we were talking about a faculty member being hounded out of a job largely over controversial views, I’d be the first to write a letter, even if I personally think he’s a first-class numbskull. But as far as academic freedom is concerned, the entitlements of University CEOs to rant and rave about whatever they like without repercussions from the faculty that they serve, are worth less than nothing.

My sarcastic remarks about red tape are not unrelated to these points.

Oh no. Another useless University bureaucrat was no longer happy with his comfortable academic CEO position and maybe it’s due to his unpopularity with the faculty. The invaluable services that University administration offers to the faculty and students of the University will be disrupted, uncoordinated, scattered, leaderless.

I weep for the future of Harvard. Damn that coterie of academic feminists, interfering with our absolutely vital educational red tape infrastructure.

Tlaloc, I agree with you that the question of what the law should be is more interesting, and important, than the question of what the law in fact is. But I do not think that this is nearly as essential to the argument as you seem to take it to be. Here are some quotes from you that I think are indicative of what is essential to the argument:

Tlaloc: This is why intent matter. Make sense now?

Tlaloc: Intention is critical. If the guy keeps the wallet because he thinks I’m thanking him for shooting the maniac behind me he did not rob me.

Tlaloc: I don’t think he should be charged with armed robbery since he had no intention to rob. He should of course be charged with B&E and assault.

Tlaloc: Because he is the one accused of a crime. Frankly this question has me stumped, why wouldn’t you consider the motivation of the kidnapper? Rape is a crime but sex is not. Motivation and action both play a role in distinguishing the two.

Tlaloc: Stating something does not make it true. You believe that consent is all important. I believe that consent is certainly important but that intent is also.

These comments clearly indicate that you are arguing at cross-purposes with the other commenters in this thread. Further that you are arguing at cross-purposes because you have the wrong idea, or a confused collection of ideas, of what “rape” and “consent” mean.

Rape is defined as non-consensual sex. I am going to simply stipulate this without argument, because it is obvious. If you don’t believe me, look it up in a dictionary. It is important to note that “non-consensual sex” does not mean “sex intended to be non-consensual;” it means sex that is, in fact, non-consensual.

Thus, what matters here — and also, incidentally, in other cases of assault and battery, robbery, and other similar crimes — is whether what happened was coerced or consensual.

And, here is the important part: when we say that something is coerced, that’s because of what happened to the victim. Not because of what’s going on with the perpetrator. If sex is coerced under duress (here, through the use of repeated physical violence, threats, and terror), then, under any sane moral standard, that sex is non-consensual, no matter what the coercer had in mind when he did the coercing. It’s non-consensual because the victim didn’t consent; not because the coercer intended for her not to consent. And if the sex is non-consensual, then it is rape.

If you want to argue about whether rapists should be treated differently by the criminal justice system, or in moral discourse, depending on the intent that they had when they committed the rape, then you’re free to do so. What you’re not free to do is make up your own definition for the word “rape” so as to make it dependent on the rapist’s, rather than the victim’s, condition.