Ilyka, will you marry me?

You are so generous. I really hope they all appreciate you. Not everyone would do half so much for them.

"... your very own blog! ..."

I love it!

:: snicker ::

Heh, you always cheer me up with this stuff.

Fuck zuzu, you're running off with me.

oh, snap.

Ilyka

I didn't attack the at all the woman in my post. What I found IRONIC was the narrative from piny decrying the exact thing she was engaged in.

You may notice I had never posted on Duke before. For a very specific reason... I WORK in the judiciary and I smelled DA election politics from the beginning and as awful as the first reports came out, I wanted to see what REAL evidence was presented.

I've processed rape cases. I've reviewed the reports from sex kits.

We just went through a horrible case where after 4 months in jail, and protesting his innocence all the while, we released a man and dismissed charges that he had sexually molested a child when the DNA didn't link him... INSPITE of the child's credible testimony and physical evidence of moslestation.

The child was molested, BUT NOT BY THE MAN WE CHARGED. The man lost 4 months of his life and the real perp is still out there.

RAPE is a heinous charge. The DA in this case has been making statements that border on grounds to have him dismissed from the case and the circumstantial evidence does not support the woman's statements.

Does that mean she's lying? No. No more than the child in my office's case. She may have been traumatized earlier, she was (via police reports) drunk and alcohol may have caused confusion.

But she states that she was physically assaulted, raped and sodomized by three males for 30 minutes.

NO DNA was found that linked any of the lacrosse players to her.

The players, as I wrote, were indeed, indecent and creepy.

But rapists?

Hey, I'm fucking tired of RAPE AS POLITICS.

I'm looking at it from a judicial POV. Evidence counts. And it is the ONLY thing that counts for me.

Maybe I'm a bit jaded after processing thousands and thousands of cases. But show me the evidence.

And that doesn't include the meme of "culture of rape."

Darleen, I know you didn't attack the woman. You just took it upon yourself to exonerate the accused:

Now, Duke University certainly has a case to suspend merely on the behavior of these young males of privilege who acted indecently in going to a home and hiring strippers, plus the one real sicko sending outregeous emails about "skinning" ...

but RAPE they didn't do.

[Emphasis added.]

You know, I certainly hope they didn't, but we don't know at this point. No one's even been charged.

As for Piny, I do not want to put myself in the position of speaking for him; nonetheless, I find only the most tenuous link between his posting about the history of lynching and his final remark in that post that the idea that "those people need to suffer" was one that "rose up in the discussions on HR 4437 and the Duke rape case." But then, I read this:

It’s the reality David Brooks refused to acknowledge when he argued that tradition taught men to oppose rape as anathema to manhood. As though that understanding of “morality” and “strength of character” cannot still shelter the Duke lacrosse team, as though it is not shining out of the faces of the lynch mob in that picture.

. . . as a critique of Brooks' reasoning in his editorial, not as a conflation of the Duke team with lynchers of old. I read it as an observation that much evil has been done to minorities in this country in the name of morality, and that calling on only morality to fix what I believe Piny takes to be a problem with racial, class, and sex dimensions is insufficient--maybe even harmful, in that it allows the full scope of the problem to fester unchecked.

But to say anything more definite than that would put me squarely in the role of Piny's interpreter, and I don't want to do that. Just telling you what I got out of it, and why I don't see Piny's post as engaging in the very behavior he decries. The irony meter just ain't pinging for me on this one.

For one--and good gravy, but I'm tired of pointing this out--we are talking about discussions ON BLOGS. No one's gonna be tried, hanged, or harmed BY A BLOG. If people were really susceptible to such, based on what bloggers wrote about them, then what I wrote about Michael Schiavo ought to have left him stone dead.

For another, I'm a little annoyed at the smear job you did on the Feministe posts about the subject. They were not "about the Duke lacrosse team being, without any question, rapists," which is why I took the trouble to link them individually, with brief summaries of their content, in my comment there today. Nor did Piny dismiss your remarks because they didn't "fit the narrative." I can't even FIND where you commented to Piny about the DNA findings, because in the post you reference, the one about lynching, you commented in order to lecture Piny about Dr. Frankl.

It winds up looking to me as though either you're just skimming Feministe, looking for keywords to set you off without trying to grasp the ideas expressed in the posts themselves; or you're reading everything over there thoroughly, but then being dishonest about what they actually say. You're capable of mounting better and fairer arguments than that; don't stoop to Jeff's level.

Oh Ilyka...*delurks*

That is the best thing ever. :)

I'm gonna make a brand new template for menandwomenaredifferent.blogspot.com, with a background that's checkered tiles: a big-ass tank with those mudflaps with the women on them (blue), and a Barbie holding a rose or something (pink). Or maybe a knight with a briefcase and a big-ass sword (blue), and a Stepford wife with, oh, a fetus (pink). So many possibilities...

That'll keep 'em on topic.

I gave Piny the link to the USA article breaking the news. Whereupon I was treated like some idiot with snarky references to some weird ass tv show.

I didn't lecture him about Frankl at all. Piny claimed ignorance and I gave him as definitive a quote that explains MY personal value system in a nutshell. Dismissed as being "piously shallow" I figured again no one wanted to discuss the conflation of alledged rapists with lynchers in good faith.

Jill just ASSUMED these guys were rapists. Hey, privileged white guys, black woman QED.

I didn't touch the Duke case from the git-go precisely because it just smacked of the worst kind of politics, but when DNA evidence came out and suddenly DNA wasn't "important" any more, then it got to me. No presumption of innocence for these guys, even when court ordered tests come back showing NO LINK to the victim. At a minimum, 44 lacrosse team members are NOT rapists, but you'd never know that listening to Nancy Grace on CNN for crissakes.

Rape is not a football game where we tout up the winners and losers in a court case and high five each other for another win for "our side".

I'm interested in justice. It's one of my hot buttons. And justice is served up to individuals, not groups.

Some of the blogsphere got rightly slapped around for the over-the-top nasty stuff said about Jill Carroll. The MSM in the Duke case needs the same kind of slapping around.

"And justice is served up to individuals, not groups."

Tell that to the survivors of genocide, ethnic cleansing, or any number of other war-related crimes.

Tell that to members of ANY group that's been oppressed.

Some sort of justic only make sense when applied to entire groups, not individuals. The above cases come to mind, and I'm sure that other readers here can come up with many more examples. Why else would it be possible to put people on trial for "crimes against humanity"?

Darleen's quote is another of those inane little soundbites that looks good at first glance but means next to nothing in a real-world context.

Darleen's quote is another of those inane little soundbites that looks good at first glance but means next to nothing in a real-world context.

Crys T. has done us a favor: one need only copy the above and paste it in reply to anything Darleen ever says.

Its pretty ironic that Crys T. denounces Darleen's "inane little soundbites" by conjuring up some of his own. Doubly ironic that he choses to hoist the specter of genocide after Darleen was critisized for quoting Dr. Frankl. Pot meet kettle.

I *love* the Culture & Tradition link, Ilyka. "When you start making me (OR MY KIDS) uncomfortable, "... you can really tell it's his kids who are uncomfortable. Comedy gold.

Medicine Man, why the holy hell have you assumed I'm a "he"? I'm not, and next time you post about someone you don't know, try to bear in mind that the default setting for human is not "male".

Genocide was only one example. As I clearly stated, people are free to supply any others. I used it because it's one people can think of concrete instances of. I could've used language rights, but most people in English-speaking cultures have a hard time wrapping their heads around that one.

Darleen made a very silly statement that most of us are capable of debunking by coming up with fairly common instances where it flat out isn't true.

Better to light a candle than curse the darkness. Well done.

hey, asshat

Tell that to the survivors of genocide, ethnic cleansing, or any number of other war-related crimes

Survivors are INDIVIDUALs.

Or are you going to stand here and argue for, you know, GROUP reparations? Because of, not one's OWN specific suffering, but because of you happen to have the same religion/melanin level/eye color et al of other individuals who DID suffer?

You wanna start talking "real world"? Come down to where I work and start leafing through the STACKS of police reports.

meshugga schmuck