I was responding to your assertion that police don't take rape seriously enough (and need to be held accountable for that), and wondering what taking it seriously would actually look like in your view (compared to what the best departments are already doing).
What I hear is the suggestion that after a prompt …
I was responding to your assertion that police don't take rape seriously enough (and need to be held accountable for that), and wondering what taking it seriously would actually look like in your view (compared to what the best departments are already doing).
What I hear is the suggestion that after a prompt (pre shower) report, the PD which too rape seriously enough would:
* provide a rape kit
* provide a trained investigator
* act promptly on DNA evidence
* investigate the alleged victim's story
Good suggestions, but I'm not seeing how that contrasts with the best departments today, at least when stated in this non-quantitative way. If so, then the issue would be "the best departments already do what we want, we just need to expand that to the rest".
I think there are several nuances that are needed, though.
You clearly don't believe that every accusation should be automatically treated as completely true, which implies some filtering by the detectives and the DA, as to how much resources to spend on each case, how credible each is, etc. That filtering is inherently somewhat subjective - both in how the case is evaluated, and in regard to the thresholds for deeper investigation, charges, prosecution.
How do we hold police "accountable" for making the "right" judgement calls in that swamp of complexity? It's cheap and easy to suggest that "if they just took it more seriously" that would fix things, but how do we know whether or not they are doing so?
But I think that may miss the largest issue making rape more complex than most other crimes: consent. A rape kit can verify whether ejaculation occurred, but it cannot speak to consent, which is often the confounding issue. Compared to say, a carjacking, where we would not need to deal with most carjackings being acknowledged to be consensual and in many of the relatively few where it's disputed, only the parties involved know whether or not it was. (Imperfect analogy I just concocted, don't pick too hard on it).
Many well intentioned people want to modify the criminal justice system in regard to rape, but there are huge difficulties in how to translate vague slogans into appropriate and effective real world policies (beyond what we already aim for today; bringing more PD's up to best practices is a different topic). How do we know whether we have it right?
One approach would be to substantially lower the thresholds for prosecution, which would mean many more prosecutions of weaker cases, and correspondingly lower conviction rate (per prosecution). Would that be a net gain, for what end? One hint: it's not going to be the wealthy who suffer the most from increased jail/prosecute/acquit dynamics.
The deeper I've looked into this issue, the less respect I have had for the oversimplifications which are politically popular.
My thoughts are, as always, focused on that percentage of women who report promptly, rather than wait too long.
I don't know what the 'best' PDs are doing to handle these cases but if you know of any please let me know, I'd love to know what they're doing right.
The justice system *shouldn't* assume every accusation is true; 'guilty until proven innocent'. But it also shouldn't assume it's not; as Bill Maher put it, we need to change from #BelieveAllWomen to #TakeAllegationsSeriously, and then investigate. That's how our system of justice is designed to work, and it's a good process. That's why we say 'alleged' anything until the accused is convicted; an exception might be someone like Trump who confessed publicly to several of his crimes (I'm not counting the ones on tape, the ones he spoke to the news media about, like the Mar-A-Lago documents case).
My own deep suspicion is that the police aren't all that motivated, frankly. They're famously misogynist and I feel quite comfortable making that blanket statement while noting #NotAllCops. They have a 40% higher domestic violence rate than other professions, including high-stress ones, and they've had to be dragged kicking and screaming to responding properly to domestic abuse calls. (Where they may well think the guy was justified in doing what he did; and also, if they arrest *this* abuser, what does that make the cop himself, who perhaps abuses his own wife? Self-image conflict there).
From what I've read (please correct me if you can refute this), they tend to wait on investigating rape reports, and then do it lackadaisically. Again, if you know of any that are handling it particularly well I would love to know about them. I probably could get an article or two out of them.
As for getting more convictions, if the women are reporting promptly, undergoing all the necessary physical examinations (can't get around that - has to happen if we want more convictions), and the police *are* handling it promptly and with a genuine goal to locate the truth, whatever it is - then I think we will see more success in the courts. True, proving consent is hard but that's outside the scope of this discussion, which is about what PDs can do more, or faster, to facilitate rape cases.
What feminists can do is provide better support to rape victims who do report, helping to guide them through the very difficult process of filing the report and potentially going to trial. If there are other weaknesses or holes in the system we haven't addressed, they'll become clearer with this process.
If you've got some good sources on this - books, documentaries, websites, news articles, etc. - I would love to see them.
One question I ask myself constantly nowadays is about confirmation bias. An example would be latching onto popular assertions of fact which support my preferred narrative, without doing any checking at all.
An example would be the "gender pay gap", widely proclaimed to be 19%. I myself used to smugly quote that to prove my points. But it turns out that even a brief search will find US Department of Labor statistics that indicate that men work about 10% more hours than women (in the category of full time jobs). Remember that time and a half or double time will amplify differences in ours: working 44 hours will in many jobs bring in 46 or 48 hours of pay (15 or 20% increase in earned pay for 10% more hours). So right off the bat, any professional feminist (paid to know the truth) who quotes the "women earn 81 cents on the dollar compared to men" is consciously deceiving the public. There are a lot more confounding factors in a nuanced study, but even that one question of "hours worked" shows that the "gap" is substantially exaggerated for propaganda purposes. (We could explore this in more depth, but here I'm just using it to illustrate a point about confirmation bias).
Another example is the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson. I read the report from the Obama DOJ (who was NOT sympathetic to the police there, and went after them on other grounds), and the popular narrative of the shooting is basically false.
We had a police involved shooting around here a few years ago, and similarly what activists were saying was nowhere close to the evidence.
So where did you get that 40% figure? Did you accept it on face value or do any fact checking? For example, the third result I found was:
That does show an alarming number which I do not want to discount, albeit based on very old research with questionable sampling - but look at the embedded table for some also interesting statistics about which spouse was found to be more abusive in the reference study. That part doesn't get cited - because it doesn't advance the narrative.
Or look under the hood at the "false reporting of rape" statistics, often said to be around 2% or 4%. But if you look at the published papers, they define "false reporting" as provably false reporting where there is conclusive evidence of its falsity; 100% of the vast number of ambiguous cases are assumed thereby to be true reports. Sometimes a study only considers convictions for false reporting as a portion of all reports - assuming that 100% of false reports are known, prosecuted and result in convictions.
As long as "reinforce the narrative" is a stronger incentive than "tell the truth", we as a society are in trouble - even when it's a narrative which appeals to our own individual biases.
From what I've read, in many jurisdictions whenever police are called into a domestic violence situations, they are expected to arrest somebody (in order to remove them from the scene), even if the other party does not want that. Is that a good policy or not? We can easily discern the motivations, but are good stats being kept on the real world results?
It's in this broad context that I ask: what does "taking rape seriously" mean in the real world, not just as a slogan? I would agree that "take all allegations seriously" is much better than "believe all women" and in fact a great idea if done appropriately. But how would we know whether or not enough allegations are being taken seriously, but not too many? By trusting the neutrality of judgement of the same activists who have been deceiving us routinely for decades?
If you want to know why I'm wary of a blanket endorsement for taking ALL allegations seriously as a guideline, I highly recommend the book "Unwanted Advances" by Laura Kipnis. It's about how campuses are taking allegations seriously under Title IX - and it's not a pretty picture. How "take all allegations seriously" is interpreted on the ground, in today's postmodernist political atmosphere, can be a long shot from the innocent concept we might imagine from our own interpretations of the words. Some allegations are more credible than others, and "taking it seriously" can and often does translate into a kangaroo court which damages lives.
And I hope I don't need to say that I am strongly in favor of prosecuting rape! And treating reports respectfully.
My distrust is more in terms of the weaponization of supposedly positive concepts by an illiberal left, deceiving good liberals with evocative slogans and hoping they don't look under the hood at how the slogans are being implemented. I'm sure you've seen that dynamic in other areas of our politics; the dismaying thing is that even some (many) of the folks we have long accepted as being on the right side are deceiving us.
You've probably heard of the "replication crisis" in psychology. A daunting portion of keystone studies upon which theories and other research were constructed, turned out to not be replicable. Nobody knows exactly how deep the rot goes, because the dynamics which produced this go back decades and it's not very feasible to retest everything. There are some efforts to re-establish scientific integrity gradually by seeking replication of the most important studies.
I'm finding that the same is true for many of the stories and stats I have believed for a very long time. Like learning that Mathew Shepard in Wyoming was not killed for being gay (in fact one of his killers was one of his lovers). Some new deception or distortion comes to my attention every month I'd guess. It's kind of humbling to be honest.
(And yes, let's just stipulate that the other side is always worse, but that excuses nothing).
So I finally got to reading your comment and the DV link you included above. Thank you. Always up for refining what I think I know about stuff.
Interesting article, and as to where I got my info on the 40% DV rate for cops, I'm pretty sure it was one of the articles listed within - maybe The Atlantic, which has a pretty decent reliability rating. I kick out an article a week on my blog and I do the best I can to source references. I rely a lot on Media Bias Fact Check and also checking About links to see where more unknown sources come from. I aim for sources that are rated as highly factual or mostly factual and I don't bother as much about bias (although bias and factualism tend to travel down either side of the spectrum the same way...the farther you go in one direction factualism goes down, and bias goes up).
So, learning that the 40% stat might not be any good anymore is valuable to know and I thank you. I'd just remind you that, as I think you mentioned already, we almost can't trust any previously reliable info source anymore. Sci American & Nature have been 'wokenized' and buy into trans ideology; so have the AMA, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychological Association, and other so called 'experts' and 'scientists' to the point where they are no longer anywhere as reliable as they should be. Throw in deepfake videos & photos and chaos has already begun to reing.
I've read "Hate Crime Hoaxes" by a black sociologist whose name escapes me and I was surprised at how many notorious 'hate crimes' were often anything but. And I read "The Book of Matthew" a few years ago, still have it, which casts quite a different light on America's most famous 'homophobic' hate crime.
So no, I didn't take it at face value, I did some fact-checking, but probably not as much as I'd like to if I have more time.
I've saved the article you've referenced as it will no doubt come in handy in the future.
Hate Crime Hoax is by Wilfred Reilly. Eye opening.
As a lifelong progressive liberal, I was seriously shocked to find out how deeply misleading or inaccurate much of what I had assumed for many years to be well documented truths, turned out to be. And then to see how determined some fellow progressives are to avoid acknowledging that, to discount anybody who has the temerity to put truth above reinforcing tribal narratives.
It's so nice to find others seeking truth.
I too have had to remove some of my talking points, when they turn out to be either false, or at least credibly challenged and uncertain enough that I need to do more checking before presenting them again. And like you, I appreciate when someone helps me overcome a blind spot or misinformation.
One of the hardest things to do is to double check the items which you want to believe because they help you make your point - in order to compensate at least partially for confirmation bias.
I have no desire to be sucked into another tribal narrative on the right, so I'm going to hang out in the grey zones and look for what seems true from either side, no trust for either. It's great to have companions like you.
I am also blessed with a partner with very similar tendencies - we have both become opponents of critical social justice ideology (as former progressive liberals for most of our lives) in recent years - but we also try to help each other not to over-react or over-shoot. Basically, trying not to be captured by another narrative, even an anti-woke bias. I might feel a lot more lonely if my partner were not with me on this journey.
Always happy to engage with those in the Murky Middle, where we don't always like the company we keep - which is occasionally extremists or people who are sorta loose cannons like Jordan Peterson - he's all over the board from insightful to religious whack job. The extremists aren't part of the Murky Middle but sometimes an idea or two of theirs is.
Sometimes we can't know what we don't know. I just updated a blog article of mine about OJ & Nicole, in which I'd said his first wife claimed he never hit her. I tried to find anything that might challenge this but I couldn't. Having just finished a book on OJ's & Nicole's marriage, I find that OJ's circle of friends in his first marriage widely believed he was hitting her although they couldn't be sure. But Marguerite always wore sunglasses inside & outside, bit suspish.
So I updated it to say that Marguerite may in fact have been beaten by him, and, well, lied about it to the media. It messes up my speculation that some men only abuse women who will tolerate it (I still believe that, actually) but Marguerite ain't the poster child for not tolerating his shit.
I went on a bit of a rant yesterday morning on Facebook as some of my friends think I'm too hard on the 'woke'. I wrote that the reason why I disliked them as much as the Trumpers is because of their authoritarianism. I got deplatformed again from a social media platform yesterday morning for an article challenging the science behind 'gender affirming care' for kids and noting how much Europe, including the most liberal countries, are pulling back on it. Guaranteed that's what they meant by 'hate speech', which is what the woke call 'truth' now.
I am really, really fed up with the truthphobic on both sides. But I also recognize how hard it is to get to the truth when you can't even trust the experts anymore, including the alleged science-based. I can't wait to see American doctors and 'gender therapists' getting their fucking asses sued off once the country removes the trans blinders from its eyes. In particular I want to see the AMA and the AAP go down in fucking flames.
I agree with most of what you say. And yes, it can be hard to get lefty friends to pay attention to the authoritarian themes becoming entrenched in the Critical Social Justice ideology narratives and framings.
"All worship *The Narrative* of oppression and righteousness. From The Narrative flows all of our power. The prime directive is to reinforce The Narrative - suppress any information which might cast doubt, remove any dissenting perspectives, condition all people - especially kids - to believe as we decree".
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I wanted to understand more about your characterization of Jordan Peterson, tho. I followed some of his earlier stuff when he as becoming popular, and continue to see a clip of him now and then. But I'm far from knowing his full content to date.
The criticism I found most relevant was that he slips back and forth between the science of psychology and the, um, mythopoetic Jungian stuff which is not science; and that this interweaving could mislead readers to give the latter unearned credibility as "evidence based". (This is not to say that he was consciously attempting to deceive, just that incautious readers could wind up being somewhat misled about science vs non-science based views).
I also get (from some clip I watched) that he is a Christian (albeit considerably more thoughtful than the typical Christian from my youth). I am not Christian, but I don't consider Christians to inherently be wacko. Of course, some are. (As are some non-Christians)
Perhaps in some speeches or interviews which I have not encountered, Peterson really does earn the characterization "religious whack job". I'd like to know more about that. What source convinced you that his message is in part religious wack-job stuff?
I'm not a huge follower of JP. I listened to a few of his talks on YouTube a few years ago and appreciated his comments on personal responsibility, esp re women as certain feminists seem to think they bear no responsibility for themselves, their behaviour, their reactions, their actions, or their feelings. He never went Andrew Tate-level crazy, like 'women bear responsibility for their own rape'. (I believe women sometimes unconsciously collaborate in their own rapes but my answer is, 'Don't have sex with guys like Andrew Tate' rather than 'If you're raped, it's your fault. No, it's ALWAYS the rapist's fault, but women don't have to help by doing dumb shit like getting blind-ass drunk at a party.)
I don't follow JP as much anymore (never really did, just liked his talks about personal responsibility and the weaknesses in victim feminism) but then, awhile back, he started going more Judaeo-Christian - I think he's Jewish, don't know if he identifies as a Christian now - and I don't know where he stands today. But a few years ago, don't remember the context, he was coming over as a little too religious for me. Coming from the States as I do, having grown up not in religious whackjobbery but in Ohio, where fundamentalist Christianity was popular, I have a dim view of conservative religion. (I was raised progressive Lutheran and I don't regret it even if I don't ID as a Christian anymore).
JP has also struggled with a (prescription, I think) drug problem and even wound up being hospitalized a few years back - in fact, I think he was in an induced coma. I don't remember the details and can't be arsed to look them up - you can if you like. I think he's an interesting character - emphasize on 'character' - and he's offered many intelligent talking points in the past. Sometimes he sounds rational and other times he sounds religious nutty, and it's just sort of a flag in my head when he says something weird. I hope he's getting his shit together because I think he has some valid ideas to contribute to the culture wars,
Thanks for responding. We are not that far apart on JP - neither of us being a devoted follower (in attitude or consumption of his material), both of us having seen some things from him which make a lot of sense, and neither of us resonating well with the Judeo-Christian facets of his approach. (I think he's Christian rather than Jewish, tho).
As I said, I do find his intellectual approach to Christian themes more interesting than the Christians of my own youth. His thesis is "this is valuable wisdom to hear and consider" rather than "the bible says so and you can't question it". But I'm still not a Christian (nor really an anti-Christian).
I thought he was Jewish by birth but I might be wrong - I did a quick Google but didn't find anything. I didn't look too hard. I seem to recall he's gone down the path, at least in the past, of supporting Biblical attitudes about women. But I don't follow him that closely.
Nicole, thanks for responding.
I was responding to your assertion that police don't take rape seriously enough (and need to be held accountable for that), and wondering what taking it seriously would actually look like in your view (compared to what the best departments are already doing).
What I hear is the suggestion that after a prompt (pre shower) report, the PD which too rape seriously enough would:
* provide a rape kit
* provide a trained investigator
* act promptly on DNA evidence
* investigate the alleged victim's story
Good suggestions, but I'm not seeing how that contrasts with the best departments today, at least when stated in this non-quantitative way. If so, then the issue would be "the best departments already do what we want, we just need to expand that to the rest".
I think there are several nuances that are needed, though.
You clearly don't believe that every accusation should be automatically treated as completely true, which implies some filtering by the detectives and the DA, as to how much resources to spend on each case, how credible each is, etc. That filtering is inherently somewhat subjective - both in how the case is evaluated, and in regard to the thresholds for deeper investigation, charges, prosecution.
How do we hold police "accountable" for making the "right" judgement calls in that swamp of complexity? It's cheap and easy to suggest that "if they just took it more seriously" that would fix things, but how do we know whether or not they are doing so?
But I think that may miss the largest issue making rape more complex than most other crimes: consent. A rape kit can verify whether ejaculation occurred, but it cannot speak to consent, which is often the confounding issue. Compared to say, a carjacking, where we would not need to deal with most carjackings being acknowledged to be consensual and in many of the relatively few where it's disputed, only the parties involved know whether or not it was. (Imperfect analogy I just concocted, don't pick too hard on it).
Many well intentioned people want to modify the criminal justice system in regard to rape, but there are huge difficulties in how to translate vague slogans into appropriate and effective real world policies (beyond what we already aim for today; bringing more PD's up to best practices is a different topic). How do we know whether we have it right?
One approach would be to substantially lower the thresholds for prosecution, which would mean many more prosecutions of weaker cases, and correspondingly lower conviction rate (per prosecution). Would that be a net gain, for what end? One hint: it's not going to be the wealthy who suffer the most from increased jail/prosecute/acquit dynamics.
The deeper I've looked into this issue, the less respect I have had for the oversimplifications which are politically popular.
My thoughts are, as always, focused on that percentage of women who report promptly, rather than wait too long.
I don't know what the 'best' PDs are doing to handle these cases but if you know of any please let me know, I'd love to know what they're doing right.
The justice system *shouldn't* assume every accusation is true; 'guilty until proven innocent'. But it also shouldn't assume it's not; as Bill Maher put it, we need to change from #BelieveAllWomen to #TakeAllegationsSeriously, and then investigate. That's how our system of justice is designed to work, and it's a good process. That's why we say 'alleged' anything until the accused is convicted; an exception might be someone like Trump who confessed publicly to several of his crimes (I'm not counting the ones on tape, the ones he spoke to the news media about, like the Mar-A-Lago documents case).
My own deep suspicion is that the police aren't all that motivated, frankly. They're famously misogynist and I feel quite comfortable making that blanket statement while noting #NotAllCops. They have a 40% higher domestic violence rate than other professions, including high-stress ones, and they've had to be dragged kicking and screaming to responding properly to domestic abuse calls. (Where they may well think the guy was justified in doing what he did; and also, if they arrest *this* abuser, what does that make the cop himself, who perhaps abuses his own wife? Self-image conflict there).
From what I've read (please correct me if you can refute this), they tend to wait on investigating rape reports, and then do it lackadaisically. Again, if you know of any that are handling it particularly well I would love to know about them. I probably could get an article or two out of them.
As for getting more convictions, if the women are reporting promptly, undergoing all the necessary physical examinations (can't get around that - has to happen if we want more convictions), and the police *are* handling it promptly and with a genuine goal to locate the truth, whatever it is - then I think we will see more success in the courts. True, proving consent is hard but that's outside the scope of this discussion, which is about what PDs can do more, or faster, to facilitate rape cases.
What feminists can do is provide better support to rape victims who do report, helping to guide them through the very difficult process of filing the report and potentially going to trial. If there are other weaknesses or holes in the system we haven't addressed, they'll become clearer with this process.
If you've got some good sources on this - books, documentaries, websites, news articles, etc. - I would love to see them.
We agree on a lot, as usual.
One question I ask myself constantly nowadays is about confirmation bias. An example would be latching onto popular assertions of fact which support my preferred narrative, without doing any checking at all.
An example would be the "gender pay gap", widely proclaimed to be 19%. I myself used to smugly quote that to prove my points. But it turns out that even a brief search will find US Department of Labor statistics that indicate that men work about 10% more hours than women (in the category of full time jobs). Remember that time and a half or double time will amplify differences in ours: working 44 hours will in many jobs bring in 46 or 48 hours of pay (15 or 20% increase in earned pay for 10% more hours). So right off the bat, any professional feminist (paid to know the truth) who quotes the "women earn 81 cents on the dollar compared to men" is consciously deceiving the public. There are a lot more confounding factors in a nuanced study, but even that one question of "hours worked" shows that the "gap" is substantially exaggerated for propaganda purposes. (We could explore this in more depth, but here I'm just using it to illustrate a point about confirmation bias).
Another example is the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson. I read the report from the Obama DOJ (who was NOT sympathetic to the police there, and went after them on other grounds), and the popular narrative of the shooting is basically false.
We had a police involved shooting around here a few years ago, and similarly what activists were saying was nowhere close to the evidence.
So where did you get that 40% figure? Did you accept it on face value or do any fact checking? For example, the third result I found was:
https://sites.temple.edu/klugman/2020/07/20/do-40-of-police-families-experience-domestic-violence/
That does show an alarming number which I do not want to discount, albeit based on very old research with questionable sampling - but look at the embedded table for some also interesting statistics about which spouse was found to be more abusive in the reference study. That part doesn't get cited - because it doesn't advance the narrative.
Or look under the hood at the "false reporting of rape" statistics, often said to be around 2% or 4%. But if you look at the published papers, they define "false reporting" as provably false reporting where there is conclusive evidence of its falsity; 100% of the vast number of ambiguous cases are assumed thereby to be true reports. Sometimes a study only considers convictions for false reporting as a portion of all reports - assuming that 100% of false reports are known, prosecuted and result in convictions.
As long as "reinforce the narrative" is a stronger incentive than "tell the truth", we as a society are in trouble - even when it's a narrative which appeals to our own individual biases.
From what I've read, in many jurisdictions whenever police are called into a domestic violence situations, they are expected to arrest somebody (in order to remove them from the scene), even if the other party does not want that. Is that a good policy or not? We can easily discern the motivations, but are good stats being kept on the real world results?
It's in this broad context that I ask: what does "taking rape seriously" mean in the real world, not just as a slogan? I would agree that "take all allegations seriously" is much better than "believe all women" and in fact a great idea if done appropriately. But how would we know whether or not enough allegations are being taken seriously, but not too many? By trusting the neutrality of judgement of the same activists who have been deceiving us routinely for decades?
If you want to know why I'm wary of a blanket endorsement for taking ALL allegations seriously as a guideline, I highly recommend the book "Unwanted Advances" by Laura Kipnis. It's about how campuses are taking allegations seriously under Title IX - and it's not a pretty picture. How "take all allegations seriously" is interpreted on the ground, in today's postmodernist political atmosphere, can be a long shot from the innocent concept we might imagine from our own interpretations of the words. Some allegations are more credible than others, and "taking it seriously" can and often does translate into a kangaroo court which damages lives.
And I hope I don't need to say that I am strongly in favor of prosecuting rape! And treating reports respectfully.
My distrust is more in terms of the weaponization of supposedly positive concepts by an illiberal left, deceiving good liberals with evocative slogans and hoping they don't look under the hood at how the slogans are being implemented. I'm sure you've seen that dynamic in other areas of our politics; the dismaying thing is that even some (many) of the folks we have long accepted as being on the right side are deceiving us.
You've probably heard of the "replication crisis" in psychology. A daunting portion of keystone studies upon which theories and other research were constructed, turned out to not be replicable. Nobody knows exactly how deep the rot goes, because the dynamics which produced this go back decades and it's not very feasible to retest everything. There are some efforts to re-establish scientific integrity gradually by seeking replication of the most important studies.
I'm finding that the same is true for many of the stories and stats I have believed for a very long time. Like learning that Mathew Shepard in Wyoming was not killed for being gay (in fact one of his killers was one of his lovers). Some new deception or distortion comes to my attention every month I'd guess. It's kind of humbling to be honest.
(And yes, let's just stipulate that the other side is always worse, but that excuses nothing).
So I finally got to reading your comment and the DV link you included above. Thank you. Always up for refining what I think I know about stuff.
Interesting article, and as to where I got my info on the 40% DV rate for cops, I'm pretty sure it was one of the articles listed within - maybe The Atlantic, which has a pretty decent reliability rating. I kick out an article a week on my blog and I do the best I can to source references. I rely a lot on Media Bias Fact Check and also checking About links to see where more unknown sources come from. I aim for sources that are rated as highly factual or mostly factual and I don't bother as much about bias (although bias and factualism tend to travel down either side of the spectrum the same way...the farther you go in one direction factualism goes down, and bias goes up).
So, learning that the 40% stat might not be any good anymore is valuable to know and I thank you. I'd just remind you that, as I think you mentioned already, we almost can't trust any previously reliable info source anymore. Sci American & Nature have been 'wokenized' and buy into trans ideology; so have the AMA, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychological Association, and other so called 'experts' and 'scientists' to the point where they are no longer anywhere as reliable as they should be. Throw in deepfake videos & photos and chaos has already begun to reing.
I've read "Hate Crime Hoaxes" by a black sociologist whose name escapes me and I was surprised at how many notorious 'hate crimes' were often anything but. And I read "The Book of Matthew" a few years ago, still have it, which casts quite a different light on America's most famous 'homophobic' hate crime.
So no, I didn't take it at face value, I did some fact-checking, but probably not as much as I'd like to if I have more time.
I've saved the article you've referenced as it will no doubt come in handy in the future.
Great response! Respect!
Hate Crime Hoax is by Wilfred Reilly. Eye opening.
As a lifelong progressive liberal, I was seriously shocked to find out how deeply misleading or inaccurate much of what I had assumed for many years to be well documented truths, turned out to be. And then to see how determined some fellow progressives are to avoid acknowledging that, to discount anybody who has the temerity to put truth above reinforcing tribal narratives.
It's so nice to find others seeking truth.
I too have had to remove some of my talking points, when they turn out to be either false, or at least credibly challenged and uncertain enough that I need to do more checking before presenting them again. And like you, I appreciate when someone helps me overcome a blind spot or misinformation.
One of the hardest things to do is to double check the items which you want to believe because they help you make your point - in order to compensate at least partially for confirmation bias.
I have no desire to be sucked into another tribal narrative on the right, so I'm going to hang out in the grey zones and look for what seems true from either side, no trust for either. It's great to have companions like you.
I am also blessed with a partner with very similar tendencies - we have both become opponents of critical social justice ideology (as former progressive liberals for most of our lives) in recent years - but we also try to help each other not to over-react or over-shoot. Basically, trying not to be captured by another narrative, even an anti-woke bias. I might feel a lot more lonely if my partner were not with me on this journey.
Always happy to engage with those in the Murky Middle, where we don't always like the company we keep - which is occasionally extremists or people who are sorta loose cannons like Jordan Peterson - he's all over the board from insightful to religious whack job. The extremists aren't part of the Murky Middle but sometimes an idea or two of theirs is.
Sometimes we can't know what we don't know. I just updated a blog article of mine about OJ & Nicole, in which I'd said his first wife claimed he never hit her. I tried to find anything that might challenge this but I couldn't. Having just finished a book on OJ's & Nicole's marriage, I find that OJ's circle of friends in his first marriage widely believed he was hitting her although they couldn't be sure. But Marguerite always wore sunglasses inside & outside, bit suspish.
So I updated it to say that Marguerite may in fact have been beaten by him, and, well, lied about it to the media. It messes up my speculation that some men only abuse women who will tolerate it (I still believe that, actually) but Marguerite ain't the poster child for not tolerating his shit.
I went on a bit of a rant yesterday morning on Facebook as some of my friends think I'm too hard on the 'woke'. I wrote that the reason why I disliked them as much as the Trumpers is because of their authoritarianism. I got deplatformed again from a social media platform yesterday morning for an article challenging the science behind 'gender affirming care' for kids and noting how much Europe, including the most liberal countries, are pulling back on it. Guaranteed that's what they meant by 'hate speech', which is what the woke call 'truth' now.
I am really, really fed up with the truthphobic on both sides. But I also recognize how hard it is to get to the truth when you can't even trust the experts anymore, including the alleged science-based. I can't wait to see American doctors and 'gender therapists' getting their fucking asses sued off once the country removes the trans blinders from its eyes. In particular I want to see the AMA and the AAP go down in fucking flames.
I agree with most of what you say. And yes, it can be hard to get lefty friends to pay attention to the authoritarian themes becoming entrenched in the Critical Social Justice ideology narratives and framings.
"All worship *The Narrative* of oppression and righteousness. From The Narrative flows all of our power. The prime directive is to reinforce The Narrative - suppress any information which might cast doubt, remove any dissenting perspectives, condition all people - especially kids - to believe as we decree".
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I wanted to understand more about your characterization of Jordan Peterson, tho. I followed some of his earlier stuff when he as becoming popular, and continue to see a clip of him now and then. But I'm far from knowing his full content to date.
The criticism I found most relevant was that he slips back and forth between the science of psychology and the, um, mythopoetic Jungian stuff which is not science; and that this interweaving could mislead readers to give the latter unearned credibility as "evidence based". (This is not to say that he was consciously attempting to deceive, just that incautious readers could wind up being somewhat misled about science vs non-science based views).
I also get (from some clip I watched) that he is a Christian (albeit considerably more thoughtful than the typical Christian from my youth). I am not Christian, but I don't consider Christians to inherently be wacko. Of course, some are. (As are some non-Christians)
Perhaps in some speeches or interviews which I have not encountered, Peterson really does earn the characterization "religious whack job". I'd like to know more about that. What source convinced you that his message is in part religious wack-job stuff?
I'm not a huge follower of JP. I listened to a few of his talks on YouTube a few years ago and appreciated his comments on personal responsibility, esp re women as certain feminists seem to think they bear no responsibility for themselves, their behaviour, their reactions, their actions, or their feelings. He never went Andrew Tate-level crazy, like 'women bear responsibility for their own rape'. (I believe women sometimes unconsciously collaborate in their own rapes but my answer is, 'Don't have sex with guys like Andrew Tate' rather than 'If you're raped, it's your fault. No, it's ALWAYS the rapist's fault, but women don't have to help by doing dumb shit like getting blind-ass drunk at a party.)
I don't follow JP as much anymore (never really did, just liked his talks about personal responsibility and the weaknesses in victim feminism) but then, awhile back, he started going more Judaeo-Christian - I think he's Jewish, don't know if he identifies as a Christian now - and I don't know where he stands today. But a few years ago, don't remember the context, he was coming over as a little too religious for me. Coming from the States as I do, having grown up not in religious whackjobbery but in Ohio, where fundamentalist Christianity was popular, I have a dim view of conservative religion. (I was raised progressive Lutheran and I don't regret it even if I don't ID as a Christian anymore).
JP has also struggled with a (prescription, I think) drug problem and even wound up being hospitalized a few years back - in fact, I think he was in an induced coma. I don't remember the details and can't be arsed to look them up - you can if you like. I think he's an interesting character - emphasize on 'character' - and he's offered many intelligent talking points in the past. Sometimes he sounds rational and other times he sounds religious nutty, and it's just sort of a flag in my head when he says something weird. I hope he's getting his shit together because I think he has some valid ideas to contribute to the culture wars,
Thanks for responding. We are not that far apart on JP - neither of us being a devoted follower (in attitude or consumption of his material), both of us having seen some things from him which make a lot of sense, and neither of us resonating well with the Judeo-Christian facets of his approach. (I think he's Christian rather than Jewish, tho).
As I said, I do find his intellectual approach to Christian themes more interesting than the Christians of my own youth. His thesis is "this is valuable wisdom to hear and consider" rather than "the bible says so and you can't question it". But I'm still not a Christian (nor really an anti-Christian).
I thought he was Jewish by birth but I might be wrong - I did a quick Google but didn't find anything. I didn't look too hard. I seem to recall he's gone down the path, at least in the past, of supporting Biblical attitudes about women. But I don't follow him that closely.