Conor Friedersdorf's Intersectional Blind Spot

Is there some reason Conor Friedersdorf keeps fumbling the snap? His memory lapses, even when the subject stares him in the face, as to how much power the intersectional left has already acquired (while thirsting for more) are disturbing. I first noticed it with his essay on the Scott Aaronson kerfuffle, in which he kept backfilling for the broken concept of "privilege" (though in the end he confessed it had no practical value in solving societal problems), and for his burying the comments of one of Aaronson's more vile detractors in a footnote. He pulled the same lame stunt with his essay responding to Susan Danuta Walters' two-minutes'-hate in the Washington Post, claiming such views were "unrepresentative" of modern feminism.

Well, here we go again, this time regarding Democrats complaining about the alleged racism of white women:

Some conservatives insist that performative, hyperbolic white-woman bashing is broadly representative of the Democratic Party and the political left. It is not. This rhetorical mode is widely seen as wrongheaded. In my experience, it elicits eye-rolling from most residents of deep-blue neighborhoods and from most Democrats in all racial groups. It is the work of a tiny, largely white, mostly privileged vanguard.

Widely seen by whom? Again and again, we see intersectional bashing of people because of their race, and especially, sex, and by people in very high positions of power. As for instance, a piece by Friedersdorf appearing days later in The Atlantic condemning the ACLU's craven and partisan rejection of Betsy DeVos's new Title IX rules. What is the construction of kangaroo courts with their "believe the victim" conclusion-assuming but presumptive male-bashing? As Scott Greenfield recently wrote, the ACLU under Anthony Romero has become just another social justice organization with only its name to reflect its origin story. How is it he dismisses Russlyn Ali's monster as somehow unrepresentative of widespread male bashing? How of legislative success in California adopting a bogus, unknowable "affirmative consent" rule for sexual encounters where consent can be revoked ex post facto by the woman with no knowledge by the man? It's like he doesn't even read his own copy.

Update 2018-11-26: Useful and interesting exchange between Friedersdorf and Scott Greenfield here, with additional response from Greenfield at Simple Justice; if I wanted to summarize my problem with Friedersdorf, I could scarcely do better than this graf from the latter: “Conor Friedersdorf is a name often mentioned here, both because I think he’s exceptionally smart and occasionally too kind, generous to a fault to people who might not be worthy of his largesse”. That's a good explanation of the problem I have with Friedersdorf: he routinely overlooks examples of bad faith.

Justice As An Explicit Roll Of The Dice: How Many Men Are Rapists?

One of the things we heard constantly during the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings was the old saw that false reports of rape amount to "2 to 8%". Some while back, Scott Greenfield some while ago published a fine review of the statistics of false reports, which found a disparity in terminology that left us with this:

True-ish: 35.3%
Definitively False: 5.9%
Inconclusive: 58.8%

But the thing I wanted to look at was the reverse of the "2 to 8%" figure (actually, 2-10% per Greenfield). If we're supposed to "believe" accusers on the basis of a low reported false accusation rate, why isn't it equally valid to decide guilt based on the number of genuinely innocent men? That is, shouldn't also "believe" men who claim innocence, on exactly the same evidentiary grounds? But how innocent? Let's try to figure out the percentage of the male population that are rapists. We start with Uniform Crime Report data. This counts reported rapes since 1960; the data tool provides data to 2014. So, using the "Legacy Rape" data*,

• Sum the number of reported rapes from 1960-2014: 4,002,079
• Divide by the 2014 population (318,857,056): 1.26%
• Multiply by 2 (because men are half the population):  2.51%
• Adjust for the RAINN estimated 69% non-reporting rate: 3.64%

The above assumes a 1:1 ratio of rapes to rapists, which contradicts the repeat offender theory of David Lisak and others. It also assumes that the number of rapists is not in part diminishing, because the oldest rapes in that count includes some that might have been committed by men now dead. This is important, because it artificially raises the male rapist percentage. Nonetheless, if we were to say that the number of false rape reports is a reason to "believe" the accusers, the even smaller percentage of male rapists in the general male population (versus the high end of false accusers at 8% or 10%) is an even stronger reason to acquit.

Of course, both of these are stupid; we don't roll the dice to determine guilt or innocence, but look at the individual circumstances of the charges and the presented evidence. N.b., I also didn't investigate actual convictions, because the Bureau of Justice Statistics website is presently broken.

---

*"Legacy rape" corresponds well to men raping women; the "Revised Rape" tallies include "penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim", which would obviously include prison rape.

"Is There A Smarter Way To Deal With Sexual Assault On Campus?" Asks The New Yorker

A steaming heap of dogma from Jia Tolentino, who had the incredible gall necessary to write that

Seven years ago, the Office of Civil Rights, under President Obama, issued a “Dear Colleague” letter, reasserting that sexual violence on campus was a violation of Title IX, and pushing universities to handle sexual-assault cases in a timely, transparent, accuser-friendly manner.

Two out of three ain't bad? Then there's the friendly interview with serial liar Emma Sulkowicz that conveniently omits the fact that Sulkowicz filed her report months after the alleged incident, or Cathy Young's embarrassing revelations of Sulkowicz's friendly text messages in the wake of the purported "assault". The two principles of the study at the center of the piece, Jennifer Hirsch and Suzanne Goldberg, meet at a conference and resolve to conduct an "enthnography". It sounds really important! Except, of course, what they mean is, "unverified stories".

They call the ensuing project SHIFT, whose clumsy retronym stands for "Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation". Already we know we are among advocates who know what they want to find and do. They're smarter! They've got Ideas!

... Hirsch and Mellins think about sexual assault socio-ecologically: as a matter of how people act within a particular environment. They are doggedly optimistic that there is, if not a single fix, a series of new solutions.

But, rape is hard to prove! Can we expand it?

Today, the D.O.J. defines sexual assault as unwanted sexual contact, which means that groping counts, as does attempted assault. The crime hinges on intention, and there are often no witnesses, which makes it uniquely difficult to adjudicate in any legal system, let alone one made up of college administrators. Campus judiciary systems don’t have a criminal court’s investigative powers or evidentiary procedures, but they do have many of a criminal court’s responsibilities. To complicate matters further, everyone involved in the process—accuser, accused, administrator—essentially works under the same roof. Betsy DeVos, Trump’s Secretary of Education, has called the current approach a “failed system,” and said that she would seek to replace it.

"It might seem simpler to let the criminal-justice system handle things," Tolentino intones, "but universities have a responsibility to insure that women have equal access to education." Pesky due process! (But wait, aren't women already a majority of students enrolled in college?) And then there's all those juicy staff positions:

Columbia now has twenty-three staffers with Title IX responsibilities, including case managers, investigators, and administrators, and provides free legal services to accusers and accused. The school’s gender-based misconduct policy is thirty-one pages long.

Somebody has to hire all those Womyn's Studies majors, not to mention attorneys who skipped class on the day they taught rape in crim law. It's a good thing, because in the end, Hirsh likens the situation to that with drunk driving; included in the "solutions" for that problem are

new laws, and social change, as school and community programs taught people to designate a driver and to intervene when a wobbly friend grabbed his car keys. It also involved changes to the physical environment: cities established police checkpoints, and offenders were required to install Breathalyzer locks on their cars. Citizens lobbied for better street lights, more speed bumps.

 What possible analog exists for these among sexual assault? Chastity belts? Whatever it might be, there's no doubt that some idiot will propose it, and it will rush through the legislatures in California, Illinois, and New York with hosannas. At last! Sexual assault has been cured! Meanwhile, young men will find themselves spied upon and spat upon for no reason other than owning a penis. Misbehavior or even missed communications on a date will result in unpardonable ejection. That is, the answer to the title question is "no".

Samantha Geimer Is Not A Victim

I've gotten a little lassitude lately, which is why I haven't remarked upon the spectacular Quillette interview of Samantha Geimer to date. But she provides a clear moral beacon, a tonic against the victimhood feminism pimps of the left. Famously, Roman Polanski raped Geimer, who later responded by writing a book on her experiences thereafter in The Girl: Life in the Shadow of Roman Polanski. There's a lot to address there, but this is my favorite:

Q: One of the threads running through the book is your powerful allergy to self-pity. Early in the book you write, “I made a decision: I wasn’t going to be a victim of anyone or for anyone. Not Roman, not the state of California, not the media. I wasn’t going to be defined by what is said about me or expected from me.” Towards the end, you write, “I was the victim of a crime—I am, and always will be, a rape victim. But I’m not a victim as a person.” That final distinction strikes me as quite subtle but astute. What is it about victimhood that caused you to reject its temptations so decisively aged just 13?

SG: I turned 14 that month, but I don’t think it was really my age. It was just who I had been raised to be and – I’d like to think – where I was raised, in York, PA. I was not taught to be fearful and ashamed or to cower before authority without question. I was not taught that sex is damaging or that it would diminish me. I understood that far worse things happen to people all the time. I was taught to be strong and confident, to be a survivor and to realize that those who would victimize me were the ones who were weak. Bad things happen in life. We must deal with what comes our way and not just roll over and die. People call this ‘victim blaming,’ but I call it good advice and something to strive for even when you think you can’t.  In his song “Refugee,” Tom Petty sings: “Somewhere, somehow, somebody must have kicked you around some/Tell me why you want to lay there, revel in your abandon.” Wise words.

We live in a world in which dogmatic halfwits like Laurie Penny can, in all seriousness, write one week that "most women don’t like to think of themselves as victims"; the next, she wailed about people being mean to her on Twitter for calling all men "trash". Geimer's sense of real justice puts the lie to hacks like Penny.

Sunday Bullets

• From the increasingly indispensable Quillette: Marta Iglesias on "Why Feminists Must Understand Evolution". Excerpt:
  

  The fact that men and women are different ... does not preclude feminists from striving for completely equal rights between the sexes. However, it is important to understand how things really are if we are to try to modify them ...

  But some feminists would prefer to doubt the applicability of evolutionary biology to the human species. They believe that equality of behaviour in the sexes would exist in nature, but culture generates our inter-sexual differences (for examples see Chapter 1 in A Mind of Her Own).^{19 20} Apparently, contradicting this line of thought means that one is adopting a ‘biological determinist’ position....

• Also from Quillette: Lexa Frankl on "Why I'm Uneasy With The #metoo Movement". Frankl opens with a discussion of a one-night-stand gone bad; the sex wax consensual, but after a night of heavy drinking, and ended with her contracting herpes simplex type 2.

  Then she asked if the intercourse had been consensual. Had I verbally consented to sex, I wondered? The answer was a resounding no. Perhaps I had been too drunk to give meaningful consent, and what had seemed consensual at the time was in fact something more sinister – predatory opportunism or even assault. For a moment, I found myself tempted by an escape into victimhood. Certainly, the emotional burden would be easier to bear if the fault could be projected elsewhere.
  
  But, try as I might, I could not persuade myself that this was a good faith account of what had actually happened. Self-examination forced me to acknowledge that both my partner and I shared responsibility for the events of that night, and that martyrdom would be a cowardly and dishonest excuse for my own poor judgment.

  She goes from there to the kinds of trite and pointless advice handed out by so many sexual assault victim agencies:

  Feminist and activist sites set up to counsel and advise victims of sexual assault seemed perversely determined to convince me that I had in fact been assaulted, and sternly warned against any assumption of personal responsibility which they invariably describe as “victim-blaming.” Instead, they offered trite slogans such as “Drinking is not a crime – rape is” and “Don’t tell your daughter not to go out, tell your son to behave properly” and “Teach men to respect women.”

  It's significant that there are no countries free of rape anywhere on the globe. If the right culture were all it took to end the crime, it has long ago failed, and in all places. Moving on, she notes the problems with feminist objections to self-responsibility:

  I might refuse to wear a seatbelt on the basis that I am particularly fastidious about road safety. But if another less cautious driver were to drive his vehicle into mine, most reasonable people would accept that I bear responsibility for any injuries I would not have sustained had I taken the sensible precaution of wearing a safety belt.
  
  ...
  
  In neither circumstance does “Don’t tell me to wear a safety belt, tell others to drive carefully” or “Don’t tell children not to talk to strangers, tell strangers not to abduct children” sound remotely like sensible or wise advice. We recognise that, as adults and moral agents, we have a duty to look after own well-being and the well-being of dependents who cannot look out for themselves.

  This ultimately is the problem with all demands to "teach men not to rape": it is a demand for a utopia. It is not terribly satisfying to those who actually have suffered such attacks, but that will not change the likelihood of its existing. Male sexual impulses are the residue of millennia of evolution; they will not (lightly) yield to exhortation.
  
  She has other salient points:
  • "[R]evealing attire will attract the attention of the opposite sex, and that it is designed and (usually) worn for precisely this purpose."
  • "To notice that certain behaviors predictably increase a person’s vulnerability is so obvious as to be banal. But any attempt to ask women to acknowledge the associated risks is routinely described as ‘rape apologism.’"
  • "[I]t is precisely because the behaviour of others lies beyond my control that I must remain responsible for taking precautions in the interest of self-protection."
• Campus rape tribunals hand down so many guilty verdicts because they are trained to do so.
• Conor Friedersdorf thinks more Christian dialogue about sex needs to start with the Golden Rule.
• Interesting chapter about academic sociology political bias. About a third of those involved in a survey (n=335) reject the idea that evolution has left any fingerprints on the human brain and behavior. (Von Hippel, W., and Buss, D.M., 2017, "Do Ideologically Driven Scientific Agendas Impede The Understanding And Acceptance Of Evolutionary Principles In Social Psychology?", The Politics Of Social Psychology, New York: Psychology Press.)
• Pretty good essay from a female Silicon Valley startup founder about sex in that place. Excerpt:

  I knew being hot got me in the door and that after that I had to make that work for me. Culturally, we are taught as women that our main power is our looks and sexuality. Then it's a matter of what you do with it. Personally, I used the s--- out of it, and I was more successful than my male colleagues because of it.
  
  However, I had a hard line of not crossing a physical line with men I was actively doing deals with, and I kept that boundary well. And then, as I got more established, men didn't meet with me for my voice or for what I might be wearing. They met with me because they knew my name and because I knew things that they wanted to know.
  
  The meetings became more professional, and I didn't have to play the woman card anymore.

Harvey Weinstein's Colonoscopy, Or, The Hannah Arendt Award Goes To...

Bar none, you will not read a more compelling, honest, or damning story about what it was like inside the beast than Scott Rosenberg's Facebook essay, reposted at Deadline: Hollywood:

Simply put: OG Miramax was a blast.
So, yeah, I was there.
And let me tell you one thing.
Let’s be perfectly clear about one thing:

Everybody-fucking-knew.

Not that he was raping.
No, that we never heard.
But we were aware of a certain pattern of overly-aggressive behavior that was rather dreadful.
We knew about the man’s hunger; his fervor; his appetite.
There was nothing secret about this voracious rapacity; like a gluttonous ogre out of the Brothers Grimm.
All couched in vague promises of potential movie roles.
(and, it should be noted: there were many who actually succumbed to his bulky charms. Willingly. Which surely must have only impelled him to cast his fetid net even wider).

He does not excuse himself:

So, yeah, I am sorry.
Sorry and ashamed.
Because, in the end, I was complicit.

Which is much less than Dan Rather's accusation that Rosenberg somehow snuck away from acknowledging his role in this.

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Other linkies on this subject:

• The original New York Times story, and the New Yorker followup. 
• Cathy Young is rightly concerned about lynch mobs going after all men as a consequence of this imbroglio:
  

  Ironically, as one Twitter user pointed out, actress Rose McGowan, who says she was raped by Weinstein and has denounced his enablers, spoke warmly a few years ago of film director Victor Salva, a child molester convicted of sexually abusing a 12-year-old boy actor in 1988. When asked if working with Salva was awkward given his record, McGowan shrugged it off as “not really my business.”Read more: http://forward.com/opinion/national/385236/its-a-good-thing-that-harvey-weinstein-has-been-stopped-but-lets-not-start/

  The Weinstein story is a depressing reminder of how difficult it can be for victims, female or male — especially victims of high-status predators — to seek recourse. But the post-Weinstein backlash has revived the demand to “believe the women” and take virtually any accusation of sexual assault as fact, at least against a man; and there are risks in that, too, particularly in the digital age, when an accusation can cost nothing more than a few keystrokes.
  
  Weinstein’s infuriating impunity will now be used to deride or dismiss concerns that men who don’t have his wealth, power or privilege — unless one regards all men as “privileged” — can get a raw deal when accused of sexual harassment or sexual assault. But the simple truth is that impunity for some can easily coexist with zealous, or overzealous, enforcement for others. In recent years, a number of men have suffered devastating consequences for conduct, proven or alleged, that doesn’t even come close to Weinstein’s reported offenses.

  
  
• Update 2017-10-19: Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic opines that the populist right is tearing down an institutional left press that has no analog elsewhere. Excerpt:
  

  If Matthew Boyle had gotten his way last year, Harvey Weinstein would still be a powerful Hollywood producer able to summon aspiring teen actresses to his hotel suites.
  
  If he ever gets his way, the beneficiaries will be corrupt, powerful actors in Hollywood, Washington, D.C., Silicon Valley, and elsewhere—corrupt actors on the left and on the right—because like a petulant child throwing a tantrum with lit matches in a dry forrest, Boyle and his ilk will have destroyed that which they lack the talent to recreate.

Sunday Bullets

• The Boy Scouts of America will start admitting female members.
• Allergan has apparently sold patents to a tribe, thus evading US patent law.The broken patent system finds yet another way to be even more broken.
• Harvey Weinstein was fired from the company bearing his name, and yesterday expelled from the Motion Picture Academy. Weinstein ironically funded the dreadful, unapologetic film The Hunting Ground, which goes to show you can't start the public rehabilitation process too early. But unlike Bill Cosby, whose studied "America's Dad" role belied the creeper beneath, Weinstein has no public goodwill, and was probably unknown to a large swath of the American public. 
• Michael Clegg has a good review of Angela Saini's Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong at Quillette. Excerpt:
  

  I think Saini is right to be suspicious of an easy reach for the biological, especially if that is merely an invocation of prejudices about what is natural rather than a reference to the actual science. However, social explanation will always be challenged in accounting for deep, cross-cultural regularities in human behaviour. If authors want to advance such arguments as alternatives to the biological then they need to do so with caution. It is wrong to assume that social explanations are commonsensical and can be approached without theory, and it is wrong to assume that evidence in history doesn’t need the same care as evidence in science.

• Lynn Saxon deconstructs the typical view of bonobos as egalitarian, promiscuous, and nonviolent in The Naked Bonobo.
• Blade Runner 2049 is misogynistic because it shows women as prostitutes. Okay. Wired? Tired.

Betsy DeVos Rescinds "Dear Colleague" Letter Title IX Guidance

As you've probably heard by now, Betsy DeVos has rescinded the infamous "Dear Colleague" letter charging universities to investigate sexual assault cases. Unsurprisingly, California has passed a law retaining the old standard (SB 169 text),  and a number of universities will either defend the old standard or even adhere to it. The show ain't over, but it's a serious step in the right direction.

Friday Links

• In reaction to Betsy DeVos rescinding the "Dear Colleague" letter, 29 US Senators have signed a letter condemning this action. The Constitution still isn't popular.
• Ross Douthat has a decent reaction to Ta-Nehisi Coates' essay about race's role in the 2016 Presidential election, accusing Coates of attacking a straw man (emboldening mine):
  

  Certainly there are many Americans whose beliefs fit Coates’ description, who regard Trump’s racial vision as basically benign if occasionally insensitive, who think he’s an unjust victim of the liberal media’s race card, and so forth. These Americans are Trump supporters, for the most part, plus a smattering of left-wing gadflies and other contrarians. But Coates is very clearly not arguing with Fox-watching Trump supporters in his essay: His piece quotes and critiques anti-Trump conservatives and Democrats and liberals, not Sean Hannity or his epigones, and his examples of the supposed “race is incidental” consensus are figures like Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, Mark Lilla and my colleague Nick Kristof, Charles Murray and Anthony Bourdain. His great complaint is not that Trump backers deny their own racist impulses, in other words, but that the “collective” of Trump opponents barely acknowledge the role of race and racism in his rise.

  Douthat repeats the same error that marred Coates' essay, namely, its refusal to look at anything resembling polling data, but it still represents a step up from that "caricature" in that it seeks to understand individuals who might have voted for Trump for reasons wholly (or even mostly) divided from racism or sexism.
• One potentially underreported cause of anti-Clinton sentiment: military voters (or people with family members in the military). Glenn Greenwald sets out a case (not as strong as he thinks) for a significant stream of such people making a difference in November:
  

  A study published earlier this year by Boston University political science professor Douglas Kriner and Minnesota Law School’s Francis Shen makes the case quite compellingly.
  

  
  

  Titled “Battlefield Casualties and Ballot Box Defeat: Did the Bush-Obama Wars Cost Clinton the White House?,” the paper rests on the premise that these wars have exclusively burdened a small but politically important group of voters — military families — and that “in the 2016 election Trump was speaking to this forgotten part of America.” Particularly in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan — three states that Clinton lost — “there is a significant and meaningful relationship between a community’s rate of military sacrifice and its support for Trump.” Examining the data, the paper concludes that “inequalities in wartime sacrifice might have tipped the election.”

• Why does Hillary Clinton think comparisons to Cersei Lannister is a good idea?
• Anita Sarkeesian's censorious tendencies perhaps have a limit.  
• Amber Tamblyn apparently has a long-ago beef with actor James Woods, who tried to pick her up as a teenager. She writes an open letter to Woods (who disputed the charges on Twitter) in the pages of Teen Vogue, and wishes for a world in which women's charges would just stick regardless of corroborating evidence or testimony:
  

  The saddest part of this story doesn't even concern me but concerns the universal woman's story. The nation's harmful narrative of disbelieving women first, above all else. Asking them to first corroborate or first give proof or first make sure we're not misremembering or first consider the consequences of speaking out or first let men give their side or first just let your sanity come last.

  Because false accusations never happen? Because memory is selective and frequently faulty? This coming from a political magazine in heels is par for the course, but it points at a dystopia.
• Update 2017-09-16: Okay, so no longer Friday, but too lazy to open a new post. Here's Jason D. Hill in Commentary responding to Ta-Nehisi Coates' recent essay:

  In the 32 years I have lived in this great country, I have never once actively fought racism. I have simply used my own example as evidence of its utter stupidity and moved forward with absolute metaphysical confidence, knowing that the ability of other people to name or label me has no power over my self-esteem, my mind, my judgment, and—above all—my capacity to liberate myself through my own efforts.
  
  On this matter, you have done your son—to whom you address your book—an injustice. You write: “The fact of history is that black people have not—probably no people ever have—liberated themselves strictly by their own efforts. In every great change in the lives of African Americans we see the hands of events that were beyond our individual control, events that were not unalloyed goods.”
  
  I do not believe you intended to mislead your son, but in imparting this credo, you have potentially paralyzed him, unless he reappraises your philosophy and rejects it. In your misreading of America, you’ve communicated precisely why many blacks in this country have been alienated from their own agency and emancipatory capabilities. The most beleaguered people on the planet, the Jews, who have faced persecution since their birth as a people, are a living refutation of your claim. ...

Betsy DeVos Declares An End to Weaponized Title IX Persecutions

The show isn't over,  and you get the distinct sense that political haymakers like Kirstin Gillibrand will fight this in the courts and elsewhere. The New York Times' story on the announcement contained a passage that is positively Orwellian in its revision of history (as ever, emboldening mine):

How to enforce Title IX, the 1972 law requiring schools to protect students from rape and sexual assault, is one of Ms. DeVos’s most difficult policy tasks, and her department has been under fire for comments made this week by Candice Jackson, who leads its Office for Civil Rights.

This is of course a fiction manufactured for public consumption that simply did not exist prior to the 2011 "Dear Colleague" letter. As the Reason story points out,

The problems with the Obama-era Title IX guidance are essentially threefold. First, it isn't obvious that Title IX—a one-sentence statute—could or should be read as having anything to do with violent crimes.

Secondly, the guidance raises constitutional questions, since it appears to many civil libertarians that a federal agency was instructing public institutions to violate the due process guarantees of the Fifth Amendment. ...

Finally, since the guidance is legally dicey, it led to lawsuits left and right. Many students who were found responsible for sexual misconduct under the new guidelines have filed suit against their universities, and a nontrivial number of them have prevailed in court.

Emily Yoffe in The Atlantic has a well-timed story on the state of Title IX which hints at the problems to come: "Many college administrators have said they will not alter the adjudication policies now enshrined on their campus even if recent federal guidelines are rescinded; capacious campus bureaucracies that were created at the behest of Obama’s OCR are likely to resist change." The bureaucracy is its own constituency. People for whom "justice" is merely a matter of collecting sufficient scalps are unlikely to stop the head-carving just because they were told to. Defunding needs to happen, and soon.

Update 8:44 PM CDT: I had forgotten this exceptional tweetstorm from Walter Olson:

With @BetsyDeVosED today unveiling plans to revamp Obama rules on sexual assault and college discipline, here's a long tweetstorm... /1

— Walter Olson (@walterolson) September 8, 2017

Bullety Stuff, Sunday Edition

• The narrative that Republicans are the principle reason why Obamacare isn't working is remarkably durable. Maybe Democrats should have created a system that wouldn't depend on their political enemies implementing it?
• The rise of the employer-provided "exclusive provider" health insurance plan. It eliminates out-of-network options for most things, but at a substantial savings ("double digit").
• Data Gone Odd looks at rape statistics (and particularly false reporting of rape) in a two-part series (part 1, part 2). As Scott Greenfield summarizes,
  
  

  The 2-10% false rape accusations stat is untrue. Actual stats:
  
  True-ish: 35.3%
  Definitively False: 5.9%
  Inconclusive: 58.8% https://t.co/6fMxzd3EaL

  — Scott Greenfield (@ScottGreenfield) July 16, 2017

• Perhaps the first recorded instance of publish or penis, i.e. the theory that getting cited in others' work "contribute[s] to 'white heteromasculinity'". 
• Steven Pinker thinks Harvard's attempt to shut down off-campus clubs starting in 2022 is a terrible idea. 
• Free speech is terrible, says progressive Christina Berchini.
• Even Vox Dep't: Nancy MacLean's hackish attack on the Public Choice school of economics backfires, Vox runs a wholly reasonable response, warning against reading everything as a conspiracy theory.

Jill Filipovic's Weak Case Against Neil Gorsuch and Originalism

For some reason, absurd lightweight and "recovering attorney" Jill Filipovic has escaped my comment before, though I've noticed her typings previously; she came to my attention mostly because she thinks men accused of rape need not be accorded due process, having signed on for the idiotic "affirmative consent" concept. (Protip: it does nothing to change the fundamental he-said/she-said nature of determining consent after the fact, unless one gets a signed affadavit at the time. This is not how any human sexual encounter actually operates.) It says a good deal about her personally that she blocked me on Twitter despite our having no prior interactions, which tells me my ID ended up on an automatic blocklist somewhere.

She most recent styled a jeremiad against constitutional originalism generally and Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch particularly. Laden with straw men, half-truths, and orthodoxy, it serves more as a weathervane for a certain subspecies of liberal opinion than any sort of intelligent analysis. In trying to understand Gorsuch the jurist, wouldn't we want to look at some of the cases he was asked to decide? That would seem reasonable, but here we do not deal with a reasonable person — or even someone conversant with the law and why it is as it is.

Filipovic's dedication to postmodernist interpretation ignores actual arguments in the texts of decisions she criticizes, if she even gets that far. Her total failure to understand the majority opinion in Heller v. District of Columbia, her mischaracterization of the judicial history of the Second Amendment prior to that decision, and her claim that Heller represents a revisionist view (despite a fair number of high-profile liberal legal scholars reluctantly agreeing with its historical accuracy) is common enough, if wrong. Her claim that "The framers of the Constitution didn’t offer any instructions for how to interpret the document, nor did they get into specifics on what each of its provisions meant" is ultimately a cop-out on making any effort to find out what that meaning might be. (Apparently, plain English is no longer a requirement in law school.)

Tediously and redundantly making the "living Constitution" argument (she spends three of her nine points on the same thing), she deceitfully claims that "the writers of the Constitution arguably intended for it to be a living document" while ignoring the amendment process they left us to change it. To Filipovic, the Constitution is whatever she wants it to be, a slab of political copper for a legislative majority to hammer into shape on a whim. That is, she subscribes to the same legal regime that delivered unto us Dred Scott v. Sandford, Wickard v. Filburn,  Smith v. Maryland, and Korematsu v. United States.

In her telling, Gorsuch is merely a damned conservative, a zombie Antonin Scalia "originalist", which according to her, no one really is. (Indeed, Scalia's deference to original intent was rather situational.) It's true that Gorsuch follows Scalia's footsteps in some matters of criminal law, but there one would think liberals might take some solace; he has shied away from strict law-and-order deference to agents of the government. As we have seen thus far in his confirmation hearings, antagonistic Democrats are having a hard go to latch on to a single, clear reason to oppose him.

Filipovic is narrowly right when she observes, "The founders weren’t fortune tellers and couldn’t predict every possible legal issue", but only to the literal extent of that sentence. That is because their intent was that the vast majority of governing would occur at the state or local level; indeed, assent to the Constitution was enacted by the states themselves. The premise and promise of federalism was accountability to those most directly affected by law. One-size-fits-all approaches (e.g. a Federal minimum wage law that sets the floor for rural Wyoming workers as well as Manhattanites, or health care mandates that result in higher prices and fewer choices for people outside the coastal states) have a tendency to backfire. When she writes, "A strictly textual reading of a law isn’t neutral; it also invites in the reader’s own biases and assumptions", presumably she's upset because it isn't her biases and assumptions.

It's not a little ironic, then, when she cites UC Irvine's Erwin Chemerinsky, who rails about the hellscape an originalist legal environment might inflict on his fellow citizens. Among these mostly imagined complaints, he makes the fraudulent, asinine claim that "No longer would the Bill of Rights apply to state and local governments." Do they not teach the 14th Amendment at UCI? The Temperance activists rightly understood that federalism meant they couldn't create a nationwide ban on alcohol without passing a constitutional amendment, thanks to the 10th Amendment delegating most lawmaking to the states. In the post-FDR, "living Constitution" era, the War On Some Drugs can go on with barely a legal peep. Chemerinsky's view of federalism is really the substitution of whatever is most popular at the moment: rights of minorities bear no examination.

There's something odd about her screed appearing in the pages of Cosmopolitan, orthogonal as Filipovic's politics are to Helen Gurley Brown's message of sexual liberation for women. At least Brown understood the risks she undertook (if they frequently turned bitter); Filipovic wants to remake the world into a giant crib — or a jail for men.

Rolling Stone Loses The Nicole Eramo Defamation Lawsuit

Sabrina Rubin Erdely, Rolling Stone, and its publisher are all liable for defamation, which is not surprising because

Rolling Stone edited out information favorable to Eramo. The dean had tried to get Jackie to go to the police, but the final draft of the story made it seem as if Eramo was no more in favor of that then, say, an informal resolution.

It takes a certain amount of navel-gazing power to say this:

When Wenner testified, he said he wished the magazine hadn't issued a full retraction to the article, apologized to Eramo, but said that he had "suffered as much as" she had.

Molly Hemingway in The Federalist:

Erdely smeared someone and failed to do obvious due diligence with her sources. At every step of the fact-checking process, the magazine failed. The publication didn’t just fail to do its job, its staff didn’t seem to want to, putting a blockbuster story over basic journalism practices.

One key factor in the verdict, according to the jury, was the magazine’s delayed retraction and its decision to keep the article online with an editor’s note.

Further, this was not some one-off mistake but part of a pattern of the politically driven narrative journalism genre the magazine has paid Erdely and countless other reporters to do for decades.

I remain skeptical that anyone there has learned anything.

The Self-Limiting Disease

Another in an occasional series of mothers haranguing their teenage or even prepubescent sons on the horrors of supposed rape culture — except the boys aren't going for it.

“Oh boy,” my son said, rolling his eyes. “Not rape culture again.”

We were sitting around the dinner table talking about the news. As soon as I mentioned the Stanford sexual assault case, my sons looked at each other. They knew what was coming. They’ve been listening to me talk about consent, misogyny and rape culture since they were tweens. They listened to me then, but they are 16 and 18 now and they roll their eyes and argue when I talk to them about sexism and misogyny.

“There’s no such thing as rape culture,” my other son said. “You say everything is about rape culture or sexism.”

As Scott Aaronson so ably observed, we here deal with religious tenets, and there is no dissuading the pious on such matters. So when your child fails to take your catechism to heart — when, in fact, it is obviously, palpably false and wholly irrelevant to their lives — the obvious next step is to shame them in the pages of a large-circulation newspaper. As usual, the author hauls out the feminist warhorses, blaming their disinterest in her gabble on "toxic masculinity", and proselytizing for "enthusiastic consent" (which third parties after the fact have no hope of determining). Her sons, apparently imbued with working critical thinking skills despite their mother's best efforts, remain unmoved.

It is not a little interesting that the author makes no effort to understand the world through her sons' eyes; empathy for the male position in all this simply doesn't matter. A marriage is one long negotiation, not a harangue, and it is no surprise that Jody Allard never mentions a husband in this exposition. If self-described feminists are now in decline in the general population, one can only imagine it is scenes like this one repeated over and over driving it. Feminism as currently practiced is a self-limiting disease, to the extent it requires male assent and cooperation.

Update 2016-09-18: Allard's backlog is a deeply disturbing array of self-indulgence; her excusing her own lousy credit because of her inability to remain unpregnant would be funnier if the life she created wasn't trying to self-terminate. (The former link also confirms my suspicion that she has left behind a trail of failed marriages and poor decision making with contraceptives.)  And while of course the question of nature or nurture here is an open one, constantly hectoring your young sons about how their sex is behind every horrible thing in the world might not have a beneficial effect.

Update 2016-09-19: Seven kids.

NOW, Emma Sulkowicz, And Modern Feminism

I have said elsewhere that combating the smaller voices in the culture war amounts to a losing proposition. So what are we to make of the National Organization of Women handing the vile narcissist Emma Sulkowicz its "Woman of Courage" award? This, apparently, was the same organization that wailed on Dean Nicole Eramo earlier this year for having the temerity to question the anonymous "Jackie's" hyperbolic story of gang rape that later unraveled under, you know, actual investigation. The politics of modern feminism, or at least in the dungheap that it has become, are about symbolism, perpetual victimhood, and a studied refusal to grapple with inconvenient yet glaringly obvious facts. In Sulkowicz' case, those facts would include damning (and seductive) texts after the alleged "rape" that make it clear she wanted a relationship with him (which he later rejected). What possible "courage" could attach to this award? Sticking to her idiotic and risibly false story despite having been found a fraud?

NOW's problems with the real world may stem from its age. Having lately turned 50, NOW opened shop in the age of sit-ins and complaint:

Betty Friedan, the Feminine Mystique author famous for leading the group, called for every woman to focus her work on what made her angry, recalls Muriel Fox, now 88, one of the group’s founders and its publicist.

“Everyone there knew that she wanted to work on what made her mad,” says Fox, now 88. “That’s the reason the movement was so successful. We had wonderful leaders, but we had thousands of people who all were leaders working on what made them angry about the situation at that time.”

Apparently, irrational rage is the only thing that matters anymore. NOW's irrelevance is, it seems likely, one genesis of the declining number of people willing to adopt the label "feminist". Whatever that label stands for, surely justice isn't part of it.

Brock Turner, And The Difficult Job Of Reforming Rape Law

The case of former Sanford swimmer Brock Turner raping sexually assaulting one Emily Doe is by now well-documented: on January 17, 2015, she went to a frat party, and got blackout drunk. She awoke in a hospital to find police and medical personnel attending to her, whereupon they informed her she had been raped behind a dumpster. (Her attacker had been driven off when, by chance, two Swedish students encountered Turner and Doe, and pinned Turner until authorities could arrive.)

The original complaint contained five charges, three of sexual assault and two of rape, but the prosecuting attorney dropped the latter at a preliminary hearing in January. This is curious given that California rape statutes contain the following:

261. (a) Rape is an act of sexual intercourse accomplished with a person not the spouse of the perpetrator, under any of the following circumstances:

(3) Where a person is prevented from resisting by any intoxicating or anesthetic substance, or any controlled substance, and this condition was known, or reasonably should have been known by the accused.

(4) Where a person is at the time unconscious of the nature of the act, and this is known to the accused. As used in this paragraph, “unconscious of the nature of the act” means incapable of resisting because the victim meets any one of the following conditions:

(A) Was unconscious or asleep.

263. The essential guilt of rape consists in the outrage to the person and feelings of the victim of the rape. Any sexual penetration, however slight, is sufficient to complete the crime.

That would appear to be pretty open-and-shut, at least for rape, especially since "sexual intercourse" is left undefined. (Turner was initially charged under 261(a)(3) and 261(a)(4).) Turner lately received a smack on the wrist of a mere six month sentence, of which he is likely to only serve three, and that in the county jail, not the state penitentiary. Such a light sentence has naturally yielded a torrent of vituperation aimed at the judge, including death threats and other vulgarities.

The obvious problems of race, and perhaps more, personal affiliation did not escape the eye of the New York Post's Shaun King, who was rightly dismayed at the injustice of Turner's sentence versus what routinely gets thrown at blacks:

Do you know how many young black boys and girls, sometimes as young as 13 and 14 years old, are tried as adults in court rooms all across America and given mandatory minimums of 10 years and 20 years and even life in prison? Thousands. Tens of thousands.

In a more recent column, King pointed out the 15-to-25 year sentence handed down to football player Corey Batey at Vanderbilt for a similar rape as a very particular example.  But white skin isn't the only difference, given Turner and the judge both attended Stanford. One gets the real sense that some ring-knocking is going on here, and so, the discussion necessarily turns to reforming the system, and thither to Robby Soave's remarks at Reason.

Turner's victim did not get as much justice as she deserves, and the process was, in her own words, re-traumatizing. She's very brave for sticking with it—she provided a public service by drawing attention to Turner's criminal behavior. Her case shows that the criminal justice system is in need of reform. But it's still the best vehicle for the adjudication of violent crime.

But what reforms? He doesn't say, and it seems to me fairly obvious in cases like this that the answer, at least, ought to contain something like

1. Questions about victim dress and promiscuity, however veiled, should be off the table at any phase of the trial.
2. California statutes need to clarify that rape does not exclusively consist of sexual intercourse.

Cases like Turner's are comparatively rare; the gauntlet of torturous questions asked of most rape victims will necessarily be broad, and frequently unpleasant, especially given the difficulties outsiders have in reading consent after the fact. But the problem, of course, will be that the proposals above will likely have no takers, and will further be seen as wildly inadequate; the convict-on-accusation crowd will demand no less. But surely, we can agree that the judge deserves censure. As Popehat founder Ken White wrote,

There are two ways to see good fortunate [sic] and bad fortune.  You can say “someone who has enjoyed good fortune should be held to a higher standard, and someone who has suffered bad fortune should be treated with more compassion.”  But America’s courts are more likely to say “someone who has enjoyed good fortunate has more to lose, and someone who has suffered bad fortune can’t expect any better.”

Judge Persky and his ilk can’t stop being human.  But they are bound by oath to try to be fair.  When a judge says you are very fortunate and therefore it would be too cruel to interrupt that good fortunate just because you committed a crime, they are not being fair.  For shame.

The Road To Magazine Hell Is Paved With Clickbait

Ms. magazine, in what I can only assume is either a pathetic attempt to garner controversy and clicks or earnest belief in easily refuted nonsense, has seriously equated organized ISIS rape and the modern American college campus.

While ISIS endorses sexual assault, American college administrations similarly facilitate and perpetuate the rape of women on campuses. Sexual violence becomes institutionalized through complicity. Recently published survey results show that as many as one in four women experience sexual assault on U.S. college campuses. The American Association of Universities surveyed 150,000 students at 27 colleges and universities in the spring of 2015. More than 27 percent of female college seniors reported that, since entering college, they had experienced some kind of unwanted sexual contact. Nearly half of those, 13.5 percent, had experienced penetration, attempted penetration or unwanted oral sex. A significant percentage of students say they did not report because they were “…embarrassed, ashamed or that it would be too emotionally difficult” or “…did not think anything would be done about it.”

As ever, Coyote Blog's rejoinder to this idiocy is entirely sound:

 Imagine that there is a country with a one in 20 chance of an American woman visiting getting raped.  How many parents would yank their daughters from any school trip headed for that country -- a lot of them, I would imagine.  If there were a one in five chance?  No one would allow their little girls to go.  I promise.   I am a dad, I know.

No, they wouldn't. As for Ms., my general inclination is that they have the same background problems all print publications do, i.e. real distribution costs, falling revenues in the face of essentially infinite competition for ad space, and declining readership, in addition to the specific problem of an apparently declining population who self-identify as feminists.

The Dog Fancy Steals A Page From The "Rape Crisis" Hoaxers

I've previously written about the various bogus surveys of rape and its much broader sister charge, sexual assault, and how political motivation has expanded that to include clumsy attempts at hand-holding. With its engineered results that turn virtually any unwanted advance or gaffe into sexual assault, it's little wonder those trying to prove there's a huge sexual assault problem on college campuses come up with numbers vastly higher than actual rape statistics, which latter have been in decline for decades — unlike the static "1-in-5" factoid. File under "figures don't lie, but liars can figure".

The dog fancy has taken a similar approach to dealing with their flawed product. Two years ago, UC Davis published a study finding some genetic diseases common to all dogs apparently occur at the same rates in mutts and purebreds. AKC apologists rapidly seized on this finding, even though it didn't actually say what they thought it did. In fact, for 10 of the 27 diseases surveyed, purebred dogs had notably higher incidence rates than mutts. Yesterday, I encountered a similar study (original at PLOS One) with even brighter news for the KC (or so they would have you believe). Originating from a survey of English veterinary records and paid for by the RSPCA, the press release version claims "purebreds are no more likely than crossbreeds to suffer the most common disorders", i.e. the diseases they studied had equal incidence in both purebreds and mutts, based on reviews of veterinary practice data throughout that country. In fact,

• For three of the most common 20 diseases (otitis externa [ear infections], obesity, and skin masses), the incidence in purebreds was materially higher (p<0.05) than in "crossbred" dogs (in fact, dogs of unknown provenance).
• Four of the 20 "mid-level" diseases (musculoskeletal issues, aural, opthamological, and again obesity, though not sure why that latter is counted in this group again) again have materially higher incidences in purebreds than mutts; none were higher in mutts than the general population.
• For specific breeds, some problems were more frequent and some were less than the general population. This is to be expected.

So rather than a rigged study, the Telegraph article simply fails to note the cases where there were in fact more problems among purebreds; but ignoring those cases does not make them go away. Likewise, the survey doesn't attempt to address breed-specific genetic or genetically-linked diseases (hip dysplasia, cancer, collie eye anomaly, Leonberger polyneuropathy, high uric acid in Dalmatians, inability to whelp vaginally, etc.) that are much more likely in certain breeds and contribute to overall health problems. I eagerly await more detailed studies that include such conditions.

Susan Brownmiller's Refreshing Views On Rape Prevention

Susan Brownmiller long ago wrote Against Our Will, a largely fact-free jeremiad that has since informed modern feminism's belief in rape as a political tool. That this is true only in distant lands populated principally by itinerant goat herders has not much changed the canon; if anything, it's gotten shriller and even more untethered from reality. Yet, despite her book's foundational status, Brownmiller seems to have views on rape that diverge wildly from modern feminist orthodoxy. Uncovered in a recent interview in New York magazine, they come as an utter shock to anyone aware of her earlier work. She recoils from developments in the theory she originated (emboldening in Brownmiller's responses are due to me):

I was wondering if you have been following the discussions of rape activism on college campuses.
Yes, very closely. In the 1970s we had an extraordinary movement against sexual assault in this country and changed the laws. They [the campus activists] don't seem to know that. They think they are the first people to discover rape, and the problem of consent, and they are not.

They have been tremendously influenced by the idea that "You can drink as much as you want because you are the equal of a guy," and it is not true. They don't accept the fact there are predators out there, and that all women have to take special precautions. They think they can drink as much as men, which is crazy because they can't drink as much as men. I find the position "Don't blame us, we're survivors" to be appalling.

Also, they [college women] are not the chief targets of rapists. Young women and all women in housing projects and ghettos are still in far greater danger than college girls.

Holy smoke, did you hear that? Men and women are different! Yikes! And the last, at least,  comports with empirical Bureau of Justice Statistics data showing young women off campus are much more likely to be raped than college students. And then, this:

And my feeling about young women trapped in sex situations that they don’t want is: "Didn’t you see the warning signs? Who do you expect to do your fighting for you?" It is a little late, after you are both undressed, to say "I don’t want this."

Interviewer Katie Van Syckle makes a weak attempt at a late save:

I guess the hope is that young men would respect [a naked woman in bed telling them "no"].
That would be nice. There is not much attention on them is there?

Predictably, Amanda Marcotte tars her with the epithet "former feminist hero". Break out the popcorn:

There's a real irony here, because our cultural allergy to focusing on men who actually rape also prevents us from having a productive conversation: one that should be had with both men and women—ideally starting when they are boys and girls—about why rapists rape. We would talk about how our culture valorizes male domination. How some men learn to feel big by putting women down. How both men and women often stand aside and let some men express toxic views about women without being challenged.

 This is, of course, the purest bullshit, because she's been one of the principle drivers pushing for an expansion of rape away from coercive sex. That is to say, while she presumably cares about men who actually rape, she's also eager to inflate the charge to include regetted and even imaginary sexual encounters, despite her own denials. Whether it's the Rolling Stone hoax set at the University of Virginia or Emma Sulkowicz's sordid lies ("rape apologists", LOL), she's only ever prepared to believe the "victim", even if the accuser has but a fleeting grasp of reality. To force everyone else to adopt the correct, guilt-stricken pose, she plans on "having a productive conversation", which we assume starts young and is indistinguishable from harangue.

She goes on to discuss the Steubenville rape case, which is rather atypical for her because it has actual perpetrators, clear evidence (along with video confessions), and a real victim.

If you want to see the cause, you have to look at the culture around the assault: the guys who made a video laughing about it, the spreading of the images, the unwillingness of anyone to interfere, the congratulations for domineering, abusive behavior. That is why assault happens, not because some girls drink too much. We need to help young people, both men and women, spot predatory behavior for what it is, and to push against it instead of laughing it off.

But having that conversation requires talking with and about men. As the Brownmiller interview shows, even for feminists, policing women and talking about their choices is just a lot easier to do. It's comfortable, like an old nightgown (one that hopefully doesn't show off too much thigh!). We've tried the woman-policing route for hundreds or perhaps thousands of years now. It's time to switch it up and start focusing on male choices instead.

 A number points worth mentioning here:

1. The sort of "culture" she describes derives from a number of poor choices by men. This is an ancient problem, and one that appears to have no ready solution, despite it being of obvious import. No OECD country has a per-capita rape rate of zero, though they vary quite a bit. This suggests the "just teach men not to rape" silver bullet beloved of modern feminists has been tried everywhere and found wanting. While she doesn't come out and say it, that's the only solution she appears to know.
2. I suppose we should be grateful she wants to talk to men at all.
3. The large majority of men do not, in fact rape. So her "don't rape" message there will do no good. In fact, it is liable to result in the opposite: contempt. This will likely have negative consequences in the jury box.
4. For the minority that does commit rape due to some combination of hormones, alcohol, drugs, poor impulse control, and misplaced or nonexistent empathy, this message will fall on deaf ears.

Because she does not understand male behavior and its underlying driving factors, she cannot reasonably prescribe preventative courses of action. (Indeed, it's unclear that there is much that can be done, outside of women taking defensive measures.) It has nothing to do with idiotic "men are taught to" nonsense, and everything to do with male nature. This is, of course, no excuse for rape, but modern feminists seem utterly incapable of distinguishing advice to minimize exposure to potential rapists from victim-blaming. That Marcotte savages the iconic Brownmiller for suggesting otherwise signals just how unhinged from reality she and her fellow third-wave sisters have become.

"De Minimus Non Curat Lex, Bro": Scott Greenfield On Campus Rape Tribunals

A great piece from Scott Greenfield on the subject of rape court grand inquisitors:

In a twit, K.C. Johnson pulled out a bit from lawprof Paul Gowder’s comment to Tamara Lave’s post at PrawfsBlawg that looks, well, just horribly bad.

Honestly, I’m not even sure why we need an adversary process at all. In light of the fact that the fundamental purpose of such process is to exclude individuals who prey on these closed communities, it seems reasonable as a first-pass to me to have an inquisitorial process in which accusations are investigated by neutral trained professional staff, and then action is taken based on an overall conclusion as to the impact that that student’s presence would have on the learning environment.

Posted by: Paul Gowder | Sep 3, 2015 12:49:05 PM

The notion of an “inquisitor” has a bad rap, harkening back to the Spanish Inquisition, though in other countries, the inquisitorial system is the norm and, if done properly, isn’t such a terrible thing. By “done properly,” I mean that the inquisitor is truly a “neutral trained” person.

Gowder’s idea sounds horrible for two reasons, the first being that he contorts the purpose by saying “[I]n light of the fact that the fundamental purpose of such process is to exclude individuals who prey on these closed communities.” That’s one of those “begging the question” assertions, since no one knows whether the accused “preys” on anyone until after it has been determined that a wrong has occurred and the accused is the person who committed the wrong.

But worse, Gowder conflates the harm envisioned by our imaginings of dangerous rapists with the reality of what colleges call sexual assault. Assuming Gowder’s right, then most of the accused shouldn’t be subject to inquisition because their conduct has nothing to do with preying on anyone.  Claims of consensual sex with, say, post-hoc regret, or a beer and a claim of intoxication, don’t fit his “preying” fact, so nothing to see here, everybody go home.

The other part of his inquisitorial notion is that, as a “first pass,” with the next pass inclusive of appropriate due process protections, it should vet the bad claims out if the inquisitor was, indeed, neutral and trained. The problem is that they are trained, but trained to condemn, rationalize common excuses for evidentiary lapses, see rape and sexual assault in every contact, and believe the accuser no matter what. That ain’t exactly neutral.

No, it's not. The parallel manufacture of kangaroo courts for rape cases on campus is a disaster for due process and the men who suffer under such broad definitions. As Greenfield says, "You’re a survivor of an attempt to hold your hand? That’s what it’s come to, what these researchers intend to include to prove their desired outcomes?"