Weaponizing Suffering: Clinging To "Jackie"

New (to me) blog Jacobinism, back in December, when all we had was the WaPo and Washington Times reporting:

Herein lies the value of 'Jackie' as a pawn of gender warfare, and the reason why Marcotte, Valenti, and like-minded allies steeped in their reactionary cynicism were not prepared to give her up without a fight, no matter how ridiculous it made them look in the short-term. Contrary to their own pious and self-serving claims, the interest of these activists lies not in alleviating the suffering of women, but in manufacturing and instrumentalising it.

 Or, for that matter, weaponizing it. The rest of the post is just as well written; I just wish I could do as well.

Megan McArdle Responds To The UVa Rape Hoax

Megan McArdle breaks out the clue hammer on Rolling Stone, taking to task her former pupil (who knew?). There's a couple points here I want to highlight:

3. Privacy laws and the norms of survivor support groups created the illusion of institutional verification. Erdely first heard the story from Emily Renda, a rape survivor and alumna who now works on the issue at UVA. Renda mentioned the alleged attack in congressional testimony. Erdely seems to have assumed in some way that this meant the university had confirmed the attack. This impression was heightened by various privacy laws, which make it virtually impossible for the university to discuss specific cases. Erdely was operating under the assumption that the university knew this had happened and was stonewalling. In fact, Renda had the same information Erdely did: the story she heard from Jackie. The university did not have enough information to take action, but it also could not discuss these details with Erdely. The lack of disconfirmation seems to have been taken as positive proof that it happened, rather than what it was: a legal prohibition on sharing information. [emboldening mine]

In other words, because university Title IX rape procedure is sealed, it is also unverifiable — which makes the fabulist's life easier and the reporter's work harder. But the most interesting thing in McArdle's essay is the following bit of speculation as to why "Jackie" might have manufactured the whole tale:

Erdely's reporting suggests at least two reasons Jackie might have made it up: She first told her story to the school when she got in trouble for failing classes, and connecting with anti-rape groups on campus plugged Jackie into a social network that gave her a feeling of purpose and fellowship. Had Erdely tried harder to contact the friends whose behavior she maligned, she would have heard a third reason: Jackie had a crush, not returned, on one of the friends she called for help that night.

Yikes. Talk about spiraling out of control.

"Jackie's" Last Defenders

With yesterday's unapologetic (to those that mattered) retraction in full of the Rolling Stone UVa hoax story, I thought it would be useful to review some of the reaction from that cluster of modern feminism exhorting us to "believe" all charges of rape, regardless of merit. I first turn my attention to Shakesville, which once upon a time called the opinions of "Jackie" skeptics "[not] worth a smudge of dogshit":

Earlier this week, writing for the Washington Post under the headline "Rolling Stone whiffs in reporting on alleged rape," Erik Wemple said: "For the sake of Rolling Stone's reputation, Sabrina Rubin Erdely had better be the country's greatest judge of character. ...Rolling Stone bears a great deal of responsibility for placing the credibility of the accuser in the spotlight, thanks to shortcomings in its own reporting. Consider that: Erdely didn't talk to the alleged perpetrators of the attack."

Katherine Reed has written a thoughtful response [H/T to Jessica Luther] to this particular criticism, from the perspective of someone who covers sexual assault cases, and I encourage you to read the whole thing.

Unsurprisingly, Reed's "thoughtful" remarks include this graf:

I also understand the fairness argument when names are involved. But in this particular case, the names of the accused are not included in the Rolling Stone story.

In other words, Reed takes the position that, so long as no particular individuals are named as perpetrators, anything goes, i.e. the same position taken by Rolling Stone editor Will Dana. That Melissa McEwan confuses this with something like responsible journalism comes as no surprise; she continued in this vein for literally months, condemning in harsh terms anyone daring to do the actual investigation that Rolling Stone had not, or who shared Wemple's skepticism. From December 5, 2014 (emboldening mine):

Robby Soave, writing under the headline "Is the UVA Rape Story a Gigantic Hoax?" for Reason, does not find it credible that Jackie's friends could have discouraged her from going to the hospital or reporting out of self-interest.

If the frat brothers were absolute sociopaths to do this to Jackie, her friends were almost cartoonishly evil—casually dismissing her battered and bloodied state and urging her not to go to the hospital.

Failure to support a rape victim is something that could only seem "cartoonishly evil" to someone who has never survived an assault only to be met with indifference from friends, law enforcement, and/or even one's own family.

If "Jackie's" story were even remotely like true, in the real world, her friends should have immediately driven her to the closest emergency room. But of course, in McEwan's tortured cosmology, it's much more likely that they're monsters; she cannot imagine a good rape tale being false, ever. It's the same reason she justified Erdely's failure to contact the assailants on the grounds that "there was nothing meaningful they were going to add" to the story, never mind that their very existence would be a good starting point.

She does this sort of toe dance repeatedly, here, and here, and finally here, pretending that the Charlottesville police investigation and reporting from the Washington Post and Washington Times (which latter she does not mention) indicated that "Jackie" was anything other than a serial fabulist. (Mean old facts.) So at last, what does she take away from this? Why, of course, that Rolling Stone "threw Jackie under the bus" when they credulously and unquestioningly believed the supposed victim, just as McEwan demanded, and this now amounts to "victim-blaming". "Always believe" got Erdely to publish the story, just as it got her in trouble when "Jackie" turned out to be a liar. And I use that term without reservation, because who gives out multiple burner accounts to "friends" when trying to establish the identity of a supposed date? Why could no one confirm literally a single detail of "Jackie's" story?

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The same approach, i.e. it's really Rolling Stone's fault for doing what I told them, pollutes Jessica Valenti's reaction at The Guardian, initially established by her December 9 piece in which she announces that

I choose to believe Jackie. I lose nothing by doing so, even if I’m later proven wrong – but at least I will still be able to sleep at night for having stood by a young woman who may have been through an awful trauma.

It's a "heads I win, tails you lose" argument that should invite derision and contempt from anyone interested in justice or actual facts. Surprisingly, Amanda Marcotte's followup is remarkably subdued in comparison; she's the only one of the three — to her credit — who calls "Jackie's" prevarications "lie[s]". Even so, she partially lets Erdely off the hook for want of "guidance and support". That said guidance should have been obvious — get on the phone with the friends, and track down and interview the alleged perps — is almost beside the point. It's nearly a monumental victory to cross the low bar of calling a lie a lie.

Rolling Stone Story Annihilated By Columbia Journalism Report, Nobody Fired

I reckon we shouldn't be too surprised that the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism report on last November's Rolling Stone article, "A Rape On Campus: A Brutal Assault And Struggle For Justice at UVA" was both damning of virtually every action taken by managing editor Will Dana, and immediately followed by an abject refusal to take any responsibility for changing things so this can't happen again:

Rolling Stone’s senior editors are unanimous in the belief that the story’s failure does not require them to change their editorial systems. “It’s not like I think we need to overhaul our process, and I don’t think we need to necessarily institute a lot of new ways of doing things,” Dana said. “We just have to do what we’ve always done and just make sure we don’t make this mistake again.” Coco McPherson, the fact-checking chief, said, “I one hundred percent do not think that the policies that we have in place failed. I think decisions were made around those because of the subject matter.”

In which case, it's necessary to actually question what the real, not titular, points of those procedures really are, viz. bias confirmation of their most loyal readers and clickbait/issue sales. The Pressthink deconstruction is a lot more succinct, and especially, their point 7 about how "[n]one of those schools felt quite right". That is to say, none of the other stories fit the narrative as well; Rolling Stone knew their audience and knew their point, true or not. Likewise, Sabrina Erdely's bad faith apology which does not even mention Phi Kappa Psi, to whom her story had done real reputational and even physical damage. Rolling Stone's lawyers must be pretty sure of their case that they don't sense a libel suit coming, because indeed nobody will get fired for this mass indiscretion. Similar sentiments apply to UVa president Teresa Sullivan, who has refused to apologize for her actions of shutting down all frats in the wake of the article. The future is clear: so long as you don't libel specific people who can sue, bias-confirming, fact-free, unchecked articles will keep getting published.

Update: Phi Kappa Psi has initiated a lawsuit against Rolling Stone. I hope they win big, but I am rather doubtful.

More On Gender Imbalances In STEM: The Hidden (And Real) Good News

I made the mistake of looking at (and actually commenting on) Megan Geuss' silly Ars Technica opinion piece of the Ellen Pao verdict; there's nothing you haven't already seen in TechCrunch or Verge, i.e. It's Important We Have A Conversation About Sexual Bias In Tech (Now Stop Looking At What An Obvious Grifter Our Poster Girl Was). But that got me thinking about a post I happened upon a few days ago at Randal S. Olson's data visualization blog, showing the actual percentage of women graduating with bachelor degrees in STEM fields over time:

With the exception of engineering and computer science, women increasingly near parity with men in mathematics and the hard science fields, and have surpassed them in biology and the social sciences. Further, the so-called "pipeline problem" appears to be mostly a myth, according to a large-scale research study from Cornell, U. Texas, and Northwestern. Women are no more likely to "leak" (i.e. exit) from the "PhD pipeline" than men, something that will no doubt come as a disappointment to TechCrunch and anyone else invested in the idea that brogrammers and other modern bridge trolls are somehow chasing women out of these fields.

"There’s been a lot of focus on this idea of women in particular leaving academic science at far higher rates than men," says Miller, an advanced doctoral student in psychology at Northwestern and lead author of the study. "But in some cases … there’s been scant evidence of some of those gender gaps in persistence, and evidence that those gaps in persistence don’t exist at other time points."

That's not to say, however, that women and men are equally represented in pSTEM academia. Men still outnumber women about 3 to 1, Miller says. But the differences are not explained by gender bias in the pipeline – the percentage of women earning pSTEM degrees is now higher at the doctoral level than at the bachelor's degree level, the researchers found.

"We need to start reframing the conversation from instead of just trying to plug leaks, we need to get more students interested in the first place," Miller says.

Which, basically, is what I've been saying all along. Math instruction, particularly, is almost uniformly horrible at the K-12 level, even in fairly well-off districts. This is personal experience talking; if not for one particularly good instructor in college, I would not have ended up taking the major I did. But that is not the kind of thing feminist advocates wish to emphasize, because it means women might have some responsibility for learning math and how to write solid code (e.g.) instead of mewling pitiously that they are owed a high-status job despite inexperience.

Insisting On My Own Reality: Teaching Rape Law In A Trigger Warning World

Whatever you may think of BuzzFeed, they occasionally have some thought-provoking reportage. Today's example is mostly of interest because it gives us a glimpse into the deeply entitled and horribly flawed thought processes behind the students objecting to rape law instruction. Back in December, the New Yorker ran an excellent essay by Harvard Law professor Jeannie Suk in which she wrote that

Students seem more anxious about classroom discussion, and about approaching the law of sexual violence in particular, than they have ever been in my eight years as a law professor. Student organizations representing women’s interests now routinely advise students that they should not feel pressured to attend or participate in class sessions that focus on the law of sexual violence, and which might therefore be traumatic. These organizations also ask criminal-law teachers to warn their classes that the rape-law unit might “trigger” traumatic memories. Individual students often ask teachers not to include the law of rape on exams for fear that the material would cause them to perform less well. One teacher I know was recently asked by a student not to use the word “violate” in class—as in “Does this conduct violate the law?”—because the word was triggering. Some students have even suggested that rape law should not be taught because of its potential to cause distress.

In other words, we should not teach rape law because ... even talking about rape will freak certain people out. "[C]riminal law professors at schools across the country ... are concerned about what they perceive to be a troubling trend among students who would rather protect themselves than engage with complex issues." Well, yes (emboldening mine):

“What’s new is the suggestion that the teaching of rape doctrine and its flaws in a serious way, open to contending views, makes some students feel ‘unsafe,’ and because they feel ‘unsafe,’ there must be something deeply wrong — immoral and perhaps even illegal — going on,” said Yale Law School professor Jed Rubenfeld. He said he’s been asked (and has declined) to give trigger warnings and announce phone numbers of sexual assault hotlines before teaching rape, although he does ask students to be especially conscious of their classmates and refrains from cold-calling on students when rape is being discussed.

“This is a sad and profoundly anti-intellectual point of view, and it’s spreading,” he said. “Every topic taught in criminal law is a terrible reality.” Professors who don’t teach the class in a serious way, “subjecting both the doctrine and the criticisms of it to searching logical and moral scrutiny,” are “failing the most basic principles of intellectual honesty and academic rigor.”

But what happens when female law students vehemently disagree?

“I am not afraid to study rape law,” said Cari Simon, a Harvard Law graduate and former president of the college’s Women’s Law Association who now defends survivors of sexual violence at colleges and fraternities. “Of course I understand the import of studying rape in law school. That I expect rape to be taught with the understanding that 1 in 5 women are assaulted while in college, and therefore there are very likely survivors sharing the law school classroom does not mean I am afraid. It means I care.”

In other words, as always, teaching about rape is okay provided we cater to her fantasies about rape victimization rates, and that we refer to everyone accused of such charges as a priori guilty.  I've repeatedly gone over the intentional infantilization and propagandizing necessary to arrive at the "1 in 5" figure (the Heather MacDonald piece in City Journal lays it out perfectly). It's of a piece with the overall kid glove treatment certain women seem to demand here. One thing I didn't realize is that

“There was a point in time where women were excused from not just rape but any disturbing legal topic because it was too traumatic,” said University of Colorado Law professor Aya Gruber, who said she’s noticed a “rapid and profound shift” in the way her students think about rape pedagogy over the past few years.

“Several of my contemporaries do not teach rape because it is too fraught, but I find this to be an almost sexist position,” she said. “My question is always the extent to which we as teachers are protecting women in a world which oppresses them, and the extent to which we as people in power are reaffirming and reinforcing the messages that keep women in that position.”

This metastasizing view of women as overgrown children incapable of dealing with a sometimes brutal world is a real problem for anything resembling actual equality between the sexes. It draws from a deeply Victorian sensibility, one catering to women by way of the fainting couch.

Update: I appear to have been banned from further comment on that page. No surprise.

Why Craft Beer Is Like Dog Food

My friend Scott Templeman today mentioned that Yuengling is now the top craft beer in the US, which can be the case thanks to a relaxing of standards for what qualifies as "beer". Yuengling, which is still privately owned, cracked the top spot despite using corn and other "fillers" thanks to a relaxed definition from the Brewers Association. That got me going on a discussion about the relevance of ownership; Anheuser-Busch, whose signature Budweiser has never appealed to me (except in relation to even worse beers, e.g. Iron City), is now a part of the InBev monster based in Belgium. Thereupon I found this excellent rant on the topic from I Think About Beer, which I wanted highlight for an odd parallel in the dog world. It's no secret that Budweiser's market share is in decline, possibly terminally; last year, more Americans drank craft beer than Budweiser, and wine and spirits are eroding beer's popularity. To fight back, InBev has been obliged to buy every craft brewer it can get its mitts on. The hook for the independent craft beer brewer, as ever, is the ease of distribution once they get bought by the powerhouse, but ...

Elysian and co. will see some increased distribution to fuel their volume growth. But where does this come from? With 3,000 breweries in operation and 2,000 more coming on line, available store and bar space certainly isn’t keeping pace. AB-InBev isn’t acquiring craft brands because it believes in the segment’s quality. They’re buying out craft breweries to capture shelf space and profits. Big Red is down and continuing to slide in sales. Coors Light is gaining market share on Bud Light and even out sells it in Oregon. AB-InBev’s former imports are in a steep decline. AB-InBev is losing valuable shelf real-estate. It needs some way to stem the flow; so they’re picking up brands they can take to stores and bars to capture their lost business. That business has to come from somewhere: the competition.

The more brands AB-InBev has to take before retailers; the easier it is for them to decide against smaller and independent brands. And let’s face it, retailers don’t really want to deal with a million different vendors so if someone can bring them a whole host of products that will fulfill their needs, why should they care if they’re only supplied by one mega-conglomeration. Each brand AB-InBev can present is tap or shelf space they’re denying an independent competitor. Distributors and breweries are in a state of constant war when it comes to beer sets and tap handles; and the more weapons you have the more territory you can conquer.

The problem, of course, is that over the long term, the only way the new owners can keep such duplicative efforts rolling is to eventually slash staff and cut corners, with long-term consequences for the quality of the suds. (The author points to Goose Island's mainline product as an example of lowered standards.) And it's here that the comparison to dog food kicks in, because Mars alone is responsible for no fewer than eighteen brands of pet food (and rumored last December to be finalizing a purchase of Blue Buffalo), many of which were purchased for exactly the same reasons: the demand for shelf space. Of course, the arguments about quality are probably less compelling in this space — it's broadly lower to begin with, with the Friday night recall dump aimed at suppressing broad dissemination among the target PR outlets that might not get to it until Monday. But the pressures driving reduced cost and quality ingredients are identical.